The Water Thief

by Ben Pastor

  He kept thinking of the priests this morning: how neither of them could read the ancient stones, he could see that. They singled out sets of signs and images, which at Philae or Coptos had been explained to him to mean one thing, and here at Antinoopolis appeared to mean something else entirely. He of course had no way to tell. Though the drawing of a mosquito or a phallus or a standard seemed easy enough to read, there was no imagining what a crooked line or semicircle or a square stood for. All else was in Greek, or in the half-Greek alphabet that no more resembled the sacred writing of millennia past.

  Egyptian gods and temples still unnerved him, there was no two ways about it, whether it was the stuffy half-coolness of the interior compared to the scorching sun of the outside, or the darkness pierced by sunbeams here and there as by flaming spears that should burrow the floor and those passing into their trajectory. It might be, too, the statues of the beast-headed, beast-bodied gods themselves, scented like the sycamore and cypress wood of which they were made, not human or superhuman or whatever it is that magic animals are, less than man in so many ways and yet wiser, or endowed with skills men do not have.

  Tonight, all the commonplaces of traveling to Egypt came to him. The prejudice of the old Romans, who saw it as a land of whores and cunning thieves, the grudging admiration of the Greek philosophers, who’d sat in these cities and spoken to the ancestors of these half-smiling priests, surely half-smiling even then. Now, as eight years before, he thought the women beautiful, especially those who had Greek blood—like the girl Anubina, whose father was a dead soldier. The girl who burned like a brazier and who’d married since, and had grown heavy and kept a shop.

  17 Payni (12 June, Vigil of the Ides, Monday)

  A religious show trial in the city courthouse was scheduled for Monday. Aelius decided to attend, and took along a minutes-taker this time, in order to concentrate on the proceedings. He also had in mind to see Harpocratio again, and sent him word that he’d be coming for a visit. Killing time before the trial, he stopped by the mall’s antiquarian stalls to peruse through copies and originals of old documents and correspondence. They showed him interesting material, unrelated to his present research, but useful for future reference— namely sectarian tracts dating from the conflict between Severus Caesar and Albinus. He also managed to pick up a booklet of riddles, purported to have been written by the deified Hadrian (“What has no arms but many elbows, and the more elbows, the better for Rome?” Answer: the Nile, whose flood, producing grain for the City, is measured in cubits; or, “What companion’s departure always brings death?” Answer: the human soul; or, “What is more silent than the grave?” Answer: a grave that has been rifled, for its hidden secrets are dispersed).

  The trial was a painful affair. In attendance were numbers of anti-Christian zealots, ready to create a commotion outside of the courthouse; others threateningly stationed around the building. Aelius, who had fought extremists in Egypt during the Rebellion, knew how volatile tempers became at times like this. The accused—an engineer who had designed the waterworks for the annex of the Serapeum in the old Alexandrine district of Rhakotis—had converted to Christianity as late as the beginning of the prosecution. An elderly widower by the name of Sakkeas, he now went by Pudens. His second wife and children, already dressed in mourning, over and again begged him to reconsider, and became so disruptive in their anguish, that they had to be removed from the courtroom. Military escort had been provided for them (they happened to be Tralles’s men), so that the mob would not attack them once out from under the magistrates’ protection.

  Aelius was learning the intricacies of prosecuting in a country like Egypt. The judge was a special referee sent by Culcianus, who excused himself because of his old friendship with the defendant; someone in the audience made the comment that he was actually related to the prefect of Egypt by his previous marriage. This being the third time the old man appeared before the magistrate, it was undeniable that great pressure had been exerted on him. Despite, or because of, his family connections, he had been manhandled and bruised, and spoke with some difficulty.

