by Ben Pastor
As Serenus said, the letter was not dated, but Aelius understood nearly at once that the merchant had mistaken the reference to the emperor’s last illness for distress related to the loss of Antinous eight years earlier. The recipient of the letter was no doubt—he kept a list of the consuls at hand at all times—the former comes per orientem Caesernius Quinctianus, but in his role as consul in the year of Hadrian’s death. Without a place of provenance it was difficult to tell, though it was reasonable to infer that the letter had either been written in the imperial villa of Tibur or even at Baiae, where the emperor died on 10 July of the 891st year of Rome. Since most likely the consul was in or around the City at that time, there was no accounting for the letter’s being found in Egypt, and in the Western Wilderness of all places. The seal having been only broken by Serenus upon discovery, one could further suppose that the message had never reached its destination, and no action had been taken regarding the unnamed threat to the state adumbrated therein.
He spent the rest of the day checking the letter before him against those collected by historians. Was this Hadrian’s style? Would he use these phrases? Fingering the paper, too, he thought that it had been touched by the same hands that had pulled out of the water the body of a dead favorite. Why did the deified Hadrian, who spoke of himself as “I,” refer to the Boy as “our” Antinous? Most of all, where was the grave site he referred to? Until late at night Aelius worked at his papers. He had far more information than he was expected to put in the imperial biography, and even as he compared the perspectives of Hadrian’s reign as put forth by various authors, he sought references to significant threats, dangers, conspiracies in those days. Back and forth, try as he might, all he could find were references to the great Jewish revolt, and to the apparently mad suspicion of Hadrian’s last years, when even those close to him, even the old and infirm, had been put to death on apparently frivolous charges. He read and wrote into the early morning hours, and went to bed exhausted, with the boxed imperial letter under his pillow.
2 Epiphi (27 June, Tuesday)
In the morning, he was up relatively late, and took a leisurely breakfast. Rereading about the Jewish revolt had made him think overnight (he’d slept fitfully, dreaming of getting lost in dark alleys and being pursued by enemies old and new) of the man he might have to see to get a perceptive reading of the present circumstances. As he readied to leave the house, he ran into the housekeeper, returning—as she put it—“from birthing twins uptown.” With the directness typical of her profession, she addressed him first, “Have you heard the commotion this morning?” Because Aelius said no, she continued with the undisguised pleasure people always have when they find out their news is not yet known. “There was a fire in one of the fancy shops’ storerooms, down the theater way. No, they didn’t break in, they just threw burning rags soaked in pitch and oil into one of the windows, through the iron grill. By the time the slaves organized themselves and the fire patrol was sent for, the place was a total loss. Smoke everywhere, I had to take the long way around the block.”
Aelius had more than an inkling of what might have happened. Without asking further information, he set off in haste for the general direction of Theo’s store, which the spice merchant had shown him in passing during their walk a week before. The street had been cleared by the authorities, but Theo’s slaves were still picking through the rubble of the gutted building, a block down from the store itself, which was open for business.
Theo himself was inside the store, chatting with friends who had rushed in for the news. Aelius bought ginger and carum for his mother, and waited until the floor emptied of gossipers and the curious. Theo cordially joined him and attended to his acquisition himself.
“You find me at a rather odd moment, Commander,” he said with a crooked smile. “I’m like that farmer who lost one of his sons, but consoled himself saying, ‘At least he wasn’t my strong-backed son.’ ”
Aelius found it politic to feign ignorance. “What happened?”
“Arsonists. They took out one of my buildings, bold as brass. Why? I don’t know. I’d like to say it was competitors—there’s one in Hermopolis who’s nearly bankrupted himself trying to undersell me—but if so, they failed.”
“But it’s a loss, isn’t it?”
Theo shrugged the incident off. “It wasn’t where I keep my spices, just my junk storeroom. Nothing but a storage of old furniture, harness for my animal packs, fodder, easily replaceable. I wouldn’t be so blithe if they’d set my other storeroom on fire. As it is, I think I can stand the loss.”
The junk storeroom. Aelius remembered Theo mentioning it as the place where Serenus’s crate had been kept, and from which Thermuthis’s old porter had removed the saddlebag. Theo prevented his asking anything about it, by volunteering with a raising of eyebrows, “No point in even bringing up to Harpocratio the old rugs Serenus gave me to keep. They went up in smoke with the rest, but then they weren’t worth fifty drachmas.” He smiled at Aelius. “If you don’t tell him I even had them, I won’t.”
Aelius left the encounter itching to put his thoughts down on paper, and to find the man who’d come to his mind as someone from whom he might get a clearer vision of what was actually happening at Antinoopolis and in the Heptanomia.
Baruch ben Matthias was as secular a Jew as anyone could expect to find in the metropolis. He’d been much less secular a few years back, when he’d come close to killing Aelius during a well-planned ambush near Coptos. It’d taken two weeks for Aelius to get over spitting blood from a pierced lung, and then he’d prosecuted with enough vigor to make ben Matthias despair of saving any of his own. They’d come to an agreement of sorts at last, and had left one another with a wink, convinced they could trust one another now that they’d cleared the air of ideological and personal matters, but for the world it could not really appear as though they’d come to that.
