The Uncertain Hour (26 page)

“Will this do?”

“No, it won’t do. I said heavy. I … never mind, I’ve got it.”

Petronius leaned down and plucked the golden statuette of Apollo from its niche. The dead thrush still lay at its feet, a sacrifice disdained. He considered it a moment; earlier, he might have spared a pensive afterthought to the creature’s plight, to wondering what it might be like to be twelve hours dead, but now he had no time. He would be a dead thrush himself soon enough, and all such questions would be answered, or not. Instead, he hefted the statuette, considerably heavier than its size would have suggested, and posed it on the balustrade. Then he removed the signet from the ring finger of his right hand and placed it beside the statuette.

“After Lucan killed himself,” he said, “Fabius Romanus stole his signet ring and forged the letter that incriminated Annaeus Mela. After my ring is destroyed, I want you to hold on to the pieces and bear witness to the falsehood of any document claimed to have been sealed by me after this moment.”

So saying, he raised the statuette with both hands and brought its marble base down onto the onyx signet, which shattered into a thousand fragments, most falling off the far side of the balustrade onto the rocky parapet and into the water, along with the gold ring itself. The three watched the pieces disappear into the darkness.

“Perhaps I overdid it,” Petronius said after a moment. He shrugged. “Never mind, you get the idea. Now, on to other business. Here’s two documents, sealed. One contains the final amendments to my will, to be delivered into the hands of Gaius Lucilius, and no one else. Understand?”

“But Lucilius left not half an hour ago. Why didn’t you just give it to him then?”

“I’ve made changes since. And anyway, there was a danger of his being detained on his way home. He may be in custody right now, for all I know. But no one’s going to arrest you, with your fresh-from-the-brothel mystique. Any more interruptions? Right. The other is a letter addressed to Nero. You give that to Lucilius, too, and he’ll find a way of getting it safely to court without endangering the messenger.”

“Why not just leave it here for Nero to find in the morning?”

“Idiot! Melissa Silia will still be here, attending to my obsequies.”

“Nasty letter, is it? Rancid with accusations of shameful excess?”

“What time do you suppose it is, Melissa?”

“An hour, perhaps an hour and a half to dawn.”

“Do Marcus and I have time for our walk, do you think?”

“I shouldn’t dawdle too much, if I were you.”

“Come on then, Marcus. Melissa, I’ll wake you as soon as I get back.”

“I’ll wait up.”

“As you wish.”

“And Marcus, will you come by in the morning? I think I shall have need of you.”

“Yes, Melissa, I will come. Good night.”

In silence, they padded through the orchard, across the canal, and through a small wooden door in the outer wall that gave onto a path through an ancient grove of oaks. Petronius led the way; although it was still too dark to see much farther than the hand before one’s face, he had taken this route too often to be waylaid by the night. Shortly, the path and the woods gave way to an olive grove, where visibility improved and the Saturnalia bonfires in the village served as beacons. The slope steepened, and suddenly they reached the road. Petronius stepped confidently onto the flagging, but Martialis hung back warily.

“Don’t worry,” Petronius whispered. “My gate is half a mile east of here. They’ll never know we’re gone.”

With the dark mountain looming to their right and the gentle vineyards sloping down to the sea on their left, they made for the village gate, keeping a brisk pace. Petronius felt giddy and reckless, like a boy on a caper.

“Let me ask you a question, Marcus.”

“Go ahead.”

“What is life?”

“You must be joking. You don’t expect me to answer that, do you?”

“I have no time left for joking. What is life, to you?”

“People have been asking that question for six-hundred years. Why should I have an answer?”

Petronius said nothing.

“Well, since you insist. Let’s see. Life is … a series of encounters strung together by flawed memories of previous encounters.”

“That’s all?”

“What else do you want it to be?”

“A search for meaning?”

“Well, then it’s that, too.”

“You’re very glib.”

“It’s a stupid question. Petronius, you have, perhaps, an hour or so to live. Have you found your meaning?”

“No.”

“And so you must die unhappy?”

“I’m not unhappy. I’m confused. I’d imagined it would all be clear by now. I’d been led to expect it would be.”

