The House of the Vestals rsr-6

by Steven Saylor

  Eco pointed at himself and shook his head, then pointed at me. He cupped his hands behind his ears and closed his eyes. He preferred it (and secretly, so did I) when I did the reading, and he could enjoy the luxury of merely listening. All that summer, on lazy afternoons and long summer nights, the two of us had spent many such hours in the garden. While I read Piso's history of Hannibal, Eco would sit at my feet and watch elephants among the clouds; while I declaimed the tale of the Sabine women, he would lie on his back and study the moon. Of late I had been reading to him from an old, tattered scroll of Plato, a cast-off gift from Cicero. Eco understood Greek, though he knew none of the letters, and he followed the subtleties of the philosopher's discourses with fascination, though occasionally in his big brown eyes I saw a glimmer of sorrow that he could never hope to engage in such debates himself.

  "Shall I read more Plato, then? They say philosophy after dinner aids digestion."

  Eco nodded and ran to fetch the scroll. He emerged from the shadows of the peristyle a moment later, gripping it carefully in his hands. Suddenly he stopped and stood statuelike with a strange expression on his face.

  "Eco, what is it?" I thought for a moment that he was ill; Bethesda's fish dumplings and turnips in cumin sauce had been undistinguished, but hardly so bad as to make him sick. He stared straight ahead at nothing and did not hear me.

  "Eco? Are you all right?" He stood rigid, trembling; a look which might have been fear or ecstasy crossed his face. Then he sprang toward me, pressed the scroll under my nose and pointed at it frantically.

  "I've never known a boy to be so mad for learning," I laughed, but he was not playing a game. His expression was deadly serious. "But Eco, it's only the same volume of Plato that I've been reading to you off and on all summer. Why are you suddenly so excited?"

  Eco stood back to perform his pantomime. A dagger thrust into his heart could only indicate the dead Panurgus.

  "Panurgus and Plato-Eco, I see no connection."

  Eco bit his lip and scrambled about, desperate to express himself. At last he ran into the house and back out again, clutching two objects. He dropped them onto my lap.

  "Eco, be careful! This little vase is made of precious green glass, and came all the way from Alexandria. And why have you brought me a bit of red tile? This must have fallen from the roof…"

  Eco pointed emphatically at each object in turn, but I could not see what he meant.

  He disappeared again and came back with my wax tablet and stylus, upon which he wrote the words for red and green.

  "Yes, Eco, I can see that the vase is green and the tile is red. Blood is red…" Eco shook his head and pointed to his eyes. "Panurgus had green eyes…" I saw them in my memory, staring lifeless at the sky.

  Eco stamped his foot and shook his head to let me know that I was badly off course. He took the vase and the bit of tile from my lap and began to juggle them from hand to hand

  "Eco, stop that! I told you, the vase is precious!"

  He put them carelessly down and reached for the stylus again. He rubbed out the words red and green and in their place wrote blue. It seemed he wished to write another word, but could not think of how to spell it. He nibbled on the stylus and shook his head.

  "Eco, I think you must have a fever. You make no sense at all."

  He took the scroll from my lap and began to unroll it, scanning it hopelessly. Even if the text had been in Latin it would have been a tortuous job for him to decipher the words and find whatever he was searching for, but the letters were Greek and utterly foreign to him.

  He threw down the scroll and began to pantomime again, but he was excited and clumsy; I could make no sense of his wild gesturing. I shrugged and shook my head in exasperation, and Eco suddenly began to weep with frustration. He seized the scroll again and pointed to his eyes. Did he mean that I should read the scroll, or did he point to his tears? I bit my lip and turned up my palms, unable to help him.

  Eco threw the scroll in my lap and ran crying from the room. A hoarse, stifled braying issued from his throat, not the sound of normal weeping; it tore my heart to hear it. I should have been more patient, but how was I to understand him? Bethesda emerged from the kitchen and gazed at me accusingly, then followed the sound of Eco's weeping to the little room where he slept.

