The Tribune's curse

5

For once, I wasn’t grousing and complaining at having to rise before dawn. I was too apprehensive for that. I breakfasted lightly, but drank plenty of water, for I was all too aware of how hard I would soon be sweating. I dressed in a red military tunic and caligae, since that was the ancient custom when performing the lustrum.

“All the patrician women are gathering at the Temple of Vesta,” Julia told me. “That is where I will be.” She had put on her aristocratic Roman lady persona, as she had been drilled by her grandmother to do in times of crisis. I shuddered to think that one day she might turn into Aurelia.

“I will meet you back here, then, my love, although I may have to be carried. Hermes, do you have all my things?”

“Got them right here.” He patted the bulging hide bag that contained most of my military gear, which might be needed at some stage of the ceremony. Surely, I thought, they would not demand that we wear armor the whole time. But anything was possible.

I kissed Julia and made my way into the street with Hermes close behind me. All the way to the front door, aged Cassandra sprinkled me with dried herbs and called upon obscure rural deities to lend me strength. On that particular morning they probably weren’t listening, but I was not about to turn down any aid, however slight, and it could do no harm.

The streets were crowded as people left their homes to find viewing places atop the wall. Despite the solemnity of the occasion, there was a certain subdued holiday feeling in the air, as there always is when routine is broken for an extraordinary event.

The Senate assembled by torchlight outside the gate nearest the base of the Capitol. Had this been the conventional, five-yearly lustrum, the citizens would have been drawn up by centuries, for this ceremony in former times was the purification of the army, and, by extension, of the populace as a whole. Of course, the armies were now far away, and the centuries had become mere voting categories, but we adhered to the ancient forms. The Censors were required to perform the lustrum before they left office.

But this was an extraordinary ceremony, and nothing was as usual. We had to hope that the rex sacrorum knew what he was doing.

“Senators!” Pompey shouted. “The sun will be up soon, so there’s little time to get organized. The lictors will direct each of you to his place along the support poles. Since there will be a bit of sag to the poles, the shortest men will be nearest the center, the tallest at the ends. Many of the older senators have volunteered to go a part of the way. I’ll take a hand myself for part of the course. But the senators under forty will make the whole three circuits-is that understood? Any of them who fall out had better recall that the Censors will be watching and they haven’t purged the senatorial roles yet. Personally, I want to hear death rattles from anyone who drops. Lictors! Get them lined up.”

With brisk efficiency, the lictors lined us up by height, with the shortest on the left end of the line, the tallest on the right. I found myself standing next to Cato, and he was dressed in full legionary gear, including a shield slung across his back.

“How far are you planning to carry it, Cato?” I asked.

“What do you mean? The full three circuits, of course.”

“You don’t have to, you know,” I said. “Only those under forty have to go the whole course.”

“I was born when Valerius and Herennius were consuls,” he said stiffly.

“The same year I was born?” I said, aghast. “Unbelievable!” Cato was one of those men who give the impression of being elderly from childhood. I had always taken him to be at least ten years my senior, and probably more.

“Ah!” Cato said, ignoring me. “This is splendid! The gods will have to be pleased with this!”

Dawn was creeping over the field, and at last I saw clearly what we had to carry. “Oh, no!”

The priests and the temple slaves had indeed outdone themselves to honor the gods. The litter was the sort that is carried in triumphs, but this one was huge even by triumphal standards, with two support poles the size of ship’s masts. It was beautifully made of the finest woods and decorated with gold, draped heavily with such flowers as were available in November. And atop it, on a high platform, rested the sacrifices.

The lustrum always takes the form known as suovetaurilia, in which three animals are sacrificed: a boar, a ram, and a bull. In the countryside near Rome there are sizable farms that do nothing except breed the exceptional animals required for the major ceremonies. The ram atop the float was not the wooly little creature you picture in hearing those awful pastoral poems, where lovesick shepherds tootle their pipes while mooning over some nymph named Phyllis or Phoebe. This one was the size of a small horse, with huge, curling horns and a haughty look on his face. The boar was the size of a common ox-a fierce-looking creature I wouldn’t want to meet if he were fully conscious. The bull was, I believe, the largest such creature I had ever seen, larger than the fighting animals bred in Spain. He was pure white and was, as required, an absolutely perfect specimen of the breed.

