Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (62 page)

A hand gripped my arm. I turned and saw Tiro leaning on his crutch. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘you came after all. I was afraid – well, no matter. I saw you from across the way. Here, follow me.’ He hobbled through the crowd, pulling me after him. An armed guard nodded at Tiro and let us pass beyond a cordon. We crossed an open space to the very foot of the Rostra itself. The copper-plated beak of an ancient warship loomed over our heads, fashioned in the shape of a nightmarish beast with a horned skull. The thing stared down at us, looking almost alive. Carthage had never lacked for nightmares; when we killed her, she passed them on to Rome.

The space before the Rostra was a small, open square. On one side stood the crowd of spectators from which the statue of Sulla rose like an island; they stood and peered over one another’s shoulders, confined behind the cordon maintained by officers of the court. On the other side were rows of benches for friends of the litigants and for spectators too esteemed to stand. At the corner of the square, between the spectators and the Rostra, were the respective benches of the advocates for the prosecution and defence. Directly before the Rostra, in chairs set on a series of low tiers, sat the seventy-five judges chosen from the Senate.

I scanned the faces of the judges. Some dozed, some read. Some ate. Some argued among themselves. Some fidgeted nervously in their seats, clearly unhappy with the duty that had fallen on them. Others seemed to be conducting their regular business, dictating to slaves and ordering clerks about. All wore the senatorial toga that set them apart from the rabble that milled beyond the cordon. Once upon a time, courts were made up of senators and common citizens together. Sulla put an end to that.

I glanced at the accuser’s bench where Magnus sat with his arms crossed, scowling and glaring at me with baleful eyes. Beside him, the prosecutor Gaius Erucius and his assistants were leafing through documents. Erucius was notorious for mounting vicious prosecutions, sometimes for hire and sometimes out of spite; he was equally notorious for winning. I had worked for him myself, but only when I was very hungry. He paid well. No doubt he had been promised a very handsome fee to obtain the death of Sextus Roscius.

Erucius glanced up as I passed, gave me a contemptuous snort of recognition, then turned about to wag his finger at a messenger who was awaiting instructions. Erucius had aged considerably since I had last seen him, and the changes were not for the better. The rolls of fat around his neck had become thicker and his eyebrows needed plucking. Because of the plumpness of his purple lips he seemed always to pout, and his eyes had a narrow, calculating appearance. He was the very image of the conniving advocate. Many in the courts despised him. The mob adored him. His blatant corruption, together with his suave voice and unctuous mannerisms, exerted a reptilian fascination over the mob against which homespun honesty and simple Roman virtue could not possibly compete. Given a strong case, he would skilfully whip up the mob’s craving to see a guilty man punished. Given a weak case, he was a master at sowing corrosive doubts and suspicions. Given a case with political ramifications, he could be relied upon to remind the judges, subtly but surely, exactly where their own self-interest lay.

Hortensius would have been a match for him. But Cicero? Erucius was clearly not impressed with his competition. He yelled out loud for one of his slaves; he turned to exchange some joke with Magnus (they both laughed); he stretched and strolled about with his hands on his hips, not even bothering to glance at the bench of the accused. There Sextus Roscius sat hunched over with two guards at his back – the same two who had been posted at Caecilia’s portal. He looked like a man already condemned – pale, silent, as inanimate as stone. Next to him, even Cicero looked robust as he stood and clutched my arm in greeting.

‘Good, good! Tiro said he had spotted you in the crowd. I was afraid you’d be late