Saturnalia

by Lindsey Davis

  ‘I never met the woman.’ He was crisp. Too crisp? I did not think so; he was genuinely relieved to be able to deny involvement. Did that mean there were other subjects where his position might be more equivocal? Were our questions causing him anxiety?

  We would not find out. The carriage had finally rumbled to the outskirts of the city. It lurched into the hiring stables and we all had to tumble out, Aedemon setting down one heavy limb at a time, then extracting his body from the carriage with a surprisingly lithe shuffle. As he straightened up, he was huffing alarmingly. Helena and I offered to walk with him, but he claimed he had a litter waiting nearby and was not going in our direction. Since we had not said where we were heading, either he was glad to end our interrogation because it strayed into dangerous areas—or he was just bored with our company.

  XXXII

  It was dark now. I walked us fast from the stables to our house. The season’s misrule had begun. Barrow-wheelers and stallholders in the Transtiberina thought that meant asking women—respectable women who were promenading with their husbands—for a quickie up an alley. Helena took it in silence, but she was obviously rattled. Not as much as I was, to be put in the role of her pimp. We had hardly recovered when we were accosted by a six-foot scallywag in his sister’s dress, with heavy eyeliner and rouge, and sporting a ridiculous woollen wig with yellow plaits.

  ‘Get away from us! You look like a damned doll.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be like that, darling… Give us a cuddle, legate.’ ‘I’m not your darling, sweetheart. Compliments of the season and take yourself off or you’ll get a Saturnalia gift you won’t like.’

  ‘Spoilsport!’ The burly demoiselle stopped pestering us, though not before bombarding us with festive vegetables. I threw them back, with a better aim, and he scampered away.

  ‘I hate this festival!’

  ‘Calm down, Marcus. It’s like this in the Transtiberina all the time.’

  ‘There must be better ways to celebrate the end of harvest and the planting of a new crop than letting slaves play dice all day and demented cabbage-sellers dress up in girls’ clothes.’

  ‘It’s for children,’ murmured Helena.

  ‘What? Demanding even more presents than usual? Eating their little selves sick on cake? Learning how to put out the fire by pissing on the hearth?—O Saturn and Ops, how many burned bottoms will doctors have to treat next week?—And so much for ending quarrels and wars—there are more unnatural deaths over Saturnalia and New Year than any other working or holiday period! Merriment leads to murder.’

  Helena managed to get a word in: ‘Gratianus Scaeva wasn’t murdered in the festival.’

  ‘No.’

  Plenty of people would have hangovers this week. Few would decide that decapitation was a reliable cure. Helena had sidetracked me neatly.

  Was the timing of events at the Quadrumatus house significant? I couldn’t see it. Veleda was not engaging in the spirit of misrule. She might have had the joyful feast of Saturn explained, but Roman celebrations would mean nothing to her. Did the German tribes glorify the revival of the light? Did they honour the unconquerable sun? All I knew was that those bombastic bastards loved a fight. Suspending grudges, whatever the month, was not in their character.

  Veleda’s gods were spirits of forest and water. She had been a priestess of the mystic presences in glades and groves. Spring and pool nymphs. They were celebrated by gifts—deposits of treasure, weapons, money—laid at sacred spots in rivers and marshes. And yes, these gods were also honoured by depositing the severed heads of enemies in water. But if there was a special season for it, other than in any time of war, I did not know when. To me, if Veleda killed Scaeva, the fact that it happened now appeared to be irrelevant.

  If Scaeva’s killer was somebody else, as I still thought most likely, they had hardly been overcome by the normal rages of the festival. No brooding uncle finally lost himself, driven crazy because everyone else was enjoying a good time, so he went for Scaeva. Miserable uncles, in my experience, stick it out and inflict their depression on you year after year. They never bring presents, because they ‘aren’t feeling quite up to it this time’ (same as last year’s excuse from the miser). All they are up to is swigging the best wine. They don’t do anything bad enough to get themselves completely banned, though; they don’t kill people.

  And no disillusioned girlfriend had launched herself on Scaeva in festival jealousy; we knew the women he had dallied with accepted his attentions as a fact of life; and they liked him, at least for his generosity.

