Catilina's riddle rsr-3

by Steven Saylor

  Meto rode up beside me. 'But, Papa, we left before Gnaeus Claudius admitted his guilt!'

  'We would be a long time waiting for him to admit something he didn't do.'

  'I don't understand.'

  'You saw the man with your own eyes, Meto, and heard him speak with your own ears. Do you believe he knows anything about the body in the well?'

  'He admitted to killing Forfex!'

  'Without hesitation, which makes his protestations of ignorance all the more convincing. I believe him when he says he knows nothing about the body in the well. He killed Forfex and ordered his slaves to dispose of the body, and that is the last he knew of the matter. You noticed, I suppose, that I never mentioned that the body had no head, though I alluded to it.. He showed no comprehension at all, and assumed that we recognized Forfex by his face, not by his birthmark.'

  'But he could have been lying.'

  'The man is not much of an actor. He shows everything on the surface. I know his type. He was raised to have all the pomposity and pride of a patrician without any of the polish of his class. He threatens and bullies other men with impunity, because he thinks it's his birthright. Not a devious or even deceitful type; he has no use for lying, because he's never ashamed of anything he does, no matter how outrageous. He says whatever he wants because he always expects to get his way, and he probably does.'

  'He didn't get his way about keeping you from having the farm.'

  'True, but if he was serious about attacking us, I think he would do so in a less underhanded manner. And if he was involved in these outrages, I think he would admit his part when we accused him, don't you? He would boast about it. He's a crude man; he has no subtlety at all — you've seen the way he handles his slaves and his dogs. Whoever gave us Nemo and Forfex has a shrewd mind, almost playful, however wicked. That hardly describes Gnaeus Claudius.'

  'I suppose not. But just before we left, you accused him outright of being responsible for Nemo, too. You said you could tell he was lying. You said you had proof!'

  'A final bluff, a last effort to convince myself that he knows nothing at all about either of the bodies appearing on the farm. No, Gnaeus is not our tormentor. He killed Forfex, true, and for that I pray that Nemesis will punish him. Forfex somehow came to be in our well, with his head missing -1 give you credit for remembering the birthmark when I did not, and I confess to doubting you wrongly. But between the crude interment of Forfex's body and its decapitation and appearance in the well, someone else had a hand.'

  'But who, Papa?'

  'I don't know. Without some further crisis, we may never know.'

  I could see by the look on his face that this was not good enough for Meto. Nor was it satisfactory for me, but the years had given me more patience. 'I still say we should bring charges against him,' said Meto.

  'It's not worth bothering Volumenus. You've seen how long it's taking him to get a judgment on our water dispute with Publius Claudius. What is the point of bringing a suit where we have no evidence at all?'

  'But we do have evidence!'

  'A headless corpse with a birthmark? The testimony of a goatherd who could never be compelled to testify against his master? The complete denial of the charge by Gnaeus Claudius? The testimony of an old, senile farm slave who thinks he might have heard a splash and might have glimpsed a shadow one night when he got up to pass water? No, Meto, we have no evidence at all Granted, we might be able to bribe a jury, which is one way of winning a lawsuit in Rome when you have no case, but my heart would not be in it. I don't believe that Gnaeus Claudius was responsible.'

  'But, Papa, someone must have done it. We have to find out who!'

  'Patience, Meto,' I counselled wearily, and wondered if I should counsel resignation also, knowing all too well that many mysteries are never resolved. Men go on living anyway, in ignorance and fear, and though they may call their state of puzzlement intolerable, they seem able to tolerate it nonetheless, as long as their hearts keep beating.

  Aratus gave me counsel on the purification of the well. Hardly a priest, he seemed nonetheless to take a practical view of the matter, and he had seen others purify wells polluted by rodents and rabbits, if not dead slaves. He thought it significant that Forfex had been properly buried, at least for a slave, before his remains were disturbed. This meant there was a good chance that Forfex's lemur had been put to rest before he was disinterred. If so, the lemur might have clung to the more familiar site of the waterfall on the mountainside, rather than follow the desecrated and beheaded corpse onto unknown soil. The arguments seemed to ring true with the slaves, who accordingly relinquished their newfound terror of the well. Whether Aratus himself believed the arguments he put forth I did not know, but I was grateful for their pragmatic effect and for his politic handling of the situation.

