Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4)

by Steven Saylor

  ‘But I was talking about Spartacus. In the normal course of things these Thracians would have been broken to Batiatus’s will, one way or another, or they might have revolted against him and been killed on the spot, putting a sorry end to a sorry episode. But among their number was a man called Spartacus. It happens sometimes that even among slaves you’ll find a man of forceful character, a brute with a way of making other brutes gather around him to do his will. There’s nothing mystical about it – I suppose Dionysius has babbled on to you about his history of the supposed magician Eunus and the slave revolt in Sicily sixty years ago, a thoroughly disgusting episode; at least it was contained on an island. They’re already saying the same sort of rubbish about Spartacus, that before he was sold into slavery he was seen sleeping with snakes coiled around his head, and the slave he calls his wife is some sort of prophetess who goes into convulsions and speaks for the god Bacchus.’

  ‘So they say down in the Subura markets,’ I admitted.

  Crassus wrinkled his nose. ‘Why anyone would live in the Subura when there are so many decent neighbourhoods in Rome—’

  ‘My father left me a house, up on the Esquiline,’ I explained.

  ‘Take my advice and sell whatever sort of rattrap you’ve got on the Esquiline and buy a newer place outside the city walls; out on the Campus Martius beyond the Forum Holitorium there’s a lot of new building going on, by the old naval yards. Close by the river, clean air, good values. More wine?’

  I accepted. Crassus rubbed his eyes, but from the way he ground his jaw I could see he was not sleepy.

  ‘But we were talking about Spartacus,’ he said. ‘In the beginning there were only seventy of them – can you imagine, just seventy miserable Thracian gladiators who decided to escape from their master. They didn’t even have a plan; they were going to bide their time and look for an opportunity, but then one of their number betrayed them – slaves always betray one another – and they acted on impulse, using axes and spits from the cookhouse for weapons. The goddess Fortune must have looked down and been amused, because on their way out of town they came upon a driver with a cart full of real weapons, headed for Batiatus’s gladiator farm. From then on it seemed that nothing could stop them. To be sure, the threat was badly gauged at the start; no one in Rome could take a revolt of gladiators seriously, so they sent out Clodius with a half legion of irregulars, thinking that would be the end of it. Ha! It was merely the end of Clodius’s career in politics. Victory feeds on victory; every time he triumphed over Roman arms Spartacus found it easier to incite more slaves to join him. They say he now commands a movable nation of over a hundred thousand men, women, and children. And not only slaves; even freeborn herdsmen and shepherds have cast their lot with him. For one thing, they say he hands out the booty with no regard for rank or station; his foot soldiers get as great a share as his generals.’

  Crassus curled his lip as if his wine had gone sour. ‘The whole affair is perverse! To think it should come to this, that I should be scrambling for glory by pitting myself against a slave, a gladiator. The Senate won’t even allow me a triumph in Rome if I win, never mind that Spartacus is a greater threat to the Republic than Mithridates or Jugurtha ever were. I’ll be lucky if they give me a garland. And if I should lose …’ A shadow crossed his face. He muttered a prayer of supplication, dabbed his fingers in his wine cup and tossed the drops over his shoulder.

  It seemed a good time to change the subject. ‘Was it true, the story that Dionysius told this evening, about the sea cave?’

  Crassus smiled, as he had at dinner. ‘Every word. Oh, I suppose it’s become a bit embellished in the retelling over the years, given a nostalgic polish. In many ways those were terrible times for me, miserable months of anxious waiting. And grief.’ He swirled his cup and studied its depths. ‘It is a hard thing for a young man to lose his father, especially to suicide. His enemies drove him to it. And an older brother, assassinated only because Cinna and Marius were bent on destroying the best families in Rome. They would have wiped out the nobility altogether if they could have. Thank the gods, and especially Fortune, that Sulla rose up to save us.’

  He sighed. ‘Do you know, stuck in that miserable cave day after day, month after month, I made a vow to myself every morning: they won’t get me, I said. They struck down my father, they struck down my brother, but I will not be struck down! And so far I haven’t been.’

