The Water Thief

by Ben Pastor

  To the sides, well, he could hardly bring himself to pay mind. Toward the sea, invisible but for the deeper sky hung above it, a low growth of trees and shrubs, a wayside shrine overgrown until it lost its shape, like a hairy wart on the land. In the direction of the mountains, fingers of ancient lava flows extended like talons, made friendlier by the vineyards dressing them. People living that way, too, each in his place and with his hard or lazy day half-behind him already.

  Aelius Spartianus, who was so careful with his notes and took pride in his memory, had mistaken things and men completely. It was as if he’d unglued himself from the world, from history. Had he not felt so bitterly rooted to where he stood, he’d say it would feel like falling, falling. For an instant he understood Antinous in the act of leaving the edge of the imperial barge, before striking the treacherous water below. Vaguely sensing the mortal peril ahead, but already completely avulsed from the living. You must do something, his mind was telling him. Quickly, something. But he stood there with his useless notes and useless memory, between the edge and nothingness, precisely as Antinous had, who however, unlike him, had understood.

  At their evening meeting, perceiving Aelius’s frame of mind, Paratus showed a friend’s concern. What he could not see—the knitting of one’s brow, an anxious expression—he surely detected from quick breathing, or the small rustle of nervous motions, cloth on leather or cloth on cloth. “Is anything amiss?” he asked;

  “No.”

  Aelius couldn’t say how things stood. Not yet. Until today both of them had been careful to function, each in his blindness. His own lack of sight had come to an end, and now he envied Paratus’s dark world of remembered light.

  “All I can tell you is that we have this much: a fragmentary sentence.”

  “Favorable or unfavorable?”

  “Judge for yourself. ‘. . . Antinous the Justified, who is here, and here rests within the garden bounds of the great lord of Rome.’ And nowhere does it say that the monument actually stood in the City.”

  “So. The burial could be anywhere.”

  Aelius read disappointment on Paratus’s seamed face, as if his sedateness had received an unexpected blow he was at this time incapable or unwilling to accept. “Unless we read ‘garden bounds’ as a specific reference to the villa at Tibur. I’m sure I don’t know where else to look for it in that jumble of buildings.”

  “Is it the end of the road, then? Do you give up?”

  Aelius breathed in. On the threshold of his colleague’s room, he faced gloom unrelieved by the window, through which only the mortified grayness of evening filtered. Lamps were scarcely needed in a blind man’s space, but that murkiness was physically intolerable for him just now. He said something to the effect of having to go, and turned on his heel.

  “Do you give up, Aelius Spartianus?” Paratus’s voice followed him as he walked down the vaulted corridor of the barracks. “You’ll have to stick by your decision, if you do.”

  Aelius gave himself time to reach the top of the stairs leading to the vestibule before answering.

  “Yes. I give up.” And his half-shouted words slapped the hallway like an order to himself.

  Notes by Aelius Spartianus:

  Night, they say, brings counsel. But a night marked by anger may bring more than that. I returned to my flat not even trying to keep my emotions at bay. Theo’s written translation of the funerary text kept rolling in my mind, squeezed of all possible meaning. I could neither eat nor go to bed, so I went outside on the balcony and sat there. I told myself that, having gathered more than enough information to write the imperial biography, I could very well list all possible causes of the Boy’s death, all burials and cenotaphs known and fabled. Better historians than I have been more vague on details than that. I couldn’t accept having failed at the other search, but uncovering conspiracy (there is one) and murder (it has everything to do with it) are not the historian’s task. I told myself too, that I’m just a soldier who has bitten more than he can chew, and not for the first time.

  But I kept digging into my memory like a dog, lifting dirt, coming up over and again with Theo’s written words. How he handed me the scrap of papyrus, how he accompanied me to the door chewing on mint, how he stood admiring my young guardsman. Then I remembered that between this moment and the moment I took my man aside to hear his report, Theo added a few more words. Namely: the Boy’s obelisk was a very late work in terms of Egyptian history; it had been carved in Italy besides; the sign for “lord” was in later tradition identical to the pictograph for “lady,” and it might just as well mean one or the other.