  There remained the literal pollution of the well, for while a lemur might or might not have been involved, there was no doubt that a bloated corpse had been in contact with the water and had tainted it. A man or beast could grow sick and even die from dnnking such water. Aratus believed that the well would replenish and purify itself, given time, and meanwhile recommended that we drop heated stones into the well, to make the water boil and steam. This seemed to me like cauterizing a wound with a hot iron and made no sense in connection with a well, but I reluctantly took his advice. In the meantime, we had some water that had been stored in urns, and the stream was not completely dry. Still, there were dry days ahead.

  Much of our hay for the winter had been blighted. We ran a grave risk of running short of water. I began to realize, with great uneasiness, that if another such disaster struck, I might be compelled to sell the farm. For a rich man, a farm in the country is a diversion, and if it loses money the loss is merely the cost of the diversion. But for me there was no fortune back in the city; the farm was the enterprise on which I had staked my future. Its success was essential; its failure would ruin me. That summer it seemed to me that the gods themselves were conspiring to rob me of what Lucius Claudius in his generosity had given me, and Cicero with his cleverness had secured for me by law.

  Each day, Aratus fed a bit of well water to one of the farm animals, usually a kid. It did not kill them, but it did loosen their bowels and cause them to vomit. The water remained undrinkable.

  I persevered with the building of the mill on the stream. Aratus had the slaves tear down a little unused shed to provide building stones and beams. Day by day the vision in my mind began to take shape. My old friend Lucius would have been surprised and proud, I thought.

  I anticipated a visit from Catilina, or perhaps from Marcus Caelius, but for the rest of Quinctilis and well into the month of Sextilis I was undisturbed. In the meantime I posted slaves to act as watchmen each night, relieving each other in shifts, like soldiers in a camp. Whether this was the cause or not, we received no more rude surprises in the form of headless bodies. There was another unsettling event, however.

  It was the just after the Ides of Sextilis, almost a month after our return from Rome. The day had been unusually busy. We had reached a critical pass in the construction of the mill; the gears would not mesh, though I had measured and remeasured the proportions and worked out all the calculations beforehand. Also, a thunderstorm had blown over us during the night, bringing no rain but scattering broken branches and other debris all over the property; the men had a full day's work cleaning up the mess. As the long summer afternoon dwindled to twilight, I at last had found time to rest for a moment in my study, when Aratus appeared at the door.

  'I didn't want to disturb you before, because I thought it might pass, but as he's getting worse, I suppose I should tell you now,' he said.

  'What are you talking about?'

  'Clementus. He's ill — very ill, it appears. His complaints began this morning, but as they seemed to come and go, and as he appeared to be in no great distress, I saw no reason to bother you with it. But he's grown worse through the day. I think he might die.'

  I fo
llowed Aratus to the little lean-to by the stable where Clementus slept at night and as often napped in the daytime. The old slave lay in the straw on his side, clutching his knees to his chest He moaned quietly. His cheeks were flushed, but his lips were slightly blue. A slave woman hovered over him, dabbing his race from time to time with a damp cloth. At intervals he was seized by a shuddering spasm, drew even more tighdy into a ball, and then slowly relaxed with a pathetic whimper.

  'What's wrong with him?' I whispered.

  'I'm not sure,' said Aratus. 'He was vomiting earlier. Now he can't seem to swallow, and when he tries to speak his words come out slurred.'

  'Do any of the others share the same complaints?' I asked, thinking that a plague on the farm would be the final calamity.

  'No. It may simply be because he's old.' Aratus lowered his voice. 'Such storms as we had last night are often harbingers of death to people of his age.'

