The Water Thief

by Ben Pastor

  “Really?” Tralles sneered a comment. “And you start the list of emperors with a faggot-lover first class? But then they mostly were, those old crowned heads. So you did not joke in the old days when you said you wanted to be a historian.”

  Together, they walked out to the inner court, and across it to the regimental chapel, for the little ceremony of sacrifice to the gods and the unit standards. “It isn’t exactly what I said.” Aelius faced the altar, gathered a pinch of incense, and tossed it on the brazier. “What I said is that I meant to write about history. What’s the difference? Claim to greatness, for one.”

  For all the perfunctory nature of their visit to the chapel, they were both religious men, and a few moments of devout prayer followed. Then, “Let’s go get a beer,” Tralles spoke up.

  They did, and as at the officers’ club there was scarcely anyone given the midmorning hour, Tralles secured plenty of drink and snacks for their table. After catching up with one another on acquaintances and assignments, the conversation widened to gossip.

  “Do you remember Serenus Dio?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do. Used to run provisions to the post. From Zeugma.”

  “I don’t remember him.”

  “Tall, Aelius—hatchet-faced, a slight stoop—used to sell books on the side.”

  “Ah, yes, yes. What about him?”

  “He died.” Tralles chewed on nut meats, having called for more barley drink. “Was coming upriver from some property of his, in the neighborhood of Ptolemais. The story has been all over town for the last two days. The crew became curious when he didn’t emerge from under his tent in the morning, and they checked on him. Serenus wasn’t there. No one had seen him after he’d retired, and it was about twelve more hours before they found him on the shore a bit down river, by a potter’s shed. The crocodiles must not have been hungry, because they left most of him intact.”

  “I see.” Aelius cracked two walnuts against each other in his palm. “He could have fallen off.”

  “Nah. He was killed.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Tralles took a swig, and rinsed his mouth with it. “You really do not recall him, then. He was terrified of drowning while on travel, seeing that he couldn’t swim. His personal boat had high railings on all sides, to make sure he wouldn’t accidentally lean too far over.”

  Now that he heard the details, Aelius remembered the merchant with the acidulous voice, a man who’d moved mountains of foodstuff and fodder and provisions of all kinds during the campaign against the rebels. He dealt in rare books as an avocation, and Aelius had ordered from him copies and originals, spending half of his yearly bonus on them. Twice he’d had Serenus bring him volumes from war-torn Alexandria, where the dealer knew all the little copyist shops attached to the library, from which obscure historical tracts not in circulation could be commissioned. Serenus’s boat—whenever he traveled by river, which wasn’t often, but still remained the fastest way to go up and down Egypt—had such high bulwarks as to resemble a box with oars and sails.

  “So,” Aelius thought he should ask, “who would gain from his murder?”

  “That’s the oddest part. To all appearances, no one. His finances were in order, but I heard that a stipulation in the will—since he had no heirs—states that in case of suspicious death, all assets will be frozen indefinitely. Folks who’re afraid of water shouldn’t be sailing, you’ll say. But doesn’t the will sound as if he was afraid of being done in?”

  Aelius was still thinking of the legal aspects of the inheritance. “Unclaimed real estate and cash would eventually end up in the Roman fisc.”

  “But it could take years for the tax men to hunt down his investments, and he surely had plenty of undeclared revenue. Of course his lover, friends, and business partners are rushing to point out that they couldn’t possibly have anything to gain from doing him in. They’re weeping and pulling their hair even as we speak, and not only because they lost a dear associate.”

  “Money isn’t the only thing one may gain from disposing of somebody.”

  Tralles finished his drink, and craned his neck to look into his friend’s glass. “Right you are. That’ll be for the authorities to figure out. Are you going to finish that?”

  Aelius was not fond of Egyptian beer, and pushed the glass over. “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks. What about Anubina—did you go to see her?”

  Mention of his great physical passion of a few years back made him ache a little. “No,” Aelius hastened to say, “but I inquired. Married. Has children. What about you and Cosma?”

