The Sacrilege s-3

by John Maddox Roberts

  "Metellus! I have the feeling that you have been avoiding me! I am hurt!" He grinned his ugly, oily grin. Clodius had been making no formal calls and was dressed only in tunic and sandals. These latter were ordinary brown leather, although he was entitled to the thick-soled red buskins with the ivory crescent at the ankle. Even his tunic was the workingman's exomis, the Greek type that leaves the right shoulder and half the chest bare. Clodius, man of the people.

  "You know how dearly I cherish your company, Publius," I said. "You have but to call at my house during my morning reception."

  His laugh was loud and false. "When did a Claudian ever come calling on a Metellan?"

  I waggled a finger at him. "Careful, Publius, your patricianship is showing. People might think you were wellborn, and you'll have wasted all that slumming and hanging around with low company."

  "He's drunk," said one of the thugs.

  "Drunk is as good a way to die as any," Clodius said. "Get him."

  "Just a moment," I said, holding out a palm. "You have the advantage. Give me a moment." Ceremoniously, I removed my toga and folded it.

  "He wants to make a fight of it," Clodius said. "I wouldn't have given him credit. Go ahead, Decius. Afterward we'll wrap you up in it, and you won't look so bad when your servants come to carry you home. You'll look better than poor Appius Nero did after you murdered him."

  "I didn't kill him, Publius, you did, or maybe it was Clodia."

  He went into his vein-popping routine again. "Enough of this! Kill him!"

  As I have already said, running in a toga is futile. Since I was no longer encumbered with mine, I bounded like a deer up the steps to my left. When I reached the street at the top of the steps, I turned right, downhill. I survived the next few seconds only because Clodius and his men were temporarily surprised by my bolting. Only a fool could have expected me to stand and fight against such odds, but men are capable of endless folly, and Publius Clodius of more than most men.

  Nonetheless, I could almost feel their breath on my heels as I dashed down the street, with startled pedestrians dodging out of my way. Romans were all too familiar with the sight of a man running for his life and knew how to behave accordingly. I mentally vowed a goat to Jove, asking him to cloud the eyes of the people before me. My greatest fear was that someone would recognize Clodius behind me and would try to stop me to curry favor with him.

  I was far from Milo's territory and I did not know what Clodius's strength might be in this area. If I could make it to the Subura, I would be safe. Clodius and his men would probably not make it back out alive. Unfortunately, to make it all the way to the Subura I would have to be as swift and enduring as that Greek who ran with the news from Marathon to Athens. I cannot recall his name just now.

  Our fine new colonial cities have beautiful, wide boulevards, flat as a pond and straight as a javelin. Rome has none. The streets I ran on rose and dipped, bent in serpentine curves or sharp angles, narrowed without warning and transformed into steps with no order or reason. This worked to my advantage, because I was recently returned from military service and Celer had insisted that his officers train as hard as the legionaries, to include broken-field running in armor. This stood me in good stead as I dodged, hopped, turned and leapt over the occasional recumbent drunk.

  Clodius had no athletes in his following, and most of his ex-gladiators were well-drilled in arms but not in running. When I risked a glance over my shoulder, I saw that Clodius was close behind, but he had lost all but three or four of his men. The odds were getting better all the time.

  I came to a warren of low wineshops and whores' cribs. The road had narrowed to an alley and took a right-angled turn to the right. On both sides rows of low doorways gave access to tiny cubicles and the services of their inhabitants. I ducked into one, and such was my state of heightened awareness that I still remember the sign above the doorway. It read: Phoebe: Skilled in Greek, Spanish, Libyan and Phoenician (this did not refer to languages). Price: 3 sesterces. 2 denarii for Phoenician. The smell within was rank, and from the back of the room came heavy breathing and the sound of flesh slapping rhythmically against flesh. I had my dagger and caestus out, and when a shadow crossed the doorway I lunged. There was a sharp indrawing of breath and the man toppled, clutching his belly. The face was bearded. Not Clodius, worse luck. Another man tripped over the one I had stabbed, and I kicked him in the jaw as he fell. I barged out the doorway, swinging at the first face I saw, and felt a jawbone crack under the bronze spikes of my caestus. Someone swung a curved short sword at me and I felt it draw a cold line along my shoulder, missing my throat by a finger's breadth. Before the man with the broken jaw had a chance to fall, I got my unwounded shoulder into him and sent him crashing into Clodius.

