Saturnalia

12

For a few minutes longer I sat on the portico of the temple, basking in the light of the sunny morning. With most of the litter of the holiday swept up and carted away, the Forum was almost back to its customary state of majestic beauty, and the eye was not distracted by the usual swarming crowds. Rome at its most beautiful, though, can be a strange and dangerous place.

I decided that there was one person I ought to talk to, although I dreaded the prospect. I had no excuse to procrastinate, save my own cowardice. On the other hand, I consider cowardice to be an excellent reason to avoid danger. It has saved my life many times. But time was pressing and this was one thin possibility and it had to be pursued. With a sigh of resignation I got up from the bench, descended the steps of the little temple, and began the walk around the base of the Capitol to the Field of Mars and the Circus Flaminius.

It was just about noon when I reached the warren of stalls and tents. There were not as many as there had been three days before. Could it really have been only three days? It hardly seemed possible. Many of the vendors had disposed of all their wares during the holiday and had returned home for more. Others had ended their business season and would not be back until spring.

I half-hoped that Furia would not be there either. On the lengthy walk I was forced to face my fear. It wasn’t just that she was a woman of great presence who was a little too handy with a knife-I had confronted murderous females before without trepidation-no, I was forced to admit it was because she was a striga. Educated, aristocratic Roman I might be, but my roots were buried deep in the soil of Italy, like those of an ancient olive tree. My peasant ancestors had cowered in fear of such women, and their blood was more powerful in my heart and veins than the mishmash of Latin and Greek learning in my brain.

I saw the tent of Ascylta but I walked past it without a glance. For all I knew I might put the woman in danger by speaking with her out here. I had the uncomfortable but familiar feeling of being watched from every booth and tent entrance I passed. Among these people, I was a marked man.

Then I stood before the arch curtained by Furia’s familiar hangings. I took a deep breath, summoned up an expression of fake courage, pushed the curtains aside, and strode in.

Furia glared up at me beneath the brim of her odd headdress. “I didn’t expect to see you snooping around here again.”

“So you did not. You did not expect to see me alive at all, at least not with eyes in my head.”

“Those incompetent fools!” She calmed herself and put on a faint smile. “Still, I notice that you aren’t here with a crowd of lictors to arrest me. Not having much luck with your law-enforcing peers, are you?”

I crouched so that our eyes were on the same level. “Furia, I want some answers, and I won’t leave this booth until I have them.”

“Do you really believe I will betray my religion?” she said.

“I won’t ask you to. I need to catch a murderer. It is the death of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer I am investigating, but the same killer murdered Harmodia. She was the leader of your cult, was she not? Don’t you want to see her avenged?”

“She has been!” Her eyes were as steady on mine as those of a bronze statue, and about as informative.

“I don’t understand.”

“There is much you don’t understand, Senator.”

“Then let’s talk about what I know. I know that Harmodia was selling poison to a Greek physician named Ariston of Lycia. Some months back she sold him a slow-working concoction you veneficae call ‘the wife’s friend.’ ” At the name her eyes widened fractionally. I had managed to surprise her. “It was this poison that killed Celer. Not long after he died, Harmodia was murdered by a killer who wanted to hide his tracks. Within a very few days the physician was dead as well, supposedly by accident; but we know better, don’t we, Furia?”

“Harmodia was foolish!” she said. “She dealt too much with that Greek. It is one thing to sell a woman the means to get rid of a husband who beats her or a son an easy way to dispose of the rich father who takes too long to die. What are such people to us? But the Greek was an evil man. He killed those who entrusted themselves to his care. Even worse, he sold his murdering services to others.”

It seemed that even poisoners had their own code of ethics, and Ariston had overstepped the boundaries.

“Why do you say that Harmodia has already been avenged?” I asked her.

“The Greek killed her.”

“Are you certain of that?”

“Of course. He was a great and respectable man.” These words were spoken with the withering sarcasm possible only to an Italian peasant or Cicero on one of his best days. “He could not afford to let Harmodia expose him, so he killed her.”

“Was Harmodia blackmailing Ariston? Did she demand money in return for her silence?”

Furia stared at me for a long time. “Yes, she did. I told you she was foolish. And she was greedy.”

“How did she expect to expose him without attracting the awful punishment meted out to a venefica?”

Furia actually chuckled. “She was no Roman politician. She did not threaten to accuse him in the assemblies. She would simply let his deeds be known to many people in many places. He never told her who he was poisoning, but we have our ways of learning such things. She would be far away before he could implicate her.”

“A friend of mine, also a Greek physician but an honest one, told me that the deadliest weapon in Rome today is the spoken word.”

“Then your friend is a wise man. Some things are best not spoken of.”

“Tell me, Furia,” I said, “about your cult. …”

“My religion!” she corrected vehemently. “Your spying was a profanation, and you should have died for it.”

