My heart pounded in my chest. What had I done? How had I arrived at a conclusion so far from the truth, and drawn all these others along with me?
"Unveil her!" wailed Apollonides, his voice trembling with suspense.
There was no other choice. I prepared myself for the shock, the shame, the terrible mistake of Cydimache unveiled.
But at that moment, Zeno, too, must have seen the hand that restrained me. He expelled a strange, barking laugh fraught with anguish. He cried out, "Beloved! It's no use, anymore. Show yourself?"
What did he mean? I somehow sensed that he was not addressing the veiled one, but someone else in the room. There was a movement behind one of the wall hangings. With a shuddering sob, a slender figure stepped out of concealment and stole across the room, into the astonished arms of Arausio and his wife. They cried out in stunned, joyous surprise as they embraced their daughter. Rindel was even more beautiful than I had imagined.
Apollonides, as confounded as I was, stared from Rindel to the veiled one and demanded, "Unveil her, Gordianus!"
I tried to reach for the veil, but the hand that restrained me was strong-stronger than I expected, far stronger than I was. Suddenly the hand released me and the figure drew back, straightening as if shedding the hunch from its back, growing tall and erect. The coarse, dark, hairy-backed hand reached up to the veil, seized it, and tore it away.
I looked into two eyes I had never thought to see again. The face before me wavered and melted as my tears obscured it. I blinked, wiped my eyes, and stared.
"Meto!" I whispered.
On the upper floor, along the wing of Apollonides's house that faced in the direction of the city's main gate, there were five small rooms all in a row, each opening onto the same hallway. In one of those rooms I sat alone with Apollonides.
The room was dark. Its single window provided a view of the faraway city wall outlined against the flames that now burned low among the Roman siegeworks. In many places the flames had dwindled to embers; the fires had done their work. Against this lingering glow I could see the tiny silhouettes of the Massilian archers who restlessly patrolled the battlements. The breach itself was starkly outlined, a flickering fissure in the midst of the jet-black wall.
Apollonides stared out the window. His face, lit only by the distant, dying firelight, was impossible to read. Finally he spoke. "In all the hours you spent beneath his roof, I suppose Hieronymus must have told you the details of his family history." Alone with Apollonides, after the shock we had both received, this was not the first utterance I expected to hear from his lips.
I nodded. "I'd scarcely known him an hour before he told me about the deaths of his father and mother, and about his own years as an orphan and an outcast."
"His father was a Timouchos."
"Yes, Hieronymus told me. But his father lost his fortune-"
"He didn't lose it; it was stolen from him. Not literally stolen, but taken from him nevertheless, by devious means. His competitors conspired to ruin him, and they succeeded. Hieronymus has never known for sure how it happened or who was behind it; he was too young at the time to understand. So was I."
"What are you trying to tell me, First Timouchos?"
"Don't press me, Finder! Let me proceed at my own pace."
I sighed. In the aftermath of Meto's unveiling, Apollonides had taken charge. His soldiers had driven everyone out of Cydimache's room, up the stairway, and into this wing of the house. We had been dispersed into various small rooms, like prisoners confined to their cells, with soldiers standing guard in the hallway outside. In one room was Zeno, in another, Meto, and in another, Davus. Rindel and her parents were in another room. And in the last room, Apollonides and myself.
"It was my father who was behind it. My father destroyed Hieronymus's father and took his fortune. All that followed-the father's suicide, the mother's suicide, Hieronymus's ruin-came about because of what my father did. He never regretted it. And when I grew old enough to examine the family ledgers and eventually discovered the truth, he told me that I shouldn't regret it, either. `Business is business,' he said. `Success shows the favor of the gods. Failure is a mark of the gods' disfavor.' The very fact that he had succeeded so spectacularly meant that he had nothing to atone for, and neither had I. My father died an old man in his own bed, without regrets.
