Roman blood rsr-1

by Steven Saylor

  Again something like the truth flickered in the room, like a pale light beside the lamplight, too weak to cast shadows. I shook my head, confused. I felt a hand on my shoulder and gave a start.

  'Gordianus!' It was Rufus, without the girl. Corestus and Felix shrank back. 'Gordianus, I'm going to have to go back to the party. I've already sent the giri ahead. Chrysogonus sent a slave to look for m; Metrobius is about to sing. If I'm not there it will only attract their attention.'

  'Yes, very well,' I said. 'Go on.'

  'You'll be able to find your way out?'

  'Of course.'

  He looked around the room, uncomfortable amid the tawdry surroundings of the slave quarters. The role of spy didn't suit him; he was more at home playing the honest young noble in the sunlight of the open Forum. 'Are you almost done? I think you should try to leave as quickly as you can. Once Metrobius is finished, the entertainment will be over and there'll be all sorts of strange people wandering about the house. You won't be safe here.'

  'We'll hurry,' I said, squeezing his shoulder and pushing him towards the doorway. 'Besides,' I said in a low voice, 'it can't have been so very awful, entertaining Aufilia for an hour.'

  He twisted the comer of his mouth and shrugged my hand away.

  'But I saw how you kissed her in the pantry.'

  He spun around and glared at me, then looked askance at the others in the room and stepped back until they couldn't see him. He lowered his voice so that I could barely hear. 'Don't make a joke of it, Gordianus.'

  I stepped into the hallway with him. 'It's not a joke,' I said. 'I only meant—'

  'I know what you meant. But don't mistake me. I didn't kiss her for pleasure. I did it because I had to. I closed my eyes and thought of Cicero.' He tensed his face and then was suddenly

  serene again, sedated like all lovers by the act of speaking the — beloved's name. He took a breath, smiled at me oddly, then turned to go. I watched him step through the curtain into the formal hallway. What I saw next made my heart skip a beat.

  'So there you are, young Messalla!' The voice was golden indeed, like honey, like pearls in amber. He was striding up the hallway towards Rufus, twenty paces away. For just an instant I saw his face and he saw mine. Then the curtain fell.

  I heard him through the cloth. 'Come, Rufus, Aufilia is back at work and you must return to pleasure.' He laughed a deep, throaty laugh, muscular and ripe like heavy grapes tumbling on flesh. ' "Eros makes fools of the old and slaves of the young." So says sweet Sulla, who certainly should know. But I won't have you prowling about up here looking for more conquests while old Metrobius warbles his best.'

  There was no suspicion in his voice, and to my relief I heard it fade into silence as they retreated down the hallway. But I knew what I had seen when our eyes met. A slight wrinkle had appeared across his smooth and eminently golden brow, and a look of puzzlement sparked in his blue eyes as if he wondered which of his many servants I might be, and if not his slave then whose, and what I was doing upstairs during the party. If my expression in that instant was as transparent as his — if I had looked a tenth as startled and fearful as I felt — Chrysogonus would be sending bodyguards up to investigate as quickly as he could.

  I stepped back into the room. 'Rufus is right. We must hurry. There's only one other thing I wanted to ask you,' I said; in fact, it was the only real reason I had for corning. 'There was a girl, a slave, a whore — young, blonde, pretty. From the House of Swans — Elena.'

  I saw by their eyes that they knew her. They exchanged a conspiratorial glance, as if deciding who should speak. Felix cleared his slender throat.

  'Yes, the girl Elena. The master was very fond of her.'

  'How fond?'

  There was a strained silence. I stood in the doorway, imagining sounds from the hall. 'Quickly!' I said.

  It was Chrestus who spoke — Chrestus, the emotional one, the one who had wept before. But his voice was quite flat and dull, as if all passion had been burned from it. 'The House of Swans — you mentioned it, so you know where she came from. That was where the master found her. From the first she was different from the rest. At least the master thought so. We were only puzzled that he left her there so long. How he hesitated, as a man might hesitate in taking a bride. As if bringing her into the house would truly change his life, and such an old man wasn't sure he wanted such a change. He had finally made up his mind to buy her, but the brothel owner was a hard bargainer, he kept stalling and changing his price. The master was growing desperate. It was because of a note from Elena that he left Caecilia Metella's party that night.'

