The Eyes of Aurora

by Albert A. Bell, Jr.

  “The woman, Crispina, left this morning, my lord.”

  “Where did she go? What did she say?”

  “We don’t know, my lord. One of the servants saw her in the latrina shortly after sunrise, but no one has seen her since. About the third hour I discovered that the rear gate was unlatched. She must have gone out that way.”

  “That’s unfortunate. I had more questions for her.” And once again “surprise” meant bad news. “What about the boy?”

  “She left him, my lord.”

  *

  When we reached my home I wanted to carry Aurora in myself, but I knew that would arouse my mother’s ire and make the other servants suspicious of my relationship with Aurora. Two of the servant women helped her walk into the house, with me right behind them, my arms out ready to assist, although I couldn’t have done anything because of the pain I was in.

  As we came into the house, one of the women encouraged Aurora. “Come on, dear. We’ll get you to bed and you’ll feel better in no time.”

  “No,” I said. “Keep her sitting up. That’s an order. Put her in the room next to mine.” I keep that room unoccupied to guarantee that I will have the kind of quiet I need to sleep and write. The two rooms together are not as nice as the suite I’ve constructed for myself at my villa in Laurentum, but it’s the best I can do in a house in the city.

  “Why not just put her in with you?” a woman’s voice said.

  I turned to see Pompeia and my mother emerging from a room off the atrium. Seeing my thin, fragile mother next to a hefty, robust woman like her cousin made me wonder if my mother was ill, or was growing old faster than I realized.

  “That’s what you really want to do, isn’t it?” Pompeia continued. “To have her right there with you? Do you see, Plinia? That’s what my daughter was talking about. That’s why she won’t have him.”

  So Livilla had told her mother that she wasn’t going to marry me. I had hoped she might leave Aurora out of it, just say that she’d decided I would be an inadequate husband.

  “He takes all kind of risks,” Pompeia continued. “Livilla said she’s afraid he’ll get himself killed and leave her a widow before she’s twenty, like her sister.”

  Her sister a widow? What was that all about? I felt like I’d walked into the middle of a play and didn’t know what was going on. Did that mean Livilla hadn’t mentioned Aurora? I would have to straighten all of that out later. Struggling to keep my voice even and wincing at the pain in my chest, I clipped the words as I said, “This woman is injured. I want to be sure she has the proper care.”

  Pompeia must have read the anger in my voice. She fell quiet as I turned and walked away.

  But my mother wasn’t quiet. “We will have to talk about this, Gaius. It must be soon, and it will be a long talk.”

  Nodding to her, I sent a servant with a message to Jacob, telling him that Aurora had been injured and asking him to see me as soon as possible.

  *

  While I sat with Aurora, I sent another servant to fetch Democrites, a physician of whom my uncle thought highly. He is attached to the family of a friend of mine, Servilius Pudens, so I had no hesitation in requesting his services. Meanwhile I set Phineas to looking through the medical works in my library for any information about the treatment of blindness or injuries to the head beyond what my uncle said in his notebooks.

  Democrites returned with my servant. I thanked him for his prompt response.

  “I’m glad to be of service, sir. Your uncle and I had many interesting conversations. I had the greatest respect for him.”

  “As he did for you. Now, the woman who was injured is in here.”

  He felt Aurora’s head, peered into her eyes, and asked her several questions about where she was and what had happened to her. She told a simplified version of the story—we were waiting out the storm in a cave when two men found us and attacked us. During the scuffle she hit her head on the wall of the cave. She made me sound Herculean in the way I overcame them. Democrites raised his eyebrows but didn’t ask for further details. I corroborated her story.

  When he was finished I walked with him as far as the front edge of the garden, far enough to be out of Aurora’s hearing. “What can you tell me?” I asked. “Is she going to be blind forever?”

  “That I cannot say, sir. There doesn’t seem to be any serious injury. Her memory is unimpaired. I’ll give some thought to a course of treatment and return tomorrow, if that suits you.”

  “By all means.”

  “You seem to have a pain in your side, sir. Were you injured in the fight?”

  I put a hand on my side. “There is a sharp pain here.”

  Democrites touched the spot and put pressure on it. “I think you have a cracked rib,” he said as I moaned.

  “Is there anything you can do about it?”

  He shook his head. “It will have to heal on its own. I can give you an opiate to ease the pain, with the warning that it can cloud the mind.”

  “No. I need to be able to think clearly. I’ll see you tomorrow, and thank you again.”

  Watching him walk through the atrium, I noticed Hashep and Dakla playing around the impluvium with Clodius. They had fashioned boats out of pieces of papyrus and were sailing them. They had to retrieve them from the shallow water as they floated to a halt. I was surprised at how easily Clodius was adapting to being deserted by his mother. A boy that age, it seemed to me, ought to show some distress about her leaving. I needed to talk to him, and I didn’t know when I would get another chance.

  The children stood when I approached them. I picked up one of their boats and refolded it. “This is the way I made them when I was a boy.” I launched the boat and it floated all the way across the impluvium.

  Clodius’ eyes got big. “Show me how, please, Uncle Gaius, sir.”