  Aelius Spartianus, how can you have taken so many wrong turns and made so many mistakes?

  Fate itself held in front of your face the answer, by pushing your ship north of the City, and forcing you to approach Rome from the Aurelian Way. The first sight you beheld looking down from the hill the evening of your arrival was the one you should have at once recognized! Not the garden bounds of the great lord, but of the great lady of Rome. None but the gardens by the Vatican Field, named for the imperial ladies: specifically, the Gardens of Empress Domitia, whose very name contains the root of dominion!

  That area by the river, now a public park where the rich and poor—even the Christian elder called Peter—were buried, welcomed me to Rome, and I ignored the clues. One of its graves is what I began searching months and months ago. It all makes sense now: The verses Cleopatra saw in the male brothel, saying that Antinous is naught but shadow and dust/close by, where Hadrian took his flight from mortality/riding in Helios’s chariot. Why didn’t I think of it? Hadrian’s majestic tomb in the Vatican, in the Gardens of Empress Domitia, the bronze chariot of Sun-Helios crowning its roof signify the emperor’s name and role. The chariot at the top of the mausoleum indicates that flight into eternity, and isn’t the whole Vatican area called ‘Egypt’? Maybe that’s what the guardian at Two Laurels meant, when he made the same objection. Antinous’s grave—the memoria Antinoi—if it still stands, stands near Hadrian’s tomb. And there’s no stopping me from leaving the house at this time to make sure.

  7 September, Thursday (9 Thoth)

  The city prefect had pillow marks on his face, and mumbled, halfdressed from his bedroom’s door, “This had better be of great importance, Commander Spartianus,” which was less overt than the “Who in fucking hell is asking for me at this hour?” he’d been shouting a moment earlier to his secretary..

  Having heard Aelius’s request, he seemed briefly fought between apoplexy and a yawn, but all he actually added was, “Do what you want—you do anyway. I’m going back to bed.”

  Outside the City gate, the ramp of Hadrian’s bridge gleamed over the musty depth of the riverbed. A gurgle of water binding the piers below, and the remote call of nightingales from the imperial gardens—a complex series of trills and chirps, prolonged and repeated—were the sounds that came to Aelius’s ears once he and a few guardsmen stopped at the head of the bridge. At the opposite end, in the late night air a luminescence like corposant glared from the vast mausoleum at the foot of the bridge, and similarly white stood the two nameless tombs near it, seen so many times: the burial tower, a miniature copy of the imperial grave, and the marble pyramid at the crossroads by Nero’s decaying bridge. It came down to deciding which one would be opened first, and Aelius chose the pyramid only on the strength of its perfect alignment with the Via Cornelia, built by Hadrian to connect his mausoleum to the Vatican Field. On such a clear night, an ideal line could be drawn from the pyramid’s tip, nearly one hundred feet high, to the gilded chariot, higher yet, and as if lost against the stars.

  No doors opened on the pyramid’s sides, but midway up its south face, overlooking the road, what seemed like a deep window had probably served the crew to exit after sealing the ground entrance. A ladder was leaned against the marble wall so that a carpenter could climb. Soon he was calling down that it was actually a square door, the size of one of the outside marble blocks, closed
by a bronze shutter. More than half an hour elapsed before the lock could be forced, at which time Aelius impatiently took the man’s place atop the ladder. The flame of his tin lantern held to the hole trembled and was nearly snuffed out by the gush of dank cold air that flowed from within. Leaning in, Aelius saw a shaft inclining downward, apparently toward. the center of the pyramid, barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through—unless of course it narrowed even more at the lower end. Sliding in head first might mean becoming lodged into a deadly funnel, or breaking one’s skull against whatever floor (at what depth?) might lie within. With a rope tied to his waist and lantern extinguished, Aelius opted for lowering himself down feet first, to leave his arms free in case others should pull him out.

