The Venus Throw - Roman Sub Rosa 04

by Steven Saylor

what other life was he fit for?

  So the roaring lion went crashing

  down the mountainside and drove

  Attis back into the forest, back into the

  madness and raving ecstasy,

  back into a life of loyal, unsexed

  slavery to the Great Mother.

  Catullus shivered, as if the poem were slowly releasing him from its grip. His voice began to fade, until the final lines were barely audible:

  "Goddess, Great Mother Cybele,

  guardian of Ida,

  Madden other men—not me!

  Give others your raving dream.

  Avert your furies from my house.

  Draw others into your scheme!"

  Catullus was transformed. Mounting the stage, he had looked like a man stupefied by wine and self-pity, all soft and uncertain. Now his face was haggard and his eyes glowed, like a man emerging from a terrible ordeal, winnowed to his essential core. He stumbled a bit leaving the stage, not like a drunken man but like a man drained of all energy.

  The garden was silent. Around me I saw raised eyebrows, uncertain frowns, thoughtful nods, grimaces of distaste. Sitting close by the stage Clodia stared unblinking at the spot Catullus had vacated. Her face was blank. Did she consider the poem a tribute to her, or the opposite, an insult? Or could she not see herself in a young man's poem about inescapable obsession, the obliteration of dignity and freedom by overwhelming passion, and the unequal, disastrous union of a mere mortal with an aloof, uncaring goddess?

  Behind me I heard a stifled sob, like the sound of a woman weeping, so soft that except for the utter quiet I would never have noticed. I turned my head. Away from the other guests, on the steps leading down into the garden, a figure sat by the pedestal of the monstrous Venus, concealed in its shadow. He hugged his ankles as if to keep from shivering and hid his face against his knees, but by his dress I knew it was Trygonion.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  After Catullus's performance, the party never regained quite the same air of levity, despite the relentless parade of entertainments that followed. This included several other poets, better known than Catullus, who had been placed at the beginning of the evening as a sort of warm-up for those who followed. But no other poet who recited that evening left any lasting impression, at least not on my ears.

  There were also dancers and jugglers and a concluding set of excruciatingly crude but very funny skits by the mime. During a break in all this entertainment our hostess found her way to our comer. She greeted Bethesda with outstretched arms and a kiss. "Did you receive the gift?"

  "Yes, thank you. It arrived at the house while we were down at the Forum." Bethesda gave me a sidelong glance.

  Clodia nodded. "Good. Now you're one of us. Yes, I saw you both at the trial. What do you think, Gordianus? How did it go for us today?"

  "I suppose Bethesda said it best: 'Oratory is all very well when there are no facts to go on.' "

  Clodia gave me a quizzical smile. "Was it Bethesda who said that? I thought it my ancestor Appius Claudius, the one who . . . well, never mind. May I talk to you privately? Senator, amuse this lady for a moment while I take her husband away on business."

  She led me out of the garden, into a private chamber. The walls were painted a rich red, decorated with rustic scenes of satyrs and nymphs.

  "You're looking much better today," I said.

  "Am I? I thought I looked rather horrible when I saw myself in the mirror this morning. I considered calling off the party, but it would have been the first time I ever missed giving a party on the eve of the Great Mother festival. Even when Quintus and I were up in Cisalpine Gaul — "

  "Did you have Chrysis tortured today?"

  She looked at me blankly for a moment. Even by the lamplight reflected off the red walls her face looked pale. "Actually, I took you aside to talk about more important matters. But since you ask, Gordianus—yes, Chrysis was tortured today. Not by me, of course. By officials of the court. Surely you know that a slave can't give a statement in a trial without being tortured? Otherwise she might simply say whatever her mistress told her to say."

  "So the logic goes."

  "The bitch was about to poison me. I caught her in the act."

  "Did she confess?"

  "Yes."

  "Did she implicate Caelius?"

  "Of course. You can hear her statement read tomorrow, just before my own testimony."

  "The statement which she gave under torture."