  With a single leap I cleared the tangle of bodies and flailing limbs and was running at top speed down the alley. I passed a crowd seated in the open front of a wineshop, and they whistled and clapped in appreciation. In the years since, I have sometimes had cause to wonder what the Phoenician style might be. It must have been complicated. Two denarii was awfully expensive for a girl in that part of town.

  My shoulder began to sting, but the fire in my lungs was worse. The alley opened onto a small plaze in front of a temple of Vertumnus. This gave me my bearings, and I ran toward the temple with the sound of sandals slapping close behind me. A few more of Clodius's men must have caught up with him. I veered to the right and went down the narrow street that ran between the temple and a towering tenement. Unwillingly, I had to slow down and tread carefully. The pavement before a tenement is often slick, because the wretches who inhabit such places are often too lazy to carry their chamberpots to the nearest sewer opening and just dump them into the street. Squawks and thuds behind me told me I was correct in being cautious.

  The road began to level out, and I began to feel a bit of hope that I might get out of this alive. The great, hulking building just ahead of me was the Basilica Aemilia. I was looking at its unornamented rear, and I knew that if I could just get past it, I would be in the Forum, where even Publius Clodius might hesitate to murder me. My sides were cramping and my lungs were working so hard that I felt as if blood were about to burst forth from them.

  Then I was past the basilica and down its steps and onto one of the wooden trial platforms in front of it, And, just my luck, there was a trial in progress. I knew that because it was crowded with men and a barrister was in mid-gesture, his beringed hands raised dramatically as he made the crowning point of his argument. I will never forget the look of horror on his face when I ran into him. We went sprawling across the platform, his snowy toga billowing about us like the sail of a ship carried away in a storm.

  I came up in time to see Clodius bearing down on me, his face distorted with transcendent rage, purple as a triumphator's robe. In one hand he brandished a curved short sword. So he was the one who had cut me. I was swept up with the urge to do the same to him, only worse. The sword came down at me with a wild slash, which I managed to deflect with my caestus. I stabbed straight for his throat, but he lunged forward and ducked, throwing a shoulder into my belly and wrapping his arms around my waist. I went over backward, and this time we both rolled over the unfortunate lawyer. I struggled to keep Clodius from getting his sword arm free while he concentrated on biting my face off. I kneed him in the balls and that, at least, made him open his mouth, freeing my nose. Another good one to the cods and he squealed like a gelded pig. I broke his hold and scrambled out from beneath him, dealing a weak, backhanded blow to the side of his neck as I did so. It was enough to half-stun him and send him sprawling on his belly. I clambered onto his back and seized a handful of his thick, curly, greasy, goatlike hair and yanked his head back. I placed my dagger beneath his neck and was poised to cut his throat from larynx to spine when both my arms were grabbed and all but wrenched from their sockets. A lictor's fasces was placed across my throat and locked there by the official's arm in a unique variant of the common wrestling hold. T
he bundle of rods nestled into the crook of his elbow while his hand, on the back of my head, pressed my throat against the rods until the breath whistled in my nostrils. Another team of lictors applied the same treatment to Clodius.

  The jury and spectators whistled and stamped at this rare entertainment. The lictors hauled us before the praetor like reluctant sacrifices.

  "Who dares offend the majesty of a Roman court in this fashion?" The man in the curule chair wore an expression of cold fury. It was the distinguished praetor Caius Octavius, famed jurist and soldier and, incidentally, the true father of our esteemed First Citizen, who was still a burping baby in that year.

