Sparrow

by James Hynes

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In a brothel on the Spanish coast during the waning years of the Roman Empire, a young enslaved boy of unknown parentage is growing up. His world is a kitchen, then an herb-scented garden, followed by a loud and dangerous tavern, and, finally, the mysterious upstairs where the “wolves” do their business. The wolves, named after the muses and coming from across the vast empire, are Sparrow’s surrogate family. They are his mothers and his sisters, his guides in a rough life, his solace from it. When he is not being told stories by his beloved Euterpe, he runs errands for her lover, the cook, while trying to avoid the blows of their brutal overseer or the machinations of the chief wolf, Melpomene. But a hard fate awaits Sparrow, one that involves suffering, murder, mayhem, and the scattering of the little community that has been his whole world. Through meticulous research and bold imagination, James Hynes brings the entirety of a Roman city to vivid life, recreating old Pagan Rome as its codes and morals give way before the new religion of Christianity, and introduces listeners to one of the most powerfully affecting and memorable characters of recent fiction. Sparrow is an enthralling, heartbreaking novel of identity, endurance, and love in a dangerous and changing time.

Release date: August 8, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

Print pages: 464

Sample

I

An angry woman is boning a fish. She carves with a controlled rage, her fingers expert, her gestures unwasted. With a long, sharp blade, she slices the fish behind the gills, unseams the spine, and lifts off the pink fillet. She scoops out the blue intestines and tosses them aside. Then she lifts the head with two fingers under the gills and swings the naked spine at me.

I am a nameless child in the shadows, legs akimbo on a cracked flagstone in a corner of a kitchen. The fish head and its ladder of spine slither to a stop between my splayed legs. The fish’s mouth is ajar, as if surprised to find itself naked on the floor. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Is this a game? Maybe, maybe not. The fish’s clouded eye fixes itself on my startled face, as if to warn me.

‘It’s you she’s angry at,’ it says.

The kitchen is full of shadow and stifling heat. It smells of smoke, onions and garlic, stale oil, and, yes, fish. Years of hot southern spices are baked into the blackened walls, a tang I can still feel in my sinuses. Along the back of a cement countertop are bottles of seasoning and spice, battered pots and pans, canisters of chickpeas and dried figs, and stained jars of olive oil, vinegar, honey, and garum. Above the countertop, hanging from hooks, are knives, tongs, a spatula, more knives, two ladles, assorted spoons. On a masonry cooktop along the adjacent wall, an iron pot is already on the boil. The morning’s fire smoulders in the fire-box below, red seams glowing in the ash. The only light comes through a low, square doorway, and beyond the doorway sunlight pours straight down into a kitchen garden, a knee-high jungle where chickens jerk their heads this way and that among the drooping leaves of heat-wearied plants. Beyond the garden is a whitewashed wall almost too bright to look at, and above the wall, a sky of flawless cerulean. Even now, after having lived most of my life under milky, shifting, inconstant British skies, the adamantine blue of that Spanish sky is still my Platonic ideal of the firmament – cloudless, boundless, depthless, perfect. It is the sky I would expect to see in heaven, if there actually were a heaven, and if I had any hope of going there.

Down the centre of the narrow kitchen is a stout wooden table, unsteady, unpainted, and crosshatched with knife cuts. Hunched over the table is the woman who is angrily boning fish. Under the table I see the ragged hem of her skirt. Her dirty toes clench and unclench against the flagstones as she eviscerates another. I have earlier memories than this, but they are just fragments – sunlight glittering on the sea, pellets of cat shit on a wooden floor, the smell of almond blossoms. This is my first coherent memory. It is the start of my story, and like all the best stories, says Horace, it begins in medias res. So when the serpentine head and spine of another fish skid to a stop near me, I am startled, but I do not cry. I already seem to have known not to protest. I already seem to know what will happen if I do.

‘Still angry,’ says the second fish head. ‘And it’s still you.’

In the stifling twilight of the kitchen, the woman’s pale face shines with sweat. Her abundant hair is tied back in a bun, and the light through the doorway picks out unruly red strands round her face. She wears a blackened iron collar round her neck. She never looks in my direction, which is another way I know she’s angry at me. Yet somehow the fish heads continue to land with unerring aim between my legs, a little boneyard of staring eyes and twisted spines. She knows where I am. She just doesn’t want to look at me.

