Probably—but it was satisfying. All in all, he thought the letter would serve. There was enough of the truth in it that it ought to sound convincing, and with luck Rufus and his man would believe that they were going to get what they wanted—that he would spend the next ten days holed up in his friend’s house nursing his broken ankle, and that they would have the documents when he left Rome. They would not want to risk sending him to Scipio by making another attempt on him—not unless they were completely insane with arrogance, and he did not think they were insane.
They would, however, probably have the house watched, to make sure he wasn’t going to Scipio or another of Rufus’s enemies. He would have to think of some way around that.
He rolled and sealed the letter, then hopped over to the trunk, unlocked it, and got out clean clothing. Menestor was still asleep, so he dressed very quietly, then crawled silently to the door, resolving that another thing he would do that morning would be to get some kind of crutch.
It was still very early, and nobody had yet come to sweep the colonnade, but a male slave whose name he thought was Gallus was watering the plants in the garden. He greeted the startled man and asked for Stentor. The slave shot off. By the time he returned, with the steward, Hermogenes had been able to crawl unobserved over to the fountain in the center of the courtyard, and was soaking his swollen ankle in the cool water.
“Sir!” whispered Stentor doubtfully. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“I have a letter which needs to be delivered urgently.” Hermogenes told him. “I hope that it will prevent further trouble, Stentor. I very much want to avoid having any of my troubles touch this house, so I hope you can spare someone to carry it at once.”
Stentor looked embarrassed. “That’s … I am glad of that, sir. I will send someone with your letter immediately.”
Hermogenes handed him the letter and advised him to tell the messenger to deliver it to the guards at the consul’s gate with the information that it was urgent and should be given directly to the consul or his freedman. The steward nodded and went off to arrange it, and Hermogenes remained where he was, soaking his ankle. The carp in the pond came over to nibble agreeably at his toes. The sunlit peace of the morning seemed both artificial and ineffably sweet.
Gradually the house woke up. There was a smell of burning charcoal as the morning fires heated water and baked bread, and a sound of voices as the slaves set to work on the daily war against dirt. Eventually Hyakinthos appeared, sent by Titus to check the guest’s health. Hermogenes assured the boy that he would be fine.
“Tell your master that I have already sent a letter to Rufus which I hope will prevent more trouble,” he said.
To his surprise, the boy looked acutely disappointed. “You’re giving in, sir?” he cried indignantly.
Hermogenes wondered how much the household actually knew of what was going on. Probably most of it: he and Titus had discussed things freely in front of Hyakinthos at least, and slaves did talk among themselves. They would undoubtedly have discussed why their master’s Alexandrian guest had twice come back to the house covered in blood.
“You think I should not?” he asked mildly.
Hyakinthos scowled. “It’s not up to me to say, sir.”
But that was clearly what he did think. Well, he’d liked Phormion. “I am not giving in,” Hermogenes told him in a low voice, “but I want Rufus to think I am.” He paused, evaluating again, then added, “I think he will probably have this house watched, and he may send people to try to pick up gossip about me, so I would prefer it if he heard that I am prostrate and depressed with a broken ankle.”
The boy’s face lit up. “Yes, sir!” He grinned. “I didn’t think you’d give up. I’ll tell the others to spread the news in the neighborhood that you’re … what does ‘prostrate’ mean, sir?”
“Lying down.”
Hyakinthos laughed. “Lying down in bed with a broken ankle!” He looked anxious. “It isn’t broken, is it, sir?”
“I don’t think so.” He lifted the ankle out of the pond and swiveled it cautiously. “I will need a crutch for a few days, though. Could you mention that to Stentor, please?”
“Yes, sir. Sir, how is Menestor?”
Hermogenes glanced back at the door to his room. “Still asleep. He was very badly shaken, poor fellow.”
“My master said they put a knife at his throat.”
“They did. He was very brave, though he thinks he was not. He tried to fight them. I leaned on him all the way back.”
