The Cybelene Conspiracy

by Albert Noyer

  Sigeric shrugged a muscular shoulder without looking away from the prow. “Might be good t’ have a surgeon on board, if we run into piratae.”

  “Pirates?”

  “One of th’ risks. Y’ can climb up, Surgeon.”

  As Getorius mounted the short ladder, climbing to an opening in the railing that surrounded the platform, he took in his surroundings. Another crewman was standing at an angle behind Sigeric. A cabinet built into the rail in front of the helm was fastened to the deck. In the center of its top, a silver figurine of the sea god Neptune gazed toward the prow. A small flag, attached to a dowel that was pegged into a hole on a bronze disk, whipped noisily in the same direction. Next to it, protected by glass in a frame sealed with bitumen, was a stained navigational map.

  Getorius wiped a film of salt spray off the glass and read titles that identified the coasts of Italy and Dalmatia, from Aquileia in the north down to the island of Corcyra off the Greek mainland. A red line traced a crude zig-zag from Ravenna to a port in southern Dalmatia.

  “I never knew my father, but I was told he made maps, probably like this one,” Getorius said, trying to establish a common interest with Sigeric. “What port are we headed for?” When he saw the helmsman’s brow knit in a puzzled frown, Getorius quickly added, “That is, how long will it take us to get there?”

  Sigeric motioned to the crewman, who came to take over the steering oars.

  Standing next to Getorius, the helmsman placed a callused fore-finger on the glass. “This here red line shows our route t’ Olcinium.”

  Olcinium. “What are the four numerals along it?”

  “Our position at sunrise each day.” Sigeric chuckled and stroked the silver statue. “That’s if Neptune here is busy fooling around with sea nymphs and can’t brew up a storm. This band across th’ top shows stars in Aries and Taurus.”

  “March and April skies. The diagram along the bottom?”

  “Height of the sun at each hour. Sunup t’ sunset.”

  “So, it will take four days to reach…Olcinium?”

  “Like I said, if Neptune behaves. Th’ flag shows wind direction. Northwest Caurus. What I need.”

  “You’ve marked places along both coasts in red.”

  “Landfalls. Help me know my position. First day and night we’ll be running with th’ Adria Current, should make about a hundred twenty miles. We’ll sight Ancona lighthouse off the star rail around th’ eighth night hour.” Sigeric shifted his finger to an island. “Cybele will bear by Issa, about half way t’ Olcinium, but she’ll start bucking a north Ionian Current near there. Slow her up a bit.”

  “Fascinating.” Getorius looked into Sigeric’s gray-blue eyes as he reached to shake his hand. The man’s own relatives might well have taken part in the Mogontiacum raid, yet, Fate had placed the son of two of their victims in the helmsman’s safekeeping. “I hope we don’t meet those pirates you mentioned, but if I can be of help, do call on me.”

  Sigeric grunted. “Y’d better give Neptune a friendly pat, Surgeon, and ask for calm seas. We’ll have no sight of land all of tomorrow.”

  Getorius reached over and touched the metal god. The statue felt oddly warm, at body temperature, but of course it was the afternoon sun that was responsible. He moved to leave, but at the top of the ladder turned back to Sigeric. “I hope to learn more about Cybele.”

  Sigeric pushed strands of hair back into the leather hood. “I liked her better as Aurora, not named after that Stygian goddess. But she’s still a stout lady.”

  Stygian goddess? What does he mean? Getorius climbed down and walked to the center of the port rail to try and get a deeper sense of being at sea. He had seen the blue, flat line of seemingly endless horizon from the beaches around Ravenna, but to be surrounded by water on all sides would be an exhilarating—if slightly unsettling—experience.

  Pushed southeast by the Caurus wind and Adria Current, Cybele dipped in and out of the rolling Adriatic swells almost playfully, a creaking companion to the dolphins which had sidled alongside and now frolicked in leaping zig-zags across her prow. To the right, on the mainland, Getorius could still make out the flat coastline of Picenum, backed by the jagged bluish summits of the Apennines, and estimated the galley was about twelve miles offshore. Mount Conero, overlooking the Via Flaminia, was a slightly higher, hazy crest. He looked seaward again. In essence, on the most dangerous part of the voyage on the following day, his and Arcadia’s universe would be reduced to a fifteen-by-sixty-foot curved wooden box, pitching on a seemingly infinite expanse of water. The intimidating thought combined with a freshening afternoon breeze to make Getorius shiver and wish he had put on a cloak.

