Render Unto Caesar

by Gillian Bradshaw

  The priest prayed that the earth would be light upon the body of the departed, that Mercury would guide his soul safely to the Underworld, and that Lord Serapis, consort of Isis, would receive him kindly. He poured out a libation of wine and oil and sprinkled the assembled mourners with water from the Nile. The lamb brought for the purpose was led up and slaughtered. A cemetery attendant thrust a torch into the heart of the heap of firewood.

  “Farewell, Phormion!” Menestor’s voice cried, in Greek, and a ragged chorus of other voices repeated it in Latin, “Farewell!”

  Hermogenes sat quietly in the litter until the fire was burning fiercely. Eventually Cantabra came, drew back the curtains on the side facing the pyre, and helped him out. “Two of them followed,” she informed him in a low voice. “But they are both at the entrance to the cemetery, watching from there.”

  He nodded. He had been certain that the guardsmen would not actually attend the funeral of a man their comrades had killed. He beckoned Menestor over. The young man came reluctantly, and stood motionless while his master took off the borrowed cloak and draped it round him. The curtains of the litter hid them from the observers at the cemetery gate.

  Hermogenes adjusted a fold of the cloak to cover Menestor’s head. “Just get into the litter and let them take you back,” he ordered. “Keep the curtains closed. When you get to the house, keep the cloak well over your head, and let them help you to the door. Remember to limp on the right ankle.”

  Menestor scowled, but said only, “Yes, sir.”

  The litter bearers were by this time looking worried and bewildered, and the priest came over frowning with concern. “Is something the matter?” he asked.

  Hermogenes had resolved not to involve the religious man in his plans any more than he had to. The priest knew that the guardsmen had been sent by Rufus, but not why. Hermogenes had managed to imply that it was just an attempt to intimidate him about the debt. Now he put on a look of embarrassment. “Last night I checked my strongbox and found that I did not have enough coin to pay for all of this,” he said. This was true, though he did not add that he’d already given Titus a bank draft for the cost.

  The priest was horrified, and he went on quickly, “There is no need to be worried! My friend Titus Fiducius will pay you, but I must get some money to repay him. I am a businessman, and I can draw on an account with a bank in the city. I confess, though, I am somewhat concerned about what those guardsmen would do if they knew I was collecting a large amount of money, so I don’t want them to know.” He made a point of catching the eyes of the litter bearers as well as he said this. They nodded understanding: they were even less clear about why the guards were there, but they did agree that it wouldn’t be good to let barbarians know he was carrying money. “I am sending my slave back in the litter in my place,” he went on. “He is very distressed at the loss of his fellow anyway, poor young man, and he is not needed for this errand. My bodyguard will fetch a sedan chair to take me to the bank. I hope this is no problem?”

  It wasn’t. The bearers moved the litter to keep the watchers’ eyes baffled while the priest helped Hermogenes over to sit down on the pedestal of a funerary monument, hidden from view. He sat waiting, crutch across his lap, while the procession reassembled itself and left. The others would return to the house, where the sacrificed lamb would be roasted to provide the funeral feast, and the assembled mourners would drink to the memory of Phormion. Cantabra would slip away quietly en route.

  The fire still blazed, and the air was thick with the scent of burning flesh. Ashes, gray and crimson, drifted from an overcast sky. The cemetery attendant cast him a few curious glances as he raked up stray embers, but said nothing. He would keep the pyre burning through the day, and the following morning collect the charred bones for burial.

  He waited for what seemed a long time. His mind darted nervously about at first, worrying about the neighborhood, the unseen guards, the meeting ahead of him. Then he made himself think of Phormion instead. He remembered when his father had first bought the bodyguard, picking the man out in the slave market to replace an attendant who had grown too old for the work, and leading him back to the house. Phormion had been about twenty then, a big, dark, silent young man, obedient but sullen: his previous owner had considered him stupid and beaten him frequently. As he became accustomed to a more tolerant household he had grown lively, and with it, bad-tempered. He had got into fights, at home and in the market, and he had stolen wine from the household stores and been beaten for it. Then he had found a girl in a neighbor’s house. For about a year he had become all smiles—and then he’d broken with her and caused havoc. Eventually, though, he had settled down, seemed to resign himself to his place in life, and become the man his master now mourned: quiet, reliable, largely good-natured, though with an occasional outburst of drinking and violence.

