Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (65 page)

‘Look at the man himself, Judges – turn your heads and look! With his hair so carefully curled and scented, how he struts about the Forum with his following of Roman-born citizens who disgrace their togas by appearing in the retinue of an exslave! See what contempt he has for all those about him, how he considers no one a human being compared with himself, how he puffs himself up with the illusion that he alone possesses all power and wealth.’

I glanced over my shoulder. Anyone who at that moment might be seeing Chrysogonus for the first time would never have taken him for a handsome man. His face had turned so bloated and red that he appeared to be on the verge of apoplexy. His eyes bulged from their sockets. I had never seen so much fury pent up inside a body so rigid. If he had literally exploded I would hardly have been surprised.

Cicero, from the Rostra, could clearly see the effect his words were producing and yet went on without pausing. He, too, looked excited and flushed. He spoke more and more rapidly, and yet maintained complete control, never tripping over a syllable or searching for a word.

‘I fear, from my attack on this creature, that some may misapprehend me, that you may assume that I mean to attack the aristocratic cause that has proven triumphant in our civil wars, and their champion, Sulla. Not so. Those who know me know that I longed for peace and reconciliation in the wars, but reconciliation having failed, victory went to the more righteous party. This was due to the will of the gods, the zeal of the Roman people, and of course the wisdom, power, and good fortune of Lucius Sulla. That the victors should have been rewarded and the vanquished punished is not for me to question. But I cannot believe that the aristocracy roused itself to arms only so that its slaves and exslaves should be made free to glut themselves on our goods and property.’

I could stand it no longer. My bladder felt as near to bursting as Chrysogonus’s swollen cheeks.

I rose from my seat and sidestepped past nobles who scowled at the distraction and fastidiously tugged up the hem of their togas, as if the mere touch of my foot might soil the cloth. While I escaped down the crowded aisle between the judges and the gallery, I glanced back into the square and felt that odd detachment of an anonymous spectator leaving the heart of the furore – Cicero passionately gesticulated, the crowd looked raptly on, Erucius and Magnus gritted their teeth. Tiro happened to glance towards me. He smiled, then looked suddenly alarmed. He gave me a cramped wave of summons. I smiled and gave him a wave of dismissal in return. He gestured more urgently and began to rise from his seat. I turned my back to him and hurried on. If there was some last, hushed conference he wanted with me, it would have to wait until I had tended to more pressing business. Only later did I realize that he was trying to warn me of the danger at my back.

At the end of the gallery I passed by Chrysogonus and his party. At that moment I imagined I could actually feel the heat that radiated from his blood-red face.

I pushed my way past the throng of retainers and slaves who filled the space behind the gallery. The street beyond was open and empty. Some spectators with no civic pride had already left a stench of urine in the nearest gutter, but my bladder wasn’t so weak that I couldn’t wait until I arrived at the public latrine. Behind the Shrine of Venus there was a small alcove specifically for the purpose, situated just above the Cloaca Maxima, with a slightly tilted floor and drains at the base of each wall.

An old man with a grizzled beard and a spotless white toga was just leaving as I stepped inside. He nodded as he passed. ‘Quite a trial, is it not?’ he wheezed.

‘It is.’

‘This Cicero is not a bad speaker.’

‘A fine speaker,’ I agreed hurriedly. The old man departed. I stood against the inmost wall, staring at the pitted limestone and holding my breath against the stench. Thanks to an acoustical curiosity I was able to hear Cicero from the Rostra. His voice was echoey but distinct: ‘
The ultimate aim of the accusers is as clear as it is reprehensible: nothing less than the complete elimination of the children of the proscribed, by any means at their disposal. Your sworn judgment and the execution of Sextus Roscius are to be the first steps in this campaign.
’

Cicero had reached his closing arguments. I tried to hurry my bladder. I closed my eyes and the floodgates opened. The sensation of relief was exquisite.

That was when I heard a low whistle behind me and stopped in midstream. I looked over my shoulder to see Mallius Glaucia standing ten paces behind me. He smoothed his hand down the front of his tunic until he closed it around the unmistakable shape of a dagger hidden within the folds at his waist. He fondled the hilt with an obscene grin, as if he were clutching his sex.

‘
Be vigilant, Judges; for otherwise you may on this very day and in this very place inaugurate a second wave of proscriptions far more cruel and ruthless than the first. At least the first was directed against men who could defend themselves; the tragedy I foresee will be aimed at the children of the proscribed, at infant sons in their cradles! By the immortal gods, who knows where such an atrocity could lead this republic?
’

‘Go ahead,’ Glaucia said. ‘Finish what you were doing.’

I dropped the hem of my tunic and turned to face him.

Glaucia smiled. He slowly reached into his tunic, pulled out his knife, and toyed with it, dragging the sharp tip against the wall with a scraping noise that set my teeth on edge. ‘I mean it,’ he said, sounding very charitable. ‘Do you think I’d stab a man in the back while he was pissing?’

‘A reasonable point of honour,’ I agreed, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘What do you want?’

‘To kill you.’

I sucked in a sharp breath, full of the smell of stale urine. ‘Now? Still?’

‘That’s right.’ He stopped scraping and touched the point of the blade to his fingertip. A bead of blood welled up from the flesh. Glaucia sucked it clean.

‘
Judges, it behoves wise men, furnished with the authority you possess, to apply the surest remedies to the lingering ills of this republic.
. . .’

