Roman Blood (8 page)

Cicero clapped his hands and sprang to his feet. " G o o d . Very good!

We'll leave for Caecilia's house right away."

" N o w ? In this heat? It's just past n o o n . "

"There's no time to waste. If the heat is too much for you, I could summon a litter—but no, that would take too long. It isn't far. Tiro, fetch us a pair of broad-brimmed hats."

Tiro gave his master a plaintive look.

"Very well, then, fetch three."

47

SIX

" W H A T makes you think she'll even be awake at this hour?"

The Forum was deserted. The paving stones shimmered with heat. Not a soul was afoot except for the three of us stealing like thieves across the flagstones. I quickened the pace. The heat burned through the thin soles of my shoes. Both my companions, I noticed, wore more expensive footwear than my own, with thick leather soles to protect their feet.

"Caecilia will be awake," Cicero assured me. "She's a hopeless insomniac—so far as I can tell, she never sleeps at all."

We reached the foot of the Sacred Way. My heart sank as I gazed up the steep, narrow avenue that led to the imposing villas atop the Palatine. The world was all sun and stone, utterly without shade. The layers of shimmering heat made the summit of the Palatine seem hazy and indistinct, very high and far away.

We began the ascent. Tiro led the way, oblivious of the effort. There was something strange about his eagerness to come along, something beyond mere curiosity or the desire to follow his master. I was too hot to puzzle over it.

"One thing I must ask of you, Gordianus." Cicero was beginning to show signs of exertion, but he talked through them, like a true stoic. "I appreciated your candor when you spoke your mind in my study. No one can say you are less than an honest man. But hold your tongue in 48

Caecilia's house. Her family has long been allied with Sulla—his late fourth wife was a Metella."

" Y o u m
ean
the daughter of Delmaticus? The
one
he divorced while she lay dying?"

"Exactly. The Metelli were not happy about the divorce, despite Sulla's excuses."

" T h e augurs looked in a bowl of sheep entrails and told him his wife's illness would pollute his household."

" S o Sulla claimed. Caecilia herself would probably take no offense at anything you might say, but you can never tell. She's an old woman, unmarried and childless. Given to strange ways—such as happens when a woman is left to her own devices too long, without a husband and family to occupy her with wholesome pursuits. Her passion these days is for whatever Oriental cult happens to be new and fashionable in Rome, the more foreign and bizarre, the better. She's not much concerned with mere earthly matters.

"But it's likely there'll be another in the house with keener ears and sharper eyes. I'm thinking of my good young friend Marcus Messalla—

we call him Rufus, on account of his red hair. He's no stranger to Caecilia Metella's house; he's known her since he was a child, and she's almost like an aunt to him. A fine young man—or not quite a man yet, only sixteen. Rufus comes to my house rather often, for gatherings and lectures and such, and he already knows his way around the law courts. He's quite eager to help in Sextus Roscius's behalf."

" B u t ? "

"But his family connections make him dangerous. Hortensius is his half brother—when Hortensius dropped the case, it was young Rufus he sent to my door to beg me to take it on. More to the point, the boy's older sister is that same young Valeria whom Sulla recently took to be his fifth wife.

Poor Rufus has little affection for his new brother-in-law, but the marriage does put him in an awkward position. I would ask that you restrain yourself from slandering our esteemed dictator in his presence."

" O f course, Cicero." When I left the house that morning I had never expected to be circulating with high nobles like the Metelli and Messalli.

I looked down at the garments I wore, a common citizen's toga over a plain tunic. The only touch of purple was a wine stain near the hem.

Bethesda claimed to have spent hours trying to remove it without success.

49

By the time we reached the summit, even Tiro was showing signs of fatigue. His dark curls were pasted to his forehead with sweat. His face was flushed with exertion—or perhaps with something more like excitement. I wondered again about his eagerness to reach Caecilia Metella's house.

"This is it," Cicero huffed, pausing to catch his breath. The house before us was a sprawling mass of rose stucco, ringed about by ancient oaks. The doorway was recessed beneath a portico and flanked by two helmeted soldiers in full battle gear with swords at their belts and spears in their fists. Grizzled veterans from Sulla's army, I thought, and gave a start.