"But when Cydimache was born…" Apollonides sighed. "The first moment I saw her, I thought: this is the gods' punishment for what my father did, that this innocent child should be so hideously disfigured. I should have disposed of her before she drew another breath; any other father would have done so, simply as an act of mercy. But I had my own selfish reasons for letting her live. Over the years she was often sickly, but she survived. She grew, and with every year became… even more hideous. She was a constant reminder of my father's sin. And yet… I couldn't hate her. Don't the philosophers tell us that to love beauty and hate ugliness is natural and right? Yet against all my expectations, against all reason, I came to love her. So I hated Hieronymus instead. I let myself blame him, not just for his own ruin, but for my daughter's deformity. Can you understand that, Finder?"
I said nothing and merely nodded.
"When the priests of Artemis came to the Timouchoi clamoring for a scapegoat, it was I who arranged for the choice to be Hieronymus. I thought that was very clever of me, to finally rid myself of the pest without having to bloody my own hands, and in a way that would not offend the gods, but in fact would be pleasing to them! It seemed fitting that he should be made to follow his father, be forced to step off the Sacrifice Rock into oblivion and out of my guilty dreams forever. Instead… it was my Cydimache who fell from the Sacrifice Rock! Could the gods make their will any more explicit, than to punish me with her death from the very spot where the father of Hieronymus died? My father always told me that the gods loved us. All along, they despised us!"
How strange, I thought, how typical of the gods and their devious sense of humor. I had come to Massilia seeking a lost child who was not lost at all, while Apollonides had lost a child and did not even know it, and we had both discovered the truth in the same instant.
"Finder, when you told me, on Hieronymus's terrace, that you had seen a man and woman on the Sacrifice Rock and that the woman had fallen-how aloof I was, how uncaring, not knowing… it was my Cydimache!" He sucked in a shuddering breath. "Hieronymus said she jumped. Your son-in-law said she was pushed. Which was it, Finder?"
"I don't know."
"But Zeno knows."
I shifted nervously. "Do you intend to torture him, First Timouchos?"
"Why, when I have you to find out the truth for me?"
"Me, First Timouchos?"
"They call you Finder, don't they? Domitius told me all about you; how men are compelled by some strange power to tell you the truth. This was a gift the gods gave you."
"Gift, or curse?"
"What do I care, Finder, so long as you compel Zeno to tell you exactly what happened on the Sacrifice Rock? Do that for me… and then you may speak to your son."
XXII
In the small room where Zeno was being held, as in the room where Apollonides had interviewed me, a single window looked out on the distant silhouette of the city wall and the dying fires beyond. But this window, unlike the other, had bars across it. Apollonides had accounted for that when he chose this room for Zeno.
If, indeed, I possessed some unique skill at ferreting out the secrets of others, I had little need to call upon it with Zeno. Or perhaps it was as Apollonides suggested, and the baring of secrets was not so much a skill on my part as a compulsion placed upon others by the gods when I was present. However it was, Zeno was not reluctant to talk. It seemed to me that he desperately needed to talk.
"I should have had you killed, I suppose," was the first thing he said, staring out the window.
I was not quite sure how to answer that.
"I knew that you had witnessed… what happened on the
Sacrifice Rock-you and your
son-in-law and the scapegoat. I overheard some of the soldiers talking about it, saying they'd been sent to question people in the vicinity of the rock, on account of what the scapegoat and his Roman guests had seen. Later that same night, I passed Apollonides in the front courtyard, and he mentioned it in passing, looked me straight in the eye and told me about some nonsense the scapegoat had reported about seeing an officer in a blue cape and a woman on the Sacrifice Rock. I thought my heart would leap from my mouth. But he wasn't testing me. He had no idea. He had too much on his mind. He never suspected."
"I thought it was Rindel on the rock with you, because Arausio thought so. But it was Cydimache."
"Yes."
"The scapegoat thinks she jumped."
"Does he?"
"Yes. My son-in-law holds a different opinion."
For a long moment, Zeno made no reply. He stared out the window and was so still that he seemed hardly to breathe. "I should never have fallen in love with Rindel," he finally said. "I never meant to. I desired her, of course, but that's not the same thing. It was impossible not to desire her. Any man would. You saw her tonight."
"Very briefly."
"But well enough to see how beautiful she is."
"Very beautiful."
"Extraordinarily beautiful."
"Yes," I admitted.