  Two stocky crewmen with curly black hair and swarthy, pock-marked complexions came on deck from below. Getorius guessed they could have been recruited from any of the coastal villages south of Ravenna, hoping to find life aboard a merchant galley more adventurous than tedious days of bobbing in a fishing boat, and exhausting nights cleaning slimy seaweed from broken nets. The men knelt to separate a coil of cord from two-foot square blocks of red-painted oak which had silver busts of human heads attached to the top. Curious, Getorius approached them.

  “I’m a surgeon,” he said as an introduction. “Never been on a galley before. What are you doing?”

  One of the men glanced up. “Getting ready to gauge Cybele’s speed,” he replied, then went back to unwinding the cord.

  Getorius noticed that the sailor’s accent was provincial, yet certainly better than Sigeric’s guttural Germanic pronunciation. Virilo was evidently shrewd enough to recruit crewmen who were above the average naval war galley standards. “How will you do that?” he asked, hoping the man, like Sigeric, would be humored enough by the interest to explain. “You are…?”

  “Gaius.”

  “How is that done, Gaius?”

  The man stood and held up one of the red blocks. “This log has Jupiter on top. Weighted with lead to make him float upright. I’ll drop him in the sea at the bow, call out ‘One’ when I see the god pass the stern. While I pull Jupiter back, Victor, on the port side, will throw in Mercury and yell out ‘Two.’ We’ll keep this up until Sigeric tells us his sandglass has recorded a quarter of an equinoctial hour.”

  “And?”

  “And?” Gaius snorted. “Cybele’s sixty feet long, Surgeon. I figure she’s making five miles every hour. If we end around number one hundred, I’ll be right.”

  “I see. Thanks.” Getorius turned back to watch the sea, wishing he had paid better attention to his mathematics tutor. A legionary mile is about four thousand, eight hundred feet long. During the sandglass quarter-hour interval, one hundred times the length of the hull, multiplied four times, evidently adds up to Cybele’s speed. He glanced up at the sun, estimating there were less than three hours until sunset, then went down the ladder to see how his wife felt. I’ll figure it out later.

  The cargo space was damp from salt spray blowing in through the open hatch. Arcadia was lying under a blanket on one of the two folding cots the crew had set up in the center of the hold. A wet cloth covered her eyes.

  “Are you feeling any better?” Getorius asked, dropping down onto one of the bales.

  “No, but I may survive if I never look at food again.”

  “I know, I’m a bit queasy myself. But it should pass in a day or so, and we’re fortunate the sea is calm. I talked to the helmsman, a Burgond named Sigeric. Our destination is the port of Olcinium.”

  “I’ve not heard of it.”

  “Nor had I. He said it was four days from Ravenna, if we don’t offend Neptune and run into a storm.” Getorius picked absently at the bale’s rope knot, deciding not to mention what Sigeric had said about the possibility of a pirate attack.

  “Getorius, while I was being sick, wasn’t that Diotar who came out of a cabin?”

  “With someone else who was wearing a hooded cape, so I couldn’t see who it was.”

  “Is Claudia on board?”

 
; “I asked Virilo about that, but he avoided answering.”

  “Why would he be taking Diotar to Dalmatia? The priest seems to have some hold on Virilo, and knows more about Atlos than he should.” Arcadia lifted the cloth from her eyes and sat up. “Getorius, what have we gotten into? A few days ago things were going well. Now, we’re practically fugitives, running away to an unknown town—”

  “We? Cara, you’re not involved in this.”

  “I certainly am. Leudovald suspects you and knows I was at Thecla’s basilica when you found Atlos.”

  “He wouldn’t arrest a woman.”

  “Getorius, we don’t know how the man’s mind works. Even you joked about him being capable of beheading his own grandmother.”

