Last Act In Palmyra Page 13

  Slowly the tired parade of our company went past me, all bare legs on backboards, bursting baskets and bad jokes. Those who had camels mostly led them on foot; if you’ve ever been up on a camel you’ll know why. Those in the waggons were scarcely more comfortable. Some of the stagehands had given up having their ribs jolted and had chosen to walk. People carried cudgels or long knives in their belts in case we were attacked by desert raiders; some of the orchestra piped or banged on their instruments - an even more successful deterrent to nomadic thieves.

  Byrria drove her own cart. That summed her up. She shared herself with no one, and relied on no one. As she drew level I stood up and hailed her. She didn’t want to give me a lift, but she was almost at the end of the caravan and had to accept that if she didn’t I might be left behind. Nobody thought they needed a writer, but people like keeping a target to mock.

  ‘Cheer up!’ I cried, as I sprang aboard with a lithe twist of the torso and a charming grin. ‘It won’t happen!’

  She continued to scowl bleakly. ‘Drop the antique routine, Falco.’

  ‘Sorry. The old lines are the best - ‘

  ‘Diana of the Ephesians! Put a lid on it, poser.’ I was about to think, This never happens to Philocrates, when I remembered that it had.

  She was twenty, perhaps less. She had probably been on the stage for eight or nine years; it’s one of those professions where girls with looks start young. In a different social circle she would have been old enough to become a vestal. There can’t be much difference between being a priestess and an actress, except for public status. They both involve fooling an audience with a ritual performance in order to make the public believe in the unbelievable.

  I did my best to be professional, but Byrria’s looks were impossible to ignore. She had a triangular face with green eyes like an Egyptian cat set wide above high cheekbones and a thin, perfect nose. Her mouth had a strange lopsided quirk that gave her an ironic, world-weary air. Her figure was as watchable as her face, small and curvaceous, and hinting of unrevealed possibilities. To finish the business, she had a dramatic knack of looping up her warm brown hair with a couple of bronze hairpins, so it not only looked unusual but stayed in place, showing off a tantalising neck.

  Her voice seemed too low for such a neat person; it had a huskiness that was completely distracting when combined with her experienced manner. Byrria gave the impression she was holding all the competition at arm’s length while she waited for the right person to move in on her. Even though he knew it was a false impression, any man she met would have to try.

  ‘Why the hatred of men, flower?’

  ‘I’ve known some, that’s why.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘Men are never particular.’

  ‘I meant, anyone special?’

  ‘Special? I thought we were talking about men!’

  I can recognize an impasse. Folding my arms, I sat in silence.

  In those days the road to Gerasa was a poor one, begging for a military highway to be thrust through to Damascus. It would be done. Rome had spent a great deal of money on this region during the Judaean troubles, so inevitably in peacetime we would be spending even more. Once the region settled down the Decapolis would be dragged up to decent Roman standards. In the meantime we were suffering on an old Nabataean caravan route that nobody maintained. It was a lonely landscape. Later we reached a level plain and crossed a tributary of the Jordan through more fertile pasture into thick pine forest. But this early stage of our trip involved a rocky track amongst scrubby hills with only occasional glimpses of low nomad tents, few of them with visible occupants. Driving was not easy; Byrria had to concentrate.

  As I expected, after a short time the lady felt obliged to fire more arrows at me. ‘I have a question, Falco. When do you intend to stop slandering me?’

  ‘Goodness, I thought you were about to ask for the address of my cloak-maker or my recipe for tarragon marinade! I know nothing about any slander.’

  ‘You’re making out to everyone that Heliodorus died because of me.’

  ‘I never said that.’ It was only one possibility. So far it seemed the most likely explanation for the playwright’s drowning, but until I had proof I kept an open mind.

  ‘I had nothing to do with it, Falco.’

  ‘I do know you didn’t push him into the cistern and hold his head under. A man did that.’