  “Farewell, Phormion,” Hermogenes whispered to the fire. “I am sorry I was not wise enough to preserve your life. May the gods receive you kindly.”

  At last there came footsteps behind him, and he twisted round and saw Cantabra arriving with the sedan chair.

  The bearers were strangers, hired at the livery stable up the road. It was unlikely they even knew Gaius and Quintus Rubrius: this was the other side of the city from the Aemilian Bridge. Cantabra had been instructed to tell them that he needed to go directly from a funeral to a business meeting, and they greeted him politely, with no trace of suspicion—though he did notice the shocked looks cast at his bandaged face and splinted ankle.

  “I was robbed in the Subura,” he explained, unasked; and the looks changed to sympathy.

  “Happens all the the time, sir,” one of the bearers told him. “You want us for the day, then? Or just for the trip to your meeting?”

  “For the day, please. I should pay you half your fee now, half this evening?”

  He paid them a denarius as the advance, which pleased them, then got up. Cantabra pulled the cloak he had loaned her from her shoulders and handed it to him silently: a gentleman did not go a business meeting wearing just a tunic. He propped himself up with the crutch, draped the garment as well as he could, then allowed the bearers to help him into the chair. He was painfully aware that he was a travesty of his normal business self.

  “I have the misfortune to have a meeting at the house of Vedius Pollio on the Esquiline,” he informed the chair bearers, when he was seated. “At the fifth hour. Do you happen to know what time it is now?”

  It was partway through the fourth hour, the men thought. There should be no problem. They would follow the road up along the old wall to the Esquiline Gate, then go left into the city; the house was not far from there. Yes, they knew where it was.

  They began to walk steadily through yet another area of tenements. To their left the old wall appeared at intervals like a black outcrop in a gray sea of unwashed humanity. Cantabra walked silently beside the litter, her red hair brilliant in the sun. Her face was still sullen.

  “Cantabra,” Hermogenes said, after a long silence. He knew he was about to sacrifice some more dignity to her, and, worse, do it in front of the chair bearers, but he was not comfortable about the scene in the dining room, and he did not want to go into the meeting with Pollio feeling uncomfortable about his bodyguard.

  The woman looked up at him quickly, her eyes hard.

  “I am sorry I spoke to you that way, as though I were your master,” he said quietly. “I understood afterward that you felt I had betrayed a confidence. I did not mean to do so, and I regret causing you offense.”

  The blue eyes regarded him for another long moment in silence. “I hadn’t asked you to keep quiet about what I told you,” she said abruptly. “You were not at fault.” She looked away, then kicked viciously at a loose stone on the road and sent it spinning into the side of a building. “You were even right. That woman Tertia, she isn’t going to be like they were in the school. She wouldn’t laugh at me if I cried.”

  “People laughed at you if you mo
urned for your dead?” he asked, appalled.

  The eyes came up again, angry this time. “You think gladiators are supposed to cry? When you arrive in the school they tell you that you are there to be burned, to be chained, to be beaten, and to be killed with iron. The free men who enlist swear an oath to endure it. The rest of us just endure it.”

  “This was a gladiatorial school?”

  She nodded shortly. “Taurus’s school. In the Campus Martius.”

  “You was a gladiatrix?” one of the bearers asked her, in surprise.

  She nodded again, scowling.

  “Huh! You was, yah! but I didn’t recognize you without the armor! I like the games. Cantabra. You fought Bellona at the consular games in January, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, still scowling. “I won my freedom.”

  “Well, good luck to you! That was a good fight.”

  Cantabra kicked another stone, scowling so forbiddingly that the bearer fell silent.

