Render Unto Caesar (27 page)

The two slaves had not stirred even when he went through the dressing room with the lamp. Nestor's breath whistled a little in his sleep, but Pyrrhus's was soft and even as a child's.

Cantabra was looking at the two men. “How did you persuade the doctor to give you the right drug?” she asked him.

“I told him I had symptoms they normally prescribe it for. I assumed they wanted me incapacitated anyway.”

“Huh! You are as cunning as that evil man said. Blow out the lamp now: we must let our eyes get used to the dark.”

He blew out the lamp and set it down, and they stood together in the darkness, listening to Nestor's whistling breath.

“Now,” said Cantabra at last, and moved soundlessly to the door.

It would not open wide enough to let them slip out: Pyrrhus was in the way. Eventually, seeing this, Cantabra took hold of his mattress and dragged it aside. The young man sat up abruptly and gazed at them, his eyes shining liquid even in the dimness. Everything seemed to freeze: Hermogenes was certain that even his heart stopped beating. Cantabra put her hand down the front of her tunic and pulled out a knife.

Pyrrhus muttered indistinctly and lay down again. His soft, childlike breathing resumed as though it had never stopped.

After a long minute, Cantabra prodded the young man's shoulder with a cautious knuckle. He did not stir.

“Probably he was never really awake at all,” Hermogenes told her, his voice unsteady. “Opium does that.”

The bodyguard shook her head and slid the knife back into its place. She must have a sheath for it stitched into her breast band, he thought, and wondered when she'd acquired that. The shopping trip before she carried his message to Pollio's house, probably: the knife looked like the one she'd taken off Rufus's man. She opened the door, stepped carefully around the sleeping slave out into the corridor, and Hermogenes followed her, closing the door behind them. Cantabra strode off, a shadow in the blackness, and he limped after her as quickly and quietly as he could.

They met no one in the corridor or the colonnade. Cantabra turned right at the bathhouse wing and led him along a path under the trees. The night was dark, with a half moon occasionally showing as a pale blur behind low cloud. Water gleamed on his right, and he wondered again about the lampreys.

When they neared the bottom of the garden, Cantabra made him wait in the shadows under a bush while she went to retrieve her rope and check that the wall was clear. Hermogenes sat quietly rubbing his sore foot for what seemed to be hours. At last, however, the barbarian woman reappeared, the rope in her hands. It was dark with dirt and smelled of compost: presumably she had buried it.

She put her mouth against his ear and breathed, “The place to climb the wall is there,” pointing with a hand held low near the ground. He looked where she indicated, and saw that the ground rose slightly, making the climb less. “There is a tree to tie the rope to, there. But there are spikes on top of the wall, and there is a drop on the other side. You will have to be careful.”

“
I
will?” he murmured back. “What about you?”

“I am going to distract the watchman.”

“There's a watchman? Where?” His voice had risen, and she made an angry hushing gesture.

“Over at the far end of the wall,” she told him, gesturing into the darkness. “At the foot of that tree. He is half-asleep, but he would notice you climbing the wall. I am going to go up the slope from him and make small noises, like an animal caught in the bushes or a slave trying to hide. When he comes to investigate, I will slip away silently and follow you over the wall. I will go now. Count to two hundred, then go, tie the rope to the tree, and go over as quickly as you can.”

“Will you be able to ‘slip away silently'?” he asked with dread.

“Yes,” she replied at once, and slid off into the night.

He counted to two hundred, then stood and walked down to the place his bodyguard had indicated. He made himself move quietly and carefully, despite the desperate desire to hurry: the last thing he needed was to turn the ankle again by running in the dark. He looped the rope about the tree, tied it, then approached the wall. Despite the rise in the ground it was higher than his head, and, as Cantabra had warned, the top was guarded with spikes of sharpened wood. They were angled outward, however, to catch thieves trying to climb in, and he thought they would not cause too much trouble to someone trying to climb out. He tossed the end of the rope over the wall, took off his cloak and threw it over the spikes, then worked the end of his crutch into the ground, got his left foot onto the handle, and scrambled up onto the top of the wall. A trapped pinecone fell, rattling against the brick, and he thought for a moment he would be sick. He caught hold of the rope and slid off on the other side; dangled a moment above a half-seen roadway, then lowered himself quickly, careful to land on his left leg.