  ‘Then why keep hinting I was involved?’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that I had. But face facts: like it or not, you’re a popular girl. Everyone keeps telling me Heliodorus was after you but you weren’t having it. Maybe one of your friends tackled him. Maybe it was a secret admirer. It’s always possible someone knew you would be pleased if the bastard was out of the way, and tried to help.’

  ‘That’s a horrible suggestion!’ She was frowning bitterly. On Byrria a frown looked good.

  I was starting to feel protective. I wanted to prove the murder was nothing to do with her. I wanted to find a different motive. Those wonderful eyes were working impossible magic. I told myself I was too professional to let a dainty little actress with a pretty set of wide-spaced peepers overcome me - then I told myself not to be such a fool. I was stuck, just as anyone would be. We all hate murderers to be beautiful. Before long if I did unearth evidence implicating Byrria as an accomplice I would find myself considering whether to bury it in an old hay sack at the bottom of a drainage ditch…

  ‘All right, just tell me about Heliodorus.’ My voice was rasping; I cleared my throat. ‘I know he was obsessed with you.’

  ‘Wrong.’ She spoke very quietly. ‘He was just obsessed with getting what he wanted.’

  ‘Ah! Too pushy?’

  ‘That’s a man’s way of putting it!’ Now she sounded bitter, her voice rising.’ “A bit too pushy” almost makes it sound as though it was my fault he went away disappointed.’

  She was staring ahead, even though the road was easier to travel at this point. Away to our right a teenaged girl watched over a small flock of lean brown goats. In another direction vultures wheeled gracefully. We had started out early on purpose; now the heat was beginning to reflect off the stony track with dazzling force.

  Byrria was not intending to help me. I pressed for more details: ‘Heliodorus tried it on, and you rebuffed him?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Her voice remained dangerously level. ‘He assumed that saying “No” meant “Yes, please -with force”.’

  ‘He raped you?’

  She was a person who showed anger by very carefully keeping her temper. For a moment, while I reeled at this new angle, she also stayed silent. Then she attacked me contemptuously: ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that there is always provocation, that women always want it, that rape never happens.’

  ‘It happens.’

  We were raging at one another. I suppose I knew why. Understanding it did not help.

  ‘It happens,’ I repeated. ‘And I don’t just mean men attacking women, be it strangers or acquaintances. I mean husbands misusing their wives. Fathers having “special secrets” with their children. Masters treating their slaves like so much bought meat. Guards torturing their prisoners. Soldiers bullying new recruits. High officials blackmailing - ‘

  ‘Oh be quiet!’ There was no mollifying her. Her green eyes flashed and she tossed her head so the ringlets danced, but there was nothing charming in the gesture. Undoubtedly enjoying the fact that she had misled me, she exclaimed, ‘It did not happen to me, in fact. He had me on the ground, he had my wrists pinioned above my head and my skirts up, and the bruises he made forcing his knee between my thighs were still showing a month later, but somebody came looking for him and rescued me.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ I meant it, even though something in the way she had forced me to hear the details was subtly disturbing. ‘Who was the useful friend?’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

 
‘Maybe it matters.’ I wanted to force her to say it. Instinct told me I ought to identify her rescuer. She knew something I wanted to hear, and I could easily have become as much of a bully as Heliodorus.

  ‘What matters to me,’ Byrria flared angrily, ‘is that I thought Heliodorus was going to rape me. Afterwards I was living with the knowledge that if he ever caught me on my own he was bound to try again - but all you need to know is that I never, ever went near him. I tried to know where he was always, because I made certain that I kept as far away from him as possible.’

  ‘You can help me then,’ I said, ignoring her hysterical edge. ‘Did you know he was going up the mountain that last day at Petra? Did you see who went with him?’

  ‘You mean, do I know who killed him?’ The girl was effortlessly bright — and deliberately made me feel like an idiot. ‘No. I just noticed the playwright was missing when the rest of us gathered at the theatre ready to leave.’

  ‘All right.’ Refusing to be put off, I tackled it another way. ‘Who was there - and when did they arrive at the meeting point?’