  I looked down at the scroll in my lap. There were so many words on the parchment; which ones had keyed an idea in Eco's memory, and what could they have to do with dead Panurgus? Red, green, blue-I vaguely remembered reading a passage in which Plato discoursed on the nature of light and color, but I could scarcely remember it, not having understood much of it in the first place. Some scheme about overlapping cones projected from the eyes to an object, or from the object to the eyes, I couldn't remember which; was this what Eco recalled, and could it have made any sense to him?

  I rolled through the scroll, looking for the reference, but was unable to find it. My eyes grew weary. The lamp began to sputter. The Greek letters all began to look alike. Normally Bethesda would have come to put me to bed, but it seemed she had chosen to comfort Eco instead. I fell asleep on my dining couch beneath the stars, thinking of a yellow cloak stained with red, and of lifeless green eyes gazing at an empty blue sky.

  Eco was ill the next day, or feigned illness. Bethesda solemnly informed me that he did not wish to leave his bed. I stood in the doorway of his little room and spoke to him gently, reminding him that the Roman Festival continued, and that today there would be a wild beast show in the Circus Maximus, and another play put on by another company. He turned his back to me and pulled the coverlet over his head.

  "I suppose I should punish him," I whispered to myself, trying to think of what a normal Roman father would do.

  "I suppose you should not," whispered Bethesda as she passed me. Her haughtiness left me properly humbled.

  I took my morning stroll alone-for the first time in many days, I realized, acutely aware that Eco was not beside me. The Subura seemed a rather dull place without ten-year-old eyes through which to see it. I had only my own eyes to serve me, and they had seen it a million times before.

  I would buy him a gift, I decided; I would buy them each a gift, for it was always a good idea to placate Bethesda when she was haughty. For Eco I bought a red leather ball, such as boys use to play trigon, knocking it back and forth to each other using their elbows and knees. For Bethesda I wanted to find a veil woven of blue midnight shot through with silver moths, but I decided to settle for one made of linen. On the street of the cloth merchants I found the shop of my old acquaintance Ruso.

  I asked to see a veil of dark blue. As if by magic he produced the very veil I had been imagining, a gossamer thing that seemed to be made of blue-black spiderwebs and silver. It was also most expensive item in the shop. I chided him for taunting me with a luxury beyond my means.

  Ruso shrugged good-naturedly. "One never knows; might have just been playing dice, and won a fortune by casting the Venus Throw. Here, these are more affordable." He smiled and laid a selection before me.

  "No," I said, seeing nothing I liked, "I've changed my mind."

  "Then something in a lighter blue, perhaps.? A bright blue, like the sky."

  "No, I think not-"

  "Ah, but see what I have to show you first. Felix… Felix! Fetch me one of the new veils that just arrived from Alexandria, the bright blue ones with yellow stitching."

  The young slave bit his lip nervously and seemed to cringe. This struck me as odd, for I knew Ruso to be a temperate man and not a cruel master.

  "Go on, then-what are you waiting for.?" Ruso turned to me and shook his head. "This new slave-worse than useless! I don't think he's very smart, no matter what the slave merchant said. He keeps the books well enough, but here in the shop- look, he's done it again! Unbelievable! Felix, what is wrong with you? Do you do this just to spite me? Do you want a beating? I won't put up with this any longer, I tell you!"

  The slave shrank back, looking confused and helpless. I
n his hand he held a yellow veil.

  "All the time he does this!" wailed Ruso, clutching his head.

  "He wants to drive me mad! I ask for blue and he brings me yellow! I ask for yellow and he brings me blue! Have you ever heard of such stupidity? I shall beat you, Felix, I swear it!" He ran after the poor slave, brandishing a measuring rod. And then I understood.

  My friend Statilius, as I had expected, was not at his lodgings in the Subura. When I questioned his landlord, the old man gave me the sly look of a confederate charged with throwing hounds off the scent, and told me that Statilius had left Rome for the countryside.

  He was in none of the usual places where he might have been on a festival day. No tavern had served him and no brothel had admitted him. He would not even think of appearing in a gambling house, I told myself-and then knew that the exact opposite must be true.

