The Water Thief

by Ben Pastor

  Bubbles came up from the lukewarm mire as he stepped into it, insects flew and flitted in clouds, stumps of dead trees and mucky alluvium collapsed and caved in under his boots. A water snake slithered before him, seeking the river. The green of the leaves reminded him of Thermuthis’s unwavering glance, when, at the end of their conversation four days earlier, he had suggested a solution to the dilemma he had brought to her, and told him that she would take care of things. Today, if all went well, he would discover Antinous’s marker, and hear back from Thermuthis. In a cloud of gnats he bent the grass with a stick, parting the papyrus stalks as he went, eyes low. The feathery heads of the paper plants tickled him and fluttered above him, gracefully bending this way and that.

  It was stumbling upon its base that allowed him to find the marker. The growth was thickest here, well above his height and mixed with marsh grass with cutting serrated edges, but meeting the hard corner and edge with his foot gave him the clue. He parted the grass and saw the inscription, three Greek words—Ántínou tó sama—to indicate that the Boy, or part of him at least, had been buried here. Not hardly the memoria Antinoi quoted by Serenus, nor the place to conceal state secrets: but a start, and one more addition to his careful research notes. A green blue residue from the many intervening floods stained the pyramidal stone, and feeling with a stick around its base, it was obvious to Aelius the small monument had sunk as well, and would eventually disappear into the river.

  He studied the marker long enough to be able to describe it. With his foot, meanwhile, he pushed and patted down the grass around it, facing the river, halting only time enough to wave off the swarms of mosquitos that crowded him and sought his sweaty skin.

  It was only because of the herons’ taking flight from the sandbar that he realized something was behind him, and his first instinct was to turn, but he was already being pushed with great force forward as a man fell on him from the ledge. Aelius lost his balance in the marshy soil and sank farther, bracing to avoid falling face first, and already a second attacker joined in. The combined weight caused him to collapse in the reeds. Trying to get out from under it, he slipped in the slime down the submerged sandy slope of the river bank proper, a disintegration of loam under his boots, soft and malodorous and cool, a feeling of being sucked downward, and he was into the water to his waist, his chest and neck, and over his head. Hands and elbows bore down on him; to avoid being held below the surface he let himself go down farther into it, without fighting the pressure, escaping the scramble to sink him long enough to drop deep into the water, conscious all the while that crocodiles waited for commotion at the water’s edge to rush in to feed, lashing their tails. Keeping his eyes open was difficult, and nothing but a murky detritus-bearing greenness surrounded him anyway, with dark sand being kicked up from below, the taste of rotten leaves and roots stripped from their matrix filling his nose and mouth.

  Aelius fought to double over in order to reach for the army knife he carried in his right boot, holding his breath, but he feared blacking out and tried to come up for air instead. They would not let him and he grew furious, grabbing at arms and waists, cloth floating about, until he got out of the water in an instant that gave him the sky like a burst of whiteness, time to exhale, struggle to stay up to take another breath, refusing to be drowned without a strife. All had escaped his mind, meanwhile, except the exigency of living through the next few moments, and only when he was finally able to feel under his fingers, after a backbreaking effort to gain hold for it, the handle of the army knife. It all came real and in perspective again, the attack, the danger of crocodiles, the forlorn length of the Nile, the errand, Antinous having drowned in the same water, washed ashore in the same spot, Sirius drowning by his master’s hand, and what it must have taken to drown him, too. His knife met nothing at first, waving slow arcs in the green water, but he found meat or bone later, just a glancing stab but sufficient to create a red spill in the water, a swirling haze, more cloth flapping about, the white sky and splashing and sinking again, another hitting of the mark and some freedom, more blood oozing up.

  He was suddenly out from under the pressure and the weight. The buoyancy of his unencumbered body brought him up, head out of the water, with his back to the bank so that only the seemingly endless width of the Nile was before him, and a sky with no bounds. Aelius turned to see his assailants flee, scrambling back up the ledge, whichever of the two was wounded, or both, their faces invisible as they covered them again in black cloth, and regained the road and, judging by the clatter, their expecting mounts.