“That,” I said, “is something that has me puzzled. While I abhor your rites, I recognize that yours is an ancient religion and one native to Italy.”

“It is that. My foremothers practiced our rituals long before you Romans arrived. Even you adopted them before you began to imitate the Greeks from the south. You Romans call human sacrifice evil, yet you allow men to fight to the death in your funeral games.”

“That is different,” I told her. “It is for another purpose, and the men aren’t always killed. You must understand the distinction between …”

“I spit on your distinctions! On the eve of the Feast of Saturnus you saw us sacrifice a slave. In the old days, before your censors made it a criminal offence, the sacrifice was a free volunteer. In times of terrible crisis, a prince of our people would willingly pour his blood into the mundus for the good of the people. What are your slaughters of bulls and rams and boars to a sacrifice like that?”

“Be that as it may, venerable and hallowed as your religion is, why do you allow the likes of those patrician women to attend? You must know that they come only for the excitement, for the decadent thrill of doing something forbidden. I know that you practice your sacrifice as a holy rite pleasing to your gods. Why then do you allow your religion to be defiled by a foreign people who enjoy it as something evil?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Senator?” She smiled knowingly. “They are our protection. I observed before that you bring no officers to arrest me and throw me into prison. Is it not exactly because of those loathsome ladies? They are most highly placed. This, too, is an ancient tradition, Roman. You have your King of Fools on Saturnalia. These women play the same role, although we don’t tell them that. And being women, their presence does not pollute our rites, as yours did.”

“There were other men there,” I said. “At least one of them was a Roman.”

“There were no men there save yourself, Senator. There were masked creatures somewhat manlike in shape to make the music and stand watch over our solemnities.”

“Who was the masked Roman who volunteered to kill me, Furia? I knew his voice. He was not one of your strigae, and he was not one of your people.”

“He is one of us nonetheless. It was he who avenged Harmodia.”

Glimmerings of light began to sift through the gloom that enshrouded this tangled, demon-ridden affair.

“It was he who killed Ariston?”

“He did. He said he’d do it the Roman way and sacrifice him to the river god.”

That gave me pause. “You mean he was thrown from the Sublician Bridge?” I had assumed that he had been crossing the Fabrician to the island where many of the physicians of Rome had their living quarters.

“Yes, that was the one. Why should I give him to you? He may be a Roman, but he avenged our sister.”

I leaned close. “I don’t think he did, Furia. I think he is the one who hired Ariston to poison Celer. I furthermore think that he killed Harmodia himself to cover up his tracks. Ariston was a coward who liked to use poison and keep his own hands clean. Your Roman enjoys spilling blood. He killed Harmodia, then he killed Ariston to destroy the last link between himself and the poisoning, and in doing it he further ingratiated himself with you. He is a clever man, Furia, cleverer than you and almost as clever as I. I am going to find him and I will see justice done, if I have to mete it out myself.”

She regarded me for a long time with cool, steady eyes. “Even if I believed you, I could not reveal his name. I am bound by sacred oath and cannot reveal an initiate to an outsider even if one of them sins against the gods.”

I knew better than to try to break that sort of determination. I stood. “Good day to you, then, striga. I think that I will know my man before the sun sets. I can feel it now just as you read my future in my palm and my blood.”

“A moment, Senator.”

I waited.

“It was the blood of both of us. Tell me one thing: Since I first saw you, you have been as grim and determined as a hound on a scent. You were that way when you came in here just a little while ago, although I could tell that you were in fear of me as well. But now you are angry. Why is that?”

I examined my feelings for a few seconds. “I was determined to find out who killed Celer because he was a member of my family and a citizen. But Romans of my class have been murdering each other for centuries, and sometimes it is as if we’ve asked to be killed. Anger in such cases is as futile as anger against an enemy soldier who kills from duty and habit. Also, I wanted to make sure that a woman was not accused unjustly, although she has plenty of blood on her hands and her brother is my deadly enemy.” I paused, thinking of the thing that stirred anger within me.

“Your masked drum beater, this Roman swine, killed a worthless man. But he did it in mockery of one of our most ancient rituals, the sacrifice of the Ides of May, when the sacred argei, the puppets of straw, are cast from the Sublician Bridge into the Tiber. Politics is one thing; sacrilege is another.”

She turned and rummaged through one of her baskets. “Roman, you are no friend of mine or my people. But I think you are a good man, and those are rare in Rome. And your gods watch over you; this I saw when you were here before. Take this.” She held something out to me. It was a thin disk of bronze, pierced at one edge and hanging from a leather thong. I took it and examined it in the dim light. On one side was writing in a language I had never seen before. On the other was a stylized eye surrounded by lines like rays.