  The shaft angled sharply. Despite the fact that, once past the marble sill, the building’s cement core slightly retarded his fall, he slipped down faster than planned. The hole did narrow toward the center of the pyramid, too, and became distinctly uncomfortable, but Aelius was never restricted enough to stop sliding, and in the end he fell into a void mercifully short, onto a stone floor that did nothing to absorb the shock. Due to the angle of the shaft, darkness was unrelieved and perfect. Unhurt, Aelius stood, groping for flint in the pouch at his belt. The damp odor that had first met his nostrils must derive from water seepage through the outside marble lining, because down here—and Aelius assumed he was in the burial chamber—there was cool dryness, and if anything, a faint, old scent of balm and perfume.

  After lighting the lantern again, he did in fact recognize a burial chamber, about twenty by fifteen feet across, barrel-vaulted. Two of its walls spangled with brightly painted Egyptian themes, while the other two stood blank but for the red tracing of unfinished frescoes, and the faint outline of the sealed doorway. In the middle of the floor, laid directly on the pavement without a stone coffin, was a gilded wood or cartonnage sarcophagus roughly shaped like a human body, not unlike the one Aelius had seen in Antinous’s temple. Absence of grave goods testified the haste of the translation, perhaps the furtive nature of it, with an old man sick unto death witnessing the last act of mercy. The coffin’s brown reddish ground danced under the flickering light. Here were the gold leaf images of dog-headed Anubis holding a vessel over a corpse, of Ma’at lifting in her hand the feather of justice and cosmic order, and the sign of Horus-on-the-Horizon; above and below, resplendent rows of lotus and, lilies, and on the chest a narrow band with Greek gilded characters that read the farewell words, Antinoe, eupsychi.

  Aelius had to wait until his breathing slowed down enough for him to continue his work. Ignoring the muffled calls from above, asking if all was well, he drew near the sarcophagus’s head, where a window in the lid revealed the dead man’s wooden portrait. Of exquisite making, it showed a young man of about twenty, with a goldleaf crown in his hair. A face freshly shaven, paler where the beard had been sheared off, and lovely in a manly way; gray-eyed and tranquil, which no astonishment or pain seemed ever to have marred, a serious and thoughtful face that—Aelius, deeply moved, wanted to believe—had waited until now to exchange glances with him.

  How sacrilegious any of this might be, or contrary to the deified Hadrian’s will, he had no time to consider now. His hands fumbled with the seals of the lid, which in spite of his emotion came open easily enough. Beneath it, an intricate crisscrossed binding of bright red linen strips, purple-dyed, formed a complex multilayered pattern that resembled coffering, each hollow square dotted with a gold button at the center. At the feet of the mummy, for a moment so brief that later Aelius doubted having seen it at all, lay a fresh garland of roses and lotus buds, tightly bound, scented, which withered and turned black at once. On the body’s chest, set at an angle, rested a flattish wood cylinder such as letters and documents are entrusted to.

  The muffled calls from above had ceased. Silence returned to this space sealed and suspended above the ground, save for a low rustle as of wind seeking the shaft and burrowing down its length. Kneeling against one of the blank walls with his lantern on the floor, Aelius opened the cylinder and took the first of two rolled-up documents out of it.

  There flowed the graceful letters, so like those he had with similar thrill read in Egypt, but distorted by age or infirmity, or great physical pain.

  I, Publius Aelius Hadrianus, feeling close to death and wishing to ensure our Antinous’s presence close to my tomb, have hurriedly and in secret laid him in this place without the funerary gifts I planned for him to have. In the document attached to this, I commit to eternity how by his act he saved Caesar’s life and Rome, he who seemed mildness itself and at no time gave me reason for reproach. He, who is ours and not mine alone, as he belongs to the City. In the same document, I also trace for posterity the sequel of events caused by the occult, age-old enemy of Rome I have come to call with the collective name of Water Thief. Such among the Greeks is the term that indicates a water clock, hence Time itself, devourer of all the empires of the earth ...

  Words crowded and faltered before Aelius’s eyes. The Water Thief, hidden in plain sight through memory, ritual, like the villa’s plan, like this most visible and nameless of sepulchers—a hint from the start of his investigation, to which he’d been both blind and deaf. Even now his ears, at first as if stopped by the utter silence around him, perceived that rustle as of coming wind again, but paid no attention.

