The Venus Throw - Roman Sub Rosa 04

by Steven Saylor

  "Is it too dark to see?" said Clodia. "I can't have the lamps any brighter. The light hurts my eyes."

  "I can see well enough. I may be wrong, but I suspect this is a substance called gorgon's hair. It comes from the root of a plant that grows wild on the shores of Mauretania. It used to be quite rare in Rome, but one sees it more and more nowadays. It's very potent, acts fairly quickly, and has almost no flavor, so that it can be mixed with almost any kind of food."

  Clodia closed her eyes and nodded. "You see, Trygonion, I told you that Gordianus would know. The physician said the same thing."

  "Did he explain the effects?"

  "He hardly needed to. I've discovered them for myself." "Dizziness, nausea, a sensation of coldness, a painful sensitivity to light?"

  She nodded, keeping her eyes shut. "How much did you swallow?"

  "Only that single small taste. Once I saw the look on Chrysis's face I knew what I'd done."

  Again, I heard the whimpering from the corner of the room. "Silence!" cried Clodia.

  "If you swallowed no more than that—" "Then I'll survive, yes? That's what the physician said." It would be a stupid physician who told a powerful, dangerous woman that she was going to die, if there was even the slightest possibility that she might survive. The powerful do not appreciate being given bad news, especially if it turns out to be false. Better for the physician to assure his master's sister that she would live; if she didn't, she would be in no position to vent her disappointment on him. But the physician was probably right. I knew something of gorgon's hair and its effects, and such a small dose seemed unlikely to kill her.

  "If the physician said you'll be better, then I'm sure—" "Don't you have your own opinion?" Her voice was sharp. "You recognized the poison. You must know how it works."

  "I know many poisons by sight, but it's others who use them, not

  me."

  "Of course you're not going to die!" Trygonion insisted. Clodia allowed him to fuss with her blanket and caress her hands.

  "I thought you'd forestalled the poison plot against you," I said. "So did I. But that farce at the Senian baths must have been only a diversion staged by Caelius. He wanted me to think I had got the better of him, when all the time his viper was already at my breast. The slave I trusted more than any other!"

  Over in the corner, Chrysis whimpered and twisted in space. My eyes had grown used to the darkness and I was able to see her more clearly. Her smooth, naked flesh was scored with mottled stripes.

  "The little spy weeps because I had her beaten," said Clodia in a low voice.

  "Her punishment has only begun." "She confessed to you?"

  "Not yet. But Caelius must have spies in my house, just as I have spies in his. Who better than Chrysis? And I caught her in the act of poisoning my food! If I hadn't happened to step into the kitchen at that moment—"

  "Why do you think this poison came from Caelius?" Clodia gave me such a withering look that I sucked in my breath. Had Catullus ever known that look? Then she shuddered and winced and shut her eyes. "Who else?" she demanded in a weak voice. "We know he already had the poison. What I didn't know was the slave he would use to get the stuff into my house. Chrysis, not Barnabas!"

  "You think this is the same poison that he tested on his own slave?" "Of course." "It's not."

  She bit her lips and shifted beneath the blanket. "What do you mean?"

  "The poison Caelius administered to his slave acted very quickly. You told me so yourself, and I assume that your spies gave you an accurate report. The slave died in agony, you said, while Caelius watched. 'It took only moments,' you said. This can't be the same poison. The Mauretanians say that gorgon's hair is like 'a coiled snake in the belly.' Once ingested, it bides its time before striking. The victim feels no ill effects for a while, then the symptoms come on suddenly. You told me that you tasted the powder in the morning but felt no effects until midday. That hardly sounds like Caelius's 'quick-acting' poison." "So? He decided to use a different poison."

  "Perhaps. If you'd let me, I'd like to take what's left of this poison with me. If I remember correctly, I happen to have a bit of gorgon's hair at my house, locked in a box where I keep such things." My son Eco had been given the stuff months ago, by a man whose wife was trying to poison him. Eco passed it on for safekeeping to me; he won't have poison in his house because of the twins. I'd almost forgotten about it. "I should like to compare this powder with the bit I have at home —"

  Clodia hesitated. "Be sure to return it," she whispered, closing her eyes. "It's evidence against Caelius."

