Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (85 page)

‘What an awful idea!’

‘Even so . . .’ I called for a slave, who managed to find a chisel for me.

‘What are you doing, Gordianus? Here, those tiles are made of fine limestone! You shouldn’t go chipping away at the corners.’

‘Not even to discover
this
?’ I slid the chisel under the edge of one of the stones and lifted it up.

Lucius drew back and gasped, then leaned forward and peered down into the darkness. ‘A tunnel!’ he whispered.

‘So it appears.’

‘Someone must go down it!’ Lucius said. He peered at me and raised an eyebrow.

‘Not even if Cornelia doubled my fee!’

‘I wasn’t suggesting that
you
go, Gordianus.’ He looked up at the young slave who had fetched the chisel. The boy looked slender and supple enough. When he saw what Lucius intended, he started back and looked at me imploringly.

‘No, Lucius Claudius,’ I said, ‘no one need be put at risk; not yet. Who knows what the boy might encounter – if not lemures and monsters, then booby traps or scorpions or a fall to his death. First we should attempt to determine the tunnel’s egress. It may be a simple matter, if it merely follows the logical course of the plumbing.’

Which it did. From the balcony on the western side of the house it was easy enough to judge where the buried pipes descended the slope into the valley between the Palatine and the Capitoline, where they joined with the Cloaca Maxima underground. At the foot of the hill, directly below the house, in a wild rubbish-strewn region behind some warehouses and granaries, I spied a thicket. Even stripped of their leaves, the bushes grew so thick that I could not see far into them.

Lucius insisted on accompanying me, though his bulky frame and expensive garb were ill suited for scrambling down a steep hillside. We eventually reached the foot of the hill, then pushed our way into the thicket, ducking beneath branches and snapping twigs out of the way.

At last we came to the heart of the thicket, where our perseverance was rewarded. Hidden behind the dense, shaggy branches of a cypress tree was the tunnel’s other end. The hole was crudely made, lined with rough dabs of mortar and broken bricks. It was just large enough for a man to enter, but the foul smell that issued from within was enough to keep out vagrants or curious children.

At night, hidden behind the storehouses and sheds, such a place would be quite lonely and secluded. A man – or a lemur, for that matter – might come and go completely unobserved.

‘Cold,’ complained Lucius, ‘cold and damp and dark. It would have made more sense to stay in the house tonight, where it’s warm and dry. We could lie in wait in the hallway and trap this fiend when he emerges from his secret passage. Why, instead, are we huddling here in the dark and cold, watching for who knows what and jumping in fright every time a bit of wind whistles through the thicket?’

‘You need not have come, Lucius Claudius. I didn’t ask you to.’

‘Cornelia would have thought me a coward if I didn’t,’ he pouted.

‘And what does Cornelia’s opinion matter?’ I snapped, and bit my tongue. The cold and damp had set us both on edge. A light drizzle was falling, obscuring the moon and casting the thicket into even greater darkness. We had been hiding among the brambles since shortly after nightfall. I had warned Lucius that the watch was likely to be long and uncomfortable and possibly futile, but he had insisted on accompanying me. He had offered to hire some ruffians to escort us, but if my suspicions were correct we would not need them; nor did I want more witnesses to be present than was necessary.

A gust of icy wind whipped beneath my cloak and sent a shiver up my spine. Lucius’s teeth began to chatter. My mood grew dark. What if I was wrong, after all? What if the thing we sought was not human, but something else . . . ?

A twig snapped, then many twigs. Something had entered the thicket. It was moving towards us.

‘It must be a whole army!’ whispered Lucius, clutching at my arm.

‘No,’ I whispered back. ‘Only two persons, if my guess is right.’

Two moving shapes, obscured by the tangle of branches and the deep gloom, came very near to us and then turned towards the cypress tree that hid the tunnel’s mouth.