  "You seem to have an unwholesome fixation on torture tonight, Gordianus. I should think you'd had enough of torture listening to that awful poem of Catullus's! Really, when he told me that he had an ideal poem for the Great Mother festival ... " She gave a little shudder, then brightened. "But I won't have to use torture to get you to testify tomorrow, I hope."

  "Me?"

  "Of course. Who else could Herennius have meant when he said the man Cicero called 'the most honest man in Rome' would be testifying against Caelius? You need only tell what you witnessed with your own eyes at the Senian baths, and here in my house yesterday, when you saw what was done to me."

  "What if I decline to testify?"

  She seemed surprised. "No one can compel you. But I thought you wanted to see Caelius punished."

  "I wanted to discover Dio's killer."

  "It's the same thing, Gordianus. Everyone else in Rome has figured that out, so why haven't you? Oh, yes, I know, you're a man who demands proof. Well then, you should have come up with those slaves ofLucceius's, the ones involved in the poison plot. You were going to track them down and buy them for me, you said. Did anything ever come of that?"

  "No."

  "Too bad. They would have made superb witnesses. I gave you silver to buy them, didn't I?"

  "I'll return the silver."

  "The trial's not over yet. There's no hurry." "I'll have to wait until my son Eco gets back to Rome—" "Forget about the silver, Gordianus. There's no need to return it. Do you understand?" "I'm not sure."

  "Consider it part of your fee. Now, of course you'll testify tomorrow. You must."

  "Must I?"

  "If you care about justice at all. If you want to put Dio's shade to

  rest."

  "If only it was clear to me exactly how Dio died."

  She sighed, exasperated. "Asicius and Caelius broke into Coponius's house and stabbed the poor wretch."

  I ignored her, counting days in my head. "There's still a chance that Eco might arrive tonight, or tomorrow—"

  "Good. If he does, and if he brings word of those slaves, then perhaps we can add their testimony. But I told you, forget about the silver."

  We were speaking at such cross-purposes that I hardly heard her. "There was something else," I said. "Something I'd forgotten. When I left your house yesterday, I intended to take with me that bit of gorgon's hair, to compare it to some of the same poison in my strongbox at home. I forgot it, somehow ... " I shuddered, remembering the ugliness of Chrysis's degradation and my flight from Clodia's bedchamber.

  "Could I take the gorgon's hair home with me tonight?"

  Clodia hesitated. "I'm afraid not. Herennius has it. He said he might want to produce it as evidence tomorrow, when I give my testimony. Though I don't suppose showing the judges a lump of poison is likely to be as shocking as showing them a bloody dagger or whatever. Is it important?"

  "No, I suppose not. I only wanted to make sure that I knew what the stuff was, for my own satisfaction."

  "If it would help convince you to testify, then I wish I still had it. I suppose I could somehow arrange to get the stuff back from Herennius, though it's rather late. In the morning there'll hardly be time—"

  I shook my head. "Don't bother."

  "No? Good!" She laughed weakly. "I don't think I could stand to deal with one more troublesome detail tonight. I really am awfully tired.

  Clodius's physician says that I shouldn't expect to feel completely Well for quite some time. To tell you the truth, I f
eel quite awful. I couldn't eat a bite of anything that was put in front of me tonight. I'll simply have to trust that the cook was up to his usual standard. Now, Gordianus assure me that you will testify tomorrow. Don't make me go to bed fretting about it. As I said, you need only tell the court what you've seen with your own eyes."

  I looked at her for a long moment, at her huge green eyes made all the more lustrous by illness, at the smooth white flesh of her throat curving down to her breasts and the sleek lines of her body wrapped in the transparent silk. I breathed in her perfume. What if Caelius had succeeded in poisoning her? She would be dead now, already beginning to rot. The idea was appalling, intolerable: the glittering eyes shut forever, the perfect body eaten by worms, the perfume overpowered by the stench of putrefaction.

  "Yes, I'll testify. I don't see why not."

  She smiled and kissed me, full on the mouth, and pressed her body against me as if she had read my thoughts and wanted to show me that she was still very much alive and warm to the touch. From the garden I heard the sound of a poet declaiming, punctuated by laughter and applause.

  Clodia broke the kiss and stepped back. "I'd better take you back to Bethesda before she comes looking for you. Egyptian women are uncommonly jealous, I'm told."

