A Murder on the Appian Way

by Steven Saylor

  She walked slowly toward us, the hem of her black gown trailing behind her. Her perfume reached us a moment before she did, scenting the air with the essence of crocus and spikenard. I had always seen her with her hair pulled back and held in place by pins. Now she wore it down for grieving, giving a lustrous black frame to the striking angles of her cheekbones and the proud line of her nose. She was past forty now, but her skin was still like white rose petals. Her smooth cheeks and forehead seemed to glow by the flickering light of the brazier. Her eyes—those famous, glittering green eyes—were red from weeping, but her voice was steady.

  “Gordianus! I thought I glimpsed you in the crowd. This is your son?”

  “My elder son, Eco.”

  She nodded, blinking back tears. “Come, sit with me.” She led us to a corner and gestured for us to sit on one couch while she sat on another. She pressed one hand against her forehead and shut her eyes. She seemed on the verge of sobbing, but after a moment she breathed deeply and sat upright, folding her hands in her lap.

  The light from the brazier was interrupted by a shadow. One of the others had crossed the room to join us. She sat beside Clodia and reached for her hands.

  “My daughter, Metella,” said Clodia, though I hardly needed to be told. The young woman was unmistakably her mother’s child. Perhaps she would even become as beautiful as her mother, given time. A beauty like Clodia’s was not something a woman could be born with. It consisted of more than what the eyes could see, of a mystery behind the flesh which accrues only with the passage of time.

  “I seem to remember that you have a daughter the same age,” said Clodia quietly.

  “Diana,” I said. “Seventeen.”

  Clodia nodded. Metella suddenly began to weep. Her mother embraced her for a moment, then released her and sent her to rejoin the others. “She loved her uncle very much,” Clodia said.

  “What happened?”

  Her voice was strained and colorless, as if any display of emotion would make it impossible for her to speak. “We don’t know for certain. He was down south, at his villa past Bovillae. Something happened on the road. They say it was Milo, or Milo’s men. A skirmish. Others were killed, not just Publius.” There was a catch in her voice. She paused to compose herself. “Someone passing by just happened to find his body in the road—there wasn’t even anyone standing guard over him! Strangers brought him back to the city. His body arrived here just after sundown. Since then some of his bodyguards have come straggling in. The ones who survived. We’re still trying to make sense of what happened.”

  “I saw a man in bandages being questioned in the other room.”

  “A bodyguard. The man has been with Publius for years. How could he have let this happen?”

  “And the young man questioning him?”

  “My nephew, I imagine. Our brother Appius’s oldest boy. He came with me in the litter, along with Metella. He loved Publius like a second father.” She shook her head. “Publius’s own little boy was with him down at Bovillae. We don’t know what’s become of the child. We don’t even know where he is!” This was suddenly too much for her. She began to weep. Eco looked away. It was a hard thing to watch.

  Her weeping subsided. “Clodia,” I said quietly, “why did you send for me?”

  The question seemed to baffle her. She wrinkled her brow and blinked back tears. “I’m not sure. I saw you in the crowd, and so …” She shrugged. “I don’t know, really. But something will have to be done. You know about that sort of thing, don’t you? Inquiries. Investigations. How it’s done. Publius knew how to go about that kind of thing, of course. But now Publius …”

  She drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled. Her tears had run dry. “I don’t know why I called for you, really. To see an old, familiar face? We parted friends, didn’t we?” She touched my arm and managed a wan smile. The effort produced only a small fraction of the charm of which I knew she was capable. The feebleness of the attempt made it all the more poignant. “Who knows what will happen now? The world has turned upside down. But something will have to be done to set things right. Publius’s children are too young to see to it. It will fall to others in the family. We may need you. It may come to that, you see.” She sighed wearily. “There’s nothing to be done right now, except to seek what comfort we can. Metella needs me.” She stood and looked bleakly toward the women across the room.

  The interview seemed to be at an end. I nodded to Eco. Together we rose from the couch.

  The slave girl came to show us out. Clodia walked away from us, then turned back.

  “Wait. You should see him. I want you to see what they did to him.”