A moment later I heard a man’s voice, cursing: ‘Someone has blocked the hole!’ I recognized the voice of the growling giant who guarded the house on the Caelian Hill.

‘Perhaps the tunnel has fallen in.’ When Lucius heard the second voice he clutched my arm again, not in fear but in surprise.

‘No,’ I said aloud, ‘the tunnel was purposely blocked so that you could not use it again.’

There was a moment of silence, followed by the noise of two bodies scrambling in the underbrush.

‘Stay where you are!’ I said. ‘For your own good, stay where you are and listen to me!’

The scrambling ceased and there was silence again, except for the sound of heavy breathing and confused whispers.

‘I know who you are,’ I said. ‘I know why you’ve come here. I have no interest in harming you, but I must speak with you. Will you speak with me, Furia?’

‘
Furia?
’ whispered Lucius. The drizzle had ended, and moonlight illuminated the confusion on his face.

There was a long silence, then more whispering – the giant was trying to dissuade his mistress. Finally she called out. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Gordianus. You don’t know me. But I know that you and your family have suffered greatly, Furia. You have been wronged, most unjustly. Perhaps your vengeance on Titus and Cornelia is seemly in the eyes of the gods – I can’t judge. But you’ve been found out, and the time has come to stop your pretence. I’m going to step towards you now. There are two of us. We carry no weapons. Tell your slave that we mean no harm, and that to harm us will profit you nothing.’

I stepped slowly towards the cypress tree, a great, shaggy patch of black amid the general gloom. Beside it stood two forms, one tall, the other short.

With a gesture, Furia bade her slave to stay where he was, then stepped towards us. A patch of moonlight fell on her face. Lucius gasped and started back. Even though I expected it, the sight still sent a shiver through my veins.

I confronted what appeared to be a young man in a tattered cloak. His short hair was matted with blood and blood was smeared all around his throat and neck, as if his neck had been severed and then somehow fused together again. His eyes were dark and hollow. His skin was as pale as death and dotted with horrible tumours, his lips were parched and cracked. When Furia spoke, her sweet, gentle voice was a strange contrast to her horrifying appearance.

‘You have found me out,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you the man who called at my mother’s house this morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who betrayed me? It couldn’t have been Cleto,’ she whispered, glancing at the bodyguard.

‘No one betrayed you. We found the tunnel this afternoon.’

‘Ah! My brother had it built during the worst years of the civil war, so that we might have a way to escape in a sudden crisis. Of course, when the monster became dictator, there was no way for anyone to escape.’

‘Was your brother truly an enemy of Sulla’s?’

‘Not in any active way; but there were those willing to paint him as such – those who coveted all he had.’

‘Furius was proscribed for no reason?’

‘No reason but the bitch’s greed!’ Her voice was hard and bitter. I glanced at Lucius, who was curiously silent at such an assault on Cornelia’s character.

‘It was Titus whom you haunted first – ’

‘Only so that Cornelia would know what awaited her. Titus was a weakling, a nobody, easily frightened. Ask Cornelia; she could always intimidate him into doing whatever she wished, even if it meant destroying an innocent man. It was Cornelia who convinced her dear cousin Sulla to insert my brother’s name in the proscription lists, merely to obtain our house. Because the men of our line have perished, because Furius was the last, she thought that her calumny would go unavenged forever.’

‘But now it must stop, Furia. You must be content with what you have done so far.’

‘No!’

‘A life for a life,’ I said. ‘Titus for Furius.’

‘No, ruin for ruin! The death of Titus will not restore our house, our fortune, our good name.’

‘Nor will the death of Cornelia. If you proceed now, you are sure to be caught. You must be content with half a portion of vengeance, and push the rest aside.’

‘You intend to tell her, then? Now that you’ve caught me at it?’

I hesitated. ‘First, tell me truly, Furia: did you push Titus from his balcony?’

