Saturnalia s-5

by John Maddox Roberts

  “I’m familiar with the custom,” I told her. “My father’s house has been without a lady since my mother died and my sisters married, but I remember them all flocking about on Saturnalia.”

  “Since my uncle is pontifex maximus, we went nowhere. Everyone came to us. Only the family of the Flamen Dialis has as much prestige, and there hasn’t been one of those in almost thirty years.” The high priest of Jupiter was so bound by ritual and taboo that it was increasingly difficult to find anyone who wanted to assume the position, prestigious as it was.

  “I know why Caesar wanted to be pontifex maximus,” I said. “His mother put him up to it. Aurelia just wanted to have every woman in Rome, even the ladies of the highest-ranking households, come to her and abase themselves.”

  She punched me in the ribs. “Stop that! As usual, there was gossip. People speak more freely at Saturnalia than at other times. A lot of it was about Clodia.”

  “Everyone assumes she poisoned Celer?”

  “Of course. But there was more. It seems to be common knowledge that she is the brains behind her brother’s rise to political power. They are wildly devoted to one another; everyone knows that. She may do most of his thinking for him as well.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “Clodius certainly isn’t the brightest star in the Roman firmament.”

  “Then,” she said, leaning close and being conspiratotial, “if someone wanted to eliminate Clodius without bringing the wrath of Clodius’s mob down upon him, wouldn’t it make sense to get rid of Clodia?”

  “I thought you were of the opinion she is guilty,” I said.

  “I’m trying to think like you, dolt!” Another punch in the ribs. “Now pay attention. By poisoning Celer, somebody hoped not only to eliminate him as an enemy, but to bring Clodius into disgrace as well, possibly to eliminate him entirely by getting the sister upon whom he depends sentenced to death by the state as a venefica. Even if Clodius is capable of handling his own career, the disgrace would be devastating. Does this plan eliminate a few suspects from your list?”

  “It does that,” I admitted. “If Clodius was one of the real targets, then somebody wants to cut Caesar’s support in the City out from under him while he’s in Gaul.” I glanced at her suspiciously. “You didn’t brew this up just to make your uncle look innocent, did you?”

  “I only search for truth and justice,” she said, with lamblike innocence. Then her eyes went wide with alarm. “Those men over there!”

  I looked around, expecting assassins. “Where? Is someone after us? Me, I mean?” I reached into my tunic and grasped the hilt of my dagger. I could see no northern thugs or Marsian louts.

  “No, idiot! Those two old slaves over there. They belong to my grandmother, and they’re looking for me.” She drew her veil aside and kissed me swiftly. “I have to run back. Be careful.” Then she was up and away, around a corner of the temple.

  12

  For a few minutes longer I sat on the portico of the temple, basking in the light of the sunny morning. With most of the litter of the holiday swept up and carted away, the Forum was almost back to its customary state of majestic beauty, and the eye was not distracted by the usual swarming crowds. Rome at its most beautiful, though, can be a strange and dangerous place.

  I decided that there was one person I ought to talk to, although I dreaded the prospect. I had no excuse to procrastinate, save my own cowardice. On the other hand, I consider cowardice to be an excellent reason to avoid danger. It has saved my life many times. But time was pressing and this was one thin possibility and it had to be pursued. With a sigh of resignation I got up from the bench, descended the steps of the little temple, and began the walk around the base of the Capitol to the Field of Mars and the Circus Flaminius.

  It was just about noon when I reached the warren of stalls and tents. There were not as many as there had been three days before. Could it really have been only three days? It hardly seemed possible. Many of the vendors had disposed of all their wares during the holiday and had returned home for more. Others had ended their business season and would not be back until spring.