Secular Jew that he was, ben Matthias had started a flourishing business as a painter of mummy portraits, and now employed over ten workers. His shop stood a bit back from the road, in an alley shaded by immaculate awnings, and outside the door, on both sides, big-eyed, bearded, woolly headed and heavily made-up, a variety of dead Egyptians looked down onto the visitor, so lifelike as to resemble people at small windows peering out.
The workers mixing colors in the alley facing the entrance, three tough and dark young men with the build of fighters, eyed him suspiciously when Aelius approached, and followed him in as he crossed the threshold. As for ben Matthias himself, there was no doubt that he’d recognized him. He turned at leisure, though, and—remaining seated at his easel as he put the finishing touches on the portrait of a lamentably young child with puffy cheeks—said, “You have some gall showing up here.” He told him in all coolness, “You’ve given us trouble before, cost us plenty, and it’s only because the balance of power is on your side that I don’t have you thrown out on your ear on the public street. With all respect.”
Aelius found himself having to choose so precipitously between anger and amusement, by natural inclination he chose the second. “I can’t blame you, Baruch. But the trouble was mutual, and you seem to have. recovered well enough from my throwing you out on your ear.”
The young toughs seemed within an inch of acting on their own, but a motion of ben Matthias’s hand stayed them like an invisible leash. “Well, we’re both older, though you could be my son—I started early, had my first at sixteen—so I suppose we can be civilized about this. Am I to think Nicomedia has grown stale and unexciting?”
Which was as clever a way as Aelius could think of, to let him know that ben Matthias not only remembered him, but had also kept up with his career, and even his latest assignment.
“As you’ve gone that far in fact-finding,” he replied, “you ought to know why I’m here.”
“If you don’t watch it, to get one of these painted of you, from what I hear.”
Aelius carefully showed no reaction, but ben Matthias, dragging th
e brush against the paint pot to remove the excess of color, winked. “Near the Benu Grove, and the sandbar with herons. Does that ring a bell?”
“I’ll never know how I managed to get the best of you, I swear.”
“Ha.” Ben Matthias made a wide gesture, brush and all. “I think I let you. But the brunt of the whole Roman army might have had something to do with it, too.”
“I’m glad to see you well and profitably employed.”
“Same here, same here.” Wiping his hands, the old rebel waved his young toughs back to work, and grinned an invitation for Aelius to follow. “Come out back.”
Out back was a small room at the end of a. passage so narrow, Aelius suspected it might have more than something to do with the old habit of ensuring safety. The room itself opened on an inner court, paved in ashlar, with a well at the center, sided by blind walls at least three stories high. Still, the sun fell into it so precipitously, the brightness it threw into the interior sufficed to illuminate it fully.
“Sit down, will you?”
The chairs, the table, wine in a cooler, glasses, all the utensils were Roman, imported, good quality. The wine, better than good. “Have an almond cake,” ben Matthias was telling him. “My daughter makes them.” Then said, “What in the world leads you to study the life of the Butcher of Jerusalem?”
Aelius had once more grown accustomed to the Egyptian way of feeding one’s questioner or guest, and reached for an almond cake. “You people haven’t gotten over the deified Hadrian’s victory yet.”
“Never will. We’re still talking about Pharaoh who went after us from this patch of desert land some thousands of years ago. It pays to remember.”
“Which is exactly why I am studying the life of the deified Hadrian.”
“What can you add that he hasn’t already abundantly bragged about in his Anamnesis? That’s what he called his memoirs, if I recall correctly.”
“Well, I’m rather interested in what he might not have said.”
“About the Boy?”
“Also.”
Ben Matthias poured wine for Aelius in a clear glass goblet, on which a bear was painted in bright colors. “You know, that was just about the only charming thing about the man—that he had a soft spot for someone, at some point. Come and think of it, it was ill-advised of bar Khokba to start the Jewish uprising shortly after Antinous up and died. Never start uprisings when monarchs are in a bad mood, I say.”
Aelius was careful not to acknowledge the statement in any way.
“If you drag me by the hair, Commander—which would be a feat in and of itself in this balding season of my life—I may be able to supply you with some interesting tidbits about the Butcher.”
“I’d be much obliged, if we agree on a nomenclature midway between his deified state and your insult.”
On ben Matthias’s glass, a man fighting a bear was painted in reds and greens. “But if gossip is even half close to the truth, there’s more to your visit to Egypt than retracing ancient steps. At first I said to myself, ‘He, he—he comes, to pick on the Christians. It took him long enough to get around to it.’ Then I said, ‘No, he’s here to report about all of us to the old man.’ ”
“Do you intend His Divinity?”
“God is one, Commander, and His ineffable name is certainly not Diocletian.”
“Well, so—informed as you are: how is Egypt?”
