'How exactly did he die, the old man? Bludgeons, knives, stones? How many assailants? Were they seen? Can they be identified? Where was the son at the very moment the crime took place, and how did he learn the news? Who else had reason to kill the old man? What were the terms of his will? Who brings the charges against the son, and why?' I paused, but only to take a sip of wine. 'And tell me this—'
'Gordianus,' Cicero laughed, 'if I knew all this, I would hardly be needing your services, would I?'
'But you must know a little.'
'More than a little, but still not enough. Very well, I can at least answer your last question. The charges have been lodged by a prosecutor named Gaius Erucius. I see you've heard of him — or has the wine turned to vinegar in your mouth?'
'I've more than heard of him,' I said. 'From time to time I've actually worked for him, but only from hunger. Erucius was born a slave in Sicily; now he's a freedman with the shadiest law practice in Rome. He takes cases for money, not merit. He'd defend a man who raped his mother if there was gold in it, and then turn around and prosecute the old woman for slander if he saw a profit. Any idea who's hired him to take on the case?'
'No, but when you meet Sextus Roscius—'
'You keep saying that I'll soon be meeting someone — first Caecilia Metella, now Sextus Roscius. Will they be arriving soon?'
'Actually, it's best if we pay them a visit ourselves.'
‘What makes you so certain that I'll be coming along? I came here under the impression that you had work for me, but so far you haven't even explained what you want. Nor have you made any mention of payment.'
'I'm aware of your regular fees, at least as Hortensius explained them. I assume he would know.'
I nodded.
'As for the job, it's this: I want proof that Sextus Roscius is innocent of his father's murder. Better than that, I want to know who the real murderers were. Even better, I want to know who hired those murderers, and why. And all of this in eight days, before the Ides.'
'You talk as if I'd already accepted the job. Perhaps I'm not interested, Cicero.'
He shook his head and pressed his lips into a thin smile.
‘You're not the only man who can deduce another man's character before you've met him, Gordianus. I do know a thing or two about you. Three things, in fact. Any one of them would persuade you to take this case. First, you need the money. A man of your means, living in a big house up on the Esquiline — there can never be enough money. Am I right?'
I shrugged.
'Secondly, Hortensius tells me that you love a mystery. Or rather that you hate a mystery. You're the type that can't abide the unknown, that feels compelled to wrest truth from falsehood, strike order from chaos. Who killed old Roscius, Gordianus? You're already hooked, like a fish on a line. Admit it.'
‘Well…'
'Thirdly, you're a man who loves justice.'
'Did Hortensius tell you that, too? Hortensius wouldn't know a just man from—'
'No one told me. That I deduced for myself, in the last half hour. No man speaks his mind as candidly as you have who isn't a lover of justice. I'm offering you a chance to see it done.' He leaned forwards in his chair. 'Can you bear to see an innocent man put to death? Well, then — will you take the case, or won't you?'
'I will.'
Cicero clapped his hands and sprang to his feet. 'Good. Very good! We'll leave for Caecilia's house right away.'
'Now? In this heat? It's just past noon.'
'There's no time to waste. If the heat is too much for you, I could summon a litter — but no, that would take too long. It isn't far. Tiro, fetch us a pair of broad-brimmed hats.'
Tiro gave his master a plaintive look.
'Very well, then, fetch three.'
6
‘What makes you think she'll even be awake at this hour?'
The Forum was deserted. The paving stones shimmered with heat. Not a soul was afoot except for the three of us stealing like thieves across the flagstones. I quickened the pace. The heat burned through the thin soles of my shoes. Both my companions, I noticed, wore more expensive footwear than my own, with thick leather soles to protect their feet.
'Caecilia will be awake,' Cicero assured me. 'She's a hopeless insomniac — so far as I can tell, she never sleeps at all.'
We reached the foot of the Sacred Way. My heart sank as I gazed up the steep, narrow avenue that led to the imposing villas atop the Palatine. The world was all sun and stone, utterly without shade. The layers of shimmering heat made the summit of the Palatine seem hazy and indistinct, very high and far away.