"But Rindel is a Gaul, and her father is of no account."
"According to Arausio, he's wealthier than your own father." Zeno wrinkled his nose. "Arausio may have money, but he'll never be a Timouchos. He's not the right sort. If I had married Rindel, I'd never have been anything more than a rich Gaul's son-in-law."
"Would that have been so terrible?"
He snorted derisively. "You're an outsider. You can't understand."
"I suppose not. But if you fell in love with Rindel despite yourself, I think I can understand that."
"I had almost reconciled myself to… marrying her. Then I saw… another opportunity."
"Cydimache?"
"The First Timouchos invited me to a dinner at this accursed house. It was a great honor; or so I thought, until my friends began to tease me. `You fool! Don't you know he's fishing for a son-in-law?' they said. 'You're not the first prospective suitor he's invited. All the rest-the monster gobbled up! Mind she doesn't get her fangs and claws into you! Or worse, drag you off to her bed!' They all had a hearty laugh at my expense.
"I dreaded that dinner. Sure enough, my place was next to Cydimache. She wore her veils, of course. I was nervous, at first. Cydimache said little, but when she spoke, she was actually quite witty. After a while I thought: This isn't so bad. I began to relax. I ate and drank. I looked around the garden. I saw the way they lived. I began to think: Why not?"
"You're hardly the first young man to marry for position," I said quietly.
"It's not as if I despised Cydimache! I came to care for her… a great deal."
"What about her ugliness? Her deformity?"
"We… dealt with that." He smiled ruefully. "Do you know the image of xoanon Artemis? Every Massilian boy is taught to revere that image, strange as it is. I told Cydimache that she was my very own xoanon Artemis. That pleased her immensely."
"And what about Rindel?"
He sighed. "As soon as I was betrothed to Cydimache, I made a vow to myself that I would never see Rindel again. No good could come of trying to explain myself to her; better to make a clean break, let her think the worst and forget me. I would have kept that vow, but Rindel wouldn't let me. As long as I stayed in Apollonides's house, I was safe from her. But once the siege began, my duties took me all over the city. Rindel sought me out. She stalked me like a huntress."
"Artemis with her bow," I murmured.
"In chance moments, when I would find myself alone-there was Rindel, suddenly before me, whispering, beckoning, drawing me into some hidden corner, telling me that she couldn't forget me, that she still wanted me even if I was another woman's husband."
I nodded. "Arausio said she would disappear from his house for long hours. He thought she was taking aimless walks, nursing a broken heart. He thought she was going mad."
"She was hunting for me. And after a while… our meetings were no longer by chance. We found a place to meet-a lover's nest. I had forgotten… how beautiful she was. Like Artemis, you say? No, Aphrodite incarnate! Making love to her-how can I explain? How can I expect you even to begin to understand?"
I sighed. Like all young men, he imagined that ecstasy was his own invention.
"The last time we met… like that… was on the day the Romans brought up the battering-ram. With all the confusion in the city, I was late, but Rindel waited for me. It was like never before. The excitement on the battlements-the sense of dread hanging over us-the constant pounding of the battering-ram against the walls; I can't explain. We seemed to make love that day with new bodies, new senses. She was unspeakably beautiful. I wanted to lie in her arms forever. And then…"
"Cydimache found you."
"Yes. She suspected. She'd followed me. She found us."
"And then?"
"Cydimache became hysterical. To see the two of them in the same room, side by side-Rindel naked and Cydimache in her veils, but knowing what lay beneath-it seemed hardly possible that two creatures so different could both be made of human flesh. I think Cydimache must have seen the look on my face.
She let out a cry that turned my blood to ice. She ran from the room."
"I thought she was lame."
"I'd never imagined that she could move so fast! Especially considering…" He was about to say something, but caught himself. "I threw on my clothes and my armor-I could hardly be seen out in the streets without it-and I followed after her. I thought she would run here, to her father, but then I saw her far away, heading toward the sea. I ran. I caught up with her near the base of the Sacrifice Rock. You saw… what happened next."
I nodded slowly. "It was as Hieronymus thought, then: Cydimache meant to throw herself off the rock, and you chased after her, to stop her."
