Venus In Copper

Lindsey Davis

Chapter I

Rats are always bigger than you expect.

I heard him first: a sinister shuffle of some uninvited presence, too close for comfort in a cramped prison cell. I lifted my head.

My eyes had grown accustomed to near-darkness. As soon as he moved again I saw him: a dust-coloured, masculine specimen, his pink hands disturbingly like a human child's. He was as big as a buck rabbit. I could think of several casual eating shops in Rome where the cooks would not be too fussy to drop this fat scavenger into their stock-pots. Smother him with garlic and who would know? At a furnace stackers' chophouse in some low quarter near the Circus Maximus, any bone with real meat on it would add welcome flavour to the broth...

Misery was making me ravenous; all I had to gnaw on was my anger at being here.

The rat was browsing nonchalantly in one corner amongst some rubbish, months' old debris from previous prisoners, which had avoided as too disgusting to explore. He seemed to notice me as I looked up, but his concentration was not really there. I felt that if I lay still he might decide I was a pile of old rags to investigate. But if I shifted my legs defensively the motion would startle him. Either way, the rat would run over my feet.

I was in the Lautumiae Prison, along with various petty felons who could not afford a barrister, and all the Forum pickpockets who wanted a rest from their wives. Things could be worse. It might have been the Mamertine: the short-stay political holding cell with its twelve-foot-deep dungeon, whose only exit for a man without influence was straight down into Hades. Here at least we had continual entertainment: old lags swearing hot Subura oaths, and wild swoops of disconcerting mania from hopeless drunks. In the Mamertine nothing breaks the monotony until the public strangler comes in to measure your neck.