The Water Thief

by Ben Pastor

  Aelius glanced at the key. It was an average, toothed little key such as one could buy or have made anywhere, so he didn’t bother to ask whether it was a spare, or the only one. It was just as likely for the thieves to have taken other items from the box, then slammed it shut and tossed it.

  “Has the son-in-law identified the documents, and was everything there?”

  The head patrolman—he wore a faded surplus army tunic from the times of the Rebellion, and was as local, as the saying went, as the arse of the Sphinx—said no. “But that’s only because he didn’t know what was in it. It seems the victim wasn’t one to tell his business, not even to his relatives.”

  Which was why, Aelius thought, the slave women had not been able to answer him whether Pammychios had recently met his former master Serenus or received from him anything for caretaking. “Was anything else found along the river or in the neighborhood?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. As you ordered, we set everything aside for you. Please follow me.”

  How had he not thought of what might be pushed ahead of the Nile in flood? The zealous patrolmen had filled a small courtyard with piles of flotsam and refuse, including the carcasses of drowned farm animals. He had the men dispose of these immediately, and then spent time alone examining the rest of the refuse heap. He was of course looking for the saddlebag Serenus Dio had spoken of, but—hoping against hope—also for Hadrian’s letter itself, presumably written on papyrus, perhaps rolled inside a wooden cylinder or otherwise protected. From the door of the messhall, patrolmen crowded to gawk at him at first, but their leader whisked them away soon enough.

  With a researcher’s alacrity, Aelius handled rags, woven sandals, cracked wooden bowls, broken pallets, the occasional bottomless reed basket that reminded him of his old enemy ben Matthias, telling him the story of Moses found in the Nile. From the dry land, gathered in a radius of three miles all around Pammychios’s house on its knoll, came another set of disparate objects, broken farm implements mostly, shards, two solitary copper coins, even a catapult projectile from the Rebellion days, with Achilleus’s name on it.

  “Should we keep looking, Commander?” asked the head patrolman afterward, handing him a wash basin and towel to cleanse himself. Aelius said no, but had a mind to ask others to keep an eye on the antiquarian market, perhaps through Harpocratio, for historical letters to appear, specifically concerning the reign of the deified Hadrian.

  14 Payni (9 June, Friday)

  The priests at the temple of Antinous sized him up, like fastidious cats sniffing a new animal to know what he’s about, and whether a threat or an ally. Truly, Aelius was neither, and so neutral was his position here, officially at least, that the priests couldn’t do much more than circle him and smile, half-fawning and half-annoyed, assessing him then only for usefulness, as he was Caesar’s friend.

  Aelius took precautions not to mention that his interest in the funerary temple had deepened since reading Serenus’s dramatic last message to him. Clearly, as no official tradition of documents stored in Antinous’s tomb existed, the priests kept mum for reasons of their own, or else knew nothing about it. He resolved not to inquire directly unless he ran out of oblique means of finding out. Hadn’t Egyptian priests satisfied Herodotus’s historical queries, some seven hundred years earlier, with colossal half-truths?

  So he played the cultivated tourist, official to the core, with letters from the Imperial Court and a dash of awestruck respect for the antiquities, which could only help his cause.

  For all that this was a Greek city, having been founded as such by the deified Hadrian, most everything around this temple, clergy included, seemed Egyptian. The priest house and annexes stood squarish and compact, flat-roofed, nearly windowless, with thick walls, the ever-present awnings protecting doorways and courtyards. The temple itself, at the center of an enclosed colonnade kept as a garden of shade trees and fastidious potted plants, reminded him of the island sanctuary at Philae, complete with twin obelisks. In a country where even the rich boasted, at most, of ashlar lintels and steps in their homes of fired brick, the entire construction—including the rampartlike pylons by its entrance—was of black and white marble, cut and transported from the Greek islands at God knows what expense.

