The Water Thief

by Ben Pastor

  Now, however, thanks to this likely case of mistaken identity, the “dusty roadside” to Bebiana Martial spoke of seems to me a little less welcoming, and I find myself staring searchingly at those I encounter on the way.

  Near Bebiana, fifteen miles from Rome, Aelius could not resist making a diversion to see the property once belonging to Virginius Rufus, who’d twice refused the crown after Nero’s death. Its porches were of stone rich in seashell inclusions, the quarries of which stood at a little distance. Less than one mile down from them, a reduced army post occupied the right-hand roadside. Manned by Pannonian soldiers, it was clean and spiffy, the perfect place to water his horse. Its commanding NCO was just done debriefing one of his men and stood to salute the visitor.

  “He’s back from chasing a poacher,” he informed Aelius in the gravelly voice of one used to shouting. “But if the bastard was a poacher, Commander, I’m a son of a bitch myself”

  “What makes you say so?”

  “He was signaling to a confederate from up there, the quarry top.”

  “Don’t poachers alert one another of the army’s coming, in these parts?”

  “Not if they use flags and do this. See what my boy wrote down.” On a slate, hastily jotted down with chalk, Aelius read,

  I left-I right; I left-V right; III left-I right; II left-II right; IV left-1” right; IV left-III right; IV left-V right; I left-V right; III left-III right; LI left-II right; IV left-IV right.

  “It’s army signaling, Commander.”

  “I see that.” There had been haunted nights in Armenia when the only contact with the next unit in the enemy-infested land had been the semaphore system. Aelius stayed with his hand the NCO’s offer of chalk and translation, having already deciphered the message himself. “Did your man catch the poacher?” he asked, giving back the slate.

  “He lost time marking the sequence of signals, and then rushed back here to show it. His patrol companion is still searching for sender and receiver, and I ordered two more men to scour the hillside. Damn if I can figure out what it’s all about, but poachers, they’re not.”

  “It depends on the game they’re after.” Aelius was already out of the door, and soon mounted. “If the men are captured, keep them here and send immediate word to the Selecti Alae Ursicianae, my bodyguard at the Special Agent Barracks.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Updates in nomenclature found their way slowly through the ranks. “It’s the old Foreign Unit Barracks,” Aelius explained.

  Midday was just past, and shadows had drawn back under trees and walls of stacked stones. Cicadas in the bushes fell silent when he regained the Aurelian Way, and `then clamored again behind him. Ahead, the increasingly undulated land swallowed the road, showed it more distant, swallowed it once more with a donkey-back hump, and another. Villas up for sale sat mute amid drying gardens, their eaves garlanded with swallows’ nests. Aelius rode on, halfway between disquiet and irritable curiosity: because, whether or not the inquirers at Towers were looking for him, there was no mistaking a semaphore message that read, aelius venit. So, they knew him by name, and that he was coming to Rome. Posing as travelers, being mistaken as poachers, two or more men were on to him. It thrilled him, in one way, as risk always had fascinated him. Memory of his evenings during the Rebellion came back, and how Anubina, in her shady bedroom, would help him take off his armor and say, “This piece of danger I remove from you. And this piece. And this,” until he was naked in front of her. I miss her, he thought, and knowing her married, happy, a mother of two children, makes me lonely and jealous.

  At Lorium (the local station master, busy waterproofing a sizeable cistern, pronounced it Laurium), another imperial villa stood with its principal building on a hillside, castlelike on the plain around it, about one mile from a small bridge. The travel guide read that it’d been abandoned after Commodus. Uninteresting market stands lined the road for a piece, and then the ups and downs began in earnest, in what Fronto had called “a bunch of steep and slippery stretches.” No news of strangers looking for him, at least.

