A Murder on the Appian Way

by Steven Saylor

  “Papa, you need to go home, and you need a safe escort. You don’t want to travel with Cicero, anyway, do you? He’d drive you mad. And he’ll travel slower. Go with Antony. He likes you, couldn’t you tell? He’ll be glad to have your company. And you can get to know him better and make up your mind about him, if you haven’t already. It’s so perfect, the gods themselves must have arranged it.”

  “What do you think, Eco?” I said.

  “I think I want to get back to Rome as soon as possible, and that Caesar seems determined to keep Cicero waiting as long as he can.”

  “Then, if you really think Antony would be amenable, Meto …”

  “We’ll ask him right now.”

  This, I gathered, was how things were done in Caesar’s army. Having lived so long in devious Rome, I found it hard to get used to such forthrightness.

  We departed for Rome before dawn.

  The journey lasted for four days and passed without incident. Antony seemed to be as transparent as Meto had indicated. He drank more than he should, and when he drank he showed his emotions more plainly than most men. I could imagine him killing out of pain or rage, or professionally, as a soldier, but it was difficult to see him as a conspirator in some devious plot. He was equally outspoken about those whom he hated (Cicero, chiefly) and those whom he loved (Curio, Fulvia, Caesar and his wife and cousin Antonia, in that order so far as I could tell). His lack of charm was in itself charming, just as his homeliness made him oddly handsome. I became very relaxed in his company, and began to see why Meto was so fond of him.

  On the last day we talked a little about his military service in Egypt. Four years had passed since Antony had helped the Roman governor of Syria to restore King Ptolemy Auletes to the throne that had been usurped by his daughter Berenice. “I loved Alexandria,” Antony told me, “and the Alexandrians loved me. Do you know the city?”

  “Oh, yes. I met my wife there.” I remembered something he had said back in Ravenna. “Antony, what did you mean when you referred to ‘that old business about King Ptolemy’s daughter’?”

  “When was that? Jog my memory, Gordianus.”

  “You said, ‘I swear, I never touched the child!’ It was some sort of joke. You and Meto both laughed, anyway.”

  “Ah, that wasn’t about Berenice. I was referring to Ptolemy’s other daughter.”

  “And?” Eco raised a suggestive eyebrow.

  “Nothing happened! She was only fourteen, entirely too young for my tastes.” This rang true; Fulvia was older than Antony. “Oh, some of my officers claimed I was moonstruck for the girl, in a daze after I’d met her. I still take some needling about it. All nonsense! Though I have to admit, she was quite impressive, child or not.”

  “Remarkably beautiful?” I thought of my own Diana, only a few hours away.

  “Beautiful? No, not at all. Plenty of women are beautiful, and so are quite a few boys, but not her. Beauty is common, compared to what she possessed. A certain quality; I can’t explain it. She was unlike anyone else I’ve ever met, except maybe Caesar.”

  Eco laughed. “A fourteen-year-old girl reminded you of Caesar?”

  “It sounds absurd, I know. If she’d been just a little older …”

  “If this was four years ago,” I said, “she’d be eighteen now.”

  The idea cast a strange look across Antony’s face. Dazed, his officers had said. Moonstruck. “Maybe someday I shall return to Egypt to see what’s become of her.”

  “What do they call this unusual female?”

  Antony smiled. “Cleopatra.”

  27

  We crossed the Tiber as the light of day began to soften and approached the city. The Field of Mars opened on our right. To our left, the old city walls skirted hills covered with buildings. The Flaminian Way ran straight ahead toward the Capitoline Hill, with its temples clustered crownlike at the summit. I had never been so glad to see a place in all my life.

  Outside the Fontinalis Gate we dismounted from our horses and took our leave of Antony. I hardly noticed the armed soldiers who flanked the gateway. I had grown used to seeing soldiers at Caesar’s camp, and traveling with Antony.

