Roman Blood (50 page)

Cicero parted his lips and made half a nod, unsure whether to answer or not.

Sulla made the same face again—half-amused, half-irritated. He waved impatiently about the room. "I think there are enough chairs for all. Sit."

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Tiro nervously fetched a chair for Cicero and another for me and then stood at his master's right hand, watching Sulla as if he were an exotic and very deadly reptile.

I had never seen Sulla from so close. The lamplight from above cast stark shadows across his face, lining his mouth with wrinkles and making his eyes glitter. His great leonine mane, once famous for its luster, had grown coarse and dull. His skin was splotched and discolored, dotted with blemishes and etched all over with red veins as fine as bee's hair.

His lips were dry and cracked. A tuft of dark hairs poked out of one nostril.

He was simply an old general, an aging debauchee, a tired politician.

His eyes had seen everything and feared nothing. They had witnessed every extreme of beauty and horror and could no longer be impressed.

Yet there was still a hunger in them, something that seemed almost to leap out and grasp at my throat when he turned his gaze on me.

" Y o u must be Gordianus, the one they call the Finder. Good, I'm glad you're here. I wanted to have a look at you as well."

He looked lazily from Cicero to me and back again, laughing at us behind his eyes, testing our patience. " Y o u can guess why I've c o m e , "

he finally said. "A certain trivial legal affair that came up earlier today at the Rostra. I was hardly aware of the matter until it was rather rudely brought to my attention while I was taking my lunch. A slave of my dear freedman Chrysogonus came running in all flustered and alarmed, raving about a catastrophe in the Forum. I was busy at the moment devouring a very spicy pheasant's breast; the news gave me a wicked case of indigestion. This porridge your kitchen maid brought me isn't b a d —

bland but soothing, just as my physicians recommend. Of course it might have been poisoned, but then you were hardly expecting me, were you?

Anyway, I've always found it best to plunge into peril without giving it too much thought. I never called myself Sulla the Wise, only Sulla the Fortunate, which to my belief is much better."

He dabbled his forefinger in the porridge for a moment, then suddenly swept his arm across the table and sent bowl and porridge crashing to the floor. A slave came running from the hallway. She saw Cicero's wide-eyed, blanching face and quickly disappeared.

Sulla popped his finger into his mouth and pulled it out clean, then went on in a calm, melodious voice. "What a struggle it seems to have been for both of you, rooting and digging and sniffing for the truth about these disgustingly petty Roscii and their disgustingly petty crimes against 327

one another. I'm told you've spent hour upon hour, day after day grappling for the facts; that you went all the way to godforsaken Ameria and back, Gordianus, that you put your very life in danger more than once, all for a few meager scraps of the truth. And you still haven't got the full story—like a play with whole scenes missing. Isn't it funny? I had never even heard the name Sextus Roscius until today, and it took me only a matter of hours—minutes, really—to find out everything worth knowing about the case. I simply summoned certain parties before me and demanded the full story. Sometimes I think justice must have been so much simpler and easier in the days of King Numa."

Sulla paused for a moment and toyed with the scroll in his lap. He caressed the stitches that bound the sheets and dabbled his fingers over the smooth parchment, then suddenly seized it in a crushing grasp and sent it flying across the room. It landed atop a table of scrolls and knocked them to the floor. Sulla went on unperturbed.

"Tell me, Marcus Tullius Cicero, what was your intention when you took it upon yourself to plead this wretched man's case in court today?

Were you the willing agent of my enemies, or did they dupe you into it?

Are you cunningly clever, or absurdly stupid?"

Cicero's voice was as dry as parchment: "I was asked to represent an innocent man against an outrageous accusation. If the law is not the last refuge of the innocent—"

" I n n o c e n t ? " Sulla leaned forward in his chair. His face was plunged into shadow. The lamp cast an aureole about his fire-colored hair. " I s that what they told you, my dear old friends, the Metelli? A very old and very great family, those Metelli. I've been waiting for them to stab me in the back ever since I divorced Delmaticus's daughter while she lay dying. What else could I do? It was the augurs and pontifices who insisted; I could not allow her to pollute my house with her illness. And this is how my former in-laws take their revenge—using an advocate with no family and a joke of a name to embarrass me in the courts. What good is being a dictator when the very class of people you struggle so hard to please turn on you for such petty causes?

"What did they offer you, Cicero? Money? Promises of their patron-age? Political support?"

