The Ides

by Peter Tonkin

  Cestus swung a massive right and the speedy spy easily avoided it once again. This was not the arena. He was not supposed to stand like a stunned ox and get beaten to a pulp for the entertainment of the crowd. Or further to honour the gods. But Cestus didn’t seem to see it that way. He had one fighting technique and he obviously used it wherever he was. He continued to swing one huge punch after another while his opponent ducked, dived and danced just out of his reach. Artemidorus reckoned he could keep this up all night if he had to – while he got things figured out.

  But the fact remained that if Cestus landed one good blow, then the spy was done. Even if that blow didn’t kill him it would certainly cripple him and one or other of the succeeding blows would definitely smash the life out of him. And it looked increasingly likely that there was nothing he could do about it. Truly, he had chosen a bad night to get on the wrong side of the Roman gods.

  ‘Achilleus, help me now,’ he prayed to his own favoured Spartan semi-divine power. And the most apt of all, under the circumstances. For the great Achilles was famed above all things for his speed and agility. It was these strengths which allowed him to overcome the Trojan hero Hector. And he had only met his end when Prince Paris robbed him of them by shooting an arrow through his heel. Use Achilles’ skills against his own huge Hector and he might yet come out of this alive. This was the thought that filled Artemidorus’s head in the moment before his sandal slipped on the treacherous roadway and he fell helplessly onto one knee while the victorious giant strode forward at last to deliver the killing blow.

  But perhaps the immortal Spartan hero heard him in a way that Jove had not heard Cassius. Or perhaps Achilles cared more for his lonely Spartan warrior, as far from home as Troy had been, and going to his death like a Myrmidon of old.

  The huge panther that had been tracking Artemidorus and Puella arrived like a bolt of black lightning bursting out of the side street at a full charge. The massive animal hurled through the ring of robbers and took Cestus on his left side, rearing up almost to the boxer’s height, huge pads armed with claws that reduced the boxer’s studded fists to playthings. Its great square black head bigger than the gigantic boxer’s own head, and armed with massive teeth. It stood as tall as his hulking shoulder and if it only weighed half as much as the gladiator did, the power of its charge more than compensated.

  The huge gladiator was hurled against the corner of the wall that opened into the side street on his right. He span, helplessly, flailing uselessly with his huge fists as the beast held onto him by sinking its foreclaws into the flesh of his chest and back. It slowed him by sinking two pairs of fangs the size of big bone daggers into his shoulder and neck, releasing a huge fountain of blood as it did so. And it dispatched him by using the talons on its rear legs to rip open his belly and let his guts fall free. The once-terrifying giant was dead and largely dismembered before his body hit the ground. His bullying cohorts took to their heels, dropping clubs and lanterns as they ran, keeping hold of their swords.

  Artemidorus stooped and grabbed a club and a lantern. Straightened, looking at the stricken Puella. ‘The tablets.’ He ordered. ‘Get the tablets!’

  Obediently, she stooped and retrieved the bundle from the gutter at her feet. But her eyes remained riveted on the gaping blackness that the panther had vanished into. The huge beast was invisible once again, but the way the dead boxer’s legs were sliding into the side street left little doubt where it was. Or what it was doing.

  With a mental prayer of thanks to the greatest of Spartan heroes, Artemidorus raised the lamp above his head and, with Puella close behind him, took to his heels again.

  *

  ‘It won’t come after us…’ Puella said. But she didn’t sound too sure.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he answered, almost drunk with relief. ‘Not before it has finished eating, at least. And that is one enormous meal.’

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ she said, angrily. ‘It sickens me even to think about it.’

  She was clearly reacting to their narrow escape in exactly the opposite way to him, thought the spy. Perhaps it was the difference between men and women. He was a warrior, trained to laugh at death – even his own. She was a woman, raised to care and nurture. Even murderous giants such as Cestus.