  “Hashep, run to the library and get me the biggest piece of papyrus you can find and a pot of glue. Tell Phineas I need it but not why. He thinks this is a waste of papyrus.”

  While we waited I looked at the boat Clodius had made and showed him a trick or two that I had learned as a boy. When he launched it again, I asked him, “You were out at that villa with your mother, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you see or hear anything?”

  “No, sir. I was in a room with one of our servants. He gave me a honey cake.”

  “Did you see your sister, Fabia, while you were there?”

  The boy shook his head. “She wasn’t my sister.”

  “Oh, I know. She was your half sister.”

  “No, sir. She told me she was glad she wasn’t any relation to me. She was mean to me.”

  Hashep returned with a large piece of papyrus. I folded it into a flat-bottomed barge, gluing it in spots to hold it together. I decided not to press Clodius any more for now, but to let the children enjoy their play. Besides, Aurora had to be my first concern.

  When I sat down with her again she asked, “What did he say, my lord?”

  “He’s going to think about what needs to be done.” That much was true.

  “But, my lord, what if—”

  “There’s nothing we can do right now. You’re going to have the best care anyone can have. That’s the only thing I know for certain.”

  * * *

  Sit up, they tell me. Don’t go to sleep. But all I want to do is lie down and go to sleep. I wish I could go to sleep and, when I wake up, find out that this is all just a dream. I might as well be asleep. I can’t see anything.

  I should never have coupled with Gaius. That I can see. And it was my doing. He would never have betrayed Livilla if I hadn’t been so brazen. Now she hates me, Plinia hates me, and Gaius himself will come to hate me, no matter how much he says he won’t. He’ll leave me, just like Aeneas left Dido. He’ll send me to another of his estates or he’ll sell me.

  What would I do if that happened? Would I kill myself, like Dido did?

  * * *

  It was c
lose to dinner time when Demetrius informed me that Jacob was waiting to see me. “I put him in the Ovid room, my lord.”

  I left a servant woman to watch over Aurora. On my way to meet Jacob, I stopped in my library and wrote a clean copy of the ROTAS square on a piece of papyrus. Jacob stood when I entered the room and I gestured for him to sit.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Aurora, my lord. Do you think her injury is serious?”

  “I’m not sure. A doctor was here earlier and will be back tomorrow. But that’s not why I asked you to come see me. This is.” I handed him the papyrus. He looked at it and raised his eyes to meet mine.

  “You noticed my reaction when I saw this out at Martial’s farm. I was afraid you had.”

  “Why were you afraid? Do you know something about the meaning of this gibberish?”

  “Yes, my lord, I do.”

  XII

  One of the lamps on the lamp tree sputtered and went out. I trimmed the wick and relit it from one of the burning ones.

  Jacob picked up the papyrus and his eyes met mine. The light falling across his face made the lines and creases stand out as though a sculptor had chiseled them. “Why are you so interested in this puzzle, my lord?”

  “As you heard me tell Regulus, it has some connection with one murder that’s already been committed and another one that may be committed. Understanding what it means could help me prevent that.”

  Jacob shook his head. “It has nothing to do with anyone being murdered, my lord.”

  “Then what does it mean?”

  “First, may I ask how you came to possess it?”

  He omitted the honorific “my lord,” assuming a kind of familiarity—almost equality—but I decided I needed information more than I needed to insist on formality. “It was drawn on the wall of a taberna on the Ostian Road.”

  “Marinthus’ taberna.” He said it rather than asked.

  “You know the place?”

  “Yes. Regulus sent me on some business to Ostia a few months ago. I stopped at Marinthus’ on my way there and I…drew this on the wall.”

  I was so thunderstruck that I had to sit down. “So you know what it means.”

  “I know what it means to me. I doubt it means the same to you.”

  “How can it mean one thing to you and something else to me?” I was already facing enough riddles in the case of Fabia’s murder. “Speak plainly, please.”

  “It can mean different things to each of us because I am a Christian and you are not, are you?”

  “What? That is a preposterous and impertinent question. What does it have to do with this?”

  “This square is a symbol known to many Christians.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “I could show you more easily than I can tell you, if I had a pen and some ink.”

  I opened the door and called the first servant I saw in the atrium, sending her to the library and ordering her to run, both ways. When she returned, I set the material on a table in the corner of the room. Jacob dipped the pen in the ink and wrote on the back of the sheet of papyrus.

  As the pen scratched across the papyrus, I pondered his question. Of course I wasn’t a Christian. In the last few years, though, I had learned that several servants in my familia did belong to that mysterious sect. The fact that they were Christians had not, as far as I could tell, made them disloyal to me or affected their work in my household. They said their leaders taught them to be obedient to those in authority. Uncertain what to do with them, I had isolated them on my estate at Misenum to keep them from spreading their doctrine any further.

  Just what that doctrine is, no one seems to know. From what my servants told me, it has something to do with their inexplicable devotion to a man who was executed as a criminal in Judaea when Tiberius was princeps. They even claim he awakened from death. On my return journey from Syria two years ago I met two Christians. They seemed honorable, sensible men and even helped in my investigation of a murder. One of them, a physician, gave me a book he had written, explaining the origins of the cult. Without even reading it, I allowed the group of Christian servants I sent to Misenum to take the scroll with them. They seemed to regard it as some kind of treasure.