  I half-hoped that Furia would not be there either. On the lengthy walk I was forced to face my fear. It wasn’t just that she was a woman of great presence who was a little too handy with a knife-I had confronted murderous females before without trepidation-no, I was forced to admit it was because she was a striga. Educated, aristocratic Roman I might be, but my roots were buried deep in the soil of Italy, like those of an ancient olive tree. My peasant ancestors had cowered in fear of such women, and their blood was more powerful in my heart and veins than the mishmash of Latin and Greek learning in my brain.

  I saw the tent of Ascylta but I walked past it without a glance. For all I knew I might put the woman in danger by speaking with her out here. I had the uncomfortable but familiar feeling of being watched from every booth and tent entrance I passed. Among these people, I was a marked man.

  Then I stood before the arch curtained by Furia’s familiar hangings. I took a deep breath, summoned up an expression of fake courage, pushed the curtains aside, and strode in.

  Furia glared up at me beneath the brim of her odd headdress. “I didn’t expect to see you snooping around here again.”

  “So you did not. You did not expect to see me alive at all, at least not with eyes in my head.”

  “Those incompetent fools!” She calmed herself and put on a faint smile. “Still, I notice that you aren’t here with a crowd of lictors to arrest me. Not having much luck with your law-enforcing peers, are you?”

  I crouched so that our eyes were on the same level. “Furia, I want some answers, and I won’t leave this booth until I have them.”

  “Do you really believe I will betray my religion?” she said.

  “I won’t ask you to. I need to catch a murderer. It is the death of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer I am investigating, but the same killer murdered Harmodia. She was the leader of your cult, was she not? Don’t you want to see her avenged?”

  “She has been!” Her eyes were as steady on mine as those of a bronze statue, and about as informative.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There is much you don’t understand, Senator.”

  “Then let’s talk about what I know. I know that Harmodia was selling poison to a Greek physician named Ariston of Lycia. Some months back she sold him a slow-working concoction you veneficae call ‘the wife’s friend.’ ” At the name her eyes widened fractionally. I had managed to surprise her. “It was this poison that killed Celer. Not long after he died, Harmodia was murdered by a killer who wanted to hide his tracks. Within a very few days the physician was dead as well, supposedly by accident; but we know better, don’t we, Furia?”

  “Harmodia was foolish!” she said. “She dealt too much with that Greek. It is one thing to sell a woman the means to get rid of a husband who beats her or a son an easy way to dispose of the rich father who takes too long to die. What are such people to us? But the Greek was an evil man. He killed those who entrusted themselves to his care. Even worse, he sold his murdering services to others.”

  It seemed that even poisoners had their own code of ethics, and Ariston had overstepped the boundaries.

  “Why do you say that Harmodia has already been avenged?” I asked her.

  “The Greek killed her.”

  “Are you certain of that?”

  “Of course. He was a great and respectable man.” These words were spoken with the withering sarcasm possible only to an Italian peasant or Cicero on one of his best days. “He could not afford to let Harmodia expose him, so he killed her.”

  “Was Harmodia blackmailing Ariston? Did she demand money in return for her silence?”

  Furia stared at me for a long time. “Yes, she did. I told you she was foolish. And she was greedy.”

  “How did she expect to expose him without attracting the awful punishment meted out to a venefica?”

  Furia actua
lly chuckled. “She was no Roman politician. She did not threaten to accuse him in the assemblies. She would simply let his deeds be known to many people in many places. He never told her who he was poisoning, but we have our ways of learning such things. She would be far away before he could implicate her.”

  “A friend of mine, also a Greek physician but an honest one, told me that the deadliest weapon in Rome today is the spoken word.”

  “Then your friend is a wise man. Some things are best not spoken of.”

  “Tell me, Furia,” I said, “about your cult. …”

  “My religion!” she corrected vehemently. “Your spying was a profanation, and you should have died for it.”

  “That,” I said, “is something that has me puzzled. While I abhor your rites, I recognize that yours is an ancient religion and one native to Italy.”

  “It is that. My foremothers practiced our rituals long before you Romans arrived. Even you adopted them before you began to imitate the Greeks from the south. You Romans call human sacrifice evil, yet you allow men to fight to the death in your funeral games.”