  The party had no formal ending, or at least none that I stayed for. After the mime's encore, another meal commenced with the guests seated in new combinations. Eventually, those who had eaten and conversed and laughed and drunk enough began to wend their ways to the front door. Bethesda and I were among the first to leave. Catullus and Trygonion seemed to have disappeared.

  "You look very thoughtful," said Bethesda on the way home.

  "And you look rather smug. Did you enjoy yourself that much?"

  "Enjoyment was not really the point," she said, suddenly haughty.

  "What did Clodia mean by what she said to you?"

  "When?"

  "She asked if you had gotten the little statue of Attis. You said yes, and then she said, 'Good, now you're one of us.' "

  "Did she say that?"

  "Bethesda, I'm in no mood to be teased."

  "She only meant that I had been accepted by the other women here on the Palatine. The women who matter, anyway.

  Thanks to Clodia."

  "Is that all she meant?"

  "What do you mean, is that all? Think of it, of where I come from, who I am. I dreaded it when we moved from the farm back to Rome, into such a house, such a neighborhood. I never let you see how I felt, of course, but it was just as I feared. They treated me very badly at first."

  "Treated you badly?"

  "Ignored me, shut me out. But after tonight, things will change. The others will treat me differently. As if I were one of them."

  This struck me as highly unlikely, but I shrugged. "Why not? Almost anything seems to be possible in Rome these days."

  For some reason Bethesda took offense at this comment and didn't say another word to me all the way home.

  Diana had stayed up for us. She demanded that her mother tell her everything about the party. While they settled in Diana's room, talking of what the women had worn and how they had dressed their hair, I escaped to our bedroom.

  I stripped off my toga and put on a shabby tunic. I kept a lamp burning so that Bethesda could find her way around the room. I lay down on the sleeping couch and shut my eyes against the flickering light, but I couldn't sleep. I had drunk too much, eaten too much, heard too much poetry. From down the hall I could hear Diana's and Bethesda's muffled laughter. The sound reminded me of the sound of distant laughter in the garden, when Clodia had kissed me . . .

  I had asked her for something, hadn't I? The poison, that was it! The gorgon's hair, so that I could compare it to the same stuff that Eco had given me to safeguard. Again, I had come home without it. Of course, I didn't really need Clodia's sample to make the comparison; I remembered clearly enough what the stuff had looked like. I had held it up to the lamplight, while Chrysis twisted in the corner and sobbed . . .

  I shifted on the sleeping couch, determined to fall asleep, but the laughter from Diana's room kept me up, and my thoughts kept twisting endlessly in space, like Chrysis suspended upside down from the ceiling. Finally I got up and reached for the lamp.

  There was a little storage room down the hallway from our bedroom, cluttered with rolled rugs and folded chairs and wooden boxes. After a brief search I found the strongbox amid the jumble. I tried to remember where I had hidden the key, and then realized I didn't need it. The little lock on the strongbox had been broken.

  I took the box into the bedroom and set down the lamp so that it would light the inside.

  There wasn't much inside the box—a blood-encrusted dagger that had been important at another trial, a few letters and some other mementos that I didn't want anyone else to touch. Among them was the little pyxis of poison that Eco had asked me to keep for him, not wanting to have it in his own house with the twins.

  I picked up the pyxis by the rim of the lid, which came open. I gave a jerk, thinking I had clumsily spilled the contents, then realized there were no contents to be spilled.

  The pyxis was empty. Only a few traces of poison remained, com-pacted against the inside corners of the box, identical to the crumbly yellow powder that Clodia had shown me.

  What did it mean?

  I set the pyxis aside and looked in the strongbox again, thinking the poison must have spilled inside. I saw no yellow powder, but I did see something else, a small object easily overlooked: an earring. It was a simple design, a little silver crook with a green glass bead for ornament. I recognized it at once; it was one of Bethesda's old earrings.

  The crook of the earring was bent. I looked again at the broken lock of the strongbox. The metal facing was scored with tiny scratches. The aperture was small; the crook of the earring would have been ideal for poking inside.

