The Water Thief

by Ben Pastor

  Ever grateful for the chance afforded me to travel, research, and write of men and things pertaining to the glory of Rome, I write this in Antinoopolis, on Monday, the fifth day (Nonae) of June, in the twenty-first year of Our Lord Caesar Diocletian’s imperial acclamation, the seventh year of the consulship of Maximianus Augustus, and the eighth year of the consulship of M. Aurelius Valerius Maximianus Augustus, also the year 1057 since the foundation of the City of Rome.

  S E C O N D C H A P T E R

  Turris Parva, garrison in the Antinoopolis nome,

  11 Payni (6 June, Tuesday)

  They were not expecting him here at all, so any gossip that—informally or not—an envoy from Caesar was in the province, had not reached the old garrison town lying only a couple of hours southeast of Antinoopolis, set at that uneasy edge between the green strip of cultivated land and the desert.

  Around the garrison fort, where everything happened (from tax collecting to organization of corvees to the administration of law by soldiers—expressly forbidden—to extortion), the place was like a hundred such. A struggling community with a mixture of styles and patterns, low houses with a bright wash over plaster, the occasional upper story with narrow windows, women doing their wash in wooden pails, with goats and children trampling in the squishy mud nearby. The rare Roman-style house also looked on the street, gate, and courtyard, imported bright tiles fading in the strong sun. Not at all like the metropolis, where the colonial patterns of being were carefully replicated in the crowded malls, baths, book stalls carrying the newest titles, all of them with third- and fourth-generation Greeks or soldiers and officers patronizing and maintaining the economy. Here, as in the big cities, beyond the edge of sand stood the bulwarks of ancient temples and palaces, whose walls seemed to tremble with the heat like fabulous mountains. Tourists crawled on them antlike, risking their necks.

  No hide nor hair of Christians these days. Yet the prosecution was on.

  Across from the lazy, third-rate marketplace, the courtroom had that odor of public offices that one could never mistake. An odor of ink made from lampblack, and of pews and chairs where too many had sat too long in weather far too hot, filled the space. Flies must have lived in it for generations. The presiding judge—bearing like all of them the title of strategos, but being as removed from a soldier as one could—had an ominous, hollow cough. Flustered by Aelius’s coming, he emerged from his office in a dither, and Aelius had the strong impression he’d just pinched his cheeks hard to make them look less sickly pale.

  “Why, legatos,” he greeted him in Greek, “it’s an honor, and no mistake.”

  More likely, it was the most stress he’d faced in months. Under his feverish instructions, dockets were pulled out, minutes of hearings displayed without Aelius’s asking. It was clear that he went about the business of prosecution with the dogged, weary energy of an official who’d probably come here for his health, and was now all too aware that not even the climate could save him. Punctiliously he walked Aelius through the court records, painstakingly kept, of the trials concluded thus far. In some cases the sentencing was referred to Rabirius Saxa, epistrategos of the Heptanomia, although on one occasion—a Christian cleric who had set the recruiting office on fire—the trial had been moved to Alexandria, for the prefect himself to oversee. In every case Aelius chose at random, old-fashioned and deliberate Roman fairness had been observed, and common sense had occasionally prevailed with no need of sentencing. Capital execution seemed rarely but evenly applied, invariably carried out ad locum solitum, a given place on the road to the town dump.

  “What about the military?” Aelius asked. “How much do they interfere?”

  Now that blood had drained from his cheeks, the consumptive judge looked like his own death mask. It was a loaded question, so, trying not to sound suspicious, he said, “It depends on what you mean by that.” Which meant, “Why do you ask? You hold military rank.”

  Aelius caught the meaning. But I’m not on the take, he thought. “Well,” he went on, “we’re a bit out of the way, here. Does the local commander—no, let me rephrase that. Do local commanders hold court?”

  The answer came reluctantly, as expected. “Now and then.”

  “Now and then, or often?”

  “Quite often.”

  “What do you do about it?”

  The judge averted his face to cough in his sleeve. “I?” he replied then. “To tell you the truth, nothing. Whatever time I have left, I intend to live it out. Now, as for the last six or seven generations, the military runs the show in town, here and elsewhere.”

