Dog-Headed Death: A Gaius Hesperian Mystery
Page 1
Table of Contents
Copyright Information
Opening Quotatio
Cast of Characters
Prelude
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
BOOK TWO
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
BOOK THREE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Coda
Copyright Information
Copyright © 1989 by Ray Faraday Nelson.
All rights reserved.
*
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
Opening Quotatio
Veritatem cognoscentis et veritas vos liberabit.
John 8:32
Cast of Characters
CENTURION GAIUS HESPERIAN; a reflective and compassionate member of Emperor Nero’s palace guard with a knack for detective work. He’s considered rather odd by his fellow officers because he doesn’t torture witnesses.
ODYSSEUS MEMNON; a Greek-Egyptian shipping magnate, the Onassis of the First Century Mediterranean, who is found murdered in his Alexandrian mansion after announcing his conversion to an evangelistic cult to which he plans to donate all his worldly goods.
ADRASTIA MEMNON; old Odysseus’ young, beautiful wife. Nero had her father murdered. Now she spies for Rome’s enemies.
DEMETRIUS MEMNON; Odysseus’ brother: cruel, gaunt, and old. As Odysseus’ business partner, he’s made a fortune smuggling weapons and supplies to the Jewish rebels, to the barbarians, to any subversive group plotting against Nero.
OCTAVIA MEMNON; Odysseus’ divorced first wife, mother of his children. She lives in well-heeled exile in Rome, secretly idolized by her son.
SERAPION MEMNON; Octavia’s son. He has the face of a young philosopher, but the hard, muscular body of a gladiator. After captaining his father’s ships, not only merchant vessels but fighting and racing craft, he enters the temple of the ancient gods of Egypt, Isis and Serapis, to study for the priesthood.
HATHOR MEMNON; Odysseus’ beautiful tomboy daughter. Odysseus gave her as good an education as if she’d been a boy, but now she has become distant. She won’t even reveal the name of the lover she meets secretly in the Alexandrian slums.
SABELLA; a sixteen-year-old black slave girl in the Memnon household. She calls Adrastia “Mama”, and Adrastia loves her far more than she loves either of her step-children.
ROPHOS and WAKAR; eunuch slaves in the Memnon household. Rophos dies of poisoned soup intended for Odysseus. In the investigation, Wakar is tortured by the authorities and crippled for life.
SUCHOS, HORUS, and BUBO; Adrastia’s hunchbacked dwarf clowns. They laugh, joke and turn handsprings, but nobody knows what they really think and feel.
SIMON BAAL; a Parthian spy as well as a rich ship owner. Baal backs the Memnon enterprises from behind the scenes, and his friends in high places have gotten Odysseus his prized Roman naturalized citizenship. In return, the Memnons do his bidding.
OPTIO MANNUS; Centurion Hesperian’s ambitious second-in-command, a powerfully-built soldier of forty. He’s tough and loyal, of good simple farm stock, but a little slow of wit.
LIBRARIUS DAPHNIS; Hesperian’s clerk and secretary. Vain, clever, aristocratic, Daphnis delights in outwitting Mannus, his superior officer.
The Apostle MARK; founder of the first Christian church in Alexandria, author of the earliest canonical gospel, eventually a martyr in Alexandria, all according to church traditions.
BISHOP ANNIANUS; also according to church tradition, appointed first Bishop of Alexandria in 61 A.D. by the Apostle Mark. A Jewish shoemaker by trade, he also was martyred, for protesting the worship of Serapis, in 84 A.D., during the reign of Emperor Domitian.
BASILEIDES; a rich, powerful friend of the Memnon family, his parents were slaves and he was made a freedman by the Emperor Claudius. Now he is the secret pawn of Simon Baal.
REMUS; Captain of the Guard at the Alexandrian prison, a tall, heavy-set Roman. He can read, but not without moving his lips.
Old HECATE; Hathor Memnon’s observant and talkative landlady in the slum neighborhood of Rhakotis, the Egyptian quarter of Alexandria. It is at old Hecate’s that Hathor meets her mysterious lover.
T. VINDAIUS ARIOVESTUS; fat “compounder of panaceas.” He and his equally fat wife Livia sell all manner of medicines and drugs, including poison.
Old KISSINGFISH; Adrastia Memnon’s sensitive, fastidious hairdresser, above suspicion, it would seem.
DIONYSIUS; head librarian at the vast Alexandrian library from 67 to 117 A.D., a student of Chaeremon, the previous head librarian, and a secretary to ambassadors and Emperors.
TIBERIUS JULIUS ALEXANDER; governor of Egypt from 67 to 71 A.D. He is a native-born Alexandrian Jew with naturalized Roman citizenship, nephew of Philo the Philosopher, and formerly (46-47 A.D.) Procurator of Judea.
Prelude
“Master, you awake?”
The heavy door muffled the voice of the young girl.
“Master, you in there?”
She knocked lightly.
“Master, please… I got to talk to you.” She sounded desperate, on the verge of tears.
An early evening breeze rustled the richly embroidered floral curtains at the open bedroom window, set the flames in the gold and silver oil lamps to dancing and flickering and sending out tenuous streamers of acrid black smoke.