I glanced at Cicero, whose face was set like stone. I could hardly trust my eyes in the flickering light, but it seemed that the corners of his mouth began to turn up in a very faint smile. Tiro must have noticed it as well; a strange look darkened his face, like a premonition of dismay.

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"Which of them came to you, Cicero? Marcus Metellus, that idiot who dared to show his face at the bench with you today? Or his cousin Caecilia Metella, that mad old insomniac? Or not a Metellus at all, but one of their agents? Surely not my new brother-in-law Hortensius—he'll represent his worst enemy for money, Jupiter knows, but he was smart enough not to involve himself in this farce. A pity I can't say as much for Valeria's darling little brother, Rufus."

Cicero still said nothing. Tiro wrinkled his brow impatiently and fidgeted.

Sulla sat back. The lamplight crept over his brow and into his eyes, which sparkled like glass beads. " N o matter. The Metelli recruited you against me, one way or another. So they told you this Sextus Roscius was innocent. And did you believe them?"

Tiro could stand it no more. " O f course!" he blurted out. "Because he is. That's why my master defended him—not to put himself into the pocket of a noble family—"

Cicero silenced him with a gentle touch on the wrist. Sulla looked at Tiro and raised an appraising eyebrow, as if noticing him for the first time. " T h e slave is hardly handsome enough to be allowed to get away with that type of insolence. If you were any sort of Roman, Cicero, you'd have him beaten to within a knuckle of his life here on the spot."

Cicero's smile wavered. "Please, Lucius Sulla, forgive his impertinence."

"Then answer the question instead of letting your slave answer it for you. When they told you Sextus Roscius was innocent, did you believe them?"

" Y e s , I did," Cicero sighed. He pressed his fingertips together and flexed the knuckles. He glanced at me briefly and then stared at his knuckles. " A t first."

" A h . " It was Sulla now who wore a faint, inscrutable smile. "I thought you seemed too clever to have been fooled for long. When did you figure out the truth?"

Cicero shrugged. "I suspected it almost from the beginning, not that it ever made a difference. There still is no proof that Sextus Roscius conspired with his cousins to have the old man murdered."

" N o proof." Sulla laughed. " Y o u advocates! Always on one hand there is evidence and proof. And on the other there is truth." He shook his head. "These greedy fools, Capito and Magnus, thinking they could have their cousin Sextus convicted without confessing their own part in the 329

crime. How could Chrysogonus ever have got himself mixed up with such trash?"

"I don't understand," Tiro whispered. The look on his face might have been comic had it not been betrayed by such pain and confusion. I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for myself.' Until that moment I had been struggling to hold on to the same illusion that Tiro clung to so effortlessly—the belief that all our work for Sextus Roscius had a higher purpose than politics or ambition, that we had served something called justice. The belief that Sextus Roscius was innocent, after all.

Sulla raised an eyebrow and harrumphed. " Y o u r insolent slave does not understand, Cicero. Aren't you an enlightened Roman? Don't you see to the boy's education? Explain it for him."

Cicero turned heavy-lidded and studied his fingers. "I thought you knew the truth by now, Tiro. I thought you would have figured it out for yourself. Honestly, I did. Gordianus knows, I think. Don't you, Gordianus? Let him explain it. That's what he's paid for."

Tiro looked at me so plaintively I found myself speaking against my will. " I t was all because of the whore," I said. " Y o u remember, Tiro, the young girl called Elena who worked at the House of Swans."

Sulla nodded sagely but raised a finger to interrupt. " Y o u ' v e jumped ahead of the story. The younger brother . . ."

"Gaius Roscius, yes. Murdered by his brother in their home in Ameria.

Perhaps the locals were fooled, but his symptoms were hardly caused by eating a pickled mushroom."

"Colocynth," Cicero suggested.

"Wild gourd? Possibly," I said, "especially in conjunction with some more palatable poison. I knew of an incident in Antioch once with very similar symptoms—the clear bile vomited up, followed by a surge of blood and immediate death. Perhaps Sextus was colluding with his cousin Magnus even then. A man with Magnus's connections can find just about any sort of poison in Rome, for a price.

" A s for the motive, Sextus Roscius
pater
almost certainly intended to disinherit his elder son in favor of Gaius, or so at least Sextus
filius
was convinced. A commonplace crime for a commonplace motive. But that wasn't the end of it.

