Murder on the Appian Way (37 page)

As I struck the hard, stone surface of the Appian Way, I heard Eco call out "Papa!" Where was he? I rolled upright, raising my hands to cover my face. Eco was still on his horse, but several men in dark cloaks seemed to be clambering up him, as if horse and man were a tower to be scaled. From the corner of my eye I saw a dark shape approach. I rolled away and collided with something warm and immovable. It was Davus, flat on his back on the paving stones, his eyes closed, his face pale, as still as death. He still held his dagger clutched in his hand. An image of Belbo's lifeless body flashed in my mind —

"Papa!" Eco cried again. Then he made another, muffled noise, as if his mouth had been covered.

I reached for the dagger in Davus's hand. What enormous hands he had! I pried at his fingers until the dagger slipped free. I almost had it —

Then darkness descended all at once as the sack was pulled over my head. It swallowed my shoulders, then my arms. A rope slithered snakelike around my chest. Another rope bit into my ankles. The inside of the sack tasted of onions and dirt. I coughed and spat. Another coil of rope slipped around my throat and began to tighten. What an end— strangled to death inside a filthy sack on the Appian Way!

Someone cursed. "You've got it around his neck, you idiot!"

The rope loosened, then tightened again around my jaw, working its way between my lips, gagging me.

"Not too tight. We don't want to strangle him."

"Why not? Say it was an accident — say he died of fright. Save us a lot of trouble."

"Just shut up and follow orders! How about the other one, tied up tight? Good."

"And the slave?"

"Looks dead to me."

"Me, too." I heard the sound of a vicious kick.

"Then leave him. We weren't meant to take him anyway. Strong-looking fellow — a good thing his horse threw him, or we'd have had our hands full. Enough talk! Bring out the wagon."

Hooves clopped and wheels rumbled on the paving stones. I was lifted aloft and dumped onto something firm but forgiving. The voice that had ordered the others spoke close to my ear. "As for you, it's time to be very quiet and very still. You're a sack full of onions, do you understand? Lying in the bed of a wagon with a lot of other sacks full of onions. You're going on a long trip, so wriggle about and make yourself comfortable if you need to. If you have to empty your bladder or your bowels, go ahead and do it, if you can stand to he in your own stink. Then don't move. Understand? Or else this!" Something sharp poked into the small of my back.

I grunted. The dagger poked me harder.

"Not even that much noise, or next time I'll push it in to the hilt! Now we're off"

The driver called out. An ass brayed. The wagon began to roll. The ruts and potholes of any lesser road would have caused it to jostle and pitch, but on the smooth, broad Appian Way, the wagon hardly swayed at all. I tried to lie very, very still.

Part Three

Rex?

"Forty," announced Eco. Then he counted again, wagging his finger at each scraped mark on the earth wall in turn, moving his lips as he pronounced the numbers. Towards the end he counted aloud. "Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty. Forty days, exactly."

"Perhaps. You're assuming that it took them four days to bring us here," I complained. "How can you know that? It was all so miserable and confused. They gave us almost no food or water, and kept us blindfolded so that I never knew day from night. It might have been three days, or five, or six."

"Might have been, but wasn't," said Eco matter-of-factly. "The trip from the Monument of Basilius to this place, wherever in Hades it is, took four days."

"How can you be so sure, when I'm not?"

"They hit you on the head, remember, Papa? I think you were more dazed than you realized."

"I was awake enough to know when we passed through Rome. We should have made a noise then and there, and taken our chances."

"Chances? Papa, we've been over this a thousand times. We had no chance at all. I had a dagger poking into me the whole time, and so did you, until we were through the city and well out the other side."

"You're sure it was the Fontinalis Gate that we passed through?" "Certain. I overheard -"

"Yes, I know: you overheard someone asking directions to the Street of the Silversmiths, and someone else telling them to go straight ahead and turn right."

"Exactly. So at that moment we had to be passing through the

Fontinalis Gate, heading north out of town on the Flaminian Way."

"Past the Field of Mars," I mused, "and the voting stalls. They must be overgrown with weeds by now."

