by Ben Pastor
"Leaving out the particulars, it's exactly what I thought had happened. What proofs are there that Agnus maneuvered the deal?"
"An anonymous letter, showing by the wealth of details that it was written by one of those directly involved, reached the prosecutor's office. It seems that even among the Christians the occasional traitor crops up—Agnus must have stepped on one of his comrades' holy toes. Thank goodness Isaac's name appeared nowhere on the letter. The upshot is that Agnus the charlatan is being sought, and—by association—so is his female assistant. And not only in Belgica Prima, where they were last seen. Warrants for their arrest are being issued for other provinces of the Empire as well."
"I see." Aelius resumed walking. He thought of the morning when he'd ridden to Lupus's brickyard, of the veiled women crouching in the wet fields, waiting to see the man brought back from the dead. How he'd looked at them, and they at him, covering their faces. Sounding more indifferent than he felt, he asked, "What role did the deaconess play in the mise-en-scene, do we know?"
"According to Isaac, her name is not directly mentioned, either. The letter is an invective against Agnus's hypocrisy and legerdemain, but Casta 15 Agnus's close collaborator, so ... Why, even Constantius, who's had such a soft spot for the Christians thus far, ordered the heads of their movement arrested for questioning, on the principle that, if you cannot catch the thief who runs away from you, you catch the thief who's at hand. Trust me, once the authorities lay their hands on them, the fire waker is as good as thrown to the Circus's beasts; and as far as his girl is concerned, they won't stop at stripping her naked this time. I stop here, Commander. Have to go back to work."
"This is all well and good, Baruch, but it doesn't tell us who poisoned Marcus Lupus."
"What does it matter? Send what you owe me to my quarters." Drawing the furry hood closer to his face, ben Matthias made something between a nod and a bow of farewell. "Like bakers, let me add to the dozen a thirteenth bun for free, although I don't for the life of me see why I should bother to warn you: Leave things alone. I haven't come this far in life without being able to smell danger in the air. There's danger here. I can't see its shape, but somehow I perceive its slithering motions. If you thought enemies lurked in the shadows in a sunny place like Egypt, think of how much longer the shadows are in the northern provinces."
Mediolanum's courthouse rose in the Mall, overlooking the Main Hinge, one of the two first streets from the original layout of the city. Because of the holidays, few employees were present. It turned out to be an advantage for Aelius, because they let him search the archives by himself. The building was unheated. Aelius had to walk back and forth as he read this or that list of dockets tied to property and inheritance rights. The good folks at Mediolanum seemed rather litigious when it came to money. Under Decimus's name, four different disputes were listed: M. Curius Decimus vs. P. Curius Livianus (two disputes); M. Curius Decimus vs. Publilia Otacilla (his third wife); M. Curius Decimus vs. the Estate of C. Pupienus.
A meager bucketful of coals in a brazier offered the sole relief from the cold of the high-vaulted court archives. Aelius stood with his back to the warmth, reading with growing interest how, claiming an intricate web of entitled family relations, Decimus had tried to prove that Pupienus's widow, Annia Cincia—"barely of legal age, and ill advised by fanatics"—could not dispose of the vast property left by her deceased husband "in favor of parties not connected by blood." The dispute had dragged on for months, at the end of which Minucius Marcellus had ruled in favor of the young widow. The list of property was extensive: from a large house in Laumellum to the villa in its suburbs, complete with fish pond, working farm, horse paddock, pasture and woodland; from private and business rentals in Mediolanum to other pieces of land across the region. All this, presumably, had been given by Annia Cincia to the Christians and, after the beginning of the religious prosecution, was among the real estate confiscated by the State.
