Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (86 page)

‘Please, help us! The lemures, the lemures!’ The old slave made a face of such horror that I started back. I reached inside my tunic and felt my dagger. But of what use would a dagger be, to deal with those already dead?

I stepped through the little door. My heart pounded like a hammer in my chest.

The air of the garden was dank and smoky; after the drizzle, a clammy cold had descended like a blanket on the hills of Rome, holding down the smoke of hearth fires, making the air thick and stagnant. I breathed in an acrid breath and coughed.

The soldier came running from within the house. He tripped, fell, and staggered forward on his knees, wrapped his arms around my waist and looked up at me in abject terror. ‘There!’ He pointed back towards the house. ‘They pursue me! Gods have mercy – the boy without a head, the soldier with his belly cut open, all the others!’

I peered into the hazy darkness, but saw nothing except a bit of whorling smoke. I suddenly felt dizzy and lightheaded. It was because I had not eaten all day, I told myself; I should have been less proud and presumed upon Cornelia’s hospitality for a meal. Then, while I watched, the whorl of smoke began to expand and change shape. A face emerged from the murky darkness – a boy’s face, twisted with agony.

‘See!’ cried the soldier. ‘See how the poor lad holds his own head in his fist, like Perseus holding the head of the Gorgon! See how he stares, blaming me!’

Indeed, out of the darkness and smoke I began to see exactly what the wretched man described, a headless boy in battle garb clutching his dismembered head by the hair and holding it aloft. I opened my mouth in awe. Behind the boy, other shapes began to emerge – first a few, then many, then a legion of phantoms covered with blood and writhing like maggots in the air.

It was a terrifying spectacle. I would have fled, but I was rooted to the spot. The soldier clutched my knees. The old slave began to weep and babble. From within the house came the sound of others in distress, moaning and crying out.

‘Don’t you hear them?’ cried the soldier. ‘The lemures, shrieking like harpies!’ The great looming mass of corpses began to keen and wail – surely all of Rome could hear it!

Like a drowning man, the mind in great distress will clutch at anything to save itself. A bit of straw will float, but will not support a thrashing man; a plank of wood may give him respite, but best of all is a steady rock within the raging current. So my mind clutched at anything that might preserve it in the face of such overwhelming, inexplicable horror. Time had come to a stop, just as the old slave had said, and in that endlessly attenuated moment a flood of images, memories, schemes and notions raged through my mind. I clutched at straws. Madness pulled me downward, like an unseen current in black water. I sank – until I suddenly found the solid truth to cling to.

‘The bush!’ I whispered. ‘The burning bush, which speaks aloud!’

The soldier, thinking I spied something within the mass of writhing lemures, clutched at me and trembled. ‘What bush? Ah yes, I see it, too . . .’

‘No, the bush here in your garden! That strange, gnarled tree among the yews, with yellow leaves all around. But now the leaves have all been swept in among the others . . . burned with the others in the brazier . . . the smoke hangs in the air . . .’

I pulled the soldier out of the garden, through the small door and onto the pathway. I returned for the old slave, and then, one by one, for the others. They huddled together on the cobblestones, trembling and confused, their eyes wide with terror and red with blood.

‘There are no lemures!’ I whispered hoarsely, my throat sore from the smoke – even though I kept glimpsing the lemures above the wall, cackling and dangling their entrails in the empty air.

The slaves shrieked and clutched one another. The soldier hid behind his hands.

As the slaves grew more manageable, I led them in groups to my house, where they huddled together, frightened but safe. Bethesda was perplexed and displeased at the sudden invasion of half-mad strangers, but Eco was delighted at the opportunity to stay up until dawn under such novel circumstances. It was a long, cold night, marked by fits of panic and orgies of mutual reassurance, while we waited for sanity to return.

The first light of morning broke, bringing a cold dew that was a tonic to senses still befuddled by sleeplessness and poisoned by smoke. My head pounded like thunder, with a hangover far worse than any I had ever got from wine. A ray of pale sunlight was like a knife in my eyes, but I no longer saw visions of lemures or heard their mad wailing.

The soldier, haggard and dazed, begged me for an explanation.

‘The truth came to me in a flash,’ I said. ‘Your annual ritual of burning leaves, and the annual visitation of the lemures . . . the smoke that filled your garden, and the plague of spirits . . . these things were all somehow connected. That odd, twisted tree in your garden isn’t native to Rome, or to Italy. How it came here, I have no idea, but I suspect the seeds for it came from the East, where plants which induce visions are not uncommon. There is the snake plant of Ethiopia, the juice of which causes such terrible visions that it drives men to suicide; men convicted of sacrilege are forced to drink it as punishment. The river-gleam plant that grows on the banks of the Indus is famous for making men rave and see weird visions. But I suspect that the tree in your garden may be a specimen of a rare bush found in the rocky mountains east of Egypt; Bethesda tells a tale about it.’

‘What tale?’ said Bethesda.

‘You remember – the tale your Hebrew father passed on to you, about his ancestor called Moses, who encountered a bush which spoke aloud to him when it burned. The leaves of your bush, neighbour, not only spoke but cast powerful visions.’

‘Yet why did I see what I saw?’

‘You saw that which you feared the most – the vengeful spirits of those you killed fighting for Sulla.’

‘But the slaves saw what I saw! And so did you!’

‘We saw what you suggested, just as you began to see a burning bush when I said the words.’