"Right past Pompey's villa up on the Pincian Hill," said Eco ruefully. "Maybe the Great One himself looked down from his garden and thought, 'I wonder where that wagon with all those lumpy sacks of onions is headed? And when will I hear back from that Finder fellow and his son?' "

"If Pompey has spared a thought for us at all. If it wasn't Pompey himself who's put us here!" I paced, as much as I could in the cramped space of the pit. "And then on we rolled, into the countryside, heading north and west for a miserable eternity."

"Only it wasn't an eternity, Papa. It was four days. I clearly remember."

"Nonetheless, I insist we draw brackets around those first four marks of yours, since we can't be certain of them."

"Since you can't be certain. If you draw those brackets again, I'll only rub them out again,"

The two of us were play-acting, in a way, since we had already engaged in this same argument a hundred times. There was only so much to talk about, stuck in a pit with bars across the top for forty days - or was it closer to thirty-seven? I sometimes wondered if we both had gone mad already. How would we be able to tell? I picked up the little stick that Eco used to make his daily marks and etched brackets around the first three marks. "Now, if we count the marks remaining, the undisputed number of days will be —"

"Damned rats!" One of the creatures had sneaked into the cell again and was sniffing at the bit of bread we had put aside the previous day. Our keepers usually brought us fresh bread every morning, but not always; sometimes they skipped whole days, so we had learned to save a portion of food for the lean days. The rats were a new phenomenon, and had appeared only in the last few days. Eco ran across the small cell and stamped his foot at the creature, which squeaked and scurried away into a rocky crevice we hadn't managed to fill with dirt. "Can you believe it, Papa? The little monsters are coming out in broad daylight now!"

"Not exactly broad daylight." I rolled my eyes up, looking beyond the iron bars, overhead to the ceiling far above, where gaps in the slats admitted a few beams of sunlight. The pit had been dug in the earth floor of a disused building. The irregular walls around us were made of packed earth and stones. Covering the pit (and extending an unknown distance all around it, for we had tried to dig at the edges without success) was a grate made of iron bars. If we jumped, we could reach the bars; this at least allowed us a way to exercise our arms every day. I had been able to poke my head between the bars, but there was little to see; the building appeared to be a disused stable. Far above the grate was the ceiling, which badly needed repair. The place was dim and draughty, but our keepers had given us plenty of smelly blankets to huddle under at night.

"Better the rats should come out in daylight than during the night," I said ruefully. Nights in the pit were as black as pitch, except for a few stars which occasionally glimmered through the holes in the ceiling. In such utter darkness, the scurrying and squeaking of the rats was almost more than I could stand.

"The rats aren't the only ones who're hungry," said Eco.

"I know. I hear your stomach growling, son. Perhaps you should eat that crust of stale bread, before the rats get to it."

"I don't know. What time do you think it is?"

"Hard to say. Noon, perhaps, judging from the light. Maybe they're not coming to feed us today." Maybe they won't come back at all, I thought, but didn't say it aloud, though the same morbid thought must have occurred to Eco from time to time. Abandoned entirely, we would have a chance to try to dig our way out without being stopped; but without food and water, would our strength last that long? We were at the mercy of men we never saw, who had never revealed their intentions. They looked after us in a desultory fashion, feeding us on most days, occasionally hauling up and emptying the bucket we used to relieve ourselves and supplying us with enough fresh water to drink and clean ourselves. Why had they not killed us and left us on the Appian Way, as they had done with Davus? Why had we been taken so far from Rome — or were we indeed such a great distance from the city? Perhaps the four days of travel which Eco claimed to remember so clearly had been spent going in circles to confuse us. Why were they bothering to keep us alive at all, and for how much longer would they do so? What did they ultimately plan to do with us? Who were they?

"Forty days!" I said. "You know the story Bethesda tells -" My voice caught in my throat, saying her name aloud. What had become of Bethesda and Diana in my absence? After a certain point I had tried simply not to think about them, for it was too unbearable. And yet what else was there to think of that could offer me any comfort?

