The lamp sputtered. The flame leaped up and then grew small, leaving the room even darker than before. Water lapped quietly against tile, men breathed in sighs and soft groans. I looked about and saw nothing but vapour, featureless and infinite except for the single point of light cast by the lamp, like the glow of a lighthouse on a faraway hilltop. Shapes bobbed in the distance like floating islands or monsters of the deep prowling the surface.
I sank deeper in the water, until I could feel the breath from my nostrils swirl against the surface. I narrowed my eyes, stared across the gulf of mist at the flickering flame, and for a while I seemed almost to dream without shutting my eyes. I thought of no one and nothing. I was a dreaming man, a floating, moss-covered island in a humid sea, a boy playing at fantasy, a child in the womb.
Against the background of mist, one of the shapes drew nearer – a head floating on the water. It approached, and stopped; approached and stopped again, each time accompanied by the almost imperceptible sound of flesh parting water, followed by the advancing caress of tiny waves against my cheeks.
He drew so near that I could almost make out his face, outlined by long, dark hair. He rose a bit, just enough so that I glimpsed broad shoulders and a strong neck. He seemed to be smiling, but in that light I might have imagined anything.
Then he slowly sank beneath the water with a soft fuming of bubbles and a swirl of mist – Atlantis sinking into the sea. The surface of the pool closed over him and the water merged into the mist, undisturbed. He had vanished.
I felt something brush against the calf of my leg, like an eel slithering through the water.
My heart began to pound. My chest grew tight. I had wandered the city for hours, so blindly that the clumsiest assassin could have followed me and I never would have known it. I turned and reached for the towel on the edge of the pool, and the knife concealed beneath it. Just as my hand closed on the hilt, the water boiled and splashed behind me. He touched my shoulder.
I whirled about in the water, splashing, slipping against the floor of the pool. I reached out blindly and seized him by the hair, then brought the blade to his throat.
He cursed aloud. Behind me I heard the curious murmur of the crowd, like a blind beast stirred from its sleep.
‘Hands!’ I shouted. ‘Out of the water!’ The surrounding murmur turned to a commotion. On either side of me two hands leaped out of the water like snapping fish, empty and blameless. I pulled my blade away from his throat. I must have cut him; a thin dark line marked the indent of the blade, and beneath it was a smeared trickle of blood. I was finally close enough to see his face – not Magnus at all, just a harmless young man with startled eyes and gritted teeth.
Before the chief attendant could come, before the lamps could be lit, exposing me for all to see as the fool I was, I let him go and pulled myself from the water. I dried myself as I hurried towards the door, taking care to conceal the knife before I stepped into the light and demanded my clothes. Cicero was right. I was unsettled and dangerous and unfit to be on the streets.
XXIX
It was Tiro who answered the door. He looked exhausted but exultant, so thoroughly pleased with himself and with existence in general that I could see it took him an effort to put on a disapproving face. In the background the voice of Cicero droned on, stopping and starting, an ambient noise like the sound of crickets on a summer night.
‘Cicero is furious with you,’ Tiro whispered. ‘Where have you been all day?’
‘Looking for bodies amid charred rubble,’ I said. ‘Chatting with friends of the great. Visiting ghosts and old acquaintances. Lying with whores; excuse me, lying to whores. Brandishing knives at amorous strangers …’
Tiro made a face. ‘I don’t have the least idea what you’re talking about.’
‘No? I thought Cicero had taught you everything there is to know about words. And yet you can’t follow me.’
‘Are you drunk?’
‘No, but you are. Yes, look at you – as giddy as a boy after his first cup of wine. Drunk on your master’s rhetoric, I can tell. You’ve been going at it for eight hours straight, probably on an empty stomach. It’s a wonder you could find your way to answer the door.’
‘You’re not making sense.’
‘I’m making perfect sense. But you’re so intoxicated with gibberish that a little common sense must seem as insipid to you as spring water to a hardened drunkard. Listen to him – like a knife against slate, if you ask me. Yet you act as if it were a siren’s song.’
