“But well enough to see how beautiful she is.”
“Very beautiful.”
“Extraordinarily beautiful.”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“But Rindel is a Gaul, and her father is of no account.”
“According to Arausio, he’s wealthier than your own father.”
Zeno wrinkled his nose. “Arausio may have money, but he’ll never be a Timouchos. He’s not the right sort. If I had married Rindel, I’d never have been anything more than a rich Gaul’s son-in-law.”
“Would that have been so terrible?”
He snorted derisively. “You’re an outsider. You can’t understand.”
“I suppose not. But if you fell in love with Rindel despite yourself, I think I can understand that.”
“I had almost reconciled myself to…marrying her. Then I saw…another opportunity.”
“Cydimache?”
“The First Timouchos invited me to a dinner at this accursed house. It was a great honor; or so I thought, until my friends began to tease me. ‘You fool! Don’t you know he’s fishing for a son-in-law?’ they said. ‘You’re not the first prospective suitor he’s invited. All the rest—the monster gobbled up! Mind she doesn’t get her fangs and claws into you! Or worse, drag you off to her bed!’ They all had a hearty laugh at my expense.
“I dreaded that dinner. Sure enough, my place was next to Cydimache. She wore her veils, of course. I was nervous, at first. Cydimache said little, but when she spoke, she was actually quite witty. After a while I thought: This isn’t so bad. I began to relax. I ate and drank. I looked about the garden. I saw the way they lived. I began to think: Why not?”
“You’re hardly the first young man to marry for position,” I said quietly.
“It’s not as if I despised Cydimache! I came to care for her…a great deal.”
“What about her ugliness? Her deformity?”
“We…dealt with that.” He smiled ruefully. “Do you know the image of xoanon Artemis? Every Massilian boy is taught to revere that image, strange as it is. I told Cydimache that she was my very own xo-anon Artemis. That pleased her immensely.”
“And what about Rindel?”
He sighed. “As soon as I was betrothed to Cydimache, I made a vow to myself that I would never see Rindel again. No good could come of trying to explain myself to her; better to make a clean break, let her think the worst and forget me. I would have kept that vow, but Rindel wouldn’t let me. As long as I stayed in Apollonides’s house, I was safe from her. But once the siege began, my duties took me all over the city. Rindel sought me out. She stalked me like a huntress.”
“Artemis with her bow,” I murmured.
“In chance moments, when I would find myself alone—there was Rindel, suddenly before me, whispering, beckoning, drawing me into some hidden corner, telling me that she couldn’t forget me, that she still wanted me even if I was another woman’s husband.”
I nodded. “Arausio said she would disappear from his house for long hours. He thought she was taking aimless walks, nursing a broken heart. He thought she was going mad.”
“She was hunting for me. And after a while…our meetings were no longer by chance. We found a place to meet—a lover’s nest. I had forgotten…how beautiful she was. Like Artemis, you say? No, Aphrodite incarnate! Making love to her—how can I explain? How can I expect you even to begin to understand?”
I sighed. Like all young men, he imagined that ecstasy was his own invention.
“The last time we met…like that…was on the day the Romans brought up the battering-ram. With all the confusion in the city, I was late, but Rindel waited for me. It was like never before. The excitement on the battlements—the sense of dread hanging over us—the constant pounding of the battering-ram against the walls; I can’t explain. We seemed to make love that day with new bodies, new senses. She was unspeakably beautiful. I wanted to lie in her arms forever. And then…”
“Cydimache found you.”
“Yes. She suspected. She’d followed me. She found us.”
“And then?”
“Cydimache became hysterical. To see the two of them in the same room, side by side—Rindel naked and Cydimache in her veils, but knowing what lay beneath—it seemed hardly possible that two creatures so different could both be made of human flesh. I think Cydimache must have seen the look on my face. She let out a cry that turned my blood to ice. She ran from the room.”
“I thought she was lame.”