“Perhaps you’ve been listening to the wrong people. What are we doing here?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

“I mean, what are we doing in this god-forsaken shithole?”

They’d reached the village gate, left open all night for the festivities and guarded by a municipal guildsman, who was passed out on the ground and snoring peaceably in a pool of his own vomit. Stepping around him, they penetrated into the village proper, whose narrow cobbled alleys stank of cheap red wine and burning detritus. Here and there, where the main street opened onto some little square, a bonfire still glowed and sputtered, but the revelry seemed for the most part to have burned itself out. A few stragglers leaned against each other as they stumbled home to their beds, but otherwise the village was quiet. And yet, coming into the central marketplace, they found a young couple sitting on the ledge of the fountain, deep in quiet conversation. Petronius stopped directly in front of them.

“Surisca!”

The girl, startled, leaped to her feet in confusion, then sank to one knee with her head bowed. Petronius noted that her hair was still immaculately braided, twisted, and pinned with his silver brooch. Clearly, she and her baker boy, if this were he, were still in the platonic phase of their love affair. Petronius felt a keen, if transient, pang of regret that this girl, so naturally modest and well-behaved, had been made such a debased plaything at his hands. The boy, a lanky redhead not yet in his first beard, stood slowly and sullenly tried to stare down the interlopers. Petronius reached down and raised Surisca to her feet with a tap on the shoulder.

“Forgive me for disturbing you, my dear,” he said. “And for interrupting you.”

“Master, I was just on my way back …”

“No, no need. That’s not why I stopped. I was simply pleased to see you, as I have something I wanted to tell you and didn’t think I’d get the chance.”

She sat down on the fountain, and pulled her boyfriend, who was still pouting and pointing his chin churlishly, down beside her. Petronius crouched so as to speak to them face to face.

“This evening,” Petronius went on, “I made an amendment to my will concerning you. I hope you will be pleased. I have decided to bequeath you as a gift to my client here, Marcus Valerius Martialis.”

“You what?” Martialis sputtered. Surisca merely looked bewildered.

“Quiet, please. Now, Surisca, you have known Martialis for some little while. You know he is a kind man, if sometimes ill-mannered. I believe he will be a good master to you, in his way, which is why I wanted him to have you. Accordingly, when you return to the villa this morning, I want you to pack your belongings and go find him in his lodgings in Baiae.”

“But Petronius, you know I can’t feed a slave!”

“Just a
moment
. Surisca, I have also left you some money. Not a lot, but enough to be useful. It might, for instance, suffice to pay off your manumission tax, should you eventually be freed, with enough left over to start you in a little business.” He looked the redheaded boy straight in the eye. “A bakery, perhaps. Now, what do you think of that?”

Surisca seemed not to have understood a single word he’d said, but nodded her head several times and appeared to be on the verge of tears. Petronius patted her demurely on the hand, aware of his own hypocrisy, and stood.

“Very well, then. Good night, Surisca, and good-bye.” He turned and continued on his way, Martialis tripping after him and looking back anxiously at the stunned teenagers.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” he called. “Look for me at Saufeia’s house, down by the port.”

By the time he caught up with Petronius, they had already reached the northern gate and passed out onto the road to the acropolis.

“That was a dirty trick. You could have just manumitted her yourself, instead of saddling me with all the hassle.”

“She and her boy want to move to Rome. I can’t have that. You must give her a stern lecture, scare all that nonsense out of her. Take them to Rome, help them set up their little bakery before you free her. And don’t you dare lay a hand on her. She’s had more than enough of that already.”

“Who are you to tell me what to do with my own slave ?”

The road made an uphill, hairpin turn as it climbed to the acropolis, the sanctuary of Apollo gleaming above them on the lower terrace. It seemed to Petronius that the marble columns were glowing, as if picking up some ambient light, but a scan of the horizon showed no sign of incipient dawn just yet. Martialis followed his gaze and put his hand on Petronius’s shoulder in a gesture that seemed to seek both to comfort and to speed him up the slope. The sacred road skirted the wall of the terrace, past the ceremonial stairway, and continued on up to the peak of the rise to the temple of Zeus and the crypt, but Petronius stopped just short of the acropolis at a sarcophagus-shaped portal, some fifteen feet high, set into the side of the slope. A tunnel, supported by arches echoing the five sides of the portal, plunged deep into the heart of the mountain. A torch burned somewhere way down the tunnel, but the far end was invisible.

