Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (169 page)

Eco circled his arms in a hoop before him and puffed his cheeks. I shook my head. ‘Sergius Orata? No, Crassus would be even less likely to show weakness to a business associate. A philosopher would be a natural choice, but if Crassus has one, he’s left him behind in Rome, and he despises Dionysius. Yet Crassus desperately needs someone, anyone, to listen to him – here and now, because the gods are too far away. He faces a great crisis; he is full of doubt. Doubt hounds him from hour to hour, moment to moment, and not just about his decision to take on Spartacus. I think he secretly doubts even his decision to massacre Gelina’s slaves. He’s a man used to absolute control and clear-cut decisions, counting up tangible profits and losses. The past haunts him – bloody chaos and the death of those he loved most. Now he’s about to step into a dark and uncertain future – a terrible gamble, but one worth taking, because if he succeeds he may at last become so powerful that no power on earth can ever harm him again.’

I shrugged. ‘So why not tell everything to Gordianus the Finder, from whom no one can keep a secret anyway? As for confidentiality, I’m famous for it – almost as well known for keeping my mouth shut as you are.’

Eco splashed me with a handful of water.

‘Stop that! Besides, there’s something about me that compels others to empty their hearts.’ I said it jokingly, but it was true; there are those to whom others quite naturally confide their deepest secrets, and I have always been one of them. I looked at myself in the mirror. If the power to pull the truth from others resided somewhere in my face, I couldn’t see it. It was a common face, I thought, with a nose that looked as if it had been broken, though it had not, common brown eyes and common black curls streaked with more and more strands of silver every year. With the passing of time it had come to remind me of my father’s face, as best as I could recall it. My mother I barely remembered, but if my father told the truth when he insisted she had been beautiful, then I had not inherited her looks.

It was also a face that badly needed a shave, if I was to put in a decent appearance at the funeral of Lucius Licinius.

‘Come, Eco. Surely out of ninety-nine slaves Gelina has one who’s a decent barber. You shall have a shave as well.’ I said it just to please him, but when I glanced at his smiling face in the morning sunlight, I saw that there actually was a faint shadow across his jaw.

‘Yesterday you were a boy,’ I whispered, under my breath.

Ironic as it sounds, there is nothing quite so alive as a Roman household on the day of a funeral. The villa was full of guests, who thronged the atrium and the hallways and spilled over into the baths. While Eco and I reclined on couches, submitting our jaws to be shaved, naked strangers loitered about the pools, refreshing themselves after hard morning rides from points as distant as Capua and the far side of Vesuvius. Others had arrived by boat, ferried across the bay from Surrentum, Stabiae, and Pompeii. After my ablutions I stood on the terrace of the baths and looked down on the boathouse, where the short pier was too small for all the arrivals; skiffs and barges were lashed to one another, so that the later arrivals had to walk to the pier over a small floating city of boats.

Metrobius, draped in a voluminous towel, joined me on the balcony. ‘Lucius Licinius must have been a popular man,’ I said.

He snorted. ‘Don’t imagine they’ve all come just to see poor Lucius go up in smoke. No, all these wealthy merchants and landowners and vacationing nobility are here for quite a different reason. They want to impress you-know-who.’ He glanced over his shoulder toward the heated pool, where the slave Apollonius was helping an old man emerge from the water. ‘I had to push and shove all through the house to get here. The atrium is already so crowded I could hardly cross it. I haven’t seen so much black in one place since Sulla died over in Puteoli. Though I noticed,’ he said, wrinkling his nose, ‘that most of the visitors were giving the corpse a wide berth.’ He laughed softly. ‘And they’re already whispering jokes; usually that doesn’t start until
after
the ceremony, when the eating begins.’

‘Jokes?’

‘You know – stepping up to the bier, peering into the corpse’s mouth, then sighing, “The coin is still there! Imagine that, with Crassus in the house!” And don’t you dare repeat that to Crassus,’ he quickly added. ‘Or at least don’t tell him that you heard it from me.’ He stepped away with a dry smile. Apparently he had forgotten that he had told me the same joke the day before.

I peered over the balcony again, wondering how I would ever manage to discover what had been dumped off the pier with so many vessels moored there. Many of the rowers were still in their boats, or loitered about the boathouse, waiting for their masters to return.

Eventually I found Eco, who had disappeared into one of the cubicles for a cool bath to follow his hot one. We dressed in the sombre black garments that had been laid out for us that morning. The slave Apollonius assisted us with the various tucks and folds. His bearing was grave, as suited the occasion, but his eyes were a clear and dazzling blue, unclouded by the fear that haunted the eyes of the other slaves. Was it possible that Mummius had somehow kept him from knowing what the next day might bring? More likely, I thought, Mummius had secretly assured him that he himself would be spared. Did he know that Mummius had failed to sway Crassus?

As he dressed me, I took the opportunity to study him more closely. That he was beautiful was obvious at a glance, and yet the closer and longer I looked the more beautiful he seemed. His perfection was almost unreal, like the famous Discus Thrower of Myron come to life; as he moved, the shifting planes of light across his face highlighted a succession of cameos, each more striking than the last. Where many youths of his age have a stumbling gait, he moved like an athlete or a dancer, without any trace of artifice. His hands were nimble, infusing every movement with an innate and unassuming grace. When he stood close to me, I felt the heat of his hands and smelled the warm sweetness of his breath.

