The Cybelene Conspiracy

by Albert Noyer

  “Pregnant?”

  “And without a wedding band.”

  “Then that could explain the dead youth. Atlos was a slave, and I assume Sybil is a freewoman. Her father, brother…someone in her family…found out and evened the race.”

  “Getorius…your metaphors! Evened the race that drastically—with a druid’s ritual sickle?”

  “I admit that part’s a mystery. I mean, druid priests in Ravenna? Now?”

  “Exactly. If there are still a few around, they’re in the wilds of Britannia, not on the Via Armini.”

  “So my family theory makes more sense,” he said.

  “Perhaps, but that’s for a magistrate to decide. I’ll stay with Sybil in case she wakes up and has another seizure.”

  “You’ll stay all night in the clinic?”

  “I’ll sleep in the wicker chair,” Arcadia replied. “You didn’t finish supper. Shall I tell Silvia to get you anything?”

  “Only a cup of mulled wine and bath towels. After what we saw, I have no appetite, but a warm soak would be nice.” Getorius looked at Arcadia and realized how tired she was. Dark circles surrounded her hazel eyes, and the black hair he loved to nuzzle when they made love framed a complexion that was gray with fatigue. “You look exhausted, Cara.” He reached up to knead her trapezius muscles, knowing they would be stiff from tension.

  “Mmmm, that feels good.” Arcadia rolled her neck and shoulders to the rhythm of his massage.

  Her sensual motion and closeness was arousing. He kissed the back of her neck and gently nibbled at the nape hair. “How about joining me in the bath house? We don’t have to make love. I just want you to soak off some of the horror.”

  “I should stay here, Getorius, but that felt nice.” Arcadia reached back to hold his fingers.

  “Your hands are cold. Are you sure you want to stay?”

  “I’m fine.” Arcadia turned to face her husband. “Getorius, why did Thecla think Sybil looked like an ancient priestess?”

  “When I went to the apartment to purge her stomach daemon, she showed me a mural depicting some kind of Vestal ritual. The women were dressed like Sybil.”

  “Strange. We should know more about her in the morning.”

  “After we find out where she lives.” Getorius pulled Arcadia into a close hug. “I’ll miss you in the bath.”

  “And I on the wicker chair.”

  He bent and playfully burrowed his face in the front of her tunic. Arcadia laughed and pushed him out the door.

  In the tepid water of the pool, Getorius sipped a cup of warm wine mulled with mastic and continued his speculation about the chain of events that could have led to such a hideous death for Atlos. In his mind the sequence gradually became as clear as the water around him.

  Simple. A slave impregnates a freewoman. The family finds out and saves the magistrate the trouble of a hearing, trial, and execution.

  The girl’s pregnancy was proof of the slave’s guilt. At a trial, Sybil’s illness would have to be revealed and the family would accuse Atlos of raping her while she was helpless. The verdict would be death. As punishment, he would be tied up in a grain sack—with perhaps a poisonous adder thrown in for company—and tossed off the breakwater wharf into the cold Adriatic. Murdering the youth had saved Sybil’s family the embarrassment of publicly displaying her infirmity.

  Getorius drained his wine and heaved himself onto the edge of the pool to scrape down with a strigil and towel himself dry.

  If an investigation did reveal that Sybil’s father, or another family member, was responsible for mutilating Atlos, even the bishop’s court would agree that the youth’s death by castration, however gruesome, was appropriate punishment for a sin of lust. A scribe would record that the matter was closed, settling the problem for Sybil’s father.

  Getorius slipped on his night tunic. When we take Sybil to him, how will her father react to his daughter’s overnight absence? Sybil was found in a heretic church, next to her lover’s dead body. Did she find him there, or was she dragged to the spot as punishment? Technically, her father has patria potestas, the power of life and death over his daughter. A magistrate wouldn’t enforce it, but just the threat could be enough to bring on one of Sybil’s epilepsy attacks.

  “We’ll know in the morning,” he muttered, throwing the towel aside and slipping into a silk dressing gown that Childibert had laid out on a bench.

