A Gladiator Dies Only Once rsr-11

by Steven Saylor

  "How? What had Cleon done to finally push the god too far?"

  Again I saw the internal debate behind his eyes. Clearly, he wanted to tell me everything. I had only to be patient. At last, he sighed and spoke. "Lately, some of us thought that Cleon might finally be softening. He had a new tutor, a young philosopher named Mulciber, who came from Alexandria about six months ago. Cleon and his sister Cleio went to Mulciber's little house off the forum every morning to talk about Plato and read poetry."

  "Cleio as well?"

  "Sosistrides believed in educating both his children, no matter that Cleio's a girl. Anyway, pretty soon word got around that Mulciber was courting Cleon. Why not? He was smitten, like everybody else. The surprise was that Cleon seemed to respond to his advances. Mulciber would send him chaste little love poems, and Cleon would send poems back to him. Cleon actually showed me some of Mul-ciber's poems, and asked me to read the ones he was sending back. They were beautiful! He was good at that, too, of course." Hippolytus shook his head ruefully.

  "But it was all a cruel hoax. Cleon was just leading Mulciber on, making a fool of him. Only the day before yesterday, right in front of some of Mulciber's other students, Cleon made a public show of returning all the poems Mulciber had sent him, and asking for his own poems back. He said he'd written them merely as exercises, to teach his own tutor the proper way to write a love poem. Mulciber was dumbstruck! Everyone in the gymnasium heard about it. People said Cleon had finally gone too far. To have spurned his tutor's advances was one thing, but to do so in such a cruel, deliberately humiliating manner-that was hubris, people said, and the gods would take vengeance. And now they have."

  1 nodded. "But quite often the gods use human vessels to achieve their ends. Do you really think the statue tumbled into the pool of its own accord, without a hand to push it?"

  Hippolytus frowned, and seemed to debate revealing yet another secret. "Yesterday, not long before Cleon drowned, some of us saw a stranger in the gymnasium."

  At last, I thought, a concrete bit of evidence, something solid to grapple with! I took a deep breath. "No one else mentioned seeing a stranger."

  "I told you, they're all too superstitious. If the boy we saw was some emissary of the god, they don't want to speak of it."

  "A boy?"

  "Perhaps it was Eros himself, in human form-though you'd think a god would be better groomed and wear clothes that fit!" "You saw this stranger clearly?"

  "Not that clearly; neither did anybody else, as far as I can tell. I only caught a glimpse of him loitering in the outer vestibule, but I could tell he wasn't one of the regular boys."

  "How so?"

  "By the fact that he was dressed at all. This was just after the games, and everyone was still naked. And most of the gymnasium crowd are pretty well off; this fellow had a wretched haircut and his tunic looked like a patched hand-me-down from a big brother. I fig-ured he was some stranger who wandered in off the street, or maybe a messenger slave too shy to come into the changing room."

  "And his face?"

  Hippolytus shook his head. "I didn't see his face. He had dark hair, though."

  "Did you speak to him, or hear him speak?"

  "No. I headed for the hot plunge and forgot all about him. Then Caputorus found Cleon's body, and everything was crazy after that. I didn't make any connection to the stranger until this morning, when I found out that some of the others had seen him, too."

  "Did anybody see this young stranger pass through the baths and the changing room?"

  "I don't think so. But there's another way to get from the outer vestibule to the inner courtyard, through a little passageway at the far end of the building."

  "So Caputorus told me. It seems possible, then, that this stranger could have entered the outer vestibule, sneaked through the empty passage, come upon Cleon alone in the pool, pushed the statue onto him, then fled the way he had come, all without being clearly seen by anyone."

  Hippolytus took a deep breath. "That's how I figure it. So you see, it must have been the god, or some agent of the god. Who else could have had such perfect timing, to carry out such an awful deed?"

