The Egyptian priest observed the two with some apparent concern but made no comment.
"Show me the lad's neck," Suetonius demanded. "Surisca, come closer," he asked his honorary male associate.
She stepped forward to the table. "I want you to see these markings and tell me what they are," he asked, quite clearly recalling the several hickey-like bruises or decay blooms on the youth's throat from the earlier viewing.
Once again a worker lifted Antinous's head from the supporting woodblock pillow beneath his cranium. Again Clarus, Surisca, and Suetonius peered at the throat and neck of the youth. The markings which were clearly seen only hours earlier were no longer evident.
"What markings, master?" she asked.
Again, Clarus and Suetonius were wide-eyed. The workers were silent. Neither the wrist incision nor the roseate blemishes were visible.
"Egyptian," Suetonius proclaimed in exasperation, "we are dismayed. There were certain markings on this body only hours ago. And I'm not talking about the faint scar across the lad's left cheek."
The priest simply smiled apologetically in feigned humility.
Surisca had an idea.
"May I, master?" she asked the biographer with her eyes firmly on the youth's neck, "I think I have an answer."
The courtesan with the full bosom, the luscious flood of hair, and the well-modulated voice wiped a single index finger across Antinous's throat. After checking her fingertip she held it up for the group to view. The tip was covered in a thin slime of pink-tinted fat. His throat was painted with a cosmetic in a fleshy color and dusted with powders to present a natural appearance.
Surisca then took a kerchief from her sash and wiped it carefully over Antinous's neck. A thin line of make-up paint wiped off revealing a streak of yellowed cadaver flesh beneath. It exposed several rosy blemishes.
These were the marks Suetonius recalled, but now the hickeys were no longer pale pink blazons on his throat, they were blue-gray bruises seeping into his tissue. Each was edged in a thin yellow rim. Perhaps corruption was underway?
Surisca continued to swab the paint and reveal the full extent of the bruising. She uncovered four love-bites on the upper left side of his throat, and three on the lower alternate side, in two differing sizes. Suetonius looked directly at the Egyptian.
"Why didn't you tell us you had painted the marks, priest?" he demanded.
"You did not ask, sir," was the inadequate reply.
Surisca now applied her cloth to one of the wrists. As she lifted the left arm and wiped her napkin on its inner side a small lump fell to the tabletop. The priest leapt forward and sharply cried "No!" trying to halt the procedure, but Clarus pushed him back.
Surisca continued with her inspection of the fallen item and held it up for the group to view. It was a small wedge of wax embedded with fine pins of ivory. Surisca had bumped a slender molding of wax fitted with pins which had fallen from a deep incision on Antinous's left wrist. The incision had not been simply sewn together as one does with the cut limbs of warriors; it had been packed with wax to conceal its very existence. Surisca checked the right wrist but found no similar incision.
"Seven bruises and a slash into the left wrist," Clarus confirmed. "Is there anything else we should note before these people destroy the cadaver entirely? Are there other hidden wounds, I wonder?"
Suetonius took the initiative. "Priest, one further question."
"Yes," the Egyptian responded coolly. To date he had not been especially eager to meet requests in a helpful manner.
"How long had your team been assembled at Besa to attend to this preservation of the body?" Suetonius asked, looking him directly into the eye to detect any shiftiness.
"Sir, we are residents of Besa at the Temple Of Amun. We are already here," he offered as Suetonius sensed a half-smiled quickness to his response. "We assembled only yesterday by instruction of Priest Pachrates on behalf of Great Caesar."
"I see," Suetonius said. He took a more audacious path.
"Tell me Greek — ," he addressed the painter of pictures from the Fayum, "when were you summoned to this place from your home city?"
The priest sharply interrupted the Greek's reply. He sensed the drift of the query.
"This is irregular, my lord!", he called.
Clarus simply replied, "Shut up, priest!"
The Greek artisan, a quiet sensitive man who would not have been aware of the nature of the interrogations underway but who was fully aware of the status and powers of the men before him in russet-striped white togas, muttered his hesitant response.