  As we watched, Clementus convulsed and stiffened. He opened his eyes and peered up at us with an expression more of puzzlement than pain. He parted his lips and released a long, rasping moan. After a moment the woman attending him reached out and touched his brow with trembling fingers. His eyes remained unnaturally open. The woman drew back her hand and crushed her knuckles to her lips. Clementus was dead.

  He was quite old, of course, and the old are apt to die from many causes, and at any time. But I could not help remembering that it had been Clementus who had heard a muffled splash when Forfex was dropped into the well, and afterwards had witnessed a vague shadow walking about in the night.

  XXVIII

  The water mill would not work.

  I told myself ruefully that I was not an engineer — any more than I was a farmer, added another voice in my head — and so should hardly have been surprised when my plans turned out not to be workable. I had kept the design as simple as I could. I had built a little model out of slivers of wood that seemed to work well enough. Aratus himself, never hesitant to inject a negative note, had deemed the idea practical and the construction sound. But when I set the slaves to turning the master wheel (for at midsummer in the month of Sextilis there was not enough force in the stream to turn it), the gears revolved only for a few degrees and then jammed fast. The first time this happened, the slaves kept pushing at the master wheel until two of the wooden axles split asunder with a great noise like a thunderclap. I was more careful the next time, and the next, but the mill simply would not function.

  At night I dreamed of it. Sometimes I saw it as it should be, with the stream sliding along its banks, the master wheel spinning, and the crushing blocks gnashing together like teeth, with grain pouring from the outlet in endless abundance. In other, darker dreams I saw it as a sort of monster, living but malicious, spinning out of control, crushing hapless slaves in its gears and pouring blood from its mouth.

  Why did I lavish so much energy and imagination on the completion of the mill? I told myself that it was a gift to the shade of my benefactor, Lucius Claudius. It was a sign of my full adjustment to country life, a signal that I had not simply accommodated myself to being a farmer but was mastering the elements around me. It was a gesture of defiance against Publius Claudius, who thought he could rob me of my water rights. It was all these things, true enough (besides being what it concretely was, or should be, a building of intrinsic value), but it was also a diversion. The mysteries of Nemo and Forfex remained unsolved. Rather than allow these failures to prey on me, I fretted over the continuing failure of the mill instead; rather than turn my fantasies to the professional satisfaction I would feel if I could somehow resolve these mysteries once and for all — an old, familiar satisfaction, as comfortable as a worn garment — I turned my fantasies to the technical triumph of a water mill that would actually work. In the same way, my obsession with the mill allowed me an escape from the problem of our dwindling water and the looming prospect of a winter without enough hay.

  These crises seem small now when compared to the greater crisis that was brewing all around us — not only down in Rome and in Etruria, but all up and down the length of Italy. I might claim that I had no intimation of the catastrophes to come, but that would not quite be true. A man who turns his back on a fire can truthfully say that he cannot see the fire, but he can feel its heat against his back; he can see the lurid light that colours the objects around him and his own shadow cast before him. But if I had an inkling of where the struggle between Cicero and Catilina would lead, I chose to fret over my water mill instead.

  Towards the end of the month of Sextilis, Diana reached her seventh birthday. The birthdays of little girls are not much celebrated among Romans, but this day — the twenty-sixth day of Sextilis, four days before the Kalends of September — was doubly special in our household, for it was not only the day that Bethesda had given birth to Gordiana, but also the day when Marcus Mummius had delivered Meto to us after rescuing him from his bondage in Sicily. We had made the day a family holiday and always celebrated with a special meal; several days beforehand Bethesda began overseeing Congrio's preparations in the kitchen. Eco had always been present for the event, and this year would be no exception. As we had journeyed down to Rome for Meto's toga day, so Eco and Menenia would come up from the city for the private celebration.