That was a small detail Decimus kept for himself, in telling his distant cousin s story. Aelius wondered what, if anything, the late Protasius might have had to report about that dispute. A member of the conservative aristocracy scarcely fit a killer's profile, but a loser's grudge over an adverse ruling was still the most credible explanation for Marcellus's death. Hadn't the Christian hierarchy supplied a useful scapegoat? Dec-imus's slipping away from the execution at the arena, with the excuse of Helena's company, took on a disquieting new meaning. True, the timing was delayed. Seven years is a long time to nurse murderous discontent, except that Pupienus's inheritance might have seemed not wholly unrecoverable until the recent expropriation of church goods put it back in discussion. Aelius was replacing the dockets on the shelf when his eye fell on a slim document that had escaped him. It, too, was under Decimus's name, and it concerned an act of interdiction of his daughter, Portia, aged twenty-two, "for moral degeneracy."
In a thoughtful mood, he left the tribunal under a thick snowfall, less wet, adhering to everything. Protasius had given him as a city address the rented rooms where he stayed while Marcellus's heirs decided what to do with the family villa. It was nearby, behind the government mint—an edifice closed for the past several years. Walking by its nail-studded bronze door, Aelius thought there was little chance it would open again soon; today, most of the currency needed to pay the army was minted directly in the Danubian lands.
No point in asking whether the poor old freedman had left messages for him before his death. Gloomily Aelius continued on his walk to the exclusive flat, midway between the Mall and the city theater, where Helena had her chambers.
Helena was still dressing for the day. She dismissed the girl who combed her hair and finished the task herself, driving ivory pins into the shiny braid circling her head.
"You did not tell me you were staying at Decimus's! I am so provoked, Aelius, I don't think I want to see you."
The spearing motion of her hands unpleasantly reminded Aelius of Sido stabbing the severed hand. "I wasn't the one who told him I knew you."
"But he mentioned you to me, dumb calf!"
"When? While the rest of us watched the execution of the Christians?"
"No, it was when we had dinner together, afterward. Last year we left each other so badly, I decided we needed to talk. Not to patch things up." Helena raised her voice spitefully, to make sure Aelius would not come to such a conclusion. "To give myself a chance to be a little more civil, since I broke a couple of his antique vases during our final disagreement. I was on the point of poisoning his candied apple a little, by saying I was here to see an old flame." She pointed at Aelius with little jerks of her forefinger, as if piercing the air. "But he beat me to it. 'I have a guest at my place,' he said, 'whom I'm surprised you didn't lake to bed in Nicomedia: tall, fair, blue-eyed.'"
"There were hundreds of us with those characteristics," Aelius broke in to say. "How did you know Decimus meant me?"
" 'He's His Divinity's historian,' Decimus said. It annoys me no end to think that two of my lovers room together and can compare notes."
"Gentlemen wouldn't dream of such a thing."
"Ha!"
They lunched alone, at a table so small their heads could touch if they only leaned forward. With a mixture of comradeship and coquetry, Helena told him of her heartache for someone she'd seen at court, so Aelius would know that she had made her diplomatic rounds there, too.
"How high up?" he asked.
"Close to the top."
"Close to the top there's a eunuch."
"A eunuch, and a gray-eyed brute."
"NotSido!"
"Why not Sido?" She aped his surprise, then smiled. "He reminds me of Constantius when he was young. And he's political."
"If you can trust him."
"I trust none of the men I sleep with, Aelius. They wouldn't sleep with me if they were trustworthy." She took tiny bites from a green olive, exposing a little at a time the stone within. "Take yourself. You, I'm friends with, but I cannot trust you."
>
"Because I say that your son has to wait his turn? His Divinity has' already—"
"His Divinity, His Tranquillity, His Serenity—His Idiocy! They're old men, Aelius."
"You wouldn't say such dangerous things if you didn't trust me, Helena."
"No, it's true. I trust you, but it bothers me." She tossed the discarded olive pit his way. "Anyhow, it is a dreadful waste of hale manhood, this marching to the frontier."
"You know about that, too, eh?"
Her gleaming eyes held him. "My darling, I will be an emperor's mother. I have to know what goes on."
