'What in the name of Jupiter can he want?' I muttered.
I shrugged off my cloak and headed towards the library. I found Gnaeus seated in a backless chair, looking bored and fingering the little tag attached to a scroll tucked away in its pigeonhole, as if he had never seen a written document before. He raised an eyebrow when I entered but did not bother to stand.
'What do you want, Gnaeus Claudius?'
'Bitter weather we're having,' he remarked in a conversational drawl.
'Beautiful weather in its way, if a little harsh.'
'Yes, harsh, that's what I meant to say. Like country living in general. It's a hard life, running a farm, especially if you don't have a home in town to retreat to. People from the city read a few poems and imagine it's all butterflies and fauns lurking in the woods. The reality is quite different. All in all, I gather you've had a very harsh year here on cousin Lucius's old farm'
'From where did you gather that idea?'
'So my cousin Claudia says.'
'And what concern is that of yours?'
'Perhaps I could help you.'
'I don't think so, unless you have hay to sell me.'
'Of course I don't! You know there are no decent fields on the mountain for growing hay!'
'Then what are you talking about?'
His sudden vehemence slowly faded into a smile. 'I should like to make an offer to buy this farm'
'It's not for sale. If Claudia told you so—'. 'I merely assumed you might be ready to give it up and go back where you belong.'
"This is where I belong.'
'I think not.'
'I don't care what you think.'
'This is Claudian land, Gordianus. It has been Claudian land since—'
'Tell that to the spirit of your late cousin. It was his will that I should have this land.'
'Lucius was always different from the rest of us. He had more money and took everything for granted. No appreciation of his status; no understanding of the importance of keeping plebeians in their place. He'd have left this land to a dog if a dog had been his best friend.'
'I think you should go, Gnaeus Claudius.'
'I came here prepared to make a serious offer. If you're worried that I'll try to cheat you—'
'Did you come by horse? I'll have Aratus fetch it from the stable.' 'Gordianus, it would be best for all concerned—' 'Go now, Gnaeus Claudius!'
* * *
I was still brooding over Gnaeus's visit the next day when a messenger arrived with a letter from Eco. Whatever the news, it would brighten my outlook to hear his sweet, gruff voice in my mind. Perhaps Meto had attached a note as well, I thought. I retired to the library and hastily broke the seal.
Dearest Papa:
Your slave Orestes has arrived with no real explanation for being here. He claims that he set out from the farm with Meto the other day, but that Meto soon turned back, ordering him to go on to Rome without him and to tell me that you were making a gift of him to the household. It seems that Orestes originally thought that he was accompanying Meto to Rome, but at any rate he says that you did intend for him to stay with me for good. (He's strong as an ox, I grant, but not very bright.) Can you explain?
The mood in the city continues to oscillate wildly. I do not think there can be any return to normalcy until Catilina is soundly defeated. At times this seems inevitable, only a matter of days; then one hears rumours that Catilina's forces now include thousands of runaway slaves and his army has grown larger than that of Spartacus at its peak. It is hard to know what to believe from day to day. There even appears to be a kind of backlash against Cicero, at least among those who are not busy proclaiming him to be the greatest Roman who ever lived….
I continued to read long after the words stopped making sense to me. At length, when I put down the letter, I noticed that my hand was trembling.
If Meto was not in Rome, then where was he?
The moment I let myself ask the question, I knew the answer.
'How far away are they? How long will you be gone?' Bethesda demanded.
'How far? Somewhere between here and the Alps. How long? There's no way of knowing.'
'You're sure he's gone to join Catilina?'
'As certain as if he had told me so aloud. What a fool I've been!'
Bethesda did not contradict me. As I hurriedly gathered the things
I would need, she watched me from the doorway, her arms crossed, her back straight, but with a lurking wildness in her eyes that indicated she was secretly distraught and struggling to hide it, I had seldom seen her so upset; to look into her eyes unnerved me. 'What will we do here without you, and without Meto? There could be danger, from runaway slaves, from soldiers. Perhaps Diana and I should go to Rome—'
'No! The roads are too dangerous now. I don't trust the slaves to protect you.'