We began the ascent. Tiro led the way, oblivious of the effort. There was something strange about his eagerness to come along, something beyond mere curiosity or the desire to follow his master. I was too hot to puzzle over it.
'One thing I must ask of you, Gordianus.' Cicero was beginning to show signs of exertion, but he talked through them, like a true stoic. 'I appreciated your candour when you spoke your mind in my study. No one can say you are less than an honest man. But hold your tongue in Caecilia's house. Her family has long been allied with Sulla — his late fourth wife was a Metella.'
"You mean the daughter of Delmaticus? The one he divorced while she lay dying?'
'Exactly. The Metelli were not happy about the divorce, despite Sulla's excuses.'
'The augurs looked in a bowl of sheep entrails and told him his wife's illness would pollute his household.'
'So Sulla claimed. Caecilia herself would probably take no offence at anything you might say, but you can never tell. She's an old woman, unmarried and childless. Given to strange ways — such as happens when a woman is left to her own devices too long, without a husband and family to occupy her with wholesome pursuits. Her passion these days is for whatever Oriental cult happens to be new and fashionable in Rome, the more foreign and bizarre, the better. She's not much concerned with mere earthly matters.
‘But it's likely there'll be another in the house with keener ears and sharper eyes. I'm thinking of my good young friend Marcus Messalla — we call him Rufus, on account of his red hair. He's no stranger to Caecilia Metella's house; he's known her since he was a child, and she's almost like an aunt to him. A fine young man — or not quite a man yet, only sixteen. Rufus comes to my house rather often, for gatherings and lectures and such, and he already knows his way around the law courts. He's quite eager to help in Sextus Roscius's behalf'
'But?'
'But his family connections make him dangerous. Hortensius is his half brother — when Hortensius dropped the case, it was young Rufus he sent to my door to beg me to take it on. More to the point, the boy's older sister is that same young Valeria whom Sulla recently took to be his fifth wife". Poor Rufus has little affection for his new brother-in-law, but the marriage does put him in an awkward position. I would ask that you restrain yourself from slandering our esteemed dictator in his presence.'
'Of course, Cicero.' When I left the house that morning I had never expected to be circulating with high nobles like the Metelli and Messalli. I looked down at the garments I wore, a common citizen's toga over a plain tunic. The only touch of purple was a wine stain near the hem. Bethesda claimed to have spent hours trying to remove it without success.
By the time we reached the summit, even Tiro was showing signs of fatigue. His dark curls were pasted to his forehead with sweat. His face was flushed with exertion — or perhaps with something more like excitement. I wondered again about his eagerness to reach Caecilia Metella's house.
'This is it,' Cicero huffed, pausing to catch his breath. The house before us was a sprawling mass of rose stucco, ringed about by ancient oaks. The doorway was recessed beneath a portico and flanked by two helmeted soldiers in full battle gear with swords at their belts and spears in their fists. Grizzled veterans from Sulla's army, I thought, and gave a start.
'The guards,' Cicero said, making a vague gesture with his hand as he mounted the steps. 'Ignore them. They must
be sweltering beneath all that leather. Tiro?'
Tiro, who bad been staring in fascination at the soldiers' gear, sprang ahead of his master to rap at the heavy oak doors. A long moment passed in which we all caught our breaths and removed our hats beneath the shaded portico.
The door opened inward on silent hinges. Cool air and the scent of incense wafted out to greet us.
Tiro and the door slave exchanged the typical formalities — 'My master comes to see your mistress' — then we waited for another moment before the slave of the foyer came to usher us inside. He relieved us of our hats, then disappeared to fetch the announcer. I looked over my shoulder at the doorkeeper, who sat on a stool beside the portal busying himself with some sort of handicraft, his foot attached to the wall by a chain just long enough to allow him to reach the door.
The announcer arrived, obviously disappointed to find that it was Cicero and not some grovelling client from whom he might extort a few denarii before allowing further admission to the house. From small signs — his high voice, the visible enlargement of his breasts — I realized he was a eunuch. While in the East they are an indispensable and ancient part of the social fabric, the unsexed remain a rarity in Rome and are looked on with great distaste. Cicero had said that Caecilia was a follower of Oriental cults, but to keep a eunuch in her household struck me as a truly bizarre affectation.
