Tacitus shifted noisily to a new piece of papyrus. “Did you go out the window?”
“No, my lord.”
“We’ll have to take a look at that roof,” I told Tacitus. “It doesn’t seem likely, though, that a woman could have climbed down from there, killed Cornutus, then climbed back up.”
“Two women might have helped one another,” he replied.
Chryseis’ eyes got bigger as she realized the implications of what she’d told me. “My lord, I swear they didn’t go anywhere. They just sat outside for a while. It was so hot.”
“But you yourself did not leave the room at any time. Is that correct?”
“Yes, my lord. It looked too high. I was afraid.”
So she couldn’t have cut Cornutus’ heart out. But she was serving him at dinner, according to Tacitus. Did she poison him?
I couldn’t ask any questions about poisoning because Luke, Tacitus, and I had agreed not to make that public. But I wasn’t ready to send Chryseis away. I wished I could think of enough questions to keep her sitting there all day. “All right, then. How did you come to be Cornutus’ slave?”
“I was born in the household.” She was obviously relieved to turn to another subject.
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen. I’ll be sixteen in August.”
“Tell me about your mother.”
“I never knew her, my lord. She died during the birth. She was a German captive. She was very beautiful, my nurse used to tell me.”
That was easy to believe as I contemplated the daughter. Sculptors often distort features ever so slightly—making the mouth minutely too large or placing the eyes just a fraction too far apart—so that they will appear to the viewer to be perfect. I could have sworn, though, that I was looking at a perfect face.
“Who is your father, Chryseis?”
“I don’t know, my lord.”
By the way Tacitus’ head jerked up I could tell her response had raised the same possibility for him that it had for me. We had an entire conversation with just a couple of glances. If a male slave in the household were her father, he would have been given the responsibility of raising her, with the assistance of a female slave. Circumstances in this case suggested another possibility: Could Cornutus be her father? It’s not uncommon for Roman aristocrats to father children by their female slaves. Legally such children are classed as slaves. Few aristocratic fathers acknowledge these children because they complicate the inheritance situation for their legitimate offspring. If the mother and Cornutus were both dead, how could we explore the question of Chryseis’ parentage? And, if she was his child, why did Cornutus brand her?
“Did Cornutus ever sleep with you?” Tacitus asked from his end of the table.
“No, my lord.” Chryseis barely turned her head toward him.
“Did he ever have any sort of sexual relations with you?” I asked. If he had sex with her in some other fashion, she could have answered ‘no’ to Tacitus’ question, quite legitimately to a slave’s way of thinking.
“No, my lord. He never did anything like that to me.”
“Did he allow any of his male slaves to have relations with you?” Apparently I was going to have to pull the information out of her piece by piece. I hoped I didn’t have to name each male slave in the household.
“No, my lord.” She looked down, then caught my eye again. “One of the male slaves—a boy that I really liked—once told me Cornutus had ordered all of them to stay away from me. Any slave who slept with me, he said, would be castrated and sent to the mines.”
That struck me as decidedly odd. It’s not unusual for slaves to copulate with one another. Few slave owners attempt to regulate their behavior that closely, and sex certainly serves to relax tensions. Some owners welcome any children that result as a way of increasing their stock of slaves. It might be hard to find a slave, male or female, over the age of fifteen who wasn’t already experienced in the ways of Venus. Was Cornutus saving Chryseis for some special reason? Or did he have other inclinations?
“Did Cornutus sleep with any of his other slave women?”
“Yes, my lord. But for several years Melissa has been his favorite.”
So Cornutus was one of those masters who turns his house into his own private brothel. I heard Tacitus’ pen scribbling busily in the silence as I pondered my next question.
Chryseis seemed to want to say something else. “You’re not a magistrate, my lord? Is that what you said?”
“That’s right. I’m not. I don’t have any official standing here. I’m just trying to keep things under control until the governor arrives.” I tried to exude a little extra confidence.
“I see,” she said. “Is that all, my lord?”
