The Tribune's Curse (15 page)

“I am pleased that you appreciate the gravity of the act. I have been commissioned to investigate this sacrilege.”

“I am flattered to be called upon. But the curse, as it was
repeated to me, involved none of the Baalim. This is the plural form,” he added, although I had guessed the meaning already.

“Even so, it is thought that foreign influence may be present.”

“Ah,” he said, ruefully. “And your Roman officials are always wary of the corrupting influence of foreigners, despite your habit of packing the City with them in the form of slaves.”

“Precisely. Three years ago, during the aedileship of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, there was a purge of Rome’s foreign cults. Your name was on the list of those to be driven from the City, yet I find you still here. How comes this about?”

He made a truly comprehensive gesture involving hands, shoulders, neck, and head, indicative of all things unknowable and unavoidable, combined with all things eminently mutable and subject to arbitrary change, ever altering, yet ever remaining the same. I have never known a people as eloquent in their gestures as the Syrians.

“The honorable aedile and I came to an agreement whereby I was to remain in the City, so long as I refrain from any unnatural practices and do not disturb the neighbors.” He smiled broadly. “You have said that you stand for that same office, and surely so eminent a gentleman as yourself will have no difficulty in securing it. I do trust that we shall be able to come to a similar understanding?”

So he thought I was here soliciting a bribe. He knew his Roman officials, all right.

“That’s as may be,” I said vaguely, knowing how strapped for money I would soon be, “but just now I am more concerned with that curse. The list of foreign priests to be sent away listed you and two others as ‘traffickers with the chthonians.’ How does this refer to you?”

He quirked an eyebrow upward. “
Chthonian?
That is not a
word I encounter every day. Greek, is it not? Indicating things of the underworld?”

“Yes. In Rome, our chthonians mostly came to us by way of the Greeks and Etruscans. We Romans were a rustic lot. Our gods were those of the fields and rivers and the weather.”

“I see. This must account for your fondness for pastoral poetry.”

“Please,” I said. “I regard pastoral poetry as one of the blights of this age. Epic is the only worthwhile verse form as far as I am concerned.”

“Spoken like the scion of an heroic people. Now, as to the chthonians, some of the Baalim are lords of the underworld and have as their servants whole legions of imps ever eager to torment the living. These can deliver to my—my associates,” he chose a legally innocuous term, “certain valuable services, always protective and always secured by means of perfectly respectable ceremonies, I assure you.”

“But none of these deities were named in the tribune’s curse?”

“None.”

“Two other such traffickers were named along with you on Aemilius’s list: Eschmoun of Thapsus and Ariston of Cumae. What can you tell me about them?”

Another gesture, this time contemptuous. “As for Eschmoun, you will waste your time talking with him. He is a fraud from Africa, of mixed Libyan descent. He claims to commune with the underworld through a serpent that resides in a golden egg. What he actually does is bilk wealthy ladies of large sums of money by bringing them messages from their dead husbands, children, and other relatives. He is exceptionally good at discerning what it is that his clients long to hear. He has purloined the name of a Carthaginian god and taken upon his shoulders the mantle of power still clinging to that thankfully destroyed city.”

“ ‘Thankfully’?” I said. “You have no esteem for Carthage? And yet were the Punic people not relatives of yours?”

He grimaced. “Distant kin at the very most. The Phoenicians founded Carthage many centuries ago, and the Punic race worshiped the Baalim, but their practice grew very degraded even as the city grew rich and powerful. As you are aware, they performed the most frightful acts of human sacrifice.”

“They were barbarians, however well they dressed,” I said.

“Even so, their practices must have given some satisfaction to their gods, for those deities blessed them with many victories. In the end, of course,” he added hastily, “the gods and arms of Rome prevailed, praise be to all the Baalim.”

“It was a rough fight,” I admitted, “but it made soldiers of us.”

I was putting it mildly. The First Punic War alone had been twenty-four uninterrupted years of solid campaigning—land battles, sea battles, and sieges. The Carthaginians had thrashed us far more times than we beat them, but in the end we were a matchlessly warlike, military nation for good or ill. Before, we had just fought our Italian neighbors and expanded our territory incrementally in the peninsula. But we won Sicily from Carthage, and with it our first taste of empire. By the end of the Third Punic War, we had holdings in Spain, Gaul, and Africa, and Carthage was a pile of rubble.

“Ariston is another matter. He is a very deep scholar of the ways of gods and spirits. Many aspiring scholars and historians consult him on these matters.”

“And what sort of cult does he lead?”

A shrug. “I was unaware that he had any such. Of course, men involved in arcane studies often excite malicious and fearful rumors. Perhaps some superstitious or malevolent person gave false information against him.”

“That may have been it.” I stood. “Well, I thank you for your
help and hospitality. I am sure that I shall be able to report that you had nothing to do with the tribune’s scandalous behavior.” I was sure of nothing of the sort, but neither was I under oath.

“I rejoice in meeting you, Senator,” he said as he led me back to his door. “Soon you will be an official of great authority, and I have learned that previous acquaintance makes one such far more approachable.” He was still expecting to bribe me. I said nothing to discourage his assumption.

It was a fairly lengthy walk to the house of Eschmoun, which was just off the old Forum Boarium, in a block of tenements that were foul even by Roman standards. Beside his doorway were painted all sorts of trashy mystical signs, and I was sure I would find a filthy, wild-eyed loon within. What I found instead was the well-appointed town house of a man of considerable means.

Eschmoun himself was a plausible, smooth mountebank, as described by Elagabal. The rogue proudly displayed his mystical egg, a handsome object of smooth gold the size of a child’s head. I had to take for granted the residence within of the holy serpent. Eschmoun, too, tried to bribe me, and again I ignored the attempt, while leaving the impression that I might be back sometime. His occult knowledge clearly extended only to his confidence spiel, and fleecing wealthy, gullible ladies is far down on my list of intolerable offenses.

It was another long walk to the dwelling of Ariston, and I stopped on the way for lunch and a brief rest. I was loosening up, and walking had become moderately tolerable. Passing through the Forum, I saw Milo returning from his morning court. I asked him if anything had been heard from our eccentric tribune.

“Not a word or a sighting since the curse,” he informed me. “He has a gang surrounding his house, but no petitioners have been able to get through to see him.”

“Then he can be impeached,” I said.

“If someone is willing to bring charges. And if he can be
located. The house may be empty. The
populares
are concerned for the institution of the tribuneship. If he’s disappeared, they may be pretending to protect him from assault to prevent a wider scandal.”

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that the bugger’s hanged himself.”

“He didn’t strike me as so obliging a man.”

So I continued on my walk, all the way to the Esquiline Gate and out of the City. This was one of the most undesirable districts of Roman territory, where the poor were buried. Besides the depressing clay tombs of the poor, a part of the district included the notorious “putrid pits,” where the poorest of the poor, the unclaimed slaves, and foreigners and dead animals unfit for salvage were thrown into lime pits. In the hot days of summer, the wind blowing from that quarter carried an utterly appalling stench. It was none too fragrant in winter, for that matter.

In more recent years, Macaenas has covered over these pits and replaced them with his beautiful gardens. For this civic improvement I can almost forgive his being the First Citizen’s crony.

The learned Ariston actually lived in a house not far from these notorious pits. It was a two-story affair standing by itself, like a country villa, only much smaller. Its only plantings consisted of a small herb garden, and its only neighbors were some very modest tombs and a few small shrines.

At least his doorway and walls were devoid of magical images, I noted with some relief. My tolerance for supernatural paraphernalia has never been high. The slave who answered my knock at this unadorned portal was a middle-aged man. When I announced my name and mission, he ushered me inside, where an undistinguished woman his own age was sweeping. Ariston didn’t seem to share Elagabal’s taste for attractive, docile young serving women. Stoic, probably. Minutes later a man entered the atrium.

“Yes, what may I do for you?” No extravagant signs of welcome or offers of hospitality, just this rather abrupt greeting. The man had a tangled, gray beard with matching hair, and he wore Greek clothing. I took this for an affectation. Cumae was once a Greek colony, but it had been a Roman possession for two hundred years.

“You are Ariston of Cumae?” I asked.

“As it happens, yes. Aside from being a senator, what distinguishes you from the rest of the citizenry?” Obviously, this fellow was going to be difficult. Maybe he was a Cynic rather than a Stoic.

“My commission, which is to investigate the curse delivered by the Tribune of the People Marcus Aemilius Capito. Living where you do, you might not have heard of the affair.”

“I’ve heard. I live here by choice; I’m not an exile on some island. Come along, then. I have to look at my garden.”

I followed the peculiar specimen back outside. “I rather thought you lived here because you were driven from the City three years ago by the aediles.”

“Nonsense. I’m a Roman citizen; I can live anywhere I like.” He stooped to examine a sickly looking plant.

“Then why here? Most don’t consider it a desirable district.”

He gestured toward the surrounding tombs and the pillars of smoke ascending from the lime pits. “The neighbors here are quiet and don’t bother me much. That way they don’t disturb my studies.”

“You’re sure it’s not because proximity gives you the opportunity to commune with the dead?”

He straightened and glared from beneath tangled brows. “Most of those interred here were ignorant fools whom death has improved in no way whatever. Why should I want to talk with them?”

“Report has it that necromancy and trafficking with the
chthonians are your specialties,” I said, undeterred.

“There is a difference between being a scholar of these things and being a fraudulent sorcerer,” he informed me with great dignity.

“And yet you enjoy a great reputation among my wife’s more superstitious lady friends, who can scarcely be accused of scholarship.”

His face clouded. “And what if I sometimes sell them the occasional charm or counsel them concerning the fate of the dead? Even a scholar has to eat.”

“I quite understand,” I said with patent insincerity.

“Listen, Senator,” he said, nettled, “Marcus Tullius Cicero himself does not scorn to come to me with questions about obscure gods and ancient religious practice. He has come here many times in the course of his researches and has asked me to read the drafts of his writings on the ways of the gods, solar and lunar, earthly and chthonian.”

This actually was most impressive. A man as deeply learned as Cicero would not allow anyone to edit his work except a scholar of equal credentials. I made a mental note to question Cicero about the man.

“Then you must indeed be what you say. That being the case, you are probably an authority on the extraordinary and alarming deities invoked by Ateius Capito some few days past.”

“I am. And if there is one thing I hate, it is the performance of dangerous, exacting rituals by an amateur!”

“You mean the curse was not well-done?”

“Oh, he carried it off well enough. Magical practice, on the level of ritual, is simply a matter of memorization; and if there is one thing every politician can do, it is memorize. The schools of rhetoric teach little else.”

“I knew that conventional temple ritual works that way. The
flamines
and
pontifices
have to memorize interminable formulae in
languages nobody understands anymore. Is it the same with sorcery?”

“Oh, yes.” He lost some of his irascibility as he launched into his favorite subject. “The greatest difficulty may be encountered in assembling the very specialized apparatus and materials required to carry out a particular ritual. If, for instance, your ceremony requires the mummified hand of an Egyptian pharaoh, it isn’t something you can just pick up in the stalls around the Forum. You might have to travel all the way to Egypt to secure such a thing, and even then it can be difficult to distinguish such a hand from the appendage of a lesser person.”

“I can well imagine. The Egyptians are sharp traders.” I said this with considerable conviction, having been there.

“Even with something as simple as herbs and other plants,” he gestured to his well-kept garden, “it is best to grow your own. That way you are sure of purity and authenticity.”

I found myself fascinated despite my skepticism. It is always interesting to hear a real expert expound upon the arcana of his realm.

“How do men of learning such as yourself acquire these—these objects and assure yourselves of their quality?” I was remembering the nameless things Ateius had tossed into his brazier.

He glanced at me shrewdly. “If you need leopards for the shows you will be giving, how do you expect to get them? They aren’t sold in the Forum Boarium.”