The House of the Vestals rsr-6

by Steven Saylor

  But a man near the front of the crowd, notable for his great long beard curled in the Babylonian fashion, saw the mistake and shouted in a booming voice, "Not that one! The man in blue is the one we want! Up there, at the end of the street! Quick, or he'll escape us again!"

  The men and women who had been ready to strike me veered away at the last moment and ran on. I drew into a doorway, out of sight, and marveled at the size of the mob as it passed by. Half the residents of Rhakotis were after the Roman in blue!

  Once the main body of the mob had passed, I stepped back into the street. Following behind were a number of stragglers. Among them I recognized a man who sold pastries from a shop on the Street of the Breadmakers. He was breathing hard but walked at a deliberate pace. In his hand he clutched a wooden rod for rolling dough. I knew him as a fat, cheerful baker whose chief joy was filling other people's stomachs, but on this morning he wore the grim countenance of a determined avenger.

  "Menapis, what is happening?" I said, falling into step beside him.

  He gave me such a withering look that I thought he did not recognize me, but when he spoke it was all too clear that he did. "You Romans come here with your pompous ways and your ill-gotten wealth, and we do our best to put up with you. You foist yourselves upon us, and we endure it. But when you turn to desecration, you go too far! There are some things even a Roman can't get away with!"

  "Menapis, tell me what's happened."

  "He killed a cat! The fool killed a cat just a stone's throw from my shop."

  "Did you see it happen?"

  "A little girl saw him do it. She screamed in terror, naturally enough, and a crowd came running. They thought the little girl was in danger, but it turned out to be something even worse. The Roman fool had killed a cat! We'd have stoned him to death right on the spot, but he managed to slip away and start running. The longer the chase went on, the more people came out to join it. He'll never escape us now. Look up ahead-the Roman rat must be trapped!"

  The chase seemed to have ended, for the mob had come to a stop in a wide square. If they had overtaken him, the man in blue must already have been trampled to a pulp, I thought, with a feeling of nausea. But as I drew nearer, the crowd began to chant: "Come out! Come out! Killer of the cat!" Beside me, Menapis took up the chant with the others, slapping his rolling pin against his palm and stamping his feet.

  It seemed that the fugitive had taken refuge in a prosperous-looking house. From the faces that stared in horror from the upper-story windows before they were thrown shut, the place appeared to be full of Romans-the man's private dwelling, it seemed. That he was a man of no small means I had already presumed from the quality of his blue tunic, but the size of his house confirmed it. A rich merchant, I thought-but neither silver nor a silvery tongue was likely to save him from the wrath of the mob. They continued to chant and began to beat upon the door with clubs.

  Menapis shouted, "Clubs will never break such a door! We'll have to make a battering ram." I looked at the normally genial baker beside me and a shiver ran up my spine. All this- for a cat!

  I withdrew to a quieter corner of the square, where a few of the local residents had ventured out of their houses to watch the commotion. An elderly Egyptian woman, impeccably dressed in a white linen gown, gazed at the mob disparagingly. "What a rabble!" she remarked to no one in particular. "What are they thinking of, attacking the house of a man like Marcus Lepidus?"

  "Your neighbor?" I said.

  "For many years, as was his father before him. An honest Roman trader, and a greater credit to Alexandria than any of this rabble will ever be. Are you a Roman, too, young man?"

  "Yes."

  "I thought so, from your accent. Well, I have no quarrel with Romans. Dealing with men like Marcus Lepidus and his father made my late husband a wealthy man. Whatever has Marcus done to bring such a mob to his door?"

  "They accuse him of killing a cat."

  She gasped. A look of horror contorted her wrinkled face. "That would be unforgivable!"

  "He claims to be innocent. Tell me, who else lives in that house?"

  "Marcus Lepidus lives with his two cousins. They help him run his business."

  "And their wives?"

  "The cousins are married, but their wives and children remain in Rome. Marcus is a widower. He has no children. Look there! What madness is this?"

  Moving through the mob like a crocodile through lily pads was a great uprooted palm tree. At the head of those who carried it I saw the man with the Babylonian beard. As they aligned the tree perpendicular to the door of Marcus Lepidus's house, it purpose became unmistakable: it was a battering ram.