“Yes, I think so. You’ve been very helpful, Chryseis. I hope it wasn’t too difficult for you, talking about some of these things.”
“No, my lord. You’ve been very kind.” She stood and hesitated. “What should I do now?”
I realized she was in what a slave would find a very peculiar situation. Her master was dead. For the first time in her life, there was no one in authority over her, no one to tell her what her next move should be. And yet she wasn’t free to decide for herself. For all she knew, she might stand there the rest of the day, waiting to be given a command.
“Why don’t you go up to Cornutus’ room?” I said, more as a suggestion than an order. “The other slaves are helping the doctor prepare the body for burial. He’ll tell you what to do next. His name is Luke.”
“Thank you, my lord,” she said, with a shy smile. I was glad I was sitting down. I don’t think I could have kept my knees under me if I had been standing in the path of that smile. I watched her turn and leave the room and couldn’t take my eyes off the doorway even after she was gone.
“And you dare to criticize my taste in women as vulgarian,” Tacitus said huffily. “At least I don’t pant after somebody else’s slave girls. I limit myself to the free ones.”
“Can’t you see there’s something special about her?” I asked. “It’s like that scene where Odysseus has difficulty disguising himself as a beggar because his natural nobility shines through the rags.”
Tacitus shrugged, still not convinced. “She’s pretty, I grant you, though I prefer a little more meat on the bones. I don’t like being jabbed by elbows and knees when—”
His critique was interrupted by a woman’s scream. We ran out into the main room and found Tacitus’ bedmate standing over a crumpled body, lying at the foot of the stairs like a child’s discarded doll. From the cascade of golden hair I knew at once that it was Chryseis.
IV
I RUSHED ACROSS THE ROOM and knelt over Chryseis. She lay on her side, her head cradled on her left arm, almost as though she were asleep. She was breathing very lightly.
“What happened?” I asked the serving girl. I didn’t know her name. I wondered if Tacitus did.
“Androcles told me to clean upstairs,” she said. “I just got to the stairs when this one come tumbling down. Like to scared me to death!”
Someone’s heavy tread on the stairs caused me to look up as Marcellus turned on the landing and came trotting down the steps.
“Is she all right?” he asked, more out of curiosity than concern.
“I’m not sure. Do you know what happened?”
“She came charging into me on the stairs,” Marcellus said. “Wasn’t watching where she was going. She knocked me back and I couldn’t catch her before she fell. Is she hurt?”
“We’ll have to let the doctor determine that,” I said. To the serving girl I snapped, “Go get the doctor, Luke. He should be in Cornutus’ room. Tell him someone’s been injured and we need him down here immediately.”
As she scampered away up the stairs I looked Chryseis over superficially, afraid to move her yet. She wasn’t bleeding, except for a couple of minor scrapes on her arms and legs. Touching her limbs reverently, I could find no evidence of broken bones. A large brui
se, however, was already becoming evident on her forehead. That concerned me.
“Since she is in your capable hands, Gaius Pliny,” Marcellus said unctuously, “I am going to attend to some things in town. I should return shortly. Is that the sort of notification you wanted?”
I wondered what kind of business he might have in a town where he had just arrived the night before. More of Regulus’ machinations? But I was too concerned about Chryseis to give Marcellus any more thought.
“What happened?” an anxious, unfamiliar voice asked. “Is she badly hurt?”
I looked up to find the German merchant, Marcus Carolus, peering down at us, his hands to his mouth in horror. From the smell of him I gathered that he was returning from tending to his horses. Tacitus retreated across the room to escape the reek of sweat and manure. I guess he’d had all his stomach could take for the morning.
“I don’t know for certain,” I said. “She’s breathing. We’ve sent for the doctor.”
“Can I do something?” he asked in his accented Latin.
“Find a cushion for her head, please.” I didn’t know if it would do any good, but I wanted him and his shitty smell away from me. He left but was back almost instantaneously with a cushion, still warm from whatever head he had yanked it from under. Given the set of his jaw, I doubt he got any argument.
