The Cybelene Conspiracy

by Albert Noyer

  When Leudovald looked around the study without beginning a conversation, Arcadia said, “That young man’s death was a terrible one.”

  “Terrible, Domina.” Instead of looking at her, he leaned forward to examine Getorius’s bruise. “What happened to your cheek, Surgeon?”

  I’d forgotten about Tigris’s blow. “Ah…an accident with a patient. How can I help you, Leudovald?”

  “I can’t officially question you until tomorrow.”

  “I understand. This is Sunendag.”

  “Sunendag.” Leudovald glanced around the room again, then back at Getorius. “Perhaps we could merely…socialize.”

  “Christ taught that the Sabbath was made for man,” Arcadia pointed out. “That would apply to social calls.”

  “To social calls,” Leudovald repeated, allowing a thin smile to pucker his mustache.

  “Were you given permission to remove the youth’s body from the basilica?” Getorius asked. “Thecla was concerned.”

  Leudovald hesitated an answer, looking down and rubbing the wooden cover of a wax slate he had brought to take notes.

  “Just social conversation,” Getorius reminded him.

  “Conversation.” Leudovald’s wan smile returned. “The body is at the palace, surgeon. In the ice room—”

  Silvia entered carrying three silver cups decorated with chased olive branches, and a matching flagon. As she poured out the hot wine, a scent of laurel leaves rose from the steam. Getorius studied Leudovald. A few years younger than I am…he has a boyish, innocent look for a man who investigates crime. That probably helps the guilty lower their shields. He has a funny habit of repeating the last words you’ve said.

  Leudovald accepted his wine without comment, put it down on the floor instead of a table, then flipped open the cover of his slate. “A social call of pleasant talk,” he murmured, incising a few words in the wax. “Surgeon, how did you come to discover the body?”

  “Thecla sent a boy for me.”

  “The heretic presbytera?”

  “Arians do have a different creed, but—”

  “Why didn’t she send for a magistrate?” Leudovald interrupted, looking up from his tablet with a hard stare.

  “Thecla may have thought the boy was still alive,” Arcadia volunteered.

  “Alive. But he was not, Domina.” Leudovald frowned, then an amused expression hovered beneath his mustache. “You work with your husband?”

  “Yes. He’s training me to be a medica.”

  “A medica, so you went with him. What did you find?”

  “Atlos bled to death,” Getorius snapped. The man had a way of making his questions sound like accusations—Arcadia’s presence at the church, the comment about his bruised cheek.

  “Bled…to…death,” Leudovald repeated slowly, as he wrote in the wax. “Exactly how, Surgeon?”

  “A wound in the scrotal area generally severs the testicular vein.”

  “And the knife was next to the dead slave?”

  “Knife?” Has he been talking to Diotar? “It wasn’t a knife,” Getorius corrected, flushing. “And it wasn’t next to him. Atlos was holding a golden sickle.”

  Leudovald’s light-green eyes darkened to a jade color as they focused again on the raw wound at Getorius’s cheek. “You’re mistaken, Surgeon. I found a fisherman’s saw-toothed knife at the side of the body.”

  Getorius felt a shudder of uneasiness spill into his stomach. Is he trying to implicate me in Atlos’s murder? I was accused of illegally dissecting a monk’s body this past December and placed under arrest. Now this Leudovald is looking at my injury as if he suspected I might have gotten it in a quarrel with the dead youth.

  “My husband is correct,” Arcadia said, to break the embarrassing silence. “It was a golden sickle.”

  “Thecla saw it too,” Getorius added. “She thought it might be some kind of ritual instrument.”

  “Ritual instrument. So. I have a loving wife’s testimony, indeed, almost a colleague, and that of a heretic.” When Leudovald paused, Getorius surmised that it was to leave the conclusion up to him. Then the investigator’s stare softened and his boyish look returned. “There was a girl kneeling beside the body?”

  “We thought her name was Sybil, but it’s evidently Claudia Quinta. Her father came for her this morning.”

  “This morning. His name, Surgeon?”

  “Gaius Virilo. Said he was master of a merchant galley at the harbor.” Leudovald looked up from his notes at the same instant that Getorius caught the connection with a sailor’s tool. “But it wasn’t a fishing knife. I saw a golden sickle, even handled it.”