'But you trust them to protect us here in the house?'
'Bethesda, please! Eco will come. I've already written to him. He could be here as soon as the day after tomorrow, or even late tomorrow night'
'You should stay until then, to make sure he.gets here.'
'No! Every moment that passes — the battle could already be taking place, this very minute — you want Meto to come back, don't you?'
'And what if neither of you comes back?' Her voice was suddenly shrill. She pressed the back of her hand against her lips and shuddered.
'Bethesda!' I clutched her and pressed her hard against me.
She began to sob. 'Ever since we left the city, nothing but trouble…'
I felt a sudden tugging at my tunic and looked down to see Diana's immense brown eyes staring up at me. 'Papa,' she said, somehow oblivious of her mother's anguish, 'Papa, come see!'
'Not now, Diana,'
'No, Papa, you must come see!' Something in her voice compelled me. Bethesda heard it, too, for she drew back, holding in her sobs.
Diana ran ahead of us. We followed her through the atrium and out of the front door. She paused in front of the stable, waved for us to catch up, and ran on ahead. My heart began to pound.
We came to the far side of the stable and turned the corner, out of sight of the house. Empty barrels were stacked against the wall. Diana stood beyond them, pointing at something we could not yet see. I took another step. Beyond the barrels, on the ground against the stable wall, I saw two naked feet.
'Oh, no.' Another step, and I saw the legs as well. 'No, no, no!' Another step, and I saw a white, bloodless torso. 'Not now, not here, not again — impossible!' I took another step and saw all there was to see.
It was a naked corpse, and it had no head.
I buried my face in my hands. Bethesda, oddly, seemed to gain composure from the hideous sight. She took a deep breath. 'Who can it be, I wonder?'
'I have no idea,' I said.
Diana, her mission accomplished, reached up to hold her mother's hand. She looked at me with an expression of mild accusation and disappointment, 'If Meto were here,' she said, 'he'd figure out who it was!'
XXXVIII
'The man who travels alone has a fool for a companion’ runs the ancient proverb, but in the heat of my urgency to reach Meto I felt oddly invincible, as if no ordinary obstacle on the road, no waylaying team of bandits of desperate gang of escaped slaves, could stop me.
This was an illusion, of course, and a dangerous one, and the wiser part of me knew it, but it gave me the fortitude to leave behind the slaves I might have taken as bodyguards, to protect the farm instead. If I could trust them to do so! There was supposed to have been a slave keeping watch atop the stables the night before, and if he had been there he might have seen how the headless body was delivered, and by whom Saying the night had grown too bitterly cold, with tears in his eyes the slave told me he had abandoned his post and begged me not to let Aratus beat him. What else should I have expected? The man was a slave, not a soldier. Even so, I left his punishment to Aratus, whom I charged with making certain there were no such lapses in my absence, or else
I would sell him to the mines. I was angry when I said it, and must have sounded convincing; Aratus turned the colour of chalk. As for the new corpse which Diana had discovered, I was able to learn nothing significant from a cursory inspection. I told Aratus to keep the body until Eco arrived; perhaps he would be able to make some sense of it.
It is a strange experience, to travel alone through a countryside braced for war in the dead of winter. The fallow fields on either side were empty and abandoned, and so was the highway. There normally should have been some traffic despite the cold, especially with the sky clear and no prospect of rain, but for hours at a stretch I saw no one. The farmhouses I passed had their doors shut and their windows shuttered, with all the animals put away in barns or in pens hidden from the road. There were not even any dogs to bark a greeting or a warning as I passed. The only signs of life were the unavoidable plumes of smoke that rose from hearth fires. The inhabitants wanted to show no signs of wealth or provisions or even occupancy to anyone passing on the road. They were like the ostriches one sees sometimes at spectacles in the Circus Maximus, digging a hole in the sand and then burying their heads, thinking to hide themselves from the roaring crowd. Had I been any different, thinking I could escape Rome by hiding on my farm? It had certainly not worked for me. Nor, I thought, would it work for these nervous country folk if a ravaging army should happen to pass through. Yet what choice remains to a bird who has wings but cannot fry — unless, I thought, he should summon up the will to fight.
