Roman blood rsr-1

by Steven Saylor

  Even in the city of one's birth there may be undiscovered streets that open onto unexpected vistas, and the goddess who guides aimless wanderers had guided me to such a spot. I paused for a long moment, looking out at the quadrant of Rome beyond the city walls, from the sweep of the Tiber on the left, sparkling beneath the sun as if it were on fire, to the straight, broad Flaminian Way on the right; from the jumble of buildings massed around the Circus Flaminius to the Field of Mars beyond, hazy with dust. The sound and the odour of the city rose on the warm air like a breath exhaled from the valley below. For all its danger and corruption, for all its meanness and squalor, Rome still pleases my eyes more than any other city on earth.

  I made my way south again, following a narrow footpath that skirted the backyards of tenements, crossed alleys and wound through patches of green. Women called out to one another across the way; a child cried and his mother began to sing a lullaby; a man roared in a drunken, sleepy voice for everyone to be quiet. The city, languorous and good-natured from the warmth, seemed to swallow me up.

  I passed through the Fontinal Gate and wandered aimlessly until I rounded a corner and saw looming ahead of me the charred mass of a burned-out tenement. Blackened windows opened onto blue sky above, and while I watched, a long section of one wall fell crashing to the ground, toppled by slaves pulling long ropes. The ground all about was blackened with ash and tumbled with heaps of ruined clothing and what remained of household goods — a cheap pot melted by the heat, the black skeleton of a loom, a long jagged bone that might have been human or canine. Beggars picked through the sorry remains.

  Because of the unfamiliar angle by which I had approached, a long, puzzled moment passed before I realized this was the same tenement that Tiro and I had watched go up in flames only a few days before. Another blackened wall came crashing down, and through the vacant space, standing in the street with his arms crossed and issuing orders to his foremen, I saw Crassus himself

  The wealthiest man in Rome looked quite cheerful, smiling and chatting with those among his large retinue privileged to stand within his earshot. I stepped carefully around the periphery of the ruins and placed myself at the edge of the group. A rat-faced sycophant, unable to insinuate himself farther into the throng, was willing to settle for a conversation with a passing stranger.

  'Clever?' he said, following my lead and turning up his rat's nose. 'Hardly the word for Marcus Crassus. A brilliant individual. No other man in Rome is so economically astute. Say what you like about Pompey being a brilliant general, or even Sulla. There are other kinds of generals in this world. Silver denarii are the troops of Marcus Crassus.'

  'And his battlefields?'

  'Look in front of you. What more carnage could you desire?' 'And who won this battle?'

  'You have only to look at Marcus Crassus's face to know that.'

  'And who lost?'

  'The poor beggars in the street, picking through what's left of their belongings and wishing they still had a roof over their heads!' The man laughed. 'And the wretched owner of this wreck. Previous owner, I should say. Off on holiday when it happened. Not a very good strategist. So saddled with debts that they say he killed himself when he got word of the fire. Crassus had to deal with the grieving son, and certainly got the better of him. They say he gave up the property for less than the cost of a trip to Baiae. And you think that's merely clever! The man narrowed his rat's eyes and pursed his thin lips in an access of admiration.

  'But he'll have to pay to have the tenement rebuilt,' I suggested.

  The man arched one eyebrow. 'Not necessarily. Given the density of this neighbourhood, Crassus may leave the property undeveloped, at least for a while. That's so he can raise the rents on the tenement next door, and keep them up. He bought that property at the same time, off a panic-stricken fool who gave it up for a song.'

  'You mean the building that barely escaped the flames? That one there, where people keep streaming out the door, assisted by those large men who look like brawlers from a street gang?'

  'Those are employees of Marcus Crassus, evicting tenants unwilling or unable to pay the new rents.'

  We watched together as a thin old man in a tattered tunic stepped cautiously out of the building next door with a large sack balanced on his back. One of the evictors intentionally stuck out his foot and tripped the man, causing the sack to slip from his shoulders and break open when it hit the street. A woman came running from an already loaded wagon, screaming at the enforcers while she helped the old man to his feet. The innocent guard turned red-faced and looked away in chagrin, but the culprit only began to laugh, so raucously that heads all around us turned to watch, including that of Crassus.