  I shook my head. "I can see you know a bit about poetry and more than a bit about wrestling holds, young man, but has no one tutored you in logic? We may have answered the question of how, but that hasn't answered the question of who. I respect your religious convic-tion that the god Eros may have had the motive and the will to kill Cleon in such a cold-blooded fashion-but it seems there were plenty of mortals with abundant motive as well. In my line of work I prefer to suspect the most likely mortal first, and presume divine causation only as a last resort. Chief among such suspects must be this tutor, Mulciber. Could he have been the stranger you saw lurking in the vestibule? Philosophers are notorious for having bad haircuts and shabby clothes."

  "No. The stranger was shorter and had darker hair."

  "Still, I should like to have a talk with this lovesick tutor."

  "You can't," said Hippolytus. "Mulciber hanged himself yesterday."

  "No wonder such a superstitious dread surrounds Cleon's death," I remarked to Eco, as we made our way to the house of Mulciber. "The golden boy of the Cup, killed by a statue of Eros; his spurned tutor, hanging himself the same day. This is the dark side of Eros. It casts a shadow that frightens everyone into silence."

  Except me, Eco gestured, and let out the stifled, inchoate grunt he sometimes emits simply to declare his existence. I smiled at his self-deprecating humor, but it seemed to me that the things we had learned that morning had disturbed and unsettled Eco. He was at an age to be acutely aware of his place in the scheme of things, and to begin wondering who might ever love him, especially in spite of his handicap. It seemed unfair that a boy like Cleon, who had only scorn for his suitors, should have inspired so much unrequited infat-uation and desire, when others faced lives of loneliness. Did the gods engineer the paradox of love's unfairness to amuse themselves, or was it one of the evils that escaped from Pandora's box to plague mankind?

  The door of the philosopher's house, like that of Sosistrides, was adorned with a black wreath. Following my knock, an elderly slave opened it to admit us to a little foyer, where a body was laid out upon a bier much less elaborate than that of Cleon. I saw at once why Hippolytus had been certain that the short, dark-haired stranger at the gymnasium had not been the Alexandrian tutor, for Mulciber was quite tall and had fair hair. He had been a reasonably handsome man of thirty-five or so, about my own age. Eco gestured to the scarf that had been clumsily gathered about the dead man's throat, and then clutched his own neck with a strangler's grip: To hide the rope marks, he seemed to say.

  "Did you know my master?" asked the slave who had shown us in.

  "Only by reputation," I said. "We're visitors to Neapolis, but I've heard of your master's devotion to poetry and philosophy. I was shocked to learn of his sudden death." I spoke only the truth, after all.

  The slave nodded. "He was a man of learning and talent. Still, few have come to pay their respects. He had no family here. And of course there are many who won't set foot inside the house of a suicide, for fear of bad luck."

  "It's certain that he killed himself, then?"

  "It was I who found him, hanging from a rope. He tied it to that beam, just above the boy's head." Eco rolled his eyes up. "Then he stood on a chair, put the noose around his neck, and kicked the chair out of the way. His neck snapped. I like to think he died quickly." The slave regarded his master's face affectionately. "Such a waste! And all for the love of that worthless boy!"

  "You're certain that's why he killed himself?"

  "Why else? He was making a good living here in Neapolis, enough to send a bit back to his brother in Alexandria every now and again, and even to think of purchasing a second slave. I'm not sure how I'd have taken to that; I've been with him since he was a boy. I used to carry his wax tablets and scrolls for him when he was little and had his own tutor. No, his life was going well in every wa
y, except for that horrible boy!"

  "You know that Cleon died yesterday."

  "Oh, yes. That's why the master killed himself."

  "He hung himself after hearing of Cleon's death?"

  "Of course! Only…" The old man looked puzzled, as if he had not previously considered any other possibility. "Now let me think. Yesterday was strange all around, you see. The master sent me out early in the morning, before daybreak, with specific instructions not to return until evening. That was very odd, because usually I spend all day here, admitting his pupils and seeing to his meals. But yesterday he sent me out and I stayed away until dusk. I heard about Cleon's death on my way home. When I came in, there was the mas-ter, hanging from that rope."

  "Then you don't know for certain when he died-only that it must have been between daybreak and nightfall."

  "I suppose you're right."

  "Who might have seen him during the day?"