  “Oh, it’s been long over. Likes being a widow, so there wasn’t much of a chance of her asking me to marry her. I got along with her son well enough, so it isn’t as though we couldn’t have made it work for us. I was ready to settle down, so I married someone else. And you?”

  “I came close, a couple of times, but no.”

  “Last time I saw you, you were bedding Constantius’s put-away concubine.”

  “Helena? It’s long over.”

  “I bet. Subemperors’ girlfriends are trouble.”

  “Yes, especially when they have ambitious and obnoxious sons.”

  After leaving the officers’ club, Tralles insisted on accompanying him to his quarters. Beyond the roofs, to the south, the mirror-bright sky had grown slightly flushed, and the wind had picked up enough to cause awnings to vibrate and door curtains to make snapping sounds. “Sandstorm coming,” Tralles muttered. “Must have been waiting for you.”

  In the street, Aelius overheard Serenus Dio’s name, fragments and snippets of conversations in Greek as he and his friend walked past vendor stalls and doorways. “. . . he’d been to court not too long ago, on account of some local dispute. I heard it at The baths, but to tell you the truth I didn’t pay attention,” and, “I had dinner with Serenus the week before. Who’d have thought?”

  “I told you it’s on everyone’s lips,” Tralles said. “Historian that you are, if you’re interested I can put you in touch with the best gossips in town.”

  Around women’s ankles, the wind caused their gauzy green and blue skirts to whip and flag, and Aelius glanced at those passing flashes of color. “No, no. I’m not interested in the least, thanks, I have other things to do. It seems at any rate a matter of getting the truth out of the boat’s crew. Clearly it is in its midst that Serenus’s killer is to be found.”

  “That’s what I think. Thanks to the laws of the deified Hadrian, the sailors—all slaves of his—haven’t been automatically strung up by the neck, as they probably deserve. As late as yesterday they were still vouching for one another. A little roughing up in jail ought to effect results before long.”

  Not so leisurely—as both men were still in the habit of walking at a good pace, and keeping step besides—they reached the end of the mall, and crossed the street to the entrance of Aelius’s flat. Extending from the cornice on the façade, awnings stretched like a cool piece of evening, although it was close to midday. The wind abated as they stepped under the shade and took leave from one another in the doorway.

  “Don’t be a stranger while you’re here,” Tralles recommended in good humor. “You know where to find me.”

  In his flat, provident servants had readied the small plunging pools in the baths. Aelius decided to take advantage of a quick scrub in lukewarm water, and relax while reviewing the paperwork pertaining to his official duties.

  The province-wide crackdown against the Christians, long expected, was to start in earnest: Tralles had seen through his assignment well enough. Along with Diocletian’s letter, spelling out his orders, copies of two lengthy imperial subscripts, penned at the foot of requests for clarification and advice by local authorities, formed the basis of the information on which, as Caesar’s envoy, Aelius was to act. Reading them seated at the poolside, with his feet in the water, he managed to cull from the bureaucratic padding of sentences what the petitioners (the commander of t
he garrison and the city mayor) were actually saying. Outward signs of unrest were still infrequent but violent; political graffiti were appearing here and there, and there was increased need for police patrols throughout the city. Arrests of recalcitrant clergy and sympathizers had begun in the countryside, several detentions might follow, and although collaborators seemed scarcer than during the last crackdown, it was too early to tell.

  What were officials expected to do? The imperial replies, redacted in the recognizable official jargon of palatine secretaries, acknowledged the complex nature of religious ideology, but confirmed the need to err on the side of clemency in the proceedings, even allowing for priests and bishops “to sacrifice to the gods and be freed, to the discretion of my envoy, as was granted in occasion of the twentieth imperial anniversary in November.”

  Aelius read on, then put away the letters and slipped into the pool. The Christians would call it persecution, and make a big deal of it, never mind that all care was being taken to abide by every accepted courthouse rule. Still, he was to oversee a few of the trials himself, and report in writing. Submerging himself entirely in the tepid water, ever so briefly he shut the world out. Clemency was well and good, and fully in keeping with a time Diocletian himself termed tranquillitas nostra. Unless the armed fundamentalist branch of the Egyptian Church had changed its methods in the last seven years, personal risk in Antinoopolis would be within hours very much a factor again.

