Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (165 page)

I opened my eyes and saw not Bethesda but Olympias looking back at me with aloof disdain. ‘What do you think I am,’ she whispered haughtily, ‘a slave, that you could ever use me so?’ She pushed herself up from the bed and stood naked, bathed in the soft glowing light from the terrace. Her hair was a golden aureole about her face; the full, sleek curves and the subtle hollows of her body formed a beauty that was almost unbearable to look at. I reached for her and she started back. I thought she mocked me, but suddenly she covered her face with her hands and ran weeping from the room, slamming the door behind her.

I rose from the bed and followed. I opened the door with a sudden foreboding, and felt a breath of hot air on my face. The door opened not into a hallway, but onto the shelf of rock above Lake Avernus. I could not tell whether it was day or night; everything was lit with a harsh, blood-red glow. On the edge of the rock a man sat in a low chair, draped in a crimson military cape. He leaned forward, his chin on his hand and his elbow on his knee, as if he watched the progress of a battle far below. I looked over his shoulder and saw that the whole of the lake was a vast pool of belching flames, filled from shore to shore with the writhing bodies of men, women, and children trapped waist-deep in the burning mud. Their mouths were wrenched open in agony, but the distance muffled their screaming so that it was like the roar of the sea or the sound of a crowd in an amphitheatre. They were too far away for their faces to be distinct, and yet among them I recognized the slave boy Meto and the young Apollonius.

Crassus looked over his shoulder. ‘Roman justice,’ he said with grim satisfaction, ‘and there is nothing you can do about it.’ He looked at me oddly, and I realized I was naked. I turned about to return to my room, but I could not find the door. In confusion I stepped too close to the edge. Part of the rock began to crumble and give way. Crassus seemed not to notice as I fell backward, desperately trying to scramble onto the rock even as it fell with me, plummeting into the empty void—

I woke in a cold sweat to see the boy Meto standing over me with a look of grave concern on his face. From across the room I heard the gentle sawing of Eco’s snore. I blinked and wiped my hand across my forehead, surprised to find it beaded with sweat. The sky beyond the terrace was dark blue, alive with the first stars of evening. The room was lit by a lamp which Meto carried in his small hand. ‘They’re waiting for you,’ he finally said, raising his eyebrows uncertainly.

‘Who? For what?’ I blinked in confusion and watched the lamplight flicker across the ceiling.

‘Everyone is there but you,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘In the dining room. They’re waiting for you to begin the dinner. Though why they’re in such a hurry I don’t know,’ he went on, as I shook my head to clear it and struggled to rise from the bed.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because it’s a dinner hardly fit for slaves!’

A great gloom seemed to have settled over the dining room. Partly it came from the gravity of the occasion, for this was the last meal before the funeral; throughout the night and all the next day, until the funeral feast that would follow Lucius Licinius’s cremation and interment, everyone in the household would fast. Tradition prescribed a meal of rigorous simplicity: common bread and bowls of plain lentils, watered wine and a grain porridge. As an innovation, Gelina’s cook had included a few delicacies, all black in colour: black roe served on crusts of black bread, pickled eggs stained black, black olives, and fish poached in octopus ink. It was not a repast to spark clever conversation, even from Metrobius. Across the room Sergius Orata surveyed the prospect with a glum eye and filled himself up with pickled eggs, popping them whole into his mouth.

The gloominess had another source, which emanated from the couch beside Gelina. Tonight Marcus Crassus was in attendance, and his presence seemed to swallow up all spontaneity. His lieutenants Mummius and Fabius, reclining next to each other at his right hand, seemed unable to shake their taciturn military bearing, while, from their shifty glances and grim faces, it was evident that neither Metrobius nor Iaia felt at ease in the great man’s presence. Olympias was understandably distracted; considering the shock she had received at Lake Avernus, I was surprised to see her in attendance. She dabbed at her food, bit her lips, and kept her eyes lowered. She wore a haunted expression that only enhanced her beauty by the muted glow of the lamps. Eco, I noticed, could not take his eyes from her.