Notes by Aelius Spartianus: Events and revelations are overlapping so quickly that I cannot tell whether they are unraveling or becoming more tangled. One constant runs through everything: Namely, Christians are suspected and accused regardless. It is a characteristic of sweeping prosecutions to ascribe to the enemies of the State all crimes, even those that rightly pertain to other culprits. It is said, and Suetonius warrants it, that in Nero's day the Christians were accused of setting the Great Fire in Rome. Without going as far as Suetonius (who suspects the Emperor himself of burning down the city to rebuild it anew, or for other reasons of his own), it is plain to all those who visited the overcrowded districts of the world's capital that accidental fires are likely to start without human intention. Not long ago, the imperial palace atNicome-dia suffered a devastating fire. Christians employed in the building crews were logically suspected and prosecuted accordingly.
Applying the edicts against the Christians in Treveri as in Mediolanum hardly needs excuses. I am not inclined to see the mark of zealous servants of the state (not even the speculatoresj on Marcellus's murder and the subsequent destruction of church leadership in this city. A venomous and acquisitive aristocrat, on the other hand —
Lupus's case is even more complicated. It does not trouble me that it brings into question the good faith of the fire waker, hailed as a holy man. It would not be the first time that a charlatan conjures up tricks and is unmasked. Lupus's assassination afterward troubles me, because it appears as it's a crime committed to silence him. But why should Lupus tattle on the holy man? A man whose affluence is due to his status as a miracle recipient would not threaten to publicize the deception he willingly lent himself to. So perhaps it all comes down to a conspiracy among relatives, to inherit the wealth; or among Lupus's competitors, who feared the lt resurrected man' would have a supernatural edge with more than a credulous brick buyer when bidding against them.
The fact remains that Agnus was nowhere to be found when Lupus's body was discovered. He "skipped town," to use ben Matthias's term, leaving his female assistant to risk her neck in his place. Had I not alarmed her by looking for her at the Solis et Lunae address, she'd have probably stayed behind and been captured. If the fire waker continues in his chicanery, Casta will have to take care not to fall before he does.
20 December, Wednesday
The following day, at the Palace the presence of military men had increased twofold. Headed for this third interview with Aristophanes, Aelius limited himself to wondering why—he would not indulge his curiosity until he had in hand Maximian's acceptance of abdication— and dispatched a waiting courier to Aspalatum with the brief. In one of the outer courtyards, it did not take long for him to learn that the specific commands and assignments were being communicated today to those leaving for the frontier. He himself found out that his old thousand-man cavalry unit awaited him in Mursella. The city of Savaria was the army's gathering point, and from there the campaign would be launched without waiting for the spring, a sign of haste that indicated the gravity of the danger.
The officer called Saphrac, recognizable in the uniform of the Syrian bowmen, was talking to a small crowd of colleagues from the Max-imiani Juniores barracks. Duco introduced him to Aelius, and soon they were all discussing the coming war.
Saphrac was pessimistic. "Before leaving for Italy, we suggested to the civilian authorities the withdrawal of colonists and settlers to a minimum of thirty miles from the military road and the frontier itself. It was not taken well, although the governors of Pannonia and Moesia agree in principle. Families have cultivated the land, built houses; they regard the settlements as their permanent home. But it won't be. High as the birthrate is in our border provinces, it is much higher in Barbaricum."
"During the Persian campaign," Aelius said, "even on the Euphrates we heard widespread reports of westward migrations far to the east. Entire peoples, not hordes, moving from places farther away than Bac-tria and Paramisos, beyond what Alexander conquered. I don't know how true it is. Or why, those lands being so rich, their inhabitants ought to be seeking Europe."
"I can tell you it isn't as you say." Saphrac gesticulated and looked like any man born and bred in Italy, except for his eyes, elongated and foreign. "Or, rather, it is true that countless tribes are pressing westward, but they aren't settled peoples. They are mounted nomadic groups living off their herds and constantly on the move. They want nothing of the culture we have, only plunder. If we're wise, we'll buy them off, because we surely cannot stop them all."
"Well," Duco intervened, "many of the tribes beyond the frontier can be brought to reason."