  Thankfully, he used none of the by-now trite religious diatribes: disparaging remarks against the Caesars and Augusti, blasphemies against the gods (which always elicited an expected groan in the audience), declarations of hate for life and preference for martyrdom. Pudens stood his ground in an uncompromising but sedate way, and it was obvious that Culcianus’s referee struggled to keep up with the debate, which might account for a certain impatience on his part. There was only one instance in which a witness’s zeal took the old man’s hand enough to make him step over the line of coolness.

  He said, slurring a little, “Take the youth whom we are told the gods accepted among themselves. Was he not a common boy from Asia, who had lain in the emperor’s bed, and committed suicide when his master no longer cared for him? Is that someone whom we should look up to and pray to? But he heals the sick and makes the lame walk, you will say, in this very metropolis. And I tell you, his temple is an abode of demons, and his incubation room is nothing but a place where evil spirits come in dreams to trick and corrupt. Why, we don’t even know that his body is in the temple! He might have been swallowed and digested by crocodiles nearly two hundred years ago!” The last comment—rather than the stomping and hissing of the angry public—made Aelius sit up with renewed interest, so that he paid little attention to the interesting and no less controversial exchange that followed, regarding what the referee called “a similar lack of evidence for Christ’s resurrection.”

  A fourth reprieve, dearly indicated as the last stay of execution unless compliance was obtained, brought the trial to an end for the time being. Three days hence, the court would reconvene to hear the defendant’s last word and act accordingly. Under heavy escort, Pudens was returned to the metropolitan prison, and a bonfire of religious books (many his own, found at his summer home in the resort town of Karanis) was planned within the hour at the horse track outside the walls. Undesirous to follow the court to the book burning, Aelius had a mind to head for Serenus’s nice villa again, to see if by any chance the saddlebag and Hadrian’s letter had found their way back there, or perhaps had never left in the first place.

  Much to his embarrassment, as he walked out of the courtroom, Pudens’s wife left the safety of armed escort and threw herself in his path. Sincerely no doubt, but with a southern sense of drama as well, she embraced his booted right ankle and placed her forehead against his foot.

  “Eminent Spartianus, we are told that you are Caesar’s envoy—please save my husband. His mind is affected by too much reading, he had a fever last season that nearly took his life!”

  “My dear lady,” Aelius said helping her to her feet, “to begin with I am not entitled to the address of ‘eminent.’ I am only a soldier. Secondly, the prefect himself has chosen to let the law take its course. What makes you think that I should or could interfere in the process of justice?”

  The lady hung heavily from his arm, a constriction Aelius would have never suffered from a man, and that in a man he’d been trained to regard as a possible prelude to a stabbing in the ribs. In fact, a courtroom guard stepped in to ask if help was needed, but Aelius said no.

  “He is not himself, sir. Ever since his illness, he has been suffering from violent migraines, and is in the habit of taking strong prescriptions. Who in his right mind would join the Christians when laws are declared against them?” She was one of those big-eyed, dark women with fine black fuzz on her upper lip, whom northern soldiers humorously nicknamed “the whiskered beauties” but often found attractive in their swarthiness.

  Aelius felt her nails dig into his wrist, and firmly freed himself. “I suggest then that you secure the presence of your husband’s physician, who may vouch for his disease and for the treatment as well.”

  “But I beg you to put in a good word. This is why I waited to talk to you. As Caesar’s envoy, you have the ear of Caesar: Your word will be listened to.”
r />   It was the first time that Aelius considered the possibility that in fact, Diocletian Caesar was listening to his words—indeed, that as a historian, he had been asked by the emperor to speak to all of those who had preceded him on the throne. Still, “Three days’ time is not enough for any message to reach His Divinity,” he said, unwilling to deceive. “The best course of action is for you to call for your husband’s physician and try to make a case for his insanity.” Summoning one of Tralles’s men in the hallway, he bade him regroup his unit and escort the lady to her house. “I urge you foremost to consider your safety, dear lady, and that of your children.” As she left, all but dragged out by the soldier, with the nurse in tow holding the small boys by the hand, Aelius thought that his own ancestors, uncouth as they might have been, had been dragged off to imprisonment and slavery, and no friends of Caesar’s had been there to appeal to.

