Last Act In Palmyra Read online

  Or rather, maybe I should lie down quietly, with sliced cucumber cooling my forehead, until I got over this lunacy.

  Grumio rose to his feet with a demure smile. ‘I seem to have given you a lot to think about! Pass on my regards to Helena.’ I managed a wry nod of the head, and let him go.

  The conversation had been devoid of clowning. Yet I was still left with the sinking sensation that somehow the joke was on me.

  Very neat.

  Almost, as the grim jokester Grumio himself would have said, too obvious to be true.

  Chapter LX

  I was dismal now. It felt like a nightmare. Everything appeared close to reality, yet was hugely distorted.

  I went in to see Helena. She was awake, but flushed and feverish. I could tell by looking at her that unless I could do something, we were in serious trouble. I knew she could see I had problems I wanted to talk about, but she made no attempt to ask. That in itself was a depressing sign.

  In this mood, I was hardly expecting what happened next.

  We heard a commotion. The Palmyrenes were all exclaiming and shouting. It did not sound as though raiders had set upon us, but my worst fears leapt. I rushed out of the tent. Everyone else was running, all in the same direction. I felt for my knife, then left it down my boot so I could run faster.

  At the roadside an excited group had clustered around a particular camel, a new arrival whose dust was still creating a haze above the road. I could see the beast was white, or what they call white in a camel. The trappings looked brighter than usual and more lavishly fringed. When the crowd suddenly spilled outwards so I had a clearer view, even to my untutored eye this was a fine creature. A racing camel, plainly. The owner must be a local chief, some rich nomad who had made several fortunes from myrrh.

  I was losing interest and about to turn back when somebody yelled my name. Men in the crowd gesticulated to some unseen person who was kneeling at the camel’s feet. Hoping this might be Musa returning, I walked up closer. People fell back to let me through, jostling close behind again as they tried to see what was happening. With bruised heels and a bad temper I forced my way to the front.

  On the ground beside the splendid camel, a figure wrapped in desert robes was searching in a small roll of baggage. Whoever it was stood up and turned to me. It was definitely not Musa.

  The elaborate head-dress was pushed back from a startling face. Vivid antimony eye paint flashed while earrings as big as the palm of my hand rattled out a joyous carillon. All the Palmyrenes gasped, awestruck. They dropped back hastily.

  It was a woman, for one thing. Women do not normally ride the desert roads alone. This one would go anywhere she wanted. She was noticeably taller than any of them, and spectacularly built. I knew she must have chosen her own camel, with expertise and taste. Then she had cheerfully raced across Syria unaccompanied. If anyone had attacked her, she would have dealt with them; besides, her bodyguard was wriggling energetically in a large bag she wore slung across a bosom that meant business.

  When she saw me, she let out a roar of derision, before brandishing a little iron pot. ‘Falco, you miserable dumbhead! I want to see that sick girl of yours - but first come here and say a nice hello!’

  ‘Hello Jason,’ I responded obediently, as Thalia’s python finally forced his head out of his travelling bag and looked around for somebody meek whom he could terrorise.

  Chapter LXI

  There were a lot of frightened men at this gathering, and not all of them were worried about the python.

  Thalia shoved Jason unceremoniously back into his bag, then hung it around her camel’s neck. With one bejewelled finger she stabbed towards the bag. Slowly and clearly (and unnecessarily), she addressed the assembled nomads: ‘Any man who puts a hand on the camel gets seen off by the snake!’

  This hardly squared with what she had always assured me about Jason’s lovable nature. Useful, however. I could see the Palmyrenes all inclined to my own nervous view of him.

  ‘That’s a gorgeous camel,’ I said admiringly. ‘With a gorgeous rider whom I never expected to meet in the middle of the desert.’ It seemed right, however. Somehow I felt more cheerful already. ‘How in the name of the gods do you come to be here, Thalia?’