  Eco and I hurried through the narrow streets and cut across the Forum, not far from the charred, ruined mass of the Senate House. Here we saw more soldiers, publicly bearing arms in the Forum as if they were an occupying army. Rome had seen civil war and armed soldiers inside her gates, but never had an army been used to police the population by the consent of the Senate. People seemed to be going about their business in a normal manner, but everything seemed strange to me. We saw a crowd in front of the Rostra, gathered for what appeared to be a contio of some sort. We made a wide detour to avoid it.

  We slipped behind the Temple of Castor and Pollux to reach the Ramp, which was guarded by yet more soldiers. My heart was racing as we neared the top, not from exertion but from excitement. I crossed the street and rapped on the door of my house.

  The door opened. An ugly, unfamiliar face peered out at me. For an instant I was confused. This was not my house. My family didn’t live here. We were not even in Rome, or at least not in the Rome I knew. I felt as the lemures of the dead must feel when they walk the earth, reduced to shadows and finding nothing as they remember it.

  But it was my house, of course. The ugly face of the guard was unfamiliar because he came from Pompey’s household. He didn’t recognize me either, and looked ready to break me in two if I tried to slip past him. The family must be safe, after all, I thought. I felt a giddy urge to hug him, but didn’t dare.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” he snarled.

  “You stupid oaf,” said Eco. “This is Gordianus, the owner of this house, and I’m his son, Eco. Now run tell the—”

  He was interrupted by a cry of pure joy. The guard understood at once and drew aside, with a sudden smile that changed the whole nature of his face. Diana was suddenly before me, and then pressed close to me with my arms around her. Bethesda and Menenia appeared, and the laughing twins, but I saw them only uncertainly, like images in water, their ecstatic, beaming, impossibly beautiful faces glimmering through a veil of tears.

  Then I saw another familiar face. He hung back from the rest so that I only glimpsed him between barrages of hugs and kisses. The look on his face was not so much of joy as of intense relief, clouded by embarrassment.

  Davus was alive after all.

  “I thought Davus must be alive. I hoped it was so,” I said, reclining on my favorite couch with my right arm holding Bethesda beside me. We had eaten inside, then pulled chairs and couches for everyone into the garden to enjoy the last of the day. The weather was mild for the Ides of Martius, which was of course more like Aprilis, figuring in the leap-month. Butterflies flitted amid the columns of the peristyle. The plants all around were beginning to quicken and stir with the spring. The statue of Minerva, I noted ruefully, remained broken and prostrate where she had fallen.

  “But I thought he was surely dead,” said Eco, peering at Davus as if still unsure of the evidence of his eyes. Davus blushed under his scrutiny.

  “Until a few days ago, I thought the same thing,” I said. “My last glimpse of Davus on the Appian Way was of a dead man, or so I believed. Our captors thought so, too, and left him for dead.”

  “I hit my head,” said Davus quietly, lowering his eyes. “They must have dragged me off the road, behind a tomb. I woke up hours later with a nasty bump on my head.”

  “And when did you realize the truth?” asked Bethesda, lazily tracing her fingertips over my earlobe and neck.

  “When I reread Diana’s letter to Meto. She made no mention of Davus, but she knew that we had been attacked and abducted on our way back to the city. How? It was possible that some passerby witnessed the attack, happened to recognize Eco or me, and felt obliged to inform the family. Possible, but not likely. It was also possible that whoever came upon Davus’s corpse, if indeed our abductors had left it in the road, just happened to recognize hi
m as my slave and returned him to the family, and that from his condition and the place where he was found, and the fact that we were missing, Diana could have inferred that we had been attacked and abducted. That chain of possibilities seemed unlikely. The simplest thing is often the true thing. Davus must have survived, I reasoned, and brought home the tale of the attack. That seemed unlikely, too, but I wanted to believe it, and so I quietly did. I am more pleased than I can say to discover that I was right. To have first lost Belbo, and then you …”

  Davus continued to blush, and would not look me in the eye.