  “That is different,” I told her. “It is for another purpose, and the men aren’t always killed. You must understand the distinction between …”

  “I spit on your distinctions! On the eve of the Feast of Saturnus you saw us sacrifice a slave. In the old days, before your censors made it a criminal offence, the sacrifice was a free volunteer. In times of terrible crisis, a prince of our people would willingly pour his blood into the mundus for the good of the people. What are your slaughters of bulls and rams and boars to a sacrifice like that?”

  “Be that as it may, venerable and hallowed as your religion is, why do you allow the likes of those patrician women to attend? You must know that they come only for the excitement, for the decadent thrill of doing something forbidden. I know that you practice your sacrifice as a holy rite pleasing to your gods. Why then do you allow your religion to be defiled by a foreign people who enjoy it as something evil?”

  “Isn’t it obvious, Senator?” She smiled knowingly. “They are our protection. I observed before that you bring no officers to arrest me and throw me into prison. Is it not exactly because of those loathsome ladies? They are most highly placed. This, too, is an ancient tradition, Roman. You have your King of Fools on Saturnalia. These women play the same role, although we don’t tell them that. And being women, their presence does not pollute our rites, as yours did.”

  “There were other men there,” I said. “At least one of them was a Roman.”

  “There were no men there save yourself, Senator. There were masked creatures somewhat manlike in shape to make the music and stand watch over our solemnities.”

  “Who was the masked Roman who volunteered to kill me, Furia? I knew his voice. He was not one of your strigae, and he was not one of your people.”

  “He is one of us nonetheless. It was he who avenged Harmodia.”

  Glimmerings of light began to sift through the gloom that enshrouded this tangled, demon-ridden affair.

  “It was he who killed Ariston?”

  “He did. He said he’d do it the Roman way and sacrifice him to the river god.”

  That gave me pause. “You mean he was thrown from the Sublician Bridge?” I had assumed that he had been crossing the Fabrician to the island where many of the physicians of Rome had their living quarters.

  “Yes, that was the one. Why should I give him to you? He may be a Roman, but he avenged our sister.”

  I leaned close. “I don’t think he did, Furia. I think he is the one who hired Ariston to poison Celer. I furthermore think that he killed Harmodia himself to cover up his tracks. Ariston was a coward who liked to use poison and keep his own hands clean. Your Roman enjoys spilling blood. He killed Harmodia, then he killed Ariston to destroy the last link between himself and the poisoning, and in doing it he further ingratiated himself with you. He is a clever man, Furia, cleverer than you and almost as clever as I. I am going to find him and I will see justice done, if I have to mete it out myself.”

  She regarded me for a long time with cool, steady eyes. “Even if I believed you, I could not reveal his name. I am bound by sacred oath and cannot reveal an initiate to an outsider even if one of them sins against the gods.”

  I knew better than to try to break that sort of determination. I stood. “Good day to you, then, striga. I think that I will know my man before the sun sets. I can feel it now just as you read my future in my palm and my blood.”

  “A moment, Senator.”

  I waited.

  “It was the blood of both of us. Tell me one thing: Since I first saw you, you have been as grim and determined as a hound on a scent. You were that way when you came in here just a little while ago, although I could tell that you were in fear of me as well. But now you are angry. Why is that?”

  I examined my feelings for a few seconds. “I was determined to find out who killed Celer because he was a member of my family and a citizen. But Romans of my class have been murdering each other for centuries, and sometimes it is as if we’ve asked to be killed. Anger in such cases is as futile as anger against an enemy soldier who kills from duty and habit. Also, I wanted to make sure that a woman was not accused unjustly, although she has plenty of blood on her hands and her brother is my deadly enemy.” I paused, thinking of the thing that stirred anger within me.