  “Surgeon, there were blood smears on the edge of the cloth covering the youth,” Leudovald continued.

  “I wiped my fingers on it after handling the sickle.”

  When Arcadia saw Leudovald’s blond eyebrows arch in renewed astonishment at the admission, she explained, “My husband asked Thecla to cover the body out of respect.”

  “Of course, Domina. ‘Covered…body…’” Leudovald’s stylus traced the words in the wax. “This Claudia. What happened to her?”

  Getorius hesitated. The Oath on his plaque forbade him to reveal a patient’s infirmity without a compelling reason. Let Leudovald provide that first.

  “What happened to her, Surgeon?” Leudovald repeated more firmly. “You seem unsure.”

  “No. Obviously, Claudia was quite upset. I sent her back here with my wife, so she could examine the girl and give her a sedative.”

  “Well?” Leudovald turned a cold gaze to Arcadia.

  “The…the girl is pregnant,” she admitted.

  “This Claudia is with child?” Leudovald slammed the wooden covers of his tablet together and stood up. “Then there’s the answer to this crime’s riddle. Violated daughter…furious father…handy fishing knife. And this Atlos was a slave, I have his collar.”

  “It’s still murder,” Getorius pointed out.

  “Murder? At best, destruction of someone’s property,” Leudovald contradicted. “Under the Lex Aquilia, Virilo would pay damages to the owner. Except, in this case, the magistrate might find that the galley master’s property had been damaged by the slave and dismiss the claim.”

  “You’re treating Claudia as property, and her pregnancy as ‘damage’?” Arcadia demanded, her complexion reddening.

  “Retribution the Hebrews might call ‘an eye for an eye,’ Domina.” Leudovald walked to the doorway, then turned and repeated, “A furious father and his knife, but I’ll talk to this heretic presbytera, and certainly with you again, Surgeon.”

  “You haven’t tasted your wine,” Arcadia said. “It’s still standing on the floor.”

  “Another time, Domina. Don’t bother seeing me to the door. I recall the way out.”

  Arcadia shivered after he was gone. “Icy little man.”

  “Indeed. I’d wager he’d have his grandmother decapitated and make her sharpen the sword,” Getorius quipped, but his voice was weak. As he gulped the last dregs of warm wine in his cup, his hand trembled.

  “Relax, Husband. That last remark sounded like Leudovald was trying to convince himself.” Arcadia rubbed at creases in Getorius’s forehead. “Are you afraid he thought you weren’t telling the truth?”

  “Cara, the magistrate believed that I was lying last December.” Getorius caught at Arcadia’s fingers and held them over his eyes. His head had begun to host a dull ache and her touch was cool. “The question is…two questions…how did the sickle get replaced with a fishing knife, and why was it replaced?”

  “There’s a third puzzle, Getorius.”

  “Oh?”

  “How could Diotar know that the dead boy’s name was Atlos? You said Thecla locked the door when you left.”

  “Or, for that matter, that he’d been castrated.”

  “Supposedly only Leudovald knew those things,” Arcadia said. “Somehow, Diotar must have gotten into the basilica.”

  “Or any curious serva
nt brave enough to enter the ice room where they put Atlos’s body might find that out. It’s unlikely one did, but it’s said that when gold asks the question, even pigs are eager to answer.”

  “You think that Leudovald was bribed by Diotar?”

  “Arcadia, how else would the actor…or whatever he is…even know there had been a death?”

  “Diotar did avoid answering when you asked him how he knew Claudia was here.”

  “I had come to the same conclusion as Leudovald, that a family member killed Atlos,” Getorius recalled. “Perhaps I was seduced, by what seemed most obvious.”

  “Speaking of seduced.” Arcadia’s hand slipped down the neck of Getorius’s tunic and toyed with a nipple. “Didn’t you try to lure me into the bath for a bit of lovemaking last night?”

  Getorius pressed her hand against his chest. “Tonight, I think that just might cure my headache.”

  “I could read you some Ovid.”

  “Please. Not about deceiving the deceivers again.”