The towns through which I passed sometimes seemed as abandoned as the farms, with all the houses shut up tight and no one in the streets. Yet each town had a tavern or two, and it was in these that all the life seemed to have concentrated. Inside these establishments there was no end to the arguing and debate of the locals who congregated to assure one another that all the battles would be fought elsewhere and all the troops would requisition their provisions from some other hapless town. They were eager to press for news from a stranger passing through, though I had little to give them. And though I was passing through a region where Catilina could claim his greatest support, I heard few words spoken in his favour. Those most enthusiastic for his cause would have gone to join him already, I thought, or else had done so once but had now abandoned him and fled back to where they came from.
I made the journey by long, hard stages, stopping over in towns whose names I never knew, always seeking word of Catilina's movements. Since the executions in Rome, his army had moved back and forth between the Alps and Rome, evading confrontation with the regular armies sent to engage them. At one time his forces were thought to have numbered two full legions, or twelve thousand men, but after the executions and the failure of a general uprising in Rome, me opportunists and adventurers had quickly deserted. Exhausted by forced marches, left hungry by lack of provisions, even those most devoted to its cause began to abandon the rebel army, until there remained only those for whom there could be no turning back. ‘I don't think you'll find Catilina and Manlius with more than five thousand men, if that, and many of them poorly armed,’ a tavern keeper in Florentia told me. He also said that the Roman army under Cicero's fellow consul Antonius had passed through only a few days earlier, pursuing Catilina northwards.
I found them encamped in the foothills of the Apennines, outside a small town called Pistoria. Antonius's much larger force was only a few miles away. In order to reach Catilina, I had to make a great circuit on side roads and across open country, avoiding Antonius's men.
I feared that I might be challenged and attacked as I rode in plain sight down the rocky hillside towards the village of camp fires and tents, but no one took much notice of a lone man on horseback, wrapped in a heavy cloak and wearing no armour. Once within the camp I found myself surrounded by many men who looked no more like soldiers than I did, whose only weapons appeared to be hunting spears and carving knives or even sharpened stakes. Some were younger than me, but many were older. Among these were Sulla's veterans, many of whom wore ancient armour that might have fitted them once but no longer did. Mixed with the ragtag bands were groups of men in decent legionary dress, well-armoured and well-armed, who had the look of disciplined troops.
The mood was less grim than I had expected. The atmosphere was coloured by that sense of shared resignation that makes even strangers seem blood kin. Men laughed and smiled, stood next to blazing fires to warm themselves, and talked to one another in low voices. Their faces were weary and sombre, but their eyes were bright. They appeared hopeless but not despairing — hopeless in the sense of having come to a place beyond hope, which is to say beyond false dreams or vain ambition. They had followed Catilina to this place willingly, and their faces bore no resentment
I searched their faces for the one I sought, suddenly at a loss. Among these thousands of men, how was I to find Meto, if indeed he was here at all? I was weary and had come to the end of a long journey and suddenly seemed to have no energy left But even as I felt gripped by uncertainty, I found that my feet had taken me to the centre of the camp, towards a tent that stood out from the others. Red and gold pennants were posted at its corners, and before it, mounted atop a tall standard, was the silver eagle Catilina had carried with him from Rome. In the cold, bright sunlight it looked almost alive, like the eagle that had come to earth on the Auguraculum on the day of Meto's manhood.
Two soldiers in legionary regalia barred my way. 'Tell Catilina I want to see him’ I said quietly. They looked sceptical. 'Tell him my name is Gordianus the Finder’
They looked at each other sourly. Finally the more senior officer shrugged and stepped inside the tent flap. After along wait he opened it and gestured for me to enter.