"We cannot be fooled by those who dwell closest to our frontier; they've lived alongside us long enough to become half civilized. My mother's uncles have encountered wild foreigners in Bactria who were like nothing they'd seen before: They pack meat under their saddles and eat it raw. Their women give birth riding."
"It seems a little excessive. Giving birth, I mean—"
"Duco, my uncles saw a child born on the saddle before their very eyes. The mother steadied herself by keeping her feet in metal hoops those people use to secure themselves while on horseback." Saphrac clapped his hands in scandalized amusement. "Can you imagine, tangling your feet in hoops hanging from the saddle? What would happen to cavalry tactics? Only barbarians can come up with such inventions."
21 December, Thursday, Divalia, Feast of Secret-Keeping
Notes by Aelius Spartianus, continued
In the face of war, I keep thinking of Lupus's death, Marcellus's death, and the fire waker. Am I forsaking all sense of proportions? What if a charlatan killed someone to protect his secrets, what if an old judge was cut down? It would not be the first time. Why does it bother me? The authorities in Germany and here are satisfied that, following the first arrests, justice will be done —/ am the only one still thrashing about, not accepting that things went as they say. Ben Matthias smells danger, but by his own admission folks of his race have good reasons to smell danger.
How wrong it is to say that dead men cannot speak! Poor Protasius is more useful to me in death than in life. A serf brought me a letter from him yesterday afternoon, while I wrestled with the vexed historical question of the influence of Severus's wife and sister-in-law on imperial politics. In order to peruse it in peace, I left Decimus's property for a private little drinking place. There, I read confirmation that my landlord fought bitterly to keep Pupienus's inheritance from ending up in the Christians' hands; so much so that his relations with the Min-ucii, until then exemplary and affectionate, were abruptly severed after the adverse sentence. Decimus opposed Marcellus's reappointment as a judge, even alienating from him the support of influential Roman families connected to him by clan. Now, that's something to keep in mind!
Regarding my other request to the late Protasius (that he secure for me an illustrative piece of writing by the fire waker), the letter contained none, but today the same secretive young serf from the Minucii household came at the first morning hour, bearing a basket of apples.
I was up, and judged it an odd time to deliver a Saturnalia gift. So, like Cleopatra, I bravely stuck my hand among the fruit to seek, as the poem goes, "what lurks amid the luscious bounty." Unlike the queen, who met the asp's fangs, I felt an envelope under the apples. In it was the pastoral homily by Agnus, also promised to me. Apparently sent from Placentia, where he preached a
nd performed cures at the time, to the then thriving Christian community of Aquileia on the border between Italia and Illyricum, the homily is lengthy and heavy with admonitions. The serf also related Protasiuss last message to me, that I "enjoy the fruit and leave none of its contents for others to pick. " Hence I will destroy the homily after reporting below the elements that give me an idea of the fire wakers personality.
"Beloved brethren in Christ, whose fortitude is according to prophecy tried by the hands of impious men and the wiles of the Evil One, answering your request for instructions on how to prepare for the supreme trial and suffering, our love and ministry compel us to instruct you accordingly."
Here follow mindless suggestions on how to tempt a judge's patience by refusing to answer, or ever repeating the sentence "I am a Christian" — these tactics I have myself heard in Egypt, and confirm that they are infuriating. Below, Agnus finds his first target.
".. . And what to say of those blind men who give themselves wholeheartedly to the impious practice of military life? Do they not make of murder and plunder their daily business? Do they not carry standards representing obscene gods and beasts? Better that they should all perish in the upcoming wars, so that their bloodthirsty race will be extinguished forever! As the blessed martyrs Julius the Veteran, Dasius, and Expeditus have proven, the army holds nothing but temptations for the Christian. Much preferable is the crown of martyrdom .. . [et cetera]
"As for the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus and of the devil-driven liars who go under the name of Epicureans and Stoics, it is precisely the pretended morality of their instructions that makes them perilous. In fact, while they teach probity of life, they extol the false gods whose stories, known to all, even to schoolchildren, are abominations of lechery and fornication.