Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (182 page)

‘Kill him, Crassus, and I will scream at the top of my lungs the name of the man who really murdered Lucius Licinius!’

I produced the bloodstained cloak. I threw it at his feet.

Gelina lurched forward, clutching the arms of her chair. Mummius turned pale and Fabius looked at me in alarm. Orata squinted down at the lump of cloth. Metrobius bit his lips and put a protective arm around Gelina’s shoulder.

Only Crassus seemed unperturbed. He shook his head as if he were a pedagogue and I a pupil who could not keep my grammar straight, no matter how many times he corrected me.

‘On the night of the murder, before he fled for his own life, Alexandros saw everything,’ I said. ‘Everything! The corpse of Lucius Licinius; the murderer who knelt beside the body, scraping the name of Spartacus in the stone to deflect suspicion from himself; the murderer’s face. That man was not a slave. Oh, no, Marcus Crassus, the man who killed Lucius Licinius had no other motive than devouring greed. He traded arms for gold with Spartacus. He poisoned Dionysius when Dionysius came too close to the truth. He threw me off the pier and tried to drown me on my first night in Baiae. He dispatched assassins to kill me in the woods last night. That man is not a slave but a Roman citizen and a murderer, and there is no law on earth or in the heavens that can justify the wholesale slaughter of innocent slaves for his crimes!’

‘And who would this man be?’ Crassus asked mildly. He poked his toe at the crumpled, bloodstained tunic. He wrinkled his nose, then frowned with dawning recognition.

I opened my mouth to speak, but Alexandros was quicker. ‘It was him!’ he shouted, and raised his arm. He pointed – but not at Crassus.

Mummius bared his teeth and grunted. Gelina cried out. Metrobius held her tightly. Orata looked slightly queasy. Crassus clenched his jaw and made a face like thunder.

All eyes turned toward Faustus Fabius. He blanched and took a step backwards. For just an instant his imperturbable patrician mask slipped to reveal an expression of pure desperation. Then, just as quickly, he recovered his composure and stared catlike at the finger pointing towards him.

Beside me, Eco swayed and crumpled onto the red carpet.

XXV

Eco fell unconscious into a burning fever. As soon as I could, I took him to the villa, where Iaia was already anxiously waiting for news. She took the matter into her hands and insisted that Eco be brought to her room, where she brooded over him, sending Olympias to the house in Cumae to fetch unguents and herbs. The air in the room was quickly filled with smoke from braziers and vapour from tiny boiling pots. She roused Eco from his uneasy sleep to pour her strange concoctions between his lips and rubbed a foul smelling salve behind his ears and around his lips. For me she prescribed a strong dose of nepenthes (‘For a few hours, at least, it will take you far away from this place, which is what you need’), but I refused to drink it.

Day turned to night without formalities to mark the hours. Dinner was never served; people slipped into the kitchens to pick at leftover portions from the previous day’s feast, or nibbled at delicacies brought back from the games. Without slaves to tend to the beds and light the lamps, to indicate the hours with the unending cycle of their labour, time seemed to stop; yet darkness still descended.

That night Morpheus passed over the villa at Baiae. His spell covered all the rest of the world, but he overlooked the inhabitants of that house; there was no sleep for anyone, only the darkness and stillness of the long night. With Iaia and Gelina I kept a vigil in Eco’s room, listening in amazement as he muttered a fitful stream of names and incoherent phrases. What he said made no sense, and the sounds were often crude and slurred, but there was no denying that he spoke. I asked Iaia if she had put a spell on him, but she claimed no credit.

I sat and fretted in the dim light of Iaia’s room, my head spinning at all the terrible and wonderful things that could happen in a single day.

At last I wrapped a cloak around my shoulders, lit a small lamp, and wandered through the quiet house. The empty hallways were dark, illuminated only here and there where cold white moonlight poured through a window.

Done with her errands for Iaia, Olympias had retired to her own room, but not to sleep. Through her door I heard soft murmurings and sighs, and the low, hearty laugh of a young man released after long days and nights of exile in a cave, luxuriating amid soft pillows and the caresses of warm, familiar flesh. I smiled, wishing I had some excuse to stumble in on their coupling, now that the throbbing in my head had finally ceased and I could truly appreciate the sight.

I continued to wander until I made my way to the men’s baths and stood beside the great pool. The waters of the mineral spring seethed and gurgled; the rising steam danced and vanished in the glow of my little lamp. I looked toward the terrace and saw two naked figures standing side by side, leaning against the balustrade and each other. They gazed out at the reflection of the moon on the shimmering bay. Pools of water marked the path of their footsteps from the bath to the balustrade, and great clouds of steam rose from their heated flesh. The moonlight shone like a fuzzy halo on Mummius’s great hairy shoulders and buttocks; the same light shone on Apollonius and seemed to turn him into quicksilver and polished marble.

I covered my lamp with my hand. Silent and unseen, I found a way down from the terrace onto the path that led to the pier. I turned toward the annexe instead and ascended the hill. I came to the long, low building where the captives had been held. Its door was pressed back against the wall and opened onto utter blackness. I paused for a moment and stepped inside, then recoiled at the shock of the smell. The place was filled with the odour of human misery, but tonight it was empty and silent.

From the stables farther ahead I heard the sounds of quiet conversation and laughter. I followed the path around the corner of the building to the open courtyard. Three guards were posted outside the stables, wrapped in cloaks and gathered around the warmth of an open fire. One of them recognized me and nodded. Behind them, the door to the stables stood ajar, and within I saw the slaves huddled in groups around tiny lamps. Above the low murmur of conversation I heard someone snap, ‘Get out of there, you pest!’ and I knew that Meto must be among them.