  ‘It won’t help you,’ Byrria assured me. ‘When we noticed your girlfriend telling an official a body had been found, we had already missed Heliodorus and were complaining about him. Allowing time for you to have found the body and Helena to have come back down the hill - ‘ I hate witnesses who have done my thinking for me’ - then he must have been dead before any of us gathered at the theatre. Actually I was one of the last to get there. I turned up at the same time as Tranio and Grumio, who were looking the worse for wear, as usual.’

  ‘Why were you late?’ I grinned cheekily, in the vain hope of reasserting myself. ‘Saying a fond farewell to a manly paramour?’

  Up ahead people were stopping so we could rest during the simmering heat of midday. Byrria reined in, then literally pushed me out of her cart.

  I sauntered back to my own waggon.

  ‘Falco!’ Musa had his head-dress wrapped across his lower face in the Eastern manner; he looked lean, cool, and much wiser than I felt in my short Roman tunic, with my bare arms and legs burning and sweat rivuleting down my back beneath the hot cloth. Byrria must have worked her spell on him too; for once he seemed actively curious. ‘Did you learn anything from the beautiful one?’

  I burrowed in our lunch basket. ‘Not much.’

  ‘So how did you get on?’ asked Helena innocently.

  ‘The woman’s incorrigible. I had to fend off her advances in case the donkey bolted.’

  ‘That’s the problem with being so witty and good-looking,’ retorted Helena. Musa burst into a rare fit of giggling. Helena, having denounced me in her normal offhand manner, merely carried on with the more important work of cleaning dust from her right sandal.

  Ignoring them both, I sat spitting out date stones like a man who had something extremely intriguing to think about.

  Chapter XXV

  Gerasa: otherwise known as ‘Antioch on the Chrysorhoas’.

  Antiochia itself had a reputation for soft living. My brother Festus, who could be relied on as a scandalmonger, had told me that as a legionary posting it was notorious for the routine debauchery of its happy garrison. Life there was continual festivity; the city resounded to minstrels playing harps and drums… I was hoping to visit Antiochia. But it lay a long way north, so for now I had to be content with its namesake. Chrysorhoan Antiochia had plenty to offer, though I personally was never offered much debauchery, with or without minstrels.

  Gerasa had grown from a small walled town on a knoll into a larger suburban centre through which ran the River Chrysorhoas, the Golden River, a bit of a stream that, compared to the noble Tiber, could barely support three minnow-fishers and a few women slapping dirty shirts on stones. Pillaged by Jews in the Rebellion, and then plundered again by Romans because one of the main leaders of the Jewish Revolt was a Gerasene, the town had been fitted up recently with new city walls that sprouted a coronet of watchtowers Two of these defended the Watergate through which the Golden River rushed out via a sluice that directed its water under some pressure over a ten-foot waterfall. As we waited to enter the city we could see and hear the cascade to our right.

  ‘This looks like a fine place for accidents!’ I warned anyone who would listen. Only Musa took notice; he nodded, with his usual seriousness. He had the air of a fanatic who for the sake of Truth might volunteer to stand beside the sluice waiting for our murderer to tip him into the racing stream.

  We were held up at the Southern Gate, waiting for customs clearance. Gerasa lay conveniently at the junction of two major trade routes. Its income from caravan tributes was such that twice it had smoothly survived being plundered. There must have been plenty of raiders to pillage, then afterwards, in the Pax Romana, there remained ample cash for restoration work. According to a site plan we later saw pegged up in the cleared area that was to become the main piazza, Gerasa was in the grip of a spectacular building programme that had started twenty years earlier and was projected to continue for several decades. Children were growing up here who had only ever seen a street that was half roped off by stonemasons. A bunch of shrines on the acropolis were being given cosmetic attention; waiting at the town gate we could hear hammers clanging frenziedly in the sanctuary of Zeus; suburban villas were being knocked out by smiling contractors like beans from a pod; and surveyors’ poles impeded progress everywhere, marking out a new street grid and an ambitious elliptical forum.