  It was nothing Aelius didn’t know already, but tolerance of excesses varied from place to place. In the outposts, commanders had always ruled like princelings, and soldiers were more often than not on both sides of the law. Tile Rebellion had succeeded for a good reason in this province. “What about the trials of Christians in the army?”

  “Oh, that.” The judge wiped his mouth with a crumpled and stained cloth. “The army mostly takes care of its own trials.”

  Aelius looked away from the traces of pink spittle on the cloth. “Must I pull each sentence out of you, strategos, or will you volunteer some specific information?”

  “I don’t see why you take it out on me, legatos. Why don’t you go across the street to the fort, and see for yourself what’s going on? There are trials scheduled for today.”

  “Be sure, I will. What about murders—are they frequent? I’m not speaking of random acts, or honor killings, but rather of theft-related ones. Do you sit in judgment of those?”

  The judge spoke with his nose in the handkerchief. “We have a bigger territory than it seems, so—yes, there are killings, especially now that money’s tight everywhere. I sit in judgment of civilian cases. For the rest—”

  “—the army takes care of its own, I understand.”

  By the time Aelius left, the judge was in a paroxysm of coughing. Down the street, only a scattering of soldiers were on hand in the fort, a typical round-cornered small enceinte of stone and masonry, with walkways built on the roofs of some twenty quarters and service rooms. The administrative building was arranged around a dinky chapel to the genius of the cohort, genius Turris Parvae, to which Aelius dutifully stopped to pay his respects. Because he wore civilian clothes, the soldiers—none of them understood Latin, and their Greek was not much better—felt no compulsion to show an interest, and he was able to walk into the trial presently being held next to the chapel.

  Notes taken by Aelius Spartianus during the trial of Syrion Antonius, private in the X cohort of the Heptanomian border guards stationed at Turris Parva:

  princeps karanus, acting as judge: Is your name Syrion Antonius?

  accused: You know it is.

  k.: Do you serve in this unit?

  s.: You know I do.

  k.: Are you a Christian?

  s.: You know I am.

  k.: Did you refuse time and again to sacrifice to the genius of the cohort?

  s.: You know I did.

  k.: Do you realize what the punishment is if you persist?”‘

  s.: You know I understand.

  And so on. One of the most abysmally dull exchanges I ever heard. It ended with K.’s ascertaining how much retirement pay and other assets S. has. S. seems reasonably well off, and the sentencing (illegal, as the princeps has no jurisdiction whatever) has been suspended. Upon promise of sending him a good physician from Antinoopolis, I managed to pull out of the strategos that moneyed soldiers get away with their Christian superstition, unless they’re hell-bent on dying for the faith. Poor recruits are out of luck, and for every one who recants, two play stupid, and one goes to his death.

  I have confronted Captain K. on the illegality of his sitting in judgment, and he gave me a song and dance about the military being the sole guardian of virtue at Turris Parva, though the few merchants I succeeded in approaching showed me receipts where extortion in K.’s name tops the list of their monthly expenses.

/>   Reminder to myself: Send a full report to Prefect Culcianus, with triplicate copy to the imperial court. Further note to myself: Murders are disgracefully frequent along caravan roads, and as a result of disputes between neighbors. That’s probably how Serenus’s freedman Pammychios ended up.

  On his way back, the road to Antinoopolis passed by a settlement of artisans and small retailers not far from the metropolis’ walls and sturdy south gate. The settlement’s glorious name was Philadelphia, but apart from a badly kept chapel dedicated by the deified Trajan to his sisters, there was no other sign of brotherly love that Aelius had ever been able to find. Except, of course, that his former lover lived in the settlement. It was here that upon arriving in Egypt he had meant to stop first, and look her up, but—having asked around, as he’d told Tralles—he had decided against it.

