Parthian Shot

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Accounts days only come two or three times a year in the Corvinus household; they rank with blots on the religious calendar like the anniversaries of Cannae and the Allia, and they involve a lot of creative swearing. Me and numbers just don’t get on, and never have. Pythagoras, unless I’m mixing up my philosophers, believed the universe was made up of the little buggers, which says a lot about Pythagoras. Anyone silly enough to spread dangerous ideas like that around deserves to come back as a clam.

I’d just totted up the column on the latest tablet for the third time and got my third different answer when there was a knock on the study door and Bathyllus put his head round. Cautiously, which is par for the course on accounts days: our superefficient major-domo knows perfectly well that interrupting the master when he’s wrestling with household income and expenditure can lose you teeth. Especially since when I’m balancing the books I have to keep off the fermented grape juice. Wine and arithmetic don’t mix.

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