Voice of the Fire, Alan Moore [year 2 reading books .TXT] 📗

the scraps of clothing halfway through their journey into rags, blue beads strung on a hair of rusted wire. Sometimes I smell her ghost upon the blankets and the boards.

When I came to Londinium a half-year since, I thought it hunched and squalid, breeding ugly humours, pestilences in amongst the jetties and the narrow yards, pooled urine yellowing there where the cobbles dip. The locals, hulking Trinovante fishermen or shifty Cantiaci traders, had a pleasing insularity, despite their sullenness. They kept amongst their own kind and made little fuss, yet fresh from home I thought the city Hades; they its fiends and chimaera. One of a team of treasury investigators sent from Rome at the request of Quintus Claudius, I spent my weeks there with my fellows quaffing vinegary wine, awaiting our assignments complaining each new inconvenience, each fresh indignity.

I work one thumb and forefinger inside my mouth and gently test the teeth to see how many move, loose in the blue and shrunken gums. I fear that it is all of them, and wish that I were in Londinium again, for it would seem a paradise now in my eyes.

Sent here into the middle-lands two months since with reports of forgery, I was a child with nothing to prepare me for this place, these Coritani, reeling drunk through short and bloody lives they take for granted; for their unconsidered, unrelenting violence; for the coloured scars, the curls of ink that craze their brows and backs, as terrible and queer as painted dogs. When I arrived here, I was yet so delicate of sensibility that I might blanch to hear some lurid passage from a drama told in verse, and now I watch them hang their young for sport, and scarcely think of it.

I light the lamp and sit upon the crumpled bedding to remove my army-issue boots. Downstairs, a woman starts to hiss and snort, as rhythmic as a bath-house pump, thus signalling that someone has received the hanged boy’s prize. The women here discomfit me. They are so big and filthy, smell so foul, yet not an hour goes by save that I think of them, the red hair lacquered by their perspiration coiling into tiny sickles underneath their arms, their cow’s-milk haunches swinging under prickly skirts. I have not had a woman for a year, not since the dyer’s eldest daughter back in Rome. How long before I take a whore? Their flat white faces, and their speckled breasts. I must not think of it.

Naked now in the chill November room, I pull on the night-shirt I have taken, folded, from my army bag, that has the stencilled crest. There’s few signs of the Empire to be seen out here, a scattering of villas where retired generals struggle to afford their mistresses. Some small way north beyond this settlement one Marcus Julius, a veteran of the Emperor Aurelian’s campaign against the Gallic Empire still maintains a modest farm. I was told to visit should I find myself close by. It was excruciating. On discovering I was not long from Rome, he seemed capable of making only one enquiry: ‘Well? How fare the Blues?’ I told him I took little interest in the chariot races, whereupon his disposition to me cooled, so that I left not much thereafter.

I fancy it was him who let the cog-name by which I am known be bandied back and forth amongst the village folk, so that they do not call me Caius Sextus now but taunt me with ‘Romilius’: ‘Hello there, Little Roman! How d’you like this woman on my arm? I’ll bring a stool that you may kiss on her above the waist!’ All of them hate me, all the women, all the men, though to be just, it is not without cause. They know why I am here, and further know the punishment for forgery. How shall they be the friend of one who’s come to see them crucified?

I burrow deep into my bed, such as it is. Downstairs, the woman barks this people’s word for copulation, over and again. If Rome should fall . . .

Put that aside. The day will never come while we are still producing Emperors of Diocletian’s mettle, men of scale who single-handedly vindicate their times. Those bold reforms to stem the plots and murderous feuds that threaten our stability, dividing up his office so that Maximian is become Augustus in the West with Diocletian as Augustus in the East. The weavers and the brewers carp, complain that he has fixed the price of rugs or beer, and yet inflation is contained. Our currency is strong. Without that strength the wilderness would have us all.

And yet my teeth hurt. Mine and my fellows’ teeth alike. Why, on the boat across there were some ten of us, investigators to the man, all with the same blue and receded gums, the headaches and the lethargies, the lapsing concentration, lapsing memory. One of the youngest said he felt as if already dead and crumbling away, stupid with maggots, though for my part it is not so bad. It’s just the teeth. No one can fix this ailment with a name, nor yet determine any cause. We speak about it as ‘the sickness’, if we speak of it at all.

Perhaps we are so much a part of Rome that we grow sick as she does; some peculiar bond, some sympathy of flesh and land. The bangled, ragged kings are at our gates and we appease them, grant them settlements and territories in the lands surrounding Rome until it is as if the vagrant tribes sit patient all about a sumptuous table at some beggars’ feast, with Rome the centre-piece. They sit politely for the moment, but their stomachs growl. If they commenced to dine the world should all be gone. The dark that gusts above the chill fields at the village edge would swallow us entire; the bright towns guttering, extinguished, all across the globe.

Sprawled on my side beneath