I had at last managed to eradicate the cheerfulness from Tiro’s face and replace it with a frown of consternation. At that moment Rufus looked tentatively around the corner and then strode into the vestibule, flushed and smiling and batting his heavy-lidded eyes. He looked utterly exhausted, which at his age only served to make him look more charming, especially as he could not stop smiling.
‘We’ve finished the second draft,’ he announced. The constant droning from Cicero’s study had abruptly stopped. On Rufus’s face was the transported look of a child who might have seen a centaur in the woods and could not possibly hope to describe it. ‘Brilliant,’ he finally said. ‘Of course, what do I know of rhetoric? Only what I’ve learned from teachers like Diodotus and Molo, and what I’ve heard with my own ears, sitting in on the Senate and the courts since I was a child. But I swear to you, he’ll bring tears to your eyes when you hear him at the trial. Men will come to their feet with clenched fists, demanding that Sextus Roscius be set free. There’s no final version, of course; we have to contend with all sorts of possibilities, depending on whatever tricks Erucius comes up with. But Cicero’s done what he can to foresee every contingency, and the core of his final argument is there, finished and perfect and ready, like pillars awaiting the dome of a temple. It’s brilliant, there’s no other word for it. I feel so humble simply to have been a witness to it.’
‘You don’t think it’s too dangerous?’ Tiro said in a low voice, stepping from behind me and drawing closer to Rufus, whispering so as to hide his doubts from Cicero in his study.
‘In an unjust state, any act of decency is by its nature dangerous,’ said Rufus. ‘And also brave. A brave man will not fail to put himself into danger, if he has just cause.’
‘Still, aren’t you worried about what might happen after the trial? Such harsh words for Chrysogonus, and Sulla himself isn’t spared.’
‘Is there room in a Roman court for the truth, or not?’ said Rufus. ‘That’s the question. Have we reached such a state that truth is a crime? Cicero is staking his future on the essential fairness and honesty of good Roman citizens. What else can a man of his integrity do?’
‘Of course,’ said Tiro soberly, nodding. ‘It’s his nature to challenge hypocrisy and injustice, to act out of his own principles. Given his nature, what choice does he have?’
I stood by, forgotten and alone. While they conferred and debated, I quietly slipped away and joined Bethesda between the warm sheets of my bed. She purred like a half-asleep cat, then wrinkled her nose with a growl of suspicion when she smelled Electra’s perfume on my flesh. I was too weary to explain or even to tease her. I did not hold her but instead turned my back to her and let her hold me, and so, just as the sound of Cicero’s droning abruptly resumed from the atrium, I slipped into a restless sleep.
One might have thought the house had been deserted, or that someone was gravely ill, so supreme did quiet reign over Cicero’s household the next morning. The strain and bustle of the previous day were replaced by a steady calm that had the appearance of lethargy. The slaves did not scurry back and forth but took their time, speaking always in hushed voices. Even the constant droning of Cicero’s voice had stopped; not a sound came from his study. I ate a bowl of olives and bread that Bethesda brought me and passed the morning as I had the day before, resting and reading in the courtyard near the back of Cicero’s house with Bethesda nearby.
The reproof I expected from Cicero never came. Instead he ignored me,
though not in any pointed manner. I simply seemed to have slipped from his consciousness. I did notice, however, that the guard on the roof whom I had eluded the day before had changed his routine to include an occasional circuit of the colonnade surrounding the courtyard. From his sullen glances I could tell that he, at least, had not escaped Cicero’s wrath.
At some point Tiro appeared. He asked if I was comfortable. I told him I had been reading Cato all morning, but except for that I had no complaints. ‘And your master?’ I said. ‘I haven’t heard a sound from him all day. Not a single epigram, not even the tiniest allusion, not one specimen of alliteration. Not even a metaphor. He’s not ill, is he?’
