Last Seen in Massilia: A Novel of Ancient Rome

by Steven Saylor

  He thrust out his jaw to stop it from quivering. “I think…I may know who she was.”

  Hieronymus and Davus both stepped closer.

  “I think…the girl who fell…was my daughter.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  Arausio’s voice was suddenly choked and bitter. “He led her on, you see. Right up until the moment he married that monster, he led Rindel to think he might choose her instead.”

  “Rindel?” I said.

  “My daughter. That’s her name. Was her name.”

  “Who led her on?”

  “Zeno! The son of a whore said he loved her. But like every other lying Greek, all he cared for in the end was bettering himself.”

  Zeno. Where had I heard the name recently? From Domitius, I recalled, when he told me the tale of Apollonides and his hideously deformed daughter, Cydimache. The young man who had recently married Cydimache was named Zeno.

  “Do you mean the son-in-law of the First Timouchos?”

  “That’s the one. We weren’t good enough for him. Never mind that I could buy and sell Zeno’s father if I wanted. Never mind that Rindel was one of the most beautiful girls in Massilia. We’re Gauls, you see, not Greeks; and no one in our family has ever been elected to the Timouchoi. In this town, that puts us just one step above the barbarians in the forest. Even so, Zeno could have married Rindel. Greeks and Gauls do marry. But Zeno was too good for that. Curse his ambition! He saw his chance to leap to the top, and he took it, over the head of my poor Rindel.”

  A part of me, frozen with grief for Meto, simply wanted the man to go away. But another part of me grudgingly stirred. I was curious. Looking at Arausio, his face now nakedly showing his misery, I felt a pang of sympathy as well. Were we not both fathers grieving for lost children? If I understood correctly, his daughter and my son had ended their lives within a few hundred feet of each other, beneath the same wall, claimed by a plunge into the same unforgiving sea.

  “She was desperately in love with him,” Arausio went on. “Why not? Zeno’s handsome and charming. He dazzled her. The young can’t see beneath the surface of things. When he told her he loved her in return, she thought that was the end of it. She’d found her bliss and nothing could spoil it. I can’t say I wasn’t pleased myself; he’d have made a good match. Then Zeno stopped calling on her. And the next thing we knew, he’d married Cydimache. It broke Rindel’s heart. She wept and tore her hair. She shut herself away; wouldn’t eat or talk to anyone, not even to her mother. Then she took to slipping out of the house, disappearing for hours at a time. I was furious, but it did no good. She said it helped her to take long walks alone. Imagine that, a young girl walking the streets in broad daylight by herself, unescorted! ‘People will think you’ve gone mad,’ I told her. Perhaps she was going mad. I should have kept a closer eye on her, but with everything in such chaos…” He shook his head.

  “What makes you think it was Rindel we saw on the Sacrifice Rock?” I asked. “And how did you hear about it? How did you know that we saw it happen?”

  “Massilia is a small town, Gordianus. Everyone’s talking about it. ‘The scapegoat has two Romans staying at his house, and you won’t believe what the three of them saw—a man chased a woman up the Sacrifice Rock, and over she went. And one of these Romans is a character named Gordianus, called the Finder; investigates for people like Cicero and Pompey, digs up scandal and snoops under people’s sheets.’”

  That was not exactly how I would have described my livelihood, but I felt curiously flattered to discover that my name was sufficiently well-known to provide fodder for gossip in a city where I had never previously set foot. Of course, anything to do with the scapegoat would be of interest to the locals, and any death at the Sacrifice Rock would excite speculation.

  “As for why I think it must have been Rindel….” There was a catch in Arausio’s voice. He cleared his throat and pressed on. “That morning she went missing again. Out for another of her long walks, I thought. But I had other things to worry about. That was the day the Romans brought up the battering-ram. For all we knew, the walls of the city might come down at any moment. As it turned out, the walls held; our soldiers even captured the battering-ram for a trophy. But Rindel….” He cleared his throat. “Rindel never came home. Night fell, and the curfew, and still no sign of her. I was angry, then worried, then frantic. I sent slaves to search for her. One of them came back with the rumor about a girl who had been seen on the Sacrifice Rock pursued by a soldier—an officer in a blue cape.” His eyes bored into mine. “Is it true? Is that what you saw?”

  “The man wore a pale blue cape,” I acknowledged. I remembered it fluttering in the wind.