"She tells that old Hebrew tale she learned from her father, about the virtuous man and the great flood. He built a huge boat and loaded specimens of every creature on it, and then it rained for forty days and nights without stopping. Imagine having to endure that - forty days in a cramped boat stinking of every sort of animal, sodden and seasick with the rain coming down."

"At least he didn't have to go hungry," said Eco, whose stomach growled. "He had all those animals he could eat."

"I think the point was to save the animals," I said. "Anyway, be glad it's hardly rained at all." During the one significant storm that had occurred since our captivity began, rain had poured in through the leaky roof above and collected in a pool on the floor of the pit. "We're very lucky that one of us hasn't become seriously ill."

"Not necessarily, Papa."

"What do you mean?"

"If they've kept us alive this long, it must be because they've been ordered to do so. Maybe if one of us fell ill, they'd let us go, or at least move us out of this horrible place."

"I suppose they might..."

"Oh, this is maddening!" Eco suddenly spun about and pounded his fist against the earth wall, striking a spot already pummelled by many previous blows. At least twice every day, and sometimes in the middle of the night, he would be seized by a sudden fury that could only be relieved by hitting something.

I envied the release this action gave him. Our captivity was indeed maddening, and the hardest thing I had ever had to endure. There is something in the spirit of a Roman that cannot acquiesce to such an unnatural condition. In other lands, where kings rule, imprisonment is a common punishment. This is because a king wishes to see his enemies suffer. What better way than to lock them in a cage or throw them into a pit where he can watch their inevitable physical and mental decline, tell them about the suffering of their loved ones outside, listen to their pleas for mercy and taunt them with false-promises of release? But in our Republic, punishment is not designed to bring pleasure to a given ruler; it is meant to permanently remove an offender from the community, either by killing him (sometimes, admittedly, with rather gruesome punishments involved, especially for religious crimes), or by allowing him to choose exile instead of death. The notion that anyone should be indefinitely locked away, even for the most horrible crime, is too cruel even for Roman tastes.

I remembered the debate which took place in the Senate when

Cicero was consul and announced he had uncovered a conspiracy by Catilina's circle to bring down the state. Cicero wanted them executed on the spot. Others disagreed, and it was Caesar who had suggested that those involved be rounded up and placed under permanent arrest. Against this novel idea was the practical problem of where such alleged criminals were to be incarcerated, since Rome has no prison to speak of, only a few small holding cells where malefactors are kept for a short while to await execution. There was also the danger of establishing a precedent for lengthy imprisonment, for once the state was allowed to take away a citizen's freedom of movement, where would such a course lead? Surely implicit in the very concept of citizenship was an individual's right to come and go as he wished, unlike a slave; if an individual had done something so terrible that he should no longer have the most basic right of a citizen, then surely he deserved either exile or death.

In the end, of course, Cicero had prevailed. The alleged conspirators (including Marc Antony's stepfather) had been rounded up and strangled to death without a trial. Many disagreed, later if not at the time, and their anger, harnessed by Clodius, eventually led to Cicero's exile for sixteen months. But even his worst enemies had never proposed that Cicero should be put into a prison, like a slavish courtier who had offended a monarch.

Such repetitious, circular meditations were my means of dealing with the madness of our situation. They wore a groove into my mind, just as surely as Eco's fist had impressed its shape into the earth wall that held us prisoner.

Eco stopped his pounding. From the unseen world above we heard the familiar sound of a wide, rickety door swing open and shut. I smelled the aroma of fresh bread, so faint I might have only imagined it. Eco's belly growled louder than ever, and I began to salivate, as dogs do when they know they're about to be fed. How ruthlessly imprisonment strips away a man's dignity. How swiftly it reduces him to me status of an animal.

The next day was the forty-first of our captivity, according to Eco's reckoning. I decided to calculate the exact date, but the imposition of the leap-month of Intercalarius complicated the matter. I knew that Februarius was past - we had been captured two days after the Ides, which in Februarius fell on the thirteenth - and I knew that all of Intercalarius had come and gone, so we were somewhere in early Martius.