Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4)

by Steven Saylor

  Day turned to night without formalities to mark the hours. Dinner was never served; people slipped into the kitchens to pick at leftover portions from the previous day’s feast, or nibbled at delicacies brought back from the games. Without slaves to tend to the beds and light the lamps, to indicate the hours with the unending cycle of their labour, time seemed to stop; yet darkness still descended.

  That night Morpheus passed over the villa at Baiae. His spell covered all the rest of the world, but he overlooked the inhabitants of that house; there was no sleep for anyone, only the darkness and stillness of the long night. With Iaia and Gelina I kept a vigil in Eco’s room, listening in amazement as he muttered a fitful stream of names and incoherent phrases. What he said made no sense, and the sounds were often crude and slurred, but there was no denying that he spoke. I asked Iaia if she had put a spell on him, but she claimed no credit.

  I sat and fretted in the dim light of Iaia’s room, my head spinning at all the terrible and wonderful things that could happen in a single day.

  At last I wrapped a cloak around my shoulders, lit a small lamp, and wandered through the quiet house. The empty hallways were dark, illuminated only here and there where cold white moonlight poured through a window.

  Done with her errands for Iaia, Olympias had retired to her own room, but not to sleep. Through her door I heard soft murmurings and sighs, and the low, hearty laugh of a young man released after long days and nights of exile in a cave, luxuriating amid soft pillows and the caresses of warm, familiar flesh. I smiled, wishing I had some excuse to stumble in on their coupling, now that the throbbing in my head had finally ceased and I could truly appreciate the sight.

  I continued to wander until I made my way to the men’s baths and stood beside the great pool. The waters of the mineral spring seethed and gurgled; the rising steam danced and vanished in the glow of my little lamp. I looked toward the terrace and saw two naked figures standing side by side, leaning against the balustrade and each other. They gazed out at the reflection of the moon on the shimmering bay. Pools of water marked the path of their footsteps from the bath to the balustrade, and great clouds of steam rose from their heated flesh. The moonlight shone like a fuzzy halo on Mummius’s great hairy shoulders and buttocks; the same light shone on Apollonius and seemed to turn him into quicksilver and polished marble.

  I covered my lamp with my hand. Silent and unseen, I found a way down from the terrace onto the path that led to the pier. I turned toward the annexe instead and ascended the hill. I came to the long, low building where the captives had been held. Its door was pressed back against the wall and opened onto utter blackness. I paused for a moment and stepped inside, then recoiled at the shock of the smell. The place was filled with the odour of human misery, but tonight it was empty and silent.

  From the stables farther ahead I heard the sounds of quiet conversation and laughter. I followed the path around the corner of the building to the open courtyard. Three guards were posted outside the stables, wrapped in cloaks and gathered around the warmth of an open fire. One of them recognized me and nodded. Behind them, the door to the stables stood ajar, and within I saw the slaves huddled in groups around tiny lamps. Above the low murmur of conversation I heard someone snap, ‘Get out of there, you pest!’ and I knew that Meto must be among them.

  I turned toward the villa and took a long, deep breath of cold air. There was no wind; the tall trees that surrounded the villa stood upright and silent. All the world seemed strangely alert and bemused by moonlight.

  I walked across the courtyard, hearing the soft crunch of gravel beneath my feet. On the doorstep I hesitated; instead of entering the villa I lingered beneath the portico, then walked along the outer wall until I came to one of the windows that looked into the library. The draperies were only partly shut. The room was brightly lit. Within I saw Marcus Crassus wrapped in his chlamys, toiling over a stack of opened scrolls with a cup of wine in his left hand. He never appeared to look up, but after a long moment he spoke. ‘You need not skulk outside, Gordianus; your spying is done. Come inside. Not through the window – this is a Roman house, not a hovel.’

  I returned to the front door and passed through the entry hall. In the darkness the waxen faces of Lucius Licinius’s ancestors gazed down on me, looking grim but satisfied. I walked through the atrium, where the odour of incense had at last covered the lingering smell of putrefaction. Moonlight poured through the open roof like a great column of liquid opal. Holding my lamp aloft, I studied the letters SPARTA on the floor. Under the wavering lamplight and moonlight the crude scratches shone gold and silver, as if some passing god, and not a mere murderous mortal, had drawn them with his fingertip.