  ‘If the panther hadn’t killed him, he’d be ravishing you now,’ he observed almost brutally. ‘With his thugs all lined up behind. And if his parts below were built on the same scale as those above, it would not be a comfortable experience. A bit like childbirth. But quicker. More repeatedly. And in reverse. I’d be dead in the gutter and you’d be envying me.’

  ‘I suppose…’

  She hadn’t considered that. So he pressed his advantage with the persistence of a man so full of the best Falernian wine that there is no room left for good sense. ‘So it’s all to the good that something which might have been coming at you like the ram on the bows of a quinquireme is now reduced to a Lucanian sausage feeding the biggest cat I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ she said again, but her tone had moderated.

  ‘And his men would all have used their weapons on you as well…’ he persisted drunk with relief. And even as he said it he remembered who the club wielder was. They called him Syrus The Syrian. He was one of the few gladiators to use a club in the arena. Only Syrian auxiliaries used clubs and maces in battle. The tight formations of the regular legions made the arc of such weapons impractical. And in any case, the pilum spear, the bow, the sling, the gladius and the pugio were more than enough. ‘At least I saved you from that…’

  ‘I suppose you did. You and your cat.’ Her tone moderated even further.

  Even so, he noticed that she was no longer walking so close to him. She was on his left side and he held the lantern in his right. The club in his hand swung between them. Even when he swapped them over she stayed back. He discovered that he rather missed the fragrance of hyssop she seemed to exude. ‘I apologise,’ he offered. ‘I’m just so relieved to have come through all this. With you safe and neither of us damaged to any great extent.’

  She did not move any closer.

  ‘But of course we’re not safe home yet,’ he persisted at his most devious. ‘And, talking of my cat as you call it, I’ve heard that those big cats do sometimes hunt in pairs…’

  Ah! He thought an instant later. The fragrance of hyssop. How lovely.

  ‘So,’ she persisted as their shoulders rubbed gently together. ‘Why are we going to see the soothsayer?’

  ‘I told you. We work together.’

  ‘Yes. But I’ve been thinking. How can a common freedman be an associate of a noble knight?’

  ‘As I’ve explained. I am in disguise. Like an actor in a play. I am in fact a centurion with the VIIth Legion. Primi ordines, if that means anything. No. I thought not. It means I am a senior centurion. Primus pilus. First spear. In battle I lead the first rank – if I’m not off on assignment behind enemy lines. I stand one step below a legate, leaving aside birth – where you were born and how high up the social ladder is sometimes more important than experience and ability in these matters. Two steps below a tribune.’

  ‘Then why are you not with your men? Where are they?’

  ‘Camped on Tiber Island. I’m not with them because I have been reassigned as I have also told you, to the command of Tribune Enobarbus. He is a senior broad-stripe tribune and chief officer controlling all of us. He commands our network and reports in person to the general, co-consul, late magister equitum and General Mark Antony. Under Lord Antony’s orders, we are all reassigned from our regular military responsibilities on occasion in order to undertake espionage assignments. It is a system first explored by General Scipio Africanus in the wars against the Punic Carthaginian Hannibal but more recently by the Divine Julius himself, and it has been very effective. The tribune and I are expecting to return to our posts in five days’ time when the legions move out against Parthia by way of the Getae in Macedonia.’

  ‘This
tribune. Enobarbus. How important is he? Or did he get his position because of ability and experience?’

  ‘He is of the Marcii family and claims descent from the Etruscan Kings of Rome – the Marcius clan. He is a patrician of senatorial rank.’

  ‘And will he be at this soothsayer Spurinna’s villa?’

  Her tone was becoming more confident now and she was beginning to sound impressed. The spy was well used to reading people’s thoughts, not that hers were at all difficult. That she, a common slave, would be hobnobbing with senior officers of the legion, men of equitum rank and senatorial patricians. Perhaps even get a chance to meet the fabulous Mark Antony, military hero, late magister equitum, co-consul, general and close friends with the Divine Julius himself. Both men known for their weakness in the matter of beautiful women. And their willingness to indulge it. Whether their lovers were slaves or queens. Like Queen Pharaoh Cleopatra, currently and outrageously settled in Caesar’s villa on the crest of Janiculum Hill, just across the river. With their bastard son and Caesar’s only natural offspring Caesarion. Her eyes took on a distant, dreamy look as her vision turned inward. To the possibilities offered to women who caught the eye of men such as these. Perhaps this was not the road to hell after all…

  But then it was.