"I was instructed to be at Besa before the first day of The Isia, my lord," he said plainly.
"By whom?" Suetonius asked as sweetly as possible.
"I was contracted by Priest Kenamun's servants, my lord," he responded cautiously, nodding towards the Egyptian priest before them. The priest, now known to the team to be named Kenamun, seethed with suppressed anger.
"And when was that?" the Roman finalized. "When were you asked to come to Besa?"
"Six weeks ago, sir," he continued. "Priest Kenamun's servant contracted me at The Fayum six weeks ago. It takes at least three weeks by mule and sail to reach Besa from The Fayum, my lords, where I am a well known painter of portraits for funerals."
Suetonius looked across at the Egyptian. His brow was furrowed. Clarus, Vestinus, and Suetonius realized they had uncovered something unexpected. Surisca understood the situation as well.
"Six weeks ago? That's long before the death of your client, isn't it," Suetonius offered graciously. "This is such remarkable prescience of mind. Please continue with your duties, gentlemen."
Outside the pavilion in the balmy night air the group of four took stock of the situation.
"Gentlemen," Suetonius said, incidentally acknowledging Surisca as a token male, "we have here a circumstance where Caesar's companion has seven love bites to his throat. This may indicate his last day or night was a time of intimate passion?
His left wrist possesses a deep incision sufficient to bleed fatally, despite his death seeming to be by drowning only a day ago. And yet a specialist painter of funerary portraits was contracted many weeks ago before the lad's death to fulfill a mission to prepare an effigy of the dead youth. I might also add, the Greek artisan was contracted by a priest who dissembles about the concealment of wounds on a corpse. These might be seen to be a suspicious set of circumstances? What do we make of it?"
They were each silent for a period. Surisca spoke politely again.
"With permission, masters, may I offer an opinion about the marks of his neck?"
Even Clarus now was coming around to an acceptance of the young woman's contribution to their investigation, though with patrician reluctance.
"Speak."
"The marks upon the young man's neck? I have seen many such markings in my time," she offered in a manner which received little dispute from her hearers.
"To my eye, they are the loving attentions of two people. A woman and a man."
"What on earth makes you think that?" asked Clarus, surprised. A male was to be assumed. But a female was less expected. Surisca continued in her matter-of-fact way.
"The hickeys at the far right side of his neck are higher up and are of a large size, while the ones to the left of his neck are lower down and smaller in size. The positions of the lower small ones makes me think they indicate a partner who is shorter than the dead youth, and therefore possibly female. The higher large ones suggest a male partner. Also, the female bites were placed several hours earlier than the male ones."
"Why do you say they were implanted some hours apart, woman?" Clarus queried.
"It has been my observation how hickeys change their coloring over a very short period of time," she explained. "At first they appear as pale pink blemishes, but over the hours their color changes to a deeper hue and eventually go from rosy to gray with a fine yellow rim. It takes almost a day for a hickey to develop the yellow rim.
&nbs
p; The two sets of love bites on your friend's neck show a distinct difference in color. The smaller ones already possess a graying color and a thin yellow rim, while the larger ones are still at the rose stage. I've seen it often on the necks of my colleagues and noted it, too, on my own."
When they thought about it, they felt Surisca had a point. There was no issue with the young man's diverse choice of partners, Suetonius acknowledged to himself. Yet Antinous was known by all to be the emotional property of Caesar for the previous five years, so it would be a brave man or woman indeed who would be so unwise as to engage in intimacy with the emperor's recent Favorite.
"What about the incision in his wrist?" Suetonius asked. "It was deep enough to sever all vital veins. This was no accident. If it were done before his drowning, he would have bled to death long before he drowned. If it were done after his drowning, it would be pointless. Did he do it himself? Or was it done to him? And when? So, is this suicide or murder?"
"Yet I understand Antinous was left-handed?" Clarus reminded. "In wielding a weapon Antinous would logically use his left hand to cut at his right wrist, not at his left wrist. But the incision was in his left wrist. What do we make of this?"
