The House of the Vestals rsr-6

by Steven Saylor

  "But there's a wineskin over there. And the inside of this bottle appears to be as dry as the outside. I have a hunch, Lucius. Would you summon Ursus?"

  "Ursus?But why?"

  "I have a question for him."

  The beekeeper soon came lumbering down the hill. For such a big, bearish fellow, he was very squeamish in the presence of death. He stayed well away from the body and made a face every time he looked at it.

  "I'm a city dweller, Ursus. I don't know very much about bees. I've never been stung by one. But I've heard that a bee sting can kill a man. Is that true, Ursus?"

  He looked a bit embarrassed at the idea that his beloved bees could do such a thing. "Well, yes, it can happen. But it's rare. Most people get stung and it goes away soon enough. But some people…"

  "Have you ever seen anyone die of a bee sting, Ursus?"

  "No."

  "But with all your lore, you must know something about it. How does it happen? How do they die?"

  "It's their lungs that give out. They strangle to death. Can't breathe, turn blue…"

  Lucius looked aghast. "Do you think that's it, Gordianus? That he was stung by one of my bees?"

  "Let's have a look. The sting would leave a mark, wouldn't it, Ursus?"

  "Oh, yes, a red swelling. And more than that, you'd find the poisoned barb. It stays behind when the bee flies off, snagged in the flesh. Just a tiny thing, but not hard to find."

  We examined Titus's chest and limbs, rolled him over and examined his back. We combed through his hair and looked at his scalp.

  "Nothing," said Lucius.

  "Nothing," I admitted.

  "What are the chances, anyway, that a bee happened to fly by-"

  "The bottle, Eco. When did we hear it break? Before Titus cried out, or after?"

  After, gestured Eco, rolling his fingers forward. He clapped twice. Immediately after.

  "Yes, that's how I remember it, too. A bee, a cry, a broken bottle…" I pictured Antonia and Titus as I had last seen them together, hand in hand, doting on one another as they headed for the stream. "Two people in love, alone on a grassy bank- what might they reasonably be expected to get up to?"

  "What do you mean, Gordianus?"

  "I think we shall have to examine Titus more intimately."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I think we shall have to take off his loincloth. It's already loosened, you see. Probably by Antonia."

  As I thought we might, we found the red, swollen bee sting in the most intimate of places.

  "Of course, to be absolutely certain, we should find the stinger and remove it. I'll leave that task to you, Lucius. He was your friend, after all, not mine."

  Lucius located and dutifully extracted the tiny barb. "Funny," he said. "I thought it would be bigger."

  "What, the stinger?"

  "No, his… well, the way he always bragged, I thought it must be… oh, never mind."

  Confronted with the truth, Antonia confessed. She had never meant to kill Titus, only to punish him for his pursuit of Davia.

  Her early morning trip to the stream, ostensibly to gather flowers, had actually been an expedition to capture a bee. For this purpose she used the clay bottle, plugged it with a cork stopper, then hid it beneath the flowers in her basket. Later, Titus himself unwittingly carried the bee in the bottle down to the stream, hidden in the basket of food.

  It was the Priapus in the glen that had given Antonia the idea. "I've always thought the god looks so… vulnerable… like that," she told us. If she could inflict a wound on Titus in that most vulnerable part of the male anatomy, she thought, the punishment would be not only painful and humiliating, but stingingly appropriate.

  As they lazed on their blanket beside the stream, Antonia drew Titus into an amorous embrace. They cuddled and loosened their clothing. Titus became aroused, just as she planned. While he lay back, closing his eyes with a dreamy smile, Antonia reached for the clay bottle.She shook it, to agitate the bee, then unstoppered it and quickly pressed the opening against his aroused member. The sting was inflicted before Titus realized what was happening. He bolted up, cried out and knocked the bottle from her hand. It broke against the trunk of a willow tree.

  Antonia was ready to flee, knowing he might explode with anger. Instead, Titus began to clutch at his chest and choke. The catastrophe that swiftly followed took her utterly by surprise. Titus was dead within moments. Antonia's shock and grief were entirely genuine. She had meant to hurt him, but never to murder him.