A shadow flickers past the doorway. I turn. There is nothing but sunlight glaring off the garden wall, a chicken bobbing her head, and leaves curling in the heat. I shift my gaze back to the woman, as she drives her blade into the next hapless fish. Then the light dims again. A sharply defined silhouette sways in the doorway, a man with bare legs and a short tunic. As I blink at him out of my dark corner, he steadies himself with a hand to either side of the door.

‘Is this the pisser?’ He breathes heavily through his mouth, as if he has just struggled up a hill.

The woman straightens, one hand on the tabletop. ‘This is the kitchen.’ She points with the knife. ‘The latrine’s next door.’

The man looks away, but he does not leave. He isn’t tall, but the door is so low, the top of his head nearly brushes the lintel. Against the glare I can’t make out his face or tell what colour his tunic is, but I can hear his laboured breathing. I see his legs trembling under him as if he has just put down a heavy weight. I hear the snick snick snick of the blade against the tabletop as the woman expertly savages another fish and stubbornly ignores the man. Then he draws a deep breath and pulls himself through into the kitchen. Light pours in after him. Now I can see he has tangled black hair and a patchy beard. Under the table I see his shoes. One of the straps has broken, and he has repaired it himself, tugging the two ends into a tight knot. His legs wobble as he stumbles across the flagstones toward the woman. She draws a breath, turns to face him, and stands as tall as she can. She sets her feet flat, she splays her dirty toes. Beneath the table I see the hand holding the knife slip into a fold of her skirt.

‘What’s your name?’ The man stands close enough to breathe on her, and she turns her face away. He is only a little taller than she is. He lifts an unsteady hand and curls one of her flyaway hairs round his finger. She jerks her head away and steps back. But drunk as he is, he’s quick, and before she can lift the knife, he’s caught her round the waist and swung behind her, clutching both her wrists. He doubles her over the edge of the table and squeezes one wrist against the tabletop until she grunts in pain and lets go of the knife. She pushes back against him, and he slams her against the table again and knocks the breath out of her.

‘You want one of the wolves upstairs,’ she gasps. ‘I’m Focaria.’

‘I have money,’ he mumbles, ‘I can pay,’ and he grasps her round the waist with one hand while he claws her skirt up with the other, handful by handful. Under the table Focaria’s toes clench as her heels are lifted off the floor. The man tenses his calves. He grinds the soles of his shoes into the flagstone. Focaria says nothing, her nostrils flared, her lips pressed bloodlessly together. With one hand she tries to find purchase on the tabletop among the slippery fish guts, with the other she reaches for the knife, but the man drops her skirt long enough to flick it off the table. The knife clatters against the floor, and Focaria cries out wordlessly as he shoves his hand again up her skirt.

If this is another game, it frightens me. Their scuffling and grunting bring me to the cusp of tears, but I’m too breathless to cry. Then, with a great hollow thump, the table lurches toward me. To keep from falling, the man lets go of Focaria and throws himself back on his heels. She falls to her knees, and while the man wobbles on his feet like a round-bottomed pot, she scuttles away under the table.

Now I do start to cry, and for the first time, the man notices me. ‘What’s this?’ He sways toward me, one hand on the table, one touching the wall. He fills my vision, a faceless silhouette against the glare from the doorway. I cry even louder. He stoops and catches me between two blunt and callused hands, and he lifts me, howling, high off the floor. He reeks of wine and sweat.

‘Who are you?’ he says.

Now there’s a question! Writing this memory now, at the opposite end of my life, I can only be impressed in retrospect at the man’s drunken perspicacity. In vino veritas, you long-dead bastard.

‘What are you?’ He lifts me over his head and peers under my tunic, then he glances back where Focaria was a moment ago. ‘He’s too dark to belong to you.’

I squirm and scream, and he hoists me at arm’s length so that my hands and feet don’t strike him in the face. Swaying up near the blackened rafters, from a vantage I’ve never known before, I see the furthest horizons of my world and everything in it: the blazing doorway, the grimy walls, the scarred and slimy table. The cement counter, the masonry cooktop, the flagstones littered with fish heads. The poker and the little iron shovel and the leather bellows propped against the oven. The figure of a woman crouching in the far corner.