  'Did he know that she was pregnant? Did you?'

  They looked at one another thoughtfully. 'We didn't know at the time,' said Chrestus, 'but that was simple enough to figure out later.'

  'Later, when she was brought to Capito's house?'

  'Ah, yes, so you know that as well. Then perhaps you know what they did to her on the night she arrived. They tried to break her body. They tried to kill the child inside her, though they wouldn't resort to outright abortion — for some reason Capito thought that would offend the gods. Imagine that, from a man with so much blood on his hands! Afraid of the unborn and the ghosts of the dead, but quite happy to strangle the living.'

  'And Elena?'

  'They couldn't break her will. She survived. They kept her shut away from the others, the way he keeps us shut away here, but I managed to speak with her a few times, enough that I finally won a bit of her trust. She swore she'd never sent the message that brought the master out into the streets that night. I don't know if I believed her or not. And she swore the child was his.'

  Something rustled across the floor behind me. I grabbed the hilt of my knife and turned, just in time to glimpse the long tail of a rat slithering between two rolled carpets stacked against the wall. 'And then the child was born,' I said. 'And then what?'

  "That was the end of them both.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'The end of Elena. The end of the child.'

  'What happened?'

  'It was the night she went into her labour. Everyone in the household knew her time had come. The women seemed to know without being told; the male slaves were nervous and testy. That was the same night that the steward told Felix and me that Capito was sending us back to Rome. To Magnus, we thought; he was in the city then, along with Mallius Glaucia. But the steward said no, that we were being sent to a new master altogether.

  "The next morning they herded us out bright and early and loaded us into an ox cart with a few other objects that were headed for Chrysogonus's house — furniture, crates, that sort of thing. And just before we were to leave, they brought out Elena.

  'She could hardly stand, she was so weak. Thin and wasted, pasty, damp with sweat — she must have given birth only hours before. There was no place for her to lie in the cart; the best we could do was to make our clothes into padding and help her sit against the crates. She was groggy and feverish, she hardly knew where she was, but she kept asking for the baby.

  'Finally the midwife came mnning out of the house. She was breathless, weeping, hysterical. "For the gods' sake," I whispered to her, "where is the child?" She stared at Elena, afraid to speak. But Elena hardly seemed conscious; she was lying against Felix's shoulder, muttering, shivering, her eyelids flickering. "A boy," the midwife whispered, "it was a boy."

  "Yes, yes," I said, "but where is it? We'll be going any minute!" You can imagine how confused and angry I was, wondering how we would ever manage to take care of a frail mother and a newborn infant. "Dead," the midwife whispered, so low that I could barely hear. "I tried to stop him, but I couldn't — he tore the boy away from me. I followed him all the way to the quarry and watched him throw the child onto the rocks."

  "Then the driver came, with Capito behind him, yelling at him to start right away. Capito was as white as chalk. Oh, how strange! I remember it all in this very instant, as if I were there now! The crack of the driver's whip. T
he cart beginning to roll, the house receding. Everything loose and jostling. Elena suddenly awake, whimpering for her baby, too weak to cry out. Capito staring after us, as stiff as a pillar, ashen-faced, like a column of ash! And the midwife dropping to her knees, clutching Capito about the thighs, crying, "Master, mercy!" And just as we were driving onto the road, a man came running around the corner of the house, breathing hard, then stepping back into the shade of the trees — Sextus Roscius. The last I saw or heard was the midwife clutching at Capito and crying out louder and louder, "Master, mercy!'"