  We croaked our names, the pressure of the fasces making it very difficult to articulate the simplest sounds. This raised a good laugh. I must admit that my voice sounded rather comical.

  "And what prominent person has died," Octavius said, "that we have funeral games in the Forum?"

  "Clodius and his thugs attacked me!" I said. "I was running for my life! Do you think I would seek a fight with a dozen armed men?"

  "Just going about your business, eh?" said Octavius. "Just like any other citizen, with a caestus on one hand and a pugio in the other? Bearing arms within the pom-erium is another punishable offense."

  "At least they're respectable weapons," I pointed out. "He was carrying a sica!"

  "A pertinent point!" said one of the lawyers, unable to help himself. The distinction between honorable and dishonorable weapons was a strict one in Roman law. The glare Octavius gave the lawyer boded ill for the progress of the trial.

  "What have you say for yourself, Publius Clodius?" the praetor demanded.

  "I am a serving Roman official and cannot be charged with a criminal offense!" he said, gloating.

  Octavius gestured with his baton toward a white-gowned figure seated near him. It was one of the Vestals. "You realize," he said, "that had one of you killed the other in this lady's presence, the survivor would have been taken outside the walls to the execution ground and there flogged to death with rods. There are few capital offenses left on the tables, but that is one of them."

  "In that case," I said, nodding to the lictors, "I wish to thank these fine citizens for preventing me from killing that loathsome and deranged reptile over there."

  "It is lucky for you," Octavius said, "that you intruded upon a court for extortion. Had this been the court for crimes of violence, I might have had you charged, tried and judged on the spot." He exaggerated. Actually, there was a good deal of oath-taking and posting of sureties before a trial could begin. "This is not the first time the two of you have been charged with public riot. You are a menace to the safety of all citizens."

  "I protest!" I cried. "I was just minding my own-"

  "Silence!" Octavius barked. He raised his eyes and gazed out over the Forum. "Where is the Censor Metellus?" He gestured to a lictor. "There he is, over by Sulla's monument. Fetch him." The man ran off and a few minutes later returned with my father. I could tell by the way he was glaring at me that the lictor had been giving him a colorful account of recent events.

  "Noble praetor, what is your wish?" Father said.

  "Cut-Nose, I am going to charge your son with public riot and bearing arms within the pomerium. I am also going to check the law books and see if a charge of crime against Maiestas is appropriate. I would like to do the same for Publius Clodius, but there is some question whether his quaestorship protects him. Will you stand surety for Decius the Younger if I release him to you?"

  "I will," Father said.

  "Then take him away. I will send to Pompey's camp for Clodius's elder brother, Appius. Perhaps if we can keep these two separated, we need not fear for the destruction of Rome and the sanctity of her courts." He truly had a gift for sarcasm.

  "I will see to it that my son arrives for trial on the appointed day. No Roman is above the law."

  "These two least of all," Octavius said wryly.

  The lictors released me and I stooped to pick up my weapons. The charge had been made, so it didn't matter if I had them in my possession now. Clodius and I exchanged a final, mutual glare, and I turned to walk away with my father.

  "You have always been an idiot," my father began as we walked across the Forum, "but this surpasses your previous enormities by a wide margin. Whatever possessed you to try to murder Clodius in a Roman court under the nose of the senior praetor?"

  "I thought I might never get another chance!" I said.

  "You were specifically instructed to keep away from him."

  "I've done my best," I protested. "He sought me out. He set a dozen men on me. I had to run and I had to fight."

  "Am I to take it, then, that the blood on your dagger is neither yours nor Clodius's? I thought it best not to ask in front of the praetor."

  I shrugged, sending a dart of fire through my wounded shoulder. "Oh, there may be a body or two in the streets back there. Nobody who amounts to anything, just Clodius's hired scum."

  "Good. I would hate to think I had raised a coward as well as a fool. How bad is that shoulder?"

  "Kind of you to ask. It's painful and bleeding freely. I think it will need stitching. I'll go see Asklepiodes in the Trans-Tiber. He's sewed me up before."