  ‘Looking for you, darling!’ she promised feelingly. For once I felt able to take it.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘Damascus is plastered with posters with your name on them. After a few days of desperately dancing for the rent, I spotted one.’ That’s the trouble with wall posters: easy to write, but nobody ever rubs them out. Probably in twenty years’ time people would still be calling at Herod’s Theatre trying to touch a man called Falco for cash. ‘The theatre gateman told me you’d gone on to Palmyra. Good excuse to get a camel. Isn’t he a cracker? If I can get another and race them, he’ll wow those front-seat freaks in Rome.’

  ‘Where did you learn to race a camel?’

  ‘Anyone who can do a twirl with a python can manage a ride, Falco!’ Innuendo came swimming back with every stride we took. ‘How’s the poor girlie? Scorpion, wasn’t it? As if one nasty creature with a wicked tail on him is not enough for her…’

  I hardly dared ask, but brought out the question: ‘How do you know about it?’

  ‘Met that strange fellow - your gloomy priest.’

  ‘Musa?’

  ‘Riding towards me like a death’s head in a cloud of dust. I asked if he’d seen you. He told me everything.’

  I gave her a sharp look. ‘Everything?’

  Thalia grinned. ‘Enough!’

  ‘What have you done with him?’

  ‘What I do with them all.’

  ‘The poor lad! Bit tender for you, isn’t he?’

  ‘They all are by my standards! I’m still holding out for you, Falco.’

  Ignoring this dangerous offer, I managed to extract more details. Thalia had decided that looking for Sophrona was a mission I might not manage. She had taken a whim to come east herself. After all, Syria was a good market for exotic animals; before the racing camel she had already bought a lion cub and several Indian parrots, not to mention a dangerous new snake. She had been earning her way by displays of her famous dance with the big python, Zeno, when she noticed my posters. ‘So here I am, Falco, large as life, and twice as exciting!’

  ‘At last. My chance to catch your act!’

  ‘My act is not for faint hearts!’

  ‘All right, I’ll skulk out the back and mind Jason. So where’s the snake you dance with?’ I had never even seen this legendary reptile.

  ‘The big fellow? Following on slowly. Zeno doesn’t like disturbance. Jason’s more versatile. Besides, when I tell him he’s going to see you, he comes over all silly - ‘

  We reached my tent, thank Jupiter.

  At the sight of Helena I heard Thalia suck in her breath. ‘I’ve brought you a present, sweetie, but don’t get too excited; it’s not a new man.’ Thalia produced the little iron pot again. ‘Small but incredibly powerful - ‘

  ‘As the altar boy promised!’ quipped Helena, perking up. She must have been reading her scroll of rude stories again.

  Thalia had already lowered herself to one mighty knee and was unbandaging Helena’s wounded arm as gently as if she were tending one of her own sick animals. ‘Giblets! Some slapdash butcher made a mess with his cleaver here, sweetheart!’

  ‘He did his best,’ Helena murmured loyally.

  ‘To mangle you!’

  ‘Lay off, Thalia!’ I protested. ‘There’s no need to make me out to be the sort of thug who’d knife his girl. Anyway, what’s in your magic jar?’ I felt obliged to show some caution before my lass was anointed with a strange medicament.

  ‘Mithridatium.’

  ‘Have I heard of that?’

  ‘Have you heard of gold and frankincense? Compared with this they’re as cheap as cushion dust. Falco, this potion contains thirty-three ingredients, each one expensive enough to bankrupt Croesus. It’s an antidote for
everything from snakebites to splitting fingernails.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ I conceded.

  ‘It had better be,’ growled Thalia, unscrewing the lid with relish, as if it were a potent aphrodisiac. ‘I’ll spread it all over your lady first - then I’ll tell you what you owe me.’

  I declared that if mithridatium would help Helena, Thalia could smooth on the stuff an inch thick with a mortar trowel.

  ‘Listen to it!’ marvelled Thalia confidentially to her patient. ‘Isn’t he ridiculous - and don’t you just love his lies!’

  Helena, who had always found that her spirits rose with any chance, of mocking me, was already chortling healthily.

