by Mike Ashley
“How many priests are there in the college of Saturn?” enquired Sollius without comment.
“But three,” replied the other. “It is a merely perfunctory tradition nowadays, and the sacrifices are few. The temple’s function to-day is chiefly that of Rome’s treasury. But it is never advisable to break entirely with even the superstition of the past, for who knows what magic truth may still linger in the ancient forms that swayed men’s minds for so long? The prevalent Stoicism, however, seems slowly to be killing priesthood, and all augury and divination with it.”
“I should like to see this priest of Saturn,” said Sollius.
“Alexias shall conduct you to him,” agreed Gennadius, “for, as I said, he and I are not on speaking terms. His chamber is behind the hangings at the temple’s western end.”
“Show me but the way,” said Sollius firmly, “and I will intrude upon him unannounced.”
The other stared at him. He could not forget that Sollius was a slave. Yet the slave had the Emperor’s authority to do as he would! Gennadius shrugged his shoulders, and when they were back again in the temple itself, he pointed to where some rich hangings were draped between two archaic pillars.
“Behind, you will see a small door,” he said, and stood and watched the slave pass on down the temple’s full length.
“What a strange fellow!” he murmured to Alexias. “Is he really as clever as you say?”
“Not as I say,” replied Alexias, a little waspishly, “but as the Emperor, my friend, wishes to think.”
“But what think you of him, O Alexias? That is what I wish to know. I have faith in your judgement of men.”
“He is certainly very astute,” answered Alexias cautiously, “but he has never before had so difficult a matter to solve, and I hold back my praises, Gennadius, until he has finally deserved them.”
“How wise! How philosophic!” murmured the chief clerk with every accent of admiration, though inwardly condemning the Emperor’s freedman for an empty time-server, in which opinion, as he really knew when less irritated, he was unjust.
Decius, meanwhile, had stood like a military statue until relieved of his torch by an attendant. He then strode a few paces in the wake of the man whom he was supposed to protect, and when he saw him disappear behind the hangings he remained there on guard.
The chamber of the priest of Saturn was furnished in the outworn fashion of the days of Augustus. It was bare and austere. The man seated on a folding ivory stool, reading a roll of ancient manuscript, was at least seventy years of age, thin, pale, and aristocratic, with long, compressed lips, a hawklike nose, and piercing dark eyes. Sollius had entered without ceremony, announcing his presence merely by a cough.
“Who are you? What do you want?” demanded the priest of Saturn, looking up in surprise and displeasure.
Sollius explained who he was, and produced his credentials, a small tablet of wax impressed with the private imperial seal.
“I have already been questioned by the Augustus himself,” was the haughty answer, “and have nothing to tell you.”
“There is, I understand, a secret way from this part of the temple into the vaults below,” persisted Sollius.
“That is well and widely rumoured,” said the priest with a faint smile of condescension, “but not how to find it. That is passed on from priest to priest, and is known only to them. I cannot divulge it.”
Sollius gave him a long glance.
“But there is such a way?” he asked finally.
“There is,” replied the other. “But it does not lead to that part of the vaults which houses Rome’s treasure,” he went on. “I can tell you that.”
“When did you yourself descend to the vaults last?” pursued Sollius.
“Many years ago,” answered the priest of Saturn with a flash of scornful amusement in his eyes. “I am an old man; the steps downward are not easy for the aged; also, there is nothing there except darkness, damp, and empty chambers and passages. In the days of the Republic it was different. The Temple of Saturn had then a more important life. But now – ”
He spread out his hands in a gesture of resignation.
“Have you visited the treasury vaults?” he asked.
“I have visited them,” replied Sollius precisely.
“Did you find any indication of how they were entered or forced?”
“I can answer only the Augustus as to that,” said Sollius.
The priest of Saturn smiled thinly.