  He took a shuddering breath and turned his face to the wall. Felix laid his hand on Chrestus's shoulder and continued the story. 'What a journey that was! Three days — no, four — in a jolting ox cart. Enough to splinter your bones and make your jaw come unhinged. We walked as much of the way as we could, but one of us had to stay in the cart with Elena. She could eat nothing. She never slept, but she never seemed awake, either. At least we were spared from having to tell her about the baby. On the third day she started bleeding between her legs. The driver wouldn't stop until sun-down. We found a midwife who could staunch the bleeding, but Elena was as hot as a coal. The next day she died in our arms, within sight of the Fontinal Gate.'

  The lamp sputtered and the room became dim. Felix calmly stooped and picked up the lamp, took it to a bench in the corner of the room, and added more oil. In the flaring light I saw Tiro staring at the two slaves, his eyes wide and moist.

  'Then it was Capito who killed the child?' I said, without conviction, like an actor speaking the wrong line.

  Felix stood with his hands tighdy laced, his knuckles bone white. Chrestus looked up at me, blinking like a man awakened from a dream. 'Capito?' he said quietly. 'Well, I suppose. I told you, Magnus and Glaucia were far away in Rome. Who else could it have been?'

  26

  Chrysogonus's house was large, but not sprawling after the manner of Caecilia's mansion; yet somehow, without the girl Aufilia to guide us, Tiro and I took a wrong turn in search of the slaves' stairway. After a failed attempt to trace our steps backwards, we found ourselves in a narrow gallery that opened onto the empty balcony that overlooked our hiding place by the cypress trees outside the pantry door.

  From somewhere within the house rose the sound of a warbling voice — a man singing unnaturally high, or else a woman singing very low. It grew louder as I pulled Tiro closer to the inner wall. The sound seemed to come from behind a thin tapestry. I pressed my ear next to a lecherous Priapus surrounded by equally lecherous wood nymphs, and could almost make out the words.

  'Quietly, Tiro,' I whispered, gesturing for him to help me lift the tapestry's bottom edge and roll it upward, revealing a narrow, horizontal slit cut through the stone wall.

  The aperture was wide enough so that two could comfortably stand abreast and share the view it afforded down onto Chrysogonus and his company. The lofty room in which he entertained rose from the marble floor to the domed roof without interruption. The window through which we peered was cut at a sharp downward angle, so that no edge obscured our view — a spy hole, plain and simple.

  Like everything else in Chrysogonus's house, the dinner was sumptuous and overblown. Four low tables, each surrounded by a semicircle of nine couches, were gathered around an open space

  at the room's centre. Cicero or even Caecilia Metella would no doubt have balked at the idea of entertaining more than eight visitors at a time — few unwritten laws of Roman manners are more unyielding than that which holds that a host should never gather more visitors at his table than he can comfortably converse with at once. Chrysogonus had gathered four times that number at four tables piled high with delicacies — olives slitted and stuffed with fish eggs, bowls of noodles flecked with the first tender asparagus sprouts of the season, figs and pears suspended in a yellow syrup, the carcasses of tiny fowl. The mingled smells rose on the warm air. My stomach growled.

  Most of the guests were men; the few women among them stood out on account of their obvious voluptuousness — not wives or lovers, but courtesans. The younger men were uniformly slender and good-looking; the older men had that indolent, well-groomed look of the very rich at play. I looked from face to face, ready to dart from the window until I realized there was not much chance that any of them would look upward. All eyes were turned on the singer who stood in the centre of the room, or else cast fleeting, sly glances at Sulla or in the direction of a young man who sat fidgeting and chewing his fingers at the table of least distinction.

  The singer was dressed in a flowing purple gown embroidered in red and grey. Masses of black hair streaked with white rose in great waves and ringlets in a coiffure so architecturally complex it was almost comic. When he turned in our direction I saw his painted face, made up in shades of chalk and umber to cover his wrinkled eyes and heavy jowls, and I recognized at once the famous female impersonator Metrobius. I had seen him a few times before, never in public and never performing, only in glimpses on the street and once at the house of Hortensius when the great lawyer had deigned to let me past his door. Sulla had taken a fancy to Metrobius long ago in their youth, when Sulla was a poor nobody and Metrobius was (so they say) a beautiful and bewitching entertainer. Despite the ravages of time and all the vagaries of Fortune, Sulla had never abandoned him. Indeed, after five marriages, dozens of love affairs, and countless liaisons, it was Sulla's relationship with Metrobius that had endured longer than any other.

