Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (60 page)

I stopped and stared at him, long and hard enough that he finally stopped smiling. I imagined him broken-jawed, bent over, and bleeding, shocked by an avalanche of pain. One of the guards growled at me like a hound sniffing invisible threats. I clenched my fists inside my tunic, bit my tongue so hard it bled, stared straight ahead, and forced myself to keep walking.

I walked until I longed to stop walking, through crowded squares where I felt a total stranger, past taverns I could not stand to enter. The illusion of invisibility descended on me again, but with it there was no sense of strength or freedom, only emptiness. Rome became a city of endless squalor, shrieking babies, the stench of raw onions and rotted meat, the grime of unwashed paving stones. I watched a legless beggar drag himself across the street while a pack of children followed behind, pelting him with pebbles and taunting him with insults.

The sun descended. I felt a gnawing in the pit of my stomach, but I could not stand to eat. The air became thin and cool in the gathering twilight. I found myself before the entrance to the Baths of Pallacina, that favoured haunt of the late Sextus Roscius.

‘Busy day,’ said the young attendant as he took my clothing. ‘Hardly any business at all the past few days – too hot for it. No hurry this evening. We’ll be staying open late to make up for the loss.’ He returned with a drying cloth. I took it from him and said something to distract him while I draped the towel over my left arm, making sure it concealed my knife. Even naked I had no intention of going unarmed. I stepped into the caldarium, and he shut the door behind me.

The fading sunset cast a strange orange glow through the high window. An attendant with a burning taper lit a single lamp recessed in one wall, then was called away before he could light the others. The room was so dim and the steam on the water so thick that the score or so of men who lounged about the pool were as indistinct as shadows, like statues seen through a dull orange mist. I lowered myself into the water slowly, bit by bit, hardly able to tolerate the heat, until the swirling water lapped at my throat. Around me men groaned as if they were in pain or ecstasy. I groaned with them, merging into the obscurity of the warmth and vapour. The glow from the window failed by imperceptible degrees. The attendant never returned to ignite the lamps, but no one complained or shouted for light. The darkness and the heat were like lovers whom no one dared to separate.

The lamp sputtered. The flame leaped up and then grew small, leaving the room even darker than before. Water lapped quietly against tile, men breathed in sighs and soft groans. I looked about and saw nothing but vapour, featureless and infinite except for the single point of light cast by the lamp, like the glow of a lighthouse on a faraway hilltop. Shapes bobbed in the distance like floating islands or monsters of the deep prowling the surface.

I sank deeper in the water, until I could feel the breath from my nostrils swirl against the surface. I narrowed my eyes, stared across the gulf of mist at the flickering flame, and for a while I seemed almost to dream without shutting my eyes. I thought of no one and nothing. I was a dreaming man, a floating, moss-covered island in a humid sea, a boy playing at fantasy, a child in the womb.

Against the background of mist, one of the shapes drew nearer – a head floating on the water. It approached, and stopped; approached and stopped again, each time accompanied by the almost imperceptible sound of flesh parting water, followed by the advancing caress of tiny waves against my cheeks.

He drew so near that I could almost make out his face, outlined by long, dark hair. He rose a bit, just enough so that I glimpsed broad shoulders and a strong neck. He seemed to be smiling, but in that light I might have imagined anything.

Then he slowly sank beneath the water with a soft fuming of bubbles and a swirl of mist – Atlantis sinking into the sea. The surface of the pool closed over him and the water merged into the mist, undisturbed. He had vanished.

I felt something brush against the calf of my leg, like an eel slithering through the water.

My heart began to pound. My chest grew tight. I had wandered the city for hours, so blindly that the clumsiest assassin could have followed me and I never would have known it. I turned and reached for the towel on the edge of the pool, and the knife concealed beneath it. Just as my hand closed on the hilt, the water boiled and splashed behind me. He touched my shoulder.

I whirled about in the water, splashing, slipping against the floor of the pool. I reached out blindly and seized him by the hair, then brought the blade to his throat.

He cursed aloud. Behind me I heard the curious murmur of the crowd, like a blind beast stirred from its sleep.

‘Hands!’ I shouted. ‘Out of the water!’ The surrounding murmur turned to a commotion. On either side of me two hands leaped out of the water like snapping fish, empty and blameless. I pulled my blade away from his throat. I must have cut him; a thin dark line marked the indent of the blade, and beneath it was a smeared trickle of blood. I was finally close enough to see his face – not Magnus at all, just a harmless young man with startled eyes and gritted teeth.

Before the chief attendant could come, before the lamps could be lit, exposing me for all to see as the fool I was, I let him go and pulled myself from the water. I dried myself as I hurried towards the door, taking care to conceal the knife before I stepped into the light and demanded my clothes. Cicero was right. I was unsettled and dangerous and unfit to be on the streets.

XXIX

It was Tiro who answered the door. He looked exhausted but exultant, so thoroughly pleased with himself and with existence in general that I could see it took him an effort to put on a disapproving face. In the background the voice of Cicero droned on, stopping and starting, an ambient noise like the sound of crickets on a summer night.

‘Cicero is furious with you,’ Tiro whispered. ‘Where have you been all day?’

‘Looking for bodies amid charred rubble,’ I said. ‘Chatting with friends of the great. Visiting ghosts and old acquaintances. Lying with whores; excuse me, lying
to
whores. Brandishing knives at amorous strangers . . .’

Tiro made a face. ‘I don’t have the least idea what you’re talking about.’

‘No? I thought Cicero had taught you everything there is to know about words. And yet you can’t follow me.’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘No, but you are. Yes, look at you – as giddy as a boy after his first cup of wine. Drunk on your master’s rhetoric, I can tell. You’ve been going at it for eight hours straight, probably on an empty stomach. It’s a wonder you could find your way to answer the door.’