  "The question is, can I trust you to go there without getting into more trouble?" Of course, it never occurred to him to accompany me there.

  "One fight a day is enough even for my glory-lusting spirit, Father." We were out of the Forum by this time, and passersby ogled at my wild appearance.

  "I think you should leave the city for a while," Father said.

  "But I just got back!"

  "Rome can take only so much of your presence. A stint managing the estate at Beneventum might settle you a bit. The realities of farm work could only improve you."

  There is a belief among us that the only respectable life is agriculture. Probably because it is the dullest life imaginable. Of course, there is no virtue in working the land. The virtue lies in owning the land. How instructing an overseer to boss a gang of slaves returns a man to the realities of tilling the soil escapes me, but many swear by it.

  "I have an investigation to conduct, Father," I said. "I can't just break it off to go watch slaves spread manure under grape vines."

  "Your wishes are of no importance," he said.

  One of the most infuriating provisions of Roman law is the one conferring lifetime authority upon the paterfamilias. You can be the gray-haired commander of legions and conqueror of provinces, but if your father is still alive, you are still, legally, a child.

  "It's a matter of state security," I insisted.

  He gave a short, humorless laugh. "That business about the rites of that foreign goddess?"

  "There is far more to it that that," I said with some urgency.

  "Go on," he said, still walking from long habit at the standard legionary pace.

  I gave him a somewhat truncated account of my findings to date, along with some speculations as to their significance. I did not identify Julia. He would assume that any woman who shared my taste for snooping must be unworthy.

  "So you suspect Pompey is behind it, eh?" He said this grudgingly, but I could tell that his interest was piqued. Like the rest of the aristocratic party, he hated Pompey and feared that the man would crown himself king of Rome.

  "No one else is so bold. He is the one who has a pack of tame Etruscan priests."

  "And," Father mused, "he wants to settle his veterans on public lands in Tuscia."

  "He does?" I said. This was new to me.

  "Yes, as you would know if you ever paid any attention to important public business instead of crawling through every sewer in the city."

  "I've only been in the Senate for a few days," I said.

  "That does not excuse you. And you realize that your vaporings are built upon the words of some of the most degenerate people in Rome?"

  "I always take that into account," I said. A sudden inspiration struck me.

 
; "Tell me, how did Capito stand on the question of settling Pompey's veterans?" At this question Father actually stopped in his tracks and stared at me as if at some wonderful apparition sent by the gods. I wiped blood from my upper lip with the back of my caestus. My nose was bleeding inside and out from Clodius's bite.

  "There may be something in your mad sophistry after all. Capito opposed the settlements most violently."

  "So does more than half the Senate. What was Capito's particular objection?" We were nearing Father's house by this time. We presented an odd spectacle, I must admit: the dignified Censor in his toga praetexta and I, who looked like the receiver of the second-place award in a munera. And the subject was politics, as always.

  "He claimed it would upset the public order and give Pompey a power base near Rome and so forth; everyone says that. But the real reason was that his family leases a huge tract of the ager publicus in Tuscia, an area that will be cut up into farm plots for Pompey's veterans if the legislation goes through."

  I grinned, but it made my mouth hurt. "So Capito's family has been farming and grazing that land for several generations, paying the state at a nominal rate set a hundred or more years ago?"

  "Closer to two hundred."

  "Oh, the elevated and patriotic motives of our Senators," I said.

  "You'll see worse than that in the Senate, if you live," Father said. By this time we were at his gate.

  "Could you send a slave to my house?" I asked. "My boy, Hermes, should be there by now with my toga. Have him meet me at the surgery of Asklepiodes. He knows where it is and bring me a tunic."

  Father popped his fingers and a slave came to take my instructions. The man ran off and we continued with every Roman's favorite subject.

  "Where does Caesar stand on these questions?" I asked.

  "As a popular, he is for giving the land to the veterans, but he favors the ager publicus in Campania. A bit farther from Rome, but the best farmland in Italy."