Conspiracies of Rome (42 page)

    I took hold of the slave’s arms and raised them to shut off the remaining flow of blood. He looked up to me, a weak, frightened look on his face. I saw his glassy eyes focus. He licked drily at his withered lips. ‘I haven’t been confessed, sir,’ he whispered. ‘Will God send me to Hell? I was a very bad slave – most inattentive to my duty. Will God punish me, sir?’

    ‘No,’ I said in a firm and priestly voice – the sort of voice that could banish all doubt by its very tone. ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son, I absolve you of all your sins,’ I continued, improvising. ‘You stand on the verge of eternal bliss. Say with me this final prayer – say with me: Our Father, which art in Heaven  . . .’

    The slave croaked along with me, looking intently all the while into my eyes. As we finished those words, which for the first time sounded so marvellously sweet, I felt him begin his last rattling breath. He died with the ‘Amen’ upon his lips.

    I dropped his arms and turned back to the shocked, silent gathering. The assistants were all on their bellies, knocking their heads against the floor in some scared, rhythmical prostration. Still on his feet, Lucius looked back at me with a white, terrified face.

    ‘The Gods of the Underworld are loose among us,’ the priest said with shaking voice. ‘They will punish us according to Their Offended Will. This trespass into our holy rites of the Galilean Blasphemy they will never forget, and may never forgive.’

    ‘There are no Gods – in the Underworld, or anywhere else,’ I shouted at him. ‘You’re just a fucking murderer.’ I glanced about the room. ‘I’m looking for one decent reason not to drag the whole damned pack of you off before the dispensator. He’ll see you punished, right enough.’

    Of course, the man wouldn’t look too kindly on me either. And I was in no position to drag half a dozen scared, reasonably strong men so much as an inch in any direction. That was reason enough.

    I contented myself with kicking over the brazier. The charcoals flared up briefly and then dimmed again.

    ‘The barbarian has profaned—’ I cut off the priest’s whine with a massive kick to his balls. He went down spluttering and gagging at the pain.

    I walked out of the room, back along the corridor towards the light that came down from the library. As I walked back, every one of the recessed lamps went out exactly as I reached it. I was walking into light with darkness behind me. Draughts can be peculiar things.

41

Lucius was onto his second jug of wine. I walked up and down in front of him, still trying to hold back the full weight of my anger.

    ‘But Alaric, my love,’ he wailed, ‘desperate times call for desperate measures. We cannot go any further by the unaided light of reason.’

    ‘Then let us go no further at all,’ I snarled. ‘I’m leaving Rome tomorrow. I’ll take the first ship to Marseilles that I can find from Naples.’

    ‘But the Gods—’

    I put my face very close to his and said slowly: ‘Lucius, there are no Gods. There is nothing but matter and space and time. There is no divine providence. There is no Judgement. Death is one eternal sleep.

    ‘Certainly, your Gods don’t exist. If they did, do you really suppose they would have given in so easily, that you people have to scurry round like rats in the sewers to worship them according to “ancient custom”? If there is any God at all,’ I added flatly, ‘it is the God of the Church.’

    ‘That mass of corruption?’ said Lucius, suddenly more effective in his argumentation.

    ‘Yes, that mass of corruption. The Church may be rotten. But it is triumphant. Unless you look at the purely human causes, do you suppose anything so rotten could survive century after century – let alone flourish – without the continual, direct intervention of God?

    ‘Those stupid books of yours give you as much ability to speak with the Gods as they show you how to make gold – and I haven’t seen you do much of that in the time I’ve known you.’

    I waved a contemptuous hand at the decayed grandeur of the library. As if in answer, I heard a gentle scurrying of mice in the still open doorway. No one else had come up. Either the others had left through another exit, or they were still down there, desperately trying to appease the imaginary demons I’d unleashed on the world.

    I stood up. ‘I’m going back to my lodgings. I’ll send tomorrow for my bags. Let this be our parting. I’ll get myself back alone.’

    Lucius followed me to the main entrance. I stepped out into the fresh darkness of the night. Though full, the moon was clouded, but still gave sufficient light to get me through the streets. My sword would do the rest.

    I walked a few yards. Then Lucius was beside me. His normal composure quite gone, he spoke from the heart. He was sorry – deeply sorry – for the horror I felt and for the shame he’d brought on himself. Yes, perhaps he was overly committed to the Old Gods. Perhaps not everything in their worship was seemly or desired by them. He’d been assured by the priest this was the truest way to unravelling the mystery. His own doubts had been broken down by that assurance. Now, he could see, there had been no divine presence in that underground chamber.

    But he’d only had a slave killed – and his life was forfeit in any event. If I wanted, he’d have the other one set free from his chains and forgiven. He’d even free the man completely. Everything he’d done was for me. Didn’t I realise how utterly devoted he was in all respects to me? Did I feel no atom of reciprocal affection?

    As I describe his urgent pleading and protestations of love, they don’t sound much excuse for the disgusting ritual I’d been too slow in breaking up. Here was a man who – whatever the exact legalities might have been regarding slaves – had just had a man murdered. I didn’t for a moment believe it had all been on the priest’s advice.

    Behind that cool, ironic façade, Lucius was a man of brutish, ungoverned passions. Forget the sacrifice – I’d seen him tyrannising over his wretched slaves after One-Eye had got away. He was just like those wolfish ancestors of his who’d sat day after day, picnicking while men gored each other in the arena for their entertainment. For however short a time, he’d brought me to a better appreciation of the Church and its mission of genuine civilisation.