‘You’re not making sense.’

‘I’m making perfect sense. But you’re so intoxicated with gibberish that a little common sense must seem as insipid to you as spring water to a hardened drunkard. Listen to him – like a knife against slate, if you ask me. Yet you act as if it were a siren’s song.’

I had at last managed to eradicate the cheerfulness from Tiro’s face and replace it with a frown of consternation. At that moment Rufus looked tentatively around the corner and then strode into the vestibule, flushed and smiling and batting his heavy-lidded eyes. He looked utterly exhausted, which at his age only served to make him look more charming, especially as he could not stop smiling.

‘We’ve finished the second draft,’ he announced. The constant droning from Cicero’s study had abruptly stopped. On Rufus’s face was the transported look of a child who might have seen a centaur in the woods and could not possibly hope to describe it. ‘Brilliant,’ he finally said. ‘Of course, what do I know of rhetoric? Only what I’ve learned from teachers like Diodotus and Molo, and what I’ve heard with my own ears, sitting in on the Senate and the courts since I was a child. But I swear to you, he’ll bring tears to your eyes when you hear him at the trial. Men will come to their feet with clenched fists, demanding that Sextus Roscius be set free. There’s no final version, of course; we have to contend with all sorts of possibilities, depending on whatever tricks Erucius comes up with. But Cicero’s done what he can to foresee every contingency, and the core of his final argument is there, finished and perfect and ready, like pillars awaiting the dome of a temple. It’s brilliant, there’s no other word for it. I feel so humble simply to have been a witness to it.’

‘You don’t think it’s too dangerous?’ Tiro said in a low voice, stepping from behind me and drawing closer to Rufus, whispering so as to hide his doubts from Cicero in his study.

‘In an unjust state, any act of decency is by its nature dangerous,’ said Rufus. ‘And also brave. A brave man will not fail to put himself into danger, if he has just cause.’

‘Still, aren’t you worried about what might happen after the trial? Such harsh words for Chrysogonus, and Sulla himself isn’t spared.’

‘Is there room in a Roman court for the truth, or not?’ said Rufus. ‘That’s the question. Have we reached such a state that truth is a crime? Cicero is staking his future on the essential fairness and honesty of good Roman citizens. What else can a man of his integrity do?’

‘Of course,’ said Tiro soberly, nodding. ‘It’s his nature to challenge hypocrisy and injustice, to act out of his own principles. Given his nature, what choice does he have?’

I stood by, forgotten and alone. While they conferred and debated, I quietly slipped away and joined Bethesda between the warm sheets of my bed. She purred like a half-asleep cat, then wrinkled her nose with a growl of suspicion when she smelled Electra’s perfume on my flesh. I was too weary to explain or even to tease her. I did not hold her but instead turned my back to her and let her hold me, and so, just as the sound of Cicero’s droning abruptly resumed from the atrium, I slipped into a restless sleep.

One might have thought the house had been deserted, or that someone was gravely ill, so supreme did quiet reign over Cicero’s household the next morning. The strain and bustle of the previous day were replaced by a steady calm that had the appearance of lethargy. The slaves did not scurry back and forth but took their time, speaking always in hushed voices. Even the constant droning of Cicero’s voice had stopped; not a sound came from his study. I ate a bowl of olives and bread that Bethesda brought me and passed the morning as I had the day before, resting and reading in the courtyard near the back of Cicero’s house with Bethesda nearby.

The reproof I expected from Cicero never came. Instead he ignored me, though not in any pointed manner. I simply seemed to have slipped from his consciousness. I did notice, however, that the guard on the roof whom I had eluded the day before had changed his routine to include an occasional circuit of the colonnade surrounding the courtyard. From his sullen glances I could tell that he, at least, had not escaped Cicero’s wrath.

At some point Tiro appeared. He asked if I was comfortable. I told him I had been reading Cato all morning, but except for that I had no complaints. ‘And your master?’ I said. ‘I haven’t heard a sound from him all day. Not a single epigram, not even the tiniest allusion, not one specimen of alliteration. Not even a metaphor. He’s not ill, is he?’

Tiro bowed his head slightly and spoke with the hushed voice of one admitted to the inner circle of a great enterprise. His transgressions with Roscia forgiven (or at least momentarily forgotten), he had fallen more than ever under his master’s spell. Now the climax approached, and his faith in Cicero had become almost mystical. ‘Cicero is fasting and resting his voice today,’ Tiro said, with all the gravity of a priest explaining the omens to be seen in a flying flock of geese. ‘All his practising these past few days has worn his throat until he’s hoarse. So today no solid foods, only liquids to soothe his throat and moisten his tongue. I’ve been recopying a fresh draft of his oration, while Rufus sorts through each of the legal references to make sure nothing has been overlooked or wrongly attributed. Meanwhile, the house is to be as still and quiet as possible. Cicero must have a day of rest and calm before the trial.’

‘Or else – what?’ I said. ‘A crippling attack of gas before the Rostra?’ Bethesda snickered. Tiro coloured, but quickly recovered. He was far too proud of Cicero to allow a mere insult to fluster him. His manner became haughty. ‘I only bring it up so that you’ll understand when I ask you to be as quiet as possible and to cause no disturbances.’

‘Like the one I caused yesterday by escaping over the roof?’

‘Exactly.’ He held himself erect for a final haughty moment, then let his shoulders slump. ‘Oh, Gordianus, why can’t you simply do as he asks? I don’t understand why you’ve become so . . . so unreasonable. If you only knew. Cicero understands things that we only guess at. You’ll see what I mean tomorrow, at the trial. I only wish you trusted him as you should.’