I waited for him to reply, but he only stared silently out the window. "And afterward," I said, "Rindel took the place of Cydimache. A masquerade. Madness-"
"But it worked! In all the confusion of that day, it was a simple thing to sneak Rindel into this house. Once we were alone in Cydimache's room, I dressed her in some of Cydimache's clothes and veils. I showed her how to stoop, how to shamble. I told her to make her voice gruff and to speak as little as possible."
"And Apollonides?"
"Ever since the siege began, he'd had no time for Cydimache. She had a husband, she was no longer his responsibility, and he had a war to fight. Last night's dinner in the garden was the closest that Rindel had ever come to him. She kept quiet. She stayed close to me. Apollonides suspected nothing."
"And what of Rindel's parents?"
"Rindel wanted to send them a message, to let them know that she was alive and well, but I told her it was too dangerous."
"So you let them think she was dead." If only they had let Arausio know the truth, then he would never have come to me; and I would never have pursued the matter, never have heard of Rindel, never have confronted Zeno with the ring. Their own secrecy had finally been their undoing. "But you couldn't possibly keep up such a pretense forever. You must have realized that."
"In a city under siege, you learn to live from day to day. Even so, time was on our side. Once Caesar takes the city, everything will change. Who knows how things will fall out? One thing is certain: Apollonides will no longer be First Timouchos. He may even lose his head. Whatever happens, Massilia will never be independent again. This is the best we can hope for: that Caesar will disband the Timouchoi and put a Roman general in charge of the city. But he'll need an insider who knows the city, someone loyal to him who can run the bureaucracy, quell sedition-"
"A Massilian lackey. And that would be you?" Just as he had married for position, so, too, was Zeno ready to call Caesar his master.
"Wh
y not? I argued from the beginning that we should open our gates to Caesar, that we never should have resisted him." I nodded thoughtfully. "My son Meto-how and when did you come to know him?"
He smiled. "I met Meto when he first came to Massilia, just before the siege began. He was passing himself off as a defector from Caesar's inner circle. Right away he must have realized that I was sympathetic to Caesar. I made no secret of it; I objected loudly when the Timouchoi voted to side with Pompey. I was rather scornful of Meto, as a matter of fact. I thought he must be even stupider than my father-in-law. Here was a young Roman who'd risen from nothing to become the companion of Caesar himself, and for some reason he'd thrown it all away and chosen to side with the likes of Milo and Domitius and Pompey. What a fool! The joke was on me, of course. Meto was spying for Caesar all along."
"And he approached you, to turn you into a spy for Caesar as well?"
"Not then; not yet. I had no idea of what he was up to until Milo exposed him as a spy. Domitius's men chased him over the wall into the sea, and supposedly he drowned. I thought no more about him. The siege went on. And then, the day after the battering-ram attack, the day after… Cydimache's death… Meto reappeared in Massilia. Or I should say, Massilia saw the reappearance of the ragged soothsayer that had sometimes been Meto's disguise. He sought me out and took a great risk in revealing himself to me. He wanted me to help him infiltrate this house. In return, he promised Caesar's favor. I was already in terrible danger, with Cydimache dead and Rindel taking her place. Helping a Roman spy would put me in even greater danger, and yet it seemed as if the gods had sent Meto to me. In the long run, my only hope was to somehow gain Caesar's favor; and here was the means to do that.
"Once I decided to trust Meto, I told him everything, even about Cydimache and how Rindel had taken her place. It was Meto's masterstroke to sometimes masquerade as Cydimache himself. If Rindel could do it, so could he. The two of them took turns. As Cydimache, Meto could move freely about the house and could even come and go, so long as I escorted him. Your son is a natural actor, Gordianus. Far more convincing than Rindel; she always overdid Cydimache's limp. But Meto was uncanny! And he made the most of the masquerade. If the daughter of the First Timouchos should choose to sit outside the room where the war council met, no one dared to question her. Quite the opposite! Brave soldiers would scurry past her like mice past a cat. They wanted no contact with the veiled monster!"
Last seen in Massilia rsr-8 Page 21