  "I didn't kill the cat!" Marcus Lepidus had said. And "Help me! Save me!" And-no less significantly, to my ears-"I'll reward you!" It seemed to me, as a fellow Roman who had been called on for help, that my course was clear: if the man in blue was innocent of the crime, it was my duty to help him. If duty alone was insufficient, my growling stomach and empty purse tipped the scales conclusively.

  I would need to act swiftly. I headed back the way I had come.

  The way to the Street of the Breadmakers, usually thronged with people, was almost deserted; the shoppers and hawkers had all run off to kill the Roman, it seemed. The shop of Menapis was empty; peering within I saw that piles of dough lay unshapen on the table and the fire in his oven had gone out. The cat had been killed, he said, only a stone's throw from his shop, and it was at about that distance, around the corner on a little side street, that I came upon a group of shaven-headed priests who stood in a circle with bowed heads.

  Peering between the orange robes of the priests I saw the corpse of the cat sprawled on the paving stones. It had been a beautiful creature, with sleek limbs and a coat of midnight black. That it had been deliberately killed could not be doubted, for its throat had been cut.

  The priests knelt down and lifted the dead cat onto a small funeral bier, which they hoisted onto their shoulders. Chanting and lamenting, they began a slow procession toward the Temple of Bast.

  I looked around, not quite sure how to proceed. A movement at a window above caught my eye, but when I looked up there was nothing to see. I kept looking until a tiny face appeared, then quickly disappeared again.

  "Little girl," I called softly. "Little girl!"

  After a moment she reappeared. Her black hair was pulled back from her face, which was perfectly round. Her eyes were shaped like almonds and her lips formed a pout. "You talk funny," she said.

  "Do I?"

  "Like that other man."

  "What other man?"

  She appeared to ponder this for a moment, but did not answer. "Would you like to hear me scream?" she said. Not waiting for a reply, she did so.

  The high-pitched wail stabbed at my ears and echoed weirdly in the empty street. I gritted my teeth until she stopped. "That," I said, "is quite a scream. Tell me, are you the little girl who screamed earlier today?"

  "Maybe."

  "When the cat was killed, I mean."

  She wrinkled her brow thoughtfully. "Not exactly."

  "Are you not the little girl who screamed when the cat was killed?"

  She considered this. "Did the man with the funny beard send you?" she finally said.

  I thought for a moment and recalled the man with the Babylonian beard, whose shout had saved me from the mob in the street-"The man in blue is the one we want!" — and whom I had seen at the head of the battering ram. "A Babylonian beard, you mean, curled with an iron?"

  "Yes," she said, "all curly, like sun rays shooting out from his chin."

  "He saved my life," I said. It was the truth.

  "Oh, then I suppose it's all right to talk to you," she said. "Do you have a present for me, too?"

  "A present?"

  "Like the one he gave me." She held up a doll made of papyrus reeds and bits of rag.

  "Very pretty," I said, beginning to understand. "Did he give you the doll for screaming?"

  She laughed. "Isn'
t it silly? Would you like to hear me scream again?"

  I shuddered. "Later, perhaps. You didn't really see who killed the cat, did you?"

  "Silly! Nobody killed the cat, not really. The cat was just play-acting, like I was. Ask the man with the funny beard." She shook her head at my credulity.

  "Of course," I said. "I knew that; I just forgot. So you think I talk funny?"

  "Yes… I… do," she said, mocking my Roman accent. Alexandrian children acquire a penchant for sarcasm very early in life. "You do talk funny."

  "Like the other man, you said."

  "Yes."

  "You mean the man in the blue tunic, the one they ran after for killing the cat?"

  Her round face lengthened a bit. "No, I never heard him talk, except when the baker and his friends came after him, and then he screamed. But I can scream louder."

  She seemed ready to demonstrate, so I nodded quickly. "Who then? Who talks like I do? Ah, yes, the man with the funny beard," I said, but I knew I must be wrong even as I spoke, for the man had looked quite Egyptian to me, and certainly not Roman.