  Chapter three

  A brilliant sun, reborn an hour earlier, cast warm rays of light through the open glass-paned doors that led from the villa’s garden to the dining area. Along with the brightness, a faint perfume of apple blossoms wafted into the room, giving a hint of life to the rustic orchard scene painted on the right-side wall.

  Getorius heard the chirp of finches above the soft slapping splash of the garden fountain as he walked outside. The startled birds fluttered into a row of poplar trees, whose upswept branches were hazed by light-green leaf buds. On each side of the fountain, blossoms on apple tree branches mimicked a covering of pink winter snow. The wet weather had caused the rosebay—rhododendron, “rose tree,” the Greeks called the evergreen shrub—to already send out reddish buds. Getorius took a deep breath of cool morning air to shake the lingering image of the dead youth, then went back inside to a table laden with bread, cheese, eggs, olives, and almonds.

  He looked at Arcadia with mock surprise. “What, no boiled barley for breakfast this morning?”

  “Very funny. Don’t you recall this is a special day?”

  Special day? Getorius nervously smoothed his hair forward, trying to recall if he had forgotten some event in their courtship or marriage that was important to his wife. Despite the bath, he had not slept well, and the scene of horror at the church had clogged any other memory. He finally shrugged in frustration.

  “Sorry, Cara, what is the occasion?”

  “Getorius”—Arcadia reached over to tousle his black hair laced with a few white strands—“it’s your birthday.”

  “April eighteenth? No, I think Nicias had it wrong. I remember being born in May.”

  Arcadia laughed as she pushed a dish of almonds toward her husband. “You were four years old when he brought you to Ravenna and you remember? He always said in April.”

  Getorius shrugged and did not contradict her. That was in the past, an unimportant detail in the incredible odyssey of the legion surgeon who had escaped with him from a city in Germania, where Burgondi warriors had killed parents he could not recall.

  “Thanks, this is nice, Arcadia,” he said, reaching for an almond. “How is Sybil this morning?”

  “Still asleep.”

  When his wife sat down opposite him, he noticed dark areas still shadowed her eyes. “You must have had a bad night.”

  “I slept a bit. I’ll look in on Sybil in a moment, but first, I have something for you.” Arcadia went to the dining room cabinet and brought back a flat cedar box.

  “What, a Saturnalia gift this early?” he quipped.

  “Saturnalia? What dead pagan author have you been reading? No, this is because I love you and I’m glad you were born on this date. Actually, it’s for your office.”

  Getorius felt the grain of the pinkish cedar, and then opened the lid to sniff the scent of the fragrant wood. “Nice. What’s wrapped in the cloth?”

  “Open it, Husband, and find out.”

  Getorius slipped a bronze plaque from its woolen cover. He felt the cool, gleaming metal for moment, then ran his fingers over an incised inscription.

  “There’s writing on this. What does it say?”

  “Read, most excellent surgeon.”

  “Wh…at? All right.” He held the plaque up toward the light. “‘I swear by Asklepios the Healer that, according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this Oath and this stipulation—to reckon him who taught me this healing art equally dear to me as my parents.’” Getorius looked up at his wife. “The Oath of Hippocrates?”

  “A somewhat shorter version, but th
e sense is there.”

  He reached over the table and squeezed her hand. “I like it, Cara, but…for my office, to make the sick feel better? Most of them couldn’t read it.”

  “But you can. And you did begin to ignore patients a few months ago, during that forged papyrus business.”

  “Treating the sick in my stead gave you good experience.” He knew his excuse sounded defensive and went on to read the plaque’s next section. “‘While I continue to keep this Oath faithfully, may I enjoy life and the practice of my art, respected by all men at all times. But should I violate this Oath, may the opposite be my fate.’” Getorius paused to wipe at an eye. “Nicias made me memorize this, but I’d forgotten the exact words.” He went around the table and squeezed Arcadia in an embrace. “Cara, it was very thoughtful of you.”

  “Yes, and now eat,” she ordered. “If Sybil is awake, I’ll bring her in for some breakfast. I wonder how much of last night she remembers?”