  Jacob put down the pen and handed the papyrus back to me. “This is what the square means to me.”

  It took me a moment to realize that I was looking at the letters of the square rearranged:

  P

  A

  A T O

  E

  R

  P A T E R N O S T E R

  O

  S

  A T O

  E

  R

  “Pater noster?”

  “Those are the first two words in a prayer which our Lord—our heavenly Lord—taught us to pray, or more accurately, the Latin translation of it. The As and Os are Alpha and Omega. Our God is the beginning and the end.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything.”

  That bold assertion didn’t leave much room for debate. I studied what Jacob had written until I realized something. Picking up the pen and dipping it in the ink, I drew some lines. “A line drawn from one T to another still forms a square. And the extra As and Os can be connected with lines that form another square.” I showed him what I had drawn. “That creates a square with another square inside it, tilted forty-five degrees, leaving a triangle on each corner of the figure. Is that significant?”

  “The T is the shape of the cross,” Jacob said. “Anyone who has seen a crucifixion would recognize that.”

  “Did you place the As and Os where they are deliberately?”

  Jacob nodded. “The Alpha and Omega next to the T symbolizes the death of the son of God on the cross. Notice that when the puzzle is written in the form of a square, those letters are still next to one another. The triangles you’ve discerned, going from Alpha to Omega through the cross, I’ve not noticed before.” He studied my diagram, closed his eyes, then looked at me with a chuckle. “Sir, I believe you’ve discovered a symbol of the Trinity.”

  “Trinity?”

  “Yes. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

  “That’s three gods.”

  “We see it as three manifestations of the one God.”

  “Like Hermes Trismegistus?”

  Jacob shook his head. “No. There might appear to be a similarity, but this is something else entirely.”

  Once again I had the feeling that I was being misled, lied to. Could I not get a believable statement from anyone these days? Avoiding any further delving into mythology, I asked a direct question. “Does Regulus know you’re a Christian?”

  “I don’t believe he does. Are you going to tell him?” He asked the question without any fear in his voice or on his face.

  “I see no reason to. It’s not against the law to believe something, no matter how absurd it may seem to others. Aristarchus believed the earth moves around the sun. Domitian believes he’s a god. I’m not convinced by either, though I’m more inclined to believe Aristarchus.”

  “I can assure you that Domitian is no god,” Jacob said. “More likely a demon in the flesh.”

  My mouth twitched. “You should be more circumspect in what you say about the princeps,” I cautioned him, while I tried to suppress a smile. “Someone who’s not concerned about your religious views might inform on you for political reasons.”

  “What would they gain? I’ve no fortune to be seized.”

  He had a point. Men like Regulus amass their wealth by informing on rich men and women and receiving a portion of whatever the government confiscates when they’re found guilty, and they’re always found guilty. Jacob was right. No one would inform on him from a financial motive.

  “But the demand for victims in the arena is insatiable,” I said, to keep some pressure on him.

  Jacob closed his eyes for an instant. “I believe that is my destiny, and I’m not afraid of it. But that’s not why you asked me to come here. You wanted to talk
to me about the square. I’ve told you what I can.”

  “You haven’t explained AREPO.”

  Jacob shrugged. “There’s nothing to explain. It’s a nonsense word that results when the letters of the Pater Noster are rearranged in this way. It means nothing, but it distracts non-Christians from the true secret of the square, which we use to identify ourselves to one another. When we see that someone who wants to talk about the square is not a Christian, we emphasize the AREPO line.”

  “Who created it?” As much as I enjoy codes and ciphers, I felt envious of someone who could create a puzzle that read the same backwards, forward, and up and down, even if it had the serious flaw of a meaningless word.

  “I don’t know. Christians first came to Rome in Claudius’ time. I’m told it has been in use since then.”

  Over thirty years then. “My friend Tacitus and I examined this puzzle closely at Marinthus’. I find it hard to believe we were staring at a Christian symbol all that time and never realized it.”

  “That is its purpose.” He chuckled. “I saw people at Marinthus’ argue over it at length. I even told one fellow that, if he could understand the AREPO line, he would understand the entire square. He thought I was some kind of prophet or oracle.”

  “Wait. When was this?”

  “About…a month ago.”

  I leaned forward in my excitement. “Did that man have a woman with him?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Did the woman have a scar on her left cheek?”

  He closed his eyes, as though calling a scene up from his memory. “Now that you mention it, she did.”

  “What else can you tell me about them? Don’t leave out any detail, no matter how small.”

  From Jacob’s description I knew he was talking about Crispina. “Did you hear any names?”

  “The woman called the man Popilius. I presume he was her husband.”

  I nodded. “What puzzles me is that you make Crispina the more assertive and inquisitive of the pair, the one who was more interested in the puzzle, and the better educated.”

  “She definitely was. I’m not even sure the man could read. The woman kept pulling him back to it when he just wanted to drink.”