  When we drove on towards Palmyra I had Thalia alongside like a spectacular outrider, galloping away in wild loops from time to time to exercise the racing camel. Jason enjoyed a more leisurely journey in a basket in the back of my cart. The Syrian heat had proved almost too much for him. He lay virtually inert, and whenever we could spare any water he had to be bathed.

  ‘My python’s not the only reptile in your group,’ Thalia muttered furtively. ‘I see you’ve got that know-all comic Tranio!’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘I’ve met him. Entertaining is a small world when you’ve been doing it as long as me, and in some funny places too. Tranio used to appear at the Vatican Circus. Quite witty, but thinks far too much of himself.’

  ‘He does a good tug of war. Know his partner?’

  ‘The one with the hair like a pie dish and the sneaky eyes?’

  ‘Grumio.’

  ‘Never seen him before. But that’s not true of everybody here.’

  ‘Why, who else do you know?’

  ‘Not saying,’ grinned Thalia. ‘It’s been a few years. Let’s wait and see if I’m recognised.’

  I was struck by an intriguing possibility.

  Thalia’s thrilling hints were still engaging Helena and me when our long ride reached its end. We had been driving at night, but dawn had now broken. With the stars long gone and the sun strengthening, our party was weary and longing to break the journey. The road had grown more winding, twisting upwards through more hilly country. The caravan trail finally emerged on to a level plain. We must now be at midpoint between the fertile coast far away on the Mediterranean and the even more remote reaches of the River Euphrates.

  Low ranges of mountains ran to the north and behind us, serrated by long dry wadis. Ahead, disappearing into infinity, stretched flat tawny desert covered with rocky scree. To our left, in a stony valley, stood square towers that we later learned were multiple tombs for wealthy families. These kept their lonely vigil beside an ancient track overlooked by the sheltering hills. On the bare slopes, a shepherd on a donkey was herding a flock of black-faced sheep. Closer to, we began to perceive a shimmer of green. We sensed expectation among our nomad guides. I called to Helena. As we approached, the effect was magical. The haze rapidly acquired solidity. The moisture that rose off the saltpans and lakes quickly resolved into fields surrounding large swathes of date-palms and olive and pomegranate trees.

  At the heart of the huge oasis, beside an energetic spring with supposedly therapeutic waters (like Thalia’s dance, not for the faint-hearted), stood the famous old nomad village of Tadmor, once a mere camp in the wilderness, but now the fast-growing Romanised city of Palmyra.

  Chapter LXII

  If I say that in Palmyra the revenue officers take social precedence over members of the local government assembly, you will see their preoccupations. A welcoming city, in fact one that welcomed its visitors with a tariff of taxes on goods entering its territory, continued the happy greeting by relieving them of some hefty rates for watering their caravans, and completed the process by exacting a little something for the treasury for every camel, donkey, cart, container or slave that they wished to take back out of the city when they left. What with the salt tax and the prostitution tax, staying there was clear-cut too: the very staples of life were nobbled.

  The Emperor Vespasian, a tax collector’s grandson, was running Palmyra with a light hand. Vespasian liked to squeeze the fiscal sponge, but his treasury officials had grasped that they had little to teach the efficient Palmyrenes. Nowhere I had ever visited was so concerned to strip all comers of their spending money, or so adept at doing it.

  Even so, long-distance traders were coming here with caravans the size of armies. Palmyra sat between Parthia in the east and Rome in the west, a semi-independent buffer zone that existed to enable commerce. Tariffs aside, the atmosphere was a pleasant one.

  Historically Greek and governed now by Rome, it was packed with Aramaic and Arabian tribesmen who had only recently been nomads, yet it still remembered periods of Parthian rule and looked to the East for much of its character. The result was a mixed culture unlike anywhere else. Their public inscriptions were carved in Greek and a strange script of their own. There were a few massive limestone buildings, constructed on Syrian plans with Roman money by Greek craftsmen. Around these monuments were spread quite large suburbs of blank-walled mud-brick houses through which meandered narrow dirt lanes. The oasis still had the air of a massive native village, but with signs that sudden grandiosity was liable to break out all over the place.