I turned toward the villa and took a long, deep breath of cold air. There was no wind; the tall trees that surrounded the villa stood upright and silent. All the world seemed strangely alert and bemused by moonlight.

I walked across the courtyard, hearing the soft crunch of gravel beneath my feet. On the doorstep I hesitated; instead of entering the villa I lingered beneath the portico, then walked along the outer wall until I came to one of the windows that looked into the library. The draperies were only partly shut. The room was brightly lit. Within I saw Marcus Crassus wrapped in his chlamys, toiling over a stack of opened scrolls with a cup of wine in his left hand. He never appeared to look up, but after a long moment he spoke. ‘You need not skulk outside, Gordianus; your spying is done. Come inside. Not through the window – this is a Roman house, not a hovel.’

I returned to the front door and passed through the entry hall. In the darkness the waxen faces of Lucius Licinius’s ancestors gazed down on me, looking grim but satisfied. I walked through the atrium, where the odour of incense had at last covered the lingering smell of putrefaction. Moonlight poured through the open roof like a great column of liquid opal. Holding my lamp aloft, I studied the letters SPARTA on the floor. Under the wavering lamplight and moonlight the crude scratches shone gold and silver, as if some passing god, and not a mere murderous mortal, had drawn them with his fingertip.

There was no guard outside the library. The door stood open. Crassus did not turn or look up when I entered, but indicated that I should sit in the chair to his left. After a moment he pushed the scrolls away, pinched the bridge of his nose, and produced a second silver cup, which he filled to the brim from a clay bottle.

‘I’m not thirsty, thank you, Marcus Crassus.’

‘Drink,’ he said, in a tone that allowed no rebuttal. I obediently put the cup to my lips. The wine was dark and rich, and spread a warm glow through my chest.

‘Falernian,’ said Crassus. ‘From the last year of Sulla’s dictatorship. An exceptional vintage; it was Lucius’s favourite. There was only one bottle left in the cellar. Now there are none.’ He filled his own cup again, then poured the last drops into mine.

I sipped, breathing in the bouquet. The wine was as bemusing as the moonlight. ‘No one sleeps tonight,’ I said quietly. ‘Time seems to have stopped altogether.’

‘Time never stops,’ said Crassus with a bitter edge to his voice.

‘You are not pleased with me, Marcus Crassus. And yet I only did what I was hired to do. Anything less would have shown contempt for the generous fee you promised me.’

He looked at me sidelong. His expression was unreadable. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said at last, ‘you’ll get your fee. I didn’t become the richest man in Rome by swindling petty hirelings.’

I nodded and sipped the Falernian.

‘Do you know,’ said Crassus, ‘for a moment, out there in the arena today, when you were rolling your eyes and making your passionate speech, I actually thought – can you believe it? – I thought that you were going to accuse
me
of killing Lucius.’

‘Imagine that,’ I said.

‘Yes. If you had dared such impudence, I think I might have ordered one of the guards to put a spear through your heart then and there. No one would have questioned such an act. I would have called it self-defence; you had a knife concealed on your person, you looked like a madman, and you were ranting like Cicero on a bad day.’

‘You would never have done such a thing, Marcus Crassus. Had you killed me immediately after I made such a public accusation, you would only have planted a seed of doubt in everyone who was there.’

‘You think so, Gordianus?’

I shrugged. ‘Besides, the point is hypothetical. I never made such an accusation.’

‘And you never intended to?’

I sipped the Falernian. ‘It seems useless to dwell on such a question, since what you describe never occurred and the true murderer was identified – just in time to avoid a terrible miscarriage of justice, I might add, though I know you find that to be a minor point.’

Crassus made a low noise in his throat, rather like a growl. It had not been easy for him to cancel the slaughter after arousing the curiosity and whetting the blood lust of the crowd. Even after the revelation of Fabius’s guilt, he might have gone on with the massacre had it not been for the intervention of Gelina. Meek, mild Gelina had at last put her foot down. Armed with the truth, she was transformed before our eyes. Her jaw set, her eyes hard and glittering like glass, she had demanded that Crassus cancel his farce. Mummius, blustering and outraged, had joined her. Assaulted from both sides, Crassus had acquiesced. He had ordered his guards to escort Fabius and himself back to the villa, curtly charged Mummius with closing the games, and then had made an abrupt and unceremonious exit.

‘Did you stay for the end of the games?’ Crassus asked.

‘No. I left only moments after you did.’ Why bother to explain that Alexandros and I had carried Eco back to the villa, fearing for his life? Crassus had hardly noticed Eco’s collapse, and probably did not even remember it.

‘Mummius tells me that all went smoothly, but he’s lying, of course. I must be the laughing stock of the whole Cup tonight.’

‘I seriously doubt that, Marcus Crassus. You are not the sort of man at whom people would ever dare to laugh, even behind your back.’

‘Still, to have the slaves rounded up and herded from the ring as unceremoniously as they were herded into it, with no explanation – I could hear the murmurs of disappointment and confusion even from outside the arena walls. For a climax, Mummius tells me he hastily assembled all the surviving gladiators and forced them to fight again in simultaneous matches; not exactly an original idea, was it? Imagine what a farce that became, with the gladiators already weary and some of them wounded, hacking away at each other like clumsy amateurs. When I pressed him about it, Mummius admitted that the lower tiers quickly emptied out. The connoisseurs know a bad spectacle when they see it, and the status seekers saw no point in remaining when I was no longer there to smile back at them.’