“I’d never imagined that she could move so fast! Especially considering…” He was about to say something, but caught himself. “I threw on my clothes and my armor—I could hardly be seen out in the streets without it—and I followed after her. I thought she would run here, to her father, but then I saw her far away, heading toward the sea. I ran. I caught up with her near the base of the Sacrifice Rock. You saw…what happened next.”
I nodded slowly. “It was as Hieronymus thought, then: Cydimache meant to throw herself off the rock, and you chased after her, to stop her.”
I waited for him to reply, but he only stared silently out the window. “And afterward,” I said, “Rindel took the place of Cydimache. A masquerade. Madness—”
“But it worked! In all the confusion of that day, it was a simple thing to sneak Rindel into this house. Once we were alone in Cydimache’s room, I dressed her in some of Cydimache’s clothes and veils. I showed her how to stoop, how to shamble. I told her to make her voice gruff and to speak as little as possible.”
“And Apollonides?”
“Ever since the siege began, he’d had no time for Cydimache. She had a husband, she was no longer his responsibility, and he had a war to fight. Last night’s dinner in the garden was the closest that Rindel had ever come to him. She kept quiet. She stayed close to me. Apollonides suspected nothing.”
“And what of Rindel’s parents?”
“Rindel wanted to send them a message, to let them know that she was alive and well, but I told her it was too dangerous.”
“So you let them think she was dead.” If only they had let Arausio know the truth, then he would never have come to me; and I would never have pursued the matter, never have heard of Rindel, never have confronted Zeno with the ring. Their own secrecy had finally been their undoing. “But you couldn’t possibly keep up such a pretense forever. You must have realized that.”
“In a city under siege, you learn to live from day to day. Even so, time was on our side. Once Caesar takes the city, everything will change. Who knows how things will fall out? One thing is certain: Apollonides will no longer be First Timouchos. He may even lose his head. Whatever happens, Massilia will never be independent again. This is the best we can hope for: that Caesar will disband the Timouchoi and put a Roman general in charge of the city. But he’ll need an insider who knows the city, someone loyal to him who can run the bureaucracy, quell sedition—”
“A Massilian lackey. And that would be you?” Just as he had married for position, so, too, was Zeno ready to call Caesar his master.
“Why not? I argued from the beginning that we should open our gates to Caesar, that we never should have resisted him.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “My son Meto—how and when did you come to know him?”
He smiled. “I met Meto when he first came to Massilia, just before the siege began. He was passing himself off as a defector from Caesar’s inner circle. Right away he must have realized that I was sympathetic to Caesar. I made no secret of it; I objected loudly when the Timouchoi voted to side with Pompey. I was rather scornful of Meto, as a matter of fact. I thought he must be even stupider than my fatherin-law. Here was a young Roman who’d risen from nothing to become the companion of Caesar himself, and for some reason he’d thrown it all away and chosen to side with the likes of Milo and Domitius and Pompey. What a fool! The joke was on me, of course. Meto was spying for Caesar all along.”
“And he approached you, to turn you into a spy for Caesar as w
ell?”
“Not then; not yet. I had no idea of what he was up to until Milo exposed him as a spy. Domitius’s men chased him over the wall into the sea, and supposedly he drowned. I thought no more about him. The siege went on. And then, the day after the battering-ram attack, the day after…Cydimache’s death…Meto reappeared in Massilia. Or I should say, Massilia saw the reappearance of the ragged soothsayer that had sometimes been Meto’s disguise. He sought me out and took a great risk in revealing himself to me. He wanted me to help him infiltrate this house. In return, he promised Caesar’s favor. I was already in terrible danger, with Cydimache dead and Rindel taking her place. Helping a Roman spy would put me in even greater danger, and yet it seemed as if the gods had sent Meto to me. In the long run, my only hope was to somehow gain Caesar’s favor, and here was the means to do that.