Even here in Egyptian Alexandria there were few bedrooms furnished as lavishly this one. A niche containing a small greenish-bronze bust of an adolescent girl; a vast many-pillowed bed draped in green silk, with a bedstead of bronze formed by a master craftsman into the shapes of women, gods, flowers, animals and birds all blending together into ornate grotesque hybrids that in the moving lamp light seemed to breathe with quick nervous gasps; murals depicting in painstaking detail the progress of a dead man’s soul through the Western Land, the Land of the Dead, and past all sorts of trials and monsters to the foot of the throne of Mother Isis and Father Osiris-Serapis, monarchs of the underworld; a modest altar on a low table where a statuette of a seated, bearded Osiris-Serapis (in the realistic Greek style) seemed to bless anyone who stood before him; a bed table where two scrolls lay, one of them partly unrolled to reveal the title in Greek, “The Gospel according to Mark”; a green desk bearing writing tools—a stylus for wax tablets and a pen for papyrus scrolls—and equipped with compartments for current reading matter; three green glazed earthenware jars, each half as tall as a man, where, carefully encased in leather sacks, other manuscripts were stored; a white ceiling slightly grayed by lamp smoke; and a floor of pink marble edged with a Greek key design in mosaic. All these combined to give an impression of relentless opulence, of a luxury that defied all restraint.
“Master! Why don’t you answer?”
Distant dogs barked, then were silent.
Two things marred the perfection of the room.
The first was an unsheathed knife with a curved, polished blade and with emeralds, rubies and diamonds set in the handle; a knife that seemed to have been carelessly tossed on the floor where it now lay, its jewels reflecting the restless lamp light.
The second was a corpse.
He was—or had been—old, gau
nt, skeletal.
He was—or had been—rich.
The rings on his bony fingers could have, by themselves, paid for a ship and the slaves to row it. His green silk robes and tunic were worth a year’s wages for a centurion, and a prostitute from the Egyptian quarter might sell her body for a lifetime and not earn the price of his silver-trimmed and bejeweled sandals.
“Master! Please!”
She knocked again, louder.
His eyes were open.
They were dark brown, almost black, and now that they were motionless seemed made of clouded glass. From the way his body was twisted as he lay there on the floor beside the bed, he must have been trying very hard to see something when he died, something behind him. Except for that twist in his body, he would have been lying face down, spread-eagle. His features were frozen in an enigmatic grimace. Could that be some kind of tortured smile? Could that be a look of triumph on his face?
His face…
It was not a rich man’s face.
It was not the face of a man born to softness and ease, but was, rather, the face of a poor man, a merchant, a man who had early learned and never forgotten the art of squeezing a coin. That bald, beardless, head was made to poke itself out of the folds of a camel driver’s cloak, not from these slippery silks for which men had no doubt given their lives to bring them all the way from China.
“Master!”
She tried the door, found it was unlocked.
She opened it a crack, letting a sliver of light into the room from the more brightly lit hallway.
Jutting upward from between his shoulder blades was a spear or javelin with a wood shaft and an iron head and point. The twist of his body made it tilt at an acute angle to the floor. The point of the spear had passed through him and protruded slightly from his chest, almost touching the marble floor, and was caked with drying blood. There was more blood on the floor, an amazing amount of blood to have come from such a small, thin old man.
The door swung open and she stood there, framed in the doorway, silhouetted against the brightness of many-branched petrolabrums behind and above her. She was a black girl, about sixteen-years-old, clad only in an unadorned grayish wool shift that barely reached her scrawny knees.
“Master?”
She stepped into the room, unable to see clearly before her eyes adjusted to the light. Something was there on the floor beside the bed, but she couldn’t quite make it out. She took a few shuffling steps toward it on the cool stone. Now there could be no mistake.
It’s him, she thought. There was no feeling of shock yet. She stood over the corpse for a full minute at least, looking down with round eyes and open mouth.
Finally, she thought, They did it. They finally did it.
She closed her eyes, opened them again.
The old man was still there.
“No!” she whispered, stamping her bare feet. The panic was rising now, but she wanted to stay calm, wanted to do the right thing, the smart thing, the safe thing.
“No!” she screamed, and the loudness of her own voice startled her. She backed out of the room, began to run down the hall. She continued to scream, unaware that she was doing so. She tried to block the image from her mind of what she had just seen, tried to concentrate on simple physical sensations.
She was going down the great marble staircase.
She could feel her bare feet slapping on stone, felt her small breasts bouncing on her chest as she leaped down three steps at a time. At the foot of the stairs a man was looking up at her, eyebrows raised, a man who looked very much like the man she had just seen crumpled on the bedroom floor… old, gaunt, hairless, richly-robed. He stepped into her path and grabbed her by the arm, then slapped her across the face so hard that she was afraid for an instant he had loosened her teeth.
“Sabella!” he shouted at her, shaking her violently. “Stop that screaming!”
She tried to pull away from him, screaming all the louder.
“Do you want me to get the whip?” he demanded.
“No! No!”
“Then quiet down, you hear me! Tell me calmly what’s bothering you, or I’ll…”
“He’s dead! He’s up there on the floor dead! The Master’s dead!”