  He swirled his cup and blinked, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them wide, looking weary but far from sleep. ‘I did the right thing, you know, the pious thing. I honoured the gods and the shades of the dead. I paid my father’s debts, though it left me with nothing, and I took up his cause, and when the times became more settled I married my brother’s widow. I married Tertulla for piety, not love; even so, I have never regretted the choice. Not all of us can indulge ourselves in cheap sentiment, like Lucius Licinius. Or Mummius!’ he snorted. ‘Now Lucius is dead, and I – I am either the man of the hour, as Dionysius will gladly tell you, or else a man who is marching steadily and without the slightest hesitation towards his utter ruination at the hands of a slave. I would rather see my wealth vanish than to hear them whisper behind my back in the Forum: “He was brought low by a mere gladiator …” ’

  While I shifted uneasily in my chair, he paused to sip from his cup. ‘You think I should spare the slaves, don’t you, Gordianus?’

  ‘If I can prove to you that they should not die.’

  He shook his head sadly. ‘All men are fated to die, Gordianus. Why does the idea fill them with such abhorrence? Wealth and possessions, joy and pain, even the body – especially the body – all these vanish in the well of time. Only honour matters in the end. Honour is what men remember. Or dishonour.’

  Such a way of thinking sums up the difference between nobles and ordinary men, I thought; it excuses the most horrifying atrocities and lets go the simplest opportunities for charity and mercy.

  ‘But you must have come here for a reason,’ said Crassus, ‘unless you were merely eavesdropping. Do you have something to report, Gordianus?’

  ‘Only that we found the body of one of the missing slaves.’

  ‘Yes?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Which one?’

  ‘The old secretary, Zeno.’

  ‘Where was he? My men supposedly searched every possible hiding place within a day’s ride.’

  ‘He was in plain sight. Or at least what was left of him. Somehow he ended up in Lake Avernus. We found his remains on the shoreline; most of his body had been eaten away. Fortunately, enough remained of his face for Olympias to recognize him.’

  ‘Avernus! I know for a fact that before he left for Rome Mummius assigned a group of men to search the whole area around the lake, including the shore. How long had Zeno been there?’

  ‘For days, at least.’

  ‘Then somehow they missed finding him. Probably one of them saw a bit of mist in the shape of his dead wife, or the lake spat like a baby with colic, and the whole lot of them turned and ran, then they lied when they reported there was nothing to find. They will have to be disciplined; the time to make one’s authority clear is long before the fighting starts. Just another of the endless details I shall have to attend to tomorrow!’ He turned wearily toward the table and rifled among the documents until he found a wax tablet and stylus. He scribbled a note and tossed the tablet back onto the table. ‘Where is the body of Zeno now, or what remains of it?’

  ‘There was very little of him left, as I said. Unfortunately, my son Eco slipped in the mud while he was carrying the head along the shore; it fell into a boiling pool of water …’ I shrugged. I was uncertain why I lied, except that I wanted to avoid calling attention to Olympias.

  ‘You mean you have nothing to show me?’ Crassus suddenly seemed to have reached the end of his patience. ‘This whole business is absurd. Between you and Gelina and Mummius – really, it’s been a very long day, Gordianus, and tomorrow will be even longer. I think you may go now.’ />
  ‘Of course.’ I stood and began to turn, then stopped. ‘One other thing, if I may impose on your patience for another moment, Marcus Crassus. I see that you’ve been looking over Lucius Licinius’s documents.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wonder if you’ve come across anything … untoward?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Sometimes a man’s records can reveal unexpected things. There might be something among all those documents that might have a bearing on my own work.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how. The truth is, Lucius usually kept impeccable records; I required him to do so. When I was here in the spring I looked over his ledgers and found everything accounted for, using the methods I had prescribed. Now it’s all a puzzle.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Expenses have been entered with no explanation. There are contradictory indications of how often he used the Fury, and on what errands. Stranger still, it seems to me that some documents must be missing altogether. I thought at first that I could reconstruct and make sense of them by myself, but I think I shall be unable to. I’d have brought along my chief accountant from Rome if I’d known the state of things, but I had no idea that Lucius’s affairs were in such chaos.’