‘Maybe he wants to watch,’ the man laughs. ‘Maybe he’ll learn something.’

He turns, looking for Focaria, just in time to see a blur of pale face and flyaway hair as she charges out of the corner with the boning knife in her fist, thrusting up from her waist. The man shouts and twists away from her. His heel catches on a fish head, his feet fly out from under him, and he drops me as he lands on his backside. I scream as Focaria drags me out of the way by my arm. Propped on his hands, the man scrabbles for footing, but all he catches are fish heads. As skilfully as a street fighter, Focaria flips the knife in her hand so that the blade is down, and she raises her arm high over her shoulder. Her eyes are glittering and terrifying. My only consolation is that her rage is directed at the man and not at me.

Then another hand, huge and hairy, jerks Focaria off her feet by the collar round her neck. She sprawls, gasping, as the knife spins away over the flagstones. A new shadow looms over me, bigger than the first man, and kicks me aside. He stoops, grabs the front of the first man’s tunic with both hands, and yanks him to his feet.

‘The slut tried to—’ the first man starts to say, but the new shadow, who is a head taller, slams him against the wall and pins the first man’s wrists over his head with one hand. With his other hand, the new man slices the first man’s face just under the eye with a short, sharp knife.

The cut man squeals. The hulking shadow drags him stumbling across the kitchen and flings him out the door. The first man flies into the sunlight and crashes through the plants in the garden, waving his arms, trying to keep his footing. The chicken erupts from the undergrowth, squawking and flapping, and the man recoils and crashes to the dirt.

The new shadow fills the door, dimming the kitchen again. Only a little light leaks around his broad back, his spreading gut, his thick calves.

‘Don’t come back,’ he says. ‘Next time I’ll face-fuck you and cut your throat.’ He wipes the blade of his knife with his fingers and slips it out of sight again.

‘My money . . .’ Among the trembling leaves the first man rises to his knees, one hand pressed to his cheek. ‘My money’s just as good as anybody else’s.’ Bright blood oozes through his fingers.

‘Fuck your money, you cunt-licker.’ The voice of the man in the doorway is rumbling and wet all at once. ‘I don’t need your fucking money.’

Between his legs, I see the first man stumble to his feet, trampling the plants around him. Somewhere out of sight, the chicken protests violently. The shadow in the doorway jerks his fist back, and the man in the garden staggers away, dripping blood on the wilting leaves. The new shadow turns back into the kitchen.

‘Audo . . .’ Focaria has pulled herself up by the edge of the table. In my corner, I am still howling like a dog.

The man Focaria calls Audo steps into the kitchen, and the light from the doorway falls across him. He has a fleshy, pushed-in face, a gut that strains over the belt of his tunic like a bloated wineskin, and meaty ankles mottled pink and white like hams. My gasping, desperate crying makes him scowl.

‘Make that be quiet,’ he says in his liquid rasp, pointing a blunt finger in my direction, ‘or I’ll send it back where it came from.’

‘I wish you would.’ Focaria rubs her throat where the collar bruised her. ‘What am I supposed to do with him?’

Now Audo looks at me. I can hear him breathing all the way across the kitchen. His eyes are like currants pushed into a bun, and under his black gaze I instinctively swallow my sobs and snot. I am learning one of my earliest lessons: a slave does not cry.

‘Put him to work,’ he says. ‘What’s the problem?’

Focaria sighs. She is a slave, too, but a more useful one than I am at this point in my life, so she has some slight licence for backchat.

‘Doing what?’ Her voice is steadier now. ‘He’s too young.’

Audo’s gaze narrows, and I fall completely silent. I am learning.

‘Hit him.’ This, I will learn, is Audo’s answer to everything. Audo is a hammer, and every problem is a nail. ‘A slave’s ears are on his back . . .’ he starts to say, but Focaria, testing the limits of her licence, finishes it for him.

‘. . . he only listens when you beat him,’ she says. ‘I know, Audo.’ She points at me. ‘But I could hit him all day long, and it won’t make any difference. He’s a child. He needs somebody to teach him, and when am I supposed to do that? I have to cook and clean and shop. I have to run food into the tavern every night. I have to fetch water and wine up to the wolves and carry away their fucking chamber pots. How am I supposed to do all that and–’ she jerks her head in my direction, but still does not look at me – ‘look after him?’