  My new acquaintance seized the occasion of being in the great man's line of sight. 'It's nothing to bother you, Marcus Crassus,' he shouted, 'just an unruly ex-tenant blowing farts at one of your servants!' He let out a ratty little laugh. Crassus's eternal smile wavered a bit, and he stared at the man briefly with a perplexed expression, as if trying to remember who he might be. Then he turned away and resumed his business. The rat-faced man turned up his long nose in smug triumph. 'There,' he said, 'did you notice the way he laughed at my little joke? Marcus Crassus always laughs at my jokes.'

  I turned my back on him in disgust, walking away so quickly I hardly noticed where I was going. I bumped into a half-naked slave covered with soot who had a rope slung over his shoulder. The rope went slack and he pushed me aside, shouting at me to look out. A section of wall fell crashing at my feet, shattering like bits of hardened clay. Had I missed bumping into the slave I might have walked right under it and probably died in an instant. Instead a cloud of soot billowed harmlessly about my knees, darkening the hem of my tunic. Feeling eyes on my back, I glanced over my shoulder and saw Crassus, alone of all those around him, staring straight at me. He did not smile, but very soberly gave a superstitious nod of his head in acknowledgment of a stranger's unaccountable good fortune. Then he turned away.

  I walked on in the way that one walks when furious, or heart-broken, or lost in the inexplicability of existence — aimlessly, carelessly, with no more attention to my feet than a man pays to his heartbeat or breath. Yet it could hardly have been an accident that I found myself retracing exactly the route that Tiro and I had taken on the first day of my investigation. I found myself in the same square, watching as the same women drew water from the neighbourhood cistern and shooed away the same indolent children and dogs. I paused by the sundial and gave a start when the same citizen passed by me, the very man I had queried before about the way to the House of Swans, the quoter of plays and despiser of sundials. I raised my hand and opened my mouth, trying to think of some greeting. He looked up and stared at me strangely, then glowered as he leaned to one side, making it quite obvious that I was blocking his view of the sundial He noted the time with a snort, glowered at me again and hurried on. It was not the same man at all, nor did he bear anything more than a passing resemblance.

  I walked on, down the narrow winding street that led to the House of Swans, past blind walls mounted with sconces and the remnants of torches and scrawled with graffiti, political or obscene or sometimes both together. (P. CORNELIUS SCIPIO FOR QUAESTOR, A MAN YOU CAN TRUST, read one in an elegant hand, and next to it, hastily scrawled, P. CORNELIUS SCIPIO WOULD CHEAT A BLIND WHORE AND GIVE HER AN UGLY BABY.)

  I passed the dead-end alley where Magnus and his two henchmen had lain in wait. I stepped around the dim bloodstain that marked the place where old Sextus Roscius had died. It was even duller than it had been on the day of my first visit, but not hard to locate, as the space all around it was markedly clean in contrast to the grimy cobblestones that filled the street. Someone had been out washing the very spot, scrubbing and scrubbing, trying to eliminate it once and for all. The job must have taken hours, and all for nothing — if anything, the spot was more conspicuous than before, and all the passing feet and soot-laden winds that had soiled it once would have to soil it again to
make it disappear once more into the street. Who had worked here for hours on hands and knees (in the middle of the day? in the middle of the night?) with a scouring rag and a pail, desperately trying to wipe out the past? The shopkeeper's wife? The widowed mother of the mute boy? I imagined Magnus himself doing it, and almost laughed at the idea of the glowering assassin down on his hands and knees like a scrub maid.

  I stooped down, brought my face near to the ground and stared into the flat stones and the tiny flecks of blackened red trapped in every fissure and pit. This was the very stuff that had given life to Sextus Roscius, the same blood that flowed in the veins of his sons, the same blood that heated the body of young Roscia, standing warm and naked against a dark wall in my memory; the same blood that must have run down her thighs when her father broke her maidenhead; the same blood that would burst from his own flesh when and if a Roman court saw fit to have him publicly scourged and then sewn up alive in a sack full of wild beasts. I stared into the stain until it grew so vast and deep that I could see nothing else, but even then it gave no answers, revealed nothing about either the living or the dead.

