Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (23 page)

‘And then what?’ My heart raced in my chest.

‘Not what you think.’ She reached up to wipe a tear from her eye. ‘The onion,’ she said. I saw the bruise that circled her wrist like a bracelet, left by a strong man’s grip.

‘But they hurt you.’

‘They pushed me. They hit me a few times. One of them held me from the back. They made me watch.’ She stared down at the table. Her voice became grim. ‘I had been squabbling with Bast all day. She was crazy from the smell of the fish. One of them found her in the kitchen and brought her to the vestibule. She bit him and scratched his face. He threw her against the wall. Then he pulled out a knife.’ She looked up from her work. ‘They wrote something. With the blood. They said it was for you, and that you shouldn’t forget it. What does it say? Is it a curse?’

‘No. A threat. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘It has to do with the young slave who came yesterday, doesn’t it? The new client, the parricide?’

‘Perhaps, though I can’t see how. Cicero sent for me only yesterday. It wasn’t until today that I started stirring up trouble – yet they must already have been on their way here, even before I spoke with the shopkeeper and his wife. . . . How did you escape from them?’

‘The same way I got away from you just now. With my teeth. The big one holding me was quite a coward. He squealed like a pig.’

‘What did they look like?’

She shrugged. ‘Bodyguards, gladiators. Fighters. Big men. Ugly.’

‘And one of them had a limp.’ I spoke the words as a certainty, but Bethesda shook her head.

‘No. No limp. I watched them both walk away the first time.’

‘You’re sure. No limp?’

‘The one who held me I didn’t really see. But the one who wrote was very big, and blond, a giant. His face was bleeding from where Bast had scratched him. I hope he carries a scar.’ She flipped the fish back into the pot, sprinkled it with the herbs and covered it all with grape leaves. She poured in water from an urn, put the pot over the fire, and stooped to tend the flame. I noticed that her hands had begun to shake.

‘Men like that,’ she said, ‘would not be satisfied with killing a cat, do you think?’

‘No. I think they might not.’

She nodded. ‘The door was still open. I knew I had to get away while the blond giant was still busy smearing letters on the wall, so I bit the man holding me as hard as I could, here.’ She indicated the thickest part of her forearm. ‘I slipped from his arms and ran out the door. They followed me. But they stopped suddenly as they were passing between the neighbours’ walls. I could hear them behind me, making disgusted noises, snorting like pigs.’

‘That would be when they stepped in the pile of excrement.’

‘Yes. Imagine men who could smear their hands in cat’s blood, turned into squeamish matrons from a bit of shit on their sandals? Romans!’ The word came out of her mouth like venom. Only a native Alexandrian can pronounce the name of the world’s capital with such withering disgust.

‘I lost myself in the street, until I thought they must be gone. But when I came back to the foot of the pathway I was afraid to come up. I went into the tavern across the street instead. I know a woman who cooks there, from seeing her in the market. She let me hide in one of the empty rooms upstairs, until I saw you coming home. She lent me a lamp. I called out from below, to warn you before you reached the house, but you didn’t hear.’ She gazed into the fire. ‘Will they come back?’

‘Not tonight,’ I assured her, having no idea whether they would or not.

Having eaten, I longed for sleep, but Bethesda would not let me rest until the corpse had been disposed of.

Romans have never worshipped animals as gods. Nor are they sentimental about household creatures. How could it be otherwise with a race that esteems human life so very little? Beneath the numbing apathy of their masters, the slaves of Rome, imported from all over the earth, but especially from the East, often lose whatever notions of sacred life they may have acquired as children in faraway lands. But Bethesda retained a sense of decorum and awe in the face of an animal’s death, and in her way she grieved for Bast.

She insisted that I build a pyre in the centre of the garden. She took a dress from her wardrobe, a fine gown of white linen which I had given her only a year before. I winced as I watched her rip the seams to form a single winding sheet. She wrapped the broken body in thickness after thickness, until no more blood would soak through to stain the outermost cloth. She laid the bundle onto the pyre and muttered something to herself as she watched the flames leap up. In the still air the smoke rose straight upwards, blotting out the stars.

I longed for sleep. I ordered her to join me, but she refused to come until the floor had been washed clean of blood. She knelt beside a pail of heated water and scrubbed far into the night. I convinced her to leave the message on the wall untouched, though she clearly thought that leaving it was an invitation to all manner of magical disaster.

She would not allow me to extinguish a single lamp or candle. I fell asleep in a house with every room alight. At some point Bethesda finished her scrubbing and joined me, but her presence brought me no comfort. All through the night she kept rising to check the bolts on the doors and windows, to refill the lamps and replenish the candles.

I slept in fits and starts. I dreamed. Over endless miles of barren waste I rode a white steed, unable to remember when or how I had departed, unable to reach any destination. In the middle of the night I woke, feeling already weary from a long, unpleasant journey.

XV

It would never do for Bethesda to stay alone in the house while I was gone. A year before, the problem would never have arisen; then I had kept two strong young male slaves. Except on those rare occasions when I needed an entourage or a bodyguard and took them with me, they had stayed with Bethesda – one to accompany her on errands, the other to watch the household in her absence, both to assist and protect her in the home. Best of all, they had given her someone to boss; at night I tried not to smile as she recounted her grievances against them and fumed at the gossip she imagined they passed behind her back.

But slaves are a constant expense and a valuable commodity, especially to those barely able to afford them. A chance offer from a client at a moment of need had weakened me into selling them both. For the last year Bethesda had managed on her own without incident, until now. My foolishness had almost brought us to complete disaster.