  "Usually pupils come and go all day, but not so yesterday, on account of the games at the gymnasium. All his regular students took part, you see, or else went to watch. The master had planned to be a spectator himself. So he had canceled all his regular classes, you see, except for his very first of the day-and that he'd never cancel, of course, because it was with that wretched boy!"

  "Cleon, you mean."

  "Yes, Cleon and his sister, Cleio. They always came for the first hour of the day. This month they were reading Plato on the death of Socrates."

  "Suicide was on Mulciber's mind, then. And yesterday, did Cleon and his sister arrive for their class?"

  "I can't say. I suppose they did. I was out of the house by then."

  "I shall have to ask Cleio, but for now we'll assume they did. Perhaps Mulciber was hoping to patch things up with Cleon." The slave gave me a curious look. "I know about the humiliating episode of the returned poems the day before," I explained.

  The slave regarded me warily. "You seem to know a great deal for a man who's not from Neapolis. What are you doing here?"

  "Only trying to discover the truth. Now, then: we'll assume that Cleon and Cleio came for their class, early in the morning. Perhaps Mulciber was braced for another humiliation, and even then planning suicide-or was he wildly hoping, with a lover's blind faith, for some impossible reconciliation? Perhaps that's why he dismissed you for the day, because he didn't care to have his old slave witness either outcome. But it must have gone badly, or at least not as Mulciber hoped, for he never showed up to watch the games at the gymnasium that day. Everyone seems to assume that it was news of Cleon's death that drove him to suicide, but it seems to me just as likely that Mul-ciber hung himself right after Cleon and Cleio left, unable to bear yet another rejection."

  Eco, greatly agitated, mimed an athlete throwing a discus, then a man fitting a noose around his neck, then an archer notching an ar-row in a bow.

  I nodded. "Yes, bitter irony: even as Cleon was enjoying his great-est triumph at the gymnasium, poor Mulciber may have been snuffing out his own existence. And then, Cleon's death in the pool. No wonder everyone thinks that Eros himself brought Cleon down." I studied the face of the dead man. "Your master was a poet, wasn't he?"

  "Yes," said the slave. "He wrote at least a few lines every day of his life."

  "Did he leave a farewell poem?"

  The slave shook his head. "You'd think he might have, if only to say good-bye to me after all these years."

  "But there was nothing? Not even a note?"

  "Not a line. And that's another strange thing, because the night before he was up long after midnight, writing and writing. I thought perhaps he'd put the boy behind him and thrown himself into com-posing some epic poem, seized by the muse! But I can't find any trace of it. Whatever he was writing so frantically, it seems to have van-ished. Perhaps, when he made up his mind to hang himself, he thought better of what he'd written, and burned it. He seems to have gotten rid of some other papers, as well."

  "What papers?"

  "The love poems he'd written to Cleon, the ones Cleon returned to him-they've vanished. I suppose the master was embarrassed at the thought of anyone reading them after he was gone, and so he got rid of them. So perhaps it's not so strange after all that he left no farewell note."

  I nodded vaguely, but it still seemed odd to me. From what I knew of poets, suicides, and unrequited lovers, Mulciber would al-most certainly have left some words behind-to chastise Cleon, to elicit pity, to vindicate himself. But the silent corpse of the tutor offered no explanation.

  As the day was waning, I at last returned to the house of Sosistrides, footsore and soul-weary. A slave admitted us. I paused to gaze for a long moment at the lifeless face of Cleon. Nothing had changed, and yet he did not look as beautiful to my eyes as he had before.

  Sosistrides called us into his study. "How did it go, Finder?"

  "I've had a productive day, if not a pleasant one. I talked to everyone I could find at the gymnasium. I also went to the house of your children's tutor. You do know that Mulciber hanged himself

  yesterday?"

  "Yes. I found out only today, after I spoke to you. I knew he was a bit infatuated with Cleon, wrote poems to him and such, but I had no idea he was so passionately in love with him. Another tragedy, like ripples in a pond." Sosistrides, too, seemed to assume without question that the tutor's suicide followed upon news of Cleon's death. "And what did you find? Did you discover anything… significant?"

  I nodded. "I think I know who killed your son."

