Free The Iron Hand of Mars by Lindsey Davis

me!” he grumbled, winding himself into the thin blanket on his narrow bed. We were in a small dormitory. Massilia believes in packing in the customers neck to neck, like pickle jars on a cargo boat.
    I grinned. “That’s the spirit! Adventures were what you wanted. They always involve suffering.”
    Just before the lamp died of exhaustion, I let him see me testing my dagger and placing it under what passed for a pillow. I think he understood the message. I was a highly trained professional. Danger was my way of life. If so much as a mouse scratched a floorboard, knifing the barber would be my instant response. Given the amount of shaving-lotion he splashed on, I would smell him coming even in the pitch-dark. And I knew where to sink my weapon for the best effect. Whatever the Palace had told him, or not told him, he must be aware of that.
    His first day in Gaul had made him too miserable to try anything that night.
    There would be plenty of other chances. But whenever he decided to do the dirty work for Titus Caesar, I would be on the alert.

 
    XII
    We reached Lugdunum. I won’t say without incident. We had fought off a gang of village urchins who thought my basket of symbolic ironwork contained something they could sell, then I hitched a lift on a wineship and nearly dropped the Hand overboard. In fact, every time we rode away from the previous night’s mansio, I ran the risk of leaving Vespasian’s present for the XIV behind on a shelf.
    The drinking-water started to affect us at Arelate; Gallic cooking oil knocked us sideways as we were rowed past Valentia; some tricky pork laid us low for a day at Vienna; and by the time we slunk into the civic capital, the wine we had gulped down to try and forget the pork had given us splitting heads. All along the route we were playing patball with the normal autumnal quota of fleas stocking up before the winter, bedbugs, wasps, and invasive little black things whose favourite lodging was up a luckless traveller’s nose. Xanthus, whose pampered skin had rarely been outside the Palace, broke out in a rash whose progress he described for me at tedious length.
    So, Lugdunum. As we disembarked, I favoured Xanthus with an informative travelogue: “Lugdunum—capital of the Three Gauls. That’s as in ‘Caesar divided Gaul into three parts…,’ which every schoolboy is compelled to know, though you barbers may escape such low points of education … A handsome city, established by Marcus Agrippa as a focus for communication and trade. Notice the interesting aqueduct system, which uses sealed pipes constructed as inverted syphons to cross the river valleys. It’s extremely expensive, from which we can deduce that in provincial terms the people of Lugdunum are extremely rich! There is a temple to the imperial cult, which we shall not be visiting—”
    â€œI’d like a chance to sightsee!”
    â€œStick with me, Xanthus. This city also boasts an outstation of the mighty Arretinum pottery. We’ll go there for our treat. You and I will be following the grand tourist tradition of trying to take home some dinnerware—at twice the cost and three times the trouble of shelling out for it in Italy.”
    â€œWhy do it then, Falco?”
    â€œDon’t ask.”
    Because my mother told me to.
    *   *   *
    The samian tableware factory offered a fabulous chance to make our feet hurt tramping about all morning staring at thousands of pots, not to mention the opportunity of lashing out on presents that would make our bankers wince. The Lugdunum potters were bidding to supply the whole Empire. Theirs was the big commercial success story of our time. They were cornering the market, and their compound had that atmosphere of tenacious greed which passes for business enterprise.
    Kilns and stalls stretched around the town like a besieging army, dominating normal life. Wagons blocked all the exit