"I have seen the youth playing ball games and casting javelin," the Special Inspector offered, "and from recall he was adept at utilizing both right and left hands. He often drank from his cups with his left hand, while he also reclined at his dining couch on his left side as is normal. Nevertheless he wore his weapons to his right side. So perhaps he was ambidextrous?"
"That indeed it seems," said Clarus with irony, alluding to Surisca's theory of the hickeys. "And despite these issues not one of us knew of Caesar's appointment with the magician Pachrates and his 'holy divination' ceremony?" Clarus forwarded. "Is this what our two day deadline is all about?"
"I admit it is not the sort of thing I would have thought Caesar would contemplate. After all, only a few hours ago he was utterly distraught at his companion's demise. I can't see how an occult reading of the lad's exposed innards fits my picture of his mood at this time."
Suetonius scratched his head. "There's something missing from our understanding of the situation. Hadrian is not a cruel-minded Caligula nor a rapacious Nero, is he? So what could our Princeps hope to gain from such a disrespectful augury?"
"Gentlemen, and the lady Surisca, I'd say it is time for each of us to sleep," Clarus declared. He was exhausted.
Suetonius was surprised to hear his patron acknowledge his assistant as a 'Lady'. Perhaps she had earned her acknowledgement in his eyes by her contributions.
"I agree, my good Clarus," he responded. "I too wish to sleep on the day's adventures and digest its meaning. Tomorrow will be a very busy day."
His eyes lingered upon the shapely proportions of his Honorary Male companion, Surisca. Her post-midnight pleasurable potentials skated through his imagination. Perhaps, he considered, it was time the activities rudely interrupted at the House of the Blue Lotus were fulfilled?
CHAPTER 14
Suetonius looked around the chamber. Vestinus had arranged the space for Surisca and him to share. Two simple traveling beds adorned the chamber. Each was dressed with a thin mattress and a linen sheet accompanied by a simple pillow. Considering how Suetonius had been slumming-it in a rented Nile ferry with five antiquarian notables of Alexandria, the encampment chamber was luxuriously appointed.
A single net tumbled from a high pole as protection from the airborne creatures buzzing around. Suetonius instructed a slave to drag the two beds together side by side for Surisca and he to share, despite a central separating ridge. It was as good as excuse as any, he thought, to encourage intimacy for the night.
Surisca retired to a camp washhouse guided by a slave to complete her toilet. Suetonius presumed she would also perform whatever precautionary arts a woman of her profession uses to avoid pregnancy. He guessed it might be something more artful than an Egyptian crocodile dung pessary or other traditional native contraceptive.
She returned to their chamber dressed in one of her beguilingly translucent nightgowns of Kos lace tied in the high bosomed Syrian style fashionable in the East. Her hair was now fully loosed in a feminine flourish while her increasingly-excited client detected the sweet aura of oil of roses exuding from her skin. Her gown revealed more of her flesh than any woman dared display in public or before a stranger, yet still veiled her limbs and feminine curves beneath layers of obscuring gossamer.
Surisca delicately crossed the chamber to extinguish several of the lamps to dim the light to a soft glow. She brought two goblets of watered wine to the edge of the double-bed arrangement. She sat very close beside Suetonius where he could catch the sweet scents from her body. Her thigh and one of her knees glanced across his leg thrillingly.
They sipped their cups so closely each was touching at the brim and their eyes were only inches apart. The biographer, ever a considerate seducer, ordained to torture his enlarging enthusiasm by introducing conversation to break the ice and restrain his impatience.
"Tell me, Surisca my young beauty, how old are you?" he asked.
"Master, my mother told me I was born at Edessa near the border to the Kingdom of Parthia in the fifth last year of the previous Caesar's reign. I think this means I am eighteen years of age. Other than that, I do not know," she replied.