  It was afternoon when Aelius crossed another bridge on the Arrone river, a place called, significatively in his mind, Caput Serapi, but no Egyptian landmark and no temple of Serapis was in sight. Even the massive round sepulcher watching the verge with its timeworn portrait statues was silent about any relation to Africa. Here the road forked, and the milestone read Via Portuensis newly written under the old nomenclature, Via Vitellia. Along the Aurelian Way, low meadows were more and more giving way to wooded dales full of birds. As long as the birds sang, it meant there were no men lying in wait; the old habit of watching himself underlay all he saw, and heard, without taking away from the beauty of the land. Soon, pouring out from under trees, tombs, and isolated farms like a liquid, shadows began to lengthen. On the fringe of hills, sheep and longhorns of Pannonian stock headed for their pens and stables.

  Beyond a roadside trough where the ever-present mosquitoes clouded water-filled hoof prints, a wooded hamlet, otherwise unmarked, was listed in his guide as Buxus; boxwood abounded, in fact, a small fenced copse of those trees must be the silva mesia mentioned in passing. The station mistress nearby was talkative. She gave him an earful of useless information about Christians coming to celebrate two of their beheaded “martyrs” here (“Rufina and Secunda, have you ever heard commoner names for so-called saints?”), and four Christianized Jews at a place thereabouts, called Nympha (“The parents had common names, too, but the two sons’ were unpronounceable!”). Asked whether anyone had inquired about an official’s coming, she said no. “But then, with all that I keep a road station, it’s not like I listen to gossip or anything.” Counting the money Aelius had paid for fodder and a quick meal, she grumbled about high prices and bad business. “For all their foolishness, Christians brought some activity. Now there’s little traffic aside from mule drovers, and they hardly spend anything. If it wasn’t for the rose plantation down the road, I might as well close shop.”

  By this time, the summer day was winding down. Aelius decided to press on toward the hill that would allow him to look upon the city, and stop for the night. A dark pine forest crowded the road past the rose garden mentioned by the station mistress (it had been the property of one of Commodus’s freedmen); beyond, from what he read, would begin a convulsed tract of land marked by deep sandstone valleys, canyons caused by hundreds of years of quarrying, cane groves extending for miles, brick kilns, army and navy burial yards between the Vatican and Janiculum hills. Ideal ambush country. Anyone waiting for him there could easily have the upper hand. Now the nomenclature on the road markers read Aurelia-Cornelia; knowing that soon the roads would split, and the second would lead to the very door of Hadrian’s Tomb made him eager to get to the crossroads, but prudence dictated otherwise. Having taken a small room at the station called in Colle Pino, Aelius resolved to start again at sunup. Still, impatience made him leave the hall where a few travelers idled and ate: On foot, he wandered with the last light of day to the rim of the hill, where an opening among the trees, under a precipitous and limitless sky, showed him Rome beneath him.

  Notes by Aelius Spartianus:

  I have seen It! It would be too easy to write that words do not suffice or there are no words altogether to describe the sight. Words are poor, but they do help to give an idea of what one witnesses. Imagine a balcony-like glorious hill, wild and solitary, whose flanks are thick with canes, and so deep that brooks and rivulets winding below are invisible and cannot be heard. Nightingales calling from one grove to the other, as I did not hear since the Armenian days. As I stood there, without any of the feared ambushes having materialized, the road followed from the ship to this point seemed to have disappeared altogether, as if swallowed into the lifetime of the man I was before seeing Rome.

  There was a moment when I myself felt as though I had not lived before. My life and doings to this point seemed puny and wholly unimportant, and my daily concerns too petty to be listed. I
saw why my father, in his thickheadedness and ignorance, wanted me to be educated and ready for an event such as this. He, who never has seen Rome and never will, but fought in its name for forty and more years. My grandfather, who had seen it once, and never tired of telling about it. My mother’s folks, who taught here as freedmen in the emperor’s house under three princes. All of these have brought me here: not my research, not the investigation, not the suspicious deaths behind me and the unexpected one that I am to find tomorrow. It seems to me tonight that all conjured to bring me to this point, including my survival at war and during the Rebellion, including the tenderness of my time with Anubina, my travels, my anger and fears. I understand the deified Hadrian’s impulse to give shape, in stone, to the accumulation of sentiments that his wanderings and experiences must have heaped within his genial mind.