  Anyway, the festival had not yet started. I could not make any of this fit… Well, I had a feeling I would end up being wrong, but if Saturnalia was important, it wasn’t showing up on the evidence I had scraped together so far.

  At home, the fun was at hand. Our two slaves, Galene and Jacinthus, had given up all attempts at work, an aspect of the festival they found greatly attractive. Legionaries were hanging green boughs everywhere. I guessed they had spent all day acquiring the foliage, cutting it to size and weaving garlands, instead of continuing the hunt for Veleda. Dinner was progressing; two of the soldiers, Gaius and Paullus, were cooking away happily, watched byour daughters. Julia was singing what I recognised, even through her half-chewed mouthful of mustcake, as a verse from the Little Mess Tin Song. Luckily it was one of the clean verses. Luckily too, Helena gave no sign of recognising the song. From evidence on their tunics and faces, both children had been tasting stuff in the kitchen all afternoon and would not want their proper food. Someone had given Favonia a sigillarium, one of the pointless earthenware figurines that are sold in hundreds for reasons no one can remember; she was using it as a teething device. As I entered the room, a broken piece choked her. Swift action—upending the darling with a sharp smack on the back—remedied that in time in the traditional way. Sensing terrified parents who had thought they had lost her, Sosia Favonia began screaming for more attention. The soldier Paullus remedied that, also in the traditional way: by offering her a big stuffed date. Triumphant, Sosia gobbled it with perfunctory thanks, while Julia began screaming because she hadn’t been given one.

  I left.

  My excuse, which Helena received much too frostily I thought, was needing to see Petronius Longus about whether any civic-minded citizen had apprehended the runaway flute boy and handed him over to the vigiles. ‘Seeing Petro was always on today’s list.’

  ‘Can’t you do it tomorrow?’

  ‘Could be vital. Why would the boy run away? Maybe he saw something—’

  ‘He saw a headless body in a room full of blood, Marcus!’

  ‘If he thinks Veleda killed the young master, he should feel perfectly safe now that she has left. I suspect he isn’t only shocked by discovering the body. He is terrified by something else. This boy is a key witness.’

  ‘Well he’s a fine excuse for you!’ Helena scoffed. ‘Don’t bother to promise me you won’t stayout long.’

  I did promise. I always do. I never learn. Fortunately women learn very quickly, so Helena would not be disappointed when I failed to come home.

  Petro was not at the patrol house; nobody was, except the clerk. ‘Give me the details, if you must, Falco—but be quick! Are you reporting him for his master? I’ll need full details of the owner—’

  ‘What for? I don’t need to find the master, just the boy. He’s a material witness to a homicide—’

  ‘Was he a trained virtuoso? Exceptionally beautiful physical specimen? Did he steal the expensive flute when he ran away?’

  ‘All you bastards care about is valuable property.’

  ‘You get it.’

  ‘Listen, you melon seed, he’s traumatised by what he witnessed, he’s a vulnerable teenager, he’s lost, he’s scared, and I think he can tell me something about a gory killing that has deep political overtones.’

  The clerk sighed. ‘So what’s new? All your cases are like that. It’s obvious: he saw something. Now he’s scared someone may come after him—
so work it out, Falco. He must have seen the killer at the scene. He knows who it is, and they either come visiting—or they even live at the house.’

  That pulled me up. ‘Slow down. Your job is to take shorthand notes. I’m the investigator.’

  ‘I think like Petronius Longus, Falco. I’ve written up his case notes often enough.’

  ‘All the more reason to find this boy urgently.’

  ‘I’ll do a memo tomorrow and have the lads look out.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to check if he’s already in your holding cell?’ ‘He isn’t.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I am sure,’ explained the clerk meticulously, ‘because the cell is empty. ‘

  I was amazed. ‘What? No arsonists or balcony-thieves? No drunks, muggers or raucous insulters of frail elderly women? Can this be Saturnalia? Whatever has happened to riot in the streets?’