  There was no guard outside the library. The door stood open. Crassus did not turn or look up when I entered, but indicated that I should sit in the chair to his left. After a moment he pushed the scrolls away, pinched the bridge of his nose, and produced a second silver cup, which he filled to the brim from a clay bottle.

  ‘I’m not thirsty, thank you, Marcus Crassus.’

  ‘Drink,’ he said, in a tone that allowed no rebuttal. I obediently put the cup to my lips. The wine was dark and rich, and spread a warm glow through my chest.

  ‘Falernian,’ said Crassus. ‘From the last year of Sulla’s dictatorship. An exceptional vintage; it was Lucius’s favourite. There was only one bottle left in the cellar. Now there are none.’ He filled his own cup again, then poured the last drops into mine.

  I sipped, breathing in the bouquet. The wine was as bemusing as the moonlight. ‘No one sleeps tonight,’ I said quietly. ‘Time seems to have stopped altogether.’

  ‘Time never stops,’ said Crassus with a bitter edge to his voice.

  ‘You are not pleased with me, Marcus Crassus. And yet I only did what I was hired to do. Anything less would have shown contempt for the generous fee you promised me.’

  He looked at me sidelong. His expression was unreadable. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said at last, ‘you’ll get your fee. I didn’t become the richest man in Rome by swindling petty hirelings.’

  I nodded and sipped the Falernian.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Crassus, ‘for a moment, out there in the arena today, when you were rolling your eyes and making your passionate speech, I actually thought – can you believe it? – I thought that you were going to accuse me of killing Lucius.’

  ‘Imagine that,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. If you had dared such impudence, I think I might have ordered one of the guards to put a spear through your heart then and there. No one would have questioned such an act. I would have called it self-defence; you had a knife concealed on your person, you looked like a madman, and you were ranting like Cicero on a bad day.’

  ‘You would never have done such a thing, Marcus Crassus. Had you killed me immediately after I made such a public accusation, you would only have planted a seed of doubt in everyone who was there.’

  ‘You think so, Gordianus?’

  I shrugged. ‘Besides, the point is hypothetical. I never made such an accusation.’

  ‘And you never intended to?’

  I sipped the Falernian. ‘It seems useless to dwell on such a question, since what you describe never occurred and the true murderer was identified – just in time to avoid a terrible miscarriage of justice, I might add, though I know you find that to be a minor point.’

  Crassus made a low noise in his throat, rather like a growl. It had not been easy for him to cancel the slaughter after arousing the curiosity and whetting the blood lust of the crowd. Even after the revelation of Fabius’s guilt, he might have gone on with the massacre had it not been for the intervention of Gelina. Meek, mild Gelina had at last put her foot down. Armed with the truth, she was transformed before our eyes. Her jaw set, her eyes hard and glittering like glass, she had demanded that Crassus cancel his farce. Mummius, blustering and outraged, had joined her. Assaulted from both sides, Crassus had acquiesced. He had ordered his guards to escort Fabius
and himself back to the villa, curtly charged Mummius with closing the games, and then had made an abrupt and unceremonious exit.

  ‘Did you stay for the end of the games?’ Crassus asked.

  ‘No. I left only moments after you did.’ Why bother to explain that Alexandros and I had carried Eco back to the villa, fearing for his life? Crassus had hardly noticed Eco’s collapse, and probably did not even remember it.

  ‘Mummius tells me that all went smoothly, but he’s lying, of course. I must be the laughing stock of the whole Cup tonight.’

  ‘I seriously doubt that, Marcus Crassus. You are not the sort of man at whom people would ever dare to laugh, even behind your back.’