“It will protect you and help you spy out evil.”

I took it and placed it around my neck. “Thank you, Furia.”

“Now forget about us. Some day you may be a high magistrate and may feel you should try to wipe us out. It has been tried before, many, many times. It is useless. You will never be able to find our mundus again, I promise you, scour the Vatican as you will. It was the gods who led you there in the first place for their own reasons, but their purpose has been accomplished. Go now. I have called off my dogs; they’ll not bother you again.” She lowered her gaze and her face was hidden by the stiff, black brim of her hat. I turned and walked out.

It was well past noon as I walked back from the Campus Martius and through the Porta Flumentata into the City. For the first time since returning to Rome I felt confident. I felt that luck was with me and maybe even the gods. Maybe Furia’s eye amulet was helping as well. I felt that, in some inexplicable way, I saw everything more clearly, not just their appearance, but their hidden meaning.

As I crossed the cattle market I glanced up and to my right and saw the beautiful Temple of Ceres low on the slope of the Aventine, glowing as by an inner light and looming, in some fashion, larger than was normal. I stood as one struck by a vision, jaw gaping, causing passersby to stare and point.

I knew what I had overlooked, what Julia and I had been discussing no more than two hours before. Had the investigation been a simple one, it would never have escaped me. It had been all those witches and their horrible rites and the presence of outlandish patricians and all the other anomalies that had cluttered up the case that caused me to overlook it. Or maybe Julia was right and I was sometimes dense.

Toga rippling in my self-made breeze, I ran all the way up to the temple and practically leapt down the stairs into the offices of the aediles. The aged freedman looked up in consternation.

“I need to borrow your boy!” I said.

“You’ll do no such thing!” the old man informed me. “He has work to do.”

“I am Senator Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, son of Metellus the Censor. I am an important man, and I demand that you give me the use of that boy for an hour.”

“Bugger that,” the old man said. “I am a client of the state and in charge here, and you are just a senator with no stripe on your toga. Get elected aedile and you can order me around, not before.”

“All right,” I grumbled, rummaging around in my rapidly flattening purse. “How much?” We reached an accommodation.

Outside, the boy walked beside me, unhappy about the whole situation. “What do you want me for?”

“You said a slave came and requisitioned the report on the murder of Harmodia. Would you recognize that slave if you saw him again?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. He was just a state slave. They all look alike. I’m a temple slave.”

“There’s another silver denarius in it for you if you guide me to the right man.”

He brightened. “I’ll give it a try.”

We trudged around the basilicas, and the boy squinted at the slaves who stood around waiting for somebody to tell them what to do. Since the courts were not in session, this was not a great deal. That is one of the problems with Rome: too many slaves, not enough for them to do.

We started at the Basilica Opimia and the boy saw nobody he recognized. It was the same with the Basilica Sempronia. Finally, we went to the Basilica Aemilia and it looked as if that was going to be a dead end as well. I was beginning to doubt my new, god-bestowed vision when the boy tugged at my sleeve, pointing.

“There, that’s him!” The man indicated was short, balding, and middle-aged, dressed in a dark tunic like most slaves. He held a wax tablet and was taking notes, apparently enumerating some great rolls of heavy cloth at his feet, probably intended to make an awning for the outdoor courts.

“Are you sure?”

“I remember now. Come on.” We walked over to him, and the man looked up from his task.

“May I help you, Senator?”

“I hope so. Do you run errands for the law courts?”

“Nearly every day they are in session,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”

“Excellent. Around the Ides of November, did you go to the Temple of Ceres to fetch a report for the aedile Murena? It was for a report he was to make to one of the praetors, probably the urbanus.”

The slave tucked his stylus behind his ear and used the hand thus freed to scratch his hairless scalp. “I do so many things like that, and that’s awhile back. I don’t recall …”

“Sure you remember!” the temple boy urged. “You asked about the trials going on in the circus that day, and I told you the new Spanish horses the Blues had were the best ever seen in Rome and I’d been watching them all week. I remembered that when I saw you just now because I recognized that birthmark on your face.” There was a small, wine-colored patch just in front of the man’s left ear.

The state slave smiled a bit, the light dawning. “And you told me the two Blacks called Damian and Pythias were pulling trace and they were better than the Reds’ Lark and Sparrow. I won some money on that tip at the next races. Yes, I remember now.”

Trust a Roman, whatever his station in life, to remember the names of horses when he’s forgotten the names of his parents or the gods.

“Do you remember the report then?” I said, elated and at the same time wanting to throttle them both.

“Well, yes, but …” he tapered off as if something was impeding his rather limited powers of reasoning.

“But what?” I asked impatiently.

“Well, it wasn’t for the curule aedile Caius Licinius Murena, it was for the plebeian aedile Lucius Calpurnius Bestia.”