  Motion and blood in the water could not fail to attract predators. As quickly as he could, Aelius waded ashore dazed and weighed down by moisture, cut his hands against the broken stalks of the reeds and into the papyrus grove, downriver a piece from where he’d fallen in. The crocodiles were, in fact, coming, their knobby spines breaking the surface of the water with undulating smoothness, but by this time. Aelius had splashed through the marsh and back to firmer ground, from which he climbed the ledge and hauled himself over it. The road, the cliffs beyond it, everything seemed red and unbearably brilliant. At his whistle, with the evenmindedness of the battle mount, his horse came back from where it’d trotted away, and Aelius gave himself time to take his breath and straighten his uniform—his cap was lost and likely to be borne by the flood all the way to the Delta—before getting in the saddle to return to the city.

  F O U R T H C H A P T E R

  Antinoopolis, 1 Epiphi (26 June, Monday)

  He wasn’t even angry when he returned to his quarters. A failed ambush has so many aspects that are altogether ridiculous, in terms of surprise gone awry, that he found himself rather in a good humor. When he told Gavius Tralles on the following day, meeting him after the sacrifice of a bull to the genius of Severus Alexander, he got a blank look back.

  “Whatever makes you think it was Christians, Aelius?”

  “Well, who else could it be?”

  “They’ve been under control for the past three months in this district, I assure you. It falls within my bailiwick, and—think what you will—I’m not one to do less than a thorough job. No, you got yourself into something else.”

  “Highwaymen?”

  “As above. This isn’t Hermopolis, you know. Around this city, I hanged and crucified them until they cleared the roads. Now, if you’d gone out of the territory of the metropolis, I couldn’t vouch for that. The scene would be easier to reconstruct then: Ruffians would notice your horse standing above the river bank—you should always hobble your horse, you know that?—and owing to your gray hair, they’d take you for an old geezer, and try to jump you. But seeing where you were, not that far from the city limits, I’m stumped.” Although Tralles made light of things, Aelius smelled anxiety in him. It wasn’t the same passing the buck as to any responsibility in the riots after Pudens’s trial. It felt like a personal concern, related to his arrival in Egypt, and the irritant of an incident that might mean more than it seemed.

  Aelius said, “They had their faces covered like desert dwellers and no weapons. Had anyone wanted to kill me, he’d have smashed my head with a rock or strangled me—not tried to drown me.”

  “They had horses, though.”

  “They didn’t steal my saddle, much less my horse.”

  Half-heartedly, Tralles laughed. “Well, anyway, I told you the army was disliked.”

  “Ah, yes.” Aelius could not resist the dig. “I forgot about the army. There’s always the squad that let the mob kill Pudens’s wife, and whose leader I got sacked.”

  “Now you offend me, Aelius.”

  After this, there were no more pearls of wisdom emanating from Tralles. Aelius was left to ask himself whether the attack had anything to do with his duties here—though only Serenus Dio’s fears and his freedman’s coincidental death made him even think that anyone cared at all about historical research, much less about decrepit imperial letters. Maybe he saw conspiracy where none existed. Yet, two men were dead, and t
he saddlebag sitting in Theo’s storeroom might answer some of his questions: What exactly did Hadrian’s letter imply, and was there a connection between it and those deaths? Who in the world would have an interest in the threats Rome had faced decades ago? Would they attack an imperial envoy for it? Watching himself was something he did as a second nature, and he did not worry about his safety, really. Just this morning, Diocletian’s reply to his letter had arrived, with the thrilling words, of encouragement-- secretly hoped for—to follow his curiosity in all directions. On the other hand, the fact that His Divinity had been asked in writing that he be recalled from Egypt, was a piece of information Aelius would keep for himself until he could discern more clearly how things stood in Antinoopolis for Caesar’s envoy. In that light, he wondered why Tralles now insisted about social unrest in the province, while swearing that here everything was under control. Even more, he was baffled at the thought that someone should try to intimidate him, but altogether not concerned enough to summon his escort from Cynopolis.

  This being the day Thermuthis had given him an appointment at her house, Aelius went there directly from the command post. In his prudence, he wasn’t hoping for much, and was thoroughly amazed when the madam handed him Serenus’s saddlebag. Risking his life on the river bank for a granite marker seemed idiotic and absurd, in the face of what this well-groomed woman had accomplished without apparent difficulty.