  If Metrobius had once been slender and beautiful, I suppose at one time he must have been a fine singer, too. He was wise how to restrict his performances to private affairs among those who loved him, and to limit his repertoire to comic effects and parodies. Yet despite the hoarse voice and the strained notes, there was something in his florid mannerisms and the subtle gestures of his hands and eyebrows that made it impossible not to watch his every move. His performance was something between singing and orating, like a poem chanted to the accompaniment of a single lyre. Occasionally a drum joined in when the theme became martial. He pretended to take every word with utmost seriousness, which only enhanced the comic effect. He must have already begun changing the lyrics before we chanced on the scene, because the young poet and aspiring sycophant who had ostensibly authored the paean was suffering a visible agony of embarrassment.

  Who recalls the days when Sulla was a lad, Homeless and shoeless with not a coin to be had? And how did he pull himself up from this hole? How did he rise to his fate, to his role? Through a hole! Through a hole!. Through the gaping cavern of well-worn size. That yawned between Nicopolis's thighs!

  The audience howled with laughter. Sulla shook his head disdainfully and pretended to glower. On the couch next to him, Chrysogonus practically glowed with delight. At the same table Hortensius was whispering in the ear of the young dancer Sorex, while Rufus looked bored and disgusted. Across the room the rewritten poet blanched fish-belly white.

  With each succeeding verse the song grew increasingly ribald and the crowd laughed more and more freely. Soon Sulla himself was laughing out loud. Meanwhile the poet chewed his lip and squirmed, changing colours like a coal in the wind, blanching white at each impiety and blushing scarlet at each tortured rhyme. Having finally caught the joke, he seemed at first relieved — no one would blame him for the travesty, after all, and even Sulla was amused. He managed a timid smile, but then he withdrew into a sulk, no doubt offended at the wreckage that had been made of his patriotic homage. The other young men at his table, having failed to tease him to laughter, turned their backs on him and laughed all the louder. Romans love the strong man who can laugh at himself, and despise the weak man who cannot. The song continued.

  It is not true that Lucius Cornelius Sulla was homeless as a boy. Neither, I imagine, was he ever without shoes, but in every account of his origins, his early poverty is stressed.

  The patrician Cornelii were once a family of some influence and prestige, generations ago. One of them, a certain Rufinus, held the consulship, back in t
he days when the office actually denoted a man of integrity and character. His career ended in scandal — imagine those righteous days when it was illegal for a citizen to own more than ten pounds of silver plate! Rufinus was expelled from the Senate. The family declined and dwindled into obscurity.

  Until Sulla. His own childhood was blighted by poverty. His father died young, leaving him nothing, and in his younger days Sulla lived in tenements among ex-slaves and widows. His enemies have charged that his rise to power and wealth, after such humble beginnings, was a sure sign of corruption and depravity. His allies and Sulla himself like to dwell on the mystique of what they call his good fortune, as if some divine will, rather than Sulla's own purpose and character, propelled him to so many triumphs and so much bloodshed.

  His youth gave no sign of the great career to come. His education was haphazard. He moved among theatre people — acrobats; comedians, costumers, poets, dancers, actors, singers. Metrobius was among his first lovers, but far from the only one. It was among the vagabonds of the stage that his lifelong reputation for promiscuity began.

  They say that young Sulla was quite charming. He was a big-boned, square-jawed lad with a stocky frame, his wide soft middle compensated by muscular shoulders. His golden hair made him stand out in a crowd. His eyes, so I have heard contemporaries recount, were as extraordinary then as now — piercing and pale blue, dominating all in their gaze and confounding those who gazed back, appearing merely mischievous while he perpetrated the most atrocious crimes, looking terrible and severe when he was merely intent on pleasure.