“Ah, it’s a mess, Aelius Spartianus. It may look like the granary of the empire yet, but it’s crawling with rats. It’s a rotten beauty, a poisonous well.”
“Good metaphors, but they tell me nothing.”
Ben Matthias glanced at the scattered shadow of pigeons taking flight from the roof across the courtyard. “Let me put it simply to you: If you have come here unscathed, and are asking these questions, it’s because someone let you.”
Aelius burst out laughing. “Truly? And who is that, who allows me to go about my official business?”
“I wouldn’t tell you if I knew.” Ben Matthias’s long, bearded face had the expression of a merry goat, so that Aelius didn’t know how seriously he meant the words. “Judges are bought and sold by them, or leave their posts in disgust. Merchants pay dues to them, the corner cobbler who doesn’t go along gets his boiled urine tossed in the family well, or else they break his legs in a dark alley. You want to build a house? You buy the land, pay the permits, hire the masons, but nothing gets done unless you drop the coins into the right slot. Your daughter won’t get married with wine and music unless you pay up.” Looking sharply at Aelius, he added, “Army suppliers fall off their boats, and nobody knows how.”
“Am I to understand that Serenus Dio might have been killed for lack of paying protection money?”
“Heaven knows. In his business, for every penny he made, he undoubtedly had to pay two to someone. Goes to prove how much he was actually making, rich as he managed to stay. Now, to you, they will tell nothing useful, Or, rather, they will point you into a couple of fine leads, and only when you’re three quarters of the way there you’ll discover they’re going into diametrically opposite directions. Either that, or they bring you back where you started from.”
“Them, they—this is all haze and smoke, Baruch. Make it short. Whom can I trust?”
“No one, not even myself, since you have no way to know whether or not what I’m telling you isn’t part of the scenario.”
It was like being in the broken light, the illusory spaces of Hadrian’s bathhouse, sinking up to the nostrils in lukewarm water. “If you could tackle the power of Rome, you surely aren’t about to knuckle under any of this,” Aelius observed.
“Who has spoken about knuckling under anything? I may have my reasons and reap my benefits from the deal.” Wagging a paint-smeared finger at him, ben Matthias had that amused expression again, but it might only have been out of contempt for the way things were. “Take a good look at something you would never get into unless you were told: the accounts of farmers and small artisans. Care to see mine? I call it as it is, Commander: For every drachma I spend on supplies or wages for my workers, I spend ten times as much in bribes. That is, whenever the bully is too powerful for me or the boys to go over and break his head. I think it’s the rottenness of every empire, which starts to show at the extremities like gangrene, but begins with some inner disease of the core.”
“I have heard just about all I’m going to hear about this.”
“Which goes to prove that you, too, historian as you style yourself, are deadened to the reality of things.”
“It’s human nature: It will tend toward corruption regardless of the political form, which is why His Divinity’s reforms must be enforced. Do you mean to tell me the Rebellion was motivated by honorable sentiments?”
“Probably not. Me, I had nothing to gain but harassing Romans, which sufficed at the time. What can I say, Commander? It’s in the blood. I fought the Romans with Achilleus much as my father fought them along with bat Zabbaif.”
“And who was he?”
“He? She, you mean. You call her Zenobia, and she gave you a run for your money. But you were barely born when she was queen of Palmyra, so you were spared that embarrassment. As for me, now I harass Romans in different ways, fleecing them through high rents of vacation houses and expensive tours of the interior.”
“You are cynical.”
“I hope so. It’s as good a philosophy as I can think of. I’m not a religious man, you know. I’m not even Egyptian. I just don’t like Romans. You, on the other hand, are actually convinced you might lift the veil of the past, and find a pretty bride; all you might find is a grinning skull, moldy and worm-eaten.”
“That is, assuming that I am seeking a bride at all.”
“Doesn’t everyone, except for those who’d rather have a lad? The Butcher brought his boy here like a puppy, drowned him like a puppy, then made him into a god. I knew two sisters in Arsinoe who did the same with their sickly lap dogs, and had me paint portraits of them
.”
Aelius bit his tongue. “How would you know he drowned him?” he asked then.
“That’s not the right question to ask. The right question is: Was this man, this blasphemer who could kill thousands, likely to have let his favorite be done in under his very eyes?”
“Domitian was a morbid and suspicious prince, but someone assassinated him anyway; and so Commodus.”
“Ha! Do not compare those two half-wits to Hadrian’s malice. On an imperial barge, with military escort, none but he could have thrown the Boy overboard, or ordered him to do so. Follow the wisdom your gray hair suggests you have: The trail of this murder is so old, there’s precious nothing for you to go by.”
“And if it’s not a murder?”
“Accidents are even harder to prove—and at such distance of time. Why, Commander, those were the ancient days when Rome first dragged your unwilling ancestors by their blond beards out of their barbaric dens!”
“You purposely insult me.”
“Well, I can’t very well help it if your ancestors were walking on all fours or close to it, and my people were already leading a national resistance against the invader of the week.”
