Age of Iron Read Online Free PDF Page B

horses, cats, dogs, bees, hippopotamuses, ocelots, rhinoceroses and more. At first it had bored him into raging furies. He’d swear, hit, bite and often run away from his despairing parents. Slowly though he learned to love the trade. He became proficient, then good, then obsessed. A well directed obsession, his parents used to tell each other, is a blessing.
    The only cloud in the bright sky of butchery was the deep smallpox scarring that covered his body and face, which the unsporting gods had seen fit to interweave with a virulent case of pustular acne. Ulpius didn’t mind that he looked so unappealing because he didn’t know. His parents were careful to keep the shop and their flat above it clear of reflective surfaces. Fortunately, there was a backlash against elitism and a championing of the downtrodden in Rome at the time, so the customers took his physical repulsiveness as a cue to be more kind and friendly.
    So Ulpius was happy. He loved chopping up animals and talking to customers, and if you love your work, then it’s not work, right? That was what his dad used to tell him.
    Then, the mirror. It was a typical Day of the Moon morning. He could remember it as if it were last week. He was preparing a boned jaguar’s head stuffed with various animals when a beautiful girl called Sulpicia walked into the shop. While waiting for Ulpius to sew up the head, she produced a hand-held mirror to check her make-up. He couldn’t remember how it came to pass, but one moment he was noticing the mirror, the next the jaguar’s head was spilling its filling onto the counter, and he was holding Sulpicia’s mirror, looking into it and looking at himself, really looking at himself, for the first ever time.
    Ugliness looked back. His face looked like a sponge that had mopped up watery blood, been dipped briefly in molten cheese, then had a pair of eyes daubed on by an inept painter. But there was one good thing: he did have almost unnaturally black shiny hair. Seeing his face was a shock, but there was the compensation that he could use his hair to distract people from it. Unfortunately, like someone who likes the effect of one mug of beer so drinks another fifteen, he went too far.
    Every Roman man that Ulpius knew had short, regularly trimmed hair, while the fashion among smart Roman women was to curl their hair in piles on top of their heads. Loads of barbarian slaves, tourists, merchants and immigrants, however, strolled around with long, unkempt hair. Ulpius believed that if he could combine the best aspects of barbarian men’s and Roman women’s hair fashions to produce a clean, managed wildness, it would look magnificent.
    To his parents’ slowly burgeoning dismay he forsook the barbers, and slowly, slowly, his wonderful mane grew. While others his age were reading, running, going to the games, loitering in forums and visiting places like Capri, Athens and the ruins of Carthage, Ulpius was in his room, styling his hair. He concocted a range of hair unguents from herbs and animal fluids. He polished the shop’s knives to use as mirrors.
    But Sulpicia’s mirror was the best. He looked forward each week to the Day of the Moon, when she’d come to the shop and let him look into it. Its polished silver surface reflected his tresses in much higher definition than knives and puddles, and its gold frame surrounded them with an appropriate degree of splendour. He began to obsess almost as much about that mirror as he did about his hair, and Sulpicia would have to spend longer and longer in the shop waiting for him to give it back.
    Initially, Sulpicia thought he was sweet. As time went by, however, the purer emotions of her youth gave way to the insecurity of young adulthood and the compensatory desire to mock others. So she found the situation increasingly hilarious. She’d take friends to see the strange little butcher’s “tonsorial fetishism”, as she cleverly called it. When she married and had a son, she often