I could have kissed him. “So you delivered it to him, and he took it into the praetor’s court?”

“I delivered it all right, but he just took it and walked away, toward the cattle market. It was nothing to me. My job was to fetch it.”

I tipped them both and bade them be about their business. My soles barely touched the pavement as I walked, once again, back around the base of the Capitol, skirting the northern edge of the cattle market, until I was once again in the precincts of the Temple of Portunus, amid the dense smells of our wonderful but all too fragrant sewers.

For the second time that day I ascended the stairs with their medical symbols and, upon the terrace, found the freedman Narcissus seated at a small table, eating a late lunch or early dinner. He was surprised to see me.

“Good day, esteemed physician Narcissus,” I said, all good cheer.

“Senator! I did not expect to see you again so soon. Will you join me?”

“Are you certain it is no imposition?” I suddenly realized how long ago breakfast had been.

“A distinguished guest is never an imposition.” He turned to a slave. “A plate and goblet for the senator.” The man was back before I had arranged my toga to sit. For a few minutes we munched in silence, observing the proprieties; then I sat back as the slave refilled my cup.

“How went the operation?” I asked.

His face brightened. “It was perfect! Asklepiodes is the most marvelous physician. Marcus Celsius should make a complete recovery if infection does not set in. Asklepiodes actually lifted out the detached piece of bone and cleaned out clotted blood and some small bone splinters from the brain itself before replacing it and securing it with silver wire.”

“He is a god among healers,” I said, pouring a bit of wine onto the pavement as a libation so the gods should not take my words as a challenge and grow jealous of my friend Asklepiodes.

“And,” Narcissus said, leaning forward confidentially, “he actually did much of it with his own hands, instead of just directing his slaves. I only say this because I know you are his friend.”

“It will be our secret,” I assured him. “Now, my friend Narcissus, it occurred to me just now that I neglected to ask you something this morning touching upon the demise of your late patron.”

“What may I tell you?”

“I understand that he fell from a bridge and was drowned. Do you happen to know where the banquet was held where he imbibed too much?”

“Why, yes. He dined out most evenings, often at the house of someone distinguished. That afternoon, just before he left, he said, should he be needed for an emergency, by which he meant a sudden illness in a very rich and prominent family, he was to be found at the house of the aedile Lucius Calpurnius Bestia.”

“Calpurnius Bestia,” I said, all but purring.

“Yes,” he said, a little puzzled at my tone. He pointed to the south. “It’s up there someplace on the Aventine. He must have come down late, long after dark, and didn’t think to ask the aedile for a slave to accompany him. He was usually a moderate man, but most people drink too much at a banquet.”

“A common failing,” I noted.

“Yes. Well, when he came down onto the level area, instead of walking straight home, he must have accidentally turned left and not realized it until he found himself on the Sublician Bridge. It was a very dark night, I remember that. It is easy to lose one’s way, even near home. He probably went to the parapet to get his bearings, or perhaps he had to vomit. In any case, he leaned too far over and fell in, striking his head. He was found just a few paces downstream on the bank.”

I stood and took his hand in both of mine, cheered by both the wine and the recitation. “Thank you, my friend Narcissus, thank you. You have been of inestimable help, and I shall recommend you most heartily to my family.”

He beamed. “Any service I may render to the illustrious Metelli, I am overjoyed to provide.”

I left his terrace, chuckling and whistling. I must have looked a perfect loon, but I was past caring about my appearance. I walked back toward my house, not feeling the many miles my feet had carried me that long day. I would have more walking to do before I went to my well-earned sleep.

As I walked I thought about Bestia. Bestia, Pompey’s cunning spy in Catilina’s conspiracy. Bestia, who would do anything to advance himself with Pompey. And how better than to eliminate Pompey’s rival for the Gallic command, Celer? Bestia hadn’t known that Pompey and Caesar had already reached an agreement on that. But perhaps not. Pompey might have wanted Caesar to go and fail and thus secure the command after the enemy had been softened up by his fellow triumvir. In any case the neat framing of Clodius through his sister could only help Pompey’s position in the city, while cutting down Caesar’s by destroying his henchman.

Ah, yes, Bestia. Bestia, whose voice I had recognized out on the Vatican field, muffled though it had been by his mask. I might have caught it sooner had I not been so terrified at the time. Bestia, whom I had seen only the night before, his face painted crimson, not because he had been elected King of Fools, but to hide the marks left by my caestus.

I had to marvel at the man’s slyness and his audacity. He had accomplished his ends through indirection and covered his tracks neatly. He had slipped only twice: He’d neglected to appropriate the brief mention of Harmodia’s murder in the tabularia, and he had not eliminated the slave he sent to the Temple of Ceres. Make that three times. He had failed to kill me. It was that last one he was going to regret.