  “Your masked drum beater, this Roman swine, killed a worthless man. But he did it in mockery of one of our most ancient rituals, the sacrifice of the Ides of May, when the sacred argei, the puppets of straw, are cast from the Sublician Bridge into the Tiber. Politics is one thing; sacrilege is another.”

  She turned and rummaged through one of her baskets. “Roman, you are no friend of mine or my people. But I think you are a good man, and those are rare in Rome. And your gods watch over you; this I saw when you were here before. Take this.” She held something out to me. It was a thin disk of bronze, pierced at one edge and hanging from a leather thong. I took it and examined it in the dim light. On one side was writing in a language I had never seen before. On the other was a stylized eye surrounded by lines like rays.

  “It will protect you and help you spy out evil.”

  I took it and placed it around my neck. “Thank you, Furia.”

  “Now forget about us. Some day you may be a high magistrate and may feel you should try to wipe us out. It has been tried before, many, many times. It is useless. You will never be able to find our mundus again, I promise you, scour the Vatican as you will. It was the gods who led you there in the first place for their own reasons, but their purpose has been accomplished. Go now. I have called off my dogs; they’ll not bother you again.” She lowered her gaze and her face was hidden by the stiff, black brim of her hat. I turned and walked out.

  It was well past noon as I walked back from the Campus Martius and through the Porta Flumentata into the City. For the first time since returning to Rome I felt confident. I felt that luck was with me and maybe even the gods. Maybe Furia’s eye amulet was helping as well. I felt that, in some inexplicable way, I saw everything more clearly, not just their appearance, but their hidden meaning.

  As I crossed the cattle market I glanced up and to my right and saw the beautiful Temple of Ceres low on the slope of the Aventine, glowing as by an inner light and looming, in some fashion, larger than was normal. I stood as one struck by a vision, jaw gaping, causing passersby to stare and point.

  I knew what I had overlooked, what Julia and I had been discussing no more than two hours before. Had the investigation been a simple one, it would never have escaped me. It had been all those witches and their horrible rites and the presence of outlandish patricians and all the other anomalies that had cluttered up the case that caused me to overlook it. Or maybe Julia was right and I was sometimes dense.

  Toga rippling in my self-made breeze, I ran all the way up to the temple and practically leapt down the stairs into the offices of the aediles. The aged
freedman looked up in consternation.

  “I need to borrow your boy!” I said.

  “You’ll do no such thing!” the old man informed me. “He has work to do.”

  “I am Senator Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, son of Metellus the Censor. I am an important man, and I demand that you give me the use of that boy for an hour.”

  “Bugger that,” the old man said. “I am a client of the state and in charge here, and you are just a senator with no stripe on your toga. Get elected aedile and you can order me around, not before.”

  “All right,” I grumbled, rummaging around in my rapidly flattening purse. “How much?” We reached an accommodation.

  Outside, the boy walked beside me, unhappy about the whole situation. “What do you want me for?”

  “You said a slave came and requisitioned the report on the murder of Harmodia. Would you recognize that slave if you saw him again?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. He was just a state slave. They all look alike. I’m a temple slave.”

  “There’s another silver denarius in it for you if you guide me to the right man.”

  He brightened. “I’ll give it a try.”

  We trudged around the basilicas, and the boy squinted at the slaves who stood around waiting for somebody to tell them what to do. Since the courts were not in session, this was not a great deal. That is one of the problems with Rome: too many slaves, not enough for them to do.

  We started at the Basilica Opimia and the boy saw nobody he recognized. It was the same with the Basilica Sempronia. Finally, we went to the Basilica Aemilia and it looked as if that was going to be a dead end as well. I was beginning to doubt my new, god-bestowed vision when the boy tugged at my sleeve, pointing.

  “There, that’s him!” The man indicated was short, balding, and middle-aged, dressed in a dark tunic like most slaves. He held a wax tablet and was taking notes, apparently enumerating some great rolls of heavy cloth at his feet, probably intended to make an awning for the outdoor courts.