  “Hopefully nothing about her lover’s fate.”

  After Arcadia disappeared around the door panels, Getorius speared a portion of sheep’s milk cheese with his knife. It was local, and he thought its brine cure made the taste too salty. The ripe olive he bit into had a rich, nutty flavor.

  The triclinium was a pleasant area. The three reclining couches that originally gave the dining room its name were no longer in fashion, and Nicias’s marble-top table and set of padded chairs had replaced the slanted benches on which diners once lay to eat.

  The old surgeon had been in the army of Theodosius, at the carnage of the Battle of Frigidus River almost a half century ago. After the first day’s bloody assault, ten thousand Visigoth allies lay dead, prompting the poet Claudian to write that the Alpine snows had grown red with gore. Afterwards, Nicias had gone to the remote Rhine River frontier to forget, and had rarely talked about the battle. Here at Ravenna his room decorations were gentle landscapes, studies of birds, fruit, or flowers, and sunny paintings of fanciful harbor scenes, anything to draw him away from the memory of that horrific slaughter.

  Getorius munched a piece of bread while he took up the plaque once more and continued reading the Oath’s stipulations. He was to teach the healing art to Nicias’s children, but the surgeon had had no offspring. The Oath swore him to abstain from injurious treatments, including prescribing deadly medicines and abortifacients. He chuckled, after realizing that a provision had been left out which forbade the seduction of females and males, free or slave. Arcadia evidently felt it an unnecessary warning for him.

  Getorius was at the section that prohibited revealing any personal information he might learn from a patient, when Childibert interrupted him.

  “Master. There is a man and woman in wait-room.”

  “Tell them today is Sunendag and the clinic isn’t open.”

  “I think you will see man,” Childibert insisted.

  “Not unless he’s dying. Tell him to come back in the morning.”

  “Man has sick arm, but is still strong enough to come in here.”

  Getorius was about to vent his annoyance at Childibert for the intrusion, when his eye caught the gleam of the bronze plaque next to his plate. “Very well,” he relented, “but your Mistress isn’t available. You take him into my office.”

  He finished chewing the bread, then stuffed half a boiled egg in his mouth and went out to the garden portico. Swallowing chunks of yolk, Getorius watched the finches twitter up into the greening poplars as he followed the porch past the clinic and opened an outside door to his office.

  The room was lit by north-facing clerestory windows which were set above several shelves that displayed a collection of animal skulls and skeletons. The prize of Getorius’s collection was the skeleton of a monkey, which he had dissected after the simian died in Valentinian’s palace menagerie. Although the physician Galen had been dead two centuries, his views on medicine and anatomy still dominated the field. Galen had the advantage of having been able to dissect corpses, a practice now banned by Church authorities, but Getorius had defied that ban once and had partially examined the dead body of an indigent stevedore in secret. His discovery that the function of the brain was not to produce phlegm was one of the things that put him at odds with a claim of the ancient physician.

  Evidence of other animal dissections were displayed in glass jars—hearts, livers, and lungs. Patients usually avoided going near these reminders of their own mortality.

  Getorius looked across the room. Childibert was trying to persuade a well-muscled brute with cropped hair to sit on a stool. The man’s left arm was wrapped in a dirty length of wool. A loincloth covered his groin, and his bare chest displayed a number of white and pink scars. Although Childibert had abandoned Latin to cajole the man in Frankish, he only glared at the steward and showed no sign of cooperating.

  A stocky, blonde-haired woman stood beside him, her tunic cut short enough to show more of her muscular arms and legs than a Roman matron would think proper. She turned when Getorius entered and frowned at him with eyes that were the cold tint of a winter sky.

  “Were you in the latrine all this time, Surgeon?”

  “I…sorry you had to wait,” Getorius found himself apologizing. “We’re not open today.” Childibert slipped out the door, leaving the man standing to glower his defiance at Getorius.

  “What happened to your arm? What’s your name?”

  “Tigris,” the woman responded.

  “Tigris? The animal or the river?” Getorius immediately regretted his feeble jest. “Ah, what’s his name?”