“Will she be all right?” he asked, placing the cushion under her head and stroking her hair tenderly.
“The doctor will be here in a moment. I’ll have to let him answer that.”
I hoped Luke could answer the question. My uncle had observed slaves and soldiers who had received severe blows to the head. In one case which he recorded in his notebooks, a man kicked in the head by a horse was in a sleep-like state for twelve days. After he awoke it took several more days before he returned fully to his senses. Even then his power of speech was permanently diminished. In other cases people were unconscious for only a few hours and suffered no ill effects. My uncle could find no consistent pattern or reasonable explanation for the differences.
With enormous relief I saw Luke reach the landing of the stairs and hurry down to where we were. He examined Chryseis much as I had.
“There’s not much I can say,” he concluded. “She appears to have hit her head as she fell. Perhaps more than once. I don’t think any bones are broken. There’s nothing we can do except put her in bed and keep watch over her. There may be some bleeding inside.”
“But how will we know?” Marcus Carolus asked anxiously.
“I’ll be watching for discolorations and swellings. For now we need to get her into a bed. I’d rather not move her upstairs. She needs to be kept as straight as possible and moved as short a distance as possible.”
Tacitus fetched Androcles and we asked if there were any rooms on the ground floor of his inn.
“There are several in the back,” he informed us, “but they’re all occupied.”
“Well, get one of them unoccupied immediately,” I said.
“Now, just a minute, my lad! This isn’t government business. You can’t come in here and start throwing my paying customers out because some clumsy slave fell down the stairs.”
I hesitated. He was within his rights. If I were on official government business, I could commandeer his entire inn, his livestock, anything I wanted. As it was, all I could do was ask, or offer money.
Suddenly Marcus Carolus grabbed Androcles by the neck of his tunic and jerked him up so hard that the innkeeper’s toes barely stayed on the floor. “I will pay for the room,” he said, “and I will flatten your ugly face if it isn’t ready immediately.”
Androcles pulled free and scurried to the back of the inn. “It rents by the hour,” he shot over his shoulder. We heard squeals and protests, then a woman who was past her most glamorous days came running by us, with a blanket almost wrapped around her and her clothes in her hand. A man followed at her heels, pulling on his tunic as he trotted past us. So the noble Androcles was running a whore-house on the first floor of his inn.
“Your room is ready,” he said sarcastically.
Carolus scooped Chryseis up in his arms and carried her into the suddenly vacant, windowless room, which still reeked of the old whore’s perfume. It contained no furnishings except a bed carved out of stone and covered with blankets and pillows, a common feature in lupinaria across the empire. Two small lamps illuminated frescoes of couples engaged in acrobatic sex acts. As soon as Chryseis woke up we would have to move her somewhere else, I resolved. Luke insisted that we all leave.
Tacitus was kind enough to find Damon, the most reliable of my slaves, whom I placed on guard in front of the door. I told him he was not to leave the door until he was relieved. Nor was he to let anyone but me, Tacitus, and Luke enter the room. Under pain of death. Since I never threaten my slaves with such dire consequences, the man realized I was entirely serious.
“Why the guard at her door?” Tacitus asked.
“I find it peculiar that Cornutus is brutally murdered and a few hours later one of his slaves just happens to fall down the stairs,” I replied. “And Marcellus is close at hand in both cases.”
“Then why don’t you put guards on all Cornutus’ other slaves? Aren’t you afraid something will happen to them? Or are they not blond enough for you?” For those questions I had no ready answer.
I was about to go upstairs and take care of some of my own personal needs when one of Cornutus’ slaves brought me a cloth bag.
“Chryseis keeps her things in this, my lord. I thought it ought to stay with her.”
He was a young fellow, perhaps the one Chryseis said she liked. But Cornutus must own dozens of young male slaves. No reason for my instant dislike of him.
