A Mist of Prophecies

by Saylor, Steven

  Steven Saylor’s fascination with Ancient Rome began in childhood. A history graduate and former newspaper and magazine editor, he has now completed numerous novels featuring Gordianus the Finder as well as his epic novels of the Roman Empire, Roma and Empire. His work has been widely praised for its remarkable accuracy and vivid historical detail. He divides his time between Berkeley, California and Austin, Texas. His web address is www.stevensaylor.com..

  Praise for the Roma sub Rosa series

  ‘A marvellously authentic slice of antiquity that will serve as a savoury treat for fans both of mystery and historical fiction.’

  Booklist

  ‘The best of two genres: a faithful and breezy historical novel and an entertaining whodunit.’

  New York Times

  ‘Sensuously wrtten ... spellbinding.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘Saylor has acquired the information of a historian but he enjoys the gifts of a born novelist.’

  Boston Globe

  ‘Saylor’s scholarship is breathtaking and his writing enthrals.’

  Ruth Rendell

  ‘It is Saylor’s particular skill to sketch the political intrigues of the time with great authenticity ... the sense that murky, terrible things are moving secretly beneath the surface of a fairly benign exterior increases in this brilliant novel.’

  San Francisco Review of Books

  ‘How wonderful to have a scholar write about ancient Rome; how comforting to feel instant confidence in the historical accuracy of the novel.’

  Sunday Times

  ALSO BY STEVEN SAYLOR

  Roma

  Empire

  THE ROMA SUB ROSA SERIES

  Roman Blood

  The House of the Vestals (short stories)

  A Gladiator Dies Only Once (short stories)

  Arms of Nemesis

  Catilina’s Riddle

  The Venus Throw

  A Murder on the Appian Way

  Rubicon

  Last Seen in Massilia

  A Mist of Prophecies

  The Judgement of Caesar

  The Triumph of Caesar

  In ancient myth, the Egyptian god Horus (whom the Romans called Harpocrates) came upon Venus engaged in one of her many love affairs. Cupid, her son, gave a rose to Horus as a bribe to keep him quiet; thus Horus became the god of silence, and the rose became the symbol of confidentiality. A rose hanging over a council table indicated that all present were sworn to secrecy. Sub Rosa (‘under the rose’) has come to mean ‘that which is carried out in secret’. Thus ‘Roma sub Rosa’: the secret history of Rome, as seen through the eyes of Gordianus.

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published by St Martin’s Press, USA, 2002

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2002

  This edition published by Robinson, 2012

  Copyright © Steven Saylor, 2002

  The right of Steven Saylor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-84529-242-3

  eISBN: 978-1-78033-603-9

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  To Rick Lovin

  THE ROMAN MONTHS

  Januarius (January, 29 days)

  Februarius (February, 28 days)

  Martius (March, 31 days)

  Aprilis (April, 29 days)

  Maius (May, 31 days)

  Junius (June, 29 days)

  Quinctilis (July, 31 days)

  Sextilis (August, 29 days)

  September (29 days)

  October (31 days)

  November (29 days)

  December (29 days)

  Kalends: the first day of the month

  Nones: the fifth or seventh day

  Ides: the thirteenth or fifteenth day

  CHRONOLOGY

  THE STORY OPENS ON 9 AUGUST 48 BC SOME DATES CITED BELOW ARE CONJECTURAL. THE ENTRIES THAT MENTION CASSANDRA ARE FICTIONAL.

  BC 82–80

  Sulla rules Rome as dictator.

  73

  The Vestal Fabia is tried for breaking her vow of chastity with Catilina. Spartacus begins the great slave revolt, suppressed the next year.

  63

  Cicero serves as consul; he suppresses Catilina’s conspiracy.

  56

  April: Marcus Caelius is tried for murder with Cicero defending; Clodia is behind the prosecution.

  55

  18 November: Milo and Fausta are married.

  52

  18 January: Clodius is murdered.

  April: Milo is tried for the murder of Clodius with Cicero defending, Marc Antony prosecuting; he is convicted and flees to Massilia.

  BC 49

  11 or 10 January: Caesar crosses the Rubicon.

  17 March: Pompey flees across the Adriatic Sea to Greece.

  19 May: Cicero’s daughter, Tullia, gives birth to a baby, who dies shortly thereafter.

  7 June: Cicero leaves Italy to join Pompey in Greece.

  2 August: Pompey’s forces in Spain surrender to Caesar.

  October: Massilia surrenders to Caesar, who pardons all the Roman exiles there except Milo. Caesar returns to Rome to accept the dictatorship for eleven days, expressly to conduct elections; Caelius elected praetor.

