by Ben Pastor
Ben Matthias clapped his hands in amusement. “I’ll have to make an effort not to look smug, but go ahead.”
“A man by the name of Gaius Aviola Paratus has been recommended to me in connection with my historical research. I am to meet him in Italy later this month or early in August. What do you know about him? He used to serve on Domitius Domitianus’s staff, but left him when the general started the Rebellion, and fought in the Delta on our side until the victory in March.”
“Paratus? I recall him well enough, though ‘fought’ is hardly the term I’d apply to a blind veteran who was head of intelligence. I expect he’ll serve you as well as he served your common master during the Rebellion. His birth name is Breucus, if I’m not mistaken. Pork- and Danube-fed like so many of you. If I find out anything else about him before you leave, I’ll send you word.”
“Any words of wisdom before I go?”
“Well, it’s just a hunch. But two killings, two thefts, and two attacks against you—if the crazy man who tried to jump you in the street counts as much as what happened to you on the river bank—point to something more than coincidence. Mind you, I’m not asking what about any of these crimes fascinates you, but it’s been noticed you’re interested.”
“Come out with it, then. Do I have enemies?”
“I’m not an oracle, Aelius Spartianus. Ask the priests at Antinous’s temple: They are in that business.” Ben Matthias turned to the easel and busied himself with a small paint pot, out of which, with a fine brush, he gathered just enough white to highlight the scowling eyes of his sitter. “Enemies, we all have. I’d watch my back all the way to the harbor, and unless you know the crew, aboard the ship as well.”
Aelius was less amused than he sounded. “You wouldn’t have anything to do with any of this, Baruch, would you?”
“Me!” Once more the painter, faced him “If I’d wanted to kill you, I’d have come myself and made sure the arrow went deeper than last time.” But the way ben Matthias said it, cocking his head through half-closed lids, made Aelius wonder how much of what the Jew told him could be taken as true.
The housekeeper was supervising the covering of furniture with linen throws when Aelius returned home. She was quite happy to keep the flat rented during the hot season, when tourists dwindled to a few consumptives hoping to roast away their disease.
“Commander,” she said gingerly at his entrance, “a few minutes ago there came a young girl with a package for you. I had it brought to your bedroom.”
Aelius had bought nothing today. “What sort of package?” he asked, and, “Was there a message?”
“No, no message. The girl was dressed like an apprentice, so I figure it’s from some shop you went to.”
Aelius went to see. On his bed, there lay a bundle of cloth tidily wrapped and tied with wool yarn, which he undid at once. Folded with care inside, a finely stitched tunic with dark blue applied strips—those called clavi—down the front. A sober decoration, which only at a close exam showed the minute embroidery of blue jackal heads, for the whole length of the strips.
From the doorstep, the housekeeper’s voice caused him to turn.
“Why, that’s from Anubina’s shop. What a great piece of work! That girl has done well for herself.”
11 Epiphi (6 July, Vigil of the Nones of July, Thursday)
On the morning of his departure, ben Matthias’s coming to his flat surprised him, but the Jew was there, keenly eyeing the luggage to be packed on mules for the land travel to Alexandria. He said something to the effect of being headed for Oxyrhinchus himself. “So, since we’re to follow the same route, I thought we might join up.”
Aelius had just folded Anubina’s gift tunic into his trunk, and felt a little vulnerable at the moment.
“Is that why you’re here uninvited?” he said, briefly.
“Actually, no. I came because you did ask me to find out about the contact your colleague suggested.”
Ben Matthias, too, was in traveling clothes, and armed. Aelius had to wonder how many of his young toughs would go with him, and how believable this sudden travel of his was. Clearly he knew his party planned to travel along the right bank from Hermopolis through the Arsinoites basin to the sea.
The Jew seemed unfazed by the officer’s scrutiny. “As far as I can tell,” he continued, “Aviola Paratus is all right. Had been volunteering as a language instructor at the metropolis command post, and left to rejoin his family in Italy about a month ago. Quiet man, pays his bills, manages to stay active despite his blindness. Began as a policeman in Rome, made the grade, and then joined the army. Has an uncanny ear for languages and dialects, and his specialty until he lost his eyesight was cryptography.” Ben Matthias took one step to the side when the house servants lifted the trunk and took it out. “It was a loss to the Rebellion and to our Jewish unit that he went over to Diocletian.”