All three creatures has been drugged so that there would be no unseemly bleating, squealing, or bellowing to disrupt the proceedings. Their legs had been doubled beneath them and bound with ropes entwined with fine, golden chains. Horns and tusks were gilded, and the beasts themselves had been heavily sprinkled with gold dust.

“Gold,” I said, disgusted. “Just what we needed. More weight.”

Pompey strode down the line, inspecting. Like most of us, he wore a plain military tunic and boots. He stopped before Cato.

“Senator, all that ironmongery will not be necessary.”

“Consul, I am quite prepared to carry out this ceremony in the ancient fashion, fully armed.”

“Senator-”

“I think it would be most pleasing to the gods if we all did so, in fact,” Cato maintained stoutly.

“Senator!” Pompey snapped, out of patience. “We are losing time! If Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus,” here he poked a finger into his own chest, just in case Cato was in some doubt as to whom he meant, “twice consul, winner of more victories than any other general in Roman history, finds a military tunic the proper uniform for this ceremony, then a senator who has held no offices higher then quaestor and tribune should not find this beneath him!”

“Yes, Consul!” Cato said, with a fine, military salute. While his slaves helped him out of his gear, Pompey addressed the rest of us.

“The pacesetters will take the front position on each pole. These will be the praetor urbanus Titus Annius Milo and Lucius Cornelius Balbus, whom the Censors have just enrolled as a senator in recognition of his heroic military service. They are undoubtedly the two strongest men in this august, but usually out-of-shape, assembly.”

This was the first I’d heard that Balbus was a senator. There was an ancient tradition that heroism could win a man a seat in the curia and a stripe on his tunic, but Sulla had instituted the law that a man had to be elected to at least the quaestorship to be enrolled. But Pompey usually got what he wanted. It was one more piece of evidence that Sulla’s constitution was crumbling and that we were heading back into the anarchic old days.

The lictors positioned me on the left-hand pole, the one Milo captained. I noticed that Clodius was a few men behind me. I wished that he had been placed ahead of me, so that I could watch him suffer. It would have made up a bit for my own agony to come. Two other stalwarts took the rear positions, and we were all arranged.

“Now, Senators,” Pompey said, “I want no one to try to run, no matter how late it gets. We’ll never make it that way. We can get this done on time if we keep to a legionary quick pace. You’ve all been drilled in that since you were boys. Rome will rest on your shoulders today. So, lift!” Again came the word, hurled like a deadly missile, and we all stooped, laid hold of the poles, and lifted the tremendous parade float onto our shoulders. Upon the walls the people sighed with satisfaction. The animals seemed not to notice, merely blinking with lordly equanimity.

The flamines and other priests set out before us, some of them swinging censers in which incense burned. Atop the walls more incense smoked in braziers. We were burning enough that day to cause a serious shortage of incense throughout Roman territory.

“By the left,” Milo said quietly, “quick step, march.” As one man, we all stepped off, left foot first.

In the beginning, the weight seemed quite tolerable, but I knew that would change. Soon the older senators would start dropping out. Then fatigue would take its inexorable toll. And even among the younger senators, for years many had performed no exertion more strenuous than crawling from the cold bath to the hot. They would not last either. I wanted no part of Cato’s foolish nostalgia, but it seemed even to me that we were growing too soft. Unlike Cato and his ilk I did not blame this on foreign influence, but upon our increasing reliance on slaves to do everything for us.

The wall built centuries before by Servius Tullius had once marked out the boundaries of Rome. The City had long since spilled out of its confines, onto the Campus Martius and even across the river into the new Trans-Tiber district, and Sulla had even extended the span of the sacred pomerium, but these changes were too recent to make much of an impression. To all Romans of that day, the Servian Wall, following the line of the old pomerium, still defined the City.

Much building now lay outside the old wall, but it was surrounded by a span of sacred open ground on which nothing could be built and in which the dead could not be buried. This open ground formed our processional way. It was relatively level, going around the bases of the hills, and it was grassy, for no trees or shrubs were allowed to grow upon it. The old wall was still one of the military defenses of Rome, and you don’t just give your enemy effective cover.