  “Feel free to look around, legatos.” The priests, a fat and a spare one, addressed him in Greek, leading the way. Polite, but surely seeing him as the complete outsider that he was, ready to show him what they wished, and no more—which Aelius planned not to accept, though he was not yet sure of how to get around it. Everything pointed to the wealth and power of this priesthood: the temple had large Antinous-related revenues, from the incubation room where one waited for healing dreams to the hospital, the souvenir shops, and mummification facilities, drawing a percentage even from the sale of mummy-shaped anise and honey cakes, called kuroi, sickeningly sweet. The priests would tell him what they wanted about Hadrian’s visit and its results for Egypt (the end of a five-year drought) and the emperor (a lover’s death). They would not be easy to circumvent. As Aelius stood there, a young baboon came to sit and pick lice off his belly at his feet, and looked up at him with his dull half-dog, half-ape face.

  “This way, legatos.”

  Throughout the oasislike sacred area, Antinuous’s image was charmingly but obsessively inescapable. Aelius—whose only close-up view of the Boy had been one portrait during the Rebellion, and he’d paid scant attention then—had the odd feeling of seeing double, and in multiples. Boy-headed sphinxes flanked the entrance to the, colonnade, and one then walked through a bodyguard of pillarlike representations of Antinous as the god Min, with a tall double-feathered headdress and an erected penis painted black. Past these, on a row of identical pedestals among blooming shrubs, copies of ancient statues made to resemble Antinous stood witness to the expensive piety of local officials.

  So, in turn, the Boy held grapes, bow, spear, libation cup, as Antinous-Hermes and Antinous-Apollo, with the attributes of Mars and those of Dionysus, naked, dressed, half-clothed, standing, sitting, and striding and staring back at Aelius from glass paste and marble eyes. Not even Egyptian art could make the brooding young face less distinctive. Still, following the priests, Aelius thought how little the real person had to do with this place—and this cult. He doubted Antinous had asked for any of it, or would prefer artistic eternity to running the natural course of his life. But he was dead, long dead, and enshrined, so that—willing or not—forever this face should be familiar to those who had not known him in life.

  On a windless midmorning, with the undulating crest of the Antinoan ledge so sharp against the sky as to seem a cut marring the blue, he came here to pursue history, as was his assignment. Learning about the deified Hadrian, and Antinous’s death, was a tall order already. Yet, Aelius’s duty already took on a different personal meaning, if Serenus had told the truth about the imperial letter. The thought that unknown papers about the safety of the State—Hadrian’s State at least—rested within these walls made him desirous to possess what no historian had spoken of. It might not be true, for all that. Serenus might have been sold a forged document, or even have tried a hoax himself. On the other hand, true or not, the merchant had been frightened by something or someone, and was now dead.

  After showing him through the sacred area, and requesting that he wash his hands and face in the water of a small fountain in the antechamber, Aelius was invited inside the temple itself. There, out of the reddish dark swimming before his sun-dazzled eyes, the sudden rise of the immense striding god startled him, nearly perpendicular sunlight pouring like molten metal from an overhead oculus down the sides of a massive black figure of Antinous as Osiris. The cell was dwarfed by it, made oppressively narrow despite its large size, and the heady smoke of incense wafting past really did resemble it like a forge out of which a monster had come to life. On second thought, and at a second look, it all regained a commonsensical reality, and it was nothing but a temple with an oversized basalt cult image in it. The
priests had likely noticed his start and were satisfied.

  The Boy’s anthropomorphic coffin only vaguely resembled a mummified corpse. It was a massive, porphyry boxlike sarcophagus the size of two army supply carts stacked on one another, set at the foot of the cult statue; garlanded with blue lotus, roses, heaps of fresh flowers; wherever in that congeries of petals the light from above succeeded in trickling down, the petals seemed to incandesce out of the dark

  Having offered a sacrifice and expressed appropriate sentiments of respect, Aelius asked general questions, among which he placed the one he really wanted answered. “Has the body been here since the beginning?”