  Anubina was half-Greek and half-Egyptian, a soldier’s orphan. They didn’t know exactly, but she was around twenty-six now. She’d been seventeen or eighteen when Aelius Spartianus had met her, and for his stay in Egypt had hired her out as his own. They’d liked one another a great deal. He had set her up in a little house, painted blue in and out, bought her things, had even written to her afterward five or six times. She had never answered. Not because she was illiterate (she was, but there were scribes who could do the job for her), but because, as she had told him from the start, “There is no point, and we both have other things to do.”

  The acacia trees were still shading this side of the street, and he remembered them in bloom, yellow and dusty-scented, with their graceful ragged shade topping the roof.

  She came to open the door barefooted and with her hair pinned up, holding in one hand the brush she’d been using to scrub around the house. She saw him there, and for a moment looked transfixed, but it was just a moment and immediately she was lifting the scarf she had on her shoulders to her face, turning away a little, but stepping back to invite him in. It was surprising how there was no need of words between them, how the changes in them spoke for themselves, and had a bearing on how they would behave toward one another.

  “Come in, I have food ready.” This had been so much like Anubina, he felt both moved and comforted and did not question whether he should accept. The wide room received light from the door only, and the chalky blue of the walls resembled it like a square pool; a copper jar catching the sun by the wall was like a fire in the water. “Welcome,” Anubina said.

  Beyond the blue room, another room painted blue, which he remembered so well. It was where their bed had been, and that room had a small window on the alley behind, just enough to make one know whether it was night or daytime (the daytime, always regretted in those days). Aelius looked away from that door, and toward her. The scarf had been lowered again as she tasted food in the steaming pot.

  She’d put on weight in these eight years. Her feet were still dainty, scrawled and dotted with henna, but she’d grown plump in her linen dress, and her face had filled out under the black waves of well-combed, crispy hair. Aelius looked at her only because she did not look at him, but went about putting food in the bowl, and wine on the table, as if he’d gone out this morning, and were coming back to be fed.

  “Your husband?” he asked.

  “In the fields.” Her hands sprinkled spices, broke bread, poured wine. “How did you know?”

  “I asked.”

  “Sit down, will you?”

  It was fennel-flavored meat wrapped in vine leaves, brightened with turmeric: food he’d only had here, and longed for many times. As Aelius took his place by the table—he’d bought it for her, a Roman import solid and well-made—two children came tramping in from the street, and were at once checked on the threshold by the presence of the stranger. They stood there like restive young goats, a tall little girl with hair plaited all over her head, big-eyed, and a younger boy who wore the Egyptian braid on one side of his head, and the rest of his head shaven and bluish. The boy covered his face, laughing.

  “Is he my uncle?” the little girl asked.

  “Shush,” Anubina said, handing them round cakes. “Go outside and play.”

  The children did. Having set the food in front of her guest with a half-turn of the plate, so that the meat rolls were at a graceful angle, Anubina sat down across from him. Despite her weight gain, she still had a beautiful face, and her eyes especially had lost none of the charm they’d held for him.

  He said, “Have you been doing well?”

  “I have. What about yourself?”

  “Well.” Aelius began eating slowly, without asking himself if he was hungry. Her cooking had always been exceptional, like her lovemaking. Food and love were so inextricably linked in his recollection of Anubina, memories of his few leisure days in Egypt were always about those two things. He was not an empty-headed young officer in those days, either, but the simplicity of that feeding of the body in two different but somehow sweetly connected ways had meant so much to him.

  “Will you stay long?”

  “Not very.”

  While he ate, for a short time Anubina’s daughter came back in to munch on her cake; she sat on a stool with her legs crossed, staring at him. Then she skipped to the door and looked outside; when the noise of a mule pack clacked down the road, “Hello, uncles!” she called out, and waved to the drovers.

  Aelius tasted the wine. “She’s tall,” he observed.

  “Not that tall, Aelius.”

  “And what color are her eyes?”

  “Like mine.”

  Anubina’s hands clasped slackly on the table, her round forearms were still smooth. Copper and silver bracelets bound the flesh tightly; all so similar, he could not recognize those he’d given her. She absentmindedly—no, not absentmindedly, self-consciously—gathered a wisp of lustrous hair from the side of her face and pinned it back. He’d seen her indulge in that neat grooming gesture many times.