  What the engineer had said—that for all anyone knew Antinous might not even be buried in his coffin—intrigued him enough to make him add “collect more specific information on the Boy’s burial” to his list of things to do. As for his visit to Harpocratio’s house, Aelius actually ran into him at the mall across from his quarters, flatfooted, impossibly blond, and fanning himself as one who has been rushing about until that moment. So he decided to invite him over for lunch at his place, where a comfortable dining area opened on a fountain court.

  Harpocratio seemed glad of the chance meeting. He was in town to denounce a crime, he said breathlessly, and “had been sent from pillar to post all morning like a mad woman,” without being able to secure the attention of a magistrate high enough to make a difference.

  “They’re all at the horse track to watch Christian books being burned,” Aelius said. Though he was dying to hear what crime he was referring to, he let Harpocratio come to it by degrees, over good food and apricot juice, which Aelius sent for at the mall, since his guest drank no wine.

  The story started with a touching reminiscence of “how hard, how hard” it was to come to the metropolis without Serenus, and on a couple of occasions Harpocratio had to stop and sip convulsively from his cup of serent to keep from weeping. By the time fruit was brought to the table, he’d come so close to telling the truth that Aelius fairly sat at the edge of his dining couch.

  “We didn’t speak much about it, Commander, but Serenus had—let us say—other sources of income and other interests aside from supplying the army and collecting old books. One interest in particular he kept practically from everyone.” As he reclined there on his elbow, breathing deeply to steady himself, the embroidered squares of capering infant boys on his tunic came alive as though the stitched babies were about to jump out of the cloth. “Ever since his first years in this country, he’d been acquiring property in the hills, in places so barren that everyone thought he might be after long-exhausted mines, or else gone daft with the heat. But in fact he knew what he was doing, and how. He was one of the last few who could decipher the inscriptions of the ancients, and could read this country like a map. A treasure map, at that.”

  Here Harpocratio paused to see if the revelation had made an effect on his host, but Aelius said nothing, seated on his couch with legs crossed, looking across the room at a copper vase that reflected the light as did the one in Anubina’s house. “Well, Commander,” he went on, “I shouldn’t tell a historian, since it is common knowledge that from the beginnings of Egypt, kings and queens have been buried and reburied by priests there where thieves would not suspect. Suffice to say that Serenus had gotten hold of texts that gave him clues. He’d go off for a couple of weeks or a month, with a pack of donkeys and mules, and not show up until friends (including myself) started giving him up for gone or dead. Mercy, I stayed awake nights, worrying about him. Then he’d show up again, scuffed and unkempt, saying that he’d been to this outlying village or that lost sanctuary, looking for books. That was all. But,” Harpocratio lowered his voice, and though they were alone in the dining room, he forced Aelius to strain to hear what was being said. “I have seen what he was seeking. He’d found the graves of kings, and one by one, like a burrowing insect, he managed to open them and get into them, with no help, no witnesses, breaking seals and smashing plastered doorways, crawling into holes. He told me this himself. Told me how he had to do all this alone, as he could trust no one else in those wilds—oh, he was brave, don’t let his fear of the water make you think him cowardly. He’d show me his beautiful hands, and say, ‘These hands have carried gold collars and chest pieces of the god kings.’ Imagine that. Heart in his mouth, my poor Serenus, alert to the smallest extraneous noise, getting nightmares from fear of being sacrilegious and cursed by the dead.”

  Aelius had heard tales about hidden gold ever since landing in the Delta with the First Cavalry Crack Regiment, and had not fully believed the accounts. All he’d seen was a small cache of gold coins minted by the rebels in Alexandria, which his unit had spent to build an altar to the Genius of the Roman People. “Well,” he said now, “what about these treasures?”

  “Oh.” Harpocratio reached for a handful of pitted dates, and munched on them. “Much was broken up, melted or sold, or paid in bribes and protection.”