  “It was just that, Arcadia, a jest.” Getorius held a hand up to shield his eyes from a ray of sunlight that had slanted through the hatch opening. The hull’s yaw gave the shaft movement as the square of brightness swept over the bales of wool, then back again. A moment later, a smell of grilled fish wafted in with the light. “The crew is preparing supper already.”

  “Not for me.”

  “No”—Getorius brushed a hand against her cheek—“Arcadia, we can’t change anything that happened in Ravenna, but we mustn’t let Virilo even suspect that we’ve discovered those counterfeit coins.”

  “Did he react when you told him we slept in the bales?”

  “He didn’t. Either he doesn’t know about the coins, or he should have been an actor.” Getorius looked toward the hatch opening. “I think I might eat a little. Sure I can’t get you anything? Watered wine? Bread?”

  “Nothing. I’m not moving from this cot.”

  Getorius leaned over to kiss her. “By this time tomorrow, Cara, you’ll be back to feeling normal.”

  “I hope so. I’m going to lie back again.”

  On deck the crew was being served wooden plates of red mullet, liberally sprinkled with pepper filched from Maximin’s import supply. The cook, nicknamed Maranatha—“Come, Lord,”—by the crew, a jesting reference to being poisoned by his food, was a short, wiry Greek tending a grill set over glowing charcoal. The stove area was shielded from the wind and sea spray by the curve of the prow.

  When Maranatha turned to hand Getorius a bowl of bread chunks soaked in fish broth, he saw that the left side of the cook’s face was disfigured by pink burn scars. The man’s sightless eye was a milky sphere resembling those found on statuary. What had caused such a hideous injury? Had a careless assistant spilled water onto a pan of hot olive oil and caused a terrible accident?

  The crew, except for Victor, who stood, squatted on deck to eat their mullet and help themselves from a keg of green olives. Getorius joined them, hunkering down next to Gaius. He tried a spoonful of the broth and found it delicious, flavored with onion, laurel and coriander. Maranatha handed a crewman a pan of the fish, and three plates, and Getorius watched him take it toward Diotar’s cabin. Three? There must be someone else with the priest and that person I saw.

  The sailor returned, smirking and clutching his crotch while making jokes in Greek. Getorius caught the words eunoukhoi and hermaphroditos, and guessed that the men’s snickers related to comments about Diotar’s womanly manner.

  “They’re laughing at the priest?” he asked Gaius.

  “And about what goes on at his temple outside Olcinium,” Gaius replied, picking a mullet bone from his teeth.

  “Diotar has a temple? Have you seen it?”

  “Only the outside. Rumor is Diotar’s sorceresses change men into women in there.” Gaius tossed the bone away and winked. “Neptune knows what else they might do to a man.”

  “Sorceresses?” Getorius probed. “Don’t you mean a priestess, like Claudia?” Perhaps the crewman would tell him if she was on board.

  “Sorceresses,” Gaius repeated.

  Before Getorius could ask about Claudia, Maranatha leaned down in front of him with a plate of the mullet. Getorius slurped down the rest of his broth, then handed the bowl to the cook in exchange for the pinkish fish.

  “I’m sure this will be as good as your soup.”

  Maranatha cocked his head to look at Getorius with the good eye. “Tell that to the bilge scum, Surgeon,” he commented loudly, nodding toward the crew.

  In response the men hooted and threw fish bones at the cook. Getorius took a bite of mullet, but saw Victor suddenly fling his uneaten fish over the side and come to kneel in front of him.

  “Y’ said y’ were a surgeon?” the crewman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “My gut’s hanging out my ass,” Victor complained. “Would y’ take a look?” He turned and hiked his tunic up over a bare, swollen rectum.

  Getorius’s bite of mullet stuck in his throat as he recognized the raw symptoms of hemorrhoids. Hippocrates had described the condition as an excess of bile in the anal veins leading to a heating of the blood. This attracted more blood from nearby veins and forced the bowel outward. Getorius spit fish bits into his hand.

  “There are…several treatments,” he told Victor. “Perhaps we could talk about them tomorrow, when you’re not on watch?”

  “Fourth hour.” Victor flipped the tunic down and reached for a handful of olives.

  “Fourth hour.” Getorius looked at the reddish mullet chunks on his plate and felt his already-queasy stomach rebel. He stood slowly and scraped the fish over the rail, grateful that Arcadia was not well enough to join in the crew’s evening meal—even though she had missed an opportunity to gain an intimate, if disgusting, bit of knowledge about yet another medical problem.