  What had happened was obvious: the earring had been used to force the lock.

  I sat and stared dumbly at the earring, the strongbox and the empty pyxis, at first puzzled, then stunned, then furious.

  Diana and her mother gave a start when I pushed aside the curtain and stepped into the room. I held the empty pyxis in my outstretched hand.

  "Can you explain this?" I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

  They both looked at me as if they hardly knew me. Would I have known myself in a mirror at that moment?

  Neither of them spoke. "I asked if you could explain this." I said. They stared at me dumbly.

  "Very well. It needs no explaining." I held up the earring. "You must have been in a considerable hurry, Bethesda, to have left this behind. That was careless, very careless. Didn't you realize I'd find eventually?"

  She stared blankly at the earring. "Please, Bethesda, don't pretend that you don't recognize it. Even I recognized it, and you claim I neve notice jewelry! It's one of a pair that you've had for years." I sighed

  suddenly more sad than angry. "Did gaining her favor mean so much to you? Did you not know how she would use the poison—not just to fool the court, but to make a fool of me!" I snapped the pyxis shut and threw the earring on the floor. Diana gave a start and drew against her mother, frightened. For a moment I felt ashamed, but then my anger returned. I paced the floor.

  "She's made a fool of you as well, can't you see that? Inviting you to her party, giving you that abominable statue, making you think you could belong to her circle. Sharing shameful secrets with you, whispering behind my back in the garden! She made up whatever you wanted to hear, I imagine. She's had a lot of practice at that. It's what she does with her lovers, so why not with you? Did you really think she wanted to be your friend, a woman who talks about her ancestors as if they were gods, stooping to share gossip with a woman who was born a slave?"

  I stopped my pacing, trying to quiet my rage, but I only grew angrier. I clutched the pyxis so hard that the corners cut the palm of my hand. "Wife, you have taken part in deceiving me! Do you deny it?"

/>   Bethesda made no answer.

  "You have deliberately deceived me! Do you deny it?" "Mother—" said Diana, clutching at Bethesda's arm. Bethesda covered the girl's face and pulled Diana against her breast to quiet her. "Do you deny it?" I shouted.

  Bethesda looked steadily into my eyes, shrewd and unflappable to the last. "No, husband. I do not deny it." "You took part in deceiving me?"

  "Yes."

  We stared at each other for a long moment. Bethesda never blinked. I threw the pyxis on the floor and left the room in a rage. My shouting had roused Belbo, who rushed after me as I raced out the door and up the night-dark street.

  The polite manner of knocking on a door is with the foot, but that night I used my fist to bang on Clodia's door. The banging reverberated in the still night air, loud enough to wake neighbors, I thought, but the slaves took a long time to answer. Did the noise frighten them, or did they simply think me rude? At last a slotted peephole slid open and two eyes peered out. Even in the darkness I recognized them by the single brow above them.

  "I want to see your mistress, Barnabas."

  "It's late. You can see her tomorrow at the trial."

  "No, I must see her tonight."

  The eyes studied me dispassionately. I realized how I must look, wearing my sleeping tunic, my hair mussed. The peephole closed. I paced back and forth on the narrow doorstep while Belbo stood in the street behind me, yawning and blinking.

  At last the door opened. I slipped inside, but Barnabas closed the door in Belbo's face.

  He led me through the foyer, down the steps and across the garden By the light of a few low-burning lamps I was able to see that the garden was not entirely deserted. Coupled figures moved and whispered in the shadows. Suddenly, like a fawn in the forest, a naked girl went running across our path, taking great bounding strides. It was the girl who had dined with Senator Fufius. She turned her head and gave a startled laugh as she passed, then vanished. A moment later Fufius, naked and drunk, went chasing after her.

  Barnabas led me into the red-paneled room off the garden. He set a lamp on a small table and left. I had plenty of time to study the nymphs and satyrs on the walls before Clodia appeared in the doorway. Her hair was unpinned and hung down past her shoulders. She wore a transparent white robe belted only at the waist, so that it was open between her breasts. The naked patch of flesh shimmered in the red light reflected off the walls. She smiled wearily.