  “I just told you,” she snapped. “And I’m called Giamona.”

  “Yes. Well, tell Tigris to sit down so I can look at his injury.”

  Giamona turned to the man, but he slumped onto the stool before she could tell him to do so.

  “That’s better.” Getorius bent down to undo the makeshift bandage, but the man pulled away with a savage grunt. “Steady there, Tigris. What happened to him?”

  “An accident at…at the port.” Giamona glanced away toward the shelf of animal skeletons.

  “He’s a stevedore? What kind of accident?”

  “Cure his arm,” she snarled, the winter sky in her eyes turning to blue ice. “Isn’t that what you do?”

  Great Asclepius, where did these two come from? “I…I’ll have to unwrap the cloth to examine the wound.”

  “Tigris, let him look at your arm.”

  He glowered at Giamona, but supported the arm in his right hand and slowly extended it with a grimace of pain. Getorius noticed that several of the man’s teeth were missing, and his nose had been broken at one time. The smell of his perspiration was strong. Getorius sucked in his breath when he unwrapped the wool binding and saw the extent of Tigris’s wound.

  Gore glistened in flesh laid open by a slash that exposed part of the humerus bone. The wound extended from the deltoid muscle to just below his biceps. A flap of swollen flesh from the deltoid dangled downward, held on by a mere shred of skin.

  “Christ, what hoisting machine did this to you?” Getorius blurted out in outrage that he couldn’t hide. “If it was a winch, it should be tossed into the sea.” He knew that the extent of flesh here exposed to air assured the formation of black bile in a few days. The arm was lost. “How did this happen?”

  Tigris’s narrowed brown eyes reflected pain and fright, but he did not answer. Giamona was also silent, looking down and tracing the floor tile grouting with the toe of a sandal.

  Getorius reexamined the wound and studied Tigris. The man was well built, with his hair cut unusually short. A nail-studded leather band circled his right wrist. The skin on his left arm up to the elbow where the slash ended was pale, as if shielded from the sun, yet his thighs and chest were tanned. He noticed that the skin around Tigris’s neck was chafed to a pinkish smoothness, and guessed that it was the result of once wearing a slave collar. He glanced at Giamona. She displayed the same pale areas on her arms as Tigris, as well as on her legs up to the
knees. She, too, was scarred. The reason struck him with the force of a boxer’s blow: the limbs had been covered by arm guards, or leg greaves, as protection against an opponent’s weapon.

  “You…you’re gladiators!” Getorius exclaimed. “But how? The games are illegal now.”

  Tigris jumped up into a crouch. Giamona scowled at him and shook her head. He sat down again.

  “Illegal? You are child-like, Surgeon,” she chided. “Where men are willing to wager gold, there will be bouts. You’d have us enter a monastic order and shovel dung for our bread?”

  “Of…of course not.”

  “Then cure his arm.”

  Getorius exhaled, pondering the dilemma. He could be arrested for failing to report renegade gladiators, and Tigris also might be someone’s runaway slave. Yet the man needed help. Getorius examined the damaged area again. The deep wound was inflamed, and noxious air had been entering the exposed flesh for at least a day. He looked back at Giamona and shook his head.

  “I can’t save his arm. Muscle and tendon damage are too severe. It’s a miracle that arteries weren’t severed. Amputation is the best I can do.”

  “Cut it off?” The woman fixed him with the flat stare of a marble statue in the old senate house. “No, Surgeon. You will cure the arm.”

  Getorius hesitated. How can she sound casual and threatening at the same time? Where in Hades’ name is Arcadia? Perhaps she can reason with this…this wild Amazon. Tigris had suffered a deep slash, probably from a sword. No way could severed muscles and tendons be reattached, but even if they could, the wound would soon become corrupt from an overbalance of black bile. Amputation and cauterization of the stump were the only ways he could save the gladiator’s life.

  “Giamona, wounds of this kind attract noxious bile,” he explained. “I could try to suture the skin back together, but—”

  “Suture?”

  “Sew the wound closed.”

  “Then begin your needlework, Surgeon.”