  The interview seemed to be over.

  Clodia turned uncomfortably on the bed. Chrysis twisted from the ropes. Then Trygonion bent close to Clodia's ear and said in a low voice, "The other box." She frowned.

  "Mistress, the other box," he said again.

  The grimace she made came from something other than physical discomfort. "Yes, show him. Let him see for himself."

  Trygonion took the box of poison from me. He went to the little cosmetics table and came back holding a different pyxis in the palm of his hand, with his nose wrinkled and his arm extended, as if to keep the thing as far from himself as possible. I recognized it at once.

  "It's the same pyxis Licinius was carrying at the Senian baths," I said. "Are you sure?" whispered Clodia.

  "Bronze, with raised knobs and inlays of ivory. Exactly the same." "The brute! The monster!" said Trygonion, thrusting the box at me. "Go on, look inside."

  "It arrived this morning," said Clodia. "Left by a messenger on the front doorstep. What was he thinking? To torture me with this obscene joke while I lay dying? Is he laughing even now?" She sucked in a shuddering breath and began to sob.

  I took the tiny box from Trygonion and opened the lid. Within was a pearly, opalescent liquid, perhaps a kind of lotion or cream, I thought. I touched my finger to it and gave such a start that I dropped the box, spilling its contents on the floor. Trygonion stared at the globules of congealed semen with fascinated revulsion.

  "Damn him!" Clodia thrashed on the bed. Trygonion rushed to her. I backed away and bumped into the cosmetics table. I turned and stared blindly at the unguents and philters. Among them I noticed a little clay figurine of Attis, Cybele's eunuch consort, exactly like the ones I had seen in the room of Lucius Lucceius's wife. The dim lamplight caught his red cap and lit up his serenely smiling face.

  Clodia continued to moan and curse. Trygonion hovered over her. The dropped pyxis lay on the floor, its spattered contents glistening in the lamplight.

  I backed away again. One of the lamps began to gutter and the room grew darker. I bumped into something solid but yielding. The rope made a cracking noise above and behind me. A low whimpering rose from below. With a start I turned and realized I had collided with the suspended body of Chrysis. Seen upside down in the flickering light, her staring eyes and nostrils were so grotesque that her face became inhuman, unreadable. Her lips moved. I bent my head, straining to hear, but her whisper was drowned by Clodia's sobbing cry behind me.

  "Punish her! Punish her again!"

  Beyond the heavy curtain that blocked the door I heard a murmur and a rustling among the slaves gathered in the hall. I stared at Chrysis's soundlessly moving lips, hardly knowing what I was seeing, then finally came to my senses. I stepped toward the door and pushed my way past the curtain.

  The slaves in the hallway scattered and regrouped like brooding hens. As I made my way down the hall a figure approached and passed me, taking long, quick steps toward Clodia's room. It was the slave Barnabas, clutching a leather whip between his fists. He stared straight ahead, his jaw tightly clenched. His face was drained of all emotion except for his eyes, in which I glimpsed a strange mixture of determination and dread.

  At home, I found Bethesda going through her wardrobe, trying to find something suitable to wear for Clodia's party. "What do you think, the blue stola or the green one? And for a necklace—the carnelian beads, or the lapis lazuli ones
you gave me last year?"

  "I'm afraid it's rather unlikely that there'll be a party after all."

  "But why not?"

  "Clodia is ill." To explain what had just transpired at Clodia's house was beyond my energy.

  "Perhaps she'll feel better in the morning," said Bethesda, frowning.

  "Perhaps. We'll see whether she shows up at the trial tomorrow morning."

  "Yes, the trial! She won't miss that. She'll have to feel better, and then she'll have the party after all. She's put so much planning into it."

  "Into the trial?"

  "Into the party, silly."

  I nodded. "No word from Eco?"

  "None."

