Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (28 page)

I glanced towards Capito’s villa, then upward at the stars. All I wanted was sleep. But who could say if my host would be in such a talkative mood in the morning?

‘Tell me, Titus Megarus . . .’ Between the wine and weariness my voice deserted me.

‘Tell you what, Gordianus of Rome?’ His speech was slurred. He seemed such a naturally sober man, so moderate in all other things, that I thought he must be the sort that indulged in wine only when there was company to entertain.

‘Tell me everything. All you know about the death of old Sextus Roscius, and his feud with Capito and Magnus, and all that came after.’

‘All a rotten scandal,’ he scowled. ‘Everyone knows there’s something smelly about the whole business, but no one does anything about it. I tried, but it got me nowhere.’

‘Begin at the beginning. This feud between the late Sextus Roscius and his cousins Magnus and Capito – how far back does it go?’

‘It was a feud they inherited at birth. All three had the same grandfather; Sextus’s father was the oldest of three sons, Capito and Magnus were sons of the younger sons. When the grandfather died, virtually all the estate went to the oldest son, naturally – to the father of old Sextus Roscius. Well, you know how that goes, sometimes there’s a gracious settlement with the rest of the family, sometimes there’s an ugly break. Who knows all the petty details? All I know is that it carried into the cousins of the second generation, with Capito and Magnus always against old Sextus, always conniving for some way to get a bigger share of the family fortune. Somehow or other they’ve succeeded. A few gullible souls in Ameria think they were simply blessed by Fortune. Anyone with a brain in his head can see they must have got blood on their hands, though they’ve been clever enough to wash it off.’

‘Very well; the father of the elder Sextus Roscius inherits the family estates, leaving the rest with a pittance. The elder Sextus is his prime heir – I assume he was the oldest son in the family?’

‘The only male child; the Roscii are not prolific breeders.’

‘Very well, the elder Sextus inherits, much to the ongoing chagrin of his impoverished cousins Capita and Magnus. How impoverished were they?’

‘Capito’s father always held on to one of the farms down by the Nar, enough for a modest living. It was Magnus who had the worst of it. His father lost the one farm he inherited and finally killed himself. That’s why Magnus left for the city, to make his way there.’

‘Bitter men. And if Magnus went to Rome to learn about life, murder is a lesson easily picked up. Now correct me if my memory fails: old Sextus marries twice. The first union produces Sextus
filius
. The wife dies, and Sextus
pater
remarries. A second son is born, Gaius, and the beloved young wife dies in childbirth. Young Sextus gets the run of the farms, while his father and Gaius go off to Rome. But then, three years ago, on the eve of Sulla’s triumph, young Sextus summons his father and brother home to Ameria, and while they’re here Gaius dies from something he ate. Tell me, Titus, what did the gossips in Ameria say about that?’

He shrugged and sipped more wine. ‘Gaius wasn’t known much hereabouts, though you’d find everyone agreed he was certainly a handsome young man. Personally, I found him too airy and cultivated; I suppose that was the way his father raised him, with tutors and fancy dinner parties. Not the boy’s fault.’

‘But his death – it was accepted as accidental?’

‘There was never any question.’

‘Suppose it wasn’t an accident. Might Capito and Magnus have had something to do with it?’

‘It seems far-fetched. What would they have gained, except to spite his father? If they wanted to kill someone, why not the old man, or the whole family? Certainly, Capito is a violent man. He’s stabbed and beaten more than one slave to death, and they say once down in Rome he threw a total stranger into the Tiber, just because the man wouldn’t step aside on the bridge, and then dived in after him, trying to make certain he drowned. I suppose he and Magnus might have murdered Gaius from pure cruelty, but I don’t think it’s likely.’

‘Nor do I. It’s merely an incidental detail.’ Perhaps it was the wine warming my blood, or the fresh breeze off the hillside; suddenly I felt fully awake and alert. I stared at the light from Capito’s house. It wavered on the rising ripples of warm air and seemed to stare back at me like a baleful eye. ‘Let’s go to last September, then. Sextus Roscius is murdered in Rome. Witnesses see the chief perpetrator, a strong man in black robes with a lame left leg.’