  She led us across the room, to the altarlike table where Metella stood along with two other women and a child. At our approach the oldest of the women turned and scowled at us. Her face was gaunt and haggard. Her hair was almost entirely gray. Unpinned, it hung to her waist. There were no tears in her eyes, only anger and resentment.

  “Who are these men?”

  “Friends of mine,” said Clodia, her voice taking on an edge.

  “What man isn’t?” The woman gave Clodia a withering look. “What are they doing here? They should wait in the outer room with the rest.”

  “I asked them here, Sempronia.”

  “This is not your household,” said the woman bluntly.

  Metella went to her mother’s side and took her hand. The older woman glared at them. The fourth woman, whose face I had not yet seen, kept her back turned. She reached down to touch the head of the little girl pressed against her. The child craned her neck and looked up at us with wide, innocent eyes.

  “Sempronia, please …” said Clodia in a strained whisper.

  “Yes, Mother, let’s try to be peaceable. Even with dear Clodia.” The fourth woman finally turned. In her eyes I saw neither tears nor anger. There was weariness in her voice, but it was the weariness of exhaustion, not resignation. There was no emotion to be read in her voice or on her face, only a kind of steady determination. One might have expected to see a stronger reaction from the widow of the dead man. Perhaps she was simply numb with shock, but her gaze was keen and unwavering as she appraised us.

  Fulvia was not a great beauty, like Clodia, but her appearance was striking nonetheless. She was younger by at least ten years; I guessed her to be no more than thirty. As her little daughter clung to her, I saw where the child’s curious, luminous brown eyes had come from; there was a sharpness in Fulvia’s gaze that indicated a formidable intelligence. She lacked her mother’s grim harshness, but one could see the seeds of it in the hard lines around her mouth, especially when she turned her gaze to Clodia.

  I could see at a glance that there was no love lost between the two sisters-in-law. Clodia and her brother had long been famous (or infamous) for their mutual devotion; there were many who thought they were more like man and wife than siblings. Where did that leave Clodius’s real wife? What had Fulvia thought of the intimacy between her husband and his sister? From the look that passed between them, I gathered that the women had learned to tolerate one another, but not much more than that. Clodius had been the link between them, the mutual object of their affections as well as the cause of their mutual animosity; perhaps Clodius had also kept the peace between them. Now Clodius was dead.

  Quite dead, I thought, for beyond Fulvia I could see his corpse laid out on the long, high table. He was still dressed in winter riding clothes—a heavy, long-sleeved tunic cinched with a belt at the waist, woolen leggings, red leather boots. The filthy, blood-soaked tunic was torn open across his chest and hung in rags, like the streamers of a tattered red flag.

  “Come,” whispered Clodia, ignoring the other women and taking my arm. “I want you to see.” She led me to the table. Eco pressed close behind me.

  The face was undamaged. The eyes were closed and the bloodless lips and cheeks were marred only by a few smudges of dirt and blood and a slight grimace, like that of a man suffering from a toothache or having an
unpleasant dream. He looked uncannily like his sister, with the same finely molded cheekbones and long, proud nose. It was a face to melt the hearts of women and make men prickle with envy, a face to taunt his scowling patrician colleagues in the Senate and win the adoration of the rabble. Clodius had been strikingly handsome, almost too boyish-looking for a man nearly forty. The only signs of his age were a few strands of gray at his temples; even these were mostly lost in his thick mane of black hair.

  Below the neck, his strong, lean body was elegantly proportioned with square shoulders and a broad swimmer’s chest. A gaping puncture wound pierced his right shoulder. There were two smaller stab wounds in his chest, and his limbs were marked with numerous lacerations, scrapes and mottled bruises. More bruises ringed his throat, as if a thin cord had been tightened around his neck; indeed, had he shown no other wounds, I would have said that he had been strangled.

  Beside me, Eco shuddered. Like me, he had seen many dead bodies, but victims of poison or a dagger in the back present a less gory spectacle than did the corpse before us. This was not the body of a man who had died from quick and furtive murder. This was a man who had died in battle.

  Clodia took one of the corpse’s hands in hers, pressing it between her palms as if she could warm it. She ran her fingers over his and wrinkled her brow. “His ring. His gold signet ring! Did you remove it, Fulvia?”

