Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (154 page)

‘He escaped from Tauromenium and hid himself in a cave, until at last Rupilius flushed him out. Just as the slaves had consumed one another, so the king of the slaves was discovered half-eaten by worms – yes, just such worms as were said to have plagued the great Sulla in his last years here on the Cup, before his death from apoplexy, which demonstrates that these devouring worms, like the lower grade of humans, will take sustenance from any leader, high or low. Eunus was dragged from his cave, screaming and clawing at his own flesh, and put in a dungeon at Morgantina. The wizard continued to see visions, which became more and more horrible; at the end he was raving. At last the worms consumed him, and so the first of the great slave revolts came to its miserable end.’

There was a deep silence. The faces of Gelina’s guests were impassive, except for Eco, who sat wide-eyed, and young Olympias, who seemed to have a tear in her eye. Mummius fidgeted on his couch. The silence was broken by the soft shuffling footsteps of a slave retreating towards the kitchens with an empty platter. I looked about the room at the faces of the table slaves, who stood rigidly at their posts behind the guests. None of them would meet my eyes, nor would they look at one another; instead they stared at the floor.

‘You see,’ said Metrobius, his voice sounding unnaturally loud after the stillness, ‘you have all the elements for a divine comedy right at your fingertips, Dionysius! Call it “Eunus of Sicily” and let me direct it for you!’

‘Metrobius, really!’ protested Gelina.

‘I’m serious. All you need to do is cast it with the standard roles. Let me see: a bumbling Sicilian landowner and his son, who of course will be love-struck by a neighbour’s daughter; add to that the son’s tutor, a good slave who will be tempted to join in this slave revolt but will choose virtue instead and save his young master from the mob. We can bring this Eunus onto the stage for a few grotesque comedy turns, spitting fire and babbling nonsense. Introduce the general Rupilius as a bombastic braggart; he mistakes the good slave, the tutor, for Eunus, and wants to crucify him; at the last instant the young master saves his tutor from death and thus repays him for saving his own life. The revolt is suppressed offstage, and all ends with a happy song! Really, Plautus himself never came up with a better plot.’

‘I believe you’re half-serious,’ said Iaia shrewdly.

‘It all sounds a bit distasteful,’ complained Orata, ‘considering current circumstances.’

‘Oh, dear, you might be right,’ admitted Metrobius. ‘Perhaps I’ve been away from the stage too long. Go on, then, Dionysius. I only hope your next account of past atrocities will be as amusing as that last one.’

The philosopher cleared his throat. ‘I fear you will be disappointed, Metrobius. Since Eunus there have been a number of slave revolts in Sicily; something about the island seems to encourage depravity among the rich and insurrection among the slaves. The last and greatest of these revolts was centred in Syracuse, in the days when Marius was consul, thirty-five years ago. Its scale was as great as the first uprising under Eunus, but I fear that the story is not nearly as colourful.’

‘No fire-breathing wizards?’ said Metrobius.

‘No,’ said Dionysius. ‘Only thousands of dangerous slaves rampaging across the countryside, raping and pillaging, crowning false kings and defying the power of Rome, and in the end a general comes to crucify the ringleaders and put the rest in chains, and law and order are restored.’

‘So it shall always be,’ said Faustus Fabius darkly, ‘as long as slaves are foolish enough to upset the natural order.’ At either side of him, Orata and Mummius nodded sagely in agreement.

‘Enough of this gloominess,’ said Gelina abruptly. ‘Let’s move to another subject. I think it’s time we had an amusement. Metrobius, a recitation?’ The actor shook his white head. Gelina did not press him. ‘Then perhaps a song. Yes, a song is what we need to lift everyone’s spirits. Meto . . . Meto! Meto, fetch that boy who sings so divinely, you know the one. Yes, the handsome Greek with the sweet smile and the black curls.’

I saw a strange expression cross Mummius’s face. While we awaited the slave’s arrival, Gelina drank a fresh cup of wine and insisted that we all follow her example. Only Dionysius declined; instead, a slave brought him a frothy green concoction in a silver cup.

‘What in Hercules’ name is that?’ I asked.

Olympia laughed. ‘Dionysius drinks it twice a day, before his midday meal and after his dinner, and he’s tried to convince the rest of us to do likewise. An awful-looking potion, isn’t it? But of course, if Orata can drink urine . . .’

‘It wasn’t urine, it was fermented barley. I only said it
looked
like urine.’

Dionysius laughed. ‘This contains nothing as exotic – or should I say as common? – as urine.’ He drank from the cup and then lowered it, revealing green-stained lips. ‘Nor is it a potion; there’s nothing magical about it. It’s a simple purée of watercress and grape leaves, together with my own blend of medicinal herbs – rue for sharp eyes, silphium for strong lungs, garlic for stamina . . .’

‘Which explains,’ said Faustus Fabius affably, ‘how Dionysius can read for hours, talk for days, and never feel faint – even if his audience does!’

There was a round of laughter, and then the young Greek arrived carrying a lyre. It was Apollonius, the slave who had attended Marcus Mummius in the baths. I glanced at Mummius. He yawned and showed little interest, but his yawn seemed too elaborate and his vacant gaze was uneasy. The lamps were lowered, casting the room in shadow. Gelina requested a song with a Greek name – ‘a happy song,’ she assured us – and the boy began to play.

Apollonius sang in a Greek dialect, of which I could apprehend only scattered words and phrases. Perhaps it was a shepherd’s song, for I heard him sing of green fields and great mountains of fleecy clouds, or perhaps it was a legend, for I heard his golden voice shape the name of Apollo and sing of sunlight on the shimmering waters of the Cyclades – ‘like pebbles of lapis in a sea of gold,’ he sang, ‘like the eyes of the goddess in the face of the moon.’ Perhaps it was a love song, for I heard him sing of jet-black hair and a glance that pierced like arrows. Perhaps it was a song of loss, for in each refrain he sang, ‘Never again, never again, never again.’