‘Magnus, without a doubt!’

‘He appears to know his victim. He is also left-handed, and quite strong.’

‘Magnus, again.’

‘The assassin is accompanied by two other thugs. One is a blond giant.’

‘Mallius Glaucia.’

‘Yes. The other – who knows? The shopkeeper says he had a beard. The widow Polia could identify them all, but she’ll never be persuaded to testify. At any rate, it’s Glaucia who arrives very early the next morning to give the news to Capito, carrying with him a bloody knife.’

‘What? That’s a detail I haven’t heard before.’

‘It comes from the taverner in Narnia.’

‘Ah, the one with the blind father. They’re both completely daft. Weak blood.’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. The taverner tells me that Glaucia took the news straight to Capito. Who was the first to tell Sextus Roscius of his father’s death?’ I looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

Titus nodded. ‘Yes, that was me. I heard it early that morning at the common well in Ameria. When I saw Sextus that afternoon, I felt sure he knew already. But when I offered him my grief, the look on his face – well, it was a strange look. I couldn’t call it grief; you must know there was little love between them. Dread, that’s what I saw in his eyes.’

‘And surprise? Shock?’

‘Not exactly. Confusion and fear.’

‘So. The next day a more official messenger arrives, sent by the old man’s household in Rome.’

Titus nodded. ‘And the day after that the remains of the dead man arrived. The Roscii are buried on a little hill beyond the villa; you can see the stelae from here on a clear day. Sextus buried his father on the eighth day and then began the seven days of mourning. Sextus never finished them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because within that time the soldiers arrived. They must have come from Volaterrae, up north, where Sulla was campaigning against the last Marian remnants in Etruria. Anyway, the soldiers arrived and made a public announcement in the town square that Sextus Roscius the elder had been declared an enemy of the state and that his death in Rome had been a legal execution at the behest of our esteemed Sulla. His entire estate was forfeit. Everything was to be auctioned – lands, houses, jewellery, slaves. The date and the place were announced, somewhere in Rome.’

‘And how did young Sextus react?’

‘No one knows. He went into seclusion at his villa, refusing to leave the house and seeing no visitors. All this might be quite proper for a man in mourning, but Sextus stood to lose everything. People began saying that perhaps it was true that his father had been proscribed. Who knows what the old man had been doing down in Rome? Perhaps he was a Marian spy, perhaps he had been found out in some plot to assassinate Sulla.’

‘But the proscriptions legally ended on the first of June. Roscius was killed in September.’

Titus shrugged. ‘You talk like an advocate. If Sulla wanted the man dead, why shouldn’t it be legal, so long as the dictator declared it so?’

‘Was there much interest in the auction?’

‘Everyone knows they’re fixed. Why bother? Some friend of Sulla’s would end up paying a pittance for it all, and anyone else who cared to bid would be escorted from the hall. Believe me, we were all surprised when Magnus and a band of thugs from Rome showed up at Sextus’s door with some sort of official writ, telling him to surrender all his property and vacate at once.’

‘So he was pushed aside as easily as that?’

‘There was no one to see what actually happened, except the slaves, of course. People love to embellish. Some say that Magnus came upon him burning myrrh at his father’s grave, slapped the censer from his hands, and bullied him from the shrine at spear point. Others say he ripped the clothes from Sextus’s back and chased him into the road naked, setting hounds after him. I never heard either tale from Sextus; he refused to speak of it, and I wouldn’t press his shame.

‘In any case, Sextus and his family spent one night in the home of a merchant friend in Ameria, and the next morning Capito moved into the villa. You can imagine the eyebrows that were lifted at that. Not everyone was displeased; Sextus has his enemies and Capito his friends in this valley. Sextus goes directly to Capito; again, no one was there to witness it. In the end, Capito allows Sextus back onto the property, making him stay in a little house at one corner of the estate where they usually put up seasonal labourers at harvest time.’

‘And that was the end of it?’

