Roman blood rsr-1

by Steven Saylor

  'I knew it would be. Only a child herself, such slender hips.' Electra shook her head. A tendril of hair fell across her face. Her image, captured just so in the mirror, was suddenly too beautiful to look at.

  'Where was this?' she said.

  'In a small town. A day or two from Rome.'

  'The town where Sextus Roscius came from — Ameria, is that the name?'

  'Yes, it was in Ameria.'

  'She dreamed of going there. Ah, I think she must have liked that, the fresh air, the animals, and trees.'

  I thought of the tale Felix and Chrestus had told me, and felt almost sick. 'Yes, quite a lovely little town.'

  'And now? Where is she now?'

  'Elena died. Not long after the birth. It was the birth that killed her.'

  'Ah, well. She chose it then. She wanted to have his child so badly.' She turned her shoulder to me, making sure I couldn't see her in the mirror. How long had it been since Electra had allowed a man to see her weep? After a moment she turned back and laid her head against the pillows. Her cheeks were dry, but her eyes glistened. Her voice was hard. 'You might have lied to me. Did you consider that?'

  'Yes.' Now it was I who lowered my eyes, not out of shame but because I was afraid she would see the whole truth.

  'You lied to me before. You lied about the slave boy being yours. So why not this time?'

  'Because you deserve the truth.'

  'Do I? Am I that awful? Why not mercy instead? You might have told me Elena was happy and alive, with a healthy baby at her breast. How would I have known it was a lie? Instead you told me the truth. What good is truth to me? Truth is like a punishment. Do I really deserve it? Does it give you pleasure?' Tears streamed from her eyes.

  'Forgive me,' I said. She turned away and said nothing.

  I left the House of Swans, pushing past the grinning whores and tense-lipped, leering customers who lingered in the vestibule. The host veered by, smiling like a grotesque mask from a comedy. In the street I stopped to catch my breath. A moment later he came running after me, shouting and clenching his fists.

  'What did you do to her? Why is she crying like that? Crying and refusing to stop. She's too old to cry and get away with it, even with her looks. Her eyes will puff up and she'll be useless for the rest of the day. What sort of man are you, anyway? There's something indecent about you, unnatural. Don't bother to come back. Go to another place. Find another man's girls to play your little games.' He stormed back into the house.

  A little way down the road, close enough to have heard everything, stood the cool noble who had left before me, surrounded by a pair of bodyguards and a small retinue; he must have been at least a minor magistrate. The whole company guffawed and grinned as I passed by. Their master gave me a thin, condescending smile, the kind of look a powerful man gives to an inferior to acknowledge that despite the gulf between them the gods have given them the same appetites.

  I stopped and stared at him, long and hard enough that he finally stopped smiling. I imagined him broken-jawed, bent over, and bleeding, shocked by an avalanche of pain. One of the guards growled at me like a hound sniffing invisible threats. I clenched my fists inside my tunic, bit my tongue so hard it bled, stared straight ahead, and forced myself to keep walking.

  I walked until I longed to stop walking, through crowded squares where I felt a total stranger, past taverns I could not stand to enter. The illusion of invisibility descended on me again, but with it there was no sense of strength or freedom, only emptiness. Rome became a city of endless squalor, shrieking babies, the stench of raw onions and rotted meat, the grime of unwashed paving stones. I watched a legless beggar drag himself across the street while a pack of children followed behind, pelting him with pebbles and taunting him with insults.

  The sun descended. I felt a gnawing in the pit of my stomach, but I could not stand to eat. The air became thin and cool in the gathering twilight. I found myself before the entrance to the Baths of Pallacina, that favoured haunt of the late Sextus Roscius.

  'Busy day,' said the young attendant as he took my clothing. 'Hardly any business at all the past few days — too hot for it. No hurry this evening. We'll be staying open late to make up for the loss.' He returned with a drying cloth. I took it from him and said something to distract him while I draped the towel over my left arm, making sure it concealed my knife. Even naked I had no intention of going unarmed. I stepped into the caldarium, and he shut the door behind me.