“Once I decided to trust Meto, I told him everything, even about Cydimache and how Rindel had taken her place. It was Meto’s master-stroke to sometimes masquerade as Cydimache himself. If Rindel could do it, so could he. The two of them took turns. As Cydimache, Meto could move freely about the house and could even come and go, as long as I escorted him. Your son is a natural actor, Gordianus. Far more convincing than Rindel; she always overdid Cydimache’s limp. But Meto was uncanny! And he made the most of the masquerade. If the daughter of the First Timouchos should choose to sit outside the room where the war council met, no one dared to question her. Quite the opposite! Brave soldiers would scurry past her like mice past a cat. They wanted no contact with the veiled monster!”
I shook my head. “A mad risk!”
“But a brilliant one. I’ve never met a more daring man than your son, Gordianus, or a more fearless one.”
“He turned you into a spy, Zeno.”
“A spy, perhaps, but not a traitor. In the end, you’ll see that it was I who always had the best interests of Massilia at heart, not Apollonides.”
“You cast your lot with Caesar. Yet you sailed out to fight against Caesar’s fleet—”
“I had no choice. It was my duty to command that ship. I’m not a coward, and I’ve never betrayed my comrades! I fought as long and hard as any other Massilian that day.”
“Did you? Even knowing that if you never returned, your beloved Rindel would be left to fend for herself in Apollonides’s house?”
“Rindel wasn’t alone; Meto promised to look after her. Had I died that day, Meto would have returned Rindel secretly and safely to her father’s house, and Apollonides would never have known the part she played.”
“I see. And Meto would have been left to perform the role of your bereaved widow full time, conveniently struck mute with grief, no doubt. So much deceit!” I rubbed my eyes wearily. “Meto revealed himself to you, put his trust in you—yet he never showed himself to me, never gave me a sign that he was still alive. Outside Massilia, at the shrine of xoanon Artemis—it was Meto I met that day, wasn’t it, in his disguise as the soothsayer Rabidus? He deceived me.”
Zeno shrugged. “If Meto thought that revealing himself to you posed too great a risk, I think you should defer to his judgment. He’s kept himself alive this long, against enormous odds. He knows what he’s doing.”
“Does he?” I shook my head. I stirred and made ready to leave.
“Haven’t you forgotten something, Gordianus?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You never asked me what happened on the Sacrifice Rock.”
“I thought you answered that already. You chased Cydimache to the summit. I suppose she pulled off the ring—the skystone ring you gave her on your wedding day—and threw it down. A gesture of renunciation, before killing herself. Is that right?”
“Yes. Almost.”
“What do you mean?”
“She pulled off the ring. She threw it down. I should have remembered to pick it up later, but it all happened so quickly. Then she lurched toward the precipice.”
I frowned. “But there was a bit of a struggle, wasn’t there? We all saw that.”
“Yes. Her cloak and her veils were loose upon her; it was hard to get hold of her. Even so, I did my best to stop her. I managed to grab her—”
“But she slipped from your grasp.”
“Not exactly.” His voice abruptly changed timbre, became deeper and slower. It seemed almost as if a third presence had entered the room, as if someone else were speaking through his lips. “Cydimache wanted to die. I’m sure of that. What else could she have intended when she climbed up the rock? She wanted to die, and I tried to save her. You see, she was—she had shown the first signs—no one else knew yet. We hadn’t even told her father.”
“What are you saying?”
“Cydimache was pregnant with my child.”
I drew a sharp breath. No wonder he had tried to stop her! She was carrying the child that would purchase his membership in the Timouchoi.
“I did my best to save her—and she wanted to die—up until the instant I had hold of her. Her veil dropped, and I saw her eyes. She’d changed her mind. She wanted to die; and then, at the last possible instant, she changed her mind…”
“But it was too late. She was too far over the edge.”
“No! Don’t you understand? Her veil dropped. I saw her eyes—and her face. That hideous face! She changed her mind, and so did I. She wanted to die, then decided to live. And in that same instant…”
“You decided…not to save her.”
“Yes.”
“You pushed her.”
His voice seemed to come from a deep well. “Yes. I pushed her.”
I drew a deep breath. Hieronymus had been right, up to a point. So had Davus.
I had discovered what Apollonides had sent me to discover. My reward would be a reunion with my son in the next room.