  The fat priest nodded. “It has. The deified Hadrian oversaw the ceremony himself, on the sixth day of the month of Tybi.”

  A rapid calculation on Aelius’s part gave him the day before the Ides of January following the drowning on 24 October, which would allow for the seventy days needed to mummify the body. So, these one hundred seventy-four years, Antinous had slept in this aromatic eternity. Undisturbed, as the spare priest added, and gloriously watching over the metropolis.

  Which meant that Hadrian’s documents—if they existed—were still inside. Aelius took notes, and followed the priests.

  The hall adjacent to, and immediately behind, the temple was with some good claim termed the “collection,” as in it were gathered relics from that fateful river journey. The imperial barge itself, perfectly preserved and majestically set in the dry dock of a wooden cradle painted blue, took the best part of the long, rectangular space. The walls around had frescoes with scenes of fishing and hunting on the Nile, and a series of armoires, open to reveal rich boxes stacked inside, lined the room’s perimeter. Aelius kept jotting down details in shorthand, and committed much more to memory, for his field notes. On the floor, mosaic scenes showed the edge of the desert with its wild creatures, and a fanciful bird’s-eye view of the mysteries of the deep south, the Nubian wilds past which no one had ever gone, searching for the sources of the Nile. The priests poured water from a dainty ewer on the tessellated floor, to make the colors come alive.

  Tralles had the good sense not to say anything when it became obvious on that afternoon that his former colleague would sit in on the proceedings against two jailed Christian noncommissioned officers. Both veterans of the Rebellion, they belonged to the cohort based at Apollinopolis, in the Thebais, but had been transferred here for trial because they were registered in the metropolis. Busy writing, Aelius said nothing during the trials, and after the sentencing (one recanted, the other persisted, and was led off following the judge’s terse caput tuum amputabo), was not in a talkative mood. Beheading was merciful, after all. The difference between the temple’s contained, venerable space and the efficient summariness of legal procedures was jarring to him, having stepped from where time seemed suspended, bound by ritual, to a public room where prosecution drove change, and order was turned upside down as rank mattered little under investigation and interrogation.

  Tralles must have followed him here, because Aelius saw him pop his head into the door of the archives, where he’d-retired to examine recent civil law dockets.

  “Do you need a hand?” he volunteered.

  Undoubtedly his former colleague had other things to do, but he was curious, and there was no shaking him without whipping up more interest. Distractedly looking up from the roll he was deciphering by the window, Aelius said, “You can help me look for any legally resolved dispute involving Serenus Dio.”

  “Are you still thinking about that? How does that fit in with your research?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  It took them some time. The court clerks fastidiously put everything back on the shelves as soon as Aelius signaled that he was done with them. No document bore Serenus’s name per se, but he was cited in two instances. Tralles handed over the extract from a hearing dated Phamenoth 5, the beginning of March of that year. The minutes referred to a border dispute between neighbors over the illegal diversion of irrigation canals “water stealing,” as the plaintiff put it—from his property outside the north gate of Antinoopolis. Serenus Dio, who owned a wheat field adjacent to the defendant, had apparently also gained from the surplus of water.

  “It doesn’t seem enough to justify going after Serenus on his boat and throwing him to the crocodiles,” Tralles commented.

  “No, but this one is interesting.” Aelius read out loud, “ ‘Tionius son of Alexander, presbyter of the Catholic Church, versus Eutropius, accountant in the mercantile company of Serenus Dio, the Syrian.’ ”

  “Well, what happened, and when?”

  “It’s dated between the first and second edict against the Christians, and is now superseded by time and circumstances. But it seems the accountant took the rap for Serenus, unless accountants decide on their own for their employers. Presbyter Pionius’s accusation is that the mercantile company acquired from the authorities the buildings and lots confiscated from his community, and ‘so modified them by erecting new structures and adapting to commercial use the existing ones,’ that they could never be reclaimed.”

  Tralles snickered. “Right! As if they ever will.”

