The Bull Slayer (31 page)

That woman doesn’t exist.
He was stunned. She had come to him as a child of barely fourteen—fresh, innocent, unformed. And he, like a father as much as a husband, had molded her into the woman he wanted. Had she always secretly resented that? But she had grown more beautiful and accomplished than he could have hoped for—so much that sometimes it almost frightened him. He knew he didn’t cut a dashing figure, had never had great success with women, but he had trusted her, never been jealous of the admiring looks she got from other men.

He turned and walked away, came back. “You understand if this becomes public I will have to divorce you. How can I ever trust you again? How long will it be before you make a fool of me with some other man?
How long?
” He grabbed her by the arm, dragging her from the chair, his fingers sinking into her flesh all the way to the bone. He raised his hand to strike her.

“Yes, hit me, go ahead! Kill me if you like. When my heart was broken you sent Marinus to take my blood. Take it now, take all of it. I don’t want to live any longer. I’m no use to you. And
him
, I mean nothing to him. He treated me like one of his whores—you say she was watching us? I’m not surprised. And when we’re caught he runs away.”

Pliny flung her back. “If you hate him why won’t you tell me his name?”

“So you can banish him, kill him? No, despicable as he is he doesn’t deserve that. He didn’t do anything I didn’t let him do.”

Pliny felt suddenly empty, eviscerated, no more than a shell, without nerve, without strength. Calpurnia was wrong—he was not a killer, not even a wife beater. But
someone
must be punished. “You didn’t do this alone,” he said. “Ione helped you. She‘s been your go-between. By the gods, I’ll get the truth out of her.”

“Leave her alone, Gaius, please. She only—”

But he rushed out into the corridor, calling a slave and sending him to fetch her. A moment later Ione appeared, with Zosimus at her side. They had been next door in their room, waiting for the summons.

“Zosimus, leave us,” Pliny said. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“I beg your pardon, Patrone.” He lowered his eyes. “What concerns my wife concerns me.” It was the first time Zosimus had ever opposed his master’s wish. It took all his courage.

Pliny turned on Ione. “Tell me the name of my wife’s lover, damn you.”

“Leave her alone, Gaius,” Calpurnia cried. “Don’t make her betray me.”

“Betray
you
? She has violated the
fides
she owes me, her master. I can have her flung out into the street for this.”

“Will you send Zosimus away too, then?” Calpurnia shot back. “Or will you deprive him of his wife and child?”

“
Not
Zosimus’ child.” Ione’s voice was shrill. She pointed a shaking finger at Pliny. “
His
child! Tell her, Patrone, tell her or I will.”

Calpurnia stared at her husband wide-eyed, and instantly knew it was true. How could she not have noticed before the growing resemblance between little Rufus and Pliny? How could she not have understood his love for the boy?

He couldn’t meet her eyes. A different man would not have cared if he got a slave girl pregnant, and would not have expected his wife to care. But their marriage hadn’t been like that. He had been attracted often enough by slave women who would have been happy to share his bed, but he had always exercised the self-control that a man of his education should. And then he had bought Ione from a friend to be his wife’s maid and companion. And she reminded him powerfully of that slave woman in his uncle’s house who had initiated him when he was thirteen. And Ione was no innocent victim. She soon guessed the effect she had on him and teased him with it. Finally, one day it happened. It was a steamy summer’s day at his villa in Laurentum, and he had retired to his bedroom for the midday siesta. He had undressed to let what little breeze there was play over his naked body. Ione came into the room without knocking, claiming she was looking for her mistress. Was that a lie? He never knew for sure. But suddenly she was on the bed and in his arms and he was helpless to resist her.

But that was the only time. And two months later, when she told him that she was pregnant, he had hastily manumitted her and married her to Zosimus.

“Patrone?” Zosimus whispered. “Not my son?” His features twisted in pain. And it was like a dagger in Pliny’s heart.

“How long has this been going on, my dear husband?” Calpurnia’s voice was heavy with scorn. “She’s swelling again, is this one yours too?”

“I only wish it were!” Ione rounded on her like a tiger. “
You
couldn’t give him sons but
I
could. I could have been his concubine, given him more sons, I could have been to him what you never can be—the mother of his children! Instead, he used me once and then gave me and our baby away—to
him
.” Her eyes slid to the wretched Zosimus.

Pliny sagged, his legs barely supporting him. “I see it now. You hate us. This is all about getting back at me. Such bitterness, so long concealed.”

Ione’s lip curled. “Oh master,” she sneered, “we slaves drink in dissembling with our mother’s milk. How else can we survive in your world?”

“And to pay me back for the wrong you think I did you you made my wife a whore?”

Ione scoffed, “She did that herself, I only helped, although she frightened me sometimes with the chances she took. And now see where we all are.”

Pliny drew a deep breath. “I ask you again, who is my wife’s lover?”

“Don’t!” Calpurnia screamed.

But Ione gave him a cunning half smile. “I’ll make a bargain with you, master. I’ll tell you his name if you promise not to put me out of the house—no, more than that, make me your concubine and acknowledge our son.”

“How dare you! I don’t bargain with my servants.”

“I’ll get it out of her, Patrone—” Zosimus, who had stood all the while as motionless as if the eye of a basilisk had turned him to stone, shot out a hand and seized his wife by the throat. “— if I have to strangle her.”

But Ione broke loose from his grip, raked his face with her nails, and bolted from the room, leaving the others to stare at each other in mute, unspeakable pain. A frozen tableau. There was no sound but the howling of the wind and a distant mutter of thunder. If some god had struck them all dead at that moment, they would have thanked him.

Chapter Forty-one

The 3rd day before the Kalends of December

“It isn’t easy for a man to talk about some things,” Pliny said. He gazed down at his breakfast table, the food untouched. “You understand?”

“I’m honored by your confidence.” Suetonius looked at his chief with sympathy. The man was unshaven, haggard, his color was bad. Plainly, he hadn’t slept all night.

“Well,” Pliny forced a weary smile, “you already know the worst. You have a way of knowing secrets, haven’t you?”

“I’d rather not know this one. I’ve never had a high opinion of women. Calpurnia was an exception.”

Pliny rested his forehead in his hand. “She’s an exceptional woman.”

They were quiet for a while.

“What is everyone saying?” Pliny asked.

“They sense something’s wrong. The wives, I gather, are desperate to find out what’s happened. Harpies. Vultures.”

“Well, they won’t learn it from Calpurnia.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“She wants to go back to Italy, to her grandfather. He’s unwell and needs her. I’ve told her she can travel by the
cursus publicus
, but it will take some time to arrange. In the meantime, I’ve put her in another apartment, far from mine.”

“I mean, will you divorce her?” Suetonius looked a question at Pliny, waiting for an answer that didn’t come. “Of course, you needn’t if you don’t want to,” he went on. “As long as everyone’s discreet and the emperor doesn’t find out, the Augustan law on marriage needn’t be invoked. Sophronia won’t talk as long as we’re nice to her. And the lover, whoever he is, has apparently kept his mouth shut all along.”

“Whoever he is.”

“Calpurnia won’t name him?”

“No. If she wants to she will. I won’t force her, I can’t.”

“Nor Ione?”

“Do you know she tried to hang herself last night? Zosimus found her in time and cut her down. She’ll live, though she doesn’t want to. Maybe that’s punishment enough for what she’s done.” Pliny said nothing about fathering Rufus on her. There were some secrets even Suetonius should not know.

“Surely you can force it out of
her
.”

“Marinus had a look at her. Her throat’s so bruised she can’t speak, even if she would. And she doesn’t know how to write. So there we are.”

“Poor Zosimus.”

Pliny nodded. “He has asked my permission to divorce her but I suspect he loves her in spite of everything, and there’s the boy to think of. I haven’t given him an answer yet.”

“There’s still the
hetaera
. The girl’s scared witless, but we’ll lean on her. I’ll go back to Sophronia’s at once.”

“No, don’t.”

“What? You don’t
want
to know?”

Pliny pressed his fingertips to his temples. “Last night, if I had known who he was I might have sent soldiers to drag him out of his house—and it would have been a catastrophe. I’m a little calmer now. You understand the power I have here, my friend. In this province I’m an emperor. I can arrest, I can torture, I can banish, I can execute. I could be a little Domitian, a Caligula, if I wanted to. Plenty of governors have succumbed to that temptation. I’m not sure I could resist.”

“I, for one, wouldn’t blame you. She disgraced you with a
Greekling
. Because she was
bored
?”

“I never should have brought her here. I blame myself.”

“You’re not angry?”

“Of course, I’m angry.”

“But you still love her?”

“You know that poem of Catullus?”

“
Odi et amo
. ‘I hate you and I love you.’”

Yes, that’s it. It speaks to me, my friend. Especially the last word,
excrucior
, ‘I’m in torment.’”

They were silent for a while. Then abruptly Pliny pushed the table aside and stood up. “It’s no use sitting here, I must occupy myself. Come with me, I want to have a look at this damned cave at last.”

***

They left their horses at the foot of the hill and scrambled the rest of the way up, following the
optio
. Pliny stopped at the top to catch his breath. Suetonius shot him a worried look. The soldiers who had been left to guard the place cut back some of the bushes with their swords so that the two men could enter more easily. Pliny ducked under the overhang and felt his way down the seven steps, followed by Suetonius and the soldiers holding torches.

“So this is it,” he said. “I imagined it bigger.” With a glance he took in the painted blue ceiling with its golden stars, the sculpted relief of the young god with his red cap and blue cloak in the act of stabbing the bull. “All of this the handiwork of Barzanes,” he said wonderingly. “Astonishing.”

“The signs of the zodiac all along the walls,” Suetonius observed. “Clearly their belief has much to do with astrology. That explains those handbooks that Balbus and Glaucon owned. Apparently, you have to study to penetrate deeper into the mysteries.”

“That and pay a hefty fee, I don’t doubt. I was forced once to learn something about the cult of Isis. They’re all the same, they hook you and then they lead you on.”

Suetonius touched the desiccated corpse of a squirrel with his foot. “This place hasn’t been visited in a long time. At least not since the old priest’s death. I don’t think we need to keep the guards here any longer.”

“No,” Pliny agreed. He went up to the relief and examined it closely. “Beautiful workmanship. It’s cracked, though. Look here. And the crack runs along the ceiling too.”

“The earthquake,” Suetonius suggested.

“Yes, probably.”

“Do you suppose he’s real?”

“What, Mithras?” Pliny shrugged. “I imagine he’s just Apollo by another name.”

“And eternal life for his worshippers?

“Frankly, I don’t care. I live in this world, the next one doesn’t interest me much. Anyway, we know that these particular worshippers, or some of them anyway, were not here to save their souls but to fatten their purses.”

Suetonius examined the long stone benches that ran along the sides of the cave. “
Raven
—several of those—
Bridegroom
,
Soldier
,
Lion
,
Persian
,
Sun-Runner
,
Father,
” he translated the Greek titles that were inscribed on each place. “This was the hierarchy, then. Half a dozen Ravens and one each of the others, and the remaining places for the common worshippers, I suppose. There isn’t room for more than about twenty altogether.”