The Boat of Fate Read Free

pantheon of Roman Gods, translating their virtues and follies alike into devilish characteristics; and incidentally exhibiting more faith in the traditional deities of the Empire than the average enlightened Roman had shown for generations. In addition the rocks and soil of Hispania had produced their own rich crop of horrors; and nobody was better versed in such folklore than my old nurse Ursula. She was an extraordinary woman, tall and gaunt to the point of emaciation, with frizzy hair, an ugly, gentle face and the longest, flattest and boniest feet I think I have ever seen. Ursula was three-quarters Celt, and I’m inclined to think more than three-quarters mad. It was she who regaled me, usually at my own prompting, with tales of lemures and werewolves, vampires eating the noses of dead men; and there were old ladies who changed with the dusk into taloned birds, and a great Man who haunted the northern seas, reaching with his scaly arms to overturn the stoutest ship. So it came about, not unnaturally, that nursery bogies plagued me; Morphio with her loping donkey’s legs or Lamia, her belly swollen with a screaming, burning child. At such times Calgaca’s eyes would flash, the colour deepen in her cheeks; she would hold me against her breast and talk of strange people and plants and animals on the rim of the world till my eyelids drooped and the curtains stopped their stirring and whispering and the house was quiet. Sometimes she would send for Ursula, vowing to dismiss her from her service for filling my head with such unpleasant rubbish. Then the strange creature would snuffle and weep, clinging to my mother’s robe and swearing she would die before she injured me; and Calgaca would relent and dismiss her to the kitchen, where it took several draughts of unmixed local wine to restore her nerves. By which time, of course, she was usually in a condition to start again. I think, simple soul that she was, the old woman truly loved me; and those half-delicious terrors did no lasting harm.
    My father had been born in Rome, to a middle-class equestrian family, though he emigrated to Hispania as a young man and remained there the rest of his fife. Why, I was never too sure; except that maybe he preferred to be headman of a village rather than second-in-command of an Empire. He held an important position in Baetica, as a Curator in charge of the public water supply. His duties frequently took him away from the town, so that during my early years I saw very little of him; if he was at home he would almost invariably be shut away in his study at the far end of the house. When he was working there at his ledgers and files, or reading in his extensive library, it was more than either my mother or the servants cared to do to interrupt him. He was a stocky, quietly spoken man, balding and with steady, piercing eyes; and that truly was almost all I knew of him. About the house he was always formally polite, although he was prone to bouts of bad temper, when he would curse with a violence that was truly terrifying. He was, before anything else, a figure of authority, and I was never able to feel really close to him. In any case, I was very little interested in his work, though I learned afterwards to value his skills more highly.
    At rare intervals, when the mood took him, he would call me aside from my studies. Then as like as not he would endeavour to drive into my head some notion of the complexities behind this simple matter of piped water. His staff was divided into three sections, each of which was kept to strength, in theory at least, by levies supplied by the State; though with the constant demands of the Army taking priority manpower was usually woefully short. Also, of course, the edicts of successive Emperors binding humiliores ever more closely to their family trades had rendered free recruitment almost impossible, though there were men enough in Italica alone who would have been glad of the chance to draw the rations