  Once I began to search the gaming places in the Subura, I found him easily enough. In a crowded apartment on the third floor of an old tenement I discovered him in the midst of a crowd of well-dressed men, some of them even wearing their togas. Statilius was down on his elbows and knees, shaking a tiny box and muttering prayers to Fortune. He cast the dice; the crowd contracted in a tight circle and then drew back, exclaiming. The throw was a good one: III, III, III and VI-the Remus Throw.

  "Yes! Yes!" Statilius cried, and held out his palms. The others handed over their coins.

  I grabbed him by the collar of his tunic and pulled him squawking into the hall.

  "I should think you're deeply enough in debt already," I said.

  "Quite the contrary!" he protested, smiling broadly. His face was flushed and his forehead beaded with sweat, like a man with a fever.

  "Just how much do you owe Flavius the moneylender?"

  "A hundred thousand sesterces."

  "A hundred thousand!" My heart leaped into my throat.

  "But not any longer. You see, I'll be able to pay him of now!" He held up the coins in his hands. "I have two bags full of silver in the other room, where my slave's looking after them. And-can you believe it? — a deed to a house on the Caelian Hill. I've won my way out of it, don't you see?"

  "At the expense of another man's life."

  His grin became sheepish. "So, you've figured that out. But who could have foreseen such a tragedy? Certainly not I. And when it happened, I didn't rejoice in Panurgus's death-you saw that. I didn't hate him, not really. My jealousy was purely professional. But if the Fates decided better him than me, who am I to argue?"

  "You're a worm, Statilius. Why didn't you tell Roscius what you knew? Why didn't you tell me?"

  "What did I know, really? Someone completely unknown might have killed poor Panurgus. I didn't witness the event."

  "But you guessed the truth, all the same. That's why you wanted me backstage, wasn't it? You were afraid the assassin would come back for you. What was I, your bodyguard?"

  "Perhaps. After all, he didn't come back, did he?"

  "Statilius, you're a worm."

  "You said that already." The smile dropped from his face like a discarded mask. He jerked his collar from my grasp.

  "You hid the truth from me," I said, "but why from Roscius?"

  "What, tell him I had run up an obscene gambling debt and had a notorious moneylender threatening to kill me?"

  "Perhaps he'd have loaned you the money to pay off the debt." '

  "Never! You don't know Roscius. He thinks I'm lucky just to be in his troupe; believe me, he's not the type to hand out loans to an underling in the amount of a hundred thousand sesterces.

  And if he knew Panurgus had mistakenly been murdered instead of me-oh, Roscius would have been furious! One Panurgus is worth ten Statilii, that's his view. I would have been a dead man then, with Flavius on one side of me and Roscius on the other. The two of them would have torn me apart like a chicken bone!" He stepped back and straightened his tunic. The smile flickered and returned to his lips. "You're not going to tell anyone, are you?"

  "Statilius, do you ever stop acting?" I averted my eyes to avoid his charm.

  "Well?"

  "Roscius is my client, not you."

  "But I'm your friend, Gordianus."

  "I made a promise to Panurgus."

  "Panurgus didn't hear you."

  "The gods did."

  Finding the moneylender Flavius was a simpler matter-a few questions in the right ear, a few coins in the right hands. I learned that he ran his business from a wine shop in a portico near the Circus Flaminius, where he sold inferior vintages imported from his native Tarquinu. But on a festival day, my informants told me, I would be more likely to find him at the house of questionable repute across the street.

  The place had a low ceiling and the musty smell of spilled wine and crowded humanity. Across the room I saw Flavius, holding court with a group of his peers-businessmen of middle age with crude country manners, dressed in expensive tunics and cloaks of a quality that contrasted sharply with their wearers' crudeness.

  Closer at hand, leaning against a wall (and looking strong enough to hold it up), was the moneylender's bully. The blond giant was looking rather drunk, or else exceptionally stupid. He slowly blinked when I approached. A glimmer of recognition lit his bleary eyes and then faded.

  "Festival days are good drinking days," I said, raising my cup of wine. He looked at me without expression for a moment, then shrugged and nodded.

  "Tell me," I said, "do you know any of those spectacular beauties.?" I gestured to a group of four women who loitered at the far corner of the room, near the foot of the stairs.