  Arcadia smiled at the recollection. “All right. How about a love story from his Metamorphoses? You can choose which one. I’ll have Silvia bring more wine to the bathhouse.”

  Getorius was lying half-awake when he heard the entrance tintinnabulum start to jingle incessantly. The high-toned echoes of the small bell announcing that someone was at the door on the Vicus Caesar reached into the bedroom, along with the muffled barking of the watchdog belonging to the gateman, Brisios.

  “What hour is it?” Getorius mumbled, rolling away from Arcadia’s scented warmth and fully opening his eyes. “Dark as the pit of Tartarus. Who could be here at this hour?” The movement had not awakened his wife. Getorius lay still to gather his thoughts, recalling that immediately after making love in the bath and getting in bed he had fallen asleep, a leg thrown over Arcadia’s thigh and his face nuzzled into the rose smell of her hair. But he had awakened a few hours later, his mind clogged by images of the dead youth in Thecla’s church, the visit of Claudia’s father and that capon of a man with him, then Leudovald, he of the boyish face, but with eyes and manner that were accusatory even in ordinary conversation.

  Someone’s talking to Childibert. Getorius swung his feet out from under the covers, onto the cool tile floor. The last patient to come in the night had been a sick vagrant, brought by a friend. The man suffered from an irreversible phlegm imbalance, and had died on the examining table. Getorius had partially dissected the corpse before becoming nauseous and ending the experiment.

  “What is it, Getorius?” Arcadia murmured in a voice thick with sleep.

  “Someone at the door.” He fumbled in the dark for his sandals. “Stay warm, I’m going out to Childibert before he comes in here.”

  Getorius managed to locate his sandals under the bed and slipped them on without fastening the straps. After groping for a cloak in the wardrobe, he crossed through his study and the reception room, into the atrium.

  The night air outside was warmly damp, smelling of the rain that had fallen earlier. No stars showed through the roof opening above a central pool now filled to its marble rim with rainwater. The floor tiles around the small cistern glistened in orange wetness, reflecting the light of a single torch. Getorius saw his steward at the front entrance, arguing in loud whispers with a man.

  “Who is it, Childibert?”

  “Master, slave of Senator.” He handed Getorius a wax tablet with the imprint of a ring seal.

  “Publius Maximin?” In the dim light Getorius made out the deep intaglio image of a rooster and the letters P. MAXM, emblems of the most influential senator in Ravenna. He was not too surprised. The man had inconvenienced him several times asking for medical services. “Is the Senator’s mother worse?”

  “His niece, Master. Faustina.”

  Getorius did not recognize the name. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Midwife asks that you come. Delivered niece of a child.”

  “Then it must be serious. Midwives don’t usually call in a physician unless things are desperate.”

  “Slave has a carriage.”

  “Good. Tell him to wait while I put on trousers and get my medical case.”

  When Getorius returned to the bedroom, Arcadia had lighted a lamp. She was sitting on the bed, knees tucked to her chin, black hair tumbling loose over bare shoulders. He leaned down to kiss an ivory shoulder.

  “Cara, how can you look so beautiful any time of the day or night?”

  “Enough of your Celtic honeyed words,” she retorted. “Who was it?”

  “Senator Maximin’s niece, Faustina, has given birth. There are evidently complications that the midwife can’t handle. He wants me to come.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “No, it’s late and I want you to stay here,” Getorius told her, even while knowing that his wife would ignore his order.

  “I need to see the problem.” Arcadia slid off the bed and searched in the wardrobe. “You know it’s my dream to open a clinic for women,” she reminded him, selecting a full-length light wool tunic. “And I still have the book on gynecology that Theokritos had lent me. It might be helpful for Faustina.”

  Getorius pulled on wool trousers and belted a short tunic over them. While he put on waxed leather boots as protection against rain puddles, he thought of something that might dissuade his wife from coming with him.

  “You know, you’ll have to convince that midwife to let you help her. They’re a pretty independent lot.”

  “But they aren’t physicians. Blessed Cosmas only knows what she may have done to the woman.”

  “Arcadia, that’s unfair,” Getorius chided as he straightened up. “Most midwives are competent, and Maximin could certainly afford the best.”

