第9章 Fire in the Tall House

Quietus received her in the little room off the atrium where the family kept the images of its ancestors, which was a room for being watched over by the dead and for saying things that could not be said in the garden. He was dressed for the forum, in a tunic of good wool, and he had the look of a young man who has slept badly and has decided to pretend that he has not. Faustilla showed him the codex and the page of tokens, and then she showed him the mark at the foot of the columns, the small lopsided cross. "That is your cipher," she said. "You use it to initial the entries you check. I have seen it on a hundred tallies. It is on every column of the fraud." Quietus looked at the page for a long time. Then he sat down on the chest beneath the ancestor masks, which was more a collapse than a seat. "Where did you get this," he said. "From a clerk who is now in a cell on the charge of the theft he was trying to expose." He put his face in his hands, and when he spoke it was not to her; it was to the floor, in the voice of a man who has been carrying a thing alone and is at last made to set it down. "My father does not know the half of it," he said. "He thinks Vibidius cheats a little on the weighing and pays us a share to look away. That is what he thinks. That is what he wants to think. But two years ago I borrowed from Vibidius for the campaign, and then I borrowed again for the dowry, and then there was a third time, when a man I owed in the Subura was going to kill me, and the money came, and after that the money kept coming and I kept signing. I sign what he sends. It is a clerk's work, and I am a senator's son, and I sign it because the alternative is to tell my father that I have ruined the family with my own hand." He lifted his head. "You think I am a monster. I am not. I am simply weak, in the ordinary way, and it has cost the city its bread." Faustilla stood before him with the codex in her hand, and she found that she did not hate him, which was inconvenient, because hatred would have been simpler. "Then help me," she said. "Your name is on the page. A complaint that carries your name, spoken before a magistrate by a senator's son, will be heard. A complaint from me will not." Quietus looked at the codex, and she saw the calculation move behind his eyes, and she saw the moment when the weakness won, and she knew what he would say before he said it. "Give me the codex," he said. "Give it to me, and I will take it to my father, and my father will take it to a friend of his on the bench, and it will be handled quietly, and no one—not the family, not you—will be dragged into it. That is the only way this ends well for anyone." "Quietly," Faustilla said, "is the way it began." "Give me the codex." "No." His face changed then, and it was not the face of a weak man anymore, or perhaps it was, and this was what the weakness looked like when it was cornered. He stood up and called for the door-boy, and had her put out of the house, and as she went through the door he said, in a voice pitched to carry, that the household of Otacilius had no further use for a steward who could not keep a true account. She went back to the tall house on the grain road, where she had a small room on the third floor above a potter's workshop. She climbed the stairs slowly, because of her leg, and she was most of the way up when she smelled smoke, and by the time she reached the landing the whole stairwell below her was filling with it, and the sound of the fire came up through the boards like something breathing. The insula burned from the ground floor up. A lamp overturned, the watch said afterward; a lamp was always overturned, in the same way a porter was always drunk. The people of the tall house came down the stairs in the dark, or jumped, or did not come, and by morning the top two floors had come down into the workshop, and the workshop had come down onto the street. Faustilla stood across the road with a blanket that a neighbor had thrown over her shoulders, and watched the beams burn, and did not cry. She had lost her room, her spare clothes, the mattress, and her first tablet, the one that had lived in the lining, which held every note she had made since the first short delivery. She had kept one copy of the reckoning under her hem, and the codex, and the false token, because she had carried them with her out of the house of Otacilius, and for that, at least, she was able to be glad in the middle of the ruin. Two people of the tall house died: an old man who lived under the stairs and could not move quickly, and the potter's little girl, who had been asleep on the second floor. Faustilla went to Albia's room by the river, and Albia took her in and gave her a bed and a bowl of soup without asking a single question, and then sat with her until the lamp went out. She had thought the fire was for her, to burn the codex and the notes and the woman who carried them. Now, lying awake with the smell of smoke still in her hair, she was not so sure. The potter's girl was dead. Whatever the fire had been meant to do, the only thing it had certainly done was kill a child who could not read, and could not count, and would never testify to anything. ---