by Peter Tonkin
Which was as far as he had got in his one-sided bargaining before Artemidorus stepped past him. ‘What…’ he demanded, confused by the sudden intrusion of a large, square shoulder between himself and his victim. With his lantern in one fist and the club in the other, he didn’t know what to do with his hands. He straightened, the tiny brain in the tiny head seeking to make sense of the unexpected situation. The stranger said nothing. Still facing away from him, he took one more step forward and half-turned. The last thing that the doorkeeper saw was a blur of the stranger’s arm lashing back towards him at neck level. The last thing he felt was a sharp pain in the pit of his throat.
It was a move Artemidorus had perfected for his brief career in the arena. He called it The Scorpion and the manoeuvre had become so famous he had taken it for his fighting name: Scorpionis. As he stepped past the doorkeeper, he allowed the blade of the stolen dagger to slide away from his inner arm until it stood out at right angles behind his fist. Then he drove it backward as hard and fast as he could. The point went unerringly into the pit of the doorkeeper’s throat. It passed through the tubes there and slid between the vertebrae buried at the back of his thick neck, severing the great nerve of his spinal cord without cutting the blood vessels on either side. Then it wedged between the articulated bones which joined his skull to his spine. A finger-length of blade protruding just above the collar of his tunic. He might as well have been beheaded. In an instant, his lungs forgot how to breathe, his heart forgot how to beat and his legs forgot how to stand. There was no sound. No blood. Nothing but an instant and permanent cessation of life.
The doorkeeper collapsed, the expression on his face one of mild surprise. The weight of his body pulled the handle of the knife from the spy’s grip. Artemidorus caught the lantern as it fell and used his free hand to pull the dazed girl to her feet. She looked at the corpse and shuddered. ‘Take me away,’ she said, turning. Artemidorus turned at her side.
Then the pair of them froze. An unearthly animal scream rang out. Two red-gold points of light at the inner edge of the darkness showed Artemidorus that the doorkeeper’s dog had escaped from the slaves and returned seeking its master. Its howls were probably all he’d get by way of an elegy. But the noise the animal was making would bring the rest of the household back in moments. He took one last look at the dagger wedged immovably in the doorkeeper’s throat. Then he looked away. No point in lingering. Out of time.
Another bolt of lightning pulsed down, dead ahead. Lighting the downhill slope of the road to the Forum in front of them. Making the streaming water look like a river of gold. The picture was so striking that the pair of them hesitated, entranced, while it persisted – the brown brick walls on either side apparently gilded. Like the statue of Cleopatra so recently erected in the Forum beside that of the Goddess Venus Genetrix. The cobbled roadway ahead of them a river running deep with molten gold. Then, before the thunder could come – or the slave-catchers return – he said again, ‘Run!’
Puella obeyed automatically, her mind full of conflicting thoughts and fears. Seemingly unconnected to the body so thoughtlessly doing what her rescuer commanded. It was as though the storm had somehow entered her with all its wild and terrifying disorder. As though she was running from herself, as well as the peril she had got herself mixed up in. As though, in the end, she was running from Artemidorus and all the threats and promises, dreams and dangers he represented.
The doorkeeper’s death shocked her terribly. She had seen death before, of course, on rare visits to the arena with Lord Brutus, Lady Porcia or the Lady Servilia. But those deaths had been distant, down on the sand. And full of religious significance; blood shed and lives lost to honour the gods. The doorkeeper’s brutal execution had had nothing sacred about it. Indeed, she felt that she herself had caused it because her rescuer had done it to protect her. And he had done it within arm’s reach of her. But that terrifying dagger blow had saved her from rape – and worse. For she had no illusions about what would have happened to her had the doorkeeper taken first advantage of her. A fate from which the man who got her into this chaos in the first place had ultimately preserved her.