Hyakinthos nodded, but something more seemed to be preying on him. He hovered, fidgeting, then finally looked Hermogenes in the eye and said, “Sir—could I ask you something?”
“Ask away.”
“Are you … is Menestor your boy? Like me, I mean, to my master.”
Hermogenes looked back at the nervous young face for a long moment, trying to puzzle out what was transpiring behind it. “No,” he said at last. “Menestor is my secretary and my valet. He was born in my house and I have considerable affection for him, but I have never had the least desire to sleep with another male; in fact, the idea is repugnant to me. I suspect that in that I am like you.”
Hyakinthos reddened. “I’m sorry, sir, if I was insolent.”
“I did not find your question insolent,” Hermogenes told him. Slowly he went on. “I think that you have been wondering why you find your position so bitter, when your master is kind and your family and fellow slaves urge you to take advantage of your good fortune. I understand that you were curious about Menestor, who urges the same thing. Let me say only that I do not think you are either foolish or ungrateful because you hate to sleep with your master. It is simply that you are not by nature a lover of men, and that is something you cannot help. Eros is a god, and will neither come nor go at our command. I think you have a hard lot, child, and I wish I could help, but there is nothing I can see to do.”
Hyakinthos went even redder. “I wish you were my master,” he blurted out.
“But I am not,” Hermogenes replied gently. “Nor, I think, would Titus be willing to sell you. I am sorry.”
The boy nodded, then took a deep breath. “Thank you anyway, sir.” He forced a smile and walked off down the colonnade to report to his master. Hermogenes watched him go, wondering how much courage that took, and whether perhaps Titus would really be so unwilling to sell the boy. It would be extremely useful to have a slave who spoke Latin … but no, of course Titus wouldn’t sell a boy he was in love with.
He might be willing to swap him for Menestor, but that would be an abominable trick to play on Menestor, especially after promising him his freedom. Hermogenes was slightly shocked that he could even bring himself to contemplate it.
He realized that he could contemplate it because he was, obscurely, angry at Menestor. The young man had fallen in his estimation because of that tacit admission that he would be willing to prostitute himself for freedom, and perhaps for lesser benefits. He had been no use at all in the attack, refusing to run for help when he was ordered to. Worst of all, he thought his master should give up this disastrous insistence on collecting the debt, and go home before the consul destroyed them. Hyakinthos’s approving admiration had been soothing balm.
Hermogenes sighed and stirred the pond with his sore foot. He himself had forced Menestor to make that degrading admission—and when a slave was brought up knowing that a master had a right to his body if he chose to take it, how was it fair to blame the slave for being willing to make use of that fact? He had no right to be angry because of it, still less because the young man had stayed with him rather than run away: looked at fairly, that had been brave, loyal, and admirable. The crux of the matter was that he himself had taken two members of his household into a situation where one had been killed and the other nearly so, and he knew at heart that he was at fault. He was the master: they had relied on him to make wise decisions, and he had failed them. That, he supposed, was the real reason he was angry with Menesto
r, and if he could not help the way he felt, he should at least admit that it was cruelly unfair, and try to give no hint of it to the boy.
Hyakinthos came back, this time with Titus Fiducius. “My dear Hermogenes!” the fat man trilled. “I couldn’t believe it when Hyakinthos told me you were already up and sending off letters! Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I think I probably look worse than I feel,” Hermogenes told him ruefully. He pulled his foot out of the pond again and wobbled reluctantly upright: he owed his host a full account of what he had guessed and what he intended.
“I’ve already sent for the doctor,” Titus informed him, coming over and offering his arm. “I think he should have a look at that ankle. I presume you’ll want to send someone to the magistrates, too, to report the attack and ask about the body of your poor slave?”
“I will, thank you.” An arm wasn’t going to be enough support. Hermogenes hesitated, then put his arm around Titus’s shoulders. “Titus, what I said in the letter I sent—”
“Let’s discuss it over breakfast,” suggested Titus, smiling as he helped him away from the pond and along the colonnade.