The interior of the tent was crowded but orderly. Sleeping cots had been pushed out of the way to make room for small folding tables, upon which maps had been unrolled, with weights to hold down the corners. Leather satchels lay about, stuffed full of documents. Carefully laid out on a table, as if on display, were the ceremonial axes and other insignia that by rights can be carried into battle only by a duly elected magistrate; Catilina must have brought them from Rome, thinking that by such signs he could instill in his men a sense of legitimacy, or perhaps to convince himself of the same.
Among the small circle of men who sat and conferred at the centre of the tent, I first recognized Tongilius, who saw me and nodded. He was resplendent in a shining coat of mail and a crimson cape; with his tousled hair pushed carelessly back from his face, he looked like a young Alexander. Other faces turned to glance at me, and among them I recognized several of the young men with whom I had weathered the howling storm in Gnaeus's mine. There was also a broad-shouldered boulder of a man with white hair and a white beard. His round, ruddy face reminded me of Marcus Mummius. He could only be Manlius, the grizzled centurion who had organized the disgrunded Sullan veterans and was now their general
These men glanced at me for only a moment, then returned their attention to the man who sat with his back to me, speaking to them in a low voice: Catilina. I looked around the room and suddenly noticed another figure who sat by himself on a sleeping cot at a far comer of the tent, bent over a piece of armour that he was furiously polishing. Even from the back I knew him at once, and my heart leaped into my throat.
There was a sudden burst of acclamation from the group of men around Catilina, who had finished his address. The men stood up and quickly filed out of the tent. Tongilius smiled at me as he passed.
Catilina turned around in his chair. His drawn cheeks and feverish eyes made him look more striking than ever, as if the strain of recent days had refined and purified his handsome features. He gave me a quizzical smile. I stiffened the muscles in my jaw to keep from smiling in return.
"Well, Gordianus the Finder. When the guard whispered your name in my ear, I could scarcely believe it. Your timing is impossibly exquisite. Have you come to spy on me? Too late! Or in your own perverse manner, have you finally decided to cast your lot with me at the last possible
moment?'
'Neither. I've come for my son.'
'I fear you may be too late,' said Catilina quietly.
'Papa!' Intent on his work, Meto had not heard Catilina speak my name, but at the sound of my voice he put down the armour he had been polishing and turned his head. A succession of emotions animated his face until he abruptly stood and walked stiffly out of the tent.
I turned to follow him, but Catilina gripped my arm. 'No, Gordianus, let him go. He’ll come back in his own time.'
I clenched my fists, but the wiser part of me listened to Catilina and obeyed. 'What is he doing here? He's only a boy!' I whispered.
'But he wants so desperately to be a man, Gordianus. Can't you see that?'
A terrible feeling of dread swept over me. 'None of that matters! I refuse to let him die with you!'
Catilina sucked in his breath and looked away. I had spoken the ill-omened word.
'Oh, Catilina! Why didn't you flee to Massilia, as you said you would? Why did you stay in Italy instead of accepting exile? Did you really think—'
'I stayed because I wasn't allowed to leave! The way was blocked. The Senate's forces in Gaul cut off every pass through the Alps. Cicero had no intention of letting me escape with my life. He wanted a final confrontation. I had no choice. Outmanoeuvred,' he said, dropping his voice to a hoarse whisper. 'Outmanoeuvred at every turn. And my so-called compatriots in Rome — what a pack of fools, letting themselves be duped into that scandal with the Allobroges! That was the end of it. After that… But you were there, weren't you? As was Meto. His report to me was astonishingly vivid. Your son understands everything that's happened. He's incredibly wise for his years. You should be proud of that.'
'Proud of a son I can't understand, who defies me this way?'
'How can you not understand him, Gordianus, when he's exactly like you? Or like you once were, or could have been, or might still be. Brave, as you are. Compassionate, as you are. Committed to a cause, as you might be if you'd allow yourself.
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