I could not leave her alone. Yet, if I hired a bodyguard for the day, would she be any safer? The assassins might very well return; would a single bodyguard, or two, or three be enough if they were bent on murder? If I found somewhere for her to stay, I would be leaving the house deserted. Such men, foiled of capturing any prey, might very well set fire to everything I owned.

Long before the first cock’s crow of the morning I was awake, turning the dilemma over in my head. The only advice that came to me from staring at the candlelit ceiling was to drop the case entirely. There would be no trip to Ameria. At first light I could descend to the Subura and dispatch a messenger to Cicero, telling him I withdrew from his employ and asking him to settle my account. Then I could board myself up in the house with Bethesda all day, making love and strolling in the garden and complaining about the heat; and to any intruder who beat on the door I could simply say: ‘Yes, yes, I choose silence over death! Let Roman justice work its will! Now go away!’

There is a cock on the hillside which crows long before all the rest; I suspect he belongs to my country neighbour who throws her offal over the wall – a country cock with country habits, unlike the lazier and more luxurious birds of Rome. When he crowed, there would be two hours until dawn. I decided I would rise then and make my choice.

The nature of time changes while the world sleeps. Moments congeal, moments attenuate, like lumps in thin cheese. Time becomes uneven, elusive, uncertain. To the sleepless the night seems eternal and yet still too short. I lay for a long time watching the flickering shadows above my head, unable to sleep but unable to follow any of the thoughts that flitted through my head, waiting for the cock’s crow until I began to think the bird had overslept. Then it came at last, distinct and shrill in the warm, still air.

I sprang up, realizing with a start that I had actually been asleep, or somewhere on sleep’s border. For a confused moment I wondered if I had dreamed the cock’s crow. Then I heard it again.

Amid the light of many candles I changed my tunic and splashed my face. Bethesda had finally come to rest; I saw her curled on a straw mat beneath the colonnade at the far corner of the garden, surrounded by a ring of candles, asleep at last. She had chosen a spot as far as possible from the wall where Bast had died.

I crossed the garden, walking quietly so as not to wake her. She lay curled on her side, hugging herself. The muscles of her face were soft and relaxed. A lustrous strand of blue-black hair lay in disarray across her cheek. In the glow of the candles she looked more like a child than I had ever seen her. A part of me longed to gather her up in my arms and carry her to the bed, to hold her there warm and safe, touching and dreaming until the morning sun on our faces made us wake. To forget about whatever sordid mess Cicero had swept me into, to turn my back upon it. Looking at Bethesda, I felt a wave of such tenderness that my eyes were veiled with tears. The image of her face dissolved; the candlelight melted into glistening mist. It is one thing, so I am told, to join fortunes in marriage to a free woman. It is something else to own a woman as a slave, and I have often wondered which is more bitter and which more sweet.

The cock crowed again, joined this time by another from far away. In that instant I decided.

I knelt beside Bethesda and woke her as gently as I could. Even so she gave a start and stared at me for a moment as if I were a stranger. I felt a pang of doubt and turned away, knowing that if she saw my hesitation it would feed her own fear, and there would be no end to it. I told her to dress and comb her hair and grab a handful of bread if she was hungry; as soon as she was ready we would take a short walk.

I quickly turned aside and busied myself extinguishing candles. The house fell dark. After a short time Bethesda emerged from her room and announced that she was ready. Her voice had an anxious edge but no note of distrust or reproach. I uttered a silent prayer that I was making the right choice, and wondered to whom I was praying.

The pathway down the hill was lined with shadows, black within black. Beneath the glow of my torch the stones underfoot took on the properties of illusion, casting confused, jumbled shadows while their edges loomed up treacherous and sharp. It would almost have been safer to proceed without a light. Bethesda tripped and clutched my arm. She peered from side to side, unable to watch her feet for fear of something lurking in the darkness.

Halfway down we entered a long trough of fog that flowed and eddied like a river in the notch of the valley, so thick that the torchlight reflected back upon itself, wrapping us in a cocoon of milky white. Like the uncanny heat that had gripped Rome, there was something freakish about the fog. It brought no refreshment or relief; the great mass was warm and clammy with abrupt pockets of chilled air. It devoured light. It swallowed sound. The grinding of the loose stones beneath our feet was muffled and distant. Even the crickets stopped their chirring, and for the moment the cocks were silent.

Bethesda shuddered beside me, but I was secretly glad of the fog. If it would last until sunrise, I might be able to make my exit from the city unobserved even by eyes hired to watch me.

The stablemaster was asleep when we arrived, but a slave agreed to wake him. He was disgruntled at first; I was an hour earlier than expected, and at any rate the slave could have handled the departure without his master being disturbed. But when I explained what I wanted and offered terms, he was suddenly wide-awake and genial.

For the next two days at least he would take Bethesda into his household. I warned him not to work her too hard as she was accustomed to her own rhythms and unused to heavy work. (This last was a lie, but I had no intention of letting him work her to her limit.) If he could set her to some steady task, sewing perhaps, she would more than earn her keep.

In the meantime I wanted to hire two sturdy slaves from him to watch my house. He insisted he could spare only one. I was sceptical until he roused the boy from bed. An uglier youth I had never seen, nor a larger one. Where he came from I could not imagine. He had the uncouth name of Scaldus. His face was raw and red, blistered by the intense sun of the past week; his hair stuck out in stiff bunches from his head, the same texture and colour as the bits of straw that clung to his scalp. If his sheer size failed to intimidate any caller, his face might do the job. He was to take up a post outside my door and not to leave it until I returned; a woman from the stables would bring him food and water through the day. Even if he proved weaker than he looked or a coward, he could at least raise an alarm if intruders came to the house. As for the expense, the stablemaster agreed to extend my credit. The added fee I would pass on to Cicero.