  In any other city in any corner of the Empire, I would have said the grandiose plan would never happen. But Gerasa undoubtedly possessed the wherewithal to drape itself in colonnades. Our own interrogation gave an indication of what kind of tribute (a polite word for bribe) the citizens expected to extract from the thousand or so caravans that plodded up each year from Nabataea.

  ‘Total camels?’ barked the tariff master, a man in a hurry.

  Twelve.’

  His lip curled. He was used to dealing in scores and hundreds. Even so, his scroll was at the ready. ‘Donkeys?’

  ‘None with saleable merchandise. Only private goods.’

  ‘Detail the camels. Number of loads of myrrh in alabaster vessels?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Frankincense? Other aromatics? Balsam, bdellium, ladanum gum, galbanum, any of the four types of cardamom?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Number of loads of olive oil? A load equals four goatskins,’ he qualified helpfully.

  ‘None.’

  ‘Gemstones, ivory, tortoiseshell or pearls? Select woods?’ To save time we simply shook our heads. He was getting the picture. He ran through the straightforward spices almost without looking up from his list: ‘Peppers, ginger, allspice, turmeric, sweet flag, mace, cinnamon, saffron? No… Dried goods?’ he tried hopefully.

  ‘None.’

  ‘Individual number of slaves? Other than for personal use,’ he added, with a sneer that said he could see none of us had been manicured or massaged by a sloe-eyed, sleek-skinned bondsman in the recent past.

  ‘None.’

  ‘What exactly,’ he asked us, with an expression that veered between suspicion and horror, ‘are you dealing in?’

  ‘Entertainment.’

  Unable to decide whether we were daft or dangerous, he waved us angrily to a holding post while he consulted with a colleague.

  ‘Is this delay serious?’ whispered Helena.

  ‘Probably.’

  One of the girls from our scratch orchestra laughed. ‘Don’t worry. If he wants to cause trouble we’ll set Afrania on to him!’

  Afrania, who was a creature of wondrous and self-assured beauty, played the flute for us and danced a bit. Those who were not accompanied by fastidious girlfriends found other uses for her. As we waited she was flirting lazily with Philocrates but heard her name and glanced over. She made a gesture whose grossness belied her superbly placid features. ‘He’s all yours, Ione! Salting officials calls for an expert. I couldn’t compete!’

  Her friend Ione tu
rned away dismissively. Attaching herself to us, she gave us a grin (minus two front teeth), then hoicked half a loaf from somewhere amongst her crumpled skirts, ripped it into portions and handed them round.

  Ione was a tambourinist, and a startling character. Helena and I tried not to stare, though Musa gazed at her openly. Ione’s compact form was swathed in at least two stoles, wound crossways over her bosom. She wore a snake bracelet covering half her left arm and various glass-stoned finger-rings. Triangular earrings, so long they brushed her shoulders, clattered with red and green beads, loops of wire and metallic spacers. She went in for whippy belts, thongy sandals, swoony scarves and clownish face make-up. Her wild crinkly hair flared back from her head in all directions like a radiate diadem; odd sections of the mass of untamed locks were braided into long thin plaits, tied up with wisps of wool. In colour the hair was mainly a tarnished bronze, with matted reddish streaks that were almost like dried blood after a messy fight. There was a positive air to her; I reckoned Ione would win all her fights.

  Somewhere beneath these flash trappings lay a small-featured young woman with a sharp wit and a big heart. She was brighter than she pretended. I can handle it, but for most men that’s a dangerous girl.

  She had noticed Musa gaping. Her grin widened in a way that did finally make him look uncomfortable. ‘Hey you!’ Her shout was raucous and brisk. ‘Better not stand too close to the Golden River - and don’t go near the double pool! You don’t want to end up as a soggy sacrifice in the Festival of Maiuma!’

  Whether or not the Petran mountain-god Dushara demands that his priests be chaste, Ione’s boldness was too much for ours. Musa rose to his feet (he had been squatting on his heels like a nomad while we were held up by the customs officer). He turned away, looking haughty. I could have told him; it never works.