Tales of Ancient Rome by S. J. A. Turney Read Free Book Online Page B

possessions but the tunic he wore and the tools of his ‘trade’. Byzantium had been next and, unfortunately, a very similar story to Athens, though without the constant danger of rape. Tarsus had been brief but dangerous, with knife-wielding maniacs, the usual blood-hungry moneylenders and customers, and an almost fatal bout of something that caused the world to fall out of his bottom.
    And so he’d ended up in Jerusalem at the arse end of the empire, where rebellious Jews spent their entire time badgering, corrupting, knifing and denouncing the occupying Roman forces. After the first week he’d even given up bothering to comment when they spat on his feet. It wasn’t as though he was going to get any dirtier, after all.
    The street opened up before him that morning with its usual commotion, smells and noise. It was as though someone had ripped the roof off the Cloaca Maxima and filled it with people and stalls. Uniformly horrible. He rubbed his hands in anticipation, wincing as the two broken fingers, bound together with a torn strip of tunic, moved painfully. When this morning was over, he would have enough money to either pay Castus off, or buy a horse with plenty of change and get the hell out of this shit hole. Not both. The latter was starting to sound good, though. Alexandria might make a nice change.
    Strolling down the street, he smiled. The initial bad start to the morning was clearly just that. His luck was changing. One of the stalls at the roadside was busy packing away after the morning rush. The proprietor was head-down in his bags, packing the remnants away, but had left a loaf of bread hanging from the hook at the stall’s corner. Spurius leaned to his left as he walked and picked up speed. As he reached the stall, he lunged out with his hand, unseen by the stall’s owner, and grasped for the bread.
    The owner’s son, a tall boy with a sour face, swiped the bread out from under him, glaring, and Spurius found suddenly that his balance was off. Momentum carried his hand into open air where the bread had been, his feet seemed to do some complicated dance and moments later he was face down in the straw and horse shit by the side of the road with two bakers laughing at him.
    Hurriedly he picked himself up, dusting off the worst of the crud, and gathered his bag in his arms, clutching it tight. A quick glance up failed to improve his mood.
    As a haruspex, a diviner of truths in the entrails of beasts, Spurius was expected to be staid, sombre, sober, and above all, accurate. However, since he had ‘learned’ his craft, such as it was, from a drunken lunatic with a tendency to dribble, a beard that things lived in and the most curious smells, skin afflictions and twitches, all for the price of a place to stay for a month, he was not entirely convinced of his pedigree. The man had claimed to be an Etruscan of age-old lineage. What, in fact, he appeared to be was a drunk, a fraud, and quite possibly a carrier of disease.
    Certainly Spurius had learned a few things from the old man. While he may have had all the talents of prognostication of a jar of fish sauce, he knew the jargon and the basic principals and it was astounding in the past decade just how often Spurius had made accurate predictions based partially on the signs around him and partially on a one in two chance of being right.
    Above, three blackbirds flew in formation. Spurius knew that this could be interpreted in numerous ways, and the most positive (the one you always told clients) was that it represented the Capitoline Triad and that Jupiter, Juno and Minerva were watching over them with a kindly eye. It was how Spurius took it for himself this morning, which made it all the more poignant and irritating when a great bird of prey hurtled out of the blue and snatched one away, scattering the other two. Clearly not a good omen in anybody’s book, let alone that of the Etruscan mystics.
    Grumbling to himself, Spurius strode on. The one thing he