  I unbent myself, groaning as my legs and back reminded me of last night's leap. I stepped forward just enough to peer into the gloomy shop. The old man sat behind the counter at the back, propping his head on his elbow, his eyes shut. The woman fussed about the sparsely stocked shelves and tables. The shop exhaled a dank, cool breath into the sunlit street, tinged with sweet rot and musk. I went into the tenement across the street. The downstairs watchman was nowhere in sight. His little partner at the top of the stairs was asleep with his drooling mouth wide open and a half-full cup of wine in his hand, tilted just enough so that he spilled a few drops with each snore.

  Inside my tunic I fingered the hilt of the knife the boy had given me. I paused for a long moment, wondering what I could say to either of them. To the widow Polia that I knew the name of the men who had raped her? That one of them, Redbeard, was dead? To little Eco that he could take back his knife, because I had no intention of killing Magnus or Mallius Glaucia for him?

  I walked down the long, dark hallway. Every board I stepped on creaked and groaned above the muffled voices from the cubicles. Who would huddle inside in the dark in the middle of such a day? The sick, the old, the infirm and crippled, the weak and starving, the lame. Ancients beyond any use, infants unable yet to walk. There was no reason that Polia and her son should be home at all, and yet my heart caught in my throat as I rapped on the door.

  A young girl pulled the door wide open, giving me a view of the whole room. An ancient crone huddled amid blankets in one corner. A little boy knelt in the open window. He glanced over his shoulder at me, then went back to watching the street below. Except for its size and shape, everything about the room was different.

  Two watery eyes looked out from the blankets. 'Who is it, child?'

  'I don't know, Grandmother.' The little girl stared at me suspiciously.

  'What do they want?'

  The little girl made an exasperated face. 'My grandmother says, what do you want?' 'Polia,'I said.

  'Not here,' said the boy in the window. 'I must have the wrong room.'

  'No,' said the little girl crossly. 'Right room. But she's gone.'

  'I mean the young widow and her son, the little mute boy.'

  'I know that,' she said, looking at me as if I were an imbecile. 'But Polia and Eco aren't here any more. First she left, and then he left,'

  'Gone,' added the old woman from the corner. 'That's how we finally got this room. Lived across the hall before, but this room is bigger.- Big enough for all five of us — my son and his wife and the two little ones.'

  'I like it better like this, when Mommy and Daddy are out and it's just us three,' said the boy.

  'Shut up, Appius,' snapped the girL 'One day Mommy and Daddy will go out and never come back, just like happened to Eco. They'll disappear, like Polia. You'll run them off because you're always crying. We'll see how you like that.'

  The little boy started crying. The old woman clucked her tongue. 'What do you mean?' I said. 'Polia left without taking the boy?'

  'Abandoned him,' said the old woman. 'I don't believe it.'

  She shrugged. 'Couldn't pay the rent. The landlord gave her two days to get out. The next morning she was gone. Took everything she could carry and left the boy all alone to fend for himself. Next day the landlord showed up, took what little was left of their things, and threw the boy into the street. Eco hung around here for a few days. People felt sorry for him, gave him scraps to eat. But the doorkeepers finally ran him off. Are you a relative?'

  'No.'

  'Well, if Polia owed you money, you'd best forget it'

  'We didn't like them, anyway,' said the little girl. 'Eco was stupid. Couldn't say a word, even when Appius would hold him down and sit on him and I'd tickle him till he turned blue. He'd just make a noise like a pig.'

  'Like a pig getting poked,' said the little boy, suddenly laughing instead of crying. 'That's what Daddy said.'

  The old woman scowled. 'Shut up, both of you.'