" T h e guards," Cicero said, making a vague gesture with his hand as he mounted the steps. "Ignore them. They must be sweltering beneath all that leather. T i r o ? "

Tiro, who had been staring in fascination at the soldier's gear, sprang ahead of his master to rap at the heavy oak doors. A long moment passed in which we all caught our breaths and removed our hats beneath the shaded portico.

The door opened inward on silent hinges. Cool air and the scent of incense wafted out to greet us.

Tiro and the door slave exchanged the typical formalities—"My master comes to see your mistress"—then we waited for another moment before the slave of the foyer came to usher us inside. He relieved us of our hats, then disappeared to fetch the announcer. I looked over my shoulder at the doorkeeper, who sat on a stool beside the portal busying himself with some sort of handicraft, his foot attached to the wall by a chain just long enough to allow him to reach the door.

The announcer arrived, obviously disappointed to find that it was Cicero and not some groveling client from whom he might extort a few denarii before allowing further admission to the house. From small signs—his high voice, the visible enlargement of his breasts—I realized he was a eunuch. While in the East they are an indispensable and ancient part of the social fabric, the unsexed remain a rarity in Rome and are looked on with great distaste. Cicero had said that Caecilia was a follower of Oriental cults, but to keep a eunuch in her household struck me as a truly bizarre affectation.

We followed him around the central atrium and up a flight of marble steps. The announcer pulled back a hanging curtain, and I followed 50

Cicero into a chamber that would not have looked too out of place in a high-priced Alexandrian brothel.

We seemed to have stepped into a large and overdecorated tent, plush and pillow-strewn, with carpets and hangings everywhere. Brass lamps hung from standing braziers in the corners and exhaled trickles of smoke.

It was from this room that the smell of incense permeated the house. I could hardly breathe. The various spices were being burned without the least sensitivity to their individual proportions and properties. The crude concentrations of sandalwood and myrrh were nauseating. Any Egyptian housewife would have known better.

"Mistress," the eunuch whispered in a high voice. " T h e esteemed Marcus Tullius Cicero, advocate." He quickly withdrew.

At the far end of the room was our hostess, sprawled face-down amid cushions on the floor. Two female slaves attended her, kneeling on either side. The slaves were dark-skinned and dressed in Egyptian style, wearing diaphanous gowns and heavily made-up. Above them, dominating the room, was the object before which Caecilia prostrated herself.

I had never seen anything quite like it. It was clearly an incarnation of one of the Oriental earth goddesses, Cybele or Astarte or Isis, though I had never before seen this particular permutation. The statue stood eight feet tall, so tall that the top of its head grazed the ceiling. The thing had a stern, almost manly face and wore a crown made of serpents. At first glance I assumed that the pendulous objects adorning her torso were breasts, scores and scores of them. A closer look at the curious way in which the orbs were grouped made me realize they must be testicles. In one hand the goddess held a scythe, the blade of which had been painted bright red.

" W h a t ? " A muffled voice rose from the cushions. Caecilia floundered for a moment. The slave girls each took an arm and helped her up. She spun around and looked at us in alarm.

" N o , n o ! " she shrieked. "That stupid eunuch! Out, out of the room, Cicero! You weren't to come inside, you were to wait outside the curtain.

How could he have made such a stupid mistake? No men are allowed into the sanctum of the Goddess. Oh, dear, it's happened again. Well, by rights you should all three be sacrificed as a punishment, or at least flogged, but I suppose that's out of the question. Of course, one of you could take the place of the others—but no, I won't even ask it, I know how fond you are of young Tiro. Perhaps this other slave—" She glanced 51

at my iron ring, the mark of a common citizen, and seeing I was no one's slave threw up her hands in disappointment. Her nails were unusually long and stained red with henna, in the Egyptian fashion.

" O h , dear. I suppose this means I'll have to flog one of the poor slave
J

girls in your place, just as I did when that eunuch made the same stupid mistake last week with Rufus. Oh, dear, and they're so delicate. The Goddess will be very angry. . . ."

"I don't see how he could make the same mistake twice. Do you think he does it on purpose?" We were seated in Caecilia's reception room, a high, long hall with skylights above and open doors at either end to admit the breeze. The walls were painted in the realist fashion to reproduce a garden—green grass, trees, peacocks, and flowers on the walls, blue sky above. The floor was green tile. The ceiling was draped with blue cloth.