We started out northeast along the base of the Capitol, circling the city to the right. All around us the temple musicians played their double flutes, striving mightily to drown any sound that might disturb the ceremony or be interpreted as an evil omen. Before we had made a half-circuit, I was sweating despite the crisp breeze. Others were in far worse condition. I heard gasping from the older men and from those less well-conditioned.

Between the Colline Gate and the Esquiline Gate, all the elderly senators stepped away from the litter. The weight on our shoulders grew fractionally heavier. When we reached the embankment where the river runs along the base of the wall, the middle-aged men were dropping out fast.

About an hour before noon we reached our starting point. Four hours for the first circuit. Here Pompey left us, red faced and puffing.

“Keep it up, men,” he gasped. “At this pace, we’ll finish before sundown handily.”

But there was more to it than time and pace. For the second circuit, we had perhaps half as many men to shoulder the burden. Granted it had been the weaker half that had left, but the willing backs of even old men had been a great help. By noon my shoulder was aching, and the sweat streamed off me by the bucketful. At least, to cheer myself up, I could always look back at Clodius, who was wheezing like a punctured bellows.

From atop the walls whole troops of little girls showered us with flower petals. They must have raided every garden and flower box in the City, and most of the petals were rather withered at that time of year, but we appreciated the gesture. All along our route, lesser priests and temple slaves dipped olive branches into jars of sacred, perfumed water and splashed it over us liberally, like the Circus attendants who dash water on the smoking chariot axles during the races. This we truly needed and appreciated, although ritual law demanded that we drink nothing during the ceremony.

We completed the second circuit of the wall by mid-afternoon, and some of us were in serious condition. My shoulder, neck, and back felt like molten bronze, and spots swam through my field of vision. My right arm was all but numb, my knees were shaky, and my feet were bleeding despite the hard marching I had been doing in Gaul. I was in better shape than 90 percent of those who were left. Clodius was in a near-coma, but still gamely on his feet. I no longer took delight in his discomfiture. Cato was hanging on stoutly to his Stoic demeanor, but I could see the signs of deathly fatigue in him. Milo and Balbus seemed not to be distressed, but neither was an ordinary mortal. Many of my colleagues would clearly not make it for another quarter-circuit, and I was having waking nightmares about the drugs wearing off and those huge animals setting up a struggle, rocking the litter.

“Good, men, good!” Pompey said as we set out on the third and final circuit of the walls. “Just one more little march, and it’s done! We will be here, ready for the sacrifice, when you return.”

“He’s assuming a lot,” wheezed somebody as we set off again.

“That’s Pompey,” said someone else in a phlegm-clogged voice, “always the optimist.”

“Save your breath,” Milo cautioned.

“Right,” Balbus said in his faintly accented Latin. “Now comes the hard part.”

And hard it was. Almost immediately, men dropped in their tracks, causing those behind to stumble and the float to lurch. Now I had another terror to add to the others. If the litter toppled, which way would it fall? The men on the wrong side would have a ton of wood and livestock fall upon them. But then, I thought, maybe that was what the gods wanted. A few squashed senators would make an impressive and, certainly, a unique sacrifice.

Somewhere near the Appian Aqueduct I decided that my right shoulder was now permanently six inches lower than my left. I was half-blind, but I looked around me anyway, and I saw the final, hard core of the Senate soldiering grimly on. Not many were friends of mine, but all were men whose reputations for toughness would not let them give up short of their final breath. I saw tunics stained with vomit and others stained with blood from lacerated shoulders. Blood poured in a steady stream from Clodius’s nostrils, drenching his tunic and running down his thighs. I didn’t dare look down at myself for fear of what I might see.

I heard a gentle grunt that didn’t sound much like anything a human might perform. Then a lowing sound, followed by a quizzical baa. I looked up in pure horror.

“Hercules help us!” I said, forgetting that because of the curse he didn’t hear. “They’re waking up!”