  The giant shook his head glumly.

  "Then you are a lucky man this day." I leaned close enough to smell the wine on his breath. "I was just talking to one of them. She tells me that she longs to meet you. It seems she has an appetite for men with sunny hair and big shoulders. She tells me that for a man such as you…" I whispered in his ear.

  The veil of lust across his face made him look even stupider. He squinted drunkenly. "Which one?" he asked in a husky whisper.

  "The one in the blue gown," I said.

  "Ah…" He nodded and burped, then pushed past me and stumbled toward the stairs. As I had expected, he ignored the woman in green, as well as the woman in coral and the one in brown. Instead he placed his hand squarely upon the hip of the woman in yellow, who turned and looked up at him with a surprised but not unfriendly gaze.

  "Quintus Roscius and his partner Chaerea were both duly impressed by my cleverness," I explained later that night to Bethesda. I was unable to resist the theatrical gesture of swinging the little bag of silver up in the air and onto the table, where it landed with a jingling thump. "Not a pot of gold, perhaps, but a fat enough fee to keep us all happy through the winter."

  Her eyes became as round and glittering as little coins.

  They grew even larger when I produced the veil from Ruso's shop.

  "Oh! But what is it made of?"

  "Midnight and moths," I said. "Spiderwebs and silver." She tilted her head back and spread the translucent veil over her naked throat and arms. I blinked and swallowed hard, and decided that the purchase was well worth the price.

  Eco stood uncertainly in the doorway of his little room, where he had watched me enter and had listened to my hurried tale of the day's events. He seemed to have recovered from his distemper of the morning, but his face was somber. I held out my hand, and he cautiously approached. He took the red leather ball readily enough, but he still did not smile.

  "Only a small gift, I know. But I have a greater one for you…"

  "Still, I don't understand," protested Bethesda. "You've said the blond giant was stupid, but how can anyone be so stupid as to not be able to tell one color from another?"

  "Eco knows," I said, smiling ruefully down at him. "He figured it out last night and tried to tell me, but he didn't know how. He remembered a passage from Plato that I read to him months ago; I had forgotten all about it. Here, I think I can find it now." I reach
ed for the scroll, which still lay upon my sleeping couch.

  " 'One may observe,'" I read aloud," 'that not all men perceive the same colors. Although they are rare, there are those who confuse the colors red and green, and likewise those who cannot tell yellow from blue; still others appear to have no perception of the various shades of green.' He goes on to offer an explanation of this, but I cannot follow it."

  "Then the bodyguard could not tell blue from yellow?" said Bethesda. "Even so…"

  "The moneylender came to the theater yesterday intending to make good on his threat to murder Statilius. No wonder Flavius gave a start when I leaned over and said, 'Today you'll see The Pot of Gold'-for a moment he thought I was talking about the debt Statilius owed him! He sat in the audience long enough to see that Statilius was playing Megadorus, dressed in blue; no doubt he could recognize him by his voice. Then he sent the blond assassin backstage, knowing the alley behind the Temple of Jupiter would be virtually deserted, there to lie in wait for the actor in the blue cloak. Eco must have overheard snatches of his instructions, if only the word blue. He sensed that something was amiss even then, and tried to tell me at the time, but there was too much confusion, with the giant stepping on my toes and the audience howling around us. Am I right?"

  Eco nodded, and slapped a fist against his palm: exactly right.

  "Unfortunately for poor Panurgus in his yellow cloak, the color-blind assassin was also uncommonly stupid. He needed more information than the color blue to make sure he murdered the right man, but he didn't bother to ask for it; or if he did, Flavius would only have sneered at him and rushed him along, unable to understand his confusion. Catching Panurgus alone and vulnerable in his yellow cloak, which might as well have been blue, the assassin did his job-and bungled it.

  "Knowing Flavius was in the audience and out to kill him, learning that Panurgus had been stabbed, and seeing that the hired assassin was no longer in the audience, Statilius guessed the truth; no wonder he was so shaken by Panurgus's death, knowing that he was the intended victim."