He pressed back against the wall, trying to control the harsh gasping of his breath, which seemed as loud as a shout in the stillness. He realized that he'd left his crutch on the other side of the wall. He reached up and caught the trailing edge of his cloak, but did not pull it down: Cantabra might want it.

She might want to pull herself up the rope, too. At the thought he caught a loop around his forearm, got both hands on it, and prepared to brace himself.

He stood waiting, his back against the rough brick. The only sound was the occasional hush of wind in the pines of Pollio's garden. As the minutes wore on he told himself that it was
good
that everything was so silent. The thing to worry about would be shouts of alarm.

A footstep rustled on the other side of the wall and he braced himself. There was no pull on the rope, however, merely a dark shape appearing on top of the wall. It dipped, then reappeared, and then Cantabra slid down the rope, and he had to jump aside so that she didn't land on top of him.

She handed him his crutch, her teeth gleaming in the darkness. “That was useful,” she remarked. “Thank you.” She caught up the end of the rope and threw it back over the wall. It would, he knew, become almost invisible as soon as it was on the ground, and no one was likely to notice it until morning. He tugged at the trailing edge of his cloak, then caught it as it fell on top of him. Cantabra was already moving away down the road, so he followed with the cloak bundled in his arms together with the crutch.

They walked down the Esquiline through an unbroken silence. Hermogenes found himself listening almost desperately for cries and the sound of people running behind them, but there was nothing. They might have been the only human beings awake and about in all the city.

When they approached the main road, the silence ebbed. Torches half a block away shone from an oxcart that was rumbling in to the city markets, and in an insula across the road a baby was crying. Hermogenes stopped on the corner, stunned at the ordinariness of it all. They had escaped; they really had
escaped
!

He looked vaguely at the bundle in his arms, then set down the crutch and put on the cloak, draping it neatly over his left shoulder and under his right arm, the way he would wear it for a casual occasion. He tugged the ends straight and picked up the crutch again.

Cantabra had stopped as well, and was waiting patiently, a tall thin shadow in the darkness.

“We need to go to my friend's house,” he told her. “It should be safe if we go now. I hope that Rufus called off his watch after meeting me at Pollio's house, and probably Pollio won't set one up until tomorrow, after he knows that we've gone.”

She nodded. “We will stay there? Or will we just collect money and leave again?”

“We will collect money and leave.”

She nodded again, in a satisfied way. “Can you walk that far?”

He looked down at his bandaged ankle. “I think so. It might be better, though, if I didn't try. Perhaps we could ride on a cart.”

They caught up with the oxcart ahead of them without difficulty. It was carrying vegetables to market, along with baskets of eggs and a few live chickens. The driver and his two assistants were suspicious at first—strangers on the edge of the Subura were potentially dangerous—but apparently decided that a woman and a man with a crutch and a bandaged foot were unlikely to be dangerous. It was agreed that they could ride on the tail of the cart for small change. They rumbled and jolted slowly down the Via Labicana and into the Julian Forum, where the cart stopped and the two passengers got off.

It was about midnight, but there were plenty of people about—carters, mostly, making deliveries, with some early market vendors setting up stalls. The two fugitives picked their way through them and onto the Sacra Via.

It was still a long walk to the Via Tusculana, and Hermogenes' foot was aching badly by the time they drew near the house. He did not protest when Cantabra told him to wait in a shadowed alley mouth while she went ahead to check that there was indeed no watch on the house. He leaned against the wall of an insula, propped his foot up on the crutch, and stared up at the clouded sky. In a nearby apartment a couple were having a drunken argument. A child woke, and began to cry. Another cart rumbled past along the main road, taking a load of timber to supply the workshops of Rome.