  “One lot was used as a cemetery by the sect, so there’s a whole piece on violation of burials and sacrilege, appealing to the law. Eutropius claimed it was his idea, and his employer knew nothing about it.”

  “So, how did it end?”

  “The case was dismissed, but Eutropius got a stern dressing-down from the judge.”

  “Ooh, I bet that scared him. Meanwhile his master Serenus got to keep Church land and buildings.”

  After leaving the courthouse, Aelius took the long way home, and once he began walking, he kept on until he reached the edge of town, and from there to a spot he’d known during the Rebellion. It was a green, shady field where once a small inn had existed: At the Repose of Anthony and Cleopatra, it was called. Destroyed during the fighting, its ruined walls had been a great place to go and kiss the girls, and he’d sat there with Anubina once until nightfall. Since then, the walls had been taken down, and grass now covered the whole swatch of land as if no inn, no Rebellion, and no kissing couples had ever existed. There was still a tall willow tree close to the bank of the Nile, and a bench under it, where Aelius went to sit.

  The sluggish river water was like a green broth, with the pale strands of the willow branches coming down to it and submerging their tips, a few yellowed spear-shaped leaves eddying about ever so slowly. The silt and centuries of debris, and for all he knew, crocodiles asleep with their jaws open only a few feet below him, the sky like a burnished mirror above everything, seemed to him a perfect image of what eternity might be like. Untouched, intangible, set forever like carnelian in gold, etched like the distant mountains at the end of Hadrian’s Way, where the granite for the obelisks is quarried and begins its journey to the rest of the world.

  Anubina had asked him, “Why has your hair gone gray?” and he had no good answer for it. He could have asked, in return, “Why have you grown heavy?” or “What happened to your beauty?” Still, eight years are eight years in a man’s or woman’s life, and what happens to them, though concealed, is often worn outwardly, all the more if they do not admit within. It made him think—yes, it made him wonder, and he sat with the question a long time—whether the deified Hadrian, too, had been worn out by his duties and travels, loveless marriage, superstition, fear of incumbent doom; whether Antinous had been a young copy of himself, a portrait never aging, kept everywhere as a gently mendacious mirror, whose own aging threatened to destroy that imperial parallel existence as an eternal youth. It came to him then that perhaps Antinous had to die young, and preserve the mirror for all times.

  Hadrian’s own words, spare as they were, gave hints to the possibility, and what of the coins he’d minted late in his reign, spelling out Hadrianus renatus? What had made him be born again? The Mysteries of Greece? A cure effected in this or that temple of the merciful gods? Or the commission
to eternity of his alter ego, his little soul to remain forever untouched by time, set like the silt under the river, like the mountains at the end of Hadrian’s Way, where granite for the obelisks is quarried and stands up to the ages?

  It was well into the early evening when he returned to his quarters. The old housekeeper who ran the flats was a midwife by trade, and her sign, showing a woman being delivered who rather resembled a water jug, was cemented on a side entrance of the building. At this hour the warmth of day had wearied, and flights of pigeons from the marketplace glittered like silver against a muting sky. Once in his bedroom, Aelius checked the corners and under the bed for scorpions. Whatever the maids said about their sacredness, he didn’t want them in the room. He found two, and after considering stepping on them, he lifted them up with a cloth, and put them out of the window.

  What the short, fat priest had said (that odious singsong way of talk getting in the way of the value of the remarks) stayed with him. Among his many other charges, Antinous was the protector against water thieves. Whatever for? Because he’d died in the Nile? Because he’d turned into a water sprite? According to Tralles, Pammychios had been killed by water thieves, and one didn’t know who’d done in Serenus Dio, but he had recently been involved in a court battle over an irrigation canal. None of it outwardly matched. There was no connection except for the terms “water,” and “stealing.” Yet Aelius felt there was a link to the mystery in those words; he smelled it as he could smell the dusty evening, and the aromatic scent of the cedar trunk where his clothes were kept.