I took the drawstring bag into Chryseis’ room, where Luke was examining her with her gown pulled up under her arms. I turned my head to avoid taking advantage of her, even if only with my eyes. As I started to put her bag down by the bed curiosity got the better of me, as it usually does. I pulled it open and began to look through it. It contained two other dresses, another pair of sandals, and a couple of pieces of glass-and-paste jewelry—things which could be found in any female slave’s baggage. At the bottom, though, I came upon a leather pouch sealed with Cornutus’ horn seal, the sort of bag one would seal up a document in.
“Now, why,” I said aloud without meaning to, “would she be carrying a sealed document?”
Luke glanced up from his examination. “Might it be something she stole?”
I quickly dismissed that possibility. “It wouldn’t make any sense for her to steal something like this and then carry it around where it could be found so easily.”
“Do you want to open it?” Luke asked.
I fleetingly considered breaking the seal and opening the document, but decided I could not violate Chryseis’ confidence by looking at this any more than I could violate her by looking at her when she was unconscious.
“When she wakes up, I’ll ask her about it. If I can’t get a reasonable explanation from her of what the document is and where she got it, it might be necessary to open it.”
“That would be better done in the presence of someone with official status,” Luke said.
“That’s true.” But could I hold everything together until the governor arrived?
* * * *
By now it was approaching noon and I had yet to complete my usual morning ablutions. I found the slave who served as my personal attendant and had him shave me. I longed for a bath to wash away the stench of slaughter, but this early in the day the women would still be using the bath houses, so I had to content myself with washing off in my room and putting on a fresh tunic. Our enforced stopover in Smyrna would enable us to get clothes laundered better than we could while traveling. We started out nearly every day with wet garments hanging over the sides of the wagons. Even as they dried they picked up a coating of dust.
As I left my room I had to stand aside to allow three of Cornutus’ slaves to carry
his body down the stairs. Glancing from one face to another, I tried to discern any signs of guilt or pleasure in his death. All I could read was fear.
Feeling somewhat refreshed, I returned to Chryseis’ room. Marcus Carolus was standing outside the door, looming over poor Damon, who was holding his ground only because of the threat I had given him earlier.
“This gentleman wants to go in, my lord. I told him you had given orders that no one was to be admitted.”
“I am paying for the room!” Marcus Carolus rumbled.
The man puzzled me. He stood a full head taller than I, with that yellow hair which so many Roman women envy. They resort to dyes or wigs made from the hair of Teutonic captives to achieve what nature only rarely bestows on Mediterranean peoples. Marcus Carolus’ hair bore no hints of gray, so I figured him to be less than forty. He was broad and muscular, and I don’t think I had seen him smile in the entire time we’d been traveling together. It was a band of such men who wiped out Varus and his three legions in the Teutoburg Forest. Standing as close as I had ever been to an angry German, I could imagine what fear must have welled up in the hearts of those doomed Roman soldiers, surrounded, cut off, with the noose tightening around them.
And yet Marcus Carolus had shown an almost paternal tenderness when he put the cushion under Chryseis’ head and brushed her hair back out of her face. And he was paying for her room. Why?
“I appreciate your generosity, Marcus Carolus,” I said. “But it would be better if Chryseis not be disturbed right now. There’s nothing any of us can do for her but wait.”
“I want to know that she is getting good care,” he demanded.
“Is the doctor with her?” I asked my slave.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Then she is getting good care,” I said to Marcus Carolus. “Better than anything you or I can do for her. It’s noon. Why don’t we get something to eat? After that we’ll check on her. Maybe the doctor will have some word for us by then.”
He grudgingly allowed me to take his elbow and steer him toward the dining room. Apparently he had also taken the opportunity to wash. The stable smells had been replaced by an odd, though not unpleasant, scent. We ran into Tacitus as we reached the door, so he joined us. A few people were trickling in for something to eat at the end of their work day and before the midday rest. The way the day was warming up, it would feel good to lie down for a while.
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