  But she could hardly admit what she had done. Impulsively, she chose Davia as a scapegoat. Davia was ultimately to blame anyway, she thought, for tempting her husband.

  It was agreed that Lucius would not spread the whole truth of what had happened. Their circle of friends would be told that Titus had died of a bee sting, but not of Antonia's part. His death had been unintentional, after all, not deliberate murder. Antonia's grief was perhaps punishment enough. But her scape-goating of Davia was unforgivable. Would she have seen the lie through all the way to Davia's torture and death? Lucius thought so. He allowed her to stay the night, then sent her packing back to Rome, along with her husband's body, and told her never to visit or speak to him again.

  Ironically, Titus might have been spared had he been a little more forthcoming or a little less amorous. Lucius later learned, in all the talk that followed Titus's death, that Titus had once been stung by a bee as a boy and had fallen very ill. Titus had never talked about this boyhood incident to his friends or to Antonia; only his old nurse and his closest relatives knew about it. When he hung back from seeing the honey harvest, I think he did so partly because he wanted time alone to pursue Davia, but also because he was (quite reasonably) afraid to go near the hives, and unwilling to admit his fear. If he had told us then of his extreme susceptibility to bee stings, I am certain that Antonia would never have attempted her vengeful scheme.

  Eco and I saw out the rest of our visit, but the days that followed Antonia's departure were melancholy. Lucius was moody. The slaves, always superstitious about any death, were restless. Davia was still shaken, and her cooking suffered. The sun was as bright as when we arrived, the flowers as fragrant, the stream as sparkling, but the tragedy cast a pall over everything. When the day came for our departure, I was ready for the forgetful hustle and bustle of the city. And what a story I would have to tell Bethesda!

  Before we left, I paid a visit to Ursus and took a last look at the hives down in the glen.

  "Have you ever been stung by a bee yourself, Ursus?"

  "Oh, yes, many times."

  "It must hurt."

  "It smarts."

  "But not too terribly, I suppose. Otherwise you'd stop being a beekeeper."

  Ursus grinned. "Yes, bees can sting. But I always say that bee-keeping is like loving a woman. You get stung every so often, but you keep coming back for more, because the honey is worth it."

  "Oh, not always, Ursus," I sighed. "Not always."

  THE ALEXANDRIAN CAT

  We were sitting in the sunshine in the atrium of Lucius Claudius's house, discussing the latest gossip from the Forum, when a terrible yowling pierced the air.

  Lucius gave a start at the noise and opened his eyes wide. The caterwauling terminated in a feline shriek, followed by a scraping, scrambling noise and then the appearance of a gigantic yellow cat racing across the roof above us. The red clay tiles offered little traction to the creature's claws and it skittered so close to the edge that for a moment I thought it might fall right into Lucius's lap. Lucius seemed to think so, too. He scrambled up from his chair, knocking it over as he frantically retreated to the far side of the fish pond.

  The big cat was quickly followed by a smaller one, which was solid black. The little creature must have had a particularly aggressive disposition to have given chase to a rival so much larger than itself, but its careless ferocity proved to be its down-fell-literally, for while its opponent managed to traverse the root without a misstep, the blac
k cat careered so recklessly across the tiles that at a critical turning it lost its balance. After an ear-rending cacophony of feral screeching and claws scraping madly against tiles, the black cat came plummeting feet-first into the atrium.

  Lucius screamed like a child, then cursed like a man. The young slave who had been filling our wine cups came running. "Accursed creature!" cried Lucius. "Get it away from me! Get it out of here!"

  The slave was joined at once by others, who surrounded the beast. There was a standoff as the black cat flattened its ears and growled while the slaves held back, wary of its fangs and claws. Regaining his dignity, Lucius caught his breath and straightened his tunic. He snapped his fingers and pointed at the overturned chair. One of the slaves righted it, whereupon Lucius stepped onto it. No doubt he thought to put as much distance between himself and the cat as possible, but instead he made a terrible error, for by raising himself so high he became the tallest object in the atrium.

