SPQR VIII: The River God's Vengeance

by John Maddox Roberts

  13

  OUR CRAFT THIS TIME WAS A fiat-bottomed barge that nosed in at the base of the Aventine. Before boarding, we waited for two or three passengers to step off. One of them, coincidentally enough, was the high priestess of Ceres.

  “Revered Cornelia!” I said, helping her step ashore dry-shod. “Is there to be a sacrifice this morning?”

  “No, Aedile, it is just that my house is full of clients from the lower City and is dreadfully crowded. I have decided to move into the guest suite of the temple for now. I trust you enjoyed a restful night.” She smiled prettily.

  “I cannot praise the accommodations highly enough.”

  “You seem extraordinarily cheerful on so dismal a day,” she said.

  “There are days when the service of Senate and People is even more satisfying than others. Today is one of them,” I assured her.

  “I suppose it must be so. Please feel free to call upon the hospitality of the temple at any time, Aedile.”

  “Rest assured I shall, revered lady.”

  Hermes and I stepped aboard and greeted the other passengers, mostly people who preferred a boat ride to walking long distances to avoid the water. Some were priests who had morning sacrifices to perform.

  “Where to, sir?” asked a bargeman. There were two of them poling the clumsy craft in the stern, while another stood in the bow with his pole ready to fend us away from walls and push away fioating wreckage.

  “The theater,” I said, pointing to the hulking building.

  “The whole lower part’s fiooded, sir,” the man told me.

  “I am a plebeian aedile, and I am assessing fiood damage,” I said. “Just drop me off there.”

  There were a number of craft plying the streets and plazas and squares that morning. With the bright sunlight and still air, it might almost have been pleasant, like boating on the Bay of Baiae, had it not been for the appalling stench that permeated everything. If anything, it was even stronger than the night before. Here and there I saw chains of bubbles coming to the surface and bursting, spreading an ever fouler smell. Queasily, I realized that these were the gases of decomposition coming up through the street drains.

  The barge made a couple of stops to discharge passengers, then we were nearing the theater. The towering facade, with its triple rows of arches, each bearing a sizable statue, dwarfed everything nearby, looming like a palace of the gods set down among mortals to remind them of their insignificance.

  The bargeman steered his craft right into the main entrance, going in perhaps twice the length of the barge before scraping bottom. I wasn’t looking forward to stepping into that water, but I told myself that here, so near the river, perhaps it was clean. At least the little tunnel was relatively free of the overpowering stench, so I could always hope.

  I took off my sandals and handed them to Hermes to stuff into his satchel, then gave him my toga to roll up. Then I gritted my teeth and stepped off the bow of the barge. The cold water came to somewhat less than midway between my ankles and knees.

  “I can’t wait for you, Aedile,” said the bargeman. “I have these other passengers to deliver. Do you want us to return?”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be here,” I told him. “I’ll fiag someone down from an upper fioor when I need a boat.”

  Hermes jumped in without raising too much of a splash, and we watched the bargemen work their craft back out of the passageway, using their poles to push themselves away from the walls. There was something decidedly odd about the sight, and it wasn’t just the incongruity of a boat in a theater. The symmetrical decoration of the walls revealed that the water was higher on one side than the other.

  Hermes had noticed as well. “The water looks like it’s tilted.”

  “It isn’t the water,” I told him. “The building isn’t sitting level. I should have expected it. We know what it’s built of. Come along.”

  We sloshed along through the muddy water, alert for swimming rats, of which I saw a few. Something leapt and splashed in the water.

  “What was that?” Hermes asked, startled.

  “I don’t know, but I hope it was a fish.” No sooner did I say these hopeful words than the building emitted a huge, creaking groan that seemed to go on for minutes. “Don’t be alarmed,” I said to Hermes, thoroughly alarmed myself, “you’ve been in the Circus just after the sun comes up. The heat makes the wood complain.”

  We came out into the gigantic half bowl of the auditorium and gazed around. Overhead the sky was brilliantly blue, the tall masts stood as always, and the seats looked ready to receive the audience. Above the stage, the scaena towered three stories, all ornamental architecture, gilded pilasters, artificial wreaths draping the balconies, and everything bright with new paint.