    But you never met Lucius, or felt the bewitching effect of his charm. He was a superstitious bigot. He made that dreadful uncle of his in the Lateran another Epicurus by comparison. And I never could accept or understand his instinctive belief in the subhumanity of anyone who’d been unlucky enough to stand once on the auction block.

    But he was Lucius, the smooth and wonderful Lucius, whose charm was like the rising sun. Phocas aside, who could ever resist him? He was all I had in the world. And I did love him after a fashion. Everything he’d done, I told myself, was done indeed for me. And – my pen hesitates in its course, but I will continue – he’d acted in good faith.

    I stopped at a street corner, under the shade of one of those porticoes, now broken, that had once kept the sun and rain off the head in all the main streets. I embraced him.

    ‘Oh, Alaric,’ he wept, ‘I thought for a moment I’d lost you. I promise you, I’ll never do this again. I’ll sacrifice again to the True Gods – but never again anything like this. And promise me that we shall never argue again.’

    We stood hugging at each other and sobbing our reconciliation. Any street thieves who’d strolled by would have had an easy double target. But we were alone in the cool night air, the moon and a few stars overhead.

Marcella had been firm about no visitors after dark. But this wasn’t a visitor, it was Lucius.

    ‘Gretel! Gretel,’ she cried, as we followed her billowing nightgown up to my rooms, ‘wine for the young gentlemen – wine and refreshments against the cold air of the streets.

    ‘And put your back into it,’ she snarled, lifting her cane. ‘When I’m visited by other persons of quality, we don’t have them served like what is with the common trash.’

    ‘That will be all,’ I said to Gretel as she seemed inclined to linger in the main room. My tastes didn’t yet run to threesomes, and I was beginning to suspect Lucius had no interest whatever in women. I changed back into my own clothes and took Lucius down the corridor to Maximin’s old suite.

    Lucius stretched his legs in the chair he’d taken and drank a little to clear his throat. He was back to business as usual. ‘What he may have thought is a mystery into which we cannot enter,’ he began. ‘But we know all that Maximin did during his last day. He was called to the Lateran by the monk Ambrose. He was probably stopped by another message, sent by person or persons unknown. The slave Martin was involved in this deception, but I doubt as a principal. His function was to carry information back and take instructions. Maximin was then sent another message – almost certainly by the same – that probably called him again to the Lateran just as night was falling.

    ‘We know his movements in some detail from this house down to where he was jumped and then taken off and murdered. We can also imagine why the body was placed beside the Column of Phocas – it was meant as some kind of offering to the emperor. We can be sure those letters that both the dispensator and the Column of Phocas want – assuming, of course, they are not one and the same – were not with Maximin at any time during his last day. He hadn’t burnt them: there would have been evidence of that. But we can also at least suppose that he had read them the night before.

    ‘The letters weren’t with him on that last day, because he’d have had to hide them somewhere in the house. And we know that the house was searched by the professionals sent out by the dispensator who came for all his papers. Therefore,’ Lucius sat up, a bright smile dawning on his face, ‘therefore, he must have got rid of the letters some time between reading them and the beginning of our knowledge of his movements the following day.

    ‘What a fool I am not to have seen this. It’s so obvious. The Gods, it seems  . . .’

    In probable deference to me, he trailed off. I knew he wanted to claim that the Gods had spoken to him in their own way, after accepting his sacrifice.

    He continued: ‘Did Maximin go out the previous evening?’

    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was with you. So, by the way, was Martin for much of the evening.’

    But wait . . . I looked at the uncleaned boots over by the bed. It’s strange how you can look at things and not see them for what they are. Maximin must have gone out! Hadn’t I tripped over these boots, put out for cleaning, as I staggered in from the sacrifice? Maximin couldn’t have been wearing those boots when he was murdered. No – he’d been wearing his nice boots, and they’d been taken off with his body to the Lateran. Hadn’t it rained early the previous evening? Hadn’t it rained the evening when I had taken as read that he’d been in all night?

    I explained this to Lucius. He sat, looking for all the world like a clever schoolboy. ‘I say, then,’ he cried softly, ‘those letters are with the Sisters of the Blessed Theodora. That’s where he went the night before he died. Why else would he have said he was going there when he went out to be murdered? Anything else, and he’d surely have had the letters with him when attacked.

    ‘No, Maximin was ordered in that last message to take the letters down to the Lateran. Before he could do that, he had to collect them. That meant going back to the Sisters of the Blessed Theodora. I don’t like jumping to conclusions, as you know. But I’ll break that rule tonight for my own reasons, and because the evidence is at least highly suggestive. He was going to the Sisters of the Blessed Theodora on his last evening because he’d already been there the evening before.’

    He took another sip of his wine, repeating once more, and now with contemptuous relish, the name of the place. ‘If only the Column of Phocas could have been a shade more patient, whatever was in those letters might by now be before the whole world.’

    ‘But the abbess denied Maximin had been at the convent,’ I said.

    ‘Even if she had, why believe her unsupported word?’ Lucius asked with a curl of his lip. ‘Besides – though I don’t have our notes with me – she didn’t say that Maximin had
never
been to the convent. She only said he hadn’t been there
on his last day
.’

    ‘Then we must question her again,’ I said. ‘We can go as soon as the sun comes up.’

    ‘We haven’t much time,’ Lucius agreed. ‘But she might well tell us a direct lie if we ask a direct question. And then where does that leave us? Is there any objective evidence that Maximin was there?

    ‘I think we should get Marcella back out of her bed this moment, and start reconstructing Maximin’s probable movements from the time you and Martin left him.’