III The Comrade
A SHIP was loading at the Claudian dock. She was big for an ocean-goer, two-masted, her round black belly taking perhaps five hundred tons. The gilt sternpost, curved high over the steering oar fixtures in the form of a swan’s neck and head, also bespoke wealth. Lugo went over to inquire about her. Bound more or less this way, he had turned aside with the idea of seeing what went on at the waterfront. He made it his business to keep fully aware of the world around him.
The stevedores were slaves. Though the morning was cool, their bodies gleamed and reeked with sweat as they carried amphoras across the dock and up the gangplank, two men to each great jug. A breeze off the river mingled whiffs of fresh pitch from the ship with their odors. The foreman stood by, and him Lugo could approach.
“The Nereid,” he replied, “with wine, glassware, silks, and I don’t know what else, for Britannia. Her skipper wants to catch tomorrow’s early tide. Hoy, you!” His whip licked across a bare back. It was single-stranded and unloaded, but left a mark between shoulder blade and loincloth. “Move along, there!” The slave gave him a hopeless glower and trudged a little faster to his next burden at the warehouse. “Got to freshen ‘em pretty often,” the foreman explained. “They get out of shape and lazy, sitting around idle. Not enough to do any more.” He sighed. “Free men, you could lay off in these wretched times, and call back when you needed them. But if everybody’s in his station for life—”
“It’s a wonder this vessel is going,” Lugo said. “Won’t she draw pirates like flies to a carcass? I hear the Saxons and Scoti are turning the shores of Armorica into a blackened desert.”
“The House of the Caelii always was venturesome, and I guess there’s a big profit to be made when so few dare sail,” the foreman answered.
Lugo nodded, stroked his chin, and murmured, “M-m, sea rovers usually do seek their plunder on land. No doubt Nereid will carry guards as well as her crew being armed. If several barbarian craft came in sight, Scoti probably couldn’t climb that tall freeboard out of their currachs, and given any kind of wind, she can show her heels to Saxon galleys.”
“You talk like a mariner yourself. But you don’t look like one.” The foreman’s glance sharpened. Suspicion was the order of the day. He saw a medium-sized, wiry man of youthful appearance; face narrow and high in the cheekbones, curved nose, slightly oblique brown eyes; black hair and a neatly trimmed beard such as was coming into fashion; clean white tunic, blue raincloak with a cowl shoved back; stout sandals; staff in hand, though he walked lithely.
Lugo shrugged. “I’ve been around. And I enjoy talking to people. You, for instance.” He smiled. “Thanks for satisfying my curiosity, and a good day to you.”
“Go with God,” said the foreman, disarmed, and turned his attention back to the longshoremen.
Lugo sauntered on. When he came opposite the next gate, he stopped to admire the view eastward. His lashes snared sunlight and made bits of rainbow.
Before him flowed the Garumna, on its way to its confluence with the Duranius, their shared estuary, and the sea. Some two thousand shimmering feet across, the water bore several rowboats, a fishing smack bound upstream on oars with its catch, a gaudy spitsail above a slim yacht. Land on the far side reached low, intensely green; he saw the tawny walls and rosy tiles of two manor houses amidst their vineyards, while smoke blew in tatters from humbler roofs of thatch. Birds winged everywhere, robin, sparrow, crane, duck, a hawk on high, the startling blue of a kingfisher. He heard their calls as an overtone that skipped through the lapping and rustling of the river. It was hard to imagine that heathen Germani raged at the gates of Lugdunum, that the chief city of central Gallia might even now have fallen to diem, less than three hundred miles from here.
Or else it was all too easy to imagine. Lugo’s mouth tightened. Come along, he told himself. He was more prone to reverie than other men, with less excuse nowadays. This vicinity had been spared so far, but the handwriting on the wall grew plainer for him to read every year, as certain Jews he had known would have phrased it. He turned and re-entered the city.