Whatever else it was, I would not have called it a happy song. Perhaps it was not the song that Gelina had expected. She listened with a sober intensity, and slowly her expression became as despondent as when I had met her that afternoon. There were no smiles among the guests; even Metrobius listened with a kind of reverence, his eyes half-shut. Strangely, for so sad a tune so soulfully sung, there was only one tear in the room. I watched it descend the grizzled cheek of Marcus Mummius, a glistening track of crystal in the lamplight that quickly disappeared into his beard and was as quickly followed by another.

I looked at Apollonius, at his trembling lips parted to sing a perfect note full of all the heartbreak and hopelessness of the world. I shivered; my skin prickled and turned to gooseflesh, not from the pathos of his song or from the sudden chill breath of the sea that blew into the room. I realized that in three days he would be dead along with all the other slaves, never to sing again.

Across from me, hidden by shadows, Mummius covered his face and silently wept.

VIII

Our accommodations were generous: a small room in the south wing with two sumptuously padded couches and a thick rug on the floor. A door, facing east, opened onto a small terrace with a view of the dome above the baths. Eco complained that we couldn’t see the bay. I told him we were lucky that Gelina hadn’t put us in the stables.

He stripped down to his undertunic and tested his bed, bouncing up and down on it until I slapped him on the forehead. ‘So what do you think, Eco? How do we stand?’

He stared for a moment at the ceiling above, then swung his open palm flat against his nose.

‘Yes, I’m inclined to agree. We’re up against a brick wall this time. I suppose I’ll be paid no matter what, but how much can the woman expect me to do in three days? Only two days, really, tomorrow and the funeral day; then comes the game day and, if Crassus has his way, the execution of the slaves. Only one day, if you think about it, because how much can we hope to accomplish on the funeral day? So, Eco, did you see any murderers at the meal?’

Eco indicated the long tresses of Olympias. ‘The painter’s protégée? You can’t be serious.’ He smiled and made his fingers into an arrow piercing his heart.

I laughed softly and pulled the dark tunic over my shoulders. ‘At least one of us will have pleasant dreams tonight.’

I put out the lamps and sat for a long time on my bed with my bare feet on the rug. I looked out of the window at the cold stars and the waxing moon. Beside the window there was a small trunk, in which I had hidden the bloodstained tunic and had stored our things, including the daggers we had brought from Rome. Above the trunk a polished mirror was hung on the wall. I rose and stepped toward the starkly moonlit reflection of my face.

I saw a man of thirty-eight years, surprisingly healthy considering his many journeys and his dangerous occupation, with broad shoulders and a wide middle and streaks of grey amid his black curls – not a young man, but not an old man either. Not a particularly handsome face, but not an ugly one, with a flat, slightly hooked nose, a broad jaw, and staid brown eyes. A very lucky man, I thought, not fawned over by Fortune but not despised by her either. A man with a house in Rome, steady work, a beautiful woman to share his bed and run his household, and a son to carry his name. No matter that the house was a ramshackle affair handed down from his father, or that his work was often disreputable and frequently dangerous, or that the woman was a slave, not a wife, or that the son was not of his blood and stricken with muteness – still, a very lucky man, all in all.

I thought of the slaves on the
Fury
– the vile stench of their bodies, the haunted misery in their eyes, the utter hopelessness of their desperation – property of a man who would never see their faces or know their names, who would not even know if they lived or died until a secretary handed him a requisition asking for more slaves to replace them. I thought of the boy who had reminded me of Eco, the one the whipmaster had singled out for punishment and humiliation, and the way he had looked at me with his pathetic smile, as if I somehow had the power to help him, as if, merely by being a free man, I was somehow like a god.

I was weary, but sleep seemed far away. I pulled up a chair from the corner and sat staring at my own face. I thought of the young slave Apollonius. The strains of his song echoed through my head. I remembered the philosopher’s tale of the wizard-slave Eunus, who belched fire and roused his companions into a mad revolt. At some point I must have begun to dream, for I thought I could see Eunus in the mirror beside me, hissing, wearing a crown of fire with little wisps of flame leaking from his nostrils and between his teeth. Over my other shoulder the face of Lucius Licinius loomed up, one eye half-shut and matted with blood, a corpse and yet able to speak in a vague murmur too low for me to understand. He rapped on the floor, as if in a code. I shook my head, perplexed, and told him to speak up, but instead he began to dribble blood from his lips. Some of it fell over my shoulder, onto my lap. I looked down to see a bloody cloak. It writhed and hissed. The thing was crawling with thousands of worms, the same worms that had eaten a dictator and a slave-king. I tried to cast the cloak aside, but I could not move.

Then there was a strong, heavy hand on my shoulder – not a dream, but real. I opened my eyes with a start. In the mirror I saw the face of a man abruptly roused from a deep dream, his jaw slack and his eyes heavy with sleep. I blinked at the reflected glare of a lamp held aloft behind me. In the mirror I saw a looming giant dressed like a soldier. His face was smudged with dirt, ugly and stupid looking, like a mask in a comedy. A bodyguard – a trained killer, I thought, instantly recognizing the type. It seemed cruelly unfair that someone in the household had already sent an assassin to murder me before I had even begun to make trouble.

‘Did I wake you?’ His voice was hoarse but surprisingly gentle. ‘I knocked and could have sworn I heard you answer, so I came in. With you sitting up in the chair like that, I thought you must be awake.’

He cocked an eyebrow at me. I stared back at him dumbly, no longer quite sure I was awake and wondering how he had stumbled into my dream. ‘What are you doing here?’ I finally said.