‘Not quite. I called a meeting of the Amerian town council and told them we had to do something. It took considerable persuasion, believe me, to get some of those old bones to make a decision. And all the while Capito was glaring at me from across the table – oh, yes, Capito sits on our esteemed town council. Finally it was decided that we should protest against the proscription of Sextus Roscius, to attempt to clear his name and see that his property was restored to his son. Capito went along with everything. Sulla was still encamped at Volaterrae; a delegation of ten men was sent to plead our case – myself, Capito, and eight others.’

‘And what did Sulla say?’

‘We never saw him. First we were made to wait. Five days they kept us waiting, as if we were barbarians asking for favours, and not Roman citizens petitioning the state. Everyone was impatient and grumbling; they would have dropped it all and come home right then if I hadn’t shamed them into seeing it through. At last we were allowed to see not Sulla, but Sulla’s deputy, an Egyptian called Chrysogonus. You’ve heard of him?’ Titus asked, seeing the look that crossed my face.

‘Oh, yes. A young man, they say, of natural charm and great handsomeness, and the intelligence and ambition to turn them to his utmost advantage. He started as a slave in Sulla’s household, toiling in the gardens. But Sulla has an eye for beauty and doesn’t like to see it wasted on drudgery. Chrysogonus became the old man’s favourite. This was some years ago, when Sulla’s first wife was still alive. Sulla eventually sated himself with the slave’s body and rewarded him with freedom, riches, and a high place in his retinue.’

Titus snorted. ‘I wondered what the story was. All we were told was that this Chrysogonus was a powerful man who had access to Sulla’s ear. I told them we wanted to see the dictator himself, but all the secretaries and adjutants shook their heads as if I were a child and said we’d be much better off to win the sympathy of this Chrysogonus first, who would then put the case before Sulla on our behalf.’

‘And did he?’

Titus looked at me ruefully. ‘It went like this: we finally won our audience and were ushered standing into the presence of his Goldenness, who sat staring at the ceiling as if someone had struck him in the forehead with a hammer. Finally he condescended to blink his blue eyes and favour us with a fleeting glance. And then he smiled. I swear, you’ve never seen such a smile; as if Apollo himself had come down to earth. There was something aloof in it, but not cold. It was more like he was sorry for us, and sad, the way you might imagine a god would be sad to look at mere mortals.

‘He nodded. He inclined his head. He fixed his blue eyes on you and you had the feeling that a superior being was doing you a very great favour simply to acknowledge your existence. He listened to our petition and after that every man said his piece, except Capito, who kept in the back as stiff and silent as a stone. And then Chrysogonus stood up from his chair and threw back his shoulders, and he pushed a lock of golden hair from his forehead and put a finger to his lips, as if he were thinking hard; and it was almost embarrassing to be a mere grubby mortal presuming to share the same room with such a perfect specimen of manhood.

‘He told us we were fine Romans to have gone to such pains in pursuit of justice. He said that such occurrences as the one we described were very, very rare, but that indeed, lamentably, regrettably, there had been a handful of instances of men falsely proscribed. At the very earliest opportunity he would present our petition to the great Sulla himself. In the meantime, we should be patient; surely we could see that the dictator of the Republic had a thousand concerns pressing on him from all sides, not least of which was a final effort to eradicate the vestiges of the Marian conspiracy where it was festering in the Etruscan hills. Ten heads bobbed up and down like corks on a wave, and mine was one of them. And I remember thinking, though I’m ashamed to say it now, that I was glad we hadn’t been allowed to see Sulla, for if being in the presence of his deputy was this intimidating, what bigger fools would we have made of ourselves dealing with the great man himself?

‘But then I cleared my throat, and somehow I found the nerve to say that if we couldn’t see Sulla, at least we insisted on having some sort of clear answer before we returned to Ameria. Chrysogonus turned his blue eyes on me and raised his eyebrows ever so slightly, the way you might look at a slave who has the impertinence to interrupt a conversation with some trifle he thinks is important. And finally he nodded, and said, “Of course, of course,” and then he told us that when he returned to Rome he himself would take a stylus and mark the name of Sextus Roscius from the proscription lists with his own hand, and see to it that the dead man’s property was reconstituted and the deed restored to his son. We would have to be patient, of course, for the wheels of justice turn slowly in Rome, but never against the will of the people.