Over a breakfast of bread and honey he told his host most of what he’d said in the letter. Titus sent a messenger to the aediles of the fourth region—the magistrates responsible for the area where the attack had occurred—reporting an attempted robbery and asking about Phormion’s body. The doctor arrived while the messenger was setting off. Hermogenes lay back on the breakfast couch to have his ankle prodded and his face examined.
To his relief, the doctor decided that the ankle was indeed sprained and not broken. He bound it up, recommended bed rest and a light diet, and replaced two of the stitches on his patient’s cheek. He departed, shaking his head unhappily because his patient had refused a dose of hellebore on the grounds that it would dull his wits.
Hermogenes went back to explaining to Titus everything he’d guessed about the consul’s financial problems. Titus frowned and shook his head repeatedly, but raised no objections.
“I think you must be right,” was his final, reluctant comment on the consular finances.
“Who do you think he borrowed from?”
The Roman grimaced and shrugged. “In that circle? Gaius Maecenas or Publius Vedius Pollio are the obvious possibilities; they’re both in the business of lending at interest. But it could have been a personal loan. It could be the emperor himself.”
Hermogenes considered it. “No,” he said at last, firmly. “If it was a personal loan, it would have been interest free and with no fixed date for repayment—particularly if it came from the emperor. This has to be something that put pressure on Rufus, that he’s afraid will bring him to collapse. That means a commercial loan. Would Maecenas or Pollio be willing to put so much pressure on a member of their circle?”
Titus shrugged. “They’re both rich as kings from business, so you can be sure they know all about commercial loans.” With a touch of nervousness, he went on, “Pollio, by all accounts, is a dreadful person—utterly inhuman. Maecenas is supposed to be a gentleman, but … he’s no longer the friend of Augustus that he once was, so perhaps Rufus has fallen out with him as well.”
Hermogenes nodded. He had heard of the falling-out between the emperor Augustus and the onetime chief of his finances and head of his diplomatic service. The reasons for it, and its extent, were unclear: Maecenas had backed the emperor’s nephew Marcellus against Marcus Agrippa for the succession, and chosen the wrong horse; Augustus had been sleeping with Maecenas’s wife, and was resented; or, most simply, Maecenas was tired of politics and wanted to spend more time cultivating his business affairs and his outstanding collection of poets. There had been no open breach, so no explanation could be expected.
“Augustus quarreled with Pollio as well,” Titus went on, in a nervous whisper. “Just last year. Did you hear about that?”
Hermogenes shook his head, his interest sharpening. There had been a lot of talk about Publius Vedius Pollio in eastern financial circles at one time, but it had been dying down, and he’d heard no gossip about him at all for a couple of years. The man was a freedman’s son and military contractor—a military profiteer, most said, though only in whispers. The emperor had made use of his services to raise money during the war, and to order the tax system in the eastern provinces afterward. Pollio had become richer than any of the kings who had once ruled there.
“Pollio has a mansion on the Esquiline,” Titus told him. “An enormous place, with huge gardens—and fishponds. He likes fish, particularly lampreys.” He shuddered. “If any of his slaves misbehave, he feeds them to his lampreys—alive. Last year, he had invited the emperor over to dinner, and one of the slaves waiting on the table accidentally broke a cup of very valuable crystal. Pollio ordered him fed to the lampreys, and the poor wretch appealed to Augustus—begged him to persuade his master to have him put to death any other way then through the mouths of those unspeakable fish. The emperor urged Pollio to spare the man, and Pollio replied that he could do what he liked with one of his own slaves.”
Titus beamed suddenly. “So the emperor asked to see the rest of that set of crystal cups, as though he wanted to admire them, and he picked them up one by one, and dropped them. A hundred thousand sestertii, lying in shards on the floor! They say that Pollio just sat there, not daring to say anything. He couldn’t execute the slave for doing what the emperor had done, but they say he was very angry.”
“Good for the emperor!” Hermogenes exclaimed, surprised to be uttering the sentiment with sincerity.
“That’s what I thought.” Titus smiled.
