“He doesn’t strike me as the negotiating type,” Tacitus said, “but I guess it’s worth a try. I’d rather not have any blood shed, especially my own.”
We caught up with Scaevola’s group and I hailed them. There were five men in addition to Scaevola, four on horseback—including Licinius Strabo—and one driving the wagon, the same open wagon in which Aristeas’ body had been transported earlier. Torches had been attached to each side. Myrrha sat in it, still in manacles and now with a chain from one ankle attached to one of the slats in the side of the wagon. Scaevola gave the order to stop and turned his horse.
“What do you want, Gaius Pliny?”
“I want Myrrha, who is the daughter of a Roman citizen, to have the rights to which she is entitled. You know that what you’re doing is against the law.”
Scaevola smirked. “Everything has been done by the letter of the law. The whore had a trial this afternoon, after you left my house.”
“Who tried her?”
“The duovirs of Laurentum presided, as the law requires.” He pointed to himself and Strabo. “We considered the evidence and found her guilty.”
“Who spoke for her?”
“The only man who was willing, Publius Gabinus.”
I didn’t know the name, so I looked at Saturninus. “He runs the tavern across the street from my shop,” the cheese-maker said.
Of course. The tavern which the Licinius family owned.
“Scaevola, I don’t want to interfere with the proper execution of the law.” I regretted my choice of words immediately. “There are questions about what happened to the man Myrrha is accused of killing, questions which I don’t believe we’ve had time to answer. All I’m asking for is a day or two’s delay while I look into it. If her innocence cannot be established, I won’t stand in your way.”
“You’re standing in my way right now, Gaius Pliny. Since you’re obstructing a magistrate who is trying to carry out his duty, I have the right to remove you.”
He drew his sword and his men turned on us. Saturninus tried to take the lead on our side, but he was the first to be knocked off his horse. I heard him moan as he hit the ground.
Fighting in the dark, with only the flickering torches for illumination, swords clanking, and horses neighing, made the whole scene feel like something out of Plato’s description of the damned souls in Tartarus. Scaevola’s men were shouting encouragement to one another, striking even more fear into my men.
Tacitus did manage to take down one of Scaevola’s men, but their skill at warfare was more than we could stand against.
As soon as the first blows were struck, Apollodoros pulled his horse to the side of the road and around Scaevola’s group. For an instant I thought he might be trying for a rear assault, but he lashed the horse with the ends of the reins and bolted away up the road.
Of course, I thought, as I parried a blow from Strabo and squeezed my knees tightly to stay on my horse. What other reason would he have for volunteering?
Scaevola himself led the attack, and he was ferocious. I was holding my own against Strabo, but my other men were being pushed back so rapidly I was about to give the order to withdraw in order to save their lives when a large bat swooped down right into Strabo’s face. His horse reared in fright and Strabo fell off.
As soon as Strabo went down, the bat flew off. I would have sworn the creature had singled him out to attack. I seized the advantage I had been given. Dismounting, I stood over Strabo with my sword at his throat.
“Drop your weapons,” I barked, “or I’ll kill him.”
“You heard him,” Scaevola said without any sense of urgency. “Stop!” He guided his horse over to where his son lay. “It’s tempting, though, to let you go ahead and kill him. Can’t even stay on his horse.” His lip curled in a sneer. “I have a cross-eyed fool for a colleague this year, just as I’ve had a cross-eyed fool for a son all these years.”
“Father, please don’t let him—”
“Stop sniveling. He’s not going to hurt you. You’re the one who pushed me into this and now you can’t stay on your horse.” He turned to the driver of the cart. “Unchain the whore. Isn’t that what you’re going to demand next, Gaius Pliny?”
I nodded, taken completely by surprise by his attitude. “You men, pick up their weapons,” I ordered. “Take any others they have. I’ll send them back tomorrow.” I looked up at Scaevola. “And we’re taking Strabo as a hostage. If you pursue us, I’ll kill him.”