Gelina was in a state of fretful agitation. She could not be still and was constantly waving at the slaves and then, when they scurried to her side, could not remember why she called them. Her expression shifted from haggard despair to a timorous smile for no apparent reason, and far from averting her eyes she looked from face to face around the room, fixing each of us with an intense, inscrutable gaze that was unnerving. Even Metrobius could not cope with her; he occasionally took her hand to squeeze it reassuringly, but avoided looking at her. His wit seemed to have run dry.

Crassus himself was preoccupied and aloof. Most of his conversation was reserved for Mummius and Fabius, with whom he exchanged curt observations on the state of his troops and the progress made towards completing the wooden amphitheatre by Lake Lucrinus. Otherwise he might have been dining alone for all the attention he paid to his guests. He ate heartily but was pensive and withdrawn.

Only the philosopher Dionysius appeared to be in good spirits. His cheeks had a ruddy glow and his eyes sparkled. The ride to Cumae and back had invigorated him, I thought, or else he was very pleased with whatever result he had obtained by spying on Olympias that afternoon. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps he was as stricken by her beauty as everyone else, and his purpose for following her was simply prurient. I remembered seeing him on the cliff, furtively watching Olympias from the hidden folds of his cloak, and with a shudder I imagined him secretly fondling himself. If the smile on his face that night was the afterglow of satisfying his peculiar sexual appetite, then the gods were granting me a far more intimate look into the man’s soul than I cared to see.

Yet, for a man obsessed, Dionysius seemed quite capable of ignoring Olympias and her distress, even though she reclined at his right hand. Instead he focused his attentions on Crassus. As on the night before, it was Dionysius who finally picked up the reins of desultory conversation and sought to entertain us, or at least to impress us, with his erudition.

‘Last night we talked a little about the history of slave revolts, Marcus Crassus. I was sorry you were not here. Perhaps some of my research would have been new to you.’

Crassus took his time to finish chewing a crust of bread before replying. ‘I seriously doubt it, Dionysius. I’ve been doing my own research into the subject during the last few months, chiefly into the mistakes made by unsuccessful Roman commanders when confronting such large but undisciplined forces.’

‘Ah.’ Dionysius nodded. ‘The wise man takes an interest not only in his enemy, but in, shall we say, the heritage of his enemy, and the historical powers at his enemy’s disposal, no matter how seamy or disreputable.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ said Crassus, hardly looking up.

‘I mean that Spartacus did not exactly arise from nowhere. I have a theory that among these slaves there are whispered legends about the slave revolts of the past, stories built about the likes of the doomed slave-wizard Eunus and embellished with all sorts of mock-heroic details and wishful thinking.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Faustus Fabius, pushing back a lock of unruly red hair. ‘Slaves do not have legends, or heroes, any more than they have wives or mothers or children they can call their own. Slaves have duties and masters. That is the way of the world as the gods have designed it.’ There was a general murmur of agreement around the room.

‘But the way of the world can be disrupted,’ said Dionysius, ‘as we have seen all too clearly for the last two years, with Spartacus and his rabble cavorting up and down the length of Italy, wreaking havoc and inciting more and more slaves to join them. Such men thumb their noses at the natural order of things.’

‘And so the time has come for a strong Roman to reassert that order!’ boomed Mummius.

‘But surely it would be helpful,’ Dionysius pressed on, ‘to understand the motivations and the aspirations of these rebellious slaves, all the more surely to defeat them.’

Fabius curled his Up derisively and bit into an olive. ‘Their motivation is to escape the life of service and labour that Fortune has allotted them. Their aspiration is to be free men, though for that they lack the requisite moral character, especially those who were born slaves.’

‘And those who were reduced to slavery, because they were captured in war or made destitute?’ The question came from Olympias, who blushed as she asked it.

‘Can a man degraded to slavery ever become wholly a man again, even if his master should see fit to free him?’ Fabius cocked his head. ‘Once Fortune has turned a man into property, it is impossible for him ever to recover his dignity. He may redeem the body, but not the spirit.’

‘And yet, by law—’ Olympias began.