  They arrived by wagon on the day before Diana's birthday, with Belbo and five other slaves in attendance. The slaves, I noticed, were among the strongest in Eco's household and were all armed with long daggers tucked into their tunics. I made some joke about his going out with a bodyguard to rival Cicero's, but Eco did not laugh. 'Later,' he said enigmatically, as if to acknowledge that he owed me an explanation when I had only been jesting. - Bethesda took great pains to make Menenia feel at home, returning the courtesy that her daughter-in-law had shown her in the city; the warmth between them seemed quite genuine. Meto and Diana were delighted to have their older brother on the farm, if only for a brief visit. While all the others were engaged in one another's company, I took the chance to slip away. I found Belbo with the other slaves from Rome relaxing in a patch of shade beside the stable and taking turns in a round of trigon. They stood in a triangle, batting the leather ball back and forth. Belbo, famous for strength rather than agility, was soon out of the game. I called to him to join me. He followed as I strolled around the corner and out of hearing of the others.

  'My son surrounds himself with a considerable bodyguard to protect two people with nothing valuable on their persons, on such a short journey and on such a well-travelled road.'

  Belbo grinned and shook his head. 'The old Master misses nothing, as always.'

  ' "As always" — Belbo, I wish I were half as observant and canny as I once was, or thought I was. Why so many daggers?' 'Times in the city are tense.'

  'That's awfully vague. What has my son got himself into?' 'Shouldn't that be for him to tell you?'

  'If you were new in the household, I'd excuse you from talking to your old master about your new master behind his back, but you know me too well to hide anything from me, Belbo. Is Eco up to something dangerous?'

  'Master, you know the life. You remember the danger from day to day.'

  I stared at him steadily, unimpressed with his evasions. He was as strong as an ox and as loyal as a hound, but he was as bad at keeping secrets as he was at playing trigon. I watched his face blush red to the roots of his straw-coloured hair.

  'It's me new work he's doing,' he confessed.

  'For whom?'

  'For the young man who was at Meto's party — you saw him, you talked to him. He came back several days later to hire the young Master..The man with the fashionable beard and hair.'

  'Does that young man have a name?' I asked, knowing it already.

  'Marcus Caelius,' said Belbo.

  'Numa's balls, I knew it! They've cast their web over Eco as well.'

  Once his meagre resistance had been breached, Belbo seemed eager to speak. 'It's something to do with a conspiracy — a plot to murder Cicero and bring do
wn the government. The young Master's been going to meetings at night in secret I don't hear a lot; I stay outside with the other slaves and bodyguards. But there are big people at these meetings, I can tell you that — senators, equestrians, patricians, people I've seen in the Forum for years. Marcus Caelius is often there as well.'

  While he spoke, I shook my head and clenched my teeth. Eco should have known better, I told myself than to let himself be drawn into the affairs of Marcus Caelius and his master, whether that master was Cicero or Catilina. To investigate the circumstances of a simple murder or ferret out the truth in a property dispute was one thing; to put on a blindfold and be pushed back and forth in the devious plot and counterplot between Cicero and Catilina was quite another. It was more than the unacceptable degree of clanger and uncertainty; I had taught Eco to be a Finder, not a spy. To my mind, there is honour in uncovering the truth and laying it out for all to see in the sunlight, but none at all in covering it from view and whispering in the dark.

  It occurred to me that Eco might have been allowed no choice in the matter. The idea of a headless body appearing at the house in Rome caused me to clutch at Belbo's tunic. 'Has he been threatened? Intimidated? Have they dared to make him fear for Menenia, or for us, here on the farm?'

  Belbo was taken aback at my vehemence. 'I think not, Master,' he said meekly. 'Marcus Caelius came to the house not long after you left Rome. It all seemed cordial enough — the young Master is like you were; he doesn't like to take work from people he doesn't trust, not if he can help it. He seemed quite willing to do what Caelius wanted. If there were threats or the like, I never knew of it'

  To hear such a placating tone of voice from such a giant suddenly struck me as absurd; almost as absurd as the sight of my fist, clutching the neck of his tunic and looking like a child's hand against the massive width of his neck. I released him and stepped back.