  Without warning the cat gave a sudden leap. It broke through the cordon of slaves, bounded onto the seat of Lucius's chair, ran vertically up the length of his body, scrambled over his face onto the top of his head, then pounced onto the roof and disappeared. For a long moment Lucius stood gaping.

  At last, assisted by his slaves (many of whom seemed about to burst out laughing), Lucius managed to step shakily from the chair. As he sat, a fresh cup of wine was put into his hand and he raised it to his lips unsteadily. He drained the cup and handed it back to the slave. "Well!" he said. "Go on now, all of you. The excitement's over." As the slaves departed from the atrium, I saw that Lucius was blushing, no doubt from the embarrassment of having so thoroughly lost his composure, not to mention having been got the better of by a wild beast in his own home, and in front of his slaves. The look on his chubby, florid face was so comic that I had to bite my lips to keep from grinning.

  "Cats!" he said at last. "Accursed creatures! When I was a boy, you hardly saw them at all in Rome. Now they've taken over the city! Thousands of them, everywhere, wandering about at will, squabbling and mating as they please, and no one able to stop them. At least one still doesn't see them much in the countryside; farmers run them off, because they frighten the other animals so badly. Weird, fierce little monsters! I think they come from Hades."

  "Actually, I believe they came to Rome by way of Alexandria," I said quietly.

  "Oh?"

  "Yes. Sailors first brought them over from Egypt, or so I've heard. Seafarers like cats because they kill the vermin on their ships."

  "What a choice-rats and mice, or one of those fearsome beasts with its claws and fangs! And you, Gordianus-all this time you've sat there as if nothing was happening! But I forget, you're used to cats. Bethesda has a cat which she keeps as a sort of pet, doesn't she? As if the creature were a dog!" He made a face. "What does she call the thing?"

  "Bethesda always names her cats Bast. It's what the Egyptians call their cat-god."

  "What a peculiar people, worshiping animals as if they were gods. No wonder their government is in constant turmoil. A people who worship cats can hardly be fit to rule themselves."

  I kept silent at this bit of conventional wisdom. I might have pointed out that the cat-worshipers he so offhandedly disdained had managed to create a culture of exquisite subtlety and monumental achievements while Romulus and Remus were still suckling a she-wolf, but the day was too hot to engage in historical debate.

  "If the creature comes back, I shall have it killed," Lucius muttered under his breath, nervously eyeing the roof.

  "In Egypt," I said, "such an act would be considered murder, punishable by death."

  Lucius looked at me askance. "Surely you exaggerate! I realize that the Egyptians worship all sorts of birds and beasts, but it doesn't prevent them from stealing their eggs or eating their flesh. Is the slaughter of a cow considered murder?"

  "Perhaps not, but the slaying of a cat most certainly is. In fact, when I was a footloose young man in Alexandria, one of my earliest investigations involved the murder of a cat."

  "Oh, Gordianus, you must be joking! You're not saying that you were actually hired to track down the killer of a cat, are you?"

  "It was a bit more complicated than that."

  Lucius smiled for the first time since we had been interrupted by the squabbling cats. "Come, Gordianus, don't tease me," he said, clapping his hands for the slave to bring more wine. "You must tell me the story."

  I was glad to see him regain his good spirits. "Very well," I said. "I shall tell you the tale of the Alexandrian cat…"

  The precinct called Rhakotis is the most ancient part of Alexandria. The heart of Rhakotis is the Temple of Serapis, a magnificent marble edifice constructed on a huge scale and decorated with fabulous conceits of alabaster, gold and ivory. Romans who have seen the temple begrudgingly admit that for sheer splendor it might (mind you, might) rival our own austere Temple of Jupiter-a telling comment on Roman provincialism rather than on the respective architectural merits of the two temples. If I were a god, I know in which house I would choose to live.

  The temple is an oasis of light and splendor surrounded by a maze of narrow streets. The houses in Rhakotis, made of hardened earth, are built high and jammed close together. The streets are strung with ropes upon which the inhabitants hang laundry and fish and plucked fowl. The air is generally still and hot, but occasionally a sea breeze will manage to cross the Island of Pharos and the great harbor and the high city wall to stir the tall palm trees which grow in the little squares and gardens of Rhakotis.