  Another flash of lightning lit up the roadway in front of them. ‘Stop,’ he ordered abruptly. She obeyed and he paused at her side, close enough to be obscuring most of her vision with his body. For he had noticed something that he didn’t want her to see. ‘Do you see the house opposite? That one over there with a torch burning above the door?’

  ‘Yes…’ she was uncertain again. Suspicious once again that there was more going on here than she understood.

  ‘That is Spurinna’s house. Go straight there, knock on the door and tell the slave that answers you are with Septem. They’ll take you straight to Spurinna. Go there and wait for me.’

  ‘Septem? Who is Septem?’

  ‘I am. Both Spurinna and Enobarbus sometimes call me that: Seven. It’s because I’m with the Seventh Legion. Say you’re with Seven and they’ll look after you. Now go. And take those tablets we found in Telos’ and Cyanea’s place with you. Spurinna will want them.’

  Artemidorus stood where he was and watched as she obediently crossed to the house he indicated. She knocked on the door, spoke when it opened, and was admitted. Then he turned. On this street as on many others, there was building work going on. Several of the villas had rough wooden scaffolding erected around them, just like the new basilica on the south side of the Forum. These included the villa directly opposite Spurinna’s.

  With lantern high and club at the ready, Artemidorus crossed to this one. The house behind the pinned and lashed wood construction seemed empty. It was certainly dark and silent. But the house was of no interest to him. Neither was the scaffolding.

  As Artemidorus approached, the wind whistled down the roadway and howled in the scaffolding like a pack of the wolves which had lived in the place when Romulus and Remus arrived as babies. And, hard against the scaffolding, secured so that the feet were well clear of the sodden ground, there hung a body. As the secret agent came closer, the relentless brightness of his lantern was augmented by another bolt of lightning. And he could see that the body was that of a man. A tall, slender man wearing a simple sleeping tunic that was clinging to his body, soaking with various liquids, light and dark. A barefoot, bareheaded man, terribly out of place in this deserted, benighted, stormbound street. A man who had been crucified here.

  Arms and legs lashed into place then nailed through wrist and elbow, ankle and knee. Around his neck, hanging against the thick red breast of his tunic beneath the lolling, downturned head, there hung a notice. ‘canit quasi alauda’ was all he could make out. There was more but the rain had washed it away, together with the blood that must have been on the ground, judging by the state of the tunic front. ‘Sings like a lark,’ he murmured, the words lost in the thunder and the rain.

  He dropped his club and reached for the rain-straightened fringe of hair. As gently as a mother rearranging a sleeping child, he took hold of the sodden hair and eased the face up into the light. He stood for a moment, looking into the dead features. Then he lowered it again and turned. One glance had been enough to sear it into his memory for ever.

  They had gouged the eyes out.

  They had torn the tongue out.

  They had cut the throat, last of all; probably even after they crucified him here.

  The notice was the grimmest of jokes of course. He had sung like a lark. So they had taken his tongue. Larks’ tongue. The greatest of delicacies. But you never ate just one of them.

  And, worst of all, the murdered man was Telos.

  III

  The same servant who opened the door to Puella admitted Artemidorus and the bloody bundle slung over his shoulder. The spy and the servant knew each other. The spy was relieved to be talking to a level-headed youngster he believed he could trust. The servant hesitating only for an instant, confronted with a soldier disguised as a freedman he only just recognised carrying the recently murdered, brutally mutilated corpse of a man he also half knew.

  ‘Show me to somewhere private I can put this, Kyros,’ ordered Artemidorus, careful this time to use his free hand to pat the picture of Janus on the door jamb. ‘Then summon your master and send someone for Antistius the physician.’