  ‘And do you find any of this suggestive?’

  ‘Suggestive of what?’ He looked at me quizzically, then snorted. ‘With you, everything comes back to the murder. Yes, it suggests something to me – namely, that the old secretary Zeno had made such a muddle of things that Lucius decided to give him a sound beating, whereupon the hotheaded young stableman Alexandros exploded in a Thracian rage and killed his master, where upon the two slaves fled into the night, only to find themselves swallowed up by the Jaws of Hades. There, I’ve done your work for you, Gordianus. Now you can go to bed content.’

  From the tone of his voice I knew that Crassus insisted on having the final word. I was at the door, reaching to open it, when my hand froze. Something had been not quite right from the moment I entered the room; I had felt an apprehension so vague that I had dismissed it as one blinks away a mote of dust. At that instant I knew what it was, and that I had seen it not once, but over and over as I had sat listening to Crassus and letting my eyes wander about the room.

  I turned and walked to the little statue of Hercules in his lion hood.

  ‘Marcus Crassus, was there a guard on this room during the day?’

  ‘Of course not. My bodyguards go where I go. The room was empty, so far as I know. No one has legitimate business to come into this room except me.’

  ‘But someone might have entered?’

  ‘I suppose. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Marcus Crassus, you mentioned the blood on this statue to no one?’

  ‘Not even to Morpheus,’ he said wearily, ‘with whom I have a meeting long overdue.’

  ‘And yet someone else in the house knew of it. Because since last we spoke someone has done a thorough job of removing the dried blood from the lion’s mane.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘See here, where last night there was plentiful evidence of blood trapped in the sculpted furrows, someone has since then deliberately and carefully scraped them clean. You can even see where the metal has been newly scratched.’

  He pursed his lips. ‘What of it?’

  ‘The rest of the room isn’t freshly cleaned; I see dust on the shelves, and a circle from a wine cup on the table. It seems unlikely that a slave would have given such a thorough cleaning to this particular object in this particular room, with so much other work to do in preparation for the funeral. Besides, any domestic slave fit for this house would have known how to clean a statue without scarring the metal. No, I think this was done hurriedly by someone who didn’t know that the blood had already been noticed, and hoped to prevent us from seeing it. That someone was not Alexandros, and it surely was not Zeno. Whereby it follows that the murderer of Lucius Licinius, or someone who knows something about the murder, is here among us, actively concealing evidence.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Crassus admitted, sounding weary and cross. ‘It’s getting chilly,’ he complained, plucking his chlamys from the centaur statue and wrapping it across his shoulders.

  ‘Marcus Crassus, I think it might be a good idea to place a guard inside this room at all times, to make sure that nothing else is taken or altered without our knowledge.’

  ‘If you wish. Now, is there anything else?’

  ‘Nothing, Marcus Crassus,’ I said quietly as I left the room, walking backwards and nodding my head in deference.

  XVI

  Why you? asked Eco, signing sceptically the next morning when I told him of my midnight conversation with Crassus. I took the question to mean: Why should such a great man confide so much to a man like you?

  ‘Why not?’ I said, splashing my face with cold water. ‘Whom else can he talk to in this house?’

  Eco squared his shoulders and mimed a beard on his face.

  ‘Yes, Marcus Mummius is his old friend and confidant, but at the moment they’re feuding about the fate of the slave, Apollonius.’

  Eco stuck his nose in the air and painted tendrils of hair swept back from his forehead.

  ‘Yes, there’s Faustus Fabius, but I can’t imagine Crassus showing weakness to a patrician, especially a patrician who happens to be his subordinate.’