  Fulvia shook her head. “The ring was gone when they brought him. The men who killed him must have taken it, like a trophy.” Again, she showed no emotion.

  There was a gentle rapping at the door. A group of slave girls entered with cloths folded over their arms. They carried combs, jars of unguents and pitchers of heated water that sent trails of steam into the air.

  “Hand me a comb,” said Clodia, reaching out to one of the girls.

  Fulvia frowned. “Who sent for these things?”

  “I did.” Clodia moved to the end of the table and began to comb her brother’s hair. The teeth caught on a tangle of dried blood. Her face stiffened. She pulled the comb through, but her hands were shaking.

  “You sent for them? Then you can send them away,” said Fulvia.

  “What do you mean?”

  “His body doesn’t need to be bathed.”

  “Of course it does. The people outside want to see him.”

  “And they will.”

  “But not like this!”

  “Exactly like this. You wanted your friends to see his wounds. Well, so do I. Everyone in Rome is going to see them.”

  “But all this blood, and his clothes hanging from him like rags—”

  “We’ll take off his clothes, then. Let the people see him exactly as he is.”

  Clodia continued to comb, keeping her eyes on her work. Fulvia stepped toward her. She seized Clodia’s wrist, snatched the comb and threw it on the floor. The gesture was sudden and violent, but her voice remained as impassive as her face. “Mother is right. This isn’t your household, Clodia. And he wasn’t your husband.”

  Eco tugged at my sleeve. I nodded. It was time to take our leave. I bowed my head in deference to the corpse, but the gesture went unnoticed; Clodia and Fulvia stared at one another like tigresses with flattened ears. The slave girls scattered nervously as we made our way to the door. Before I left the room I turned and took a last look at the women, and was struck by the tableau of Clodius dead upon the table, surrounded by the five females who had been closest to him in life, their ages spread over the range of a lifetime—his little daughter, his niece Metella, his wife Fulvia, his sister Clodia, his mother-in-law Sempronia. I thought of the Trojan women mourning Hector, with the attendant slave girls for a chorus.

  The brightly lit outer room seemed like another world, with its fretfully pacing men in togas and hushed masculine voices. The atmosphere was just as tense, but of a different nature—not of mourning but of crisis and confusion, like a military camp under siege or a desperate gathering of conspirators. The room was more crowded than before. Important newcomers had arrived, and with them their retinues of freedmen and slaves. I recognized several well-known senators and magistrates of the populist stripe. Some stood in pairs, quietly conversing. Others were gathered in a circle, listening to a wild-eyed man with unkempt hair who kept striking his palm with his fist.

  “I say we mount an assault on Milo’s house tonight,” he was saying. “Why wait? It’s just a stone’s throw away. We’ll drag him into the street, set the place on fire and tear him limb from limb.”

  I whispered into Eco’s ear, “Sextus Cloelius?”

  Eco nodded and whispered back, “Clodius’s right-hand man. Organizes mobs, stages riots, breaks arms, slits noses. Not afraid to get his hands dirty.”

  Some of the politicians nodded at Cloelius’s suggestion. Others scoffed. “What makes you think that Milo would dare to come back to the city, after what he’s done?” said one. “He’s probably half way to Massilia by now.”

  “Not Milo,” said Cloelius. “He’s boasted for years that he’d kill Publius Clodius one day. Mark my words, he’ll be down in the Forum tomorrow to brag about it. And when he shows his face, we’ll slaughter him on the spot!”

  “There’s no point in a slaughter,” said the handsome, elegantly dressed young man I had noticed on the way in, Clodius’s nephew Appius. “We’ll press for a trial instead.”

  “A trial!” cried Cloelius, exasperated. There was a collective groan.

  “Yes, a trial,” insisted Appius. “It’s the only way to expose the bastard and his friends along with him. Do you think Milo alone was behind this? He hasn’t the wits to stage an ambush. I smell Cicero’s bloody maw! Uncle Publius’s enemies didn’t kill him on a whim. It was cold, calculated murder! I don’t want just revenge; a knife in the back could accomplish that. I want to see these men discredited, humiliated, jeered out of Rome! I want the whole city to repudiate them, and their families with them. That means a trial.”