  ‘We had a bunch of house guests, Falco. I personally supervised letting them all off with a caution. In return I have a pile of promissory notes several inches high. The riot begins officially tomorrow,’ said the clerk. Then he explained why he was the only person left in the station house, and why even he was about to lock up and leave. ‘Tomorrow we’ll need every man on the streets: no leave, no sick notes, no stopping at home with toothache without a sick note, and no bunking off to your grandmother’s funeral for the fourth time this year. Tomorrow is mayhem, and we’ll be there. Tonight, therefore, is the Fourth Cohort’s Saturnalia drinks party.’

  I said they would all be there tomorrow with dreadful hangovers, then—and he said, he couldn’t wait around any longer, so did I want to come?

  I should have gone straight home. I knew it. I had managed to avoid this particular event in the calendar for several years, but I was well aware of what went on. Those who attended always spent the following twelve months reminiscing about it. They would have longing looks as if they wished they could remember the best bits: what the raw recruit had innocently said to the tribune just before they both passed out and why the bill for breakages had been so high. I had been joking when I told the clerk that the troops would all be on duty tomorrow with bad heads. Most would not reappear at the patrol house for about four days, and when they turned up, ashen and trembling, it would take several hours of pep talk, stomach-settlers all round from their doctor Scythax, and a bought-in breakfast to remove the sedative effects of the stomach pills, before the situation that the innocent public know as ‘on duty’ could possibly occur.

  I was too young for this. I had too many responsibilities. I should have run a mile from the legendary night of degeneration—but I did the same as you would have done: I let him lure me into it.

  XXXIII

  I was led to a large, unused warehouse. I told myself nothing could go wrong; after all, my sister—the virtuous, pompous one—was in charge of the catering.

  A cohort of vigiles is about five hundred strong. Sometimes there is a shortfall, with a group on detachment to guard the corn supply at Ostia, but the Fourth had recently finished a tour of duty there. It is just like the army: on a good day, ten will be laid off with wounds (more after a large building fire, many more after a major city conflagration), twenty in the sick bay with general illnesses, and fifteen specifically unfit for duty due to conjunctivitis. The treasurer has always gone to see his mother. The tribune in charge is always present; nobody can get rid of him, whatever devious ruse they try.

  The first sight to greet me, then, was Marcus Rubella, the Fourth’s untrustworthy, over-ambitious cohort tribune. He was standing on a table, with his shaven head thrown back, draining the biggest double handed goblet of wine I had ever seen. In a gathering of blacksmiths or furnace stokers, who are the world’s heaviest quaffers, this would have been the final stunt of the evening, after which everyone would collapse. Normally a loner, whose men had yet to learn to like him, Rubella was just warming up in between raiding the early canape trays. Occasions like this were when he did win the vigiles’ wary respect. After a handful of quails’ eggs and a few oysters, their hard man would accept some other drinking challenge, remaining vertical and apparently sober throughout. The vigiles could admire that. It deserves mention that in order to show how conscientiously he threw himself into occasions of cohort festivity, Marcus Rubella (a staid man, conscious of his dignity) was currently wearing a silly hat, winged sandals and a very short gold tunic. I noticed with a shudder that he had not shaved his legs.

  Of the five hundred men who nightly patrolled the Twelfth and Thirteenth Districts, almost every one was there. The sufferers from the sick bay had bravely rallied. Even the bucket-handler with life threatening burns from a bakery fire had been carried in on a stretcher. Someone whispered to me that he had struggled hard to last out until the party. If he died tonight, he would be smiling.

  A drink found its way into my hand. I was expected to gulp it as fast as I could then have more; my elbow was jogged as encouragement. I recognised the wine as vinum primitivum from that night at Flora’s. Then I spotted my sister Junia, red-faced and harassed as she pushed through the press. She was approaching forty and the menopause, but that hadn’t stopped her pinning her hair in fat, lopsided rolls, adorning the edifice with fake rosebuds, and mincing about in her second-best stole. The effect was incongruously girlish. I felt slightly sick. ‘Oh Juno, Marcus, these men are voracious—I’m never going to have enough!’

  ‘You knew what you were taking on. You’ve heard Petro rhapsodising often enough.’