She starts to say more, but she catches herself. Audo has put his head down. As a necessary piece of equipment, Focaria is less likely to be hit than I am, but she is not exempt.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Audo lifts his head. ‘I’m not made of money.’ This is another of his favourite sayings. It’s what he says when he thinks he’s being reasonable. Focaria sometimes repeats it mockingly behind his back, mimicking his coarse accent and calling him ‘Pecunia’. Also behind his back, and never when he can hear her: ‘It’s not his fucking money, is it?’

Just now, though, she says, ‘Send one of the wolves down to look after him.’

‘One of the wolves?’

‘Why not?’ says Focaria. ‘When she’s not working.’ Her voice is tight. She knows she’s approaching the limits of his patience. ‘All they do is sleep in the morning.’

Audo drums the tabletop with his meaty fingers.

‘It doesn’t have to be the same one every day.’

Audo sighs massively, like a bull pawing the earth.

‘They can take turns. They can—’

Audo slams the table with both hands and makes it jump. Focaria breaks off and drops her gaze. He has not hit her, but such is the wonderful efficacy of violence that after a certain point, all you have to do is raise your hand to a dog, and it will cringe.

Yet Focaria seems to think she has one more inch of leeway. Under her breath, quickly, she says, ‘I can’t watch him every moment. If he hurts himself, you’ll beat me. If he dies, you’ll beat me. If I ask for help, you’ll beat me. What am I supposed to do?’

Audo glares at her across the table, or rather at the top of her lowered head. He swings his gaze to where I sit on the floor, blinking, silent, breathless. Then he looks away toward the garden, and his face catches some sunlight. I can see the grey in his coarse black hair. I can see the red blossoms on his flattened nose.

‘I’ll send Euterpe down,’ he says. ‘In the mornings.’

Still not looking at him, Focaria mutters something.

‘What?’ says Audo.

Focaria hunches her shoulders, as if expecting to be hit from behind.

‘Send Urania,’ she says, still staring at the tabletop. ‘Euterpe’s too scatter-brained.’

‘That was the old Euterpe,’ Audo says. ‘The new one’s not so stupid.’

‘Urania,’ Focaria insists. ‘How do I know the new Euterpe won’t kill him?’

‘It’ll be up to you to make sure she doesn’t.’

‘Then what’s the point,’ Focaria says, much too sharply, ‘if I have to watch them both?’

‘Enough!’ Audo roars.

Focaria cringes and clutches her elbows.

‘Do you want to go back to sucking cock under the aqueduct?’ he says.

‘No, Audo,’ whispers Focaria.

‘Then what do you say?’ says Audo.

It is settled. Euterpe is the best she’s going to get. Focaria works her lips until the words come. ‘Thank you, Audo.’

‘Right.’ He dips his head under the low lintel and squeezes into the garden. He stabs through the door once more with his finger. ‘And put him to work.’

Then he’s gone. Focaria sighs and lets her shoulders loosen. She stares sourly through the doorway, tallying the plants the first man trampled in the garden. The chicken clucks past, jerking its head, swivelling its wide yellow eye. I start to whimper again in the corner, still shocked and bruised from being grabbed, dropped, and kicked. Sighing again, Focaria pushes the table back to its original position. She bends over, picks up the boning knife, and jams it, quivering, into the tabletop. Then she stoops, picks me up, and perches me on the edge of the table. She stares intently into my face until my whimpers subside and my tears stop. She swipes the snot off my nose and chin and flicks it away. Then she takes my jaw in her fishy fingers, not brutally, but not tenderly either, and she searches my face as if she has never seen anything like me before. In the light from the doorway I see her red hair. I see the freckles across her nose and cheeks. I see the bruise darkening her throat where Audo jerked her by the collar. I see her blue eyes, as hard and depthless as the sky above the garden wall.

‘Your happy days are over,’ she says.