Scaevola laughed and said in Greek, “You’re a scholar, a man of books. You could no more kill my son than you could throw your own mother off a cliff. I could do it; you couldn’t. But I’ll pretend to be concerned so we can play this out.”
“I’ll send him back tomorrow with your weapons.”
“Keep them—and him—as long as you like. I have little use for either.”
“Myrrha does have some use for the bag with the fifty aurei in it which you took from her. That must be returned.”
“Fifty aurei? In a bag? Why, Gaius Pliny, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Myrrha scrambled out of the wagon, rubbing her wrists and shivering. With the sun down now, the air was growing chill and her gown was soaked in blood, sweat, and other excretions. The man Tacitus had wounded took her place and lay down. I handed her the clean gown, expecting her to step behind a tree at the side of the road to change, but she slipped off her old gown where she stood and put on the clean one. In the dim light of the torches I thought I could detect a mark of a whip on her back. She’d never been a slave. When would she have been whipped?
Seeing my startled expression, she said, “They’ve all seen me naked, every last man of ’em. And I mean all of yours, too.”
Chloris had been right about Myrrha growing old. The glimpse I had in the unsteady light didn’t arouse any erotic feelings in me.
Scaevola’s horse reared as he guided the animal closer to me. “You do realize that you’re interfering with a magistrate trying to carry out his duty, don’t you, Gaius Pliny?”
“Is it a magistrate’s duty to rush a defenseless woman into the arena to settle an old grudge?” I tightened my grip on my sword, even though he was now unarmed. “She will be as secure in my custody as in yours until we get to the bottom of this.”
“Are you sure there is a bottom?”
“I’m afraid Saturninus is badly injured,” Tacitus whispered to me as we watched Scaevola’s party start back to Laurentum.
“There’s no doctor in Laurentum. What’s wrong with him?”
“He has a sword wound—a big gash across his stomach. He’s bleeding badly, and he hit his head pretty hard when he fell off his horse. I don’t think he can survive a trip back to your villa.”
“I doubt we could do anything for him there anyway.”
“At his age, I wish we could have persuaded him not to come.”
Myrrha was standing on the edge of the road, fighting back tears as she looked at Saturninus. I stepped over to her and said, “It’s all right. We know.”
She ran to her father, dropped to her knees and cradled his head against her bosom. “Papa, please forgive me.”
“For what, darlin’? I’m the one who ... needs forgiveness. I turned my own daughter out. Made her and my granddaughter ... into whores. What sort of man am I?”
I knelt beside them and took Saturninus’ hand. “I know this is hard, my friend, but what can you tell me about the man who was murdered fifteen years ago? I think this whole business is as much about him as it is about Aristeas.”
Saturninus took a breath and moaned. I knew he wasn’t going to live long. He kept his eyes on Myrrha’s face as he talked in such a low voice I could barely hear him.
“Myrrha and me, we was always ... more like cats and dogs than father and daughter. I had arranged a ... a marriage for her, but she refused. She was in love with somebody ... wanted to marry him. I threw her out and she went to him. She got pregnant.”
As
Saturninus paused, Myrrha said, “And then he told me he never would marry me. I wasn’t good enough to be his wife, just his whore. He would never admit my child was his. He said I was never to tell nobody. If anybody came to him and told him about this child, he would know that I told ’em, and he would have me killed.”
“Who was he?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Myrrha said. “He left here long ago.”
I wanted to know more than that, but she obviously wasn’t going to tell me now. “So you went back home?”
Myrrha nodded.
“I didn’t want to take her back,”Saturninus said. “But my wife ... wouldn’t let me send her completely away. Most of my money ... comes from my wife’s dowry. She said if I drove Myrrha out, she would ... divorce me and take the dowry with her.”
So their marriage had not been the most formal type possible under Roman law.
“She insisted we give Myrrha ... and her child a place to live. On her death bed she made me ... promise I wouldn’t cast them out.”