  “How did I manage?” She smiled, condescendingly. “Why do men always have to find out how women manage things? It should be enough for you that we do, and very well, thank you. It was easy. You posed the problem, and straightaway I told you it’d be a good idea for a woman to go to Theo’s. Then I thought to myself, give her a basket to put it in, and the older the better—women are invisible past a certain age. So I sent the porter did you notice her, below?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “See what I mean? She was sitting there, let you in, you probably even took the trouble of muttering a thank you or tossing her a coin, and you didn’t even notice her. And to think that she was one of the Younger Gordian’s twenty-two concubines in her day!”

  “Was she?” Aelius was feverishly anxious to open the saddlebag, but restrained himself a bit longer.

  “I might ask her for details on that prince’s reign.”

  “Yes, the whole one month of it.” Thermuthis poured serent in a glass. “The old woman will tell you that it isn’t true that he died in battle with the governor of Numidia.”

  “Well, his body was never found, but—”

  “He escaped. She hid him in her room for three months, until his silly nephew ended up on the throne, and even then Gordianus never went back to Italy. Lived anonymously the rest of his life here keeping a pub, which given how much he drank, was a natural choice for him. Ask her, when you go back down, she’ll tell you.” With her glass of apricot juice in hand, Thermuthis walked to the door. “You’re dying to open that stupid bag of yours—go ahead. I’ll be outside.”

  It was not very different from document pouches used by army dispatchers these days; Aelius saw why Serenus Dio had rightly identified it as a Roman piece of equipment. No legion or unit mark appeared on the outside. Dryness and age, exposure to the sand-bearing wind had made the thick leather fragile, and he had to steady the eagerness of his hands in order to unfasten the corroded buckle without tearing the strap. Inside was a note, tied with an incongruously new hemp string around a much older, cylindrical wooden letter case. This, he couldn’t bear the possible disappointment of finding empty, so he unfolded the note first, and read it.

  It is my hope, esteemed Commander Spartianus, that it is you—with God’s help, and following the directions that my freedman Pammychios undoubtedly gave you—who tracked down this saddlebag and its contents to its present location. If you did, it likely means that I have met an untimely end, as I fear might happen. Should anything have befallen my freedman also, know that, two days after I wrote my previous letter to you, he endeavored to meet me as if by chance at the store of Theo the spice merchant’s, where I always go at that time of the week He told me that for the last several hours he had noticed suspicious people prowling up and down the road near his place on Dovecotes Alley. He wasn’t afraid for himself but , feared that, should thieves or other marauders succeed in robbing him, the document I had entrusted to him (he has no idea of its nature) might be lost. Pammychios brought the letter of the deified Hadrian in a shopping bag—ask him for details of our meeting in case I should not be alive. I was just then in the process of asking Theo whether I could leave with him a crate of old rugs, in which I had already placed the empty saddlebag. To summarize things, I replaced the letter in the saddlebag, it inside the crate, and the crate is being stored today at Theo’s place.

  It is up to you, if all that I dread should come to pass, to find out why such a long-lost, ancient document seems to cause such turmoil. I am on my way to Upper Egypt to visit lands of mine and to do business. God willing none of this subterfuge will have been necessary, and it will be the undersigned Serenus Dio who shall receive your offer to acquire the letter for your own purposes. Written on 19 Payni (14 May), the ninth and eighth year of D. and M. consulships.

  The rambling note pointed to Serenus’s last-minute afterthought. Thermuthis’s decision not to let her brother Theo know that the saddlebag was being removed from the crate seemed wise in the context. Thermuthis had asked Aelius no questions, showed no interest in the saddlebag (“Men’s games, play them all you want”), and offered to keep it in her safe if needed, or else return it to its place in the spice merchant’s storeroom. Now it all depended on what, if anything, was in the letter case.

  Aelius could not bring himself to open it, much less read its contents in a brothel. The girls’ laughter came from the upper floor, whose small, charmingly furnished rooms he remembered well. Thermuthis, businesswoman that she was, would likely put one or the other of her better prospects in his way if he stayed. He’d made up his mind he’d let her do it, but this wasn’t the time. Accordingly, he left her a note with instructions to keep the saddlebag in custody for the moment, and left.