  ‘I thought you and he were exaggerating as usual.’

  ‘Not this time, sis!’ Fear grew in her eyes. Grinning, I let her be dragged away by a group who were demanding their mixed platter of seafood (they knew exactly what they had signed for when the menus went round for advance orders)—what did it take to get service? they had asked four times… The vigiles held one party a year and were as fussy as young patricians at an expensive banquet. More so, because the vigiles paid for theirs.

  When plain men who do hard jobs hold an entertainment, they like all the trimmings. Whole trees had been suspended from the rafters, until the roof space was crowded with greenery. Dropped pine needles stuck through the gaps in your bootstraps every time you took a step. Beneath the aromatic forest canopy, they had positioned enough lamps and candles to chase away the darkness of Hades. Smoke from the oil and wax was already thickening the air. Sooner or later they would set something on fire; in theory they had enough professional know-how to douse the blaze—but that assumed any of them were still sensible by then. Already they had flushed faces, gleaming with sweat from the heat and excitement. The noise level had risen high enough to cause complaints from neighbours several streets away—though if the locals had heard that this party was being planned, they had probably all left to stay with their aunties in the Sabine hills.

  At one side of the room, a long table was serving as a bar. The idea was to protect Apollonius, who was penned behind it, looking unperturbed as he diligently doled out pottery cups of primitivum from a vast row of amphorae. The hard-bitten drinkers in the cohort had wedged themselves three deep in front of the table where they could most easily grab refills, and were set to stand there all night. Fighting fires gives men a great capacity; the vigiles were practised in working up a thirst. They had been banking contributions to the food and drink bill for the past twelve months, after which Rubella had added his customary top-up. He liked to pretend the bags of sesterces were a personal contribution, a generous thank-you to his loyal men; in fact, we all knew he fiddled the equipment budget. Still, he took the risk, and if ever the cohort was properly audited it was Rubella who would be penalised… Unlikely. I could see the internal auditor lapping up wine in a corner with a blissful expression that had nothing to do with discovering financial irregularities. He looked as if he had come across a crock of gold coins buried under a thorn-bush, and wasn’t going to give the treasure back to its owner.

  Quite a few of the vigiles were in fancy
dress. They must have borrowed costumes from a third-rate theatrical troupe, the kind that drew the crowds the intellectual way: notoriety for topless actresses. The fire-fighters were sturdy ex-slaves with arms as thick as anchor cables and chin stubble a bear would be proud to own; in flimsy drapes of turquoise and saffron, the results were unspeakable. Some were throwing themselves into their feminine disguise so wholeheartedly it was sinister. Others were more restrained and had merely crammed wreaths on their greasy heads or draped themselves in strips of moth-eaten fur. Three were pretty well naked and had spent all afternoon painting one another all over with blue patterns, to look like Celts in woad—always a popular obsession in Rome. One of them had mistletoe in his hair, while a second had made himself a torque, though the ‘gold’ had melted and was running down over his swirly patterned chest among the curly black hairs and sweat. Attending on Rubella I saw a man dressed as a splendid five-foot carrot. His friend had come as a turnip, but had taken less trouble and didn’t look so good.

  Some new recruits whose mothers had sent them out cleaned up and nicely presented had used far too much crocus hair pomade. They were standing about in a perfumed little group, all very quiet. None had plucked up courage to go for a drink yet. It was their first year in the cohort and they were starting to feel overwhelmed by the promise of full-throated merriment ahead. Once they let go and began on the primitivum, they would be disgusting.

  Women were present. None I recognised. From their dress and demeanour, it seemed unlikely they were vigiles’ wives.

  I was on my third beaker (though I had passed on my second to another man) when I finally spotted Petronius. He was behind the bar, helping Apollonius break off the wax bungs from a new batch of amphorae. His size and authority were helping to keep order; his only concession to fancy dress was the laurel wreath he wore. It was tied with crimson ribbons; Maia probably made it at home. Forcing my way through the press I waved a salute and mouthed ‘lo!’ As soon as I could get closer, I added, ‘You’re in the right place!’