  November: News of Curio’s death in Africa reaches Caesar in Rome.

  48

  5 January: Caesar crosses the Adriatic Sea.

  Late February: Caelius erects his tribunal next to Trebonius and sets off a riot.

  Late March: Antony crosses the Adriatic Sea to join Caesar. Caelius sets off a second riot.

  April: Pompey and Caesar begin military operations at Dyrrachium. The Senate invokes the Ultimate Decree against Caelius. Milo escapes from Massilia to return to Italy.

  17 July: Pompey nearly overruns Caesar’s forces at Dyrrachium. Caesar decides to withdraw. The theatre of battle moves inland to Thessaly.

  5 August (the Nones of Sextilis): Cassandra is murdered.

  9 August: Cassandra is buried. Caesar and Pompey engage in battle near the town of Pharsalus in Thessaly.

  Cassandra:

  Apollo, Apollo!

  Lord of the ways, my ruin

  You have undone me once again, and utterly.

  Chorus:

  After the darkness of her speech

  I go bewildered in a mist of prophecies.

  – Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1080–82; 1112–13

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX
/>
  XX

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I

  The last time I saw Cassandra . . .

  I was about to say: the last time I saw Cassandra was on the day of her death. But that would be untrue. The last time I saw her – gazed upon her face, ran my fingers over her golden hair, dared to touch her cold cheek – was on her funeral day.

  It was I who made all the arrangements. There was no one else to do it. No one else came forward to claim her body.

  I call her Cassandra, but that was not her real name, of course. No parents would ever give a child such an accursed name, any more than they would name a baby Medea or Medusa or Cyclops. Nor would any master give such an ill-omened name to a slave. Others called her Cassandra because of the special gift they believed her to possess. Like the original Cassandra, the doomed princess of ancient Troy, it seemed that our Cassandra could foretell the future. Little good that accursed gift did either of the women who bore that name.

  She called herself what others called her, Cassandra, saying she could no longer remember her real name or who her parents were or where she came from. Some thought the gods had given her glimpses of the future to compensate for robbing her of the past.

  Someone else robbed her of the present. Someone snuffed out the flame that burned inside her and lit her with an inner glow such as I have seen in no other mortal. Someone murdered Cassandra.

  As I said, it fell to me to make the funeral arrangements. No outraged friend or lover, no grieving parent or sibling came forward to claim her. The young man who had been her sole companion, the mute she called Rupa – bodyguard, servant, relative, lover? – vanished when she was murdered.

  For three days her body rested on a bier in the foyer of my house on the Palatine Hill. The embalmers clothed her in white and surrounded her with pine branches to scent the air. Her killer had done nothing to destroy Cassandra’s beauty; it was poison that killed her. Drained of colour, Cassandra’s smooth cheeks and tender lips took on a waxen, opalescent quality, as if she were carved from translucent white marble. The hair that framed her face looked like hammered gold, cold and hard to the touch.

  By day, illuminated by sunbeams that poured through the atrium skylight, she looked no more alive than a white marble statue. But each night, while the rest of the household slept, I stole from my wife’s bed and crept to the foyer to gaze at Cassandra’s body. There were times – strange moments such as occur only in the middle of the night, when the mind is weary and flickering lamplight plays tricks on an old man’s eyes – when it seemed hardly possible that the body on the bier could be truly dead. The lamplight infused Cassandra’s face with a warm glow. Her hair shimmered with highlights of red and yellow. It seemed that at any moment she might open her eyes and part her lips to draw a quickening breath. Once I even dared to touch my lips to hers, but I drew back with a shudder, for they were as cold and unresponsive as the lips of a statue.

  I placed a black wreath on my door. Such wreaths are a warning in one sense, alerting others to the presence of death in the household, but in another sense they issue an invitation: come, pay your final respects. But not a single visitor came to view Cassandra’s body. Not even one of those compulsive gossips came to pester us, the type who make the rounds of the city looking for wreaths and knocking on doors of people they’ve never met, just to have a look at the latest corpse so they can deliver an opinion on the embalmers’ handiwork. I alone mourned Cassandra.

  Perhaps, I thought, death and funerals had become too commonplace in Rome for the passing of a single woman of unknown family, commonly thought to be as mad as – well, as mad as Cassandra – to excite any interest. The whole world was swept up in a civil war that dwarfed all other conflicts in the history of the world. Warriors were dying by the hundreds and thousands on land and on sea. Despairing wives were wasting into oblivion. Ruined debtors were found hanging from rafters. Greedy speculators were stabbed in their sleep. All was ruin, and the future promised only more death and suffering on a scale never known before by humankind. Beautiful Cassandra, who’d haunted the streets of Rome uttering shrill, crazy prophecies, was dead – and no one cared enough to come and see her body.