  “I hardly think it’s a matter of choosing whether to stage or not stage a slaughter,” said a calm, shrewd-looking young man at the edge of the crowd.

  “Gaius Sallust,” Eco whispered in my ear. “One of the radical tribunes elected last year.”

  Heads turned. Having gained the group’s undivided attention, Sallust shrugged. “Well, what makes you think we can control the mob one way or the other? Clodius could, but Clodius is dead. There’s no telling what will happen tomorrow, or tonight for that matter. A slaughter? Perhaps a bloodbath. We’ll be lucky if there’s enough organization left in Rome to stage a trial.”

  At this there was another round of groaning and scoffing, but no one challenged outright what Sallust had said. Instead they turned uneasily away and resumed their argument without him.

  “A trial!” Appius insisted.

  “A riot first!” said Sextus Cloelius. “The mob won’t settle for anything less. And if Milo dares to show himself, we’ll chop off his head and carry it through the Forum on a stick.”

  “Then the mood of the city will surely swing against us,” argued Appius. “No. Uncle Publius understood the way to make use of the mob—as a dagger, not as a bludgeon. You’re wrought up, Sextus. You need some sleep.”

  “Don’t tell me how Publius used the mob,” said Cloelius. “Half the time, I was the one who plotted his strategies for him.”

  Appius’s eyes flashed. They reminded me of Clodia’s eyes, glittering and green like emeralds. “Don’t try to rise above your station, Sextus Cloelius. Save your vulgar rhetoric for the mob. The men in this room are a little too sophisticated for your style of blustering.”

  Cloelius opened his mouth to answer, then turned and stalked off.

  There was a tense silence, broken by Sallust. “I think we’re all a little wrought up,” he said. “I’m going home to get some sleep.” A large coterie of retainers shuffled out of the room with him, leaving more space for those who remained to carry on with their pacing and gesticulating.

  “We should do likewise,” I said,
nudging Eco. “I need my sleep. Besides, it’s as Sallust says: there’s no telling what may happen in the streets tonight. We should be home with our families behind barred doors.”

  The gladiator who had escorted us earlier had been keeping an eye on us. As we moved toward the door he joined up with us and insisted on showing us out. He turned back only when he had delivered us into the protection of Eco’s bodyguards on the landing outside the secluded side entrance.

  We descended the steps to the street. The crowd gathered outside the forecourt of Clodius’s house had grown even larger. Men stood in groups, arguing, like their leaders inside the house, over what should be done, only in louder voices and cruder language. Other men stood alone and openly sobbed, as if their own brother or father had been murdered.

  I meant to walk straight on, but the crowd was like a force, an undertow at my feet that held me back. Eco was content to stay and observe, and so we lingered, fascinated by the torchlight, the floating bits of conversations, the shifting mass of humanity, the mood of uncertainty and dread.

  Suddenly the great bronze doors to Clodius’s house swung open with a double clang. A hush of anticipation rippled through the crowd. Armed men appeared first. They descended the steps in a cordon, preceding and flanking the men in togas who carried the body of Clodius upon a long, flat bier.

  A groan rose from the crowd at the first glimpse of the body, followed by a great rush forward. The bier was set down on the steps, tilted upward so that Clodius could be seen. We were caught in the crush. The crowd in the forecourt compressed, and those in the street were pulled in behind them, as if sucked into a vortex. Eco gripped my hand as we were carried through the gates and into the forecourt, like flotsam on a flood. His bodyguards struggled to stay close, shoving and pressing against us. I was jabbed in the ribs by the point of a knife concealed inside the tunic of the bodyguard beside me, and considered the mad irony if I should be accidentally gutted by the weapon of a man intending to protect me.

  We came to a stop. The crowd was packed into the forecourt like grains of sand in a bottle. Through the reek of the torches, I had a clear view of Clodius propped up on his bier, surrounded in death as he had always been in life, by armed guards. To either side of the bier stood the men who had carried it. Among them I recognized Appius and Sextus Cloelius.