“You are quite right; I should not have asked. Did you see the silver statuette of Verus? It is a pity that so lovely a thing is so tarnished. Had he been alive, I should know, at least, who loved jewels and gold beyond most men – not, I mean, for their value in money, but for their beauty – and you might not have had to seek . . . farther. But, of course, he is dead.”
“Yes, he is dead,” agreed Sollius dully, and then added with a flash of humour, “I do not really suspect him.”
The other laughed, and Sollius bowed, and adroitly withdrew before the conversation could be prolonged, as he felt it would have been, uselessly.
He found the others waiting for him where he had left them, the centurion still as though on guard, and Gennadius and Alexias conversing in whispers. At that end of the temple there was considerable activity of scribes, seated at desks in rows as in some great business of money-changing.
“What more would you see, O Sollius?” asked Gennadius, coming a pace or so forward to meet him. But his smile was false. Alexias, carefully watching so as to be able to report every detail to the Emperor, had taken no personal part whatever as yet in the investigation, and took no part now. He was an observer, not a participant, perhaps too jealous as a freedman to help a slave unnecessarily, yet not jealous enough – for, at bottom, he was a just man – wilfully to hinder, and he was waiting for the answer of Sollius with a certain studied mingling of indifference and curiosity.
“I have seen, I think, all that may be seen here,” came the slave’s words after a brief hesitation, and Alexias found that he had been holding his breath, but now he expended it in what was almost a sigh of relief. “I may come hither again tomorrow,” Sollius went on. “But now I would return home to my master’s house to think. Farewell!”
He departed without further courtesy, and left both the chief treasury clerk and the Emperor’s freedman slightly outraged by his casual manners. Decius the centurion marched stolidly at his heels, and saw the slave safely to the house of Sabinus the senator, where, at the Emperor’s command, he was to be billeted during the course of the investigations, and so be at hand when necessary, whether by day or by night.
“How did it go, Sollius?” asked young Lucius, the slave’s usual confidant and sometimes his assistant.
Sollius related his morning’s visit to the Temple of Saturn in close detail. The telling served not only to inform Lucius of everything, but likewise to arrange it all neatly within his own mind. They were pacing up and down in their favourite solitude, beside the small carp-pool behind the chariot-house.
“It is indeed a puzzle!” breathed Lucius. “How could anyone pass through that locked and chained grille?”
“Someone did,” answered Sollius dryly. “Two, as I guess, were in it.”
“Think you, then, that they stole the key? But, since it never leaves the person of this Gennadius, how?”
“The key was not stolen. The grille, Lucius, was never unlocked, nor unchained,” said Sollius in a tone of certainty. “I am sure of all that.”
Lucius gaped.
“But – ” he began.
“I asked myself these two questions,” Sollius broke in with a smile. “Was the gate of the grille opened? If it was not opened, is there another entrance? I think that the gate of the grille was not unlocked and unchained; but there is another entrance from the temple itself. The priest of Saturn did not deny it. But he did deny going down by the secret way for many years, and I believed him.”
“But you said
, Sollius,” interjected Lucius, “that the secret way down does not come out behind the grille.”
“That is so,” returned Sollius placidly. “But the priest of Saturn made a slip. Did you not notice it, and see the implication?”
Lucius stared at his companion blankly.
“I have told you everything he said,” pursued Sollius, and he gave the youth a sly, whimsical glance. “You do not see it?”
Lucius puckered his brows, and then shook his head.
“He asked me,” said Sollius, “if I had seen the silver statuette of Verus. This, as I told you, is in the chamber behind the grille, and invisible from the grille because of the winding passages. Yet he had himself told me that he had not been in the vaults for many years – and again I say that I believe him. Moreover, this silver statuette had been placed in its marble niche but a year ago. How did he know that the statuette was – tarnished? Because he had been told so. He could not know it otherwise. Therefore, though he had not been in that treasury chamber himself, he has spoken to someone who has been there. It is that person whom I must discover.”