  Chapter eight

  That evening Getorius tried to recall as much as he could about the methods that Hippocrates had recommended for treating Victor’s condition. The most drastic was to purge the patient, and then cauterize the pile with a red-hot oblong iron until the swelling dried up. Since this also involved several days of applying poultices and suppositories to the area, he decided against such a painful and lengthy procedure. Excising the hemorrhoid was somewhat less drastic, but utilized medicines in the healing poultice that he did not have, such as calcined flower of bronze. He finally decided to wash the man’s anus with hot water and administer a suppository composed of what was available on board; alum and boiled honey from Maranatha’s stores, ground cuttlefish shell, the bitumen used in caulking the hull, and verdigris scraped from the galley’s weathered bronze fittings. There was plenty of wool in the bales for making the insert itself.

  By mid-afternoon of the next day, after the odors of fish, garlic, and onion from the noon meal had dissipated on the wind, Arcadia felt well enough to come up on deck for some air. Getorius had just finished treating Victor when he saw her emerge.

  “Arcadia, you’re better? That’s wonderful.” He turned from watching the dolphins that were still racing the Cybele to take her arm and bring her to the railing. “I was about to go below and tell you to come see this.”

  “I do feel weak, but less nauseous.”

  “Good. Come look. The dolphins seem to be enjoying our company. It’s like a game for them.”

  Arcadia tentatively walked to the railing and peered over the side. Getorius put his arm around her waist, and was just pointing out the frolicking mammals when he saw Diotar come out of his cabin and stand at the stern rail.

  “I still wonder what Diotar is doing on board. This is only the second time he’s been outside, that I’ve seen.”

  “Even creatures in Ravenna’s swamps come up for air,” Arcadia commented dryly.

  “You really don’t like Diotar.”

  “I told you that the first time I saw him,” she reminded her husband. “He’s undoubtedly a eunuch, like the Augustus’s steward, but that isn’t the reason. There’s something…sinister about him.”

  “I’d like to talk to him. Find out more about his cult.”

  “Now would be the time. Let me try.”

  The Cybelene ArchGallus was dressed in a full-length wool tunic, hooded cloak, and ti
ght-fitting felt boots. A glint of gold at his throat came from a neck torc. His face was pale under the light make-up he had put on. Getorius noticed him draw back as Arcadia walked over to start a conversation. He followed her.

  “Has the sea upset your humor balance as it has mine?” she asked pleasantly.

  Diotar looked past her at Getorius. “Surgeon. I had not expected you on this journey.”

  “I…decided rather quickly. We’ve always wanted to visit Olcinium.”

  “That minor port?” Diotar’s painted eyebrows rose in surprise. “It’s not to be compared with Dyrrhachium in Macedonia.”

  “Perhaps import duties are less strictly collected?”

  “A concern of the galleymaster, not mine.”

  “Are you an associate of Senator Maximin’s?” Arcadia asked. “One of his investors in pepper?”

  “Each man knows his own business best.” Diotar evaded her question and looked past Arcadia again to ask Getorius, “Are you familiar with the worship of Magna Mater, Surgeon?”

  “Great Mother? Not really.”

  “The goddess is not unlike the Christians’ Maria.”

  “We don’t worship her,” Arcadia corrected. “She’s only honored as the mother of Christ.”

  “The cult of the Great Mother, of Cybele, is centuries older,” Diotar sneered.

  Arcadia tried to place the man’s accent. She was certain he knew Greek, but there was also a Celtic lilt to his pronunciation. Diotar might try to ignore her, but she was determined to know more about him and his cult. “You’ve not come to our clinic,” she probed. “Have you been in Ravenna long?”

  Diotar hesitated a moment before replying, “I went there from Pessinus.”

  “That’s in which province?” Getorius asked.

  “Galatia.” Diotar abruptly turned toward the door of his cabin. “I must go inside. This wind is chilling.”

  “So much for finding out more.” Arcadia led her husband to the stove area in the shelter of the bow. “He said he lived in Galatia. I thought he knew some Celtic.”