  Looking at the girl leave the doorway for the street, he asked, “What is her name?”

  “Thaësis, but we call her Thea.”

  Thaësis was Anubina’s Egyptian name, too. There were constraints like veils between them, subtle and resilient, allowing them to see each other but not to slip into desire. He thought with a little shame that he’d bought her—that the procuress had asked him if he wanted a virgin and he’d said no, but not because of the cost. Anubina had been dancing at men’s parties for six months already when they’d first met.

  So now they exchanged a few sentences, as former lovers do, in the tidy space of her house, but Aelius’s mind was also conversing with itself, without answers for his questions. Where did he keep his tools, this husband who was out in the fields? His cloaks? Was this the plate from which he ate? The benign talk of people they had, both known, the bland statements about life in general, those were exchanged effortlessly. Her eyes rested on him with immense heiferlike calm, as though she had come to terms with everything in her life.

  “How old is she, Anubina?”

  “Seven.”

  The image of the poor judge coughing in his cloth came to him, because reticence seemed to be a part of this country as much as the acacias with their bright yellow flowers, or the old temples at the desert’s edge. Within days of his coming he, too, was falling into this habit of indirect speech, and had to remind himself that historians and soldiers can never be vague. He said, forcing himself to look her in the eyes, “Anubina, are you going to tell me before I leave?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s none of your business.”

  Aelius looked into his plate once more. He was unsure of why he’d want to know whether the girl was his; it would only complicate things, and he had no great interest in starting to see himself as a father, albeit of a prostitute’s child. “Well, it’s somewhat my business,” he spoke back.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Come, tell me.”

  “No.”

  He finished his meal in silence, with Anubina wa
tching him and saying nothing either. She was comfortably off, he could tell, and perhaps it was because of this that she wanted nothing from him—if the girl was his. She looked like her mother entirely, so there was no telling who had fathered her. As it seemed, she called all men “uncle,” and was lovingly taken care of. Through the corner of his eye, Aelius could see that the sun-fire in the copper vase had been extinguished, and now it was a dull pottery jar that took in the light from the doorway, dimming it without reflection.

  “Is she going into the profession?”

  “No. She’s learning her letters. I mean for her to do something else.”

  He stood up from the chair, and Anubina with him, but slowly. “The boy?”

  She smoothed her dress on her belly, and he couldn’t tell whether it was a fleshy midriff or she was pregnant again. “He’ll do whatever. His father can figure that out.”

  “What about her father?”

  “Aelius, you’re not going to get me to tell you anything, so stop it.”

  “You have to tell me, Anubina.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I’ll be back, and ask you again.”

  She led him to the door, firmly, because the moment he should step out he’d be legatos and historian and Caesar’s envoy again. “You do that.”

  Antinoopolis, 13 Payni (8 June, Thursday)

  An obsequious note from the head of the Hermopolis river patrol awaited Aelius on Thursday, as he returned to his quarters for a break from reading at the city library, in preparation for his visit to the temple of the blessed Antinous the following day. The message informed him that a box “with papers in it” had been found alongside the bank, tangled in a lotus clump at the edge of the freedman Pammychios’s property. Having been identified by the victim’s family, as by the esteemed commander’s request he was now sharing the intelligence, et cetera. The box had been deposited for his viewing at the Moon Gate police district.

  Aelius decided to see for himself at once, and before noon he was across the river and at the police station. Three soaked, drying, yet still legible papyri were inside the unpainted, four-footed wooden box: Pammychios’s manumission document, a will, and a lease paper. In the head patrolman’s opinion, the box had never even been opened by the thieves. “They just took it along and then, by shaking it, they realized it contained only documents, and thought there was nothing to gain from hanging on to those. So they tossed the whole thing. I suspect they were fleeing north, because the box was found downriver. But come to think of it they could have thrown it down from the other direction as well, and it’d have ended up the same way. As you can see, it’s the kind of box that locks shut when the lid is lowered, so you need a key. Here, we got this from the dead man’s son-in-law.”