  “Then, according to Soranus, she’d be Greek.”

  “Latin-speaking, hopefully. My Greek is, ah, sta cripia, in ruins.”

  “Gnorízo hellenikó eph’ homileín aute. Biazometha! Tachy, tachy!”

  “I think you said that you know enough Greek to talk to the midwife? Fine, Arcadia, get dressed and we’ll go.”

  Getorius gulped a drink from the washbasin pitcher as Arcadia finished fastening a hooded cloak over her gray tunic. “Ready?” he asked. “I’ll get my case from the clinic and meet you at the door.”

  “All right. Just let me put a band around my hair and get something.”

  At that hour, the Vicus Julius Caesar was deserted, and shrouded in mist from the evening rain. Torches on the corner of the Via Honorius appeared in the distance as flickering islands of dim yellow light. Maximin’s carriage was an elegant black covered rig, drawn by an equally beautiful ebony mare. When the driver turned around to help Arcadia onto the back seat, Getorius caught a glimpse of the words MVTVS SVRDVS engraved on a silver plaque dangling from his neck. Mute and deaf. Not bad limitations for a driver who sees everything that goes on at Maximin’s and might be tempted to sell the information.

  Arcadia put down the leather pouch she was carrying and caught her husband’s arm when he followed her onto the seat. “It’s the same deaf-mute who picked me up that time I was invited to the senator’s villa,” she whispered.

  “While I was under arrest, I recall.”

  Arcadia looked away. “It all worked out.”

  “Not for that dead Hibernian abbot.”

  “Let’s not bring that up now.” She gestured toward the slave, who had clambered up alongside the driver. “Go.”

  The axle suspension’s leather hinges creaked in protest as the carriage pulled away from the curb. At the corner, the wheels jostled left onto the smoother paving stones of the Honorius. Getorius saw that the driver was heading toward the old Oppidum quarter, where Maximin and the wealthy families of Ravenna had villas. The area dated back to the last decades of the Roman Republic, when a military camp was constructed to protect the small town.

  The Via Honorius was empty of cart traffic and pedestrians, but watchdogs in shuttered homes and shops occasionally snarled or
barked an alarm at the rhythmic clip-clop of the mare’s hooves.

  An unpleasant smell of fish and sewage was heavy on the damp air, and a soft gurgle of water came from sewer openings in the squared lava paving stones. Some of the torches on street corners were burned out, even though Getorius estimated there might still be three or four hours until dawn. Galla Placidia and her emperor son would not be out to inspect the lights, and the men hired by the city to maintain them were undoubtedly asleep somewhere. God only knew where the night civic guard was—either already at home or bedding the taverns’ serving girls they had flattered earlier in the evening.

  “I wonder where this Faustina lives?”

  “You’ve gone to the senator’s villa, Getorius.”

  “His is on the Via Aurea. She may live nearby.”

  “Maximin hasn’t had you in to treat his mother since December,” Arcadia recalled. “Agnes must be better.”

  “Or has died. We don’t socialize, so he wouldn’t bother to tell me. I mean, he’s obscenely wealthy, twice been Prefect of both Rome and Italy. A term as consul a few years ago.”

  “I don’t really trust him,” Arcadia admitted. “Too smooth. He even managed to convince the magistrate that he knew nothing about that abbot who died inside his country villa.”

  The carriage passed the Cardo I intersection, recently renamed the Via Theodosius, then clattered past the Milarium, a tall column with a golden milestone at the base. Distances from Ravenna to other cities in the empire were measured from there. Rome lay a relatively manageable one hundred forty miles to the southwest. Mogontiacum, from which Getorius had been rescued as a child, was in Germania, over three hundred grueling miles to the north, far beyond the Alps.

  A block past the old forum, the dark front of the Basilica of Hercules acted as the backdrop for a colossal statue of the demigod. The giant stooped on one knee, supporting a globe whose upper surface was a solar and lunar timekeeper, where twin markers recorded the passing hours. One dial gnomon cast the shadow of the sun from its rising to its setting. On nights when enough light from the moon cast the companion dial’s crisp shadow on numerals, the night hours were recorded.