" N o , don't answer that. I know what you'd say, Cicero. But Ahausarus is far too valuable to be gotten rid of, and too delicate to punish. If only he weren't so scatterbrained."

There were four of us seated around a small silver table set with cool water and pomegranates—Cicero, myself, Caecilia, and the young Rufus, who had arrived ahead of us but had known better than to enter Metella's sanctum, preferring to wait in the garden instead. Tiro stood a short distance behind his master's chair.

Metella was a large, florid woman. Despite her age she appeared quite robust. Whatever color her hair might originally have been, it was now fiery red, and probably white beneath the henna. She wore it piled high on her head, wound in a tapering coil held in place by a long silver pin.

The pointed tip poked through on one side; the needle's head was decorated with carnelian. She wore an expensive-looking stola and much jewelry. Her face was covered with paint and rouge. Her hair and clothing reeked of incense. In one hand she held a fan and beat the air with it, as if she were trying to disperse her scent about the table.

Rufus was also redheaded, with brown eyes, flushed cheeks, and a freckled nose. He was as young as Cicero had indicated. Indeed, he could have been no more than sixteen, for he still wore the gown that all minors wear, whether male or female—white wool fitted with long sleeves to deflect the eyes of the lustful. In a few months he would put on the toga of manhood, but for now he was still a boy by law. It was obvious that 52

he idolized Cicero, and equally obvious that Cicero enjoyed being idolized.

Neither of the nobles showed any discomfort in accepting me at their table. Of course, they were seeking my help in a problem with which neither of them had any experience. They showed me the same deference a senator may show to a bricklayer, if the senator happens to have an archway about to collapse in his bedroom. Tiro they ignored.

Cicero cleared his throat. "Caecilia, the day is very hot. If we have dwelt long enough on our unfortunate intrusion into your sanctuary, perhaps we can move on to more earthly matters."

" O f course, Cicero. You've come about poor young Sextus."

"Yes. Gordianus here may be of some help to us in unraveling the circumstances as I prepare his defense."

" T h e defense. Oh, yes. Oh, dear. I suppose they're still out there, aren't they, those awful guards. You must have noticed them."

" I ' m afraid s o . "

"It's such an embarrassment. The day they arrived I told them flatly I wouldn't stand for it. Of course it didn't do any good. Orders from the court, they said. If Sextus Roscius was to abide here, it would have to be under house arrest, with soldiers at every door, day and night. 'Arrest?' I said, 'As if he were in a prison, like a captured soldier or a runaway slave? I know the law very well, and there is no law that allows you to hold a Roman citizen in his own home, or the home of his patroness.' It's always been that way; a citizen accused of a crime always has the option to make his escape if he doesn't want to face trial and he's willing to leave his property behind.

" S o they sent for a deputy from the court who explained it all very smoothly—it couldn't have been smoother if it had come from your own lips, Cicero. 'Right you are,' he says, 'except in certain cases. Certain capital cases.' And what did he mean by that, I wanted to know. 'Capital'

he said, 'as in decapitation—cases involving the removal of the head, or other vital organs, resulting in death.' "

Caecilia Metella sat back and fanned herself. Her eyes became narrow and misted. Rufus leaned forward and tenderly laid his hand upon her elbow.

"Only then did I realize how terrible it all was. Poor young Sextus, my dear friend's only surviving son, having lost his father, might now have to lose his head as well. But even worse than that! This underling, this 53

person, this deputy, went on to explain exactly what the word
capital

meant in a conviction for parricide. Oh! I would never have believed it if you hadn't confirmed it yourself, Cicero, word for word. T o o terrible, too terrible for words!"

Caecilia fanned herself furiously. Her eyelids, heavy with Egyptian kohl, flickered like moth's wings. She seemed about to faint.

Rufus reached for a cup of water. She waved it away. "I don't pretend to know the young man; it was his father whom I loved and cherished as a dear, dear friend. But he is the son of Sextus Roscius, and I have offered him sanctuary in my home. And surely, what that man, that deputy, that odious person described should never happen to any but the most wretched, the most foul and debased of murderers."