by Peter Tonkin
Especially as the ways in which the tribune and his general had tested the waters of public opinion recently had all added weight to Spurinna’s darkest predictions. The crown Antony had offered Caesar at the Lupercal festival a month ago. That got boos from the crowd. In spite of the group placed nearby and bribed to cheer. Lucius Cotta’s pronouncement of the deliberations of the Fifteen interpreting the Sibylline Texts that only a King of Rome could conquer Parthia had clearly offended a majority in the Senate. Even Caesar’s current predilection for regal red boots as footwear was causing negative comment.
It was Spurinna’s concerns, supported by these incidents, that had caused the three spies to be sent urgently undercover into the households of Brutus and Cassius, the social leaders, brothers-in-law and men most widely believed to be behind any plots that were being laid.
Which in turn had led to this.
Telos began dripping onto the tile floor and the noise broke the brief silence.
‘I don’t want Puella examined. And I don’t want Telos healed or resurrected,’ answered Artemidorus as though the conversation had never faltered. ‘I want to know about his death. The order in which these things were done to him. How he finally died. Perhaps I might even learn something of the men who killed him. They still have Cyanea…’
He stopped speaking, suddenly seeing at least part of the point of this brutality. Cyanea. Any of Spurinna’s associates finding Telos would bound to be distracted from whatever they were doing by concern about what was being done to Cyanea. And it must certainly be Spurinna or his friends, given where the body had been placed. Perhaps Cyanea’s colleagues might even turn aside from their immediate plans to go in search of her before she could share Telos’ terrible fate. Which might well mean that whoever had done this was worried that Enobarbus’ spies must be closing in on them as their plans rushed towards fruition. Likely enough, if what the note on his breast said was true and Telos had sung like a lark before he died.
Kyros appeared with a sheet of rough woollen cloth and a tunic. As the spy dried off and changed for the second time that night, his mind continued to work. Something must have been said or done at Cassius’ house which could have given the murderous patricians’ game away. Something that suddenly meant there was a chance the new staff so conveniently placed in the conspirator’s kitchen had seen or heard a crucial clue. A clue to whatever these brutes were worried about. And might well have passed the information on. That whatever Cassius was planning must be coming to its climax very soon indeed. A climax fragile enough to be threatened by Enobarbus’ secret agents.
But no such message had been communicated, though there had been no time for detailed debriefing as Artemidorus rushed through the tiny room on top of the insula on his way to release and recruit Puella.
On the other hand, he thought as he handed the wet cloth and the sodden tunic to the waiting slave, the situation and Telos’ terrible fate also made it more than possible that someone in Caesar’s most intimate circle, someone among Mark Antony’s friends or, most likely of all, someone working undercover for the tribune was in fact a double agent who had warned Cassius and his cohorts that there were cuckoos in his nest…
*
Artemidorus had reached this point in his rapidly darkening speculations when Kyros returned once more to usher the physician Antistius into the room. The medical man was slight but dynamic, even though he was by no means in the first flush of youth. Or even of middle age, thought Artemidorus. His frame was spare. His back stooped and his hair thin. But his eyes were blue and clear as water. He was the personification of the sharp-eyed, down-to-earth side of Spurinna’s character. With a silent frown he pulled back his hood and swung his dripping cloak off his shoulders, revealing a warm-looking woollen tunic. After an instant, he strode forward, frowning with concentration already. Kyros, who had taken the cloak, retreated into the atrium with every sign of relief.
‘This looks bad,’ Antistius observed. Neither Artemidorus nor Spurinna answered the self-evident truth. ‘If I’m going to examine the poor lad properly, we’d better strip him,’ the physician continued. ‘He’s clearly beyond my professional help. So I assume you wish me to speculate as to how he got into this state. Where and when.’ The physician rolled the sleeves of his tunic up and flexed his hands, hooking his fingers like eagles’ talons. ‘Where did you find him?’