“I thank you for the information. And if it’s all the same with you, Baruch, we’ll travel separately.”
“Suit yourself, Spartianus. I’ve never been one to insist when I’m not wanted. However, I plan to be in Rome sometime during the fall, to check on real estate I have north of Nero’s Meadows. I might see you then if there’s occasion. And if you travel to Tibur on the Butcher’s tracks, make sure you bring my greetings to Queen Zenobia’s grave. I bet no one remembers the old girl these days.”
Travel Notes by Aelius Spartianus:
We departed Antinoopolis today, 6 July, crossing over to Hermopolis, and from here heading north. I had originally intended to follow the route on the left side of the river, and to cross over at Babylon in the Delta on my way to Alexandria. Given the state of the river, this is now quite impossible, besides, the river police discourages all travel on that side, on account of recent raids on caravans. When I objected that I did not see this as a peril for myself and my men, I was told by Rabirius Saxa himself that the local authorities did not wish to take upon themselves the responsibility for any accident, and I had to acquiesce.
There are evident advantages to traveling along the right bank, as one needn’t ferry across the Nile at any point to reach Alexandria, but the river branch that parallels on this side the course of the river from Abydos to the sea, nearly five hundred miles in all, presents its own obstacle now that we are in the flood season. As this bank is lower than the other, much of the riverside is already impracticable on foot and in most places on horseback as well. Hence we will have to keep on the ledge road. My intention is to maintain as much as possible an average speed of forty miles daily, stopping only to rest, and to visit a couple of sites associated with the deified Hadrian, but my aim is Alexandria, its harbor, and the Felicitas Annonae.
As we left the city by the north gate, no hide nor hair of ben Matthias and his crew were to be seen on the road. It strengthens my suspicion that he never meant to travel on his own but to follow me, if possible. I do not trust him or his, and will keep on the lookout should they appear to be in the neighborhood. I have the advantage of immediate access to the army posts along the way. Not having traveled this way since the Rebellion, I assume some of them will be much depleted or in disuse, still this is a more populated trek than on the Antinoopolis side. At Oxyrhinchus I plan to do some asking of the Libyan Wilderness merchants, who tarry there at the terminus of the caravan roads.
Day One. We have come without impediment the distance agreed upon. Four militarily trained men can compel local mule drovers to do miracles. We avoid the midday sun, unbearably hot, and stay away from the water’s edge at night, when insects blacken the moonlit air. A couple of fortified cisterns, wholly useless due to lack of maintenance, had the sand around them so wellsmoothed out that I suspect someone might have actually concealed traces of having stopped there shortly before our passage. I may be wrong, or it may be any one traveler heading north even as we are, but I gave orders to keep weapons at the ready anyway. The natural branch of the Nile splits in two and braids back again in this area, but if one didn’t know f
rom the map, one would not notice: The land is flooded over all. We crossed a couple of dilapidated villages, built on the titanic ruins of ancient temples or fortifications. These, too, being built of sun-dried bricks, have crumbled through the centuries, leaving behind mountains of detritus rich in salt. Goats lick the collapsed walls. Precious nothing visible on the other bank. A hot norther blows continuously. Mosquitoes most annoying.
Day Two. Cynopolis. The foundation day of the Ala Ursiciana, my Armenian unit. The men and I offered sacrifice in the temple of Hermanubis, which is in very bad shape. Its outer perimeter has given way, and although we read in books that this was once a famous center for the cult of the jackalheaded god, Dog City is now little more than a village—where incidentally everyone complains about taxes, and started running at our arrival taking us for tax men. Once it was clear we were not, I managed to converse with one of the local elders, whose Greek is so abominable that, were it not for the little practice years ago with Anubina, I should have been left scratching my head. Still, he told me that a group of ten or twelve men is riding ahead of us by half a day. They didn’t come through town, and he only knows because his sons, who were on a dinghy transporting some thing or other, saw the group filing on the ledge road. Again, it may be a coincidence, or not. It is likely that sooner or later, either because they slow down or we gain speed, we will meet along the way.