  "No, not him, silly. The other man."

  "What other man?"

  "The man who was here yesterday, the one with the runny nose. I heard them talking together, over there on the corner, the funny beard and the one who sounds like you. They were talking and pointing and looking serious, the one with the beard pulling on his beard and the one with the runny nose blowing his nose, but finally they thought of something funny and they both laughed. 'And to think, your cousin is such a lover of cats!' said the funny beard. I could tell that they were planning a joke on somebody. I forgot all about it until this morning, when I saw the funny beard again and he asked me to scream when I saw the cat."

  "I see. He gave you the doll, then he showed you the cat-"

  "Yes, looking so dead it fooled everybody. Even the priests, just now!"

  "The man with the funny beard showed you the cat, you screamed, people came running-then what happened?"

  "The funny beard pointed at a man who was walking up the street and he shouted, 'The Roman did it! The man in blue! He killed the cat!'" She recited the lines with great conviction, holding up her doll as if it were an actor.

  "The man with the runny nose, who talked like me," I said. "You're sure there was mention of his cousin?"

  "Oh yes. I have a cousin, too. I play tricks on him all the time."

  "What did this man with a runny nose and a Roman accent look like?"

  She shrugged. "A man."

  "Yes, but tall or short, young or old?"

  She thought for a moment, then shrugged again. "Just a man, like you. Like the man in the blue tunic. All Romans look the same to me."

  She grinned. Then she screamed again, just to show me how well she could do it.

  By the time I got back to the square, a troop of King Ptolemy's soldiers had arrived from the palace and were attempting, with limited success, to push back the mob. The soldiers were vastly outnumbered, and the mob would be pushed back only so far. Rocks and bricks were hurled against the building from time to time, some of them striking the already cracked shutters. It appeared that a serious attempt had been made to batter down the door, but the door had stood firm.

  A factotum from the royal palace, a eunuch to judge by his high voice, appeared at the highest place in the square. This was a rooftop next to the besieged house. He tried to quiet the mob below, assuring them that justice would be done. It was in King Ptolemy's interest, of course, to quell what might become an international incident; the murder of a wealthy Roman merchant by the people of Alexandria could cause him great political damage.

  The eunuch warbled on, but the mob was unimpressed. To them, the issue was simple and clear: a Roman had ruthlessly murdered a cat, and they would not be satisfied until the Roman was dead. They took up their chant again, drowning out the eunuch: "Come out! Come out! Killer of the cat!"

  The eunuch withdrew from the rooftop.

  I had decided to get inside the house of Marcus Lepidus. Caution told me that such a course was mad-for how could I ever get out alive once I was in? — and at any rate, apparently impossible, for if there was a simple way to get into the house the mob would already have found it. Then it occurred to me that someone standing on the same rooftop where Ptolemy's eunuch had stood could conceivably jump or be lowered onto the roof of the besieged house.

  It all seemed like a great deal of effort, until I heard the plaintive echo of the stranger's voice inside my head: "Help me! Save me!"

  And of course: "I'll reward you!"

  The building from which the eunuch spoke had been commandeered by soldiers, as had the other buildings adjacent to the besieged house, as a precaution to keep the mob from gaining entry through an adjoining wall or setting fire to the whole block. It took some doing to convince the guards to let me in, but the feet that I was a Roman and claimed to know Marcus Lepidus eventually gained me an audience with the king's eunuch.

  Royal servants come and go in Alexandria; those who fail to satisfy their master become food for crocodiles and are quickly replaced. This royal servant was clearly feeling the pressure of serving a monarch who might snuff out his life with the mere arching of an eyebrow. He had been sent to quell an angry mob and to save the life of a Roman citizen, and at the moment his chances of succeeding looked distinctly uncertain. He could call for more troops, and slaughter the mob, but such a bloodbath might escalate into an even graver situation. Complicating matters even more was the presence of a high priest of Bast, who dogged (if I may use that expression) the eunuch's every step, yowling and waving his orange robes and demanding that justice be done at once in the name of the murdered cat.

  The beleaguered eunuch was receptive to any ideas that I might have to suggest. "You're a friend of this other Roman, the man the mob is after?" he asked.