Zeno’s voice returned to its normal timbre. He ended the conversation as he began it. “I should have had you killed, I suppose. You were a dangerous witness. But early on, Meto explained to me who you were. His father, come to look for him here in Massilia! That complicated matters. You can thank your son that you’re still alive. Give him my regards.” He flashed a sardonic smile and then turned to gaze out the window.
XXIII
The window in Meto’s cell also looked out on the breached wall and also had bars across it. What sort of man, I thought, has a home with prison cells on the upper floor? A man like Apollonides. The kind of man who rises to become first citizen of a city-state.
The fires amid the Roman siegeworks had died even lower, but because of the particular angle of the view from Meto’s window, the breach in the wall appeared brightly lit, its jagged edges seeming to glow as if traced with a fiery nimbus. The wall itself and the silhouettes of pacing archers were utterly black.
When Meto had unveiled himself in Cydimache’s room, I had not cried out in jubilation, had not embraced him. Why not? Because the moment had been too shocking, I thought. And yet the parents of Rindel, equally stunned, had immediately gathered their daughter into their arms and wept tears of joy.
In Cydimache’s room, I had restrained my emotions, I told myself, because the circumstances had been so strange, the presence of others too inhibiting. But now I was alone with Meto. Why did I not rush to embrace him?
Why, for that matter, did he not embrace me and weep for joy? Because he had not feared for me as I had feared for him, I reasoned. He had known my whereabouts from the moment I arrived at the shrine of xoanon Artemis outside Massilia. He never thought me lost, never had cause to believe that my life was in immediate danger. But was that true? I easily could have died—by any reasonable expectation should have died—in the flooded tunnel. The priests of Artemis might have had me executed for climbing onto the Sacrifice Rock. Apollonides might have had me killed at any time, on a whim. I had been in some degree of danger every moment since I had left Rome, and so had Davus. What did Meto have to say about that? Was he so inured to danger that it counted for nothing, even when it threatened his own father?
He smiled broadly at the sight of me, stepped forward and clapped his hands on my shoulders, but he did not embrace me. Instead, he reached for a great lump of fabric on the floor and picked it up, grinning as he had when he was a boy and had something to show off. He was dressed only in a light tunic, I noticed. The thing in his hands was the costume he had worn in his guise as Cydimache.
“Look at this, Papa. It’s really ingenious. I made it myself. Amazing what you can do when you have to rely on your own resources.” He held the thing up so that I could see that the sumptuous, voluminous gown and the veils were all sewn together in one piece. “It slips over my head, you see, and everything instantly falls into place, even the hunch on my back—that’s just a bit of extra padding. No tucking or tying or bothering with veils coming loose. One minute, I’m Cydimache the hunchback, and the next—” He snapped the garment in the air and turned it inside out. Now it was a ragged cloak with a cowl. “Now I’m Rabidus the soothsayer, who comes and goes as he pleases.”
“Very impressive,” I said, and coughed. My throat was dry.
“You could use some wine, Papa. Here, I’ll pour you a cup. It’s good stuff. Falernian, I think.”
“I’m surprised Apollonides has supplied you with wine at all, let alone a fine vintage.”
“Apollonides may be a fool, but even he has begun to realize that it’s only a matter of time—hours, maybe—before Massilia belongs to Caesar. It will behoove him to hand me over to Caesar alive and well.”
“You’re relying on his shrewdness as a politician to keep you alive, then? Apollonides is also a father who’s just received a terrible shock.”
“And so are you! To Caesar!” Meto clinked his wine cup against mine and grinned, and seemed oblivious of the cruel difference between the shocks that had buffeted Apollonides and me. I had never seen him in such a reckless, giddy mood. It was because Caesar was coming, I thought. Soon Caesar would be here, and Meto’s beloved mentor would be very pleased with all that Meto had done on his behalf.
I drank the wine and was glad for its warmth.
Meto paced the room, too excited to be still. “You must have a thousand questions, Papa. Let me think; where to begin?”
Last Seen in Massilia: A Novel of Ancient Rome Page 22