XXI

WE STAYED OVERNIGHT with my relatives. The beauteous Meldina had promised that if Scaurus returned, she would send him to talk to us. She said this with a frightening air of certainty. I was used to being won over with much subtler maneuvering but I could see that a man brought up in an atmosphere of repression might welcome a girl who was so firm. The poor wimp would feel secure.

Ma and Great-Auntie Phoebe were vying with each other in exclaiming dolefully that this might be the last time they ever saw one another. According to these two tough old birds, feeding a bone to Charon’s dog in the Underworld was just a day away for each of them. Myself I gave them both another decade. For one thing, neither could bear to depart life while Fabius and Junius were still providing them with disasters to deplore.

Fabius, the present homeboy, had been told about my new position as Procurator of the Sacred Poultry. “Oh, you must come and see what I am doing with our chickens, Marcus. This will interest you-”

My heart sank. While my great-uncle Scaro lived here, he too was full of crazy schemes and inventions, but Scaro had the knack of convincing you that when he showed you some weird piece of carved bone that looked like a potbellied pigeon, he had discovered the secret of flight. Any prototype produced by Fabius or Junius was bound to be of a more meager dimension and their mode of expressing enthusiasm had all the vigor of a very old rag rug. Whichever one backed you up against a manger for a lecture, the result was torture.

My grandfather and Great-Uncle Scaro (both long passed away) had built the original hen yard, a large enclosure which they had covered with nets and lined with coops, and where in good times they had nurtured upwards of two hundred birds. A woman and a boy lived alongside in a hut, but my uncles were the world’s worst managers of staff (either seducing them, feuding with them, or totally neglecting them), and so the birds were badly managed too. Reduced to forty or fifty in total during the recent reign of Uncle Junius, the flock had lived pleasantly, hardly ever troubled by having eggs removed or birds killed for the family pot. Now that Junius had run off somewhere, Fabius had plans to change all that.

“I am fattening them for sale scientifically. We are going to be thoroughly organized.” Nothing about my uncle was scientific or organized, except when he went fishing. His note-tablets of tedious data on fishes caught, location and weather, variety, length, healthiness, and bait used took up a whole shelf in the kitchen food cupboard, forcing Phoebe to keep her pickles at the back of the bucket store. Otherwise, Fabius could hardly put on a pair of boots by himself; he would get stuck after the first one and worry what to do next.

Fabius now had a large clutch of hens in a dark building where they were individually confined, some in cribs along one wall, some in special wicker containers with a hole fore and aft for the head and the tail. They were lying on soft hay, but packed so that they could not turn around and use up energy. Here the hapless fowl were being crammed with linseed or barleymeal kneaded with water into soft pellets. I was informed it took just under four weeks to bring them up to a good marketable size.

“Is this regime cruel, Fabius?”

“Don’t talk like a soft townie.”

“Well, be practical then. Is their flavor as good as that of the ones who run free?”

“People don’t pay for flavor, you know. What buyers look at is size.”

This astuteness must be why the Romans thought so highly of their agricultural forebears. In mine, I was descended from true masters of the land. No wonder Ma, like that smelly old peasant Romulus, had escaped to the city life.

Against the constant clucking of the birds, Fabius relentlessly detailed his financial projections, which led him to the conclusion that in two years he would be a millionaire. After an hour of tosh, I lost my temper. “Fabius, I have heard this before. If every get-rich scheme that came out of this family had worked, we would be a legend among the Forum banking fraternity. Instead, we just go downhill from year to year-and our reputation stinks.”

“The trouble with you,” said Fabius, in his maddeningly grave way, “is that you never want to take a risk.”

I could have told him that my life was based on hazard, but it seemed cruel to boast when his own was grounded in hopelessness.

I always liked visiting the country. It reminded me why my mother had been so keen to get away that even marrying Pa had seemed worth it. It refreshed my view of the joys of city life. I always went home a true Roman: full of my own superiority.

XXII

THE DAY BEFORE the Nones of June: the festival of Hercules the Great Custodian. A voting day.

At first, it looked as if Laelius Scaurus would not show. That’s a common drudgery in the world of informing. I had spent half my life waiting for time-wasters who made no attempt to keep appointments.

Now the misery was aggravated by Helena’s mockery: “Meldina fooled you! She looked so desirable, grinning at you as she was bursting out of her tunic-she couldn’t possibly be lying, could she?”

I went along with it. “Seems she is so busy being a fertility goddess, she has no time to pass on simple messages.”

“Or maybe Scaurus is still stuck in Rome,” Helena conceded.

“Oh, I expect he’s back here. He just sees me as an interfering outsider: that’s a family trait,” I said.

“And true, of course.”

Having seen both his pallid wife and his sumptuous girlfriend, I reckoned Scaurus would cut short his city visit. In his position, there were better pleasures on the farm. But I kept that to myself. I’ m not stupid.

I hung about a while longer, discussing with Phoebe whether she could take in one of my young nephews, one of Galla’s brood who needed to be lifted from Rome before life on the streets was the ruin of him. Ma sat in the cart, ready to go, pursing her lips and pronouncing that Galla would never agree to let Gaius leave home, even if it was for his own good. She had a point. I had already extracted his elder brother Larius and left him enjoying life as an artist at the Bay of Neapolis, so my sister now saw me as a child-thief. For some reason, Great-Auntie Phoebe had faith in my talents, so she promised to make preparations to receive Gaius right away. He was a revolting little tyke, but I had faith in her too. If he could be saved, she would do it.

I was collecting my party when Fabius came wandering by. “Listen, Marcus, I have had a thought-”

I managed to restrain my irritation.

“We have to go now!” Ma chipped in loudly. She had had seventy years of trying to bring her brother Fabius to the point. Anyway, she had stuffed our cart with vegetables and wanted to get them to Rome while they were still fresh. (I mean, she needed to leave before Phoebe realized quite how many nets of onions and baskets of young asparagus Ma had decided her affectionate relatives would hand over as free gifts.)

“No, look-now that you have responsibility for the Sacred Chickens, maybe we can work something out,” Fabius suggested, looking dangerously keen.

“I don’t want to sound pompous, but there is no chance of putting the augury birds into body baskets to fatten them up, Uncle Fabius. The whole point is to give them free movement so they can express the will of the gods in an untrammeled way.”

“I can see that, Marcus,” replied my uncle ponderously. “I was thinking about supplying you with new birds from time to time.”

“Sorry. They supply their own. We hatch their eggs.”

“What, even in the town?”

“Cities are hotbeds of nature, Fabius. Encyclopedists sit on every street fountain making notes of the copulating species they have seen that day and the peculiar spawn they have watched hatch out.”