I turned to Myrrha. “Chloris is your daughter, isn’t she?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And she doesn’t know that Saturninus is her grandfather?”
“No, sir. But please don’t say nothin’. Let me tell her.”
Saturninus grabbed Myrrha’s arm as a wave of pain washed over him. “And I wouldn’t let my wife give them any money,” he wailed. “I locked up my strongbox ... just like I locked up my heart, and I ... turned my daughter and my granddaughter into whores. Can you imagine what that ... feels like, Gaius Pliny?”
“You did what you thought was right, Saturninus. That’s all any man can do.”
Saturninus coughed up blood. “The only right thing ... I ever did in my life was getting rid of that dead man in Myrrha’s room ... so they couldn’t accuse her of killing him. I wrapped him up and ... stuffed him down that old well.”
“I didn’t kill him, Papa. And I didn’t kill this man Aristeas either.”
“I know, darlin’. But I had to ... protect you.”
“It’s all right, Papa. Chloris and me can take care of ourselves.”
“You’ll get everything. My will ... in the strongbox ... the key.” He touched a thin piece of leather around his neck. Myrrha pulled it out from under his tunic and fingered two keys hanging on the end of it. “Big one ... for the shop door,” Saturninus said. “Little one ... strongbox.”
“Thank you, Papa.”
“I’m afraid for you,” Saturninus gasped. “Scaevola wants the building ... Don’t ... don’t let him ...”
I patted the old man’s arm. “I’ll see that everything is carried out according to your wishes, my friend.”
Myrrha looked at me in surprise. “Sir?”
“That’s what I do for my friends.” Raising my voice, I said, “With Cornelius Tacitus and Licinius Strabo as witnesses, I hereby acknowledge Saturninus and his entire family as my friends.”
Saturninus shuddered and went limp. I stepped away and let Myrrha hold her father and weep over him.
“I told you,” Tacitus said as I stood beside him, “there was something between them that we weren’t privy too. I’m surprised your mother doesn’t know all about this.”
“It happened twenty-five years ago. My father was still alive. We didn’t spend much time down here then.”
“But you said you were here when your sister was still-born.”
I nodded. “The birth was posthumous. My father died before my mother even knew she was pregnant.”
“So even before your mother started buying cheese at Saturninus’ shop, Chloris had already been born and the town was keeping the secret.”
“Yes, small towns are good at that.”
We had no choice but to hoist Saturninus’ body over the back of the horse he’d been riding and tie him on. I hated to treat the old gentleman with such little dignity. Tacitus and I led the funeral procession, with Licinius Strabo behind us and my servants bringing up the rear with Saturninus’ body. We kept a slow pace to avoid jostling him too much.
“Were you surprised by Apollodoros’ desertion?” Tacitus asked.
“A bit, although I guess I shouldn’t have been.”
“Where do you think he went?”
“To wherever he stashed the money he and Aristeas made on this scheme of theirs. They must have hidden it somewhere, since neither of them was carrying anything.”
“And there must be some vials of blood—or something that passes for blood—hidden along with it. Are you going to try to find him?”
I shook my head. “That wasn’t even one of my best horses he stole. I doubt we’ll ever see him or the horse again.”
Myrrha rode behind me, clutching me tightly and with her head pressed against me. There was nothing erotic in the gesture. If there could have been, the memory of coupling with her daughter squelched it. I could tell that, by the time we reached my house, the back of my tunic would be as wet from her tears as if I’d been caught in the rain.
“That bat certainly did you a favor,” Tacitus said.
“Yes. I’ve never seen or heard of anything quite like that. It singled out Strabo, knocked him off his horse, and then flew off, as though it had done what it came to do.”
Tacitus looked over his shoulder at Strabo. “Do you have any bats among your enemies?”
“Are you sure it was a bat?” Strabo asked. “Did you see the white face on the thing?”