“What? You’re lying! You’re lying, Sabella!”
He raised his hand as if to slap her again.
“No!” she howled up at his contorted face. Partly from fear and partly from dizziness caused by his first slap, she fell on her knobby knees at his feet. “He’s there! Go look!”
A woman’s voice called out angrily: “Let her go! Sabella’s no liar!”
He released her, after a moment’s indecision, and Sabella scuttled away from him on her hands and knees.
“A slave only tells the truth under torture,” he grumbled, wiping his hands on his silk tunic as if he had dirtied them by touching Sabella.
“Get up, Sabella,” the woman commanded, firmly but kindly.
Sabella obeyed.
The woman was pale, slender, and young, with black hair that hung to the small of her back. Sabella had often thought, when she saw her Master’s wife like this, dressed in fine embroidered linen gowns and wearing rings and necklaces, that she was the most beautiful woman in Alexandria.
“Come here, Sabella.” The woman opened her arms.
“Yes, Mama Adrastia.”
Sabella called Adrastia “Mama” all the time. She’d never known her real mother.
Adrastia held the black girl in her arms until the trembling stilled. Sabella liked to be near her. She smelled so good.
“Now, Sabella, do you think you could take me with you and show me whatever it is you saw?”
“Yes, Mama Adrastia.”
“You’re spoiling that slave…” began the man.
“Not now, Demetrius,” snapped Adrastia.
They left him behind as they went up the stairs.
Adrastia stood over the corpse even longer than Sabella had. Finally she sighed, shook her head slowly and said, “By the gods, I wish there was some way we could keep the authorities out of this. We have so much to hide!”
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
There was one seagull, all white with some of his tail feathers missing, who had stayed with the ship when, off the toe of Italy, the others had turned back. As a reward for loyalty, Mannus had given him a name: Charon.
The Roman officer stood, elbows resting on the rail, watching Charon glide over the wake, a dark spot against the cloudless, blindingly-bright sky. Though it was hours before the thin dark line of Africa would appear on the horizon, other gulls had now appeared, hoping for a share of the sparse garbage the Romans dumped overboard after each meal.
I wonder… thought Mannus… will Charon stay with us all the way to Alexandria?
There was a burst of laughter from below decks where the rowers, Mannus knew, were casting dice in their interminable game. They were an inexperienced crew, assembled at the last moment and without training. (Mannus suspected that this was the first time some of the younger ones had been to sea.) Thus it was fortunate indeed that the wind was behind them, strong and steady in the great square mainsail. They had scarcely needed the oars since they’d left port.
The commanding officer, Centurion Gaius Hesperian of Nero’s Imperial Praetorian Guard, was also below decks in his cabin and had left orders that he was not to be disturbed. Mannus, then, was now in command. He was an optio, something like an apprentice centurion, and some day, if he served Hesperian well, he’d have the rank himself and eighty men serving under him. Mannus smiled, thinking about it.
I’m thirty years old now. I wonder if I’ll get my command before I’m forty? Hesperian would certainly make the recommendation, but there was always a wait for a vacancy, a wait that m
ight last for years. Mannus frowned, thinking about it.
Hesperian was forty and had already served as a Chief Centurion, with sixty other centurions under him; but, Mannus decided, that was probably too much to hope for. Rare indeed was the man who became a Chief Centurion before the age of sixty. Mannus ran his blunt, powerful fingers through his short-cropped brown hair… hair that was beginning to turn gray and recede at the temples.
Charon, seeming to hang for a moment motionless just out of reach, squawked raffishly. Mannus laughed. “What are you, eh? A clown? A rascal? Or a philosopher?”
The bird did not answer but, with a few arrogant beats of his wings, swooped up to perch on the yardarm. Mannus, turning to follow his flight, caught sight of another Roman officer approaching with uncertain steps across the shifting deck.
“Daphnis!” called out Mannus. “Where are your sea legs?”
Daphnis came weaving up and leaned on the rail beside him. “You’re a swine, Optio Mannus. Did anyone ever tell you that? You’re a filthy swine.” The tone was delicate, disdainful, aristocratic; not really angry. “Sea legs indeed!”
In spite of a muscular soldier’s body, there was something almost feminine about Daphnis. Mannus, out of the corner of his eye, studied the officer’s handsome, hawk-like profile. Daphnis was five years younger than Mannus, and it showed.
“It’s the wind,” complained Daphnis. “It does nothing at all for my hair.” Short hair was the prevailing fashion for soldiers, but Daphnis had long blond hair, as beautiful as any woman’s. “I think I’d love the sea, really, if it weren’t for the wind.” He rolled his eyes heavenward in mock despair. The wind was, as he said, whipping his golden locks like a banner, tangling the strands, drying it out.
Hesperian had once described Daphnis as being in philosophy a rigorous skeptic and in love a rigorous homosexual. A rigorous homosexual! As usual Hesperian had summed things up perfectly. Damned boy-lover, thought Mannus disgustedly, but he kept his thoughts to himself. These days it was considered old-fashioned to be shocked by what was coyly referred to as “Greek love.”