  I suddenly realized that I had forgotten the box of gorgon's hair which I had intended to borrow from Clodia, to compare with the poison stored in my own strongbox. I had no desire to go back for it. For the moment, I forgot about it.

  Chapter Twenty

  Bethesdawas prescient. In the morning, when we went down to the Forum to watch the trial, Clodia was already there in

  the great square in front of the Rostra, seated behind the prosecutors in the midst of a great many of her retainers. She

  was pale and her eyes were listless, but the crisis had apparently passed. She looked in our direction and smiled wanly—not at me, I realized, but at Bethesda, who nodded and smiled in

  return. For me Clodia had no smile, only a raised eyebrow, as if to ask if I had any last bit of information to give her. I pursed my lips and shook my head. Eco had still not returned, and none of my nets had snagged a fish.

  It was the day before the beginning of the Great Mother festival. For six days Rome would celebrate with games and competitions, religious processions and plays, private parties and public ceremonies. After the festival, members of the Senate would briefly reconvene before taking their traditional Aprilis holiday at their country estates. Rome would shut down, like a great gristmill grinding to a halt. On the eve of all this, the mood in the Forum was a combination of rush and relaxation— hectic hurry to take care of final business together with the delicious anticipation of the coming days of indolence and pleasure.

  This giddy mood was heightened even more by the raucous atmosphere which always attends a major trial, especially a trial as rich with the promise of scandal as this one. With no other courts in session, every advocate in Rome was in attendance, and with so much recent debate over the Egyptian situation and Dio's death, most of the Senate had come to watch. Those wise enough to plan ahead had sent slaves to the Forum at dawn to put down folding chairs and hold places for them. I had sent Belbo to do just that for Bethesda and myself. I scanned the cluttered rows and spotted him waving to us from an excellent place near the front, just behind the benches where the seventy-odd judges would sit. We made our way to our seats. Before Belbo withdrew to the great crowd of gawkers and idlers that continued to gather at the periphery, I told him to keep an eye out for Eco, who might still show up at the last moment.

  Before us, beyond the judges' benches, was the open square, from which the advocates would deliver their speeches. To the left sat the prosecutors with their assistants and witnesses. This was where Clodia sat. Barnabas sat next to her, and nearby I recognized "Busy Fingers" Vibennius and several others who had taken part in the fruitless chase at the Senian baths.

  Directly opposite the prosecutors, to our right, were the benches of the defendant, accompanied by his advocates, family, supporters and character witnesses. The parents of Marcus Caelius were dressed all in black, as if in mourning. His mother's eyes were puffy and red and her cheeks were wet with tears; his father had white stubble on his jaw and unkempt hair, giving him the look of a man half crazy with worry. The parents of every accused man show up in court looking just the same. If Caelius had children, they would have been standing in rags, weeping. Such traditional means of evoking pity in the judges began so long ago that no advocate would consider allowing his client's family to show up looking less than wretched.

  Seated beside Caelius were his two advocates. Cicero was looking leaner and sharper than when I had seen him last; a year of bitter exile had trimmed his belly, taken in his jowls and polished his eyes to a fine glitter. Gone was the fat complacency that had settled on him after his year as consul and his triumph over Catilina. In its place was a look at once haunted and eager—haunted because he had learned that Rome could turn viciously against him, eager because he had successfully lashed back at his enemies and was again in the ascendant. The eagerness in his eyes recalled the headstrong young advocate I had first met many years ago, but the hard set of his jaw and the bitter line of his lips belonged to a much older man. As an advocate Cicero had been ambitious, unscrupulous and brilliant from the very beginning—a dangerous man to take on in a court of law. Now he looked more formidable than ever.

  As for Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome seemed to have stopped aging in recent years. He was a few years older than I, but looked closer to forty than sixty. Some joked that Crassus had made a deal with the gods to let him grow richer with passing time instead of older. If so, even that deal was not sweet enough to satisfy him; he looked as stern and discontented as ever. Crassus was a man who could never succeed enough for his own satisfaction. This restlessness drove him from triumph to triumph in the arenas of finance and politics, setting a pace that his less gifted colleagues could not hope to match and bitterly resented.

  Beside these two old foxes, Marcus Caelius looked strikingly young and fresh, almost boyish. A good night's sleep or some other tonic had erased the slack dissolution I had seen on his face at the Salacious Tavern. Caelius had always been a mime of sorts, able to put on roles and shrug them off to suit the moment, and for this occasion he mimed the bright-eyed innocence of youth with uncanny precision. His cleverness had gotten him into trouble before; in recent years he had strayed from his mentors Crassus and Cicero, perhaps even betrayed them in the pursuit of his own fortunes. They might reasonably have turned their backs on him now, but all differences had apparently been reconciled. They were three foxes sitting in a row.

  I turned my eyes from the defense to the prosecution. Leading them was young Lucius Sempronius Atratinus. If Caelius looked fresh beside his weathered advocates, Atratinus looked positively childlike. He was only seventeen, barely a man in the eyes of the law. But youthful passion can count for much with Roman judges, who have sat through too many speeches to be much impressed by false indignation or tired blustering, no matter how experienced the advocate. Young Atratinus's interest in prosecuting Caelius was the extension of a family feud; it was Atratinus's father, Bestia, against whom Caelius made his notorious pun about the "finger of guilt." Atratinus's pursuit ofCaelius's destruction was a virtuous act in the eyes of a Roman court, where loyalty to fathers counts for so much.

  Flanking Atratinus were his fellow prosecutors. I knew little about them. Lucius Herennius Balbus was a friend of Bestia's and more familiar to me by sight than by ear; I had never heard him argue a case, but the sight of his well-fed body scurrying back and forth in the Forum (like a giant egg wearing a toga, Eco had once said) was impressed on my memory. Publius Clodius was the third prosecutor—not Clodia's brother, but one of his freedmen, who accordingly bore the same name; thus the Clodii were represented among the prosecutors in an indirect way, as they no doubt preferred, by name but not by blood.

  Gnaeus Domitius, the presiding magistrate, mounted his tribunal. The judges were sworn in. The trial commenced with the reading of the formal charges.

  There were five charges in all. The first four dealt with incidents of violence against foreign dignitaries, whose persons were sacrosanct; violence against them was technically violence against their protector, the Roman state, and so qualified for prosecution under the law against political terror. The charges were grave: that Marcus Caelius master-minded attacks at Neapolis to intimidate the newly arrived Alexandrian delegation; that he instigated a riot against the delegation at Puteoli; that he
perpetrated arson against the delegation during their stay at the property of Palla, on their way to Rome; that he attempted to poison the head of the delegation, Dio, and subsequently took part in Dio's murder.

  To these was added another, new allegation: that Caelius had attempted to poison Clodia. There were reactions of surprise among many in the crowd, including Bethesda.

  "What are they talking about?" she whispered.

  I shrugged and tried to look ignorant.

  "You told me she was ill, not poisoned!"

  I put a finger to my lips and nodded toward the defendant's bench, where Crassus had risen to make a statement. "It should be noted by our presiding magistrate Gnaeus Domitius and by the judges that this final charge is a new one, appended by the prosecution only yesterday, in fact. The defense has hardly been given the customary amount of time to prepare an argument in response to so serious an accusation. Thus we would be within our rights to protest the inclusion of this charge, indeed, to insist that it be thrown out and argued in a separate trial, or, if it is to be included, to demand a postponement of this trial. Further, given that this is a court convened solely to try cases of political violence, it hardly seems suitable to include a charge of attempted poisoning against a private citizen. However, as the prosecution seems to believe that this charge is in fact related to the others, and as my esteemed friend and colleague Marcus Cicero assures me that he is fully prepared to defend our client against it, we make no objection to its inclusion in this trial."

  Crassus nodded gravely to the presiding magistrate and the judges and sat. On Cicero's face I saw the quiver of a smirk, barely repressed. It was a look I knew well; the great orator was feeling smug about some-thing. Could it be that he was secretly pleased to have the charge of the attempted poisoning of Clodia included among the rest? What conjurer's trick was he planning this time?