  I, Aelius Spartianus, grew up in foreign barracks and am nobody. I will build no palace, but I am privileged to write the history of the men who did, and whose work this magnificent City is. Below me, torches and flickers of light marked the thousand streets and alleys of Rome; under a nearly full moon, the first thing I made out was a burial pyramid, which made me feel as though Egypt is not letting go. Soon I noticed the massive baths, temples, Hadrian’s great tomb by the river, and the glorious bridge leading to it, white like milk; the Palace, a city in itself malls, sanctuaries. Distant and against the Alban hills, hazy but unmistakable, the Flavian amphitheater, in the neighborhood of which I am to travel tomorrow. From afar, I knew shapes and rooftops never seen in person, recognized the hollows where the Great Fire began and spread, the quarters where aristocrats ruled in the republican days, the sacred precincts and groves: Each dimly outlined building meant an episode, birth or murder, plot or entire revolution. Gods inhabit this place! I looked and asked myself How can anyone ever endanger the capital of the world? Our enemies dared, through the years, and always lost. We are those who teach the world how to live: Any threat is—must be—doomed to fail.

  The truth is that I could have made it easily to the City gates and entered it tonight, but I couldn’t bring myself to it. I was afraid of its enormity, of its walls. Maybe ben Matthias is right in reminding me that I am a barbarian, because just like one I cowered inwardly before the power of this inhabited head of the empire, and I couldn’t even bring myself to find a little bed in a little building within it.

  Tomorrow it will be another matter. Another month, and the beginning of the second leg of my search. Someone, within the great City spread before my eyes, has been alerted of my coming, and is waiting for me. Soldiers should never knowingly walk into traps, but I cannot for my life think of a more magnificent place to do it than in Rome.

  S E V E N T H C H A P T E R

  1 August, Kalends, Tuesday (8 Mesore)

  On the first day of August—dedicated to Hope and the Two Victories—Aelius was an awestruck tourist in a haze of sites and monuments. Having approached the City by the Cornelian Way, across Nero’s and Agrippina’s Gardens, he left on one side the horse track where Tacitus placed the first Christian executions. Then, at the crossroads with the Via Triumphalis, he headed past the marble pyramid to the paved square around Hadrian’s glorious mausoleum (which he circled twice swearing to pass hours admiring it). At the foot of the bridge built for it, he entered the walls through the Aurelian Gate, whose powerful jamb he kissed. Mindless of the heat that heralded rain, he took in all he could of the district right of the Flaminian Way, where so much had been built or renovated by the deified Hadrian. Temples, theaters, arches, stadiums, porches—ben Matthias had been right in calling him provincial, but dead wrong in assuming he couldn’t or wouldn’t like Rome. He arrived at the Special Agent Barracks at sundown, wholly enthused, having neither stopped to eat all day, nor paid more than passing heed to the crowds and noise of the City.

  On Friday, thanks to a rain that veiled all things with sticky haze, he talked himself into getting back to research business. Through his bodyguard he had already gotten an unwelcome confirmation: Lucinus Soter’s secretary had died of his burns a week prior, so it came down to hearing whether his brother had any information to give.

  The man lived in a refitted farmhouse, not far from the crossroads immediately outside the Ostia gate, where a shady lane followed Aurelian’s walls. Aelius was expected. The meeting took less than an hour, in a small reception hall where the scent of herbs under the rain and the pungency of cat spray came through the window.

  “Philo died trying to save his master,” the grieving brother said. “As it is, all he saved was the money bags. What embitters me most is that he could have spared himself jumping into the burning studio. Lucinus Soter was dead already, so the flames had only books and swatches of cloth to destroy.”