  They trudged on through the narrow streets. There was another cemetery on the right, fenced off and planted with trees. A pack of scrawny dogs clustered around something under one of them, tearing at it and snapping at each other. Cheap slave burials, Hermogenes thought with a shudder. He wondered if it would really have made any difference to Phormion if he’d been interred that way. He knew it made a difference to himself.

  “Lord,” Cantabra said suddenly, “does your wife know that you are doing this?”

  He looked at her in surprise. “Doing what? And my wife’s dead.”

  “Fighting,” she said flatly. “But if she is dead it was a pointless question.”

  “She died of a childbed fever five years ago. You believe I should simply accept being robbed?”

  She gazed at him thoughtfully, then shrugged. He remembered her earlier enthusiasm for an attempt to humble a Roman consul, and felt resentment at the way she’d changed her mind. Strange woman! Why should she be so concerned about what his wife thought of what he was doing?

  Then he realized that he knew exactly why: because her own husband had fought Rome, and lost not merely his life but her freedom and the lives of their children as well. Of course she would remember that now, marching beside him into another conflict. In a way, the only surprising thing was that she was still beside him, that she hadn’t just excused herself and left.

  Perhaps she trusted him to win. The thought warmed him, and he realized, with a stab of shame, just how frightened and desperate he must be, if the fact that a barbarian bodyguard had faith in him made such a difference. He cast another glance at her stern profile under the fiery hair and felt comforted, but he said nothing. The chair bearers turned left smoothly to pass through the Esquiline Gate.

  It was not surprising that the sedan-chair bearers had known the location of the house of Vedius Pollio. The place was undeniably a palace, and would have been a landmark in any city. They walked along the enclosing wall for a long time before they came to the gatehouse, a substantial building with two separate gates—a small one for foot traffic, and a larger one for carriages.

  There were four men on duty at the gatehouse. They were not barbarians, like Tarius Rufus’s men; they had more the appearance of Roman toughs in red livery. Their swords looked military enough, though. When the sedan chair approached the gate, one of them stiffened and whispered to the others, and they all stared at Cantabra.

  “This your rich Greek?” one asked her, as the chair stopped. “Not in good shape, is he? What happened? He try to bed you?”

  Cantabra stiffened. So did her employer. “My name is Marcus Aelius Hermogenes,” he snapped. “I have an appointment with Publius Vedius Pollio.”

  The man who’d spoken looked startled, then embarrassed. Hermogenes saw that they hadn’t expected him to understand that much Latin. He sat very straight in the chair, glaring haughtily down at the guard.

  “Yes, sir,” the man said, more humbly. “He instructed us. You may pass.”

  Pollio’s formal gardens were larger and grander than Rufus’s, and merged on the left with informal groves of tall pines, planted gracefully down a terraced hillside. There was a multitude of ponds and fountains. Hermogenes eyed them unhappily, wondering which of them contained the infamous lampreys.

  The house itself was huge and ostentatious, faced with white marble columns whose tops were gilded and shone blindingly in the sunshine; the porch they enclosed was entirely paved with yellow Numidian marble. A slave doorman posted before the domed front entrance hall came out to greet them. Hermogenes produced the letter with Pollio’s seal, and the doorman, smiling widely, welcomed him, and asked the bearers to set down the chair.

  “Are they your own people, sir?” he asked. To Hermogenes’ surprise, he spoke in Greek, with the accent of an Asiatic.

  “No,” Hermogenes admitted, “but I’ve hired them for the day.”

  “Then they may wait in the stables.”

  Hermogenes let the bearers help him from the chair, and propped himself on the crutch while the doorman spoke to them in Greek-accented Latin. He was dismayed at the way his heart sank to see men and chair trudge off. He told himself that it made very little difference: if his host didn’t want him to leave, it wouldn’t help him to have bearers.

  The doorman looked doubtfully at Cantabra. “What is she?” he asked.

  “My hired attendant,” Hermogenes replied. “Please. Last time she came to this house, as my messenger, there was some trouble between her and Lord Vedius Pollio’s bodyguards. This time I think it would be better to keep her with me.”