  Egypt wanted to exact a price from him, again. He’d fought and won here, but the accounts between them had clearly not been settled, even though as a young officer he’d learned all he could about Egyptian history and ways before coming. From Herodotus’s travel notes and the accounts of Caesar’s permanence, he’d devoured the texts, down to the encomiastic, perhaps unreliable narratives of Hadrian’s visit in the seven hundred and eighty-ninth year of Rome, and more. Egypt’s antiquity was cumbersome and incomprehensible. He’d felt as one stepping into the footprint of a giant, measuring oneself—one’s comparably poor and limited claim to culture and importance—with enormous steps taken hundreds and thousands of years before.

  At the end of the Rebellion, guides had pointed out to him the relief portraits of Cleopatra, looking exactly like any other Egyptian queen on a temple wall, with her half-Roman son resembling any other young prince of the land. Aelius sat in the water, rubbing his neck, thinking how he was both attracted and troubled by the way this country made one look like anyone else, as though—smoothed out, carved into the unforgiving medium of porphyry or basalt—the human faces of power were in the end always the same, immutable because they were endowed with the same traits of native or acquired greatness. He’d considered, unlikely as it was for a cavalryman just out of a civil war, and a barbarian at that, how superior Rome was in its portraits, whose stone or bronze or clay became another self to the person they represented. Even the imperfect likeness of his father on the sandstone stela resembled the man in life more than any of these ten-cubit high figures of Egyptian rulers and scribes, alike as cats are alike. Egyptian cats at that, mummified in aromatic packets like newborn babies, a practice he’d attributed to local piety and love of animals until he’d seen the priests break the necks of the creatures to sacrifice them.

  So he had now come back to cruel Egypt, in whose long existence his having been away meant nothing. Out of the water, Aelius began to dry himself methodically. He had changed. Disquiet—it was hard to give another name to his unease—accompanied him here, a need to find out about things, turn stones over to see what lurked below, or part the weeds and peer into the brushwood, whatever metaphor indicated his need to have answers. Surely, he was here on official duty and to pursue history, and Serenus Dio’s death meant nothing to him, but there was a personal dimension to this trip as well. He had heard once that in the end the traveler is always looking for himself, and if he’s fortunate he discovers parts of his own nature wherever he goes; even as Odysseus did, who had confronted his vices and virtues and desires and gone beyond all those to go home again. If not, his travels served him nothing.

  Elsewhere in the well-appointed flat, Aelius heard the servants rush about and begin to close shutters and doors. There might be meaning in the fact that he had, as Tralles joked, arrived at Antinoopolis on the day of a sandstorm.

  8 Payni (3 June, Saturday), 304

  The sand blew all evening, and all night, and the day after. On the third day, the sky was clear once more, and the Nile flood two days closer. Brooms were clearing doorsteps all over town when Aelius met the local commander—just back after a holiday in the Delta—and handed him sealed imperial orders from Aspalatum.

  With more gossip to report, Gavius Tralles met him in the command post’s courtyard. Two of Serenus’s sailors had hanged themselves in jail, whether because they had something to hide or because the roughing up had been too much for them. “I was in the courthouse on account of the Christian trials starting up,” he said in a knowing way, but received no encouragement on the subject from Aelius. “Well, anyhow, it was there that I heard the news about the merchant’s sailors, and met his friend—his pal, you know—in the lobby. He told me that Serenus had something for you. I don’t know what, he didn’t say. If you want to, send for him, or you can go and ask him directly. Goes by Harpocratio, though his Egyptian name is Petesuchus. They still live at the fourth mile of Hadrian’s Way, by the linen manufacture—the nice villa.”

  It was just like Tralles to emphasize names of places and people he assumed others should know and remember. Aelius had not even known Serenus had a male lover. “Why would Serenus have something for me?” he asked. “I hadn’t seen him in years.”