Overnight the horizon of my world doubled in size, spreading out from the dark, hot, smoky kitchen and into the steep sunlight and tangy fragrances of the tavern garden. This was a narrow strip of dirt where Focaria grew onions, garlic, carrots, and beets, as well as basil, thyme, rosemary, mint, and other spices. It was bounded on one side by the kitchen with its sloping roof and smoking chimney and by the latrine with its rattling door of uneven planks, and on the other by the bright wall with its peeling plaster and a stout wooden door that led to the unseen street. At one end of the garden loomed the wall of the tavern itself, with a low arch into the main room on the ground floor and three barred windows peering down from under the eaves of the second floor. At the other end of the garden was the blank wall of the shop next door, and against it the sweating, masonry water tank and the weedy woodpile. The chicken and a petulant rooster also lived here, printing the dirt with their claws and fertilizing it with their droppings.

More importantly, the population of my world expanded to include Euterpe, the wolf Audo assigned to be my tutor. Each morning after cockcrow, as the early sunlight crept along the garden wall, I squatted outside the kitchen door while Focaria banged about inside. I drank a cup of water and tore at a piece of day-old bread, waiting for Euterpe to appear in the tavern archway, yawning and stretching in her red gown, still wearing her smudged make-up from the night before. Her mask, she called it. Sometimes there were bruises on her face or upper arms or around her throat. She winced if I touched them, but she never lost her temper or pushed me away. I was her Pusus, her Little One, and she was the second woman I ever knew, after Focaria. You might even say that I was raised by a wolf, just like Romulus and Remus. And yet Euterpe was both a wolf and not a wolf. She was a Christian and not a Christian. She had the name of a Muse, but she was not a Muse. Euterpe was her name and not her name. She was my mother and not my mother.

In my earliest memory of her, we have already met, and we are nestled together against the cool bricks of the water tank. I already know her name, I already know the deep timbre of her voice, I already know the yielding warmth of her breasts. I know her smell of musk and sweat, of last night’s perfume, and of something else, which I will later come to know as sex. She sits with her back against the tank and I sit on her lap or rest between her knees, and she teaches me the names of things in the world beyond the garden. That is the sky, that is a cloud, that is the sun. She lifts my hand and we point at each thing in turn. That is the wall, and beyond the wall is a house, and on top of the house is a roof, and the roof is red. She identifies for me the sounds from beyond the wall, but this is harder for me to understand, because there’s nothing to point to. That’s the sound of someone walking, and she walks two fingers up my arm. Tapping her fingers faster, that’s someone running. That’s the sound of women talking, like we’re talking now. That’s a dog barking, making her fingers yap. That’s a mule braying, opening her mouth wide. That’s a man laughing, and she tickles me until I squirm with my own laughter.

Occasionally Focaria steps into the kitchen doorway and tosses slops into the dirt for the chickens or plucks some leaves from the herbs in the garden. Sometimes, though, she just stands in the door and watches us. When Euterpe or I look back, she withdraws instantly into the kitchen like a rat into her hole.

Euterpe mostly teaches me by telling me stories, and here is the first one I remember. It’s a story about the birds.

‘In the beginning,’ she says, her breath warm in my ear, ‘God gave each bird a choice. She could do one thing well, or she could have the ability to do many things, but not very well. Do you see that bird there?’

She lifts my hand to point at the scrawny, dirty-white fowl strutting on yellow feet between the rows of the garden, turning its angry yellow eye this way and that.

‘Chicken,’ I say.

‘Very good.’ She gives me a warm squeeze. ‘Now when God asked Chicken what she wanted to be able to do, Chicken said, “I want to be able to walk upon the ground, because that’s where the food is.” God granted her wish. And so Chicken walks upon the ground and eats all the worms and beetles she wants. Her choice was good, because she got what she asked for. But her choice is also bad, because she cannot fly. And so Chicken is enslaved by men, who steal her eggs every day and eat them. And she can’t escape the fox if he gets into the garden.’

I shift in her lap. I don’t know what a fox is, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be caught by one.

‘Don’t worry,’ Euterpe says. ‘You’re too big for a fox to eat. Now, do you see that bird way up high?’

We point together at another bird, with crescent wings and a split tail, darting to and fro against the hard blue of the sky, high above the red roof. ‘That’s a swift,’ she says. ‘Can you say “swift”?’

‘Swift.’ I follow it with my eyes as it streaks back and forth, up and down.

‘Very good.’ Another squeeze. ‘Now, when God asked Swift what she wanted to do better than anyone else, she said, “I want to be able to fly, so neither man nor the fox can ever catch me.” So God made Swift better at flying than any of the other birds.’ She lifts my hand again, and we sway together as we trace the darting flight of the swift. ‘Swift can never be enslaved, and she can never be caught by the fox.’