“Steady, back there,” Balbus said. “Not much farther to go now. They’ll stay quiet.” I saw that the back of his tunic, and Milo’s, were soaked with sweat. They were human after all.

But the beasts began to shift, and the litter rocked, and when that happened, we lost step. Each time, it took us longer to get back in step again. This was looking bad.

“How far is it to the river?” I gasped, sweat obscuring what little vision I had left.

“We passed the embankment awhile ago,” Cato growled out. “Are you blind, Metellus?”

“Just about.” Past the river? I tried to remember how far it was from the river to the gate, but I couldn’t, despite having walked the route a thousand times. Rome seemed like a totally strange place-a place I had never visited before. I had no more idea of its geography than that of Babylon. I wasn’t even sure that we were going in the right direction.

I had a sensation of floating. Gradually, a sense of pressure told me that I was lying on my back. My vision cleared enough to see that I was looking up at the clouds of late evening, tinged red on their westerly edges. I knew then that we had failed. And ritual law prescribed the procedure when a ceremony was not performed properly: you do it all over again, right from the first.

“Pity Pompey didn’t let us do this in full gear,” I remarked. “I’d like to fall on my sword.”

“Are you still alive, Metellus?” I’d have known that voice on the bank of the Styx.

“So I seem to be, Clodius. But I’m just not myself without lunch and my afternoon bath. How far did we get?”

“I don’t know,” he groaned. “I fell down awhile ago, and I haven’t been able to turn over.”

“On your feet,” said Milo. Something grabbed the front of my tunic, and I was hauled to my feet as easily as a doll of straw. I saw that Milo and Balbus and a few others were reviving the fallen and that the priests were leading the sacrificial beasts from the platform.

“We made it?” I asked.

“Of course we made it,” Milo said. “We’re Romans, aren’t we? But nobody attends a sacrifice on his back, so everyone stand up until it’s over. As long as you keep on your feet, we can continue, although a sorrier-looking lot I never saw.”

At last I looked down at myself, fighting off a wave of dizziness and nausea as I did so. I was covered with blood and less-reputable fluids, to which handfuls of flower petals adhered. My companions were in equally disheveled shape, and some of them far worse. But we had done something never attempted in living memory, and if the animals would just die without fuss, we could all go home and then brag about it for the rest of our lives.

A number of men staggered in while the final preparations were made. I later learned that only twenty of us made the entire three circuits, somehow carrying that tremendous weight for the last quarter-mile on our shoulders. Later, the Centuriate Assembly voted us special oak wreaths in honor of our feat. Those of Milo and Clodius were later burned on their funeral pyres, and I believe Cato had his with him when he died at Utica, many years later. My own still hangs among my achievements in the family atrium. I don’t know what happened to the other sixteen.

Just before the upper rim of the sun disappeared below the horizon, the priests finished their droning chant, and the flutes were stilled. The rex sacrorum nodded, the hammers swung, the knives flashed, and the beautiful but weighty beasts fell with their blood gushing out onto the sacred soil.

The rex sacrorum raised his hands and intoned: “The gods are pleased. Rome is purified. All may return home now and sacrifice to their household gods. Worship of the immortals may resume.”

And that was that.

With an arm over Hermes’ shoulders, I lurched slowly toward home through a City that seemed much relieved. We weren’t out from under the curse yet, but progress had been made.

“Maybe we should stop off at the baths first,” I said, my chest sending pains through my body with every word.

“You need it,” Hermes said, “but they’ve been closed down since yesterday morning. I don’t expect to see them back in operation before tomorrow.”

“Right. I forgot.”

I vaguely remember people shouting congratulations at me and people offering me wine that I tried and immediately threw up. I had been in pitched battles far less strenuous than that day’s exertion.

To my great amazement, my father reached my door at the same time we did. I was amazed because for my father to call on me rather than the other way around was all but unheard-of.

“Well-done, my boy,” he said as he went in through the front gate. Coming from him, that was the equivalent of triumphing and winning at the Olympics on the same day.

Julia gasped at the sight of me and immediately had the slaves hustle me off to the tiny bathing room just off the kitchen. There I stripped off my unspeakable tunic, and Hermes sluiced me down with lukewarm water while I stood in the little stone tub.