  “But we are all well, all together,” I said, pulling Bethesda closer to me. The warmth and firmness of her body—the simple, solid reality of it—felt incredibly good to me. With my other hand I reached out to Diana, who sat on a low chair to my left. She smiled and lifted her chin as I stroked her black, shimmering hair. Surely there was no finer or more beautiful thing in all creation, I thought, than Diana’s hair. Yet even as she smiled, there seemed to be an anxiety that clouded her face and would not disperse. Perhaps she could not quite trust that all was well again, after so many long days of worry.

  Eco reclined on a couch across from me, with Menenia beside him and Titus and Titania at his left hand. We talked for a while longer, about our captivity, about the state of things in Rome, about Bethesda’s success in bending Pompey’s guards to her will. The sky darkened and stars began to appear. After a while, Eco and Menenia sent the twins to bed and retired to their room for the night. Davus withdrew, and a few moments later Diana left the garden as well, still looking uneasy. Bethesda and I were alone.

  She brought her face close to mine. “I missed you,” she whispered.

  “Oh, Bethesda, I worried for you so much.”

  “I worried for you, too, husband, but that’s not what I said. I said I missed you.” She smoothed her hand over my chest and down toward my legs, ending in a place that made her meaning unmistakably clear.

  “Bethesda!”

  “But husband, you must be voracious after so long.”

  It was a curious thing, but during our time in the pit I had experienced hardly any amorous impulses or fantasies at all. A few times, purely for physical relief, I had tended to myself while Eco slept. I assumed he had done the same, though probably more often. And on a few occasions, I had resorted to a certain fantasy involving a certain highborn lady and her red and white striped litter. But for the most part I had retreated from my body as much as I could. Denying pleasure was perhaps a way of also denying the more imminent prospects of pain and death. It was as if I had been buried alive—which was not far from the truth.

  Now I was free and back in Rome at last, safe and fed and surrounded by my loved ones. But I was also tired, exhausted by four days of riding and still not fully recuperated from the debilitating effects of our captivity. Much, much too tired for what Bethesda wanted, I thought … and yet the movements of her hand began to stir me, and her warmth seemed to pour a kind of vitality into my body, bringing me fully to life again. I felt myself sinking into a state beyond words or caring, like a stone dissolving into water.

  “But not here,” I whispered. “We should go … inside …”

  “Why?”

  “Bethesda … !”

  So we did it there in the garden like young lovers, not once but twice, with the moon for a lamp. The night air grew chilly, but that only made the places where our flesh touched burn all the warmer.

  Only once did I have the sensation that we were being watched, but when I looked around it was only the head of Minerva that looked back at me, lying sideways in the grass. I ignored her until we were finished the second time. When I looked again, she still seemed to be watching me, with a look of hurt in her lapis lazuli eyes. And when will you tend to my needs? her expression seemed to say—as if single-handedly I could put the goddess of wisdom together again and return her to her pedestal.

  Bethesda and I eventually retired to the bedroom, but at some point in the night I got up to relieve myself. The hulking shadow I saw across the garden alarmed me at first, until I realized who it was.

  “Davus!” I whispered. “Why are you up? Pompey’s guards take the night watch.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “But you should. I’ll need you fresh and alert tomorrow.”

  “I know. I’ll try to sleep now.” He began to walk off, slump-shouldered. I touched his arm.

  “Davus, I meant what I said tonight. I thought we had lost you for good. I’m glad it wasn’t so.”

  “Thank you, Master.” He cleared his throat and looked away. What was wrong with him? Why did he feel so guilty?

  “Davus, no one blames you for what happened.”

  “But if I’d known how to ride a horse—”

  “I’ve ridden horses all my life, and they pulled me off my mount with no trouble at all.”

  “But nobody pulled me off my horse. I was thrown! If I’d stayed on, I could have ridden for help.”

  “Nonsense. You’d have stayed and fought, and they’d have killed you for certain. You did your best, Davus.”

  “And it wasn’t good enough.”

  Where had he come by such a conscientious nature, having been a slave all his life? “Davus, Fortune smiled on you. The horse threw you, you were left for dead, and you’re alive today. Fortune smiled on all of us. We’re still here, aren’t we? You should let that be enough.”

