Thanks to Lollia’s sapphire-blue palla and Dinu’s height, we managed to keep them in sight. They skirted the western side of the forum and then veered right to run along the imposing northern wall of the basilica. There was a kind of industrial area here, with workshops. We passed several potteries, a glassmaker and, by the smell of it, a pee-laundry.
We were still running, even though I was pretty sure we had shaken off our pursuers. Once I stepped in a cowpat and nearly slipped on my flat leather soles, but by then we were in sight of the lofty town walls and twin arched gates, so we slowed to a walk and tried to look casual. Later on I found it was Bishopsgate. In my time there would be a massive gherkin-shaped skyscraper here.
There were soldiers on guard duty, but they looked bored. One was talking to the driver of a cart coming through the right-hand gate and the other was watching some boys who were rolling a hoop near a cheese stall.
‘I don’t see Lollia or Dinu anywhere,’ I said.
‘I think they went through the gate,’ panted Plecta, ‘into the cemetery. Lollia needs the spirits of the dead to help her with her magic spells.’
‘She’s doing magic now?’
Plecta tipped her head for yes. We were walking as fast as we could without seeming to hurry. Would the soldiers stop the twenty-first century boy and possible runaway slave-girl?
They didn’t even look at us.
As we went through the left-hand gate I saw dozens of small altars under the arch on both sides of the road. A man was lighting a candle at one of them. A line of bricks in the gravel road showed where Londinium ended and its northern graveyard began. I was careful to step over with my right foot.
Then we were back out into daylight, into the cemetery. I shivered as I remembered the Greek word for graveyard. It’s necropolis, which means ‘city of the dead’.
And that’s exactly what the cemetery looked like. The road was lined with buildings that were homes for the dead rather than the living.
My dad is buried in Brompton Cemetery, where there are lots of similar house-tombs, called mausoleums. The difference between this cemetery and Brompton Cemetery was that there were no trees here, only a few little shrubs. I suddenly realised why I kept seeing carts full of wood. Once there had been vast forests of ancient oak trees surrounding London, but three hundred years of heating bath houses, burning bodies and offering up burnt sacrifices had used up all the wood for miles around.
No trees meant there was nothing but mud and weeds around the tombs, apart from little bumps where cremation urns stuck up out of the ground.
Unlike Brompton Cemetery, which is usually deserted when I go there with Gran, I could see movement everywhere. Beggars huddled by a house-tomb close to where the great wall of the city rose up on my left. Mourners stood around a smoking pyre a hundred metres to the north-west. Feral dogs prowled about too, looking for something to eat. Wheeled traffic moved both ways on the road, which I found out later was called Ermine Street.
Then I spotted Dinu peeping out from behind a mausoleum on the right-hand side of the road. The top of the mausoleum had a painted stone sculpture of a lion devouring a stag.
Instead of ducking out of sight or running away as I expected, Dinu beckoned us over.
Plecta and I looked at each other and jogged along a footpath beside the road, in order to avoid cowpats, donkey dung and several mule-drawn carts heading our way.
‘Dinu!’ I hissed when I we reached the lion tomb. ‘What are you doing?’
‘She told me to keep watch,’ he said. ‘You were right. She is witch and doing something like magic. Are they still chasing us?’
I shook my head, then asked, ‘Can you actually understand her?’
‘Little bit,’ he said. ‘When she speaks Latin. Is not so different from Romanian, you know.’
I looked around for Lollia but couldn’t see her. Then Plecta pointed and I caught a glint of her fair hair. She was sitting on the ground behind a grave marker near a bush.
I tiptoed towards Lollia, trying to be as quiet as I could. As I got closer I heard her speaking in a strange sing-song voice, like when people talk to a baby or a pet. Her head was bent over something, but I couldn’t see what it was.
Curiosity drew me closer. Plecta followed, as silent as a ghost.
When I was finally close enough to see, I managed not to gasp in horror.
Lollia held a little beeswax figure of a pot-bellied man. He had copper needles in his eyes, mouth and tummy button, like a voodoo doll.
She was using her ivory leopard knife to cut off his feet.