A murder on the Appian way rsr-5

by Steven Saylor

  "A stone building. Two storeys."

  "Yes, there's probably a communal sleeping room upstairs, a tavern downstairs, and a cookhouse at the back. A stable and an inn; what else?"

  Eco shrugged. "A few houses here and there, away from the road. Oh, and an altar to Jupiter, built under a circle of old oak trees with a little creek nearby. A very pretty spot."

  "Oak trees, yes; once the road starts ascending to higher ground at Bovillae, the trees get thicker. The top of the mountain is a veritable forest. I don't suppose you've ever seen a forest, Davus?"

  "I've seen what they call groves, growing around temples in the city."

  "Not quite the same thing. Well, so much for Bovillae. Not much to it, is there? Not a very special place to breathe your last breath, but that's where Clodius died the next day. The skirmish started farther up the road, but apparently Milo's men chased Clodius to the inn, where he made his last stand. According to Fulvia, it was a senator named Sextus Tedius who came along later and found the body lying in the road. He had his slaves put the corpse into his litter and sent it on to Rome. You and I saw the condition it was in when it reached Fulvia — stabbed and strangled. And after Bovillae, Eco? What's next on the road?"

  "The land begins to rise, as you said. Wooded slopes with rich people's estates — pylons set on either side of private roads leading up to big houses that you can barely glimpse as you go by." He cocked his head and squinted. "Something new, closer to the road-a temple of some sort…"

  "Not a temple, but a residence: the House of the Vestal Virgins. You're right, it's new, built only in the last few years. Before that, the Vestals lived somewhere higher up the mountain. There's a temple of Vesta somewhere up there. Not a place we men are likely to set foot in. Press on, imaginary rider. What's next along the road?"

  "On the opposite side of the road… something else religious… having to do with women. A shrine, not a temple… a shrine to Fauna, the Good Goddess!"

  "Excellent! A place for Fauna's female worshippers to leave offerings and make prayers, and another place where we wouldn't be particularly welcome. But according to Fulvia, it was on the stretch of road directly in front of the shrine of the Good Goddess that the skirmish between Clodius and Milo began. Well want to take a careful look at the lay of the land and see whether it looks like a suitable place for an ambush. But let's return to Clodius on the day before his death, on his way from Rome to Aricia. He'll have passed all these places, perhaps without stopping, wanting to press on now that he's so close to his destination. What comes next, Eco?"

  "Hmm. I seem to remember some impressive pylons on the left and a road heading up to a villa on the ridge above."

  "Yes. If my assumption is correct, that's where we'll be spending the night."

  "Pompey's villa?"

  "From the directions Baby Face gave me, I think that must be the place."

  Eco whistled. "The view must be extraordinary."

  "Yes. Pompey seems to like living in places where he's able to look down on the world around him. But don't stop yet What's next along the road?"

  "More private estates. One of them must belong, to Clodius."

  "Yes, his is that enormous thing that seems to perch on the side of the hill."

  "The place where they cut down all those trees and did all that excavating?"

  "Yes. Apparently a great deal of the interior space is underground, like a vault — defensible as a fortress, Fulvia told me. From what she said, I gathered that Clodius was especially proud of the place, even happier with it than that palace of a house on the Palatine. We'll get the chance to take a closer look at it. That's where Clodius's journey ended for the day, just a mile or so this side of Aricia. There must have been a few hours of sunlight left. Clodius probably inspected the grounds, talked to the foreman, saw to whatever it is that estate owners see to when they arrive at one of their estates. His cook, prepared a dinner that night to which some of the local elite were invited. It all sounds very respectable, very boring. After all that riding, little Publius junior probably fell asleep on his dining couch. The next morning, Clodius delivered his address to the town senate of Aricia, followed by a brief reception. Then back to his estate by shortly after midday or early afternoon. Fulvia says that he intended to spend at least another night there."

  "Did he have more business in the area?"

  "I don't know. Let's be sentimental and assume that he wanted to spend some fatherly time with his son, strolling through the wooded grounds around his villa. But then a messenger arrived."

  "A messenger?"

  "The one that Fulvia dispatched that morning, to give her husband the sad news about Cyrus the architect. She asked Clodius to return to Rome at once."

  "Was it really necessary for Clodius to hurry home?"

  "Fulvia seemed to think so. Cyrus was close enough to have named Clodius among his heirs, and Fulvia was depending on the man to finish their Palatine house. She felt overwhelmed by his death. She wanted her husband to come home."

  "And Clodius dropped everything to come running at her call?"

  "You don't find that credible, Eco?"

  "I don't know, Papa. You've had more contact with the woman than I have."

  "Yes, well, I’ll venture to say that when Fulvia tells a man to do something, the chances are good that the man will do what Fulvia says."

  "Even Clodius?"

  "Even Clodius. Which is to say that I find what Fulvia told me credible if not necessarily convincing: that Clodius intended to spend another night at his country villa, but instead found himself unexpectedly back on the Appian Way headed towards Rome, because of that message from Fulvia. If that was the case, then there was no premeditated ambush, was there? When Milo and his entourage passed by, Clodius should have been off strolling in the woods with his son; instead, Clodius was on the Appian Way, but only by chance."