  And yet, someone had cared enough to murder her.

  When the period of mourning was done, I summoned the strongest of my household slaves to lift the bier onto their shoulders. The members of my household formed the funeral cortege, except for my three-year-old grandson, Aulus, and my wife, Bethesda, who had been ill for quite some time and was not well enough to go out that day. In her place my daughter, Diana, walked beside me, and beside her walked her husband, Davus. Behind us walked my son Eco and his wife, Menenia, and their golden-headed twins, now old enough, at eleven, to understand the sombre nature of the occasion. Hieronymus the Massilian, who had been residing in my house since his arrival in Rome the previous year, also came; he had suffered much in his life and had known the pain of being outcast, so I think he felt a natural bond of sympathy with Cassandra. My household slaves, few in number, followed, among them the brothers Androcles and Mopsus, who were not quite as old as Eco’s children. For once, sensing the gravity of the occasion, they behaved themselves.

  So that all would be done fittingly, I hired three musicians to lead the procession. They played a mournful dirge, one blowing a horn and another a flute, while the third shook a bronze rattle. My neighbours in their stately houses on the Palatine heard them coming from a distance and either closed their shutters, irritated at the noise, or opened them, curious to have a look at the funeral party.

  After the musicians came the hired mourners. I settled for four, the most I could afford considering the state of my finances, even though they worked cheaply. I suppose there was no shortage of women in Rome who could draw upon their own tragedies to produce tears for a woman they had never known. These four had worked together on previous occasions and performed with admirable professionalism. They shivered and wept, shuffled and staggered but never collided, pulled at their tangled hair, and took turns chanting the refrain of the playwright Naevius’ famous epitaph: ‘ “If the death of any mortal saddens hearts immortal, the gods above must weep at this woman’s death . . .” ’

  Next came the mime. I had debated whether to hire one, but in the end it seemed proper. I had been told he came from Alexandria and was the best man in Rome for this sort of thing. He wore a mask with feminine features, a blond wig, and a blue tunica such as Cassandra wore. I myself had coached him on mimicking Cassandra’s gait and mannerisms. For the most part his gestures were too broad and generic, but every so often, whether by accident or design, he struck an attitude that epitomized Cassandra to an uncanny degree and sent a shiver through me.

  Funeral mimes are usually allowed a great deal of latitude to caricature and gently lampoon their subject, but I had forbidden this; it is one thing to sketch a loving parody of a deceased patriarch or a public figure, but too little was known about Cassandra’s life to offer fodder for humour. Still, the mime could not offer a portrait of her without imitating the one thing that everyone would recall about her: her fits of prophecy. Every so often, he suddenly convulsed and spun about, then threw back his head and let out a strange, unnerving ululation. It was not an exact imitation of the real thing, only a suggestion – not even remotely as frightening or uncanny as the real Cassandra’s episodes of possession by the god – but it was close enough to cause any bystanders who had ever seen Cassandra prophesy in the Forum or in a public market to nod and say to themselves, So that’s who’s lying upon that funeral bier. Directly after the mime came Cassandra herself, carried aloft and ensconced amid fresh flowers and evergreen boughs, her arms crossed over her chest and her eyes closed as if she slept. After Cassandra came the members of my household, marching in solemn procession for a woman none of them but myself had actually known.

  We strode slowly past the great houses on the Palatine and then down into the region of the Subura, where the narrow streets teemed with life.
Even in these impious days, when men scorn the gods and the gods scorn us in return, people pay their respects when a funeral passes by. They stopped squabbling or gossiping or bargaining, shut their mouths, and stood aside to let the dead and the mourning pass.

  Often, as a funeral cortege makes its way through Rome, others join the retinue, inspired to pay their respects by following along behind the family and adding to the train. This invariably happens with the funerals of the famous and powerful, and often even with those of the humble, if they were well-known and well liked in the community. But on that day, no one joined us. Whenever I looked over my shoulder, I saw only a gap behind the last of our retinue, and then the crowd closing ranks behind us, turning their attention away from the passing spectacle and getting back to their business.

  And yet, we were observed, and we were followed – as I soon would discover.

  At length, we came to the Esquiline Gate. Passing through its portals, we stepped from the city of the living into the city of the dead. Sprawling over the gently sloping hillsides, as far as the eye could see, was the public necropolis of Rome. Here the unmarked graves of slaves and the modest tombs of common citizens were crowded close together. Ours was not the only funeral that day. Here and there, plumes of smoke from funeral pyres rose into the air, scenting the necropolis with the smells of burning wood and flesh.