  “Zeno! It must have been him. I knew it! Rindel must have found him and confronted him. He’d led her on, betrayed her, broken her heart—married that monster instead. Who knows what Rindel said to him, or what he said to her? And it ended with him driving her up the rock, and then—”

  “No one drove anyone,” objected Hieronymus. “The woman we saw led, and the man chased after her. He was clearly trying to stop her. The tragedy is that he failed. The woman jumped.”

  “No, Arausio is right,” insisted Davus. “The woman was trying to get away from the man. Then he caught up with her. He pushed her over.”

  Arausio looked at me. “What do you say, Gordianus?”

  Both Hieronymus and Davus looked to me for vindication. I turned my gaze to the Sacrifice Rock. “I’m not sure. But both versions can’t be true.”

  “It matters, don’t you see?” Arausio leaned forward. “If Zeno pushed Rindel, then it was murder. The heartless beast!”

  “If the woman was Rindel; if the man was Zeno.”

  “But it must have been them! Rindel never came home. She couldn’t simply disappear, not in a city as small as Massilia, with every exit blocked. It was her on that rock. I know it was! And the man was Zeno, wearing his blue officer’s cape; you saw that for yourself.”

  “And if it was your daughter and Zeno, and if the only witnesses to the event were the three of us on this terrace, then there are at least two different opinions of what may have occurred—and no way to reconcile them.”

  “But there is a way. There’s someone who knows the truth,” insisted Arausio. “Zeno!”

  I nodded slowly. “Yes, if it was Zeno we saw in the blue cape, then he alone can tell you exactly what happened, and why.”

  “But he never will! He lied to my daughter about loving her. He’ll lie about this as well.”

  “Unless he could be compelled to tell the truth.”

  “By whom? His fatherin-law, the First Timouchos? Apollonides controls the city police and the courts. He’ll stop at nothing to protect his son-in-law and avoid a scandal.” Arausio lowered his eyes. “But there will be a scandal. Word is already out. Everyone knows there was a death at the Sacrifice Rock. No one knows yet who it was, but word will spread soon enough. ‘I heard it was the daughter of that Gaulish merchant Arausio,’ they’ll say. ‘Rindel was her name. She went crazy after Zeno spurned her. Her father should have seen it coming.’ And I should have. I should have locked her in her room! How could she bring such shame on her family? Unless I can show that Zeno pushed her, everyone will assume that she killed herself. An illegal suicide, unsanctioned by the Timouchoi—an offense to the gods at the very moment they sit in judgment on the city, deciding whether Massilia lives or dies! How can I bear it? This will be the ruin of me!”

  I felt a sudden chill toward the man. He had come to us grief-stricken at the disappearance of his daughter. Now he seemed more concerned about damage to his own reputation. But the scapegoat had a different reaction. Hieronymus knew what it meant to suffer the onus of public humiliation and ruin in Massilia, to be outcast for the sins of others. He looked at Arausio with tears in his eyes.

  “That’s why I’ve come to you, Finder,” said Arausio. “Not just because you witnessed the thing, but also because of what they say about you. You find the trut
h. The gods guide you to it. I know the truth—my daughter didn’t jump; she must have been pushed—but I can’t prove it. Apollonides could squeeze the truth out of Zeno, but he’ll never do it. But maybe there’s some other way to bring out the truth, and if there is, you’re the man to find it. Name your fee. I can afford it.” As proof, he slipped one of the thick bracelets from his wrist and pressed it into my hand.

  The yellow gold was worked with images of a hunt. Archers and hounds pursued an antelope, and overseeing all was Artemis, not in her guise as the strange xoanon of the Massilians, but in the traditional image of a robust young woman with long, graceful limbs, armed with a bow and arrow. The workmanship was exquisite.

  “What did your daughter look like?” I asked quietly.

  Arausio smiled weakly. “Rindel’s hair was blond. She wore it in braids, like her mother. Sometimes her braids hung free. Sometimes she wound them about her head. They shimmered like ropes of gold, like that bracelet in your hand. Her skin was white, as soft as rose petals. Her eyes were blue, like the sea at midmorning. When she smiled….” He drew a shuddering breath. “When Rindel smiled, I felt like a man lying in a field of flowers on a warm spring day.”

  I nodded. “I, too, have lost a child, Arausio.”

  “A daughter?” He looked at me with tears in his eyes.