  "But where was his son, if the boy wasn't with him when the skirmish occurred?"

  "Fulvia says that Clodius had promised the boy a stay in the country, and left him at the villa with his tutor."

  "Does it strike you as credible that he would leave the boy behind, Papa?"

  "Perhaps. You might think Fulvia would have wanted her son brought back to her, but the rich see these things differently. I suppose, if I owned a huge villa in the country with a full staff of slaves to run the place, I might feel comfortable leaving my eight-year-old son in their keeping. Or perhaps the boy is an insufferable brat and a terrible traveller. Perhaps he'd been a complete pest all the previous day and Clodius couldn't abide another long trip with the monster and wanted to be rid of him."

  Eco laughed. "That's better! Forget the sentimentality."

  "Of course, to some it might look suspicious that Clodius just happened to set out from his villa with an armed company just as Milo was approaching on the Appian Way, and just happened to leave his young son behind, out of harm's way. Another detail to be noted."

  "So we finally come to Milo. What was he doing on the Appian Way?"

  "You heard his speech in the Forum the other day. He was expected for a religious ceremony in Lanuvium, which is the next town you come to after Aricia, a couple of miles farther south. From what I've been able to tell, the bare facts of the account Milo gave at Caelius's contio are true: he attended a meeting of the Senate in Rome that morning and later he set out at the head of a large retinue, riding with his wife in a carriage. Milo claims they got a late start and didn't pass Bovillae until about the eleventh hour, the last hour of daylight. If that's true, it would seem to contradict Fulvia's story about Clodius heading home, because the eleventh hour of a winter day is too late for anyone with a scrap of sense to set out on a journey of several hours with a troop of men on foot. It would have been long after dark before Clodius got to Rome, and travelling by night is a dangerous business, if only because of the chance that a man or beast will trip in the dark and break a leg. So did the incident really occur that late? Fulvia says that Clodi
us's body, carried in a litter, arrived at her house on the Palatine at the first hour of the night — only an hour or two after Milo claims the skirmish began, which is impossible."

  "So there's a discrepancy about when the incident occurred. Fulvia says it happened earlier in the afternoon; Milo says it happened not long before sunset. Is that important, Papa?"

  "It means that one of them has to be mistaken — or deliberately lying."

  "I shall try to contain my surprise!"

  "Yes, but why lie about the time, Eco? And if Fulvia or Milo has lied about that, then what else might one or the other be lying about?"

  "Do you think we're likely to find out, simply by going to these places and asking some questions?" "We can try," I said.

  Mount Alba loomed straight ahead of us, steadily growing larger. Clouds had gathered at its summit, casting a shadow over the higher slopes, so that the mountain seemed to erupt from the surrounding sunlit plains like a brooding mass of doubt. Davus frowned, viewing the prospect with misgivings. He was not the only one.

  XV

  Though we arrived at Bovillae before the fourth hour, the midday meal was already being prepared. Smoke rose from the cookhouse behind the inn, carrying smells of baking bread and roasting meat.

  "I'm starving!" said Eco. Davus's stomach growled in sympathy.

  "Good," I said. "We won't have to invent any pretences for why we're stopping at the tavern."

  It was a two-storey building made of much-weathered stone. The land all around was cleared and trammelled by the passage of many feet over many years. It was to this place, according to Fulvia, that Clodius had fled when Milo's men overwhelmed him. He had taken refuge in the tavern. Milo's men had stormed the place. Fulvia knew no details of the battle, only that eventually a passing senator on his way to Rome had come upon Clodius's body lying in the road outside the tavern, and had sent it on to Rome in his litter.

  Davus walked the horses to a hitching post beneath a nearby stand of trees. There was a trough with water for the horses and a bench for Davus to sit on while he watched them.

  Before we went inside, Eco and I took a quick look at all four sides of the building, to see how defensible it looked. There were large, shuttered windows in the upper storey, inaccessible as there was no way to climb up to them. The shuttered windows in the rear and side walls of the lower storey were small and set high up. A man might have been able to wriggle through one, but only if given a boost and if there was no one inside to stop him. The back door, made of solid wood, opened onto a covered walkway to the cookhouse. The front door, which at the moment stood open, was also made of solid wood. The doorway was so narrow that Eco and

  I had to turn sideways and step inside one at a time. The windows on either side of the front door were slightly larger and situated a little lower than the other windows on the ground floor, but a man would still have had a difficult time scrambling in or out of them.

  All in all, the inn appeared to be a reasonably defensible building. Still, I saw the signs of a recent, losing battle.

  So did Eco. "Did you notice the difference in the shutters, Papa?"

  "Yes."

  "The ones on the upstairs windows are all made of old, grey wood-"

  "— while the shutters on every one of the downstairs windows are conspicuously new, as are both the front and back doors. There's a lot of new plaster around the doorway, as well. You and I know all too well how doors can be broken and need replacing."

  "Where do you suppose everyone is, Papa?"