He shook his head. ‘It was never so powerful before. Last night was more terrible than ever!’

‘Probably because, in the past, you happened to burn only a few of the yellow leaves at a time, and the cold wind carried away much of the smoke; the visions came upon some but not all of the household, and in varying degrees. But last night you happened to burn a great many of the yellow leaves at once. The smoke filled the garden and spread through your house. Everyone who breathed it was intoxicated and stricken with a temporary madness. Once we escaped the smoke, the madness passed, like a fever burning itself out.’

‘Then the lemures never existed?’

‘I think not.’

‘And if I uproot that accursed bush and cast it in the Tiber, I will never see the lemures again?’

‘Perhaps not.’
Though you may always see them in your nightmares,
I thought.

‘So, it was just as I told you,’ said Bethesda that afternoon, bringing a moist cloth to cool my forehead. Flashes of pain still coursed through my temples from time to time, and whenever I closed my eyes alarming visions loomed in the blackness.

‘Just as you told me? Nonsense!’ I said. ‘You thought that Titus was pushed from his balcony – and that his wife Cornelia did it!’

‘A woman pretending to be a lemur drove him to jump – which is almost the same,’ she insisted.

‘And you said the soldier’s old slave was lying about having seen the lemures himself, when in fact he was telling the truth.’

‘What I said was that the dead cannot go walking about unless they have been properly mummified, and I was absolutely right. And it was I who once told you about the burning bush which speaks, remember? Without that, you would never have figured the cause.’

‘Fair enough,’ I admitted, deciding it was impossible to win the argument.

‘This quaint Roman idea about lemures haunting the living is completely absurd,’ she went on.

‘About that I am not so sure.’

‘But with your own eyes you have seen the truth! By your own wits you have proved in not one but two instances that what everyone thought to be lemures were not lemures at all, only a vengeful pretence in one case, intoxicating smoke in the other – and at the root of both cases, a guilty conscience!’

‘You miss the point, Bethesda.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lemures
do
exist – perhaps not as visitors perceptible to the senses, but in another way. The dead do have power to spread misery among the living. The spirit of a man can carry on and cause untold havoc from beyond the grave. The more powerful the man, the more terrible his legacy.’ I shivered – not at lurid visions remembered from the soldier’s garden, but at the naked truth, which was infinitely more awful. ‘Rome is a haunted city. The lemur of the dictator Sulla haunts us all. Dead he may be, but not departed. His wickedness lingers on, bringing despair and suffering upon his friends and foes alike.’

To this Bethesda had no answer. I closed my eyes and saw no more monsters, but slept a dreamless sleep until dawn of the following day.

LITTLE CAESAR AND THE PIRATES

‘Well met, Gordianus! Tell me, have you heard what they’re saying down in the Forum about Marius’ young nephew, Julius Caesar?’

It was my good friend Lucius Claudius who called to me on the steps of the Senian Baths. He appeared to be on his way out, while I was on my way in.

‘If you mean that old story about pretty young Caesar playing queen to King Nicomedes while he was in Bithynia, I’ve heard it all before – from you, I believe, more than once, and with increasingly more graphic details each time.’

‘No, no, that bit of gossip is ancient history now. I’m talking about this tale of pirates, ransom, revenge –
crucifixions
!’

I looked at him blankly.

Lucius grinned, which caused his two chins to meld into one. His chubby cheeks were pink from the heat of the baths and his frizzled orange curls were still damp. The twinkle in his eyes held that special joy of being the first to relate an especially juicy bit of gossip.

I confessed to him that my curiosity was piqued. However, as it appeared that Lucius was leaving the baths, while I had only just arrived, and as I was especially looking forward to the hot plunge, given the slight nip that lingered in the spring air – alas, the story would have to wait.

‘What, and let someone else tell it to you, and get the details all confused? I think not, Gordianus! No, I’ll accompany you.’ He gestured to his entourage to turn around. The dresser, the barber, the manicurist, the masseur and the bodyguards all looked a bit confused but followed us compliantly back into the baths.

This turned out to be a stroke of luck for me, as I was in need of a bit of pampering. Bethesda did her best at cutting my hair, and as a masseuse her touch was golden, but Lucius Claudius was wealthy enough to afford the very best in body servants. There is something to be said for having occasional access to the services of a rich man’s slaves. As my fingernails and toenails were carefully clipped and filed and buffed, my hair expertly trimmed, and my beard painlessly shorn, Lucius kept trying to begin his tale and I kept putting him off, wanting to make sure I received the full treatment.

It was not until our second visit to the hot plunge that I allowed him to begin in earnest. Amid clouds of steam, with our heads bobbing on the water like little islands in the mist, he related his nautical tale.

‘As you know, Gordianus, in recent years the problem of piracy has grown increasingly severe.’

‘Blame it on Sulla and Marius and the civil war,’ I said. ‘Wars mean refugees, and refugees mean more bandits on the highways and more pirates on the sea.’

‘Yes, well, whatever the cause, we all see the results. Ships seized and looted, cities sacked, Roman citizens taken hostage.’

‘While the Senate vacillates, as usual.’

‘What can they do? Would you have them grant a special naval command to some power-mad general, who can then use the forces we give him to attack his political rivals and set off another civil war?’

I shook my head. ‘Trapped between warlords and brigands, with the Roman Senate to lead us – sometimes I despair for our republic.’