  . . . For more than two hundred years the conspiracy has attempted against the expansion and well-being of the greatest empire man has known. Its aims, decked in anti-Roman ideology but in fact dictated by the most ravenous greed, united a multiform and divided lot of haters of the state. Beheading the empire, toppling the tower of its might, bringing down the magnificence of its structure ...

  The cloth suddenly gagging his mouth had the strength of a vise. Right off, even before astonishment, an animal reaction hunched him forward. Pulled back hard in a stranglehold, a knee rammed on his spine, Aelius fully expected his neck to be broken by a twist or a blade to come gouging his throat, but the cloth kept cramming, steadily cutting his breath. The lantern overturned or was kicked, flickered out, and darkness like a taste of death ate the room around him. He tried to heave off the attacker and the pressure around his neck grew so that he blacked out. Force left him like water. Aelius vaguely felt himself collapsing on his side, and as if another were struggling like a bound calf in his place, heart, lungs on fire. The attacker’s crushing weight bore down on him, and Aelius came to only enough to know he was flat on his back being smothered, head forced against the floor. Then consciousness sank again. Water, water, I’m under water, like in the river with the mud and herons, like my drowned dog, like everyone who drowned and drowned without hope. I’ll let the bound calf labor and fight, buckle while I go down. There’s sand at the bottom. At the bottom, however, Aelius would not go down. Not after all this, not now—not yet! A rush of pain spewed him up into awareness that he was alive, straining free for a moment, thrashing about and choking again, furious at the proximity of his own death. Air jetted into his lungs only enough for him to suck it up with a gasp. I’m sinking, I’m sinking. If I weren’t, I’d reach for the knife in my boot, and strike with it as hard as I can. The muscle spasm in reaching for the knife made him cry out. Unless water had long ago closed over him, and he was already dead.

  A burnished edge looked like a wound in the eastern sky upriver, where trees from the imperial gardens crowded the banks at the bend. Seeing ben Matthias’s face upon emerging from the shaft was less surprising to him than Aelius expected. “I should have known it was you,” he said, breathing hard. Perched on the ladder, the Jew shrugged, extending his hand to help him crawl out. Below, his guardsmen’s anxious faces looked pale while they slackened the rope, and a second ladder was leaned against the pyramid for Aelius to climb down.

  “It’s amazing what nose I have for knowing when a Roman gets himself in trouble,” ben Matthias sneered. “I was just passing by, back from my real estate, and couldn’t resist the co
mmotion. Is he dead?”

  “No, but I gave him a good stab, and he’s hog-tied down there.” Ashamed of seeing the sun rise from a doubly profaned monument, Aelius was anxious to get down, and touch the earth.

  “Not that the dark should make a difference to a blind man,” commented ben Matthias.

  Once at the foot of the pyramid, Aelius asked for a canteen, drank from it, and used the rest of the vinegary water to wash his face. He should ache after the struggle, but did not; the exhilaration of having succeeded wearied him and made him numb. It took him this long to wonder what ben Matthias, arms crossed with his back to Hadrian’s monument, might be doing here.

  Amused, the Jew prevented the question. “I really was passing through the Vatican Field, and the only reasons your pork-fed guards let me get close were the ladder and coils of rope my mule was carrying. When I found out it was you inside the grave, I thought it too hilarious. My rope, I said, my ladder—I get to lead the pulling. None of my business, but how did things sour between you and Paratus?”

  Aelius watched two of his men going up the ladder, to carry out the veteran’s arrest and the laborious feat of hauling him out afterward. He said, “You’re right.”

  “About what?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  Before noon, a Praetorian unit was dispatched to The Glory of Our Lord Aurelian’s, where it took into custody Paratus’s son and his servants. Orders were issued that the same be done with the veteran’s family at Minturnae. With Rome’s gates closed to keep accomplices from escaping, and interrogations of suspects underway at the city prefect’s, there was really no one Aelius wanted to speak to but the man who had tried to kill him.

  Behind bars in the brig of the Special Agent Barracks, Paratus at on a bench. He showed no pain for the knife wound under the bandage on his side. Even his lack of anger abided, and the curl in the lips that seemed about to smile was ironic and sensitive. “So. The sweet rustle and smell of army leather. I expected you couldn’t resist coming here, Aelius Spartianus.”