She looked at me unwaveringly, the moonlight making her eyes glimmer like shards of onyx. ‘Titus jumped from the balcony. He jumped because he thought he saw the lemur of my brother, and he could not stand his own wretchedness and guilt.’

I bowed my head. ‘Go,’ I whispered. ‘Take your slave and go now, back to your mother and your niece and your brother’s widow. Never come back.’

I looked up to see tears streaming down her face. It was a strange sight, to see a lemur weep. She called to the slave, and they departed from the thicket.

We ascended the hill in silence. Lucius’s teeth stopped chattering and instead he began to huff and puff. Outside Cornelia’s house I drew him aside.

‘Lucius, you must not tell Cornelia.’

‘But how else – ’

‘We will tell her that we found the tunnel but that no one came; that her persecutor has been frightened off for now, but may come again, in which case she can set her own guard. Yes, let her think that the unknown threat is still at large, plotting her destruction.’

‘But surely she deserves – ’

‘She deserves what Furia had in store for her. Did you know that Cornelia had placed Furius’ name on the lists, merely to obtain his house?’

‘I – ’ Lucius bit his lip. ‘I suspected the possibility. But Gordianus, what she did was hardly unique. Everyone was doing it.’

‘Not everyone. Not you, Lucius.’

‘True,’ he said, nodding sheepishly. ‘But Cornelia will fault you for not capturing the impostor. She’ll refuse to pay your fall fee.’

‘I don’t care about the fee.’

‘I’ll make up the difference,’ said Lucius.

I laid my hand on his shoulder. ‘What is rarer than a camel in Gaul?’ I said. Lucius wrinkled his brow. ‘An honest man in Rome!’ I laughed and squeezed his shoulder.

Lucius shrugged off the compliment with typical chagrin. ‘I still don’t understand how you knew the identity of the impostor.’

‘I told you that I visited the house on the Caelian Hill this morning. What I didn’t tell you was what the old slave woman across the street revealed to me: that Furius not only had a sister, but that his sister bore a striking resemblance to him – so close, in fact, that with her softer, more feminine features, she might have passed for a younger version of Furius.’

‘But her horrid appearance . . .’

‘An illusion. When I followed Furius’ widow to market, I saw her purchase a considerable quantity of calf’s blood. She also gathered a spray of juniper berries, which her little girl carried for her.’

‘Berries?’

‘The cankers pasted on Furia’s face – juniper berries cut in half. The blood was for matting her hair and daubing on her neck. As for the rest of her appearance, her ghastly make-up and costuming, you and I can only guess at the ingenuity of a household of women united towards a single goal. Furia has been in seclusion for months, which explains the almost uncanny paleness of her flesh – and the fact that she was able to cut off her hair without anyone taking notice.’

I shook my head. ‘A remarkable woman. I wonder why she never married? I suppose the turmoil of the civil war must have destroyed any plans she had, and the death of her brothers ruined her prospects forever. Misery is like a pebble cast into a pond, sending out a wave that spreads and spreads.’

I headed home that night weary and wistful. There are days when one sees too much of the world’s wickedness, and only a long sleep in the safe seclusion of home can restore an appetite for life. I thought of Bethesda and Eco, and tried to push the face of Furia from my thoughts. The last thing on my mind was the haunted soldier and his legion of lemures.

I passed by the wall of his garden, smelled the familiar tang of burning leaves, but thought nothing of it until I heard the little wooden door open behind me and the voice of his old retainer.

‘Finder! Thank the gods you’ve finally returned!’ he whispered hoarsely. He seemed to be in the grip of a strange malady, for even though the door allowed him more room to stand, he remained oddly bent. His eyes gleamed dully and his jaw trembled. ‘The master sent messengers to your house – only to be told that you’re out, but may return at any time. But when the lemures come, time stops. Please, come! Save the master – save us all!’

From beyond the wall I heard the sound of moaning, not from one man but from many. I heard a woman shriek, and the sound of heavy objects being overturned. What madness was taking place within the soldier’s house?