  For one thing, the people were unashamedly wealthy and enjoyed showing off. Nothing had prepared us for the brightness of the linens and silks with which every Palmyrene of any standing was adorned. The rich weaves of their cloth were unlike any produced further west. They liked stripes, but never in plain bands of colour. Their materials were astonishing feasts of elaborate brocaded patterns, studded with flowers or other dainty emblems. And the threads used for these intricate weaves were dyed in spectacular varieties of purples, blues, greens and reds. The colours were deep and warm. The hues in the streets were a dramatic contrast to any public scene in Rome, which would be a monochrome of scarcely modulated grades of white, broken only by the vibrant purple bands that designate high status.

  The men here would have looked effeminate in Rome. It took some getting used to. They all wore tunics laden with splendidly embroidered braid; beneath were swathed Persian trousers, again richly hemmed. Most men wore straight-sided, flat-topped hats. Female dress consisted of conventional long gowns, covered by cloaks caught on the left shoulder by a heavy brooch. Veils were routinely worn by all women except slaves and prostitutes. The veil, ostensibly protecting the ownership of a strict father or husband, fell from a tiara or turban, and was then left loose as a frame to the face, allowing the owner to manipulate its folds attractively with one graceful hand. What could be glimpsed behind the pretence of modesty were dark curls, chubby chins, huge eyes and strong-willed mouths. The women were broad in the beam and all wore as many necklaces, bangles, rings and hair jewels as they could cram on; no wench with less than six neck-chains could be considered worth talking to. Getting them to talk might be difficult, however, due to the looming presence of jealous menfolk and the fact they all went about with dogged chaperones.

  Philocrates did very quickly manage to make the acquaintance of a creature in lavish pleats of azure silk, crushed under eight or nine gold necklaces from which dangled an array of pendants set with pearls and polished glass. Her arms were virtually armoured with metal bracelets. We watched her peep at him entrancingly from behind her veil, only one lovely eye revealing itself. Maybe she was winking. Shortly afterwards we were watching him being chased down the street by her relatives.

  There was supposed to be a theatre, so while Chremes tried to find it and find out whether rude Roman vagabonds like us could appear there, I set off to discover the missing girl, Sophrona. I had asked Thalia whether she wanted to come with me.

  ‘No. You go and make a fool of yourself first, then we’ll put our heads together once you know what the situation is.’

  ‘That’s good. I had thought that with you in Syria I was going to lose my fee.’

  ‘You can’t lose what you never earned, Falco. The fee is for getting h
er back to Rome. Don’t waste your ink on an invoice until she’s off the boat at Ostia!’

  ‘Trust me.’ I smiled.

  Helena laughed. I touched her forehead, which at long last was cooler. She was feeling much better. I could tell that when she gaily explained to Thalia, ‘It’s sweet really. Poor Marcus, he likes to convince himself he has a way with girls.’

  I leered like a man who should never be allowed out alone; then, feeling fonder than ever of Helena, I set off into town.

  I seemed to remember hearing that this Sophrona was i beauteous bit of stuff.

  Chapter LXIII

  It had seemed best to deal with Thalia’s task quickly, before Chremes called upon my services as his luckless author. Besides, I was happy to pack in some sightseeing.

  If you visit Palmyra, go in Spring. Apart from the cooler weather, April is when they hold the famous processions at the great Temple of Bel. In any other month you get sick of people telling you how wonderful the festival is, with its minstrels, its palanquins of deities, and its lengthy processions of garlanded animals. Not to mention the subsequent blood-letting. Or the breakdown of social order that inevitably follows serious religion. The festival (to be regarded askance by a sober Roman, though it sounded good fun to me) must have been taking place about the time Helena and I were planning our trip. It offers the only chance of seeing open the mighty portals that hold back the public from the triad in the inner sanctuary, so if you like gaping at gods or at fabulous stonework, April is a must. Even then it’s a slim chance, due to the secrecy of the priests and the vast size of the crowds.