We followed him around the central atrium and up a flight of marble steps. The announcer pulled back a hanging curtain, and I followed Cicero into a chamber that would not have looked too out of place in a high-priced Alexandrian brothel.
We seemed to have stepped into a large and over-decorated tent, plush and pillow-strewn, with carpets and hangings everywhere. Brass lamps hung from standing braziers in the corners and exhaled trickles of smoke. It was from this room that the smell of incense permeated the house. I could hardly breathe. The various spices were being burned without the least sensitivity to their individual proportions and properties. The crude concentrations of sandalwood and myrrh were nauseating. Any Egyptian housewife would have known better..
'Mistress,' the eunuch whispered in a high voice. 'The esteemed Marcus Tullius Cicero, advocate.' He quickly withdrew.
At the far end of the room was our hostess, sprawled face down amid cushions on the floor. Two female slaves attended her, kneeling on either side. The slaves were dark-skinned and dressed in Egyptian style, wearing diaphanous gowns and heavily made-up. Above them, dominating the room, was the object before which Caecilia prostrated herself.
I had never seen anything quite like it. It was clearly an incarnation of one of the Oriental earth goddesses, Cybele or Astarte or Isis, though I had never before seen this particular permutation. The statue stood eight feet tall, so tall that the top of its head grazed the ceiling. The thing had a stern, almost manly face and wore a crown made of serpents. At first glance I assumed that the pendulous objects adorning her torso were breasts, scores and scores of them. A closer look at the curious way in which the orbs were grouped made me realize they must be testicles. In one hand the goddess held a scythe, the blade of which had been painted bright red.
'What?' A muffled voice rose from the cushions. Caecilia floundered for a moment. The slave girls each took an arm and helped her up. She spun around and looked at us in alarm.
'No, no!' she shrieked. 'That stupid eunuch! Out, out of the room, Cicero! You weren't to come inside, you were to wait outside the curtain. How could he have made such a stupid mistake? No men are allowed into the sanctum of the Goddess. Oh, dear, it's happened again. Well, by rights you should all three be sacrificed as a punishment, or at least flogged, but I suppose that's out of the question. Of course, one of you could take the place of the others — but no, I won't even ask it, I know how fond you are of young Tiro. Perhaps this other slave—' She glanced at my iron ring, the mark of a common citizen, and seeing I was no one's slave threw up her hands in disappointment. Her nails were unusually long and stained red with henna, in the Egyptian fashion.
'Oh, dear. I suppose this means I'll have to flog one of the poor slave girls in your place, just as I did when that eunuch made the same stupid mistake last week with Rufus. Oh, dear, and they're so delicate. The Goddess will be very angry….'
'I don't see how he could make the same mistake twice. Do you think he does it on purpose?' We were seated in Caecilia's reception room, a high, long hall with skylights above and open doors at either end to admit the breeze. The walls were painted in the realist fashion to reproduce a garden — green grass, trees, peacocks, and flowers on the walls, blue, sky above. The floor was green tile. The ceiling was draped with blue cloth.
'No, don't answer that. I know what you'd say, Cicero. But Ahausarus is far too valuable to be got rid of, and too delicate to punish. If only he weren't so scatterbrained.'
There were four of us seated around a small silver table set with cool water and pomegranates — Cicero, myself, Caecilia, and the young Rufus, who had arrived ahead of us but had known better than to enter Metella's sanctum, preferring to wait in the garden instead. Tiro stood a short distance behind his master's chair.
Metella was a large, florid woman. Despite her age she appeared quite robust. Whatever colour her hair might originally have been, it was now fiery red, and probably white beneath the henna. She wore it piled high on her head, wound in a tapering coil held in place by a long silver pin. The pointed tip poked through on one side; the needle's head was decorated with carnelian. She wore an expensive-looking stola and much jewellery. Her face was covered with paint and rouge. Her hair and clothing reeked of incense. In one hand she held a fan and beat the air with it, as if she were trying to disperse her scent about the table.