Tiro bowed his head slightly and spoke with the hushed voice of one admitted to the inner circle of a great enterprise. His transgressions with Roscia forgiven (or at least momentarily forgotten), he had fallen more than ever under his master’s spell. Now the climax approached, and his faith in Cicero had become almost mystical. ‘Cicero is fasting and resting his voice today,’ Tiro said, with all the gravity of a priest explaining the omens to be seen in a flying flock of geese. ‘All his practising these past few days has worn his throat until he’s hoarse. So today no solid foods, only liquids to soothe his throat and moisten his tongue. I’ve been recopying a fresh draft of his oration, while Rufus sorts through each of the legal references to make sure nothing has been overlooked or wrongly attributed. Meanwhile, the house is to be as still and quiet as possible. Cicero must have a day of rest and calm before the trial.’
‘Or else – what?’ I said. ‘A crippling attack of gas before the Rostra?’ Bethesda snickered. Tiro coloured, but quickly recovered. He was far too proud of Cicero to allow a mere insult to fluster him. His manner became haughty. ‘I only bring it up so that you’ll understand when I ask you to be as quiet as possible and to cause no disturbances.’
‘Like the one I caused yesterday by escaping over the roof?’
‘Exactly.’ He held himself erect for a final haughty moment, then let his shoulders slump. ‘Oh, Gordianus, why can’t you simply do as he asks? I don’t understand why you’ve become so … so unreasonable. If you only knew. Cicero understands things that we only guess at. You’ll see what I mean tomorrow, at the trial. I only wish you trusted him as you should.’
He turned, and as he left he took a deep breath and shivered, the way dogs shiver to dry themselves, as if I had left a residue of ill will and disbelief on him and he did not wish to reenter his master’s presence stained by my pollution.
‘I don’t understand you, either,’ said Bethesda softly, looking up from her sewing. ‘Why do you taunt the boy? It’s obvious that he admires you. Why do you make him choose between his master and you? You know that’s unfair.’
It was a rare thing for Bethesda to chide me in such open terms. Was my behaviour so blatantly inappropriate that even my slave felt free to criticize it? I had nothing to say in my defence. Bethesda saw that she had pricked me and made a further sally.
‘If you have a quarrel with Cicero, it makes no sense to punish his slave for it. Why not go to Cicero directly? But I must confess, I don’t understand your attitude any better than the boy. Cicero has been only fair and reasonable at every turn, at least so far as I can see; no, more than fair. Not like the other men you work for. He’s taken you into his household for your own protection, along with your slave – imagine that! He’s fed you, opened his library to you, even posted a guard to look after you from the roof. Try to imagine your good client Hortensius’s doing that! I wonder what the inside of Hortensius’s house looks like, and how many slaves he owns? But I suppose I shall never know.’
Bethesda put down her handiwork. She shielded her eyes from the sun and looked about the courtyard, noting the decorations and flourishes as if they had been installed especially for her approval. I didn’t bother to reprimand her for speaking out of hand. What did the opinions of a slave matter, after all – except that, as always, she had spoken the very doubts and questions that were spinning in my own head.
XXX
The Ides of May dawned with a pale blue light. I woke in slow stages, dislocated from my dreams and disoriented in a strange house – neither my house on the Esquiline nor any of the houses I had passed through in a lifetime of restless travel. Hushed, hurried voices penetrated the room from every quarter. Why should any house be so busy so very early in the morning? I kept thinking that someone must have died during the night, but in that case I would have been awakened by sobbing and lamentations.
Bethesda was pressed against my back with one arm slipped beneath my own, hugging my chest. I felt the soft, full cushion of her breasts against my back, pressing gently against me with each breath. Her exhalation was warm and sweet against the back of my ear. I began to wake and resisted it, in the way that men cling to even a troubled sleep when a dull despair hangs over them. I felt content with my own unhappy dreams and altogether apathetic about whatever hushed crisis was brewing in the strange house around me. I shut my eyes and turned the dawn back into darkest night.