  ‘Still, to have the slaves rounded up and herded from the ring as unceremoniously as they were herded into it, with no explanation – I could hear the murmurs of disappointment and confusion even from outside the arena walls. For a climax, Mummius tells me he hastily assembled all the surviving gladiators and forced them to fight again in simultaneous matches; not exactly an original idea, was it? Imagine what a farce that became, with the gladiators already weary and some of them wounded, hacking away at each other like clumsy amateurs. When I pressed him about it, Mummius admitted that the lower tiers quickly emptied out. The connoisseurs know a bad spectacle when they see it, and the status seekers saw no point in remaining when I was no longer there to smile back at them.’

  We sat in silence for a moment, sipping the wine.

  ‘Where is Faustus Fabius tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘Here in the villa, as before. Except that tonight I’ve placed guards outside his room and had him stripped of any weapons, poisons, or potions, lest he do some harm to himself before I decide what I shall do with him.’

  ‘Will you bring charges against him? Will there be a trial in Rome?’

  Crassus again put on the face of a disappointed tutor. ‘What? Go to so much trouble on account of the murder of a nobody like Lucius? Alienate the Fabii, expose an unspeakable scandal in which my own cousin was involved, embarrass myself in the process – they were using my ship and my resources to carry out their schemes, after all – do all this on the eve of the great crisis, when I stand ready to take the command against Spartacus and begin my campaign for the consulship next year? No, Gordianus, there will be no public accusation; there will be no trial.’

  ‘Then Faustus Fabius will go unpunished?’

  ‘I never said that. There are many ways for a man to die during wartime, Gordianus. Even a high-ranking officer can be struck down by a spear accidentally cast from behind him, or receive a fatal blow which cannot afterwards be accounted for. And I never said that, either.’

  ‘Did he confess everything to you?’

  ‘Everything. It was just as you thought; he and Lucius had hatched their smuggling scheme together during my visit to Baiae last spring. Faustus comes from a very old, very distinguished patrician family. His branch of the Fabii retain a vestige of their old prestige, but they lost their fortune long ago. Such a man can become very bitter, especially when he serves under another man of a lower social rank whose wealth and power far exceed his own and always will. Still, to have betrayed Rome for the sake of his own aggrandizement, to have sacrificed the honour of the Fabii, to have given succour to an army of murderous slaves – these crimes are unforgivable and beneath contempt.’

  Crassus sighed. ‘The crimes of my cousin Lucius are even more painful to me. He was a weak man, too weak to make his own way in the world, neither wise enough nor patient enough to trust my generosity. I consider it a personal affront that he should have used my own organization and embezzled my own funds to engage in such a disgusting criminal enterprise. I always gave him more than he deserved, and this was how he repaid me! I’m only sorry that he died as quickly and painlessly as he did; he deserved an even crueller death.’

  ‘Why did Fabius kill him?’

  ‘My visit was unscheduled and unexpected. Lucius had only a few days’ notice before my arrival. He panicked – there are dozens of improprieties in his records; there were swords and spears hidden down in the boathouse, awaiting shipment. The night before we arrived, Fabius stole away from the camp at Lake Lucrinus after dark and came to confer with Lucius. To confuse anyone who might see him, and without my knowledge, he took my own cloak before he rode off. It was suitably dark; all the better to hide himself. He didn’t foresee the use to which he would put it, and the fact that he would have to dispose of it altogether. Once it was ruined with blood he could neither leave it at the scene of the crime nor return it to me. He tore the seal from the cloak and threw both into the bay. The seal, being heavier, must have reached the water; the cloak caught on the branches.

  ‘I missed my cloak the next day and wondered where it had gone; I mentioned it to Fabius himself and he never batted an eyelash! Why do you think I’ve been wearing this old chlamys of Lucius’s every night? Not to conform to the Baian taste for Greek fashion, but because the cloak I brought from Rome was missing.’

  I stared at him, suddenly suspicious. ‘But on the same night that I suggested Lucius had been killed here in the library, you asked me where the blood had gone; do you remember, Marcus Crassus?’

  ‘Perfectly well.’

  ‘And I told you then that a bloodstained cloak had been found, discarded by the road. You must have suspected that it was your cloak!’