  The brothel’s back door opened on the interspace between the podium of the frog goddess’s temple and the neighboring building, an alley so narrow that a man could not fully spread his arms in it. Aelius followed it, expecting to rejoin the main street if he took a right at the end of the alley, but new constructions had gone up in the years of his absence, and he found himself at a dead end. Doorless walls around him, he didn’t like on principle, so he retraced his steps in order to take another narrow street, and through a maze of lesser lanes crowded with children, clicking with the sound of looms, he emerged eventually onto known surroundings. Down a porticoed boulevard, past the command post, he aimed for the city mall, and the busy thoroughfare where his flat stood. It was an effect of carrying on his person Serenus’s note and the yet unopened letter case, no doubt, but it seemed to him he had eyes behind his head. He noticed movements, faces, gestures with the keen accuracy of his war days, which in retrospect seemed to have much more in common with the behavior of the prey than that of the hunter. Passersby didn’t notice him any more than they would any other man in an officer’s uniform, whatever the times were, hardly a novelty in this fourth century of Roman rule.

  Yet, out from under the awning of one of the book stalls where he’d often stopped, he did notice the sudden stealthy motion of a man at his passage. Aelius was by now a hundred paces from his doorway, and it was a temptation to hasten toward it and lock himself in; but he had been trained not to face danger without a fight. So he changed his plan, going down the street that led to his flat but then walking past the entrance, crossing the street again to enter the mall from one of its side gates. The man, who’d followed him around the corner and down the street, once or twice becoming lost in the crowd of shoppers and pack animals, was still behind him. Aelius let him draw closer, pass him, slink ahead among the white donkeys, porters
and market-going women, and when he recognized him desperate for an assault; with a letdown of tension he saw it was the cobbler Kopros, who’d never had his day in court. Bare-handed, a delirious look of fear and anger on his face, he was recklessly charging without covering himself. Aelius stood his ground unconcerned, with the outstretched right fist smacking him on the side of the head hard enough to fell him, and left him there. Then he cut through the press of idlers immediately assembled, regained the street, crossed it, and went home.

  His studio, once the servants had made themselves scarce, afforded him the luxury of silence, facing as it did the inner court. Aelius locked the door, went to his desk, and unscrewed the light wooden cylinder from Hadrian’s day. Inside, rolled up to fit it perfectly, paper darkened by age met his fingers. The texture reminded him of a dry leaf, but the weave was resilient, and came out easily.

  As expected, the text was in Greek. The handwriting, quick and ornate, with idiosyncratic strokes, showed how the brush had been used to apply ink with a painter’s taste for shape and calligraphy. The words swam before Aelius’s eyes, as he’d read many copies of Hadrian’s letters in anthologies of imperial correspondence, and his critical mind was searching for stylistic clues even as he devoured the subject matter laid before him.

  Hadrian to his most honorable Caesernius. What you heard about me is true, dear end this old man’s soul is a willing Proserpina, but Hades will not bother to rise up with his chariot to snatch her. Likewise it is true what they say of man: that he spends the first half of his life pining after this and that, and tragically expostulating, “I can’t live!”, while the second part of his life he passes crying out, “I can’t die!” Our Antinous’s memorial resting place, about which so solicitously you asked, is all but finished. Inside it, alongside those objects such as love requires that be placed with one who modestly and graciously conquered the palm at the Great Human Friendship Contest for all the years I knew him, I plan to lay a document which I commend to your attention and memory. As consul, you guide the fatherland. As Hadrian’s friend, you are bound by your affection for me to love the fatherland even as I did. Know then that in the memorial resting place of our Antinous is kept the record of the great and ever-present peril to the welfare of the Roman state; that you are not to reveal this detail to anyone, but judge from the receipt of this letter that I entreat you, in my infirmity, to carry out the orders I gave you when we last met to rid Rome of such danger, orders from which you were to refrain as long as I was silent. Were we not to act swiftly now, the threat should fester for years and centuries to come, and the very well-being of the empire enfeebled by it. Farewell.