Her rescuer. She glanced over her shoulder at him as he ran close on her heels, illuminating her path and his face with the dead doorkeeper’s horn-sided lantern. This tall, powerful freedman with light-coloured hair curling out from beneath his leather cap, his thick red beard and his strange eyes that seemed one moment the colour of smoke and the next the colour of steel. This self-styled libertus freedman who showed no sign at all of ever having been a slave. Who moved, rested, did everything with a soldier’s confident swagger. Who had transformed himself so rapidly, so magically, from a casual labourer to a heroic being filling her mind with fascinating stories. Who had come to fill her dreams as well.
In spite of her name, Puella Africana had never been further from Rome than the latifundia country estate just north of Capua in Campania owned by the Lady Servilia’s second husband, the late Consul Decimus Junius Silenus, Lord Brutus’s stepfather. Here in the northernmost of the areas known as Magna Graecia, she had been born on a whim of the consul’s; the issue of a couple of Ethiopian slaves matched for colour and feature like a pair of horses destined to pull a chariot in a race or at a triumph. She never met her father who was sold on before her birth and had no memory of her mother who died from tertian fever soon after the infant Puella was weaned. But all her life, in the households first of the Lady Servilia and later in that of Lord Brutus, she had heard of the wonders to be found on the outer reaches of the empire she would never get the chance to explore.
Lord Brutus was spoken of as an able administrator. Though by reputation a governor – and landlord – noted for his greed. He often talked of his work with his uncle Quintus Servilius Caepio and, later, of another uncle, Marcus Porcius Cato. Father to cousin Porcia Catonis, whom Brutus had taken as his second wife. Much to the anger of his own mother, the Lady Servilia. It was strange that he surrounded himself with uncles and stepfathers when the identity of his own father was somehow open to question. So the gossip went. Cato and Lord Brutus were together in Cyprus and Cilicia, which were apparently untamed and fascinating lands. Full of wonderful sights, strange peoples and wild pirates. But the other household members who had accompanied him looked pityingly at her when she begged details from them. Keeping the master’s accounts in Salamis or Tarsus was no different from keeping them in Rome, they shrugged. The same could be said of cooking his meals or tidying his quarters.
Moreover, Lord Brutus’s occasional visitor, his brother-in-law the soldier-statesman Cassius, also told of his adventures escaping distant, dangerous Parthia. Leading to safety the last survivors of the seven legions Marcus Licinius Crassus lost so disastrously along with his head. All wiped out at the battlefield of Carrhae in distant Mesopotamia. Of his naval actions as Pompey’s fleet commander destroying Caesar’s navy off Sicily in the recent civil wars. But such tales were snippets overheard as she served men who hardly registered her presence. Like other, darker and more dangerous information. As they lay eating, drinking, reminiscing, planning and plotting.
Her Greek hero, however, with Ulysseus’ red beard and roving spirit, talked to her. Directly to her. And more and more often as he came to know her better. Held her wide and ardent gaze as he told tales of battles, adventures and wonders in places even Lord Cassius had never visited. For, although he was a common workman now, Artemidorus had been a soldier. He could talk of Egypt, from the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria to the Library; from the Theban Valley of the Kings to the wonders of the timeless Pyramids. And even the extravagances of Queen Cleopatra’s court. Of wild northern Gaul and the long-haired barbarians haunting the black forests there. Of the legendary Spartacus and his army of slaves and gladiators. Of Cilician pirates with whom he had sailed as captive, against whom he had fought in his youth beside the Divine Caesar himself.
And the tales had won her, though she did not yet understand how each of them h
ad been bait on a hook designed to tempt from her in return those very snippets of gossip that Artemidorus was currently making her carry to the men he said he worked for. The Tribune Enobarbus and the as yet nameless, mysteriously powerful figure they simply called ‘the general’.
Even at this time of night, part way through the third night watch, the Forum was a hubbub. In spite of the torrential rain, storm winds, dazzling lightning and deafening thunder, the heart of the city was beating as strongly as ever. Wagons, forbidden during daylight hours, hauled goods from the nearby family-owned farms and patrician-owned latifundia to the shops that stood beneath the tall insulae blocks of flats. To the warehouses that stood behind them. Hauled stone and brick to the part-completed as yet unnamed basilica, beside which they entered the open Forum itself. To the Basilica Aemeilia which bustled all along its three actus, three hundred and sixty foot, length. The better part of fifty shops there alone. With the Macellum fruit market beyond.