  The fading sunset cast a strange orange glow through the high window. An attendant with a burning taper lit a single lamp recessed in one wall, then was called away before he could light the others. The room was so dim and the steam on the water so thick that the score or so of men who lounged about the pool were as indistinct as shadows, like statues seen through a dull orange mist- I lowered myself into the water slowly, bit by bit, hardly able to tolerate the heat, until the swirling water lapped at my throat. Around me men groaned as if they were in pain or ecstasy. I groaned with them, merging into the obscurity of the warmth and vapour. The glow from the window railed by imperceptible degrees. The attendant never returned to ignite the lamps, but no one complained or shouted for light. The darkness and the heat were like lovers whom no one dared to separate.

  The lamp sputtered. The flame leaped up and then grew small, leaving the room even darker than before. Water lapped quietly against tile, men breathed in sighs and soft groans. I looked about and saw nothing but vapour, featureless and infinite except for the single point of light cast by the lamp, like the glow of a lighthouse on a faraway hilltop. Shapes bobbed in the distance like floating islands or monsters of the deep prowling the surface.

  I sank deeper in the water, until I could feel the breath from my nostrils swirl against the surface. I narrowed my eyes, stared across the gulf of mist at the flickering flame, and for a while I seemed almost to dream without shutting my eyes. I thought of no one and nothing. I was a dreaming man, a floating, moss-covered island in a humid sea, a boy playing at fantasy, a child in the womb.

  Against the background of mist, one of the shapes drew nearer — a head floating on the water. It approached, and stopped; approached and stopped again, each time accompanied by the almost imperceptible sound of flesh parting water, followed by me advancing caress of tiny waves against my cheeks.

  He drew so near that I could almost make out his face, outlined by long, dark hair. He rose a bit, just enough so that I glimpsed broad shoulders and a strong neck. He seemed to be smiling, but in that light I might have imagined anything.

  Then he slowly sank beneath the water with a soft fuming of bubbles and a swirl of mist — Atlantis sinking into the sea. The surface of the pool closed over him and the water merged into the mist, undisturbed. He had vanished.

  I felt something brush against the calf of my leg, like an eel slithering through the water.

  My heart began to pound. My chest grew; tight. I had wandered the city for hours, so blindly that the clumsiest assassin could have followed me and I never would have known it. I turned and reached for the towel on the edge of the pool, and the knife concealed beneath it. Just as my hand closed on the hilt, the water boiled and splashed behind me. He touched my shoulder.

  I whirled about in the water, splashing, slipping against the floor of the pool. I reached out blindly and seized him by the hair, then brought the blade to his throat.

  He cursed aloud. Behind me I heard the curious murmur of the crowd, like a blind beast stirred from its sleep.

  'Hands!' I shouted. 'Out of the water!' The surrounding murmur turned to a commotion. On either side of me two hands leaped out of the water like snapping fish, empty and blameless. I pulled my blade away from his throat. I must have cut him; a thin dark line marked the indent of the blade, and beneath it was a smeared trickle of blood. I was finally close enough to see his face — not Magnus at all, just a harmless young man with startled eyes and gritted teeth.

  Before the chief attendant could come, before the
lamps could be lit, exposing me for all to see as the fool I was, I let him go and pulled myself from the water. I dried myself as I hurried towards the door, taking care to conceal the knife before I stepped into the light and demanded my clothes. Cicero was right. I was unsettled and dangerous and unfit to be on the streets.

  29

  It was Tiro who answered the door. He looked exhausted but exultant, so thoroughly pleased with himself and with existence in general that I could see it took him an effort to put on a disapproving face. In the background the voice of Cicero droned on, stopping and starting, an ambient noise like the sound of crickets on a summer night.

  'Cicero is furious with you,' Tiro whispered. 'Where have you been all day?'

  'Looking for bodies amid charred rubble,' I said. 'Chatting with friends of the great. Visiting ghosts and old acquaintances. Lying with whores; excuse me, lying to whores. Brandishing knives at amorous strangers. .'

  Tiro made a face. 'I don't have the least idea what you're talking about.'

  'No? I thought Cicero had taught you everything there is to know about words. And yet you can't follow me.' 'Are you drunk?'