Damp-haired and still unshaven, but washed, dressed in a clean tunic, and feeling far better, I went to join my family. I found Julia making a fuss over my father in the triclinium. I took a chair, and Hermes began to knead my shoulder, which was already turning a lurid purple. Cassandra gave me a large cup of warm, honeyed water, and I found that, if I sipped at it slowly, I could keep it down.

Julia beamed at me proudly. “The whole City is buzzing with your praises,” she said. “Word reached the Temple of Vesta just moments after the sacrifice.”

“I have a summons to deliver,” Father interrupted, apparently thinking that I had already received more praise than a mere mortal could ever deserve. “While you were carrying out your duties, I was meeting with some of the sacerdotal authorities, and they wish to meet with you under conditions of utmost privacy. What they have to say to you must be heard by no others.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

“Of course you don’t understand!” he snapped. “Why should you? It is sufficient that they want to talk to you.”

“Do they wish to honor him in some way?” Julia asked innocently. She was anything but innocent.

“No, nothing like that. Your husband’s reputation as a snoop precedes him. They have an investigation for him to undertake.”

I thought I saw where this was leading. “Has anything been heard from Ateius?”

Father shook his head. “No, the villain’s vanished. It’s at times like this that we need a Dictator. The evil demagogue should be impaled on a hook and dragged down the Tiber steps. As it is, we’ll have to wait until he’s out of office, and then the best we can do is exile him.”

“I suppose they’ll want me to find him. As far as I know, he can be interrogated before a pontifical court, tribune or not. They have no imperium, but they can make it impossible for him ever to show his ugly face in Rome again. That’s not too far from being a death sentence.”

Again Father shook his head. “I don’t think it’s that. They wouldn’t tell me, of course, but I think it is something far more serious than that.”

I began to get an uncomfortable sensation, the sort I had often felt just before the Gauls attacked. “More serious? What could be more serious than-”

“I don’t know, and I won’t speculate,” Father said. “Just meet with them. They’ll tell you.”

I sank back in my chair, groaning. “I hope they don’t want to meet too soon.”

“No, you’ll have plenty of time to recuperate,” he assured me. “Be at the Temple of Vesta at dawn.”

“Dawn!” I shouted, appalled. “By morning I’ll be unable to move! I’ll be lucky if I can get out of bed three days from now!”

“Nonsense,” he said, standing. “A few hours of sleep will set you up; no man needs more than that. Be there. Good evening to you.” With that he swept out in a cloud of gravitas.

“What am I going to do?” I moaned, covering my face with my hands.

“If I may make a suggestion,” Julia said, “you’d better get to bed right now.”

The first, gray light of dawn found me on the steps of the beautiful little temple. True to their duty, Julia and my household staff had accomplished the formidable task of getting me out of bed and out the front gate while it was still dark. In the neighborhood Julia had found a masseur to loosen my limbs and a barber to make me presentable, and between poundings and scrapings Cassandra had forced me to down honeyed milk, fruit, and bread. With Hermes dogging my steps lest I collapse, the long walk to the Forum completed my awakening process so that, by the time I reached the temple, I was actually feeling rather human.

Metellus Scipio was there, along with the Censors, both of whom were pontifices. Soon we were joined by the Flamen Quirinalis, a kinsman of my wife’s named Sextus Julius Caesar, and the rex sacrorum. Cornelius Lentulus Niger, the Flamen Martialis, arrived, and we stood there uneasily for a while, no one wanting to breach the subject of the day. The flamines wore their robes of office and their peculiar headgear: the close-fitting white cap topped with a short spike of olive wood. Passersby on early errands blinked to see such an assemblage at that hour.

A young Vestal came to the doorway of the temple. “The virgo maxima requests that you come inside,” she said. With that we passed within. The most powerful, arrogant men in Rome would never enter this particular temple without invitation.

The small, circular temple was one of the least pretentious in the central part of the City, but it was the most revered by the citizenry, who held it in greater affection than the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter. Its proportions were perfect, and it was built of white marble, inside and out, every inch of it scrubbed to an immaculate gleam. Citizens rarely saw the interior, except during the Vestalia in June, when mothers of families brought food offerings. For the rest of us, it was enough just to know it was there.