"So Surisca, tell me something of yourself," he invited. "You have so many hidden talents, I have difficulty knowing which Surisca is the real Surisca. I notice how even with your Syrian accent you speak good street Greek and you handle everyday Latin to an acceptable degree. You appear to have a smattering of the old pharaonic language of Egypt, while your mother tongue is Aramaic, the major language of the East. Do you read or write in these languages, my dear?"
"Master," she responded openly, "I do not read at all except some words of Greek, a few Latin words, and the simplest of Aramaic words. But I cannot write in any of these for myself, except my own name. I am not a fine scholar like yourself, master."
"How did you come to your profession, young lady?" Suetonius posed with polite interest, despite the burden of slumber increasingly making its presence felt.
"I was born to it, my lord," Surisca responded. "My mother was bonded to the mistress of a troupe of entertainers at the city of Zeugma on the border of the Parthian Empire before the previous Caesar defeated Parthia in battle. She and her mistress's household fled back to the safety of Edessa in the north of King Abgar's land, where I was born. My mother, of course, did not know who my father was. It was one of her many clients, so I am known simply as Surisca, with no fatherly patronymic."
Surisca paused to check if her client's attention had wandered or if such talk of the lower orders offended the noble patrician's sensibilities. It hadn't, she realized.
Suetonius was observing Surisca enthuse about her past with a keen gleam in her eyes. This had an agreeable charm all its own, he thought. He assumed very few of her clients were interested in her life story.
"I am told too how, in the year when Trajan put down the Judaean rebels across the East, I turned five years of age," she continued. "Because of those wars my mother's mistress was caught up in the movements of people trapped by the upheavals. Temples were destroyed, cities were put to the sword, and many people killed. Then the Legions killed the Judaean, Lucuas, and fiercely put down the rebellion, I am told.
But my mother had accumulated sufficient coins in her trade to buy her freedom from her mistress before my birth. This means I was a freeborn child, not her former mistress's property.
It is the tradition in our profession to retain some female children to learn the trade to support us in our later years. Clients become less interested as you age, so one or two children are raised to become our breadwinners. I am such a one."
Suetonius acknowledged to himself how Surisca had the checkered career typical of her caste. Here was a young woman of the world, he contemplated, who is engaged in the most insecure of trades yet who also
seemed to possess her own mind to a high degree. Her strengths were attractive. They incited his bloodstream to race to his privates as his imagination conjured the warm touch of her flesh and the all-encompassing folds of her body. He felt a deep longing descend upon him.
Things then shifted unexpectedly.
Suetonius didn't recall the precise details, the memory was a little hazy, but he later guessed he had simply fallen dead asleep during Surisca's explanations. He slowly crumpled head first into the basin of her lace-garbed lap, mid-sentence. Here was a warm, comforting, secure place redolent with floral fragrances which, in his drowsiness, reminded him of his concubine Priscilla's intimate nooks-and-crannies long ago. Or was it his mother at some even earlier era?
In fact, ageing years and the call of rest had finally consumed the Special Inspector. He fell into deep slumber and its pleasing reminiscences.
"Master! Master!" a close voice cried. "Wake, master, the hour is late!"
The biographer revived from his fuddled reverie to perceive Surisca was looking down at him with an expression of great concern. It was a long time since a woman had expressed concern over Suetonius and looked into his face so closely and seemed to mean it.
"Good grief," he mumbled, "I must have drifted off. Please forgive me."
"My lord, it is time to rise. The Watch has already called the hour before dawn," she announced.
"An hour before dawn? Is that possible?!"
"You've been asleep for more than four hours, master," she said. "You have appointments immediately at dawn. I heard you demand it of your companions last night."
Suetonius sat up in the bed and looked around, his wispy hair askew.
Surisca and he were lying close together on the side-by-side traveling beds. He was scantily attired in his under-tunic and cloths. Surisca was almost naked with her long hair falling fulsomely around her shoulders. He realized she must have undressed him of his tunic and belts once he had fallen asleep, and put him to bed like a babe, though he had no recollection of that happy occasion.
A Forbidden History.The Hadrian enigma Page 20