‘Over the road,’ answered Artemidorus as they rolled the stiffening corpse onto its side. ‘Crucified against the scaffolding around the villa opposite this one.’
‘A message…’ observed the physician grimly.
‘Meant for me,’ observed Spurinna. ‘I think I had better alert the household in case this is also a declaration of war. And I’d better start to go through the bits and pieces you retrieved from their home. There might well be something important there – and you don’t need me for the meantime. I’ll get your girl to help me, Seven – it’ll keep her occupied and well away from here. From this…’ He left the little room.
‘Put his clothing and that message carefully aside,’ ordered Antistius. ‘They may contain information that the corpse does not. But I have known you for some time, young Artemidorus. Even before they gave you the code name Seven, if my memory serves. And I suspect you must already have worked out that he died where you found him. Though he was probably not tortured there.’ The medical man’s abrupt tone slowed, became more thoughtful. ‘And how close to death he was when he was brought there to be crucified and killed is another matter altogether.’
‘Yes,’ said Artemidorus. ‘The bleeding and the bruising make it plain enough that he was still alive when they nailed him in place. He was alive up until they cut his throat, judging from the blood on his chest. There would have been blood on the road as well. I looked before I took him down but the rain had washed the ground clean as far as I could see.’
‘Alive, certainly,’ Antistius nodded. ‘But barely. He had already lost a lot of blood, I would guess. Simple practicality must suggest that although it would have been possible to take his eyes there and then, taking his tongue would have been all but impossible. And the dried blood on his lips and cheeks suggests that he was mutilated elsewhere.’
‘His head was hanging down,’ Artemidorus added. ‘The rain poured onto the back of his skull but his face was protected.’
‘Or the dried blood would have washed away like his lifeblood in the gutter…’ The physician leaned forward over the dead man’s torso. ‘He’s been beaten badly into the bargain.’ He pressed the purple flesh over the curve of a rib. There was the faintest grating sound. The depression made by his finger stayed in place.
Hardly surprisingly, thought Artemidorus. Telos’ chest and belly looked as though they had been clawed by the panther that killed and ate Cestus. There were lacerations, welts, round depressions almost like stab wounds everywhere from his throat to his groin.
‘There are many bones broken,’ the physician continued. ‘These things were done over a number of hours, I should say. Which also makes it highly unlikely that they were done in the street. Though the streets have been pretty well deserted tonight, because of the storm.’
That’s what you think, Artemidorus reflected – remembering the bustle in the Forum, Cassius and his attendants in the square, the robbers at the crossroad. The panther.
But Antistius persisted heedlessly, ‘His corpse is very much like the bodies I have examined belonging to dead gladiators after battles in the arena.’ Then he fell silent, rolling Telos onto his side to reveal another series of lacerations and small circular wounds on his shoulders and back. Wounds that matched the others on his chest and belly, Artemidorus realised.
‘In fact,’ Antistius said after a while, ‘I think you might take some comfort – enough perhaps to satisfy a Stoic. Poor Telos must have been so near to death from the beating that he would hardly have been aware of the final atrocities.’
‘So,’ nodded Artemidorus. ‘Our ever-astute augur was right
. This has little to do with Telos and more to do with us. It is a message. A warning.’
‘Or a declaration of war.’ Antistius nodded. ‘As Spurinna has observed.’
‘And very possibly an indirect way of torturing Cyanea,’ added Artemidorus. ‘Especially if they’ve believed the cover story that Telos and she were a young married couple deeply in love.’
‘You had better hope so,’ Antistius grunted, as he bent over the livid corpse once more. ‘There are other ways to torture a woman than by making her watch it being done to someone else. Much more direct ways.’
But his earlier words suddenly tricked something in the ex-gladiator’s mind. Something associated with his own experiences this evening. ‘Cestus,’ he said, remembering the huge robber that the panther had killed. ‘He’s been beaten by someone wearing cestus spiked gloves.’