"Perhaps the old man suspected Sextus of killing Gaius. Perhaps he simply detested him so much he was looking for any excuse to disinherit him. At the same time he was becoming infatuated with the pretty young 330

whore Elena. When she became pregnant, whether by Roscius or not, the old man hatched a scheme to buy her, liberate her, and adopt the freeborn child. Evidently he wasn't able to buy her right away; probably he bungled the purchase—the brothel owner sniffed his eagerness and drove the price absurdly high, thinking he could take advantage of an addled, lovesick old widower. This is only speculation—"

" M o r e than speculation," Sulla said. "There is, or was, concrete evidence: a letter addressed to his son and dictated by the elder Roscius to his slave Felix, who thus knew the contents. According to Felix, the old man was in a drunken rage. In the letter he explicitly threatened to do what you have just described—disinherit Sextus Roscius in favor of a son as yet unborn. The document was subsequently destroyed, but the slave remembers."

Sulla paused for me to continue. Tiro looked at Cicero, who did not look back, and then desperately at me. " S o Sextus Roscius decided to kill his father," I said. "Naturally he couldn't do it himself, and another poisoning would be far too suspicious; besides, the two were so estranged he had no easy access to the old man. So he called on his cousins Magnus and Capito. Perhaps they had assisted in Gaius's poisoning; perhaps they were already pressuring Sextus to do away with his father. The three of them formed a conspiracy. Sextus would inherit his father's estates and pay off his cousins later. There must have been assurances . . . ."

"Indeed," said Sulla, "there was a written contract of sorts. A state-ment of intent, if you will, to do away with old Roscius, signed by all three of them in triplicate. A copy for each, so they could all blackmail one another to a stalemate if things fell apart."

"But things did fall apart," I said.

" Y e s . " Sulla curled his lip, as if the whole affair had a smell. "After the murder Sextus Roscius tried to double-cross his cousins. He became sole owner of the estates by inheritance; how could they take what was his when the document they had all signed was equally incriminating to each? Sextus Roscius must have thought himself very clever; what a fool he was to try to break his bargain with the likes of those vultures."

Sulla took a breath and continued. " I t seems it was Capito who came up with the false proscription ploy; Magnus knew Chrysogonus from some shady transaction or other and approached him with the scheme—

how many times have I warned that boy not to let his avarice cloud his better judgment? Ah, well! The estates were proscribed and seized by the 331

state; Chrysogonus bought them up himself and in turn shared them as agreed beforehand with Capito and Magnus. Sextus Roscius was left in the cold. What a fool he must have felt! What could he do? Run to the authorities waving a piece of paper that implicated himself along with the others in his father's murder?

" O f course there was always the possibility that in a fit of madness or guilt he might do just that, and so Capito allowed Sextus to stay on at the old family estate where he could keep an eye on him, living in poverty and humiliation. What grudges these country cousins all harbored for one another!"

Tiro, not daring to speak to Sulla, looked at me. "But what about Elena?"

I opened my mouth to speak, but Sulla was too deep in the telling to pass the story to another. "All the while Sextus Roscius was scheming to get back his estate somehow or other. That meant that the whore's child might still someday be his rival, or at least his enemy. Imagine him brooding day after day on the uselessness of his crime, the vileness of it; on the bitterness of Fortune, his own guilt, his ruined family. And it was all because of Elena and her child that he had first embroiled himself in the plot to kill his father! When the baby was born, Roscius killed it with his own hands."

"And might as well have killed Elena," I said.

"What was the shame of more blood on his hands after all his crimes?"

Sulla asked, and I realized he had no sense at all of the irony of his words, spoken by one who was awash in the blood of others up to his chin. " I t was not too long afterward that the cousins managed to get hold of Sextus's copy of the incriminating agreement. Without it he was defense-less; he had no check on them. No doubt they were turning over various ways to murder him and his family when he made his escape, first to a friend in Ameria, a certain Titus Megarus, and then to Caecilia Metella in Rome. Since he had slipped from their clutches, the cousins' only recourse was to destroy him via the law. Since he was in fact guilty of his father's murder, they naively thought they could reconstruct a narra-tion of the events to leave themselves out of the picture. And of course they were counting on the intimidation of Chrysogonus's name to drive away any competent orators from mounting a defense—if the matter even came to trial. By this point the state of Sextus Roscius's mind was so disturbed that they hoped he might be driven to suicide, or perhaps to simply confess his own guilt and mount no defense at all."