‘But why? The trial is almost over.’

Instead of answering he continued to suck his thumb and recommenced scraping the blade against the wall. He stared at me like a demented child, monstrously overgrown. The knife in my tunic was a good match for his, but I judged his arm to be two hands longer. The odds were not good.

‘Why kill me? No matter what happens now, nothing you do to me can change matters. My part in this affair was over days ago. It was the slave who struck your head the other night, if that’s what you’re angry about. You have no grudge against me, Mallius Glaucia. You have no reason to kill me. No reason at all.’

He quit scraping the blade. He stopped sucking his thumb. He looked at me very earnestly. ‘But I’ve already told you: I
want
to kill you. Are you going to finish pissing or not?’

‘
There is not a man among you who does not know the reputation of the Roman people as merciful conquerors, lenient towards their foreign enemies; yet today Romans continue to turn on one another with shocking cruelty.
’

Glaucia stepped towards me. I stepped back against the wall, directly over the drain. A powerful stench of excreta and urine rose into my nostrils.

He stepped closer. ‘Well? You don’t want them to find you with piss all over your toga, do you, along with all the blood?’

A figure appeared behind him – another spectator come to use the drains. I thought Glaucia might glance around for just an instant, long enough so that I could rush him, perhaps kick him between the legs – but Glaucia only smiled at me and held up his blade so that the newcomer could see it. The stranger vanished without so much as a gasp.

Glaucia shook his head. ‘Now I can’t give you a choice,’ he said. ‘Now I’ll have to make it quick.’

He was big. He was also clumsy. He lunged and I was able to elude him with surprising ease. I pulled out my own blade, thinking I might not have to use it after all, not if I could simply slip past him. I dashed for open ground, slipped on the piss-covered floor, and fell face-first onto the hard stones.

The knife was jarred from my hand and went skidding away. I crawled desperately after it. It was still an arm’s length away when something enormously powerful struck my shoulders and knocked me flat.

Glaucia kicked me in the ribs several times and then flipped me over. His grinning face, looming enormous as he descended on me, was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. So this is how it shall be, I thought: I shall die not as an old man with a toothless Bethesda crooning in my ear and the perfume of my garden in my nostrils, but choked by the stench of an unwashed latrine, with a hideous assassin drooling spittle on my face, and the echo of Cicero’s voice droning in my ears.

There was a skittering sound, like a knife skipping over stones, and something sharp jabbed my side. I honestly believed, with the kind of faith reserved for the purist vestals, that my knife had somehow come skidding back to me, simply because I willed it to. I might have reached for it had I not been using both arms in a failing attempt to hold Glaucia off me. I stared into his eyes, fascinated by the sheer hatred I saw there. Suddenly he looked up, and in the next instant there was a stone the size of a bread loaf somehow attached to his bandaged forehead, as if it had popped out of his brain, like Minerva from Jupiter’s brow. It stayed there, as if glued to the spot by the blood that abruptly oozed about the connection – no, the stone was held there by the two hands that had brought it crashing down. I rolled up my eyes and saw Tiro upside-down against a blue sky above.

He did not look happy to see me. He kept hissing something at me, over and over, until my hand (not my ear) finally apprehended the word
knife.
I somehow twisted my arm in an impossible backwards bend, snatched my knife from where Tiro had kicked it and snapped it upright before my chest. There is no word in Latin, but there should be one, for the weird sensation of recognition I felt, as if I had done the exact thing once before. Tiro lifted the heavy stone and brought it down again on Glaucia’s already smashed forehead, and the giant collapsed like a mountain on top of me, impaling his exploding heart upon the full length of Eco’s blade.

‘
Suffer this wickedness no longer to stalk abroad in the land,’
a distant voice was crying. ‘
Banish it! Deny it! Reject it! It has delivered many Romans to a terrible death. But worse than that, it has robbed our spirits. By besieging us with cruelty hour upon hour, day after day, it has benumbed us; it has stifled all pity in a people once known as the most merciful on earth. When at every moment in all directions we see and hear acts of violence; when we are lost in a relentless storm of cruelty and deceit; then even the kindest and gentlest among us may lose all semblance of human compassion.
’

There was a pause, and then a great echoing thunder of applause. Confused and covered with blood, I thought for a moment that the cheering must be for me. The walls of the latrine did, after all, look something like the walls of an arena, and Glaucia was as dead as any dead gladiator. But gazing up I could see only Tiro, who was straightening his tunic with a look of exasperation and disgust.

‘I wasn’t there for the summation!’ he snapped. ‘Cicero will be furious. By Hercules! At least there’s no blood on me.’ With that he turned and disappeared, leaving me buried beneath a great quivering mass of dead flesh.

XXXII

Cicero won his case. An overwhelming majority of the seventy-five judges, including the praetor Marcus Fannius, voted to acquit Sextus Roscius of the charge of parricide. Only the most partisan Sullans, including a handful of new senators who had been appointed directly by the dictator, cast votes of guilty.

The crowd was equally impressed. Cicero’s name, along with bits and pieces of his oration, was spread all over Rome. For days afterwards one might walk by the open windows of a tavern or a smithy and hear men who had not even been there repeat some of Cicero’s choice jabs at Sulla or exclaim at his audacity in attacking Chrysogonus. His comments on farm and family life, his respect for filial duty and the gods were noted with approval. Overnight he gained a reputation as a brave and pious Roman, an upholder of justice and of truth.