  “Search me. Maybe it’s a book.”

  The possibility was intriguing. Having declined a morning beer, he left Tralles in his office and headed for the mall bookstores and antiquarian market, seeking—to no avail—rare or noncirculated material on the deified Hadrian. He then stopped by the priests’ house in the annex of the temple to the deified Antinous. Here, he set up appointments for the research visits he intended to pay to the various shrines, their libraries and collections.

  It was close to midday when he decided to follow up on Tralles’s piece of information. He left town by the monumental east gate, and having climbed the cliff called the Antinoan ledge past the hippodrome, he rode without haste along the lonely, handsome road Hadrian had built to link Antinoopolis to the Arabian Gulf. Burials of Roman soldiers, a couple of them in the shape of small pyramids on high plinths, flanked the road, and there was a wayside miniature shrine to the Boy as well, paid for, as the inscription read, “by the piety of the officers of the Alexandrian Fleet.”

  Shortly before and to the left of the fourth mile marker, a lush, walled jubilation of cultivated trees, and the manufacturing plant beyond, identified Serenus’s property at the end of a shady graveled path. Out of what he’d selectively tried to forget about this place and these days, Aelius noticed he recalled minute visual details about corners, walls, gates, as if in his recollection the small things were more important and more revealing than the large ones.

  He’d actually come here to see Serenus Dio a couple of times, when the books set aside for him had been too rare or too many to take to the army post, or he’d wanted to take a look at them in private. He recognized the garden gate with a blue tile threshold, the way dust from the road, desert dust, and small pebbles made it gritty under one’s feet when one entered.

  Serenus’s pal, as Tralles had called him (Tralles had no patience for homosexuals, as he had little patience for anything that did not fall within the parameters of what he knew, which was the army, army posts, horseflesh, and women) met him in the garden, under an elaborate barrel vault of cane-work heavy with vines. He stood to greet him, a middle-aged fellow with a paunch, green eyes, and dyed hair, and a countenance of politely contained grief. All niceties and expressions of condolence disposed of, he did say something to the effect that a letter addressed to Aelius S
partianus at his most recent assignment, which was Nicomedia, had been deposited by Serenus Dio across the river, at the army post exchange of Hermopolis.

  “It was to leave early next week with the army mail, but since you are here—we did not expect you, Commander, but it’s nice to see an acquaintance of Serenus’s, it really is, especially at this time—you might want to pick it up there. No, he did not tell me what it contains, but probably it has to do with books. He was more and more into books and less into army provisions, we were hoping to retire from that business altogether by next year. Now it’s all up in the air, and I assure you I’m here barely holding on, like a crazy woman. It’s hard, it’s hard.”

  Aelius had learned not to say much when people began to reveal things. He was himself private about his inner workings, and acutely sensitive to the possibility of being pried into. So he kept quiet out of courtesy, but also because—it was a side benefit—silence often produced more information than a set of questions. Through the cane-work, slices and droplets and squares of sunlight created patterns on patterns out of the shade, and the white hands of Serenus’s pal moved under them like fish under a veil of water, such as Aelius had seen in garden ponds. He was saying, his unlikely golden head bobbing a little, how hard it was to have lost Serenus, and how dreadful it was for him to have died in water when he was so afraid of it. “He avoided it all he could, you know, traveling by water. This time he could hardly do something else, since he was pressed for time. But he’d picked a most favorable day and started way before the flood, so there was no sacrilege on his part. No sacrilege.”

  The details came out a bit at a time, and in the end the gist of the story was that Serenus Dio had fallen overboard in the dead of night between Panopolis and a spot named Tanais-by-the-River, while traveling back from his caravan road site offices at Tentyra, Phoenicum, and Ptolemais. The crew, as Tralles had mentioned, swore no one had seen him go down, his money and things were all on board where he’d left them, including his slippers. “Can you imagine? He never went about barefooted, his feet were so delicate. He wore socks in bed, even. When his body was recovered, they found him with his legs eaten by crocodiles to the knee. I can’t reconcile myself to it, I can’t. It’s too awful.”