  His face assumed an expression of strangely mingled relief and dismay. "Tell me, then!"

  "Would you send for your daughter first? Before I can be certain, there are a few questions I need to ask her. And when I think of the depth of her grief, it seems to me that she, too, should hear what I have to say."

  He called for a slave to fetch the girl from her room. "You're right, of course; Cleio should be here, in spite of her… unseemly appearance. Her grieving shows her to be a woman, after all, but I've raised her almost as a son, you know. I made sure she learned to read and write. I sent her to the same tutors as Cleon. Of late she's been reading Plato with him, both of them studying with Mulciber… "

  "Yes, I know."

  Cleio entered the room, her mantle pushed defiantly back from her shorn head. Her cheeks were lined with fresh, livid scratches, signs that her mourning had continued unabated through the day.

  "The Finder thinks he knows who killed Cleon," Sosistrides explained.

  "Yes, but I need to ask you a few questions first," I said. "Are you well enough to talk?"

  She nodded.

  "Is it true that you and your brother went to your regular morning class with Mulciber yesterday?"

  "Yes." She averted her tear-reddened eyes and spoke in a hoarse whisper.

  "When you arrived at his house, was Mulciber there?"

  She paused. "Yes."

  "Was it he who let you in the door?"

  Again a pause. "No."

  "But his slave was out of the house, gone for the day. Who let you in?"

  "The door was unlocked… ajar…" "So you and Cleon simply stepped inside?" "Yes."

  "Were harsh words exchanged between your brother and Mulciber?"

  Her breath became ragged. "No."

  "Are you sure? Only the day before, your brother had publicly re-jected and humiliated Mulciber. He returned his love poems and ridiculed them in front of others. That must have been a tremen-dous blow to Mulciber. Isn't it true that when the two of you showed up at his house yesterday morning, Mulciber lost his temper with Cleon?"

  She shook her head.

  "What if I suggest that Mulciber became hysterical? That he ranted against your brother? That he threatened to kill him?"

  "No! That never happened. Mulciber was too-he would never have done such a thing!"

  "But I suggest that he did. I suggest that yesterday, after suffering your brother's deceit and abuse, Mulciber reached the end of his tether. He snapped, like a rein that's
worn clean through, and his passions ran away with him like maddened horses. By the time you and your brother left his house, Mulciber must have been raving like a madman-"

  "No! He wasn't! He was-"

  "And after you left, he brooded. He took out the love poems into which he had poured his heart and soul, the very poems that Cleon returned to him so scornfully the day before. They had once been beautiful to him, but now they were vile, so he burned them."

  "Never!"

  "He had planned to attend the games at the gymnasium, to cheer Cleon on, but instead he waited until the contests were over, then sneaked into the vestibule, skulking like a thief. He came upon Cleon alone in the pool. He saw the statue of Eros-a bitter reminder of his own rejected love. No one else was about, and there was Cleon, swimming facedown, not even aware that anyone else was in the courtyard, unsuspecting and helpless. Mulciber couldn't resist-he waited until the very moment that Cleon passed beneath the statue, then pushed it from its pedestal. The statue struck Cleon's head. Cleon sank to the bottom and drowned."

  Cleio wept and shook her head. "No, no! It wasn't Mulciber!"

  "Oh, yes! And then, wracked with despair at having killed the boy he loved, Mulciber rushed home and hanged himself. He didn't even bother to write a note to justify himself or beg forgiveness for the murder. He'd fancied himself a poet, but what greater failure is there for a poet than to have his love poems rejected? And so he hung himself without writing another line, and he'll go to his fu-neral pyre in silence, a common murderer-"

  "No, no, no!" Cleio clutched her cheeks, tore at her hair, and wailed. Eco, whom I had told to be prepared for such an outburst, started back nonetheless. Sosistrides looked at me aghast. I averted my eyes. How could I have simply told him the truth, and made him believe it? He had to be shown. Cleio had to show him.

  "He did leave a farewell," Cleio cried. "It was the most beautiful poem he ever wrote!"

  "But his slave found nothing. Mulciber's poems to Cleon had vanished, and there was nothing new-"