‘That’s good!’ I say.

‘But it’s also bad!’ Euterpe says. ‘Because Swift flies so well, she has no need of feet, and so she can’t walk upon the ground. And because she can’t walk upon the ground like Chicken, Swift can only eat what she can catch in the air. She must always be hunting. So Swift can fly, but she can never, ever rest.’

I look from the strutting chicken in the garden, a slave to men and prey to the fox, to the swift in the air, never able to catch her breath or sleep. It’s not much of a choice, and my lower lip trembles. Euterpe gives me another squeeze.

‘The story isn’t over, Pusus, there’s one more bird.’ She lifts my hand again. ‘Look.’ We point at a fat little bird atop the garden wall. It’s not as striking as the chicken or as fleet as the swift. It’s just a round, chestnut ball with another ball on top, with a short beak and a rusty red cap.

‘That’s Sparrow,’ she says. ‘Can you say his name?’

‘Sparrow.’

‘Good. Do you remember our story so far, Pusus?’

‘Chicken can walk but can’t fly. Swift can fly but can’t walk.’

‘Very good!’ Squeeze. ‘Now, what do you think Sparrow chose?’

I think it over. Unlike the strutting hen or the swooping swift, the sparrow just sits atop the wall and swivels his head. He rises slightly on his short legs, puffs out his chest, and lifts his blunt little beak. Then he settles, and he is once again a ball of feathers with a smaller ball on top. I look at Euterpe. She’s watching the sparrow with her bright brown eyes.

‘Remember,’ she says, ‘God told each bird she could choose to do one thing well, or she could choose to do many things, but none of them very well. Now luckily for Sparrow, he got to choose after Chicken and after Swift, and he learned from their mistakes. He learned that the best thing is to be able to fly and to walk.’

As if to prove her point, the sparrow rises up on his legs again and sidles one way along the wall and then the other. Then in a flash, he is aloft. He’s not as graceful as the looping swift, but in a flurry of wings, he has flown across the street and onto the peak of the red roof.

‘What’s the lesson?’ says Euterpe. ‘Can you guess?’

‘Sparrow can walk,’ I say, ‘and fly.’

‘Very good!’ Another squeeze. In my life so far, this is the best feeling I know.

‘Maybe Sparrow can’t walk as far as Chicken,’ Euterpe says, ‘but he can walk well enough to fill his belly. And maybe he can’t fly as quickly as Swift, but he can fly fast enough to escape the fox and keep from being enslaved by man.’

The chicken struts past us again. The swift streaks overhead. From the red roof beyond the wall, Sparrow looks down on them both, and on us.

‘Remember Sparrow, Little One,’ Euterpe murmurs in my ear. ‘He’s not excellent at anything, but just good enough at everything. It’s what the philosophers call the Golden Mean.’

‘What’s a phil . . . phil . . .?’

‘Phil-oss-oh-fer.’

‘Is that another bird?’

Euterpe laughs. ‘A philosopher is not a bird, Little One. A philosopher is a person who helps other people learn by asking them questions.’

‘Are you a philosopher?’

Euterpe smiles. ‘Yes and no.’ She kisses the top of my head. ‘Remember the story of the birds.’ She touches her lips to my ear. ‘If you get to choose,’ she whispers, ‘be like Sparrow.’

Just like that, Sparrow became my secret namesake. Compact and self-contained, he perched atop the wall, he fluffed his feathers, he swivelled his head, he broke his short beak and chirped. In the days after Euterpe told me the story, I stopped sometimes to watch him from the garden, convinced that he was watching me back. I turned my own face from side to side the way he did, I looked at him with one eye and then the other, and I chirped at him in his own language, one Sparrow to another. Sometimes he just looked back, sometimes he chirped, but sometimes he replied by erupting into flight, his blurred wings beating the air as he rose, flying and flying and flying away from me, becoming a tiny outline of himself until he dissolved into the blue.

I’m a sparrow, too, I thought. Someday I’ll fly away.