Day Three. At Oxyrhinchus. Our mysterious predecessors have entirely vanished. No one has seen them, and I’m thinking that—it being Saturday—it could very well be that it is ben Matthias and his band shadowing us, but being careful not to break the Sabbath. They’re hiding somewhere in the whereabouts, I wager. The town, antique and venerable, suffers from faulty maintenance like so many other Egyptian sites. I had great hopes that the Temple of the deified Hadrian would comprise a library, and was terribly disappointed to find that it is not even being used as a place of worship. An itinerant judge travels to it once a month from the Arsinoite to hold trials, and the annex of the temple is being used as a prison. Three Christian priests or deacons (I am unsure which) are kept there awaiting trial. The town’s other temples (to Kore, Serapis, etc.) are minimally kept up; even the capitol is used as a jail. A depressing sight. Antinoopolis in comparison seems like a thriving beehive.
The only good thing happened when I surprised some workers behind the marketplace, busy removing limestone slabs from the gymnasium courtyard. “For reuse,” they said, but they’re likely selling it or making it into lime, judging by the combustible material they were also getting ready to cart off. Most of it came from Christian households (codices, books, other written material), but some had been hauled in as kindling and scrap by caravans returning from the Libyan Wilderness. A treasure trove! An entire city archive from the days of the deified Hadrian, coming from a small desert edge community called Ptolemaion, plus an odd tract in Latin, bearing the title The Death and Resurrection of Antinous. There is a small shrine to the Boy, incidentally, nicely kept. The sexton, who looks old enough to recall Hadrian’s travels, or even Caesar’s coming, told me that a local tradition maintains that the emperor had a dream at Oxyrhinchus, commanding him to kill Antinous in order to break the long drought. We’ll see if the tract tells the same tale.
Day Four. A long solitary stretch with no towns, and even now we are still south of Herakleopolis. The men are edgy, and so am
Day Five. A soldier’s instinct never lies. When we stopped yesterday, the solitude of the road, the ruinous state of the watch towers, and an indefinable quality of tension in the air caused us to take extra precautions when camping out. I had barely begun penning my diary entry when we were attacked by a handful of mounted bandits, coming from the north. We resisted, although outnumbered two to one (servants are wholly useless in situations like this, and one of them managed to get himself killed by not taking cover). It looked ugly for about half an hour, as our group was behind the ramshackle wall of an abandoned building with nowhere to go, having the desert behind us. Once we pushed them back, since they only had swords they couldn’t pluck us off from a distance, but sooner or later they were likely to storm our redoubt and do us in.
My only consolation lay in having taken precautions as regards any valuables, having shipped them off with my escort well ahead of time. This way, we only had to lose our lives. Then, just as I calculated the bandits to be planning an irresistible assault, here comes a handful of men on horseback, with bows and arrows enough to kill three of our attackers on the spot, and convince the rest to flee, but not before scooping up their dead and taking them along. Both groups had their faces covered, in the manner of desert dwellers. I’d say they looked like those who attacked me at the Benu Grove, but they all look alike. Our rescuers didn’t stop around enough for me to jump over the wall and come to thank them. As quickly as they had ridden onto the scene, they wheeled back, and they; too, headed north again.
For a moment I was tempted to recognize ben Matthias’s men in the second group, but it is more likely that the old rebel was the one who ordered the assault in the first place, and— seeing that we resisted, or else fearful that there would be serious consequences for killing Caesar’s friend—he thought better of it and fell upon his own to ensure they wouldn’t betray him. I am beginning to suspect he sketched my portrait on the sly so as to make me recognizable to his followers. Who is to tell? In any case, if he or someone else were looking for the deified Hadrian’s letter, it is already safely in Alexandria with the head of my escort. As for us, we buried the servant, and forgoing our rest, rode on to the Arsinoite.
We are actually encamped at Aueris, where the necropolis of the city of Arsinoe has been for centuries. Most of the folks here make a living by being associated with mortuary activities. There’s an embalming school, a shroud-making factory, and mummy tablet painters thrive (one more reason to think it was ben Matthias’s men we met yesterday). The army garrison—if close to ineffectual—is open for business, and here I was told that brigandage is a way of living in the oasis. No tourists come alone, and the crocodile population has increased enough to scare off even the cartloads of sightseers who used to trek down from Alexandria during flood season. Water everywhere. Lake Moeris, the creeks, false rivers, and canals form one uninterrupted table of water spreading over the oasis.