  "Who would you expect to be here? There were no other travellers on the road this morning. We're probably early for the regular midday clientele." As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I saw a plain, rustic room with a few tables and benches. A steeply angled stairway to the upper floor began at the far left corner. Underneath the stairway a counter blocked off the back portion of the room. In the wall behind the counter there was a little archway with a cloth curtain tied back to show a shadowy storage room that led through to the rear door. After a moment the door rattled and opened to show the silhouette of a large woman outlined by bright sunlight. She closed the door behind her and waddled up to the bar, wiping her hands on the front of her coarse gown. She smelled of baking bread and roasting meat.

  "I thought I saw someone come in." She peered at us with a squint that I took to be almost hostile until I realized she was waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. She was a strong-looking woman with meaty arms and a round, open face surrounded by a tangle of greying red hair. "That's your fellow with the horses over by the trough?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Three altogether, are you?" "Yes, travellers."

  "Hungry travellers," added Eco, leaning against the bar.. She showed the hint of a smile. "We can take care of that, as long as you have something that jingles." Eco produced his coin purse.

  She nodded. "I've got a couple of rabbits roasting. It'll be a little while before they're done, but I can bring you some bread and cheese in the meantime." She reached under the bar and produced two cups, then went back to the storage room and returned with a pitcher of wine and a pitcher of water.

  "Could you take some food out to the fellow under the trees, too?" I said. "I can hear his stomach growling from here."

  "Certainly. I'll send one of my boys to take care of him. They're out in the cookhouse watching the fire. With my husband," she added, as if making of point of letting us know that she was not a woman alone. "Travellers, you say. Headed north or south?"

  "South."

  "You've come from Rome, then?" She poured out generous portions of wine, then added splashes of water.

  "We left early this morning."

  "What's it like up in the city?"

  "An awful mess. We're glad to be away from it."

  "Well, it's been an awful mess around here, too, let me tell you. Ever since that accursed day…" She sighed and shook her head.

  "Ah, yes, we must be close to where it happened — the skirmish up the road."

  She snorted. "Call it a skirmish if you like, but I'd call it an all-out battle, to judge from the damage that was done and the dead bodies lying all about. And it may have started up the road, but right here's where it ended." She slapped the top of the counter.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Aren't we talking about the same thing? Milo and Clodius and all the blood that was spilled?"

  I nodded. "No one in Rome talks about anything else these days. But everything is so confused and jumbled. Every new version contradicts the last one. Something happened on the Appian Way and Clodius ended up dead — that's about the only thing all the stories agree on. Where, when and how, nobody knows for sure."

  She rolled her eyes. "So much suffering and destruction, you'd think people would at least bother to find out what really happened, if only to be glad it didn't happen to them. But you said you were hungry. I'll get you some bread, hot from the oven."

  Eco opened his mouth to call her back, but I squeezed his arm and shook my head. "The woman is eager enough to tell us what she knows," I said in a low voice. "Let her do it at her own pace."

  She returned with a steaming loaf of bread in a basket and a piece of cheese the size of a brick, then went back to the storeroom and returned with a heaped bowl of black and green olives. She put her elbows on the bar, leaned towards us and resumed her tale without any prompting. "It was my brother-in-law who owned this tavern, my little sister's husband. A hard-working fellow, from a long line of hard workers. Inherited the place from his rather; the family's owned this inn for generations. He wept with joy the day my sister gave him a son to leave it to." She sighed. "Who could have known how soon he'd be passing the place along? The boy's still a baby, and now that his papa is dead there's not another grown man on either side of the family to run the place. So we've taken it over, my husband and I, with our boys helping us, while my poor widowed sister stays with her baby. Ah, poor Marcus! That was her husband's name. There's always some
danger when you run a place like this on the road, always the risk of being raided by bandits or runaway slaves who'd slash your throat without a thought. But Marcus was a big, stout fellow, not afraid of anything, and this inn was his whole life. Always had been, since he was a child. I think he didn't realize the danger that day when Clodius's men came running in, all bloody and out of breath. He didn't turn them away, he just asked them what he could do to help. Clodius staggered inside, wounded and bleeding, and told him to bolt the doors. Then they laid Clodius right here, flat on his back." She slapped the counter, hard enough to cause ripples in our cups. By the dim light I studied the mottled, stained surface of the old wood. A lot of wine must have been spilled on that counter over the years, I told myself but there were stains which might have been something else.

  "Marcus should have sent them all right back out into the road, that's what my husband says. But what does he know? He wasn't here. But my poor sister was. She told me all about it. She'd left her baby with me that day. Oh, how she loved working in this tavern, as much as Marcus did; nothing could keep her away. When Clodius and his men showed up, she was upstairs, shaking out blankets and sweeping the floors. If only her little boy had been sick; if only something, anything, had kept her at home that day. The shock of what happened to Marcus was bad enough, but for her to have been here, to have seen and heard — it's broken something inside her. Ah, well, that's why we have to do everything we can to keep the place going until little Marcus is big enough to take his father's place."

  I nodded. "So the skirmish — the battle — began up the road, but Clodius ended up here. Had he ever been in the tavern before? Did he know your brother-in-law, Marcus?"