“Might he not have heard it from Gennadius?” asked Lucius.
“They are not on speaking terms,” replied Sollius. “I told you.”
“Did you not ask him how he knew?”
“The time was not ripe. I shall ask him at the right moment, be assured!”
“He made a slip indeed!” said Lucius.
Sollius pursed his lips.
“I am not so sure, after all,” he murmured. “Perhaps he was seeking to tell me something – by suggestion, I mean, rather than by statement. He has a very clever face. If I can, I would learn who it was who told him of the tarnished silver statuette by other methods than by direct questioning. I think it would be more – fruitful. Nor, I feel, would direct questioning succeed. His reticence has made that plain – and he was reticent even with the Augustus himself.”
“How will you go about it, Sollius?” asked Lucius curiously.
“I shall not go about it,” replied Sollius with a sly laugh. “You will!”
“I?” exclaimed Lucius, astonished and yet delighted, for he loved helping Sollius in his investigations, partly because of the excitement in doing so, but partly, too, because it took him away from his kitchen duties, for his position as a young slave in the house of Sabinus the senator was ordinarily that of one of the cook’s menials, an occupation of much drudgery and little amusement.
“You,” repeated Sollius. “Loiter outside the Temple of Saturn, and strike acquaintance with one of the porters. Any gossip about the old priest of Saturn – such as constant, or unusual, visitors to him of late – may kindle a little lamp in my brain. Go, Lucius, at once. I will explain to Tuphus the cook.”
Lucius obeyed eagerly, and sped off like a stone from a Dacian sling.
Sollius remained by the carp-pool, pacing round and round in an unbroken muse. He admitted to himself that he was puzzled; the problem was like nothing that he had investigated before, and he did not know whether he was equal to its solution. But though a slave, he was a proud man, and he whipped his mind once more. He knew how entrance through the grille had been effected. He had not admitted that to Lucius, and certainly had not divulged it to either Gennadius or Alexias; he would keep it to himself for a while. He felt it was perhaps a dangerous thing to know, and assuredly a dangerous thing to blurt out until he had the whole matter plain in his mind and ready for laying before the Emperor.
His cogitations were abruptly broken by the running arrival of one of his fellow slaves.
“Our master wants you,” the latter gasped out breathlessly. “You are to go to his private chamber at once.”
Shaking himself free of his concentration, Sollius followed his summoner indoors, though more sedately than he had been fetched, and then proceeded alone through the cool, dark atrium to the inner chamber of Sabinus, his master and owner.
He paused on the threshold before entering, for he could hear many voices in a continual murmur of conversation. He was surprised and not a little annoyed. Surely Sabinus was not fool enough to waste the time of a man devoted to the Emperor’s most secret business by exhibiting him as a curiosity to a pack of his idle friends? He knew only too well how garrulous Sabinus was, and how he was wont to boast over his slave’s unusual aptitude for solving mysteries, but now that slave was more the Emperor’s servant than his master’s, and the senator should have recognized the position. With an impatient click of his tongue, Sollius entered, only to be brought to an amazed standstill as soon as his eye beheld the company whom his master was entertaining.
“Ah, there you are!” cried Sabinus, who obviously had been nervously on the look-out for him. “This is the fellow, Cæsar. Come hither, Sollius!”
A silence had fallen at the slave’s appearance in the doorway, and every gaze was now fixed upon him as he moved forward to where his master stood beside a youth, who was dressed in the extreme of fashion, jewelled and scented – a dark, handsome, sullen youth, with lowering brows and a low forehead overhung by a crisply trimmed fringe. His hair, otherwise, was cut close to his head. Though he had not seen this young man before, Sollius knew immediately that it was the Emperor’s son, already associated by his doting father in the imperial power, though but little over sixteen years of age and without any particular gifts except for the sports of the amphitheatre.