I opened my eyes again. Bethesda, fully dressed, was standing over me and shaking my shoulder. The room was filled with yellow light.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she was saying. I sat up at once and shook my head. ‘Are you sick? No? Then I think you’d better hurry. All the others have already gone.’ She filled a cup with cool water and handed it to me. ‘I had thought they must have forgotten you entirely, until Tiro came running back and asked me where you were. When I told him I’d tried to wake you twice already and you were still in bed, he just threw up his hands and went running after his master.’
‘How long ago was this?’
She shrugged. ‘Only a little while. But you won’t be able to catch them, not if you take time to wash yourself and eat something. Tiro said not to worry, he’d save you a place beside him at the Rostra.’ She took the empty cup from me and smiled. ‘I had a look at the woman.’
‘What woman?’ The image of Electra flashed in my mind; it seemed I had dreamed about her, though I couldn’t quite remember. ‘And surely I have a clean tunic?’
She pointed to a chair in the corner where my best clothes had been laid out. One of Cicero’s slaves must have fetched them from my house. The tunic was spotless. A rent corner in the hem of my toga had been newly restitched. Even my shoes had been freshly scrubbed and polished with oil.
‘The woman,’ Bethesda said again. ‘The one they call Caecilia.’
‘Caecilia Metella was here? This morning?’
‘She arrived just after dawn in a very grand litter. There was such a commotion among the slaves that the noise got me out of bed. She’s let you inside her house twice, hasn’t she? It must be very grand.’
‘It is. She came alone? I mean, with only her retinue?’
‘No, the man came as well; Sextus Roscius. Flanked by six guards with their swords drawn.’ She paused and looked remote, as if trying to recall important details. ‘One of the guards was extremely handsome.’
I sat on the bed to fasten the leather straps of my shoes. ‘I don’t suppose you noticed Roscius himself?’
‘I did.’
‘And how did he look?’
‘Very pale. Of course, the light was weak.’
‘Not so weak that you couldn’t see the guard well enough.’
‘I could have seen the guard well enough in the dark.’
‘I’m sure you could have. Now help me arrange my toga.’
The Forum had the unsettled feeling of a half-holiday. Since it was the Ides, both the people’s Comitia and the Curia of the Senate were closed. But a number of moneylenders and bankers had their offices open, and while the outlying pathways were empty, as I drew towards the centre of the Forum the streets became increasingly congested. Men of all classes, alone or in groups, were making their way towards the Rostra with an air of sombre excitement. The crowd that thronged the open square around the Rostra itself was so thick that I had to e
lbow my way through. There is nothing that thrills a Roman like a trial, especially when it promises to end in someone’s ruin.
In the midst of the crowd I passed a sumptuous litter with its curtains drawn shut. As I stepped alongside, a hand shot through the hangings and gripped my forearm. I glanced down, amazed that so withered a limb could command such strength. The hand released me and withdrew, leaving behind the clear indentations of five sharp fingernails. The curtains parted and the same hand beckoned me to stick my head inside.
Caecilia Metella, reclined upon a bed of plush cushions, was wearing a loose purple gown and a necklace of pearls. Her high, coiled hair was held in place by a silver needle decorated at the head with a cluster of lapis. At her right shoulder, sitting cross-legged, was the eunuch Ahausarus.
‘What do you think, young man?’ she asked in a hoarse whisper. ‘How will it go?’
‘For whom? Cicero? Sulla? The assassins?’
She furrowed her brow and frowned. ‘Don’t be facetious. For young Sextus Roscius, of course.’
‘Hard to say. Only augurs and oracles can read the future.’
‘But with all Cicero’s hard work, and with Rufus to help him, surely Roscius will receive the verdict he deserves.’
‘How can I answer, when I don’t know what that verdict should be?’
She looked at me darkly and touched her long, henna-stained nails to her lips. ‘What are you saying? After all you’ve learned of the truth, you can’t believe he’s guilty. Can you?’ Her voice trembled.
‘Like every good citizen,’ I said, ‘I put my faith in Roman justice.’ I pulled back my head and let the curtain drop.
Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) Page 43