We found the virgo maxima seated by the fire, which was tended day and night by the Vestals. It was the hearth and center and in many ways the most sacred spot in Rome. There were a number of chairs placed in the sanctuary, and at her gesture we sat.

“After the hideous events of two days ago,” she began, “the rex sacrorum and I conferred, and we determined that this would be the best place to hold our meeting. It is as holy a place as Rome affords. Rex sacrorum, please begin.”

“Some of you,” said Claudius, “already know what I am about to impart. Others are not yet aware of how serious a sacrilege was committed.”

This sounded bad.

“When the unspeakable tribune Ateius Capito pronounced his execration,” Claudius went on, “he departed from the forms generally used in such cases. All were struck by the extreme obscurity of some of the deities upon whom he called. Most of them have not been recognized in Rome since the days of the kings, when the Etruscan influence was very strong in our territory. Others are wholly foreign. But in the midst of them he spoke a name that it is forbidden to pronounce, that is supposed to be known only to a handful of the most deeply consecrated sacerdotes of Rome. He spoke-” at this the rex sacrorum trembled, and his throat closed up.

My aunt leaned forward, and in a voice that was firm yet tense with emotion, she said: “That monster spoke, aloud and for all to hear, the Secret Name of Rome!”

Metellus Scipio gasped loudly and gripped the front of his robe in palsied fists. I thought that Servilius Vatia, the ancient Censor, would drop dead on the spot. His colleague, Messala Niger, was not taken by surprise, and neither was Sextus Caesar.

As for me, I was as shocked as anyone, although I was too sore for any extravagant demonstrations. The Secret, or Hidden, Name of Rome was an ancient and incredibly potent talisman. Legend had it that Romulus himself, when he marked out the pomerium with his plow drawn by a white cow and bull, gave his City this name, which was to be used only during specific rituals. Publicly, it was to be known by a variant of his own name-Rome. Names, as all men know, have power. To know the true name of a thing gives one power over that thing. At least, the superstitious believe this. I am not personally superstitious. Nonetheless, I was trembling like a dog caught in a Gallic rainstorm.

“The incident may not be as catastrophic as it seemed at first,” the rex sacrorum assured us, having regained his composure. “He spoke in a number of old, ritual languages. To almost all who heard, that name was just one more word in a great flood of gibberish, and all but impossible to remember. At least, so we must hope. With the Secret Name of Rome at his disposal, a foreign enemy would have Rome at his mercy.”

“In accordance with practice laid down at the very founding of the Republic,” said the virgo maxima, “only six persons are to know that Name, and each is to pass it on only to his successor. These are the three major flamines-” she nodded toward Messala and Vatia, “of whom the martialis and the quirinalis are here with us. Rome has lacked a dialis for far too long. The other three are the rex sacrorum, the virgo maxima, and the Pontifex Maximus.”

“How,” said Scipio, “did a wretch like Ateius Capito learn this name?”

“We would very much like to find that out,” said Claudius. “In fact, it is for this reason that we summoned your kinsman, Decius Caecilius.”

I was afraid of that. “Ah, I expect you want me to locate Ateius. That should not be difficult, but he may have fled-”

“While it may be desirable to find Ateius,” said Claudius, “we are far more interested in learning who imparted to him the Secret Name.”

“I see,” I said, trying to think of a way out of this. “It is likely that the only way I can find that out is by interrogating Ateius himself, a man who may not be arrested for nearly two months. And I hope you will forgive me for suggesting it, but the list of likely suspects is rather limited.”

“You mean it was probably someone in this room,” said Claudius. “If so, we must know. Caesar is of course in Gaul. But,” he spread his hands, “I think there may be other possibilities. The lands of Latium, Etruria, Samnium, and Magna Graecia and all the rest of Italy and Sicily are full of ancient cults and priesthoods of an antiquity comparable to our own. It is not impossible that some cult, or some family of sorcerers, at some time in the past learned the Secret Name and have kept it as a weapon against need.”

