Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (98 page)

Eco gestured to the scattered food, mimed the act of feeding a farm animal, then vividly enacted the animal’s death – an unpleasant pantomime to watch, having just witnessed an actual death.

‘Yes, we could verify the presence of poison in the food that way, at the waste of some poor beast. But if it was in the food we see here, why wasn’t Antonia poisoned as well? Eco, bring me those pieces of the clay bottle. Do you remember hearing the sound of something breaking, at about the time we heard Titus cry out?’

Eco nodded and handed me the pieces of fired clay.

‘What do you suppose was in this?’ I said.

‘Wine, I imagine. Or water,’ said Lucius.

‘But there’s a wineskin over there. And the inside of this bottle appears to be as dry as the outside. I have a hunch, Lucius. Would you summon Ursus?’

‘Ursus? But why?’

‘I have a question for him.’

The beekeeper soon came lumbering down the hill. For such a big, bearish fellow, he was very squeamish in the presence of death. He stayed well away from the body and made a face every time he looked at it.

‘I’m a city dweller, Ursus. I don’t know very much about bees. I’ve never been stung by one. But I’ve heard that a bee sting can kill a man. Is that true, Ursus?’

He looked a bit embarrassed at the idea that his beloved bees could do such a thing. ‘Well, yes, it can happen. But it’s rare. Most people get stung and it goes away soon enough. But some people . . .’

‘Have you ever seen anyone die of a bee sting, Ursus?’

‘No.’

‘But with all your lore, you must know something about it. How does it happen? How do they die?’

‘It’s their lungs that give out. They strangle to death. Can’t breathe, turn blue . . .’

Lucius looked aghast. ‘Do you think that’s it, Gordianus? That he was stung by one of my bees?’

‘Let’s have a look. The sting would leave a mark, wouldn’t it, Ursus?’

‘Oh, yes, a red swelling. And more than that, you’d find the poisoned barb. It stays behind when the bee flies off, snagged in the flesh. Just a tiny thing, but not hard to find.’

We examined Titus’ chest and limbs, rolled him over and examined his back. We combed through his hair and looked at his scalp.

‘Nothing,’ said Lucius.

‘Nothing,’ I admitted.

‘What are the chances, anyway, that a bee happened to fly by – ’

‘The bottle, Eco. When did we hear it break? Before Titus cried out, or after?’

After
, gestured Eco, rolling his fingers forward. He clapped twice.
Immediately
after.

‘Yes, that’s how I remember it, too. A bee, a cry, a broken bottle . . .’ I pictured Antonia and Titus as I had last seen them together, hand in hand, doting on one another as they headed for the stream. ‘Two people in love, alone on a grassy bank – what might they reasonably be expected to get up to?’

‘What do you mean, Gordianus?’

‘I think we shall have to examine Titus more intimately.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think we shall have to take off his loincloth. It’s already loosened, you see. Probably by Antonia.’

As I thought we might, we found the red, swollen bee sting in the most intimate of places.

‘Of course, to be absolutely certain, we should find the stinger and remove it. I’ll leave that task to you, Lucius. He was your friend, after all, not mine.’

Lucius located and dutifully extracted the tiny barb. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I thought it would be bigger.’

‘What, the stinger?’

‘No, his . . . well, the way he always bragged, I thought it must be . . . oh, never mind.’

Confronted with the truth, Antonia confessed. She had never meant to kill Titus, only to punish him for his pursuit of Davia.

Her early morning trip to the stream, ostensibly to gather flowers, had actually been an expedition to capture a bee. For this purpose she used the clay bottle, plugged it with a cork stopper, then hid it beneath the flowers in her basket. Later, Titus himself unwittingly carried the bee in the bottle down to the stream, hidden in the basket of food.

It was the Priapus in the glen that had given Antonia the idea. ‘I’ve always thought the god looks so . . .
vulnerable . .
. like that,’ she told us. If she could inflict a wound on Titus in that most vulnerable part of the male anatomy, she thought, the punishment would be not only painful and humiliating, but stingingly appropriate.

As they lazed on their blanket beside the stream, Antonia drew Titus into an amorous embrace. They cuddled and loosened their clothing. Titus became aroused, just as she planned. While he lay back, closing his eyes with a dreamy smile, Antonia reached for the clay bottle. She shook it, to agitate the bee, then unstoppered it and quickly pressed the opening against his aroused member. The sting was inflicted before Titus realized what was happening. He bolted up, cried out and knocked the bottle from her hand. It broke against the trunk of a willow tree.

Antonia was ready to flee, knowing he might explode with anger. Instead, Titus began to clutch at his chest and choke. The catastrophe that swiftly followed took her utterly by surprise. Titus was dead within moments. Antonia’s shock and grief were entirely genuine. She had meant to hurt him, but never to murder him.

But she could hardly admit what she had done. Impulsively, she chose Davia as a scapegoat. Davia was ultimately to blame anyway, she thought, for tempting her husband.

It was agreed that Lucius would not spread the whole truth of what had happened. Their circle of friends would be told that Titus had died of a bee sting, but not of Antonia’s part. His death had been unintentional, after all, not deliberate murder. Antonia’s grief was perhaps punishment enough. But her scapegoating of Davia was unforgivable. Would she have seen the lie through all the way to Davia’s torture and death? Lucius thought so. He allowed her to stay the night, then sent her packing back to Rome, along with her husband’s body, and told her never to visit or speak to him again.