Riding in the dark, with Saturninus’ body only a few paces behind me, I couldn’t get my mind off the story he’d told of his life. How could a man live with himself when he had rejected his own daughter but had to see her every day? How could he watch his beautiful granddaughter grow up under his own roof and not want to play with her and hold her? How could he bear the thought that every man who made his way down that narrow alley was going to couple with his daughter or granddaughter?
Perhaps he couldn’t.
Could the anger and pain that he felt for so long have led him to kill a man who raped his ten-year-old granddaughter? He said he knew Myrrha didn’t kill the man. Did he say that with such confidence because he knew who did? Had that secret died with him? I had no way to solve a murder from years ago, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had more to do with Aristeas’ murder than I could fathom at the moment.
As we rode through Laurentum, we passed Saturninus’ building. The sight reminded me that, while Myrrha’s knife was too sharp to have inflicted the wound I saw on Aristeas’ throat, a cheese shop must have at least a few knives in it. The presence of a rough-bladed knife wouldn’t convict Saturninus of murder, but the absence of one would make me feel better about his innocence.
“Let’s stop here.” I reined in my horse in front of the shop.
“What are we doing?” Tacitus asked.
“We ought to get that strongbox,” I said. “Once people find out Saturninus is dead, they won’t hesitate to loot the place.”
“I’ll be surprised if my father hasn’t already been in here,” Licinius Strabo said from behind me. He’d been so quiet during the ride that I’d forgotten he was there.
Myrrha and I dismounted and stepped up on the sidewalk in front of the shop.
“It doesn’t look like the door’s been tampered with,” I said. “Try your key.”
Myrrha slipped the larger key into the lock and, after some jiggling, it turned. The door, on its leather hinges, sagged as I opened it. It wouldn’t stand up to a determined assault. Myrrha found two lamps and a flint to light them.
“Do you have any idea where your father kept his strongbox?”
“When I was a child he kept it upstairs. He would keep a few coins down here in a bowl, to do business with durin’ the day, but everything went in the strongbox at night.”
“Let’s hope he didn’t change his habits,” I said as I cupped my hand around the tiny flame and looked for the stairs. Shelves along one wall held the dozen or so types of cheeses that Saturninus
made or bought from local farms. Along a side wall sat a rack containing wooden kitchen utensils.
“Your mother used to carve those, didn’t she?”
Myrrha nodded. “There aren’t many left. I guess Papa never found nobody else to make more ... I could have.” She wiped away tears. “Mama started teaching me when I was seven.”
Even in the meager light, it was painful to see her realizing what sort of life she might have had. I wanted to know so much. Whom had Saturninus chosen for her to marry? Why did she refuse? Who was the father of her child?
“This way,” Myrrha said, leading me into a room behind the main room and up a narrow stone stairway. “Careful, sir. The footin’s none too good.”
The upper story of the building consisted of one large, dingy room, which had not known a woman’s touch for several years. Myrrha lit candles in several sconces. An unmade bed, with clothing strewn around it, occupied one of the short walls. The opposite short wall was where Myrrha’s mother had plied her trade. None of her tools or unfinished utensils appeared to have been touched. Another bed at that end testified to the painful separation between husband and wife. Just over their daughter?
The back wall of the room had two windows, with shutters, overlooking the courtyard and the aqueduct behind the building. A table, still littered with wood shavings, and a chair sat under one of the windows.
“Did you realize that your mother sat here working and watching you and Chloris?”
“No, sir, I didn’t. I talked to her a few times over the years, whenever Papa wasn’t around. She never told me she was watchin’ us.” Myrrha ran her hand over the table and looked out the window. “Chloris loved to play outside when she was little, and, of course, I had to send her out, if the weather was good, whenever I had ... company. She could hear too much in her room, and I knew the men would go after her soon enough. I wanted to keep her away from all that as long as I could.”
“Of course. The mentulas.”
Myrrha chuckled. “Chloris told you what she calls ’em, I see.”
The Corpus Conundrum Page 20