  Eco circled his arms in a hoop before him and puffed his cheeks. I shook my head. ‘Sergius Orata? No, Crassus would be even less likely to show weakness to a business associate. A philosopher would be a natural choice, but if Crassus has one, he’s left him behind in Rome, and he despises Dionysius. Yet Crassus desperately needs someone, anyone, to listen to him – here and now, because the gods are too far away. He faces a great crisis; he is full of doubt. Doubt hounds him from hour to hour, moment to moment, and not just about his decision to take on Spartacus. I think he secretly doubts even his decision to massacre Gelina’s slaves. He’s a man used to absolute control and clear-cut decisions, counting up tangible profits and losses. The past haunts him – bloody chaos and the death of those he loved most. Now he’s about to step into a dark and uncertain future – a terrible gamble, but one worth taking, because if he succeeds he may at last become so powerful that no power on earth can ever harm him again.’

  I shrugged. ‘So why not tell everything to Gordianus the Finder, from whom no one can keep a secret anyway? As for confidentiality, I’m famous for it – almost as well known for keeping my mouth shut as you are.’

  Eco splashed me with a handful of water.

  ‘Stop that! Besides, there’s something about me that compels others to empty their hearts.’ I said it jokingly, but it was true; there are those to whom others quite naturally confide their deepest secrets, and I have always been one of them. I looked at myself in the mirror. If the power to pull the truth from others resided somewhere in my face, I couldn’t see it. It was a common face, I thought, with a nose that looked as if it had been broken, though it had not, common brown eyes and common black curls streaked with more and more strands of silver every year. With the passing of time it had come to remind me of my father’s face, as best as I could recall it. My mother I barely remembered, but if my father told the truth when he insisted she had been beautiful, then I had not inherited her looks.

  It was also a face that badly needed a shave, if I was to put in a decent appearance at the funeral of Lucius Licinius.

  ‘Come, Eco. Surely out of ninety-nine slaves Gelina has one who’s a decent barber. You shall have a shave as well.’ I said it just to please him, but when I glanced at his smiling face in the morning sunlight, I saw that there actually was a faint shadow across his jaw.

  ‘Yesterday you were a boy,’ I whispered, under my breath.

  Ironic as it sounds, there is nothing quite so alive as a Roman household on the day of a funeral. The villa was full of guests, who thronged the atrium and the hallways and spilled over into the baths. While Eco and I reclined on couches, su
bmitting our jaws to be shaved, naked strangers loitered about the pools, refreshing themselves after hard morning rides from points as distant as Capua and the far side of Vesuvius. Others had arrived by boat, ferried across the bay from Surrentum, Stabiae, and Pompeii. After my ablutions I stood on the terrace of the baths and looked down on the boathouse, where the short pier was too small for all the arrivals; skiffs and barges were lashed to one another, so that the later arrivals had to walk to the pier over a small floating city of boats.

  Metrobius, draped in a voluminous towel, joined me on the balcony. ‘Lucius Licinius must have been a popular man,’ I said.

  He snorted. ‘Don’t imagine they’ve all come just to see poor Lucius go up in smoke. No, all these wealthy merchants and landowners and vacationing nobility are here for quite a different reason. They want to impress you-know-who.’ He glanced over his shoulder toward the heated pool, where the slave Apollonius was helping an old man emerge from the water. ‘I had to push and shove all through the house to get here. The atrium is already so crowded I could hardly cross it. I haven’t seen so much black in one place since Sulla died over in Puteoli. Though I noticed,’ he said, wrinkling his nose, ‘that most of the visitors were giving the corpse a wide berth.’ He laughed softly. ‘And they’re already whispering jokes; usually that doesn’t start until after the ceremony, when the eating begins.’

  ‘Jokes?’

  ‘You know – stepping up to the bier, peering into the corpse’s mouth, then sighing, “The coin is still there! Imagine that, with Crassus in the house!” And don’t you dare repeat that to Crassus,’ he quickly added. ‘Or at least don’t tell him that you heard it from me.’ He stepped away with a dry smile. Apparently he had forgotten that he had told me the same joke the day before.

  I peered over the balcony again, wondering how I would ever manage to discover what had been dumped off the pier with so many vessels moored there. Many of the rowers were still in their boats, or loitered about the boathouse, waiting for their masters to return.