  “Breathing smoke kills more than fire, I’m told.”

  “But it isn’t that, Commander. Ask the fire brigade—I told them what Philo managed to whisper to me, that his master had his throat cut.”

  His throat cut. Aelius mustered his ability not to show his alarm. “Are you sure you heard your brother correctly?” he asked, and, “How did it all start, anyway?”

  “A fire rose from the wood pile for the furnace. This I heard from the slaves, who swear that burning rags must have been tossed in from the basement window. The fire brigade examined the place, and agrees that it was not accidental combustion. The whole household rushed around to put out the flames, and I think that’s when the murderer got in. Lucinus Soter was a heavy man; he moved slowly, so Philo’s first impulse was to ensure he was helped out of the studio, right above the furnace room. There’s no mistaking what he told me, Commander. He found the master slumped back in his chair, at the desk, with that awful wound and blood all over. The time it took my brother to see the uselessness of his task cost him his life, as the burning ceiling came down on him. Why murder him? This is Rome, sir. Lucinus Soter kept money in the house, everyone knew. It was the fire brigade that found the money bags in the garden, where my poor brother had thrown them from the window. Silverware and jewelry, we found melted in their caskets. So, the thieves got nothing out of killing two good men. As for the rest, go there, see for yourself if anyone could escape that hell.”

  Soter’s house was one of those that had been carved out of the small uphill space between the baths of Titus and the massive walls of those Trajan had later built. It had been an elegant city home, Aelius had heard, once a consul’s residence. Small in plan but three-storied, with no land around it, and not much light, its door had opened about three hundred paces from the amphitheater, though one could not see it due to the house’s recessed location. Aelius saw immediately what peril the fire had caused to the neighborhood, judging by the houses across from Copper Alley, whose wall had been visibly tongued by flames and smoke.

  Under a clearing sky of swift clouds, very little remained of Soter’s property. The bricks and concrete fallen into the street had been duly removed; collapsed beams, caved-in walls, and unrecognizable rubble cluttered the site of the house itself. The real estate agent happening to survey the site brightened up when Aelius walked up to him, and quickly came to business. “New to the district, Your Excellency? There’s much you can do with the place, you know. Get some able crew out there, and—”

  “I can see the state it’s in.”

  “Ah. Well, then—you can see that it’s the land you’re buying, basically.”

  “Basically? I’d say. All the few square feet of it.”

  “Still, it’s the location, you know. Close to everything.”

  “Stuffed between two public baths. I bet one couldn’t hear oneself thinking most of the time. And the entrance to the Titian Baths looks ready to fall onto the street, which means half of the hill will go with it.” For all that, Aelius saw the immediate advantage of appearing as a prospective buyer. He straddled a broken rafter to enter what had been the atrium. “I might want it as an investment, that’s all, or decide to do nothing of the kind. I hear a man died in the fi
re, so I doubt that buyers are lining up to take it off your hands.”

  “Well, you are welcome to survey the place. In case you decide it suits you, you can send for me down at the corner.”

  Once alone, Aelius could hardly make out the space that had been Soter’s studio. The ceiling and part of the roof had collapsed into it, and although the fire brigade had cleared a path through the rubble to recover the body, still beams, blackened tiles, charred stumps difficult to decipher—probably furniture—occupied most of the floor. The pavement itself was sooty, streaked; from it and from the rubble there rose the acidic odor of wetness on burned objects, a sour cindery smell. Here, as far as Aelius could tell, where the opening of a window was indicated by gnarled remnants of its grill, had sat the desk, along the south side of the ground floor. Aelius recognized the metal claws of desk and chair, knobs and tarnished hinges. Paper and parchment, wholly combusted, left no other trace than a flimsy veil-like layer, mixed with remnants of the shelves in the wide bookcase niche. Black fragments resembling bats’ wings, stuck here and there, must be all that survived of textile samples.