Wolf Whistle

Now spring had arrived and the seas became navigable, luxury goods from the Adriatic ports travelled the Via Salaria and the guards marvelled at great tusks of ivory, peacocks from Samos and glittering sapphires but, since the road from the Sabine Hills also ended here, mostly it was the common stuff. Venison, boar meat and barrel upon barrel of thick olive oil, because everyone knew Sabine oil was the best, but my word, the price of it! Night after night you’d see them, two dray horses pulling a cart loaded with one large barrel, which sat right behind the driver, plus three smaller ones to even up the weight. The gatemen knew the drivers, the drivers knew the gatemen, the banter was as constant as it was cheerful.

On the far side of the Collina Gate, however, it was a different world. Snubbed by traffickers and guards, tired shanties with walls of mud supporting bowing thatches leaned against the greyish-yellow stonework for support. The folk who eked out their short existence in these rank and squalid hovels did not care that this was where the enemy Hannibal once had made his camp. What use was history? Today’s enemy was starvation and fever and snakebite and dysentery and, for all the good it did them, Sabine oil might as well be gold. Oil for lights? For cooking? Do me a favour! When we have to beg for alms, scavenge for our firewood, sell our bodies behind the tombs which line the roads to anyone who’ll give us the price of a loaf? The people here had sores, they had roundworm, they had night blindness, they had rickets.

They also had babies.

‘Well, Captain, any luck?’ A cultured voice called across the plodding stream of wagons.

A thin, wiry individual with a horseshoe scar dodged past a muleteer and shook his head. ‘Not a bloody one, Dino. Not even a girl.’

Lately they’d taken to splitting up to search, this was the meeting spot. ‘Arbil won’t believe this,’ said the younger man, with a laugh in his voice. ‘He’ll think we spent the whole time rabble-rousing.’

‘Not with this pong clinging to us, he won’t,’ the Captain muttered. ‘Croesus only knows what caused that,’ he rubbed at a stiffening stain on his tunic, ‘but it stinks like shit.’

‘Probably is shit,’ sniggered the henchman Vibio, joining up from the east. ‘In which case, I ain’t sitting next to you in the cart home.’

‘Fuck off,’ said the Captain good-naturedly and turned to his well-groomed companion. ‘So then. Is that it for tonight, Dino?’

‘We’re wasting our time here, that’s for sure, and I can see little point in prolonging it.’ Dino rolled down his embroidered sleeves. ‘What’s the tally, Vibio? Just the two?’

‘One,’ replied Vibio, kicking aside a bundle of muddy rags. Too late he realized there was a small child inside, it whimpered as it scuttled into the night. ‘That second bairn was already dead, poor little sod.’

Around them came low moans of pain and the smell of green wood smoking. Somewhere an old woman cackled in mirthless laughter.

‘Save your pity, lad,’ said the Captain. ‘If it grows up here, it’ll have a bloody tough life, lucky to make it into its teens, and then it’ll probably have ulcerated lungs and a rather nasty sexual disease. Better off dead, if you ask me.’

‘Tell that to the boss’s face,’ the henchman retorted. ‘See if Arbil agrees.’

‘I blame Agrippa.’ Dino cut short any arguments. The tally was low, the job was unpleasant, tempers were short. ‘His death, plus those nine days of mourning, have completely buggered up the system.’

They nodded at what they thought Dino meant. That because babies were exposed only on market days-a silent signal for childless couples to search for human treasure-it seemed logical that tonight’s poor catch could be attributed to confusion in the minds of the slum girls following a national emergency.

But this was not what Dinocrates meant. Arbil the slave master had recognized in Dino a sharpness and intelligence from a very early age, and instead of being trained for trade or simply sold on unskilled, Arbil had lavished special care on Dino’s education. Elevated to a position of trust and authority in the organization, and now third in command, wealth and responsibility had not dimmed his native intuitiveness. What he meant-and what the others would not understand-was that the ripples radiating from Agrippa’s sudden and premature death went far beyond commerce and industry. The fragility of life had been rammed home in such a way that Dino believed that for many mothers, parting with their babies would be out of the question. The fight for survival would be stretched just that little bit further…