There are rare moments when one senses not the surface of other men and women, but the very life force which animates their being, and by extension all life. I have glimpsed it in moments of passion with Bethesda, and on a few other occasions, in the presence of men or women in great extremity, in the throes of orgasm or close to death or otherwise reduced by crisis to their very essence. It is a frightening and an awesome thing to see beyond the veils of the flesh into the soul. Somehow the force of life in Apollonius was so great that it rent through those veils, or else suffused them with the perfect physical embodiment of itself. It was hard to look at him and imagine that something so alive, so perfect could ever grow old and die, much less be snuffed out in an instant merely for the aggrandizement of a politician’s career.

I suddenly felt a great pity for Marcus Mummius. On the journey from Rome, aboard the
Fury,
I had callously remarked that he had no poetry in his soul. I had spoken rashly and in ignorance. Mummius had touched the face of Eros and been stricken; no wonder he was so desperate to save the boy from a senseless death at the hands of Crassus.

Little by little the guests emptied the house and lined the road that led away from the villa. Those who had been closest to Gelina or Lucius congregated in the courtyard to become part of the procession. The Designator, a small wizened man whom Crassus had hired and brought over from Puteoli, set about arranging the participants in their places. Eco and I, having no place in the procession, walked on ahead to find a sunny spot on the crowded tree-lined road.

At length we heard the strains of mournful music. The sound grew louder as the procession came into view. The musicians led the way, blowing on horns and flutes and shaking bronze rattles. In Rome, deference to public opinion and the ancient Law of the Twelve Tables might have restricted the number of musicians to ten, but Crassus had hired at least twice that number. Clearly, he meant to impress.

Next came the hired mourners, a coterie of women who walked with a shuffling gait, wore their hair undressed and chanted a refrain that paraphrased the playwright Naevius’s famous epitaph: ‘If the death of any mortal saddens hearts immortal, the gods above must this man’s death bemoan. . . .’ They stared straight ahead, oblivious of the crowd; they shivered and wept until great torrents of tears streamed down their cheeks.

There was a small gap in the procession, just long enough for the plaintive song of the mourners to recede before the buffoons and mummers arrived. Eco brightened at their approach, but I inwardly groaned; there is nothing quite so embarrassing as a funeral procession marred by incompetent clowns. These, however, were quite good; even at the end of the holiday season, there is no lack of first-rate entertainers on the Cup, and the Designator had hired the best. While some of them resorted to crude but effective slapstick, drawing polite laughter from the crowd, there was one among them with a stirring voice who recited snatches of tragic poetry. Most of the standard passages used in funeral processions are familiar to me, but these words were from some fresh and unfamiliar poet of the Epicurean school:

What has death to frighten man,

If souls can die as bodies can?

When mortal frame shall be disbanded,

This lump of flesh from life unhanded,

From grief and pain we shall be free—

We shall not
feel,
for we shall not
be.

But suppose that after meeting Fate

The soul still feels in its divided state.

What’s that to us? For we are only
we

While body and soul in one frame agree.

And if our atoms should revolve by chance

And our cast-off matter rejoin the dance,

What gain to us would all this bring?

This new-made man would be a new-made thing.

We, dead and gone, would play no part

In all the pleasures, nor feel the smart

Which to that new man shall accrue

Whom of our matter Time moulds anew.

Take heart then, listen and hear.

What is there left in death to fear?

After the pause of life has come between,

All’s just the same had we never been.

The reciter was abruptly interrupted by one of the buffoons, who shook a finger in his face. ‘What a lot of nonsense. My body, my soul, my body, my soul,’ the buffoon parroted, rocking his head back and forth. ‘What a lot of Epicurean nonsense! I had an Epicurean philosopher in my house once, but I kicked him out. Give me a dull-as-dishwater Stoic like that clown Dionysius any day!’

There were some warm chuckles of recognition among the crowd. I gathered this must be the Arch Mime, employed by the Designator to present a fond parody of the deceased.

‘And don’t think for an instant that I’ll pay you even half a copper for such pathetic poetry, either,’ he went on, still wagging his finger, ‘nor for any of this so-called entertainment. I expect true value for my money, do you understand? True value! Money doesn’t fall from the sky, you know, at least not into my hands! Into the hands of my cousin Crassus, maybe, but not mine!’ He abruptly pursed his lips and turned on his heel, clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace.

I overheard the man next to me whisper: ‘He’s got Licinius down to perfection!’

‘Uncanny!’ the man’s wife agreed.

‘But don’t think that just because I
won’t
pay you it’s because I
can’t
pay you,’ piped the Arch Mime. ‘I could! I would! Only I owe debts to seven shops in Puteoli and six in Neapolis and five in Surrentum and four in Pompeii and three in Misenum and two in Herculaneum’ – the Arch Mime gasped and took a deep breath – ‘plus a long-standing debt to a little grandmother who sells apples by the side of the road right here in Baiae! Once I have them all paid off, come back and try another poem, you Epicurean fool, and perhaps I’ll sing another tune.’

‘Another tune—’ hooted the man beside me.

‘Sing another tune!’ said his wife, nodding and laughing appreciatively. Apparently the Arch Mime had delivered one of Lucius Licinius’s pet phrases.

‘Oh, I know,’ he went on, crossing his arms petulantly, ‘you all think I’m made of money because I live like a king, but it just isn’t so. At least not yet.’ He bobbed his eyebrows up and down. ‘But just you wait, because I do have a plan. Oh, yes, a plan, a plan. A plan for making more money than you Baian big boys could swallow with a serving spoon. A plan, a plan. Make way for the man with a plan!’ he bleated, breaking character and running to catch up with the other buffoons.