‘I do believe you’re right. Looking at the state of his torso and belly, back and front, I would say that someone wearing a cestus on each fist spent some time punching him very hard indeed.’
Artemidorus thoughtfully picked up an arm. In spite of the damage done by the crucifying nail it was possible to see the marks of a rope stretching up the back of the hand and the base of the thumb. ‘While he was hanging by his hands,’ he added.
But then he noticed the state of Telos’ nails. For a moment he supposed that the torturers must have tried to pull them out. Then he noticed the splinters beneath the torn and bleeding fingers’ ends. ‘No, wait,’ he said. ‘While he was tied to a post. He clawed it in his agony and nearly tore his nails off. A whipping post, perhaps.’
‘That would explain the presence of wounds on his chest and back, but almost none on his sides. It would also explain the damage to his ribs. He could not swing to lessen the impact so he was crushed,’ observed Antistius. ‘The threads of his tunic are still in some of these wounds, so he wore it to the end. Which is another comfort I suppose.’
‘As long as we can say the same for Cyanea,’ added Artemidorus, picking up on the physician’s earlier comment. A picture of her naked body lashed to a whipping post sprang unbidden into his mind and his breath shortened. The soft, warm, fragile naked body that he knew so intimately. The murderers’ plan was working, he thought grimly: he was being distracted after all. Being tempted to desert his post, forget his duty and go after his kidnapped lover.
Dismissing the mental picture of Cyanea before he began to speculate what they might be doing to her and see it all in his vivid mind’s eye, he crossed to the bloody rags of Telos’ clothing. Beside the pathetic pile lay the message that had hung around the corpse’s neck. He picked it up, frowning with thought, and brought it over to the light. ‘Good grade papyrus,’ he said. ‘Top quality amphitheatre-made. Expensive. This fits in with everything else. No matter who did this to Telos, someone of rank and fortune was nearby. Only someone of senatorial rank can afford papyrus of this quality. And even if they employ gladiators to do their dirty work for them, they still have people to hand who can write in a clear and flowing manner. Just look at the penmanship on this. It’s the writing of a secretary or a scholar. It’s never the work of a brutal thug wearing a cestus…’
He held it up to the light. Occasionally – very occasionally – a really expensive sheet of papyrus might have the family name or clan crest of the man who ordered it woven into its very fabric. He narrowed his eyes, willing the overlaid ribbons of Nile reed to fall into some kind of a pattern. A Latin letter or a Greek one. The more he looked, the less sense the woven patterns seemed to make. The closest he could come to anything relevant was a truncated Greek mu, its tail ripped off by the way the sheet had been torn. He was still examining the papyrus when Kyros returned. ‘The master asks Seven to accompany me,’ he said briskly. He turned to Antistius and added, ‘Is there anything you require, sir?’
‘Not at the moment,’ answered the physician, too wrapped up in his post-mortem examination to do more than glance up.
Artemidorus followed the young slave out into the atrium. Judging by the pool of the impluvium, the storm was past its height. Lightning flickered but somehow seemed further off. Thunder roared more distantly, long after the flickers of light. The wind still raved, however. Artemidorus shivered, even though he was almost dry and his new tunic was thick and warm over the still-cold dampness of his leather trousers.
Kyros hurried into the rear of the house, leading the spy through to the cramped little kitchen which stood almost like an outhouse added to the back wall of the villa. The slave seemed surprised that his master should bring the slave girl and her bundle of blank wax tablets here. But Artemidorus was not. He knew what the augur was doing.