Rufus was also redheaded, with brown eyes, flushed cheeks, and a freckled nose. He was as young as Cicero had indicated. Indeed, he could have been no more than sixteen, for he still wore the gown that all minors wear, whether male or female — white wool fitted with long sleeves to deflect the eyes of the lustful. In a few months he would put on the toga of manhood, but for now he was still a boy by law. It was obvious that he idolized Cicero, and equally obvious that Cicero enjoyed being idolized.
Neither of the nobles showed any discomfort in accepting me at their table. Of course, they were seeking my help in a problem with which neither of them had any experience. They showed me the same deference a senator may show to a bricklayer, if the senator happens to have an archway about to collapse in his bedroom. Tiro they ignored.
Cicero cleared his throat. 'Caecilia, the day is very hot. If we have dwelt long enough on-our unfortunate intrusion into your sanctuary, perhaps we can move on to more earthly matters.'
'Of course, Cicero. You've come about poor young Sextus.'
'Yes. Gordianus here may be of some help to us in unravelling the circumstances as I prepare his defence.'
"The defence. Oh, yes. Oh, dear. I suppose they're still out there, aren't they, those awful guards. You must have noticed them.'
'I'm afraid so.'
'It's such an embarrassment. The day they arrived I told them flady I wouldn't stand for it. Of course it didn't do any good. Orders from the court, they said. If Sextus Roscius was to abide here, it would have to be under house arrest, with soldiers at every door, day and night. "Arrest?" I said, "As if he were in a prison, like a captured soldier or a runaway slave? I know the law very well, and there is no law that allows you to hold a Roman citizen in his own home, or the home of his patroness." It's always been that way; a citizen accused of a crime always has the option to make his escape if he doesn't want to face trial and he's willing to leave his property behind.
'So they sent for a deputy from the court who explained it all very smoothly — it couldn't have been smoother if it had come from your own lips, Cicero! "Right you are," he says, "except in certain cases. Certain capital cases." And what did he mean by that, I wanted to know. "Capital" he said, "as in decapitation — cases involving the removal of the head, or other vital
organs, resulting in death." '
Caecilia Metella sat back and fanned herself. Her eyes became narrow and misted. Rufus leaned forwards and tenderly laid his hand upon her elbow.
'Only then did I realize how terrible it all was. Poor young Sextus, my dear friend's only surviving son, having lost his father, might now have to lose his head as well. But even worse than that! This underling, this person, this deputy, went on to explain exactly what the word capital meant in a conviction for parricide. Oh! I would never have believed it if you hadn't confirmed it yourself, Cicero, word for word. Too terrible, too terrible for words!'
Caecilia fanned herself furiously. Her eyelids, heavy.with Egyptian kohl, flickered like moth's wings. She seemed about to faint.
Rufus reached for a cup of water. She waved it away. 'I don't pretend to know the young man; it was his father whom I loved and cherished as a dear, dear friend. But he is the son of Sextus Roscius, and I have offered him sanctuary in my home. And surely, what that man, that deputy, that odious person described should never happen to any but the most wretched, the most foul and debased of murderers.'
She batted her eyes and reached out blindly. Rufus fumbled for a moment, then found the cup and put it in her hand. She took a sip and handed it back.
'So I asked this creature, this deputy, very reasonably, I thought, if it would be too much trouble to have these soldiers at least stand somewhere away from the house instead of hovering right by the door. It's humiliating! I have neighbours, and how they love to talk. I have dependents and clients arriving every morning looking for favours — the soldiers scare them off. I have nieces and nephews afraid to come to the house. Oh, those soldiers know how to hold their tongues, but you should see the looks they give a young girl! Can't you do something about it, Rufus?'
'Me?'
'Of course, you. You must carry some weight with.. with Sulla. It's Sulla who set up the courts. And he is married to your sister Valeria.'
'Yes, but that doesn't mean…' Rufus blushed a deep red.
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