  He finally looked me in the eye. “Master, there’s something I have to say. You said you were glad to find out I was still alive, but you can’t know how glad I was today, when you showed up at the door! Because—well, I can’t explain it. I wish I could, but I can’t. May I go now?”

  “Of course, Davus. Get some sleep.” He lumbered away, tongue-tied and close to tears. I thought I understood. Minerva, who could see everything from the place where she had fallen, must have had quite a laugh at me that night.

  The next morning I asked Diana to show me the note she had mentioned in her letter to Meto, the one that had arrived by anonymous courier addressed to her mother. It was just as she had transcribed it:

  Do not fear for Gordianus and his son. They have not been harmed.

  They will be returned to you in time.

  I showed it to Meto. “Does the handwriting look familiar to you?”

  “No.”

  “Nor to me. Still, it tells us something. The parchment is of good quality, as is the ink; it didn’t come from a poor household. Moreover, the spelling is correct, and the letters are properly made, so we may assume that the writer is educated.”

  “Probably a slave, taking dictation.”

  “Do you think so? To send a message such as this, I imagine a man might actually write the note himself. I think it might profit us to look among my records and correspondence, to see if we can find another example of this handwriting.”

  “I don’t have many such specimens, and neither do you, Papa. Most letters come on wax tablets, so that you can write over them and send them back.”

  “Yes, but we may find something—a bill, a receipt, anything. Do you see how he’s made the letter G in my name? That’s rather distinctive. If we could find the man who makes his Gs that way …”

  “We’d find a man who must know something about our captivity.”

  “Exactly.”

  Eco smiled. “I need to clean my study and sort through my correspondence, anyway. Shall we start here, or at my house on the Esquiline?”

  “Here, I think. Unless of course you want to drop by your house just to have a look at it, since you’ve been away so long. Of course, we should report to the Great One, sooner or later—”

  As if responding to a cue in a play, Davus appeared in the doorway.

  “A caller, Master.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “I think you gave him a nickname. Something silly …” Davus looked thoughtful. “Oh, I remember: Baby Face!”

  I turned to Eco. “It looks like we s
hall be seeing the Great One sooner then, not later. Should we take cloaks, Davus?”

  “No, it’s mild this morning, Master, and the sky is clear. Shall I … shall I come with you?”

  “I doubt if there’s any need, Davus, with Baby Face and his men to look after us. Stay here. You’ve done such a good job of looking after the women in our absence.”

  I thought this would cheer him up, but my words of praise only seemed to plunge Davus into a deeper gloom.

  28

  As consul, despite the fact that he retained command of his legions in Spain, Pompey was now legally able to enter the city and might have taken up residence in his old family house in the Carinae district. Instead he chose to remain in his villa out on the Pincian Hill, probably because it was more defensible. I thought, as we ascended through the terraced gardens ringed with soldiers keeping watch among the statuary. Was this how a king would live, if Rome had a king?

  The Great One received us in the same room as before. He sat in a corner with a pile of documents on his lap, dictating to a secretary, but as we entered he put the documents aside and dismissed the secretary. He showed us onto the terrace, which was bright with morning sunlight. No columns of smoke marred the skyline of the city. Pompey had vowed to restore order, and so he had.

  “You’ve been gone for a very long time, Finder. I must confess, I had almost given up on you. It was a pleasant surprise when I received news of your return yesterday. You both look well enough, if a bit thinner than when I last saw you. I managed to keep myself informed of your circumstances, thanks to your wife. You were waylaid down by the Monument of Basilius, I understand. And not too many days ago she received some sort of note advising her not to worry, promising that you would eventually be freed. And here you are.”

  “Except that our captors didn’t free us, Great One. We escaped.”

  “Really?” Pompey raised an appreciative eyebrow. “You’ve had an adventure, then. Here, sit. I could use a good story to distract me from my own affairs for a while. Begin at the beginning.”