Hermogenes had a drink of water and mulled over what his host had told him. “I think it’s probably Pollio,” he said at last.
Titus’s face fell. “I don’t see—” he began.
“Rufus is afraid of having his financial problems exposed,” Hermogenes explained. “Unless I am wrong about the whole business, I have to believe that he sees real danger there. That doesn’t fit with it being Maecenas. Presumably when he borrowed the money, he felt he was borrowing from a friend—a member of the imperial circle, and his own neighbor. But Pollio is a cruel and ruthless man, and now that he’s has fallen out with the emperor, Rufus would have real reason to feel worried about being indebted to him. Pollio might want to use him to get back into the emperor’s favor—or he might feel that if he ruined Rufus, it would repay the emperor for destroying his property. No, I think it’s Pollio—or possibly Pollio and Maecenas, but it is Pollio who worries him.”
“Unless it’s a commercial loan from some completely different source,” Titus pointed out.
“Would he have borrowed outside his circle if he could borrow inside it?”
Titus shrugged. “He borrowed from your uncle.”
“When he was in Cyprus, for money to spend in Cyprus. This would have been in Rome—or, I suppose, Picenum. Where is Picenum, anyway?”
Titus looked surprised. “Oh … other side of Italy from here, east and a bit north. I’ve never been there myself. It’s supposed to be an absolute backwater.”
“So there’d be nobody there to borrow from—except people a consul could dismiss as easily as he dismissed Nikomachos?”
“You have a point.” Titus sighed. He blinked anxiously. “Hermogenes, my dear, I don’t like this. That man is as dangerous as Tarius Rufus, and a great deal less straightforward.”
“I don’t like it either,” Hermogenes admitted. “But the alternative is to write off the debt, and I will not do it. Let me see if I can persuade the lamprey to kill the shark.”
Titus looked at him unhappily. There was a knock on the door, and Stentor came in, carrying a crutch, unpadded and far too long. Behind him was the barbarian woman Cantabra.
She had washed, and someone had found her a clean tunic, worn and somewhat too short, but far better than the one she had had before. She was carrying the pen case with the money in it thrust through her belt, and if she still ha
d the dagger, she’d hidden it. She nodded to the two gentlemen.
“The woman asked to see you, sir,” Stentor whispered to Hermogenes. “Sir, first could you just check this crutch? We need to know how high to make it.”
Hermogenes tried out the crutch, and Stentor marked the wood at what appeared to be the right height. He took it off to be finished, giving the woman a wide berth on his way past her.
“Har-mo-genes,” said the woman carefully, inclining her head again in what he thought was probably intended as respect, though it looked very haughty. “I have been thinking. The man the enemy killed last night was your bodyguard, yes?”
Hermogenes warily admitted that this was so.
“Then you need a new bodyguard!” Cantabra told him triumphantly. “You could hire me. I am good: you’ve seen that. I was a gladiator. Two years in the arena. I—”
“A gladiator?” Hermogenes repeated incredulously. He knew that there were such things as female gladiators—some people liked to watch women butcher each other—but they weren’t very common.
Cantabra nodded curtly. “I was enslaved when the Romans destroyed my people. They sold me to the arenas. I fought thirty times, won nineteen fights, lost two, was dismissed standing in the rest. I fought as a secutor and also as a dimachaeri. I am good. In January I was given the wooden sword and discharged—honorably, with my freedom, because I fought well. I would be a good bodyguard. People do not suspect a woman, they would not watch me the way they would a man. I would serve you faithfully and honestly for two denarii a day.”
Hermogenes stared at her for a long moment, completely taken aback by the idea. He was not sure he wanted this frightening creature anywhere near him.
Titus was even more aghast. “My dear friend!” he exclaimed. “You mustn’t even consider it!” He gave the woman a nervous glance, then leaned forward and continued in Greek, “I understand that this creature saved your life, and I bless her for it, but you’ve rewarded her generously and now you should send her off. She’s a total savage. Hardened legionaries were afraid to face the Cantabrians in the last war, and this … well, look at the creature!”
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