The markets were open for shopkeepers to top up their stock rather than to conduct business. That didn’t stop them turning a denarius or two of profit, however, by selling to the drovers, farmers and merchants anything they wanted to buy. And the gamblers, dice and knucklebone men, the prostitutes and pimps, bullies and footpads all crowded there. Also keen to relieve the yokels of their money. Warily watched by the triumviri capitales’ police patrols out to fight fires and keep the peace under the orders of the local aedile magistrate.
Everything in the centre of the city was a roar of commerce and a blaze of light. Light which travelled far enough up the house-packed hillsides to give the two running fugitives a beacon to head for and the brightness to guide them. And the stench to offend their nostrils.
As Artemidorus ran at Puella’s side past the tall, wood-scaffolded building site which was the nameless basilica, he felt the weight of tension begin to lift from his shoulders for the first time in one of the Divine Gaius Julius Caesar’s new seven-day weeks. Like the law forbidding wagons within the city during the day, the calendar had been introduced less than two years ago and he wasn’t quite used to it yet; still feeling vaguely robbed of the eighth day of the old week he had grown up with.
This time exactly seven nights ago, Artemidorus had thrown the first stone up onto the villa’s roof with sufficient force to smash a roof tile. Like his expertise with sword and dagger, he had been trained by Quintus in the use of pilum spear, the bow and arrow, and the sling. The venerable optio had also schooled him in the simple skill of throwing rocks with consistent accuracy. On the first of the rocks was written, ‘Brutus. See. Strike.’ He also held another with, ‘Shall there be a king in Rome while a Brutus lives?’ scrawled on it. These messages were copied from the graffiti adorning some of the walls nearby. Messages which, according to spymaster Tribune Enobarbus, had been thrown into the atrium and even the peristyle garden of Brutus’s house during the last few nights. The work of Gaius Cassius and his men. Like the graffiti. Which was why a couple of Artemidorus’s colleagues were working undercover in Cassius’ house as well.
The mission Tribune Enobarbus had given Artemidorus was simply to get into Brutus’ household and find out what effect all these messages were having on the man who famously displayed on his atrium wall a family tree tracing his ancestry back to the man who had founded the Republic. Lord Brutus might be hesitant about joining Cassius’ conspiracy, but he clearly saw himself as the latest son of an ancient aristocratic family whose forefather, Lucius Junius Brutus, had rid Rome of the last king more than four centuries earlier, founding the Republic of which so many patricians were so proud. A man likely enough, therefore, to die – or even to kill – in order to protect it. Which was why the Spartan spy had started throwing rocks at Brutus’ villa seven nights ago.
It was the size of the rocks Artemidorus threw with Cassius’ messages on them that damaged the roof. As he had planned they should. Damage which he, disguised as a freedman, offered to repair when he passed next day. Apparently by chance. An offer almost inevitably accepted by Brutus’s household. After all, it was better to employ a cheap freedman to do dangerous roof work than to risk killing or crippling a slave who might be expensive to replace. The spy eased himself into the household routines, exactly as he had planned, while he came and went about his business. Discovering more damage than they had suspected; drawing out the time it would take to repair. As he began to find out crucial details of the plot in which Cassius was trying to involve Brutus, Enobarbus’ fears soon proved to wildly underestimate the apparent reach and the danger of the conspiracy, and its immediacy.
During those seven days, Artemidorus swiftly built a list of patricians apparently directly involved. He had a roll of nearly twenty names within four days, and a growing suspicion that they wanted to act before the festival of Quinquatria on the 19th day of Mars, when the objective of all this murderous plotting planned to leave for a military campaign against the Parthians. A campaign and departure date which his old friends in the VIIth Legion, camped on Tiber Island, had been warned about long since. But as to Brutus, Cassius and their plans, he had none of the proof Enobarbus demanded before he dared take action against so many honourable, honoured, trusted and powerful men. Only a crushing certainty that time was fast running out.
