Island of Ghosts Read Online Free PDF

as I looked at them, and I could feel them staring after me, trying to work out where I came from. I was not wearing Roman dress, of course. I had trousers like their own men, but a shirt and sleeved coat instead of the tunic and cloak. I was wearing the coat with the sleeves loose, since the day was warm, but I’d pinned it on my right shoulder, the opposite way from them, and I had a leather hat with a peak, while they were all bareheaded. I was obviously a foreigner and a barbarian—but I was also obviously wealthy. My clothes might have been dirty, but they had been dyed expensively red, decorated with gold beadwork and fastened with gold, and my dagger had a jeweled hilt. I was a contradiction. It was not surprising that they stared.
    I paused to look at some sheep that were penned between three wicker hurdles. They were an unfamiliar breed, more lightly built than the ones I was used to: most were grayish brown, but a few, a longer-tailed, squarer sort, were white. I stopped for longer by a horse dealer. His horses were small shaggy animals with large heads and thin necks: I didn’t think much of them. But I noticed that they all wore iron shoes. My own people never trouble to shoe their horses—it’s unnecessary in a land without roads—and most of the auxiliary cavalry I’d met didn’t either. I’d seen horseshoes before, but never had a chance to inspect them. I went over to one of the horses, patted it, and knelt to check its hooves. Its owner came over and asked me a question in an unknown language.
    “I am sorry, I do not understand you,” I said. “Do you speak Latin?”
    “Indeed, man . . .” he said, then, correcting himself, “My lord, indeed I speak Latin. Are you interested in the beast? He’s a fine worker, pulls well at the plow or the cart, only four years old; you may have him for just thirty denarii.”
    “How far can he go in a day?” I asked—the first question any Sarmatian asks when buying a horse.
    The horse dealer stared at me. “Indeed, my lord, I don’t know.”
    It shocked me almost to tears, and I had to look away and pretend to study the hoof again. I felt utterly foreign and alone. “How far can he go in a day?”—the question came from another world, a world where people lived in wagons and traveled from grazing ground to grazing ground, a world to which I could never return. Here the question was “Can he pull well at the plow?” and I wouldn’t even understand the qualities that answered it.
    I put the horse’s foot down, stood, patted it on the shoulder. “Thank you,” I told the horse dealer, and limped off.
    I stopped at a public fountain on the other side of the marketplace and had a drink of water. A fat woman selling apples offered me a cup to drink from. As I returned it, with thanks, I looked at the apples, which she had in a large wooden barrel. They were small and red. “How much are they?” I asked.
    “I’d sell a basketful for a couple of eggs, my lord,” the woman replied, beaming, “but you may have one for nothing, seeing that you’re a foreign gentleman.” She handed me one. “Have you come from across the sea, my lord?”
    Plainly she had a lively curiosity. I took a bite of the apple: it was sweet. “I have,” I told her, when I’d swallowed it, “and I have some fellows there. I would like to buy your apples to give to them, freewoman. Will you sell me the barrel full?”
    “What? The whole barrel?”
    “If it is agreeable to you.”
    “Indeed, my lord! The whole barrel? Then you’d want the barrel, as well as the apples? That would be . . . let me see . . . You may have the apples for four asses, and another five for the barrel.”
    I had some coins in a purse, and I dug nine coppers out. The woman looked at them and shook her head. “My lord!” she said. “These are sestertii!”
    “Well, how many of them make up one as?” I asked.
    She stared at me in amazement, then giggled. “My lord!” she cried. “There are