  Aelius stared at him this time. “Bribes and protection out in the hills or in the city?”

  “How can you ask, Commander? Both. It’s a way of living with us. Doesn’t the saying go, ‘The tax man gets the leftovers of the extortioner’?”

  “The gold must have yielded noticeable gain even as scrap metal. What about the rest?”

  Seemingly no closer to revealing the nature of the crime that brought him to town, Harpocratio was in fact coming to it. “If my Serenus hadn’t died—and that’s what matters to me most—I’d say this is the worst part. Early this morning, marauders broke in while the household was attending a memorial service at the grave site on Hadrian’s Way. Killed the watchdogs, forced the door open, and helped themselves. How true it is that ‘A rich man’s death alerts the world to his riches’! You should have seen the house. It was in shambles—I will show you if you want. They went through everything we had, busted the armoires to get at the tableware, stole carpets and hangings, broke the kitchen pots, even made holes in the walls. Found some, of course, but not all. Still, I calculate the loss to be around two hundred thousand drachmae. Had Serenus survived this, he’d be a ruined man. As it is there will be barely enough to pay creditors for the last shipment of goods.”

  Somehow Aelius doubted this. The edge in Harpocratio’s voice was crisp and controlled now that he spoke of money, worlds away from the trembling ragged fringe of a few days ago, when he’d spoken of his lover’s death. He’d been sincere then—and was lying now. It mattered little what portion of the ancient grave goods had been squirreled away somewhere else. Probably the rest was kept in different places: corporation strong boxes, temple vaults, or what have you. Perhaps abroad, safe from further incursions. The fact remained that Serenus Dio had unexpectedly, perhaps suspiciously, died and his house had now been rifled by thieves.

  “No idea of who it could have been?”

  “No idea, no idea.” Harpocratio had the odd habit of repeating a word or a brief sentence, echoing himself. Of course he had no idea. No one seemed to know why anything happened in Antinoopolis, and silence was applied on crime like salve on wounds, packing it tight.

  “Well, let us suppose it was not an accident that befell him. Any idea of who might have wanted him dead?”

  “Wanted him dead? No, no. None at all.”

  “They tell me that he’d incurred the anger of some Christian groups.” (It wasn’t exactly true; Aelius had made the logical leap after reading the case of Pionius the Catholic presbyter against Serenus’s accountant.)

  Harpocratio hardly seemed surprised. “And who doesn’t at one time or another, I’d like to know? If the laws go against them they become belligerent, and for all their preaching meekness there are gangs of them who go around hitting people over the head in dark al
leys and doing all kinds of mischief! Why, that’s no clue at all. No clue at all.”

  It was true, what Tralles said: This was not the Egypt he remembered—maybe because war always brings things out in the open, and the enemy is declared. Inflation and poverty had taken their toll, and now it was all back into the complacent arms of long silence, millenarian tight-lipped watchfulness, and if there were scorpions, they were not only hiding under rocks, they were being fed dainties by those they might sting at any time.

  Aelius had never cared much for apricots, but wine made one thirsty in the heat, so now he poured himself a healthy dose of serent. “What about the death of the freedman Pammychios at Dovecotes Alley?”

  “Yes, I heard. A sad little piece of news. The old man had served Serenus well and deserved to die in his bed.”

  “Just out of curiosity, do you happen to know whether Serenus had called him in recently or gone to see him?”

  “Not that I know of. I can’t imagine why he’d have occasion to do so. We have more servants than we can shake a stick at.”

  Aelius debated whether saying that Serenus’s letter had directed him to the freedman’s house. Whether or not Harpocratio read his mind or simply thought about the matter that had brought them together the last time, he said, “By the way, did you ever find the letter deposited for you at the post exchange?”

  “I did. It mentions an antique saddlebag that Serenus thought would intrigue me. I would love to take a look at it if you still have it.”