*
The splintered tablets were laid out on a series of thin slate trays, reassembled as best Spurinna and Puella could manage. Behind them on a raised shelf, sat the villa’s main cooking utensil, a good-sized, pot-shaped clay clibanus oven. As Artemidorus entered, Spurinna was pulling the top of the oven up. Puella lifted one of the trays out into the light. The wax had melted off the tablets’ backing to reveal words carefully written on the wood. Secret words which had been hidden by the thin wax layer above them. It was a device that Enobarbus discovered in the annals of Scipio Africanus – though whether it was he or his mortal enemy the Carthaginian General Hannibal who began the practice no one knew for certain. The wax covered the true message, which could only be read when the wax was removed. It would usually simply be scraped off, but Spurinna was taking extra care because the tablets were already so badly damaged.
Puella’s tray joined several others which had been similarly treated. On which were written lists of words that meant nothing at all. The script was Greek, which the Spartan translated at a glance: ZFKKX, QRORIRP, KXPL…
‘They’ll be names,’ said Artemidorus, picking up the least damaged of the wooden tablets.
‘In code of course,’ nodded Spurinna. ‘It’s your province rather than mine, Seven. Any idea which one?’
‘We can try Caesar’s cipher,’ answered the spy, studying the writing on the wood with narrow eyes. ‘That’s the most likely. It’s the one he uses for most of the reports and orders he wants kept secret. The general likes it too. And so the tribune trained me in its use and transliteration, though the trick of it is known only to a few of us. To whom I must add you now. But it is a heavy secret. Breaking it means death.’
‘Almost everything we do seems to mean death,’ said Spurinna. ‘Explain your lethal secret, oh great speculator.’
‘It’s simple but efficient,’ answered Artemidorus shortly. ‘It’s a transposition code. You move each letter three places to the right, so A becomes D and so forth. I’ll try it on this first name here: ZFKKX. In Caesar’s cipher that comes out as… CINNA. Now that looks very promising.’
‘But what is Telos doing writing about a poet?’ demanded Spurinna without thinking.
‘Not Helvius Cinna,’ said Artemidorus. ‘This will be Lucius Cornelius Cinna. He’s an outspoken critic of Caesar and all his works. Lucius Cornelius must be written on the matching, left-hand panel. One of these that have been reduced to splinters, I assume. What’s next? KXPL. That comes out as NASO. Probably Publius Sextius Naso. Yes.’
He glanced up. Puella was frowning at him, clearly not quite understanding. So he assumed the manner of a schoolmaster and proceeded with his lecture. ‘The full name must be written across each side of the tablet. Praenomen and nomen, on one tablet, then cognomen on the second. So we have the cognomen, surname, Cinna. But the first and clan names, the ones that tell us which particular Cinna, are on another piece. Which would have been attached, allowing us to read the full name right across, as I said; but which now have become separated and splintered. Hence the confusion about which Cinna is which…’
‘Obviously,’ interrupted Spurinna, impatiently. ‘But until we’ve melted the wax off all of these, reassembled the splintered ones and matched one side against the other, we won’t be able to get all of the names for cer
tain.’
‘Puella,’ said Artemidorus. ‘Are any of these names familiar?’ He picked up more of the undamaged, still-warm tablets and translated Telos’ Greek letters and Caesar’s simple cipher in his head to read the list of names from them. ‘Turullius, Petronius, Galba, Spurius…’
Wide-eyed, she shook her head.
‘Then what use are you, girl?’ snapped Spurinna, angry and frustrated.
‘These are the small fry,’ answered Artemidorus, springing to her defence. ‘The minnows. Puella has been where the big sharks swim. She can tell the general about meetings she attended. Between Brutus and Cassius. Publius Servilius Casca. Quintus Antistius Labeo. Lucius Tillius Cimber. An incredibly dangerous mix of men happy to stand with the Republican senators who make no secret of their hatred for Caesar and men he considers to be loyal allies. What Puella knows, together with the list of names on these tablets, if we can piece them together, must spur the general into action. If we can get this all to Tribune Enobarbus and he can get it to the general in time.’
‘In time for what, though?’ demanded the augur.
‘In time to stop whatever they are planning,’ answered the spy.
‘But we don’t know precisely what that is or exactly when it will happen.’