  “A son. Meto was born a slave and not of my flesh, but I adopted him and he became a Roman. When he was a boy, he was full of mischief and laughter, bright as a newly minted coin. He grew quieter as he grew older, more thoughtful and withdrawn, at least in my presence. I sometimes thought he was more reserved and somber than a young man his age ought to be. But every now and then he still laughed, exactly the way he’d laughed when he was a boy. What I would give to hear Meto laugh again! The sea below the walls of Massilia claimed him, as you say it claimed your daughter. I came all the way from Rome to find him, but he was gone before I arrived. Now there’s nothing more I can do to help my son….”

  “Then help my daughter!” begged Arausio. “Save her good name. Help me to prove that she never jumped from the Sacrifice Rock. Prove that Zeno murdered her!”

  Davus cleared his throat. “As long as we’re stuck here in Massilia, fatherin-law, we could use the money….”

  “And surely,” added Hieronymus, “you need something to occupy you, Gordianus. You can’t go on as you have been, sitting and brooding on this terrace from sunrise to sunset.”

  Their advice had no influence on me. I had already made up my mind.

  “Ever since we saw the incident on the Sacrifice Rock, there’s something I’ve been wondering about.” I spoke slowly, trying to choose my words carefully, although there was no delicate way to speak of the matter. “Others have fallen from the Sacrifice Rock before—scapegoats…suicides. Were their remains never found? I should think they might eventually have…washed up on shore.” I was thinking of the woman we had seen. I was also thinking of Meto.

  Hieronymus lowered his eyes. “My parents were never found,” he whispered.

  Arausio cleared his throat. “The current can be very strong, depending on the season and the time of day. Yes, sometimes bodies have washed up on shore, but they never enter the harbor; the current won’t allow that. Bodies have been found miles from Massilia—or never found at all, because so much of the coastline consists of steep, jagged rocks. A body washed onto the shore is likely to be torn to pieces among sharp rocks, or hidden in some inaccessible grotto, or sucked into a seacave where even the eyes of the gods can’t see.”

  “After the naval battle with Caesar, there must have been scores of bodies in the waters offshore,” I said.

  Arausio nodded. “Yes, but not one of them was recovered. If they were cast onto the shore, and if they could be seen and reached, it was the Romans who claimed them, not us. The Romans control the shoreline.”

  “So, even if the woman we saw was washed back to the shore—”

  “If anyone found her, it would have been the Romans. Here in Massilia, we would never hear of it.”

  “I see. Then we should give up any hope that we might yet identify the woman by her…remains.” My thoughts turned again to Meto. What had become of his body? Surely, if it had been found and identified by Caesar’s men, Trebonius would have known, and would have told me. It seemed most likely that Meto, like Rindel—if indeed the woman was Rindel—had been swept out to sea beyond recovery, swallowed forever by Neptune.

  I sighed. “Then we must determine the woman’s identity by some other means. We can begin with practical considerations. For example, what was the woman on the Sacrifice Rock wearing when we saw her that morning? And was it the same as what your daughter was wearing the last time she left your house?”

  It was Hieronymus’s recollection that the woman on the rock had worn a dark gray cloak. Davus thought it was more blue than gray. I remembered it as more green than blue. As far as Arausio could recall, none of his daughter’s garments fit any of those descriptions, for she preferred bright colors, but he couldn’t be certain. His wife and household slaves knew Rindel’s wardrobe better than he did; perhaps one of them could either remember or, by elimination, deduce exactly what Rindel had been wearing on the day she left home for the last time.

  We talked a bit more, but Arausio was wrung out and unable to think clearly. I told him to go home and see what else he could learn from his wife and slaves.

  After he left, I sat on the terrace, idly fingering the gold bracelet and studying the changing light on the Sacrifice Rock and the sea beyond. Suddenly I noticed that Davus was looking at me sidelong, a smile of relief on his lips.

  XII

  Apparently it was my day for receiving visitors. No sooner had Arausio left, than a slave came running to tell Hieronymus that two more callers had arrived, again asking for Gordianus the Finder.

  “Greeks or Gauls?” asked Hieronymus.

  “Neither, Master. Romans. They call themselves Publicius and Minucius.”

  The scapegoat raised an eyebrow. “I thought you had no friends in Massilia, Gordianus.”

  “I’ve no idea who they are. Perhaps it’s another inquiry about what we saw on the Sacrifice Rock.”

  “Perhaps. Will you see them?”