  "The murderer" the high priest corrected.

  "An acquaintance of the man, yes," I said-and truthfully, if having exchanged a few desperate words after colliding in the street could be called an acquaintance. "In fact, I'm his agent. He's hired me to get him out of this mess." This was also true, after a fashion. "And I think I know who really killed the cat." This was not quite true, but might become so if the eunuch would cooperate with me. "You must get me into Marcus Lepidus's house. I was thinking that your soldiers might lower me onto his roof by a rope."

  The eunuch became thoughtful. "By the same route, we might rescue Marcus Lepidus himself by having him climb the same rope up onto this building, where my men can better protect him."

  "Rescue a cat killer? Give him armed protection?" The priest was outraged. The eunuch bit his lip.

  At last it was agreed that the king's men would supply a rope by which I could make my way onto the roof of the besieged house. "But you cannot return to this building by the same route," the eunuch insisted.

  "Why not?" I had a sudden vision of the house being set aflame with myself inside it, or of an angry mob breaking through the door and killing all the inhabitants with knives and clubs.

  "Because the rope will be visible from the square," snapped the eunuch. "If the mob sees anyone leaving the house, they'll assume it's the man they're after. Then they'll break into this building! No, I'll allow you passage to your countryman's house, but after that you'll be on your own."

  I thought for a moment and then agreed. Behind the eunuch, the high priest of Bast smiled like a cat, no doubt anticipating my imminent demise and purring at the idea of yet another impious Roman departing from the shores of the living.

  As I was lowered onto the merchant's roof, his household slaves realized what was happening and sounded an alarm. They surrounded me at once and seemed determined to throw me into the square below, but I held up my hands to show them that I was unarmed and I cried out that I was a friend of Marcus Lepidus. My Latin seemed to sway them. At last they took me down a flight of steps to meet their master.

  The man in blue had withdrawn to a sm
all chamber which I took to be his office, for it was cluttered with scrolls and scraps of papyrus.

  He looked at me warily, then recognized me. "You're the man I ran into, on the street. But why have you come here?"

  "Because you asked for my help, Marcus Lepidus. And because you offered me a reward," I said bluntly. "My name is Gordianus."

  Beyond the shuttered window, which faced the square, the crowd began to chant again. A stone struck the shutters with a crash. Marcus gave a start and bit his knuckles.

  "These are my cousins, Rufus and Appius," he said, introducing two younger men who had just entered the room. Like their older cousin, they were well groomed and well dressed, and like him they appeared to be barely able to suppress their panic.

  "The guards outside are beginning to weaken," said Rufus shrilly. "What are we going to do, Marcus?"

  "If they break into the house they'll slaughter us all!" said Appius.

  "You're obviously a man of wealth, Marcus Lepidus." I said. "A trader, I understand."

  All three cousins looked at me blankly, baffled by my apparent disregard for the crisis at hand. "Yes," said Marcus. "I own a small fleet of ships. We carry grain and slaves and other goods between Alexandria and Rome." Talking about his work calmed him noticeably, as reciting a familiar chant calms a worshiper in a temple.

  "Do you own the business jointly with your cousins?" I

  "The business is entirely my own," said Marcus, a bit haughtily. "I inherited it from my father."

  "Yours alone? You have no brothers?"

  "None."

  "And your cousins are merely employees, not partners?"

  "If you put it that way."

  I looked at Rufus, the taller of the cousins. Was it fear of the mob I read on his face, or the bitterness of old resentments? His cousin Appius began to pace the room, biting his fingernails and casting what I took to be hostile glances at me.

  "I understand you have no sons, Marcus Lepidus," I said.

  "No. My first wife gave me only daughters; they all died of fever. My second wife was barren. I have no wife at present, but I soon will, when the girl arrives from Rome. Her parents are sending her by ship, and they promise me that she will be fertile, like her sisters. This time next year, I could be a proud father at last!" He managed a weak smile, then bit his knuckles. "But what's the use of contemplating my future when I have none? Curse all the gods of Egypt, to have put that dead cat in my path!"