  He shook his head. ‘No, Gordianus. You told me that you had discovered a cloth, not a cloak. You never called it a cloak; I remember your words exactly.’ He breathed through his nostrils, sipped his wine, and looked at me shrewdly. ‘Very well, I admit that at that moment I experienced an odd quiver of apprehension; perhaps a part of me glimpsed a path that might lead to the truth. Perhaps a passing god whispered in my ear that this cloth might be my missing cloak, in which case there was far more to Lucius’s murder than I had previously suspected. But one hears such vague whisperings all the time, no? And even the wisest man never knows if the gods whisper true wisdom in his ear or cruel folly.’

  ‘Still, why did Fabius murder Lucius?’

  ‘Fabius left Rome prepared to kill Lucius, but the actual murder was spontaneous. Lucius became hysterical. What if I found him out, as I surely would if I made more than a cursory inspection of his records or located the captain of the Fury? He saw his own destruction loom before him. Fabius urged him to keep a cool head; together, he argued, they could keep me busy with other matters and deflect me from ever suspecting their enterprise. Who knows? They might have succeeded. But Lucius lost his wits, began to weep and insisted that a full confession was their only recourse. He intended to tell me everything and throw himself on my mercy, exposing Fabius along with himself. Fabius reached for the statue and silenced his babbling for ever.

  ‘It was a stroke of genius to incriminate the slaves, don’t you think? That kind of quick-witted, cold-blooded reaction is exactly the quality I need in my officers. What a waste! When Zeno and Alexandros walked in on him, all the better – Fabius scared them off and sent them fleeing into the night to become his scapegoats. He was lucky that Zeno died, because Zeno almost certainly had recognized him. But Alexandros had never seen him before, and so couldn’t tell Iaia and Olympias whom he had seen.’

  ‘That was why Fabius left the name Spartacus unfinished – because the slaves disturbed him?’

  ‘No. He had already cleaned the visible blood in the library and wiped it from the floor of the hallway, but he had not yet gathered up the incriminating scrolls that Lucius had been poring over. Some of them had been open on the table when he killed Lucius and were spattered with blood. Fabius had simply rolled them up to get them out of the way and put them on the floor. He intended to finish scrawling the name, rearrange the corpse in a more convincing manner, and then go back to the library to gather up the incriminating documents, so that he could toss them into the sea along with the cloak, or perhaps burn them.

  ‘Then he heard a voice from the hallway. Someone in the hou
se had apparently heard him working or had been awakened by the clatter of the slaves departing and had got up to investigate. The voice called again, closer to the atrium; Fabius knew he would have to flee immediately or else commit a second murder. I don’t know why he lost his nerve; of course he had no way of telling if the newcomer was armed or not, alone or with others. At any rate, he grabbed the cloak and fled.’

  ‘But no one in the house admitted to hearing anything that night.’

  ‘Oh?’ Crassus said sardonically. ‘Then someone lied to you. Imagine! Who might that have been?’

  ‘Dionysius.’

  Crassus nodded. ‘The old scoundrel walked into the atrium to find his patron lying dead on the floor. Instead of raising an alarm, he took his time to evaluate the situation and consider how he might profit from it. He headed for the library to do some quick snooping. He found the incriminating documents; why they were incriminating he had no way of knowing, but the blood on the parchment spoke for itself. He took them up to his room and hid them away, then presumably pored over them at his leisure, trying to connect them with the murder.

  ‘Imagine Fabius’s panic when he arrived at the villa with me the next day and, sneaking off to the library at his first opportunity, found that the documents had vanished! And yet he gave no outward sign of his agitation. What a cool, calculating countenance! What an officer Rome has lost!

  ‘It wasn’t until the night you arrived that he was able to slip down to the boathouse to throw the weapons into the water; he had attempted to do so on previous nights, but there was always some interruption, or else he was seen and couldn’t risk going through with it. Actually, I think he was being overhesitant; your arrival spurred him to take the risk – and then you came upon him in the middle of the act! Stabbing you would have looked too much like a second murder, so he tried to drown you instead.’