Sollius and Commodus took stock of one another as the former humbly approached: Commodus with more than a touch of insolence in his bearing, Sollius with a direct and piercing glance, such as the other was clearly unaccustomed to receive, and an unwilling flush suddenly stained the young Cæsar’s cheeks. With an inward smile, the slave wondered whether the prince had ever been embarrassed by a human eye before – unless by his father’s, and Marcus Aurelius was credited with a parental indulgence which was the very reverse of disciplinary.
“You are the slave Sollius?” asked Commodus in a husky voice that seemed only recently to have broken.
“Yes, Cæsar, this is my Sollius,” put in Sabinus before his slave could reply.
“I have heard of you,” went on Commodus without taking the least notice of the senator and, in fact, almost turning his back upon his host. “You were very clever over my mother’s jewels. I laughed for a whole hour! I am ready to like a man who has properly amused me.”
Sollius bowed low.
“The most honourable Sabinus tells me that he has lent you again to my father,” pursued Commodus.
Once more Sollius bowed. He could more easily feign humility in his limbs than in his eyes.
“Has he lost one of his precious philosophical treatises?” the prince asked with a laugh.
“If he has, Cæsar,” replied Sollius quietly, “he has not employed me to find it.”
The amusement died out of both voice and glance of the imperial youth, leaving only a tigerish glare and felinity in its place, as he demanded peremptorily what thing it was for which his father had employed him to look.
“After all, slave, I am half the Augustus,” Commodus reminded him, “and I have a legitimate interest in what affects my father. Do you search for some thread of conspiracy against him – or against me?”
“No, Cæsar,” answered Sollius.
Commodus waited as though in the sure expectation that the slave would say more, but being disappointed, frowned, and asked haughtily:
“What has he lost? Even my mother does not know!”
Sollius, on an impulse, knelt before the young man.
“Lord,” he said, “the Augustus has laid secrecy upon me like a yoke upon the neck of a pair of ploughing oxen. I dare not tell you!”
“Not tell, not tell, Sollius,” cried Sabinus irritably, “when the lord Commodus commands?”
Commodus himself had said nothing, but was standing motionless, biting his painted finger-nails.
“The Augustus commanded otherwise,” said Sollius. “Not even to the lord Commodus can I tell anything
.”
Sabinus puffed out his cheeks in his annoyance at his promise to the young prince going unfulfilled.
“I like not this in you, Sollius,” he muttered. “I might have you whipped for it.”
The slave rose slowly to his feet.
“At the moment, master, I am the Emperor’s; when I return as your slave, I will submit to your punishment,” he said with dignity.
“There, there, Sollius,” answered Sabinus, a little abashed, “I spoke hastily. The Emperor’s commands must come first.”
“It is a pity, slave,” said one of the young courtiers standing about Commodus and who had accompanied him to the senator’s house, “that you do not remember that even emperors are mortal, and that it is wise to anticipate the future. You seem as clever at losing as at finding!” he added with a malicious smile.
But it was not with his eyes that Sollius was really noticing him, but with his nose. He had savoured before the particular scent which hung about the young man’s rich garments, and knew very well where: in the bedroom of the Empress Faustina when he had been investigating the supposed loss of her jewels; and, once again, a man so scented had brushed past him and Decius from the doorway of one of the lowest taverns in the Subura during the same investigation. Was he the same man? He had not seen his face then.
“Peace, Gaius,” cried Commodus. “The slave has not offended me.”
He gave Sollius, nevertheless, a suspicious and venomous look, and then with affected indolence turned away to his host. Sabinus made a curt sign of dismissal, and Sollius was only too glad to escape from the crowded chamber and from the curious eyes of those who had watched every imperial gesture and listened to each imperial word so as to adjust their own attitude to the notorious slave of Sabinus with the right obsequious agreement.
In the corridor Sollius met his master’s household overseer, an Apulian freedman, for Sabinus was a widower.
“I did not hear that the Emperor’s son had been invited to-day,” said the slave, pausing as they passed one another.