We are guests of a Roman landowner, “the last of his kind,” as he puts it, whose estate along the ledge road near Philadelphia Arsinoites is amazingly and delightfully cooled by the wind. Up here most of the other estates have been eaten up by sand, due to the disastrous state of irrigation.
Sixth day. At Letopolis. The Egypt most travelers know: cities and villages close to one another, temples and pyramids, markets and orchards. Essence of roses being sold at reasonable prices (comparably speaking). We left behind the rice and flax fields of the Arsinoites, and now we are beginning to encounter traffic, fancy caravans, decently uniformed army units. It being the birthday of the deified Julius, and having purposely timed our march so as to arrive here for the occasion, my men and I sacrificed an ox as is required. I then released them to attend a ceremony at the Mithraeum of the army camp, and went to the exquisite small temple of Antinous, known here as Antinoeion but also Hadrianeion, interchangeably. It is associated with an oracle, and its priest is a cultivated man who lived at Nicomedia a few years ago. He made no pretense to believe that the gilded eggshells kept in the temple museum are actually what remains of Antinous’s last meal before drowning. Personally, he told me he believes the Boy took his own life. He thinks he is buried in Hadrian’s Tiburtine villa, on the strength of epistolary evidence he read as a young man. When I declined as gracefully as I could to ask for an oracular response for myself he asked me whether I did have something to ask, unrelated to my person. Serenus Dio’s death came to mind, so I let myself be convinced, and wrote on a scrap of papyrus the question “Who killed the merchant Serenus Dio?” This, I folded into a minuscule packet, which I tied with a string and tossed into the fire
built on the altar. Usually, as I heard, one merely deposits an oracular question, and gets also to write “yes,” “no,” or other possible answers, which then the priest picks at random. Here, however, the question was consumed by the flames. The answer, I was told, would be found in the oracular book, which without looking I was to open in the priest’s presence. I was nearly—nearly!—starting to be excited about the possibility, when my eyes fell on the first line of a page reading “He died like the blessed Antinous.” Well, I hardly needed an oracle to tell me what I knew already. Since every page, as far as I can judge, has a list of pat sentences beginning with “She will marry . . .” “He died . . .” “He will lose/gain money . . .” there seemed to be hardly any supernatural intervention at play. Still, I offered a sacrifice, left an offering, and politely took leave of the priest, about whom now I think a little less.
Seventh day. Caught a fever or something. I feel miserable. We are somewhere past Terenuthis, and the great pyramids are not far. The Delta is flooded.
Eighth day. Sick as a dog. We are staying at a house in Hermopolis Minor. The men want me to stop over, but I won’t. The Felicitas Annonae sails day after tomorrow, and I’ll be on it if it kills me. Water everywhere.
Ninth day. Still sick, but the fever is breaking. We are not far from Alexandria. Everything looks too bright, too noisy, and I wish I were back in Antinoopolis. I miss Anubina.
Tenth Day. What foolishness one writes when one doesn’t feel well! After an absolutely dreadful night of sweating and tossing. I am back to my old self The city, fully reconstructed after the Rebellion, is as beautiful as ever, and if I had time, I should bury myself in every library it contains—but another duty calls. The army doctor gave me a clean bill of health, so—having been rejoined by the bulk of my escort—I am about to head for the Eunostus Harbor, exit pass in hand, with perfect weather, and no more threats from shadowy highwaymen. The ship is a massive craft, more than 170 feet in length, which happens to be transporting a cavalry unit to Sicily. That means I’ll have a couple of officers to chat with. By great luck, there was also one available cabin aft, which will afford me privacy to think and review my material. The skipper is an energetic man from Salonae, married to an Egyptian, and whose son is one of the engineers working at His Divinity’s palace. As for the master of the ship, he’s a taciturn Neapolitan, Expositus by name, all business. The crew is entirely Egyptian, loud but—at least at first sight—competent and hardworking. According to them, the Felicitas Annonae is the pride of the Rome-Alexandria trade route (a claim I heard about other ships before), but it does carry some 15,000 artabas of wheat, enough to feed an army, plus I don’t know how many wild animals for the circus, and several pounds of silk worth at least half a million. All propitiatory sacrifices are favorable, and no delays are expected.
