London - Edward Rutherfurd [32]
All was quiet. Five hundred yards away, beside the amphitheatre, a sleepy grunt came from one of the lions brought there from overseas. Tomorrow the games would be held – a big affair. There would be gladiators, a giraffe from Africa, and fights with bears from the mountains of Wales, as well as local boars. Most of the population of Londinium would crowd into the great arena to see this splendid spectacle. Even the fat girl would waddle in there.
At the street corner it was very warm. The fat girl felt the hot sun and lazily pulled her dress to cover her breasts. There was only one fig left now. She took it out, placed it in her mouth, bit it so that the juice appeared on her chin, wiped the chin with the back of her fleshy hand, dropped the fig skin on to the ground where it joined the others, and then put the empty cloth bag over her head to shield it from the sun.
Then she sat and stared at the whitewashed wall opposite. She had nothing more to eat; it was getting very boring. The glare of the wall made her want to shut her eyes. No one at all came by. Most people were having their siesta.
Just for a moment she closed her eyes. The bag rested, limply, on her large head. By and by, the bag began to rise and fall rhythmically.
The soldiers came swiftly through the streets. There were five of them, accompanied by a centurion. The centurion was a big, corpulent man with grizzled hair; in the peaceful province he had seen little real action in his career, but a knife wound from a brawl years ago had left a scar from the top to the bottom of his right cheek that gave him the look of a veteran, and commanded a certain respect and fear in his men.
Their rapid march made little sound on the dusty street, but the gentle clinking of their short swords against the metal studs on their tunics gave warning of their presence.
It was Julius’s fault. If someone knocked him down in a boxing match, he got up cheerfully enough to fight again. It did not occur to him to hold a grudge. It was his weakness that because meanness was not in his own nature, he failed to see its presence in others. And so he had never noticed the look in the eyes of the fellow he had defeated ten days before. Nor would it have occurred to him that his opponent might open the purse he had carelessly put down that day and take note of a particular silver coin it contained.
Julius, the son of Rufus, who works in the port, has a silver denarius. How did he get it? His friend is Sextus the carpenter.
That was the anonymous note the authorities had received. It might, of course, mean nothing. But they were coming to find out.
Julius grinned to himself. If there was one thing he needed in his young life, it was money. His pay at the docks was meagre; by getting friends to place bets on him when he boxed, he could often make some extra. But at this moment, he and Sextus were making money in the simplest way possible.
They were forging it.
The gentle art of forging coins was simple, but required great care. Official coins were struck. A blank metal disc was placed between two dies – one for the top face, the other for the underside. The dies were engraved and their impression stamped – that is, struck – on the disc. Julius had heard of forgers who could actually copy this process to produce counterfeits of the highest quality, but for that you had to be able to engrave the dies yourself, which was far beyond the skill of Sextus and himself.
Consequently, most forgers did something a little less convincing but very much easier. They would take existing coins – which might be new or old – and by pressing each side of the coin into damp clay they would make two half-moulds. These were then fitted together with a little hole in the side so that when the clay was dry and hard, molten metal could be poured through it into the mould. Break open the mould after cooling, and there was quite a passable counterfeit coin.
“Except, of course, you don’t just make one at a time,” Sextus had explained. “You do it like this.