“That is, indeed, a possibility,” I admitted. “However, such cults are, by their very nature, rather secretive, and it might be quite difficult to-”

“Nephew,” my aunt interrupted briskly, “we are not asking if you can find time in your busy schedule to assist us in this matter. We are telling you to drop all lesser things and find this offender. It must be done at once!”

“Exactly,” said Claudius.

“Lesser things to include the upcoming election?” I said.

“Don’t worry, Decius,” said Scipio. “You are one of what the citizens are already referring to as the Twenty. You’ll be a hero for weeks to come, until they find someone else to idolize. You couldn’t lose if you set fire to the Temple of Castor and Pollux.”

No way out. Oh, well. “How much of this may I divulge in the course of my investigation?” I asked. “That is to say: who knows about Ateius using the Secret Name, and whom may I inform of this?”

“The members of the Pontifical College who were not summoned to this meeting may be told,” Claudius said. “Beyond those, we do not wish anyone to know that this catastrophe has befallen us.”

“That could hamper my investigation,” I protested. “Should I need the aid of a praetor, for instance-”

“You are not to spread this about,” said Messala. “As Censor I forbid it. The mere rumor of this would be sufficient to panic the citizens, to encourage Rome’s enemies, to bring about chaos. We are engaged in wars at the fringes of the world, but our hold on the peninsula of Italy is not so secure that we can afford to ignore unrest in nearby territories. Most of us remember the Samnite army camped outside the Colline Gate just twenty-seven years ago. The Umbrians, the Lucanians, even the contemptible Bruttians bide their time, watching for some great disaster to befall Rome and planning to seize upon this to rise in arms once more. None of these peoples are extinct. No, Decius, you must not give these people encouragement.”

I didn’t think much of this line of reasoning, but I was far too lowly to rebuke a Censor, especially in company as exalted as I found myself in that morning.

“You must not waste any time,” Claudius said. “I shudder at the thought of what our foreign enemies might do with the Secret Name.”

“And when I find this excessively knowledgeable person?” I asked.

“He must not be allowed to live, of course,” said Vatia.

“I can’t just kill him!” I protested. “I’m an investigator, not an executioner. The man may be a citizen, and the laws are quite specific concerning who gets to kill citizens. He will have to be tried in a praetor’s court.”

“A trial would be bad,” Claudius said. “Not only would Rome’s honor be besmirched, but the Secret Name might be uttered. No, this will have to be settled in some other fashion.”

They were talking as if sacerdotal courts still had power of life and death, as they had many centuries ago. Yet, with the exception of the virgo maxima and the rex sacrorum, all of them were Roman politicians of many years’ experience in the Senate, the Assemblies, the courts, and the army. They were certainly not naive. They were playing some deeper game of their own, either collectively or individually. Just my luck.

“To whom do I report?” I asked, knowing I would not be able to weasel out here. I would just have to weasel out somewhere else.

“It would be best if you were to report to the Censors,” Claudius said. “The virgo maxima and I are not always approachable. The Censors are men of the highest honor, and one of them is the Flamen Martialis. They will in turn report to the rest of us.”

Now for the big question. “Has Pompey been told? And if not, is he to be told?”

“The consul,” my aunt said, “although we esteem and honor him most highly, is an initiate of no priestly order save that of the augurs. He is neither pontifex nor flamen. He is aware that this extraordinary meeting has been called, but he very wisely did not seek to learn the reason for it.”

There was no love lost between my aunt and Pompey. She was a younger sister of Metellus Pius, who spent years putting down the rebellion of Sertorius in Spain. Pompey, in his usual fashion, mopped up the shattered remnants of the rebel army and then claimed sole credit for winning the war, robbing her brother of his rightful glory.

Claudius stood and bowed toward the virgo maxima. “Honored Lady, most of us have duties to perform. The morning sacrifices will begin soon.” Then he turned to me. “You have been charged with your sacred duty. When you have information, report at once to the Censors. If it should be necessary that we all meet again, you shall be informed. I dismiss this meeting.”

Hermes read my expression as I walked down the temple steps.

“Bad?” he asked.

“Hermes, kiss the easy times good-bye. We have work to do.”