Free The Germanicus Mosaic by Rosemary Rowe

roundhouse and had the roof pulled in. Said there had been beggars sleeping there. And took Rufus to every banquet with him after that, as well. Though that was all. Rufus has been . . . grateful . . . for my silence.’
    He looked so gloatingly pleased with himself that I felt the need to leave before I lost my temper and one of us got hurt. It would almost certainly be me.
    ‘I think I will take a look at this roundhouse,’ I said. ‘It may hold the answer to our mystery. Anyone might have hidden there on the day of the feast and murdered Crassus on his return.’
    Aulus sneered. ‘It would be difficult. How would they get to the hypocaust? The villa gates were locked and I had the key. Anyway the aediles had the roundhouse searched, and they found nothing – except fleas. I told you – Crassus used it for the animals.’
    ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘I think I will take a look.’
    I went out into the lane. However much the roundhouse stank, I thought, it could not be worse than the stench of stale onions and oafish self-satisfaction.

Chapter Six
    I was wrong, as I discovered when I got there. Things could smell a great deal worse.
    It had taken me some time to reach the roundhouse. The lane was steep, and even when I got there I had to pick my way to the entrance. There was a path of sorts, but the old neat enclosure had fallen into disrepair, the outer ditch and wall had both collapsed and the inner compound had all but disappeared under bushes, thistles, grasses and young trees. The building itself was little more than a ruin. What nature had begun, Crassus had completed by pulling down most of the roof, so that what remained offered little protection against the wind and rain and only then if one huddled under the fallen thatch near what had been the door. The only thing still standing was the smell.
    It was a strange smell, compounded of damp straw, rotting vegetation and animal droppings, and a horrible odour of corruption which I eventually traced to a pile of old fish-heads under the fallen thatch. There was an old dark patch on the earth floor besides, where some unfortunate creature had once been slaughtered bloodily, and there was a general ambience of pigs. Hardly a welcoming habitation, and although a pile of bedding straw had been raked together in the one place of shelter, it was dirty, rumpled and damp. I remembered what Aulus had said about beggars sleeping here.
    And this was the only place that Rufus and his lady could find to be alone. I felt a twinge of sympathy. It was hardly a senatorial palace, even for Crassus’ hogs.
    Yet, ruined as it was, the building revived memories in me. I had not been in a Celtic roundhouse since they had dragged me, at sword-point, away from my own almost thirty years ago, and there was a strange bitter sweetness in visiting one again. Mine was a little bigger, of course, but otherwise no different. A Celtic chief measures his wealth, not in draughty corridors, but in the beauty and workmanship of his possessions, in music and song and the loyalty of his people. In just such a house was I born, and to such a house I brought my bride. I could picture as if it were before me the central fire, giving off its cheerful smoky heat, while something bubbled deliciously in the blackened pot. I could see the women huddled around it, weaving cloth and plaiting baskets, the dog basking by the hearth, one ear already cocked for the returning menfolk, while a lad – it might have been myself – struck music from a little harp and sang the old, sad, proud songs of my youth.
    I was accustomed, now, to Roman ways: to stone walls and floors, latrines and drains and aqueducts, to braziers and fullered linen. But there was a part of me which remembered, with regret, an older, wilder, less directed life, when a man’s time and land and labour were his own, without patronage or taxes, and a woman who needed an extra room could weave one out of osiers in an afternoon. Of course,