‘The laws vary.’ Fabius tossed an olive pit onto the little table before him. It bounced off the silver tray and onto the floor, where a slave hurried to retrieve it. ‘Yes, a slave may purchase his freedom, but only if his master allows him to do so. The very act of allowing a slave to accumulate his own price in silver is a legal fiction, since a slave can truly own nothing – anything he may possess belongs to his master. Even after emancipation, a freedman can be reduced to slavery again if he shows impertinence to his former master. He is politically restricted, socially retarded, and barred by good taste from marriage into any respectable family. A freedman may be a citizen, but he is never truly a man.’

Gelina glanced over her shoulder at the slave who had retrieved the olive pit, and who now was retreating with a tray towards the kitchens. ‘Do you think it’s wise to carry on such discussions, considering . . .’

Crassus snorted and leaned back on his couch. ‘Really, Gelina, if a Roman cannot discuss the nature of property in the presence of property, then we have come to a sad pass. Everything Fabius says is true. As for Dionysius and his notion about some sort of vague continuity between slave revolts, the idea is absurd. Slaves have no link with the past; how can they, when they don’t even know the names of their ancestors? They’re like mushrooms; they spring from the earth in vast numbers at the whim of the gods. What is their purpose? To serve as the tools of men greater than themselves, so that those men can realize their greater ambitions. Slaves are the human implements given to us by that divine will which inspires great men and enriches a great republic like our own. They have no past, and the past does not concern them. Nor do slaves have a sense of the future; otherwise Spartacus and his ilk would know that they are doomed to a fate far worse than the one they thought they were escaping when they turned on their masters.’

‘Hear, hear!’ said Mummius tipsily, banging his cup on the table. Metrobius shot him a withering glance and started to speak, then thought better of it.

‘The common slave who labours in the fields lives from day to day,’ Crassus continued, ‘conscious of very little beyond his immediate needs and the necessity of satisfying his master. Contentment, or at least resignation, is the natural condition of slavery; for such men to rise up and kill their betters is in fact unnatural, or else it would happen all the time and slavery could not exist, which means that civilization could not exist. The revolt of Spartacus, like that of the wizard Eunus and a handful of others, is an aberration, a perversion, a rent in the fabric of the cosmos woven by the Fates.’

Dionysius leaned forward, gazing at Crassus with cloying admiration. ‘You are truly the man of the hour, Marcus Crassus. Not only a statesman and a general, but a philosopher as well. There are those who would say, however perversely, that Spartacus is the man of the hour, that he dictates the agenda of our hopes and fears, but I think that Rome will soon forget about him in the splendour of your victory. Law and order will be restored and all will be as if Spartacus never existed.’

‘Hear, hear!’ said Mummius.

Dionysius leaned back and smiled coyly. ‘I wonder where the wretch Spartacus is at this very moment?’

‘Holed up near Thurii,’ said Mummius.

‘Yes, but what is he doing even as we speak? Does he gorge himself on stolen victuals, gloating to his men about stolen victories? Or has he retired to bed already – after all, what kind of conversation can uneducated slaves enjoy to keep them up past dark? I imagine him lying awake in the darkness, restless and far from sleep, vaguely troubled by an intuition of what Fortune and Marcus Crassus have in store for him. Does he lie within a tent that reeks of his own foul smell? Or upon hard stones beneath a starry sky – no, surely not, for then he would be naked to the sight of the gods who despise him. I think such a man must sleep in a cave, burrowed into the dank earth like the wild beast he is.’

Mummius laughed curtly. ‘There’s nothing so awful about sleeping in caves. Not from the stories I’ve heard about a certain great man in his younger days.’ He cast a shrewd eye at Crassus, who grudgingly smiled.

Dionysius pursed his lips to suppress his own smile of triumph at this turn in the conversation, which he had obviously intended and in which Mummius was his unwitting accomplice. He leaned back and nodded. ‘Ah, yes, how could I have forgotten such a charming tale? It was in the bad old days before Sulla, when the tyrants Cinna and Marius, enemies of all the Licinii, spread terror through the Republic. They drove Crassus’s father to suicide and killed his brother, and young Marcus – you must have been no more than twenty-five? – was forced to flee to Spain for his life.’