  Business was brisk at the House of Swans, especially for so near to midday. The proprietor attributed the traffic to a slight change in the weather. 'The heat riles them all up, sets a man's blood boiling — but too much heat can cause even a vigorous man to wilt. Now that the weather is at least tolerable again, they're back in droves. All those pent-up fluids. You're certain you have no interest in the Nubian? She's new, you know. Ah!' He gave a sigh of relief as a tall, well-dressed man entered the vestibule from the inner corridor. The sigh meant that Electra was no longer occupied and would be able to see me, which meant that the tall stranger must have been her previous client. He was a handsome man of middle age with touches of grey at the temples. He made only a faint, compressed smile of satisfaction as he nodded to our mutual host. I felt a stupid twinge of jealousy and told myself that the reason he smiled with his mouth shut was because his teeth were bad.

  In a perfect house of this sort we should never have seen one another, being consecutive customers of the same whore, but the perfect house of this sort does not exist. Our host at least had the decorum to step between us, nodding first to the stranger as he passed and then spinning back around to me. His wide body made a formidable screen. 'Just another moment,' he said softly, 'while the lady composes herself Like a fine Falerian wine, one wouldn't want to open the bottle too quickly. Haste might spoil the bouquet with bits of cork.'

  'Do you really imagine there's anything of Electra's cork left intact?' said one of the girls from the comer of her mouth as she passed behind me. My host made no sign that he heard, but his eyes flashed and his fingers twitched. I could see he was accustomed to using his hands on his whores, but not in front of a paying customer.

  He left me for a moment and then returned, smiling unctuously. 'All ready,' he said, and waved me into the corridor.

  Electra was as striking as I had remembered, but there was a weariness about her eyes and mouth that cast a shadow on her beauty. She reclined on her couch with one knee raised and her elbow balanced atop it, her head thrown back on the pillows amid the great mass of her dark hair. At first she failed to recognize me, and I felt a pang of disappointment. Then her eyes brightened a bit and she reached up self-consciously as if to compose her hair. I flattered myself that for another man she would not have cared how she looked, and in the next instant I wondered if she pulled the same subtle trick on every man who came to use her.

  'You again,' she said, still acting, using a low, sultry voice that she might have used with anyone. And then, as if she suddenly, finally remembered exactly why I had come before and what I had sought, she unmasked her voice and gave me a look of such naked vulnerability that I trembled. 'This time you came alone?'

  'Yes.'

  'Without your bashful little slave?' A trace of wickedness, easy ' and lilting rather than studied, came back into her voice.

  'Not only bashful, but naug
hty. Or so his master thinks. And too busy to come with me today.' 'But I thought he belonged to you.' 'He doesn't.'

  Her face was suddenly naked again. "Then you lied to me.'

  'Did I? Only about that.'

  She raised her other knee and clasped them both against her breasts as if to hide herself from me. 'Why did you come here today?'

  'To see you.'

  She laughed and arched one eyebrow. 'And do you like what you see?' Her voice was sultry and false again. It seemed to change back and forth beyond her control, like the closing of a lizard's inner eyelid. She stayed just as she was, but her pose seemed suddenly coy rather than shielded. When I had first met her she had seemed so strong and genuinely lusty, almost indestructible. Today she seemed weak and broken, fragile, old, dreamless. A part of me had been excited at the prospect of seeing her again, alone and at my leisure; but now her beauty only caused me a kind of pain.

  She shivered and looked away. The slight motion caused the gown to part across her thigh. Against the pale, sleek flesh there was a slender stripe, red at the edges and purple at the centre, like the mark of a cane or a stiff leather thong. Someone had struck her there, so recently that the bruise was still forming. I remembered the vaguely smiling noble who had left with his nose in the air.

  'Did you find Elena?' Electra's voice had changed again. Now it was husky and thick, like smoke. She kept her face averted, but I could see it in the mirror.

  'No.'

  'But you found out who took her, and where.' 'Yes.'

  'Is she all right? In Rome? And the child.. ?' She saw me watching her in the mirror. 'The child died.' 'Ah.' She lowered her eyes. 'At birth. It was a hard birth.'