  'No, but you are. Yes, look at you — as giddy as a boy after his first cup of wine. Drunk on your master's rhetoric, I can tell. You've been going at it for eight hours straight, probably on an empty stomach. It's a wonder you could find your way to answer the door.'

  'You're not making sense.'

  'I'm making perfect sense. But you're so intoxicated with gibberish that a little common sense must seem as insipid to you as spring water to a hardened drunkard; Listen to him — like a knife against slate, if you ask me. Yet you act as if it were a siren's song.'

  I had at last managed to eradicate the cheerfulness from Tiro's race and replace it with a frown of consternation. At that moment Rufus looked tentatively around the corner and then strode into the vestibule, flushed and smiling and batting his heavy-lidded eyes. He looked utterly exhausted, which at his age only served to make him look more charming, especially as he could not stop smiling.

  'We've finished the second draft,' he announced. The constant droning from Cicero's study had abruptly stopped. On Rufus's face was the transported look of a child who might have seen a centaur in the woods and could not possibly hope to describe it. 'Brilliant,' he finally said. 'Of course, what do I know of rhetoric? Only what I've learned from teachers like Diodotus and Molo, and what I've heard with my own ears, sitting in on the Senate and the courts since I was a child. But I swear to you, he'll bring tears to your eyes when you hear him at the trial. Men will come to their feet with clenched fists, demanding that Sextus Roscius be set free. There's no final version, of course; we have to contend with all sorts of possibilities, depending on whatever tricks Erucius comes up with. But Cicero's done what he can to foresee every contingency, and the core of his final argument is there, finished and perfect and ready, like pillars awaiting the dome of a temple. It's brilliant, there's no other word for it. I feel so humble simply to have been a witness to it.'

  'You don't think it's too dangerous?' Tiro said in a low voice, stepping from behind me and drawing closer to Rufus, whispering so as to hide his doubts from Cicero in his study.

  'In an unjust state, any act of decency is by its nature dangerous,' said Rufus. 'And also brave. A brave man will not fail to put himself into danger, if he has just cause.'

  'Still, aren't you worried about what might happen after the trial? Such harsh words for Chrysogonus, and Sulla himself isn't spared.'

  'Is there room in a Roman court for the truth, or not?' said Rufus. 'That's the question. Have we reached such a state that truth is a crime? Cicero is staking his future on the essential fairness and honesty of good Roman citizens. What else can a man of his integrity do?'

  'Of course,' said Tiro soberly, nodding. 'It's his nature to challenge hypocrisy and injustice, to act out of his own principles. Given his nature, what choice does he have?'

  I stood by, forgotten and alone. While they conferred and debated, I quietly slipped away and joined Bethesda between the warm sheets of my bed. She purred like a half-asleep cat, then wrinkled her nose with a growl of suspicion when she smelled Electra's perfume on my flesh. I was too weary to explain or even to tease her. I did not hold her but instead turned my back to her and let her hold me, and so, just as the sound of Cicero's droning abruptly resumed from the atrium, I slipped into a restless sleep.

  One might have thought the house had been deserted, or that someone was gravely ill, so supreme did quiet reign over Cicero's household the next morning. The strain and bustle of the previous day were replaced by a steady calm that had the appearance of lethargy. The slaves did not scurry back and forth but took their time, speaking always in hushed voices. Even the constant droning of Cicero's voice had stopped; not a sound came from his study. I ate a bowl of olives and bread that Bethesda brought me and passed the morning as I had the day before, resting and reading in the courtyard near the back of Cicero's house with Bethesda nearby.

  The reproof I expected from Cicero never came. Instead he ignored me, though not in any pointed manner. I simply seemed to have slipped from his consciousness. I did notice, however, that the guard on the roof whom I had eluded the day before had changed his routine to include an occasional circuit of the colonnade surrounding the courtyard. From his sullen glances I could tell that he, at least, had not escaped Cicero's wrath.