  In Rhakotis, one can almost imagine that the Greek conquest never occurred. The city may be named for Alexander and ruled by a Ptolemy, but the people of the ancient district are distinctly Egyptian, darkly complected with dark eyes and the type of features one sees on the old statues of the pharaohs. These people are different from us, and so are their gods, who are not the Greek and Roman gods of perfect human form but strange hybrids of animals and men, frightful to look at.

  One sees many cats in Rhakotis. They wander about as they wish, undisturbed, warming themselves in patches of sunlight, chasing grasshoppers, dozing on ledges and rooftops, staring at inaccessible fish and fowl hung well beyond their reach. But the cats of Rhakotis do not go hungry; far from it. People set bowls of food out on the street for them, muttering incantations as they do so, and not even a starving beggar would consider taking such consecrated food for himself-for the cats of Rhakotis, like all cats throughout Egypt, are considered to be gods. Men bow as they pass them in the street, and woe unto the crass visitor from Rome or Athens who dares to snigger at such a sight, for the Egyptians are as vengeful as they are pious.

  At the age of twenty, after traveling to the Seven Wonders of the World, I found myself in Alexandria. I took up residence in Rhakotis for a number of reasons. For one thing, a young foreigner with little money could find lodgings there to suit his means. But Rhakotis offered far more than cheap dwellings. To reed my stomach, vendors at crowded street corners hawked exotic delicacies unheard of in Rome. To feed my mind, I listened to the philosophers who lectured and debated one another on the steps of the library next to the Temple of Serapis. It was there that I met the philosopher Dio; but that is another story. As for the other appetites common to young men, those were easily satisfied as well; the Alexandrians consider themselves to be the most worldly of people, and any Roman who disputes the point only demonstrates his own ignorance. Eventually, I met Bethesda in Alexandria; but that, too, is another story.

  One morning I happened to be walking through one of the district's less crowded streets when I heard a noise behind me. It was a vague, indistinct noise, like the sound of a roaring crowd some distance away. The government of Egypt is notoriously un-stable, and riots are fairly common, but it seemed too early in the day for people to be raging through the streets. Nevertheless, as I paused to listen, the noise became louder and the echoing din resolved into the sound of angry human voices.

  A moment la
ter, a man in a blue tunic appeared from around a bend in the street, running headlong toward me, his head turned to look behind him. I hurriedly stepped out of the way, but he blindly changed his course and ran straight into me. We tumbled to the ground in a confusion of arms and legs.

  "Numa's balls!" I shouted, for the fool had caused me to scrape my hands and knees on the rough paving stones.

  The stranger suddenly stopped his mad scramble to get to his feet and stared at me. He was a man of middle age, well groomed and well fed. There was absolute panic in his eyes, but also a glimmer of hope.

  "You curse in Latin!" he said hoarsely. "You're a Roman, then, like me?"

  "Yes."

  "Countryman-save me!" By this time we were both on our feet again, but the stranger moved in such a spastic manner and clutched at me so desperately that he nearly pulled us to the ground again.

  The roar of angry voices grew nearer. The man looked back to the way he had come. Fear danced across his face like a flame. He clutched me with both hands.

  "I swear, I never touched the beast!" he whispered hoarsely. "The little girl said I killed it, but it was already dead when I came upon it."

  "What are you saying?"

  "The cat! I didn't kill the cat! It was already dead, lying in the street. But they'll tear me limb from limb, these mad Egyptians! If I can only reach my house-"

  At that moment, a number of people appeared at the bend in the street, men and women dressed in the tattered clothing of the poorer classes. More people appeared, and more, shouting and twisting their faces into expressions of pure hatred. They came rushing toward us, some of them brandishing sticks and knives, others shaking their bare fists in the air.

  "Help me!" the man shrieked, his voice breaking like a boy's. "Save me! I'll reward you!" The mob was almost upon us. I struggled to escape his grip. At last he broke away and resumed his headlong flight. As the angry mob drew nearer, for a moment it seemed that I had become the object of their fury. Indeed, a few of them headed straight for me, and I saw no possibility of escape. "Death comes as the end" goes the old Egyptian poem, and I felt it drawing very near.