Focaria and Euterpe and the birds weren’t the only residents of the garden. There was Audo, of course, and there were my aunties, the other four wolves who lived and worked upstairs in the tavern. Their names were a conceit of Granatus, our Dominus and the owner of the tavern. The grandson of a freedman and the son of a tanner, Granatus had properties and businesses all over town, the better to dispel the stink of the tannery. He had bought his way onto the city’s curia, and though he would never rise any higher, he had hopes that one or both of his sons might be elected aedile or duovir, or join the staff of the provincial governor, or, who knows, even become a senator. His older brother was the bishop of Carthago Nova, and thereby, at least unofficially, the most powerful man in the city.

Granatus had a bit of Greek, so he named his wolves after the Muses and called the tavern itself Helicon, after the traditional home of the Muses. He hired a sign painter to ink the name in big red letters on the wall outside, but if he thought these touches of Greek sophistication would attract a more elite clientele, he was mistaken. The punters were still mostly sailors and fishermen from the harbour-side, freedmen and slaves who worked up and down the street, and a few of the local shopkeepers and merchants, looking for what they couldn’t get at home. The tavern also attracted seasonal grain harvesters and olive pickers, who spent all their wages in one night, as well as the farmers who came into market once or twice a year and spent a portion of their profits before taking the rest home to their wives. Long before I came to live there, it was so common along the street to call the tavern ‘Helicunt’ that it wasn’t even considered witty anymore. I didn’t know any of this yet, of course. It was a long time before I learned that Helicon was also a mountain in Greece, that a wolf was also a kind of animal, and that Clio, Thalia, Urania, Melpomene, and Euterpe had been goddesses long before they were whores in Carthago Nova.

Yawning, blinking, and hungover, the wolves came into the garden every morning to eat their breakfast of tavern leftovers from the night before. The morning was also their time to escape their cramped cells for a bit of fresh air and sunshine and to trade stories about the punters from the night before. Sometimes they sang together – the first music I ever heard – but sometimes they separated and went off on their own, just to be blessedly alone for a little while. At first, each one had a different name for me. Clio, a Gaul, called me Mouse, because I was small and brown and quick, I suppose. She was plump and ghostly pale, with limp, colourless hair, a mournful smile, and watchful eyes. Her shyness masked a streak of resentment that surfaced if one of the other wolves got something she didn’t. Of all the wolves, she smelled strongest of wine in the morning. She never knew what to say to me, but only patted my head at arm’s length and said, ‘What do you know, Mouse?’ Then she wrapped herself in her stained blue gown and settled into the thicket of ferns behind the stack of firewood. Here she hummed or sang wordlessly to herself, or caught up on her sleep, snoring gently with her mouth open.

The two youngest wolves, Thalia and Urania, were as inseparable as sisters, and they always sat together and groomed each other like cats – tweezing each other’s eyebrows, shaving each other’s legs, parting each other’s hair and pinching out the fleas. Thalia was compact and shapely in her yellow gown, and she was quick to laugh, quick to take offence, quick to forgive a moment later. She was an Egyptian and a Christian, and she spoke more tongues than the other wolves put together – Egyptian and Greek and Aramaic and Syrian, as well as Latin – which made her especially popular among the homesick sailors and other travellers who passed through Carthago Nova. She knew songs in each language, too, and when the wolves sang together in the garden in the morning, she led them in a clear, high voice until the others dropped away, closed their eyes, and just listened. She was dusky like me, and her hair was thick and glossy like mine, and so she called me Little Brother. Sometimes she chased me up and down the rows of the garden, calling out, ‘I’ll catch you, Little Brother! I’ll catch you and eat you up!’

Her friend Urania was the only wolf who came from Hispania, from a village nearby, sold into prostitution by her father, a pig farmer, to pay his imperial taxes. She was popular with the rustic punters, because her first language was the old tribal tongue, and she spoke Latin with the same rough accent they did. She was tall and bony, with a bent nose and sharp cheekbones and black, undulating hair, and her green gown hung from her as if from a scarecrow, accentuating her shoulder blades and her clavicles and the points of her hips. She seemed to watch the world as if from a great height, smiling slightly at things no one else thought were funny. She didn’t have a special name for me, but simply called me Pusus, like Audo and Focaria did. Usually she only watched as Thalia chased me up and down the garden, but sometimes she caught me, too, and turned me about between her long-fingered hands like a farmer evaluating a newborn piglet, as if trying to decide if I was going to survive or not.