  At some point Tiro appeared. He asked if I was comfortable. I told him I had been reading Cato all morning, but except for that I had no complaints. 'And your master?' I said. 'I haven't heard a sound from him all day. Not a single epigram, not even the tiniest allusion, not one specimen of alliteration. Not even a metaphor. He's not ill, is he?'

  Tiro bowed his head slightly and spoke with the hushed voice of one admitted to the inner circle of a great enterprise. His transgressions with Roscia forgiven (or at least momentarily forgotten), he had fallen more than ever under his master's spell. Now the climax approached, and his faith in Cicero had become almost mystical. 'Cicero is fasting and resting his voice today,' Tiro said, with all the gravity of a priest explaining the omens to be seen in a flying flock of geese. 'All his practising these past few days has worn his throat until he's hoarse. So today no solid foods, only liquids to soothe his throat and moisten his tongue. I've been recopying a fresh draft of his oration, while Rufus sorts through each of the legal references to make sure nothing has been overlooked or wrongly attributed. Meanwhile, the house is to be as still and quiet as possible. Cicero must have a day of rest and calm before the trial.'

  'Or else — what?' I said. 'A crippling attack of gas before the Rostra?' Bethesda snickered. Tiro coloured, but quickly recovered. He was far too proud of Cicero to allow a mere insult to fluster him. His manner became haughty. 'I only bring it up so that you'll understand when I ask you to be as quiet as possible and to cause no disturbances.'

  'Like the one I caused yesterday by escaping over the roof?' 'Exactly.' He held himself erect for a final haughty moment, then let his shoulders slump. 'Oh, Gordianus, why can't you simply do as he asks? I don't understand why you've become so… so unreasonable. If you only knew. Cicero understands things that we only guess at. You'll see what I mean tomorrow, at the trial. I only wish you trusted him as you should.'

  He turned, and as he left he took a deep breath and shivered, the way dogs shiver to dry themselves, as if I had left a residue of ill will and disbelief on him and he did not wish to re-enter his master's presence stained by my pollution.

  'I don't understand you, either,' said Bethesda softly, looking up from her sewing. 'Why do you taunt the boy? It's obvious that he admires you. Why do you make him choose between his master and you? You know that's unfair.'

  It was a rare thing for Bethesda to chide me in such open terms. Was my behaviour so blatantly inappropriate that even my slave felt free to criticize it? I had nothing to say in my defence. Bethesda saw that she had pricked me and made a further sal
ly.

  'If you have a quarrel with Cicero, it makes no sense to punish his slave for it. Why not go to Cicero directly? But I must confess, I don't understand your attitude any better than the boy. Cicero has been only fair and reasonable at every turn, at least so far as I can see; no, more than fair. Not like the other men you work for. He's taken you into his household for your own protection, along with your slave — imagine that! He's fed you, opened his library to you, even posted a guard to look after you from the roof. Try to imagine your good client Hortensius doing that! I wonder what the inside of Hortensius's house looks like, and how many slaves he owns? But I suppose I shall never know.'

  Bethesda put down her handiwork. She shielded her eyes from the sun and looked about the courtyard, noting the decorations and flourishes as if they had been installed especially for her approval. I didn't bother to reprimand her for speaking out of hand. What did the opinions of a slave matter, after all — except that, as always, she had spoken the very doubts and questions that were spinning in my own head.

  30

  The Ides of May dawned with a pale blue light. I woke in slow stages, dislocated from my dreams and disoriented in a strange house — neither my house on the Esquiline nor any of the houses I had passed through in a lifetime of restless travel. Hushed, hurried voices penetrated the room from every quarter. Why should any house be so busy so very early in the morning? I kept thinking that someone must have died during the night, but in that case I would have been awakened by sobbing and lamentations.

  Bethesda was pressed against my back with one arm slipped beneath my own, hugging my chest. I felt the soft, full cushion of her breasts against my back, pressing gently against me with each breath. Her exhalation was warm and sweet against the back of my ear. I began to wake and resisted it, in the way that men cling to even a troubled sleep when a dull despair hangs over them. I felt content with my own unhappy dreams and altogether apathetic about whatever hushed crisis was brewing in the strange house around me. I shut my eyes and turned the dawn back into darkest night.