  “Why not?”

  A few moments later two men slightly younger than myself were shown onto the terrace. The taller, balding one was Publicius; the shorter, curly-headed one Minucius. Even without their names I would have known them for Romans by their dress. In Massilia, the Greeks wore the knee-length chiton or the draped chlamys, while the Gauls wore tunics and sometimes trousers; but these men were dressed in togas, as if outfitted for some formal event in the Roman Forum. But what sort of man, even a Roman, dons a toga on a warm day in a foreign city under siege?

  Their togas looked freshly washed and had been impeccably draped across their shoulders and folded over their arms. I wondered if they had helped each other to arrange their garments; could one find a slave this far from Rome who knew the proper way to drape a toga? Despite their gravity, there was something comical about them; they might have been a pair of wide-eyed farmers come to the city to petition a magistrate in the Forum. It seemed absurd, especially given the state of affairs in Massilia, that they should have dressed so formally merely to call on Gordianus the Finder.

  Their manner was stiff. When Hieronymus introduced me, they stuck out their jaws and gave me a military salute in unison, striking their fists against their breasts.

  They appeared to have mistaken me for someone else. I was about to say as much when Publicius spoke up. The emotion in his voice overwhelmed his dignified bearing and caused him to stammer. “Are you—I mean, are you really—are you the Gordianus?”

  “I suppose. The name is fairly uncommon,” I allowed.

  His shorter companion elbowed him. “Of course it’s him! There can be only one Gordianus the Finder.”

  “Perhaps not,” I said. “Some philosophers teach that each man is unique, but others b
elieve that we each have a double.”

  Publicius laughed out loud. “And a wit! Of course, you would be. So famously clever and all that.” He shook his head, beaming at me. “I can hardly believe it. I’m actually seeing you in the flesh!” His eyes sparkled, as if he were Jason and I the fleece. I found his scrutiny disconcerting.

  Minucius saw my discomfort. “You’re wary, Finder—and rightly so, in this godforsaken city.” He lowered his voice. “Spies everywhere. And pretenders.”

  “Pretenders?”

  “Frauds. Impostors. Liars and rogues. Misleaders of the credulous.”

  “You make Massilia sound like Rome.”

  I was serious, but they again took my words for wit and cackled. Whom on earth had they mistaken me for? A popular comedian from the stage? Some wandering philosopher with a cultish following?

  “I think, citizens, that you may have confused me with another Gordianus.”

  “Surely not,” said Publicius. “Are you not the father of Meto, Caesar’s close companion?”

  I drew a sharp breath. “I am.”

  “The same Gordianus who fought alongside his son Meto, then barely old enough to don a manly toga, under the banner of the great Lucius Sergius Catilina—”

  “Catilina the Deliverer!” intoned Minucius in a sudden rapture, with folded hands and upturned eyes.

  “—at the battle of Pistoria?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “I was at Pistoria…with Meto. And Catilina. That was years ago.”

  “Thirteen years ago, last Januarius,” noted Minucius. “Thirteen is a mystical number!”

  “You and your son were the only followers of Catilina to survive that battle,” continued Publicius. “All the others perished alongside the great Deliverer. Nothing in this universe occurs without a reason. We are all part of a divine plan. The gods chose you, Gordianus, and your son, to carry the memory of Catilina’s last moments.”

  “Did they? All I remember is a great deal of noise and confusion, and screaming, and blood everywhere.” And fear, I thought. I had never known such fear as when the Roman troops assembled against Catilina began to converge upon us there on that battlefield in northern Italy. I was there, suited in mismatched armor with a sword in my hand, for only one reason: because my son, with the hotheaded enthusiasm of a sixteen-year-old, had decided to cast his lot with the doomed leader of a doomed revolution, and if I could not persuade him to abandon Catilina, I had determined to die fighting at his side. But in the end it was Meto who saved me, who abandoned the battlefield to drag me, unconscious, to a safe refuge where we two alone, of all those who fought alongside Catilina, survived. The next day, in the victors’ camp, I saw the head of Catilina mounted on a stake. He had been a man of immense charm and wit, radiating an infectious sensuality; nothing could have brought home more vividly the totality of his destruction than the sight of that lifeless head with its gaping mouth and empty eyes. It haunted my nightmares still. So much for the revolution Catilina had promised his followers; so much for the leader these men still, inexplicably, insisted on calling “the Deliverer.”