  The servant, pallid in the light of his candle, went white as chalk as the full horror of what the spy was carrying hit him. ‘It is Telos?’ he queried, hesitating until Artemidorus’ curt nod confirmed his worst fears. He gave one decisive nod in reply, his face setting into youthful determination. ‘Yes, Septem,’ he said.

  Kyros led him to a side room at once, pausing only to light a lamp at one of the candles, brightening the villa’s modest atrium. All of them guttering as the storm wind whirled through the open roof above the shallow pool of the impluvium. The torrential downpour made the surface heave and froth. The quick-thinking slave chose a side room taberna. A room with an ancient shop design used by one of the villa’s past owners, though shuttered and private now that Spurinna the soothsayer was the current occupier.

  Artemidorus was able to place the cold, wet body of his dead friend on the rough brick counter which was a feature of the room’s original commercial design as a shop or tavern. The slave left the lamp and vanished to summon first his master and then the physician, who was also an occasional member of Enobarbus’ military style eight-man contubernium. The active heart of his far-reaching secret organisation.

  The spy set to work arranging the body of his murdered colleague into some kind of order. Not an easy task, given the state of his elbows and knees. And the fact that he was still running with a range of liquids, mostly water and blood. Artemidorus was hardly better off. Though at least the blood wasn’t his.

  Spurinna started speaking as he crossed the atrium, able to see something of Artemidorus but nothing of Telos, as yet. ‘I’ve sent for the physician and given your pretty companion over to some of my women. They’ll get her dry, warm and fed. Then Antistius can examine her. I assume that’s what you wanted, Seven…’

  Artemidorus looked up as the augur entered the room and stopped speaking mid-sentence. He held the lamp high so that his colleague could see what was left of Telos clearly.

  ‘I bet you didn’t predict this, Soothsayer,’ he observed.

  Spurinna grunted as he joined Artemidorus at the corpse’s shoulder. He looked down with the authority of a man professionally familiar with death. Albeit the death of countless animal sacrifices. Neither man spoke for an instant, then Spurinna continued. ‘Antistius will be here soon, I expect. But he’s going to be too late to help poor Telos, if that’s what you had in mind. You need a priest, not a physician. And a change of clothing.’ He clapped his hands and Kyros reappeared at once. ‘Find a dry tunic large enough to fit my friend Seven here,’ ordered the augur. His tone of command revealed him for what he wa
s – every inch a Roman knight. ‘And something for him to dry off with.’

  Artemidorus glanced across at his companion as the slave boy disappeared. Spurinna the augur, haruspex and soothsayer was a strange compound of dreamy, other-worldly prophecy and sharp-eyed, down-to-earth observation. Part Roman knight, part Etruscan visioinary. In the time of their association, Artemidorus had come to understand and appreciate this apparently contradictory character. It was the sharp-eyed, insightful observer who informed the other-worldly prophet of the likely futures he was predicting. But it was the prophet who was listened to in a way that more down-to-earth observers were not. Especially by the Divine Julius. For Spurinna was Caesar’s personal prophet.

  Behind what Spurinna saw in the entrails of his sacrifices, in the flights of birds, the changes in the weather or in the dreams of his employer, there always lay a cold and inescapable logic. Had not Spurinna warned Caesar almost a month ago that he should beware the middle days of Mars? Caesar had laughed by all accounts, and called his prophet a dreamer. But the rumours Enobarbus was currently trying to prove had been swirling around more than a month ago. And Caesar was due to leave Rome for a lengthy campaign in five days’ time. If the plots the tribune feared were going to come to anything, then they must come to a head almost immediately. And Spurinna saw that clearly. In every sacrifice. In the flights of birds. In the dreadful weather. In dark, prophetic dreams that haunted both Caesar and his wife Calpurnia. And if Caesar was less than convinced by Spurinna, his other-worldly prophet, Calpurnia believed every word. While Enobarbus had been thoroughly convinced by Spurinna the cold logician who informed him.