‘Why don’t you sing with Thalia?’ I asked her once, and Urania looked at me gravely and said, ‘Because I croak like a frog.’

‘What’s a frog?’ I said, and she only smiled and turned me loose.

Even more than the rest of us, Urania was always hungry. While Thalia and I played in the garden, she often lingered outside the kitchen door and stared into the gloom with her sunken eyes. ‘You’ll eat when you’re fed,’ Focaria muttered, slicing an onion as if she were cutting someone’s throat. But then Urania, glancing over her shoulder for Audo and not seeing him, stretched her long arm through the door and rapped the kitchen table with the edge of a coin. Without turning round, Focaria reached back and palmed the coin, then reached back again with a piece of dry bread or a handful of olives. Stooping through the door, Urania stuffed the bread or olives into her mouth, swallowed it whole, then folded herself out the door again.

Melpomene, the fifth wolf, called me Antiochus, because I may or may not have been a Syrian, and up to seven of the old kings of Syria had been called Antiochus. Behind her back, the others called her ‘Queen of the Wolves’, partly because she was shockingly old, partly because she was a freedwoman, and partly because of her superior manner. A couple of years before, when she had turned thirty, the minimum legal age for manumission, she had persuaded Dominus to let her purchase her freedom. He’d wanted to sell her to defray the cost of a younger Melpomene, but she had offered him instead more money than she was likely to have fetched on the slaver’s block. Over the years, by giving each punter a little something extra and then persuading him to tip her a coin or two more than what he’d already paid Audo, she had saved enough – coin by coin, fellation by fellation, fuck by fuck – to buy herself. She had even raised enough to pay the emperor’s tax on manumission. Most surprisingly, she made a deal with Dominus to stay on at Helicon and continue to work as a wolf. She had calculated that it was cheaper to rent her old cell and pay for her meals than it would have been to set herself up in her own crib on the street. Her regulars knew where to find her at Helicon. On her own, she’d have had to start again from scratch.

Punters paid Audo up front to have one of the other wolves, but Melpomene accepted her own money in her cell upstairs. Unlike the other wolves, who were slaves, she could leave the tavern anytime she wanted to – properly covered up in her mantle – and buy things for herself. She kitted out her cell with cheap drapery and scented candles and doused herself with more expensive oils and perfumes than the other wolves were able to. Where the others shared a single, cloudy hand mirror and an old, mismatched set of grooming implements of tin and lead, Melpomene had her own mirror, combs, and razor, as well as a kit of tweezers, brushes, and an earwax spoon, all made of silver and wrapped in a wallet of soft leather. She was the only wolf to wear a gown of white cotton, and the only one to wear jewellery – rings and bracelets of bronze, necklaces of glass beads and amber, and earrings that looked like gold but almost certainly weren’t. She sometimes told punters she was a senator’s daughter from Rome, and once a week she came back from the hairdresser’s with her unnaturally yellow hair piled high above her head like a lady’s. She was fine-boned and sharp-nosed and highly strung, with wide eyes and a pointed chin, and she often reacted to whatever happened or whatever was said to her after half a beat, like an actor milking a moment on stage. Now that she was a renter and not a slave, Audo no longer beat her, and though Dominus had made a rule that Audo was supposed to pay for his sex like any other punter, Melpomene was the only wolf he actually, grudgingly paid.

Behind her back, the other wolves said she made up in showmanship and enthusiasm what she lacked in beauty or youth.

‘She dyes it,’ Clio said about her hair. ‘Every time she goes to the hairdresser, it comes back a different colour.’

‘The gown’s second-hand,’ said Urania. ‘She bought it off a grave robber.’

‘Oh, please,’ said Thalia. ‘I’m more Roman than she is.’

‘Don’t laugh,’ said Euterpe, who tried never to be unkind to anyone, even behind her back. ‘We’d do it, too, if we could afford it. When a punter has Mel, he can pretend he’s fucking his Domina.’

Once a week, all five wolves came into the garden for their weekly cup of atocium, a herbal concoction to prevent pregnancy and induce menses. Focaria brewed it with rue and dill from the garden, sometimes with raw egg added at the last moment to make it less bitter. Audo supervised, if only to keep the occasion from turning into a party. Today, the wolves gather just outside the kitchen, ...