Cantabra came back and told him the way was clear, and he nodded and limped the last block with the aid of the crutch.

There were no torches in the dolphin holders tonight, and he had a momentary nightmare as he faced the iron-studded door: what if there was nothing behind the door but rubble and the dead?

He told himself that that sort of blatant destruction of a well-known businessman would be too dangerously arrogant even for Rufus, and knocked on the door.

There was no answer. He considered knocking more loudly, then decided that he did not want to advertise his visit to the whole street, and went over to knock on the window of the lodge instead. When there was still no response he shoved the end of his crutch up behind the shutters and wriggled it about.

After about half a minute, somebody grabbed it, and then the window opened and the masklike face of Kyon looked out. At once the mask creased. “Sir!” cried Kyon breathlessly. “You're back!”

“Yes. Let us in, please! Quietly!”

Kyon ran to fling open the door, and Hermogenes limped through and stopped in the entranceway, trying to put his thoughts in order. A dim form came to the door of the lodge, and then Tertia's voice, soft with relief, said, “Oh, sir, you're back!”

Kyon's family must share the lodge with him at night. “Yes,” he agreed again. “But I dare not stay long. Kyon, will you tell Titus that I am here?”

Kyon shot off into the house, so quickly that he even forgot to close the door. Cantabra shut it for him, and bolted it firmly.

Another shape came to the door of the lodge, and Hyakinthos exclaimed delightedly, “Sir! We were afraid.” Erotion's voice could be heard from behind him, demanding to know if it was the nice Greek. “Yes!” Hyakinthos snarled at her impatiently, then went on, “Rufus's barbarians went away this afternoon, and we were afraid it meant he'd caught you!”

“No,” Hermogenes said. “My foot hurts. I need to sit down.”

He blundered through into the atrium and slumped onto the bench. Tertia darted past into the dining room and returned with a lamp.

There was a sound of voices from further inside the house, and then Titus Fiducius Crispus came running in, dressed only in a hastily snatched cloak. With him, however, came Menestor, tousled with sleep and dressed in nothing at all. Hermogenes sat up straight, gaping in shock. For the first time he registered that Hyakinthos had been sleeping with his family instead of his master. Menestor dropped to his knees beside him and seized his hand, his face radiant with relief and joy.

“My
dear
Hermogenes—” Titus began warmly.

“What is
this
!” Hermogenes roared furiously, waving an arm at his unclothed secretary.

Titus's face fell. “He s-said you w-wouldn't m-mind.”

“I asked you to
look after
him! I told you I wanted to
free
him! How could you possibly think that meant you could just
take
him the minute I left the house?”

“Sir!” protested Menestor, understanding the emotion, if not the Latin words, “Sir, no, please, we didn't
mean
it!” He was almost in tears.

His master looked at him in confusion, and Menestor looked back directly and reached out to touch his chest nervously. “Oh, please, sir, please understand! I didn't … I didn't know what to do when you didn't come back. When the guards disappeared this afternoon, we thought … I was afraid … Titus Fiducius was very kind to me. He said he was sure you'd come back, but he swore he'd do everything he possibly could to find you. He sent a letter to Pollio's house, and he said that if he didn't get a response, he'd even write to Rufus. I was grateful and I was so anxious and I … and it's true, I told him you wouldn't mind. I'm
sorry,
sir!”

Hermogenes stared at him in disbelief, and Menestor dropped his eyes and said bitterly, “It's not as though you ever wanted me yourself.”

He had absolutely no idea what to say, and he simply stared at the slave in shock.

“What has happened?” Cantabra asked sharply, in Latin.

“He … nothing,” Hermogenes managed at last. “Nothing. I … thought Titus had forced himself on my secretary, but I misunderstood.” He made himself look at Titus, who was twisting the edge of his cloak in both hands like a nervous little girl.

“I am sorry I shouted,” he made himself say. “I misunderstood.”

“That's q-quite…” stammered Titus. “That's … I do understand, I would've … that is, I understand.”

“I need to tell you what has happened,” he went on, trying to gather his wits again.