Then Puella offered salvation. The beautiful, dark-skinned woman was her master’s current favourite. She attended him on almost all domestic occasions – and sometimes even at social meetings. At home and around in the city. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that as soon as his preoccupation with Cassius’ secret matter was over, he would take the nubile slave to his bed. Particularly as his wife the Lady Porcia, had somehow managed to cut her thigh. She had revealed the fact to no one, and had done little enough to treat it; like her father, a follower of the Stoic philosophy, to whom bodily demands – hunger, thirst, pain, ambition, joy and sorrow – were second to mental and spiritual fortitude. The wound was now badly infected. Her health was suffering. Her bed was closed to him, even though by all accounts his heart and mind were lately open to her.
In among all this gossip and rumour, Puella innocently revealed that she had been witness to several of the meetings about which the spy and his handler had only heard whispers. And if he would help her escape, she would tell her story to Artemidorus’ Tribune Enobarbus.
On the darkest watch of the fourth night, therefore, with an ironic smile and an amused shake of his head, Artemidorus scrawled ‘Brutus vigilat’ – ‘Brutus wake up’ on the largest stone yet and hurled it unerringly through the tiny upper window, utterly destroying it. The noise had made not only Brutus but the entire house wake up. And the window’s repair had been added to the list of jobs the cheerfully accommodating workman was employed to do when he returned to the villa next morning. Yesterday morning, in fact. It had taken one full working day and part of the next to finish the roof repairs and replace the frame of the shattered window with one designed to lift out. Allowing silent entry for one – and equally silent exit for two.
But all that was behind them now. What lay ahead was a desperate race to collate all the suspicions, test the proofs and witness, and get it all first to Tribune Enobarbus and then to the man Centurion Artemidorus of the Legio VII still thought of as the general, in spite of the fact that he was currently no longer holding military office. But he was still the man who commanded Enobarbus and, through him, the entire network that Artemidorus worked for. The only man whose intervention might bring the terrible plot to an abrupt and fruitless end.
Co-consul of the Republic Mark Antony.
Artemidorus and Puella slowed as they entered the Forum. But they could not afford to stop. Pursuit would be swift and even more ruthless now. The runaway slave was accompanied by the murderer of a freedman. A freedman servant of the most powerful aristocratic household in the city. The full weight of the Twelve Tables of Law would come down on them thought the spy with one of his brief, wry smiles – and neither could hope for the great lawyer Marcus Tu
llius Cicero to defend them. For Cicero’s name was written right up at the top of his precious list of probable conspirators. Just under the names of Cassius and Brutus, in fact.
Neither the fugitive slave nor her murderous companion were Roman citizens. Citizens could face the death penalty only for treason. Or for killing their fathers, as the famous trial of Sextus Roscius had shown nearly thirty-five years ago. In Cicero’s first great case. Therefore Puella and Artemidorus, would be crucified if they were caught. Unless, as the doorkeeper had said, the slave was scourged, branded, raped or forced to suffer whatever fate her master, his wife or his terrible mother decreed. Unless the murderer was sentenced to dejection – being thrown from the Tarpean Rock. Or projection – being chucked into the Tiber to drown. Or decapitation. Or strangulation. Or being sent to the galleys. A fate in many ways worse than death.
The first obstacle to the fugitives’ progress was a huge ox cart dragging high-stacked baskets of fish up from the Tiber wharves, heading for the pisces tabernas fish shops of the Basilica Aemilia. The massive animal emptied its bladder and bowels onto the ground as it passed them and the pounding rain washed the liquid away while instantly beginning to liquefy the more solid matter. The combined stench of fish and defecation was overpowering. And the association of the beast’s activities seemed to stir something in Puella. She suddenly started looking desperately around. Her face betraying much more tension than it had shown as she hung out of the window. ‘Where are you taking me?’ she demanded as they passed upriver of the ox-droppings. Preserving their sandals as best they could. And were immediately caught in the scarcely more fragrant swirl of equally rain-soaked men, women, animals and vehicles. All laden with baskets from which issued an eye-watering array of stenches.