Ironically, Titus might have been spared had he been a little more forthcoming or a little less amorous. Lucius later learned, in all the talk that followed Titus’s death, that Titus had once been stung by a bee as a boy and had fallen very ill. Titus had never talked about this boyhood incident to his friends or to Antonia; only his old nurse and his closest relatives knew about it. When he hung back from seeing the honey harvest, I think he did so partly because he wanted time alone to pursue Davia, but also because he was (quite reasonably) afraid to go near the hives, and unwilling to admit his fear. If he had told us then of his extreme susceptibility to bee stings, I am certain that Antonia would never have attempted her vengeful scheme.

Eco and I saw out the rest of our visit, but the days that followed Antonia’s departure were melancholy. Lucius was moody. The slaves, always superstitious about any death, were restless. Davia was still shaken, and her cooking suffered. The sun was as bright as when we arrived, the flowers as fragrant, the stream as sparkling, but the tragedy cast a pall over everything. When the day came for our departure, I was ready for the forgetful hustle and bustle of the city. And what a story I would have to tell Bethesda!

Before we left, I paid a visit to Ursus and took a last look at the hives down in the glen.

‘Have you ever been stung by a bee yourself, Ursus?’

‘Oh, yes, many times.’

‘It must hurt.’

‘It smarts.’

‘But not too terribly, I suppose. Otherwise you’d stop being a beekeeper.’

Ursus grinned. ‘Yes, bees can sting. But I always say that beekeeping is like loving a woman. You get stung every so often, but you keep coming back for more, because the honey is worth it.’

‘Oh, not always, Ursus,’ I sighed. ‘Not always.’

THE ALEXANDRIAN CAT

We were sitting in the sunshine in the atrium of Lucius Claudius’ house, discussing the latest gossip from the Forum, when a terrible yowling pierced the air.

Lucius gave a start at the noise and opened his eyes wide. The caterwauling terminated in a feline shriek, followed by a scraping, scrambling noise and then the appearance of a gigantic yellow cat racing across the roof above us. The red clay tiles offered little traction to the creature’s claws and it skittered so close to the edge that for a moment I thought it might fall right into Lucius’s lap. Lucius seemed to think so, too. He scrambled up from his chair, knocking it over as he frantically retreated to the far side of the fish pond.

The big cat was quickly followed by a smaller one, which was solid black. The little creature must have had a particularly aggressive disposition to have given chase to a rival so much larger than itself, but its careless ferocity proved to be its downfall – literally, for while its opponent managed to traverse the roof without a misstep, the black cat careered so recklessly across the tiles that at a critical turning it lost its balance. After an ear-rending cacophony of feral screeching and claws scraping madly against tiles, the black cat came plummeting feet-first into the atrium.

Lucius screamed like a child, then cursed like a man. The young slave who had been filling our wine cups came running.

‘Accursed creature!’ cried Lucius. ‘Get it away from me! Get it out of here!’

The slave was joined at once by others, who surrounded the beast. There was a standoff as the black cat flattened its ears and growled while the slaves held back, wary of its fangs and claws.

Regaining his dignity, Lucius caught his breath and straightened his tunic. He snapped his fingers and pointed at the overturned chair. One of the slaves righted it, whereupon Lucius stepped onto it. No doubt he thought to put as much distance between himself and the cat as possible, but instead he made a terrible error, for by raising himself so high he became the tallest object in the atrium.

Without warning the cat gave a sudden leap. It broke through the cordon of slaves, bounded onto the seat of Lucius’ chair, ran vertically up the length of his body, scrambled over his face onto the top of his head, then pounced onto the roof and disappeared. For a long moment Lucius stood gaping.

At last, assisted by his slaves (many of whom seemed about to burst out laughing), Lucius managed to step shakily from the chair. As he sat, a fresh cup of wine was put into his hand and he raised it to his lips unsteadily. He drained the cup and handed it back to the slave. ‘Well!’ he said. ‘Go on now, all of you. The excitement’s over.’ As the slaves departed from the atrium, I saw that Lucius was blushing, no doubt from the embarrassment of having so thoroughly lost his composure, not to mention having been got the better of by a wild beast in his own home, and in front of his slaves. The look on his chubby, florid face was so comic that I had to bite my lips to keep from grinning.

‘Cats!’ he said at last. ‘Accursed creatures! When I was a boy, you hardly saw them at all in Rome. Now they’ve taken over the city! Thousands of them, everywhere, wandering about at will, squabbling and mating as they please, and no one able to stop them. At least one still doesn’t see them much in the countryside; farmers run them off, because they frighten the other animals so badly. Weird, fierce little monsters! I think they come from Hades.’

‘Actually, I believe they came to Rome by way of Alexandria,’ I said quietly.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. Sailors first brought them over from Egypt, or so I’ve heard. Seafarers like cats because they kill the vermin on their ships.’

‘What a choice – rats and mice, or one of those fearsome beasts with its claws and fangs! And you, Gordianus – all this time you’ve sat there as if nothing was happening! But I forget, you’re used to cats. Bethesda has a cat which she keeps as a sort of pet, doesn’t she? As if the creature were a dog!’ He made a face. ‘What does she call the thing?’

‘Bethesda always names her cats Bast. It’s what the Egyptians call their cat-god.’

‘What a peculiar people, worshipping animals as if they were gods. No wonder their government is in constant turmoil. A people who worship cats can hardly be fit to rule themselves.’

I kept silent at this bit of conventional wisdom. I might have pointed out that the cat-worshippers he so offhandedly disdained had managed to create a culture of exquisite subtlety and monumental achievements while Romulus and Remus were still suckling a she-wolf, but the day was too hot to engage in historical debate.