The Tribune's Curse (19 page)

The day-fishermen were readying their boats to go out as the night-fishermen came in, and as the latter began to unload their fish, I accosted an older man who seemed to be in charge of several of the fishing craft.

“I am Decius Metellus,
iudex
appointed to investigate the murder of the tribune Ateius. I need to speak with whoever found the body.”

The gray-haired fisherman spoke slowly, and I will not try to reproduce here his river-fisherman’s dialect. “Was young Sextus, the one we call Cricket, that spotted the corpse; then we all rowed over for a look. Would’ve left it till morning and reported it then, but the other Sextus, the one we call Mender because he’s so handy mending the nets, he leaned close with a torch and sang out. The dead man was wearing a strange robe and looked like lions had been at him. We’d all heard talk about the crazy tribune who’d cursed Crassus, so I went over to the gate and reported it right away.”

“Admirable. Which bank was he on?”

The man turned and pointed to the far bank, opposite the City. “The Tuscan.”

“Did you carry him in?”

He shook his head vehemently. “No, we don’t touch no corpses. You do that, you’ll never catch no fish till you’re purified by a priest. The gate captain rounded up some night-cleaning slaves from the Forum Boarium, and they carried him through the gate. By that time, word was spreading fast. There was already a crowd waiting at the gate.”

“An excellent report,” I told him. “I am obliged to you.” I turned to go, but he spoke up.

“Senator?”

I turned back. “Yes?”

“You’re up for aedile next year, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“You get elected, the big sewer’s clogged real bad, been needing cleaning for years.”

“I’ll remember,” I said, sighing with resignation. I would be paying for my predecessors’ neglect. Scouring the sewers was one of the very worst jobs on the aedile’s docket. We usually employed condemned criminals to do it.

“Do it as soon as you’re in office,” he admonished me. “Or it’ll be too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“Flood coming next year, a big one. We’ve seen all the signs,” he nodded dolefully.

“I’ll see to it. Thanks for the warning.”

I made my way toward the Campus Martius, brooding over the prospect of the year ahead. I didn’t doubt the man for an instant. This wasn’t an old woman seeing warnings from the gods in every bird that flew past her window. These were people who lived their lives on the river and knew all its moods. If they said
a flood was coming, then, barring freakish circumstances, it would come.

I skirted the edge of the Forum Boarium and went out through the Carmentalis Gate and took the long street that led to Pompey’s Theater. The street was lined with some of our smaller but nonetheless most beautiful temples. Pompey had had the street widened and improved to facilitate access to his theater, which was the first permanent theater built in Rome. For centuries, the Censors tried to keep degenerate Greek influences out of the City, regarding them as a danger to public morals.

The great complex of interconnected buildings bulked up from the flat plain of the Campus Martius like a beached whale. At one end was the vast theater with the temple atop it, and from it stretched the extravagant portico and the Senate meetinghouse, all surrounded by splendid gardens. Pompey could do some things right, if he hired someone competent to think it up for him.

I passed into the theater and stood within the great half circle of seats, said to have a seating capacity of forty thousand. On the stage, an acting troupe was rehearsing what appeared to be a tragedy, the actors looking strange without their masks. At the top of the seats, before the temple, I could see a small crowd gathered. I began to climb, feeling like a slave at the Games, relegated to the highest seats with the most distant view of the action.

A pack of thugs stood as a sort of honor guard around the mangled remains of the late, unlamented Ateius Capito. I didn’t bother to look him over, since I had come here to get a professional opinion. Instead, I admired the temple, which I had not seen since it had been completed.

The Temple of Venus Victrix was, of necessity, rather small. You do not build a truly huge temple atop a theater, even if you are inclined by nature to such odd architectural juxtapositions. Its proportions, however, were exquisite. The slender, delicately fluted
Corinthian columns, topped with their sprays of acanthus leaves, were especially pleasing.

“No signs of action from the City?” I asked the man in charge of the thugs, one I vaguely remembered seeing with Clodius’s escort.

“No. My guess is, everyone will hold off till the funeral. The other tribunes will give a rousing funeral oration and carry on just like they didn’t hate his guts. Then, if you haven’t found the killer or killers, they’ll start taking the place apart.”

“There’ll be no end of fun if that happens,” agreed another. These men were connoisseurs of mobs and riots.

I wandered over to the edge of the top terrace next to the temple and looked over the waist-high railing. The building with its tiered rows of arches below me looked like a huge marble drum. Statues stood inside every arch, all of them specially commissioned for the theater. We had looted all the Greek cities so thoroughly that there was little original artwork left worth taking, so now we brought in expert sculptors to make copies for us of famous sculptures.

I leaned out for a better look, bracing a hand against one of the masts set in massive, bronze sconces at intervals along the top of the outer wall. On days of theatricals, these masts supported the
velarium
, a huge awning. Pompey’s
velarium
was striped with purple, because he was never shy about reminding people of his military glory. Of course, the stripes were not made with the true, Tyrian purple used for the
triumphator
’s robe. That much Tyrian dye would have cost more than the whole theater complex. Rather, it was made with dye extracted from the common trumpet-shell and mixed with various native dyes. I learned this from an old dye merchant of Ostia. The effect was almost the same as that of the true purple, but unlike Tyrian dye this imitation faded with age and exposure to the sun.

Beyond the theater stretched the sprawling buildings of the
Campus Martius. They were not stacked as high as those crowded within the walls and so gave a finer sense of space. Largest of them was the Circus Flaminius. It was smaller than the Circus Maximus, but constructed largely of stone, while the Maximus was mostly of wood. Between the clusters of buildings were broad stretches of greenery. This part of Rome was actually far more pleasant to live in than Rome within the
pomerium
, but a native just didn’t feel that he was in Rome unless he was within the walls.

“An imposing view, is it not?”

I turned to see Asklepiodes behind me. He was a small man, wearing a traditional physician’s robe, his gray hair and beard dressed in the Greek fashion, with a fillet of plaited silver encircling his brow. He was physician to the gladiatorial school of Statilius Taurus and an old friend. He was also, by his own modest claim, the world’s leading authority on wounds inflicted by weapons. In this professional capacity he had aided me in many investigations. In his other capacity he had bandaged, stitched, and anointed me more times than I could readily count. I took his hand, which was astonishingly strong for a man his size.

“It is good to see you again,” I said, studying him. “You’re a little grayer, but otherwise unchanged.”

“You are likewise the same except for a few new scars. Young Hermes tells me the two of you have been conquering Gaul virtually without help.”

“He’s young and inclined to boast. Right now it seems as if someone is trying to start a good-sized war right here in Rome.”

“Truly? How might that be?”

“You haven’t heard of what’s been happening? The departure of Crassus and the curse and last night’s murder?”

“I heard some rumors at the school, but I am very busy and pay little attention to the political life of Rome. I am a foreigner and cannot vote, so what would be the point?” We strolled toward
the catafalque, and he looked over the temple with a critical eye. “This is a very strange place to build a temple, is it not?”

“You don’t know that story, either?”

“There is much about Rome that I do not understand, long though I have lived here.”

“Well, for centuries the Censors have fought any attempt to build a theater in Rome. They say that plays are a passing frivolity, and besides, they’re foreign and degenerate and, if you will forgive me, Greek. So Pompey, when he wanted to polish up his reputation by giving us a permanent theater, put this temple at the top of the seats so he could say that the seats are actually a stairway leading to the temple.”

He smiled. “That is a tortuous subterfuge, considering the reputation you Romans have as a straightforward people.”

“We have our moments.”

“And your concept of corrupting influence mystifies me. I spend my days patching up the men who fight in your funeral Games, who die by the score in those spectacles and whose practice bouts are as bloody as some conventional battles. You enjoy chariot races that are scarcely less dangerous than wars and are conducive to mob violence. Yet you fear contamination from Sophocles and Aeschylus?”

“But the
munera
are religious services in placation of our dead,” I told him.

“Drama and comedy are likewise celebrations to honor the gods.”

“But,” I pointed out, “they encourage the softer emotions, like fear and pity, whereas our Games encourage the virtues of sternness and manliness. Believe me, with the way we’ve treated the rest of the world, if we show a moment’s softness, we’ll have Persians and Syrians and Libyans and Iberians at our throats in seconds, and that’s not mentioning the Gauls and Germans, who are halfway to our jugulars already.”

“If you insist,” he muttered, grumpily. “But how you can reconcile your abhorrence of human sacrifice with dosing the shades of the dead with human blood challenges my powers of rationalization.”

“But the gladiator has a better-than-even chance of coming out of the fight alive,” I told him. “You see? It’s different.” Sometimes I just don’t understand Greeks.

“I shall defer to your command of the subject. Now, let’s have a look at this unfortunate politician.” He clapped his hands, and two men came running up the steps. They were his slaves—Egyptians who spoke only the native tongue of that land and who were expert surgeons in their own right. They had a skill of bandaging possible only to the people who invented mummies. At Asklepiodes’ wordless gesture they peeled the ragged cloak and clothing from the corpse, leaving it all but naked. Unlike Romans, they had no superstitious dread of touching corpses. The thugs looked on curiously.

“You may have consulted the wrong man, Decius,” said Asklepiodes. “I treat the gladiators, not the
bestiarii.
” He referred to the men whose specialty it was to fight wild animals in the Games. It was a much lower calling than that of swordsman.

“Do you think it was an animal?
Caesti
and spiked clubs can leave wounds similar to these.”

“Who is the expert here?” he said, testily. “Actually, I think it might be several animals. There are claw marks and teeth marks, and there is a wound here,” he indicated a huge slash that slanted across the unfortunate man’s ribs, “that looks like it was made by a great whip.” He bent closer and had his slaves turn the body over on its belly. “There are other marks here, cuts and—” he mumbled some foreign words, and one of the slaves probed delicately at a bloody depression on the back of the skull “—a depressed fracture that might have been made by a club. It is as if
he was attacked with weapons from behind and by beasts from in front.”

“Like a condemned man pushed to the lions by men with spears?”

“Possibly, although these attacks from behind were more than mere proddings. How did this man come to rate so colorful and thorough a demise?”

I gave him an abbreviated version of the story, leaving out, of course, the part about the Secret Name of Rome.

“Ahh,” he said, clapping his palms together with delight at so utterly bizarre a story. “This is far better than the usual sordid murder for gain or for revenge. It is like something from one of the dramas,” he waved a hand toward the stage, where the actors still pranced through their paces. “In fact, thinking of them,” his face grew more solemn, “if I were a more religious man, or one more superstitiously inclined—” he let it taper off portentously.

“Then what?” I urged.

“The man committed a great offense against the gods. In the ancient tales immortalized in the great plays, the gods reserve an especially terrible punishment for those who offend them greatly.”

Against all reason, fear gripped my bowels. “You can’t mean the Fur—”

He held up an admonitory finger to silence me. “I mean, sometimes they release the
Friendly Ones
from the underworld to torment the sinner to his death.” He used the famous euphemism because to speak the name of those horrid creatures was to attract their attention. “These spirits of divine vengeance are said to be provided with natural weapons sufficient to wreak the sort of damage we see here.” He waved a hand airily. “That is, I might speculate thus were I of a superstitious turn of mind.”

His little qualification was too late for some of us. At his first suggestion the thugs were backing away from the otherwise inoffensive corpse, their eyes bugging out with dread. Two of them
whirled and ran toward the exits so ingeniously designed to fill and empty the theater with greatest dispatch.
Wonderful
, I thought. Before nightfall, the City would be swept by yet another rumor: the
Friendly Ones
were loose in Rome!

“And I had always thought you the most rational of men,” I said.

“And so I am. I simply did not wish to leave any possibility unexplored.”

“I see. Well, leaving aside for the moment the nature of the creature that attacked him and adhering as closely as possible to mundane precepts, can you tell me anything at all about how he died?”