  “I will ask about it,” said the doorman. “This way, sir.”

  The doorman handed him over to another, more senior Greek slave, who once again queried Cantabra’s presence. Hermogenes repeated the story about the trouble with the bodyguards, and the slave seemed to remember it. He agreed that it would be better if she stayed with her employer.

  They were led through an atrium and left down a corridor overlooking a garden, then left again. The house was a maze of marble floors and frescoed walls, rich carpets and priceless artworks. Hermogenes limped after the slave slowly, hop-thump on his crutch, aware of Cantabra following at his heels. He found himself inexpressibly glad of those soft footfalls at his back.

  At last their attendant knocked on a door of polished maple. A voice replied, and the slave went through and bowed deeply. “The Alexandrian businessman Hermogenes, sir,” he said.

  Hermogenes went through into the room. It was a study, a comparatively small room overlooking the terraced hillside, with a bookcase along one wall and a massive desk of carved ebony along the other. The man sitting at the desk turned in his chair to face the visitor, and the slave immediately hurried forward to turn the chair itself so that he could do so more comfortably. The master of the house was old, though the marks of sickness on him probably made him seem older than he was. He had the wrinkled, sagging skin of a man who has once been fat but has lost weight; his face was pale and puffy with ill health and his fingers were swollen like sausages; his lower eyelids drooped, showing rheumy redness. He wore no cloak, only a loose tunic of fine Indian cotton, dyed yellow with saffron and embroidered with gold. He inspected his visitor with an expression of growing amusement.

  “Herakles!” he exclaimed, in Greek. “Did Lucius Rufus do that?”

  Hermogenes made himself smile. “I was robbed in the Subura. I understand it happens all the time. Do I have the honor of speaking to Publius Vedius Pollio?”

  Pollio smiled. “You do indeed. Socrates! A chair for my guest.”

  The attendant bowed, shot off, and returned a moment later with a folding chair of carved cherrywood. Hermogenes sat down warily, holding his crutch in front of him. The seat was low, and he found that he now had to look up at Pollio, whose own chair was tall and thronelike. Again he was glad of Cantabra standing silently behind him.

  “I believe you speak fluent Latin,” Pollio told him. “An unusual accomplishment for a Greek. Which lang
uage would you prefer for our business?”

  Hermogenes spread his hands. “I defer entirely to you, lord.”

  “Let’s speak Latin, then,” said Pollio, switching to that language. “It will be a novelty to conduct business with a Greek in my own language. Does the arrogance of that never strike you? That your people expect even their conquerers to learn Greek?”

  “If our conquerers choose to learn our language, lord, would it not be arrogant to reject their efforts?”

  “Oh, very smooth. And the report was right: you are fluent. What is it you want of me, Marcus?—if I may presume to use your first name?”

  Hermogenes found himself off-balance and embarrassed. He had barely even thought of that Marcus as a name: it had been a title, an indication of the status and power of his Roman citizenship. Pollio was watching him with amusement, well aware of it. He felt at once that it would be a mistake to ignore that thrust.

  “I am deftly rebuked, lord,” he said. “Tarius Rufus called me Greekling and Egyptian, yet never made me feel I had as little right to my Roman name as you do simply by using it. It is a name which I claim a right to, however, so if you wish to use it, how can I object?

  “My lord, to answer your question: I am here to see whether you wish to buy a debt which I am owed by Tarius Rufus. I inherited it with the estate of my kinsman Nikomachos of Cyprus, but it has proved difficult to collect, and, since you are his major creditor, it seemed best to offer you the chance to consolidate the loan before I tried anyone else.”

  “Difficult to collect?” replied Pollio, and leaned back in his throne smiling. “Impossible, I should think.”

  “I think not,” said Hermogenes evenly. “Rufus has enemies who would be willing to protect me in order to see him disgraced by a summons for debt. Or perhaps Gaius Maecenas would buy the debt from me, if you have no interest in it.”