  Below the seats and the stage, though, was nothing but water. I wondered if I was seeing another trick of the light because this water, instead of being brown like the water outside, was a dark red color, like drying blood.

  “Let it not be an omen!” I said, using the old formula Lepidus had spoken a few hours earlier.

  “What makes it look like that?” Hermes asked. “Is it the paint they were using?”

  “I don’t think so.” I stepped out into the orchestra where the senators would sit during a performance, stooped and scooped up a handful of mud. It was like damp, red sand, full of larger fiakes and irregular chunks, all of the red color.

  “What is it?” Hermes asked. He carried my toga rolled up over one shoulder, his metal-shod stick held at its balance point in one hand.

  “It’s dissolved brick,” I told him. “After sitting here for several years deteriorating, this fiood was all it took to turn the foundation of this building into mud.” There was another, even longer and louder groan, and the whole theater seemed to shudder.

  “Aedile Metellus!” A portly man came waddling from the false architecture of the scaena onto the stage area. “How good of you to come!” He walked to one end of the stage and descended the three or four steps to the orchestra without hesitation. “Quite a mess, eh? Well, at last we meet.” He sloshed straight up to me and grasped both my hands in his. Hermes stood ready, his eyes scanning the nearby corridors. Scaurus appeared to be about forty, with a heavy thatch of hair gone white already. His cheeks were fat, and they wrinkled deeply as he beamed. Above the cheeks, his eyes were as steely as Caesar’s.

  “Yes, I have been wishing to speak with you, Aemilius Scaurus,” I said. “I—”

  “Please, Aedile, we have little time for pleasantries, I fear to say. Come with me for just a moment; I have something to show you.” He turned and walked into the corridor through which we had followed the actor-playwright Syrus only the morning before. I followed the fat back before me, one hand on the hilt of my dagger, while Hermes followed after me, walking backward most of the way to keep an eye on the entrance we had just used.

  We came out onto the balcony area that overlooked the river, and my stomach took a turn as I saw that we stood on what appeared to be a sinking ship. The river had risen right up to the level of the fioor on which we stood. Back on the City side of the theater the water was still; but here, in the most acute curve of the river bend, Father Tiber was turbulent, and the balcony vibrated like a plucked lyre string. It was very nearly as upsetting a sight and situation as I had ever experienced.

  Scaurus turned, smiled, and leaned easily upon the railing. “You see, Aedile? I fear that holding your Games here will be out of the question. I am going to have to condemn this building and pull it down, as so many old-fashioned senators have demanded I do anyway. A pity, it was the finest Rome has ever seen. No help for it now, though, don’t you agree?”

  So he was going to make it a test of nerve, leaning there as if he were standing by the pool in his own house, trusting his patrician aplomb to overwhelm my plebeian effrontery. Well, I had been in tight spots he had never dreamed of. None quite like this one, though.

  “Now,” he went on, “of course I shall refund the
money you paid out to rent the theater for the year, and I agree I really should pay you a little extra for your inconvenience.” He pretended to count on his fingers, then looked upward as if he were adding up figures in his head. “Shall we say, ten times what you paid?”

  “Good try, Scaurus,” I told him, “but we’re a little past the bribery stage now. And the statue was a clever move, but it won’t work, either.”

  “Isn’t it exquisite?” he said, a salacious note slurring his words, like a man describing his favorite sexual practice. “I have many more of them, and you may have your pick. I agree, art is so much more dignified than mere money.”

  “Forget it, Scaurus,” I said, my words almost drowned out by another groan from the tortured building. I turned slightly and saw that the Sublician Bridge was packed with people now; and upriver, a little farther away, I could see a similar crowd on the Aemilian. Father Tiber was giving them a real spectacle today.

  “Don’t play the virtuous servant of the people with me, Metellus!” Scaurus snapped, dropping the jovial act. “You need what I have to offer! I know what your office is costing you! I will cover all your debts if you will simply cooperate with me. Many of your friends are not too proud to ask the same favor from Pompey or Crassus or Caesar.”

  “That isn’t what I want, Scaurus,” I said.

  “Then what do you want?” he cried, honestly exasperated and mystified.

  “I want your head mounted on a pole on the rostra next to the head of Valerius Messala Niger. The rest of your gang can be hanged or crucified or given to the bulls and bears for all I care, but a pair of patricians like you and Messala deserve to have your heads exposed in the Forum for the public to ridicule.” For a man of his family, such a fate was infinitely worse than any manner of death, no matter how painful.

  “For what?” he asked. “For violating some antiquated laws? For violating some building codes? Half the Senate does worse by far!”

  “Half the Senate aren’t involved in putting up insulae that collapse and kill hundreds of people at once.”

  “I was not responsible for the collapse of the house of Folius!” he said. “The filthy rogue may have cut some corners in building it, but he intended to live in it, you idiot! Do you think he’d build a house just so that it would fall down on his head?”

  As near as I could read him, he meant it. “Even if that’s true, there have been a dozen others in the last three or four years, with more than two thousand dead. I’ll tie your name to every one of them and prove Messala’s connivance as well.”

  “Well, then,” he said, recovering his equanimity, “that’s something for a jury to decide, isn’t it? I’ve had juries find in my favor before; it isn’t difficult.”

  The building gave another groan and lurch. “You’re forgetting the murder of Lucilius.”

  He shrugged. “Senators are murdered all the time. These are rough days, Metellus, you know that. The man was knifed in a whorehouse. He didn’t even die brawling with his enemies in the Forum. Anyone who could testify about his death is dead now, anyway.”

  “You admit you knew about the big slave and the girl, Galatea?”

  He shook his head, chuckling. “Metellus, you know perfectly well that I am admitting nothing at all. I know that the swine and his sow died in the collapse of their house. I sold the brute to Folius three or four years ago. The bitch wanted a bodyguard and Antaeus was a wrestler from one of my estates in Bruttium. I think the girl was from their town house in Bovillae. About a month ago the wrestler came to me and begged me to buy him and the girl. I had no use for him so I sent him away, and that is the last I saw of him. So you see, whatever happened was the doing of Lucius Folius.”

  I was beginning to see what had happened in that insula. It was a bit of a disappointment, but I still had plenty of evidence against Scaurus.

  “No matter. You and Messala can try to throw all the guilt on Folius, who was nothing more than a middleman for the two of you; but everyone will know the truth whatever verdict the jury returns. At the very least, you’ll be expelled from the Senate, stripped of your patrician status, all your wealth forfeit to the treasury, and, best of all, every poor man in Rome will be longing to kill you on sight. Even if you run, you’ll end your days in poverty in some wretched barbarian town wishing you’d died when you had the chance.”

  He sighed. “You are quite sure that we can’t come to an agreement then?”

  “Forget it,” I said, turning. “Best to be out of here anyway. I don’t want to die in another of your death-trap buildings.”

  “I am afraid that will be unavoidable,” he said. At that, the men who had been waiting on the balcony above us came scrambling down the steps, knives in their hands.

  Well, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been expecting it. We stood between two of the stairways and they had us neatly boxed in, two men to each stair. I already had my dagger in one fist and my caestus on the other, and I’d decided to kill Scaurus before dealing with the others. I’d shown him all the forbearance I was going to that day.

  He hadn’t been expecting me to move so quickly, and he let out a squawk, jumping back as I lunged, moving very fast for a bulky man. I would have had him then, but the building gave a sickening lurch and I stumbled sideways, only scoring a long scratch on his chest and shoulder. He twisted away and ran past the two men behind him. They had to pause to let him by, and this gave me a moment to recover my guard.

  Hermes was already dealing with the first man on his side. Because the passage was narrow, they could only attack one at a time, a piece of luck we really didn’t deserve. The man had a long, straight dagger, and he came in low. Hermes slung my old toga off his shoulder and it unfurled, enwrapping him like the net of a retiarius. He stepped in and his stick lanced out like a shortened trident and the muffied man folded around it, the wind blasting from his lungs. Hermes grasped the man around the waist and straightened, sending him fiying over his shoulder to hit the river with a great splash. It was done as prettily as any fight you are likely to see in the arena, but I shouldn’t have let it distract me.

  The first one bulled in like a street brawler, and my punch, instead of smashing his jaw, just ripped his cheek open to the bone. He screeched and wrapped one arm around me, jamming his knife into my rib cage. I didn’t bother to block, but instead brought my own dagger up under his chin. It was like getting kicked hard in the side, but the mail shirt I wore beneath my tunic held. His chin, on the other hand, didn’t even slow my blade down. It went in to the hilt, piercing his brain, and he was dead before he hit the fioor.

  Behind me I heard a blade ring against Hermes’s stick and knew that the boy was dueling with a more skillful opponent this time; but I had no attention to spare, for Marcus Caninus was almost on top of me and I was still trying to drag my dagger free of his friend, who seemed reluctant to let it go.

  I let the hilt go and brought up my bronze-plated knuckles to knock aside Caninus’s first short, vicious jab. He had seen what had happened to his accomplice’s stab and didn’t bother to go for my body. He was trying for my neck as if he wanted to behead me. His weapon was a large sica with a blade curved like a boar’s tusk, and it looked eminently suitable for the task. With his other hand, he grabbed my right shoulder in a grip like a blacksmith’s tongs.

  I went for his knife wrist with my free hand while I tried to knee him in the crotch, but he was an old brawler and too canny to fall for that one. He turned and caught my knee with his own thigh. I got him in the ribs with the caestus, and he grunted as one or two of them broke; but I lacked the distance and the firm stance for a full-strength punch. I had his wrist in my right hand, but that blade was getting closer all the time. I hit his ribs again, but by now he was pressing me against the railing so hard that the blow had no power. The face above me looked as if it were carved from oak, cruel and unfeeling as a crocodile’s.

  I heard the unmistakable sound of smashing bone, and I hoped it was Hermes dispatching another oppo
nent rather than the other way around. I certainly wasn’t doing well where I was. I stomped on one of Caninus’s feet, and this brought a groan of pain; but I was barefoot so the damage wrought was minimal. I knew I could feed him weak body blows all day, and I didn’t have all day. I fell back and let my grip weaken. The knife came up for the kill, his elbow rose, and with what strength I had left, I brought my caestus up into his armpit, trying for that spot which, if struck correctly, paralyzes the arm, sometimes the whole side, and can even render a man unconscious. Of course, placement is everything. If I missed by an inch, I would die in the next second.

  His eyes bugged out, and he screamed. The wide blade fell from his numbed fingers, and I wrestled him to the railing. He was too heavy for me to lift, but a moment later another pair of hands were assisting me and Marcus Caninus made the biggest splash yet. Hermes and I were about to congratulate each other when the fioor shuddered and something gave way beneath us.

  Horrified, gripping the railing for support, we saw the support work that Manius Florus and his crew had planted there the day before disengage, torn away by the rushing fiood, the big timbers shooting to the surface like sporting porpoises. The people lining the Sublician Bridge shouted with astonishment. They didn’t get to see a thing like this every day. I wondered whether they had been following the fight, or if we were just a trivial part of the spectacle that was Rome in a disaster.

  We almost fell as the whole side of the theater began to sag.

  “Let’s go!” Hermes shouted. “It’s beginning to break up!”

  “No,” I said. “There’s still one to go!” I placed a foot against the face of the man I’d stabbed, grasped my hilt, and yanked the blade free. “Get out of here. I’ll attend to this and be with you shortly.”

  I lurched for the crazily leaning steps and half-dragged myself up by the handrail. The theater seemed to be in continuous motion now. I wondered if Scaurus had gotten clean away, but I doubted it. A fight always seems to last much longer than it really does. The whole little battle had taken no more than a couple of minutes. I came up on the second-?oor gallery but saw no one. A fiutter of clothing caught my eye, and I saw a foot disappear from the next staircase as someone made it to the gallery above. I followed.