“What is this?”

“The cave of the Sybil.”

“Surely you don’t mean to go in there?”

“Scared?”

“I’m not scared. It’s just … I mean, isn’t she supposed to write her prophecies on oak leaves and leave them at the entrance? Can’t we just scrounge around for some stray communiqués right here?”

“No. We go in. I’ve brought money.”

“What do you need the Sybil for anyway? You’re going to be dead in an hour. What sort of future can you possibly have? Can’t you find your own way to the underworld?”

“Yesterday you were blubbering like a baby at the thought of my imminent demise. Now you can’t wait to get rid of me. What’s the matter with you? Anyway, it’s not my future we’re interested in—it’s yours.”

“This tragedy is rapidly turning into a farce. Besides, I already know my own future. Find a new patron; eat him out of house and home; kiss some ass, write some poems, fuck some tarts; earn everlasting glory, and die in a bed.”

“We’re in a hurry. Let’s go.”

As they entered the tunnel, Martialis took Petronius’s hand in his. They walked quickly, ignoring the passages branching off to either side as they made straight for the torch, and their footsteps on the gritty floor rang out ahead of them. One of these side passages, Petronius recalled, led to the necropolis on the other side of the hill; if he knew the way, he could make straight for his own tomb—as he had imagined himself doing only a few hours earlier—and save everyone a lot of trouble. But he was afraid of ghosts and did not have the courage for it. Instead, he pulled the torch from its bracket as they passed, and now they could see that the tunnel ended, about a hundred feet ahead, in a vaulted chamber, empty and unlit. They stopped at the entrance to the chamber and Petronius thrust the torch before him, illuminating a rough stone bench set into an alcove directly before them.

“Sybil!” Petronius’s voice was all too loud and assertive for this place, and brought no response. They waited, then entered the chamber. On the floor at the center sat a small iron brazier, cold and ash-filled, and on the bench were a dry lamp and a ragged hemp sack. Petronius nudged at the bag and it flopped over, revealing its contents: a few dry laurel leaves, a half-eaten loaf of flatbread, and a round disk of hard cheese. He sighed.

“That’s that, I suppose.”

“Not exactly the
Aeneid
, is it? What did you expect? An old witch in a bottle, just waiting up for your millennial appearance?”

“Maybe, yes. I don’t know what I expected.”

They turned toward the exit. At the far end of the tunnel, a few bright stars were framed in the arches.

“Why are you so worried about me, Petronius?” Martialis asked plaintively. “I’m a grown man. I can take care of myself.”

“But you act like a child, as if nothing matters but your own gratification. Look at the fuss you made at the party. That may wash in Spain, but it’s no way to get ahead in Roman society. I’ve been trying to educate you in the ways of the world ever since I became your patron, but sometimes I wonder if you’ve learned anything at all from me. I wonder, and I worry.”

“You needn’t. I can take care of myself.”

“You’ve said that, but I do wonder. I’ve been your father for the past two years, and I’ve watched over you. I’ve watched you. You don’t know how to behave in company, you don’t know how to control your feelings. Those things matter here. Yes, you can be charming and flattering when you want to, but charm and flattery can only take you so far. What you need is to find your solid core, the part of you that won’t feel cheapened or weakened when you need to compromise to get ahead.”

“I know who I am, Petronius. That’s why I never want to pretend to be anything else, the way you all do. I’m sorry if you feel it betrays a lack of character. The fact is, I always thought it was why you loved me.”

“It
is
. But I’ll be gone, and other people won’t love you for it. They’ll be offended by you, the way Fabius is. You know I haven’t just been acting the part of father to you. I’ve felt like your father. I love you like a father.”

“I know that.”

“So I can’t simply take you as you are. I can’t just be another one of your ‘flawed encounters’ or whatever it is. I have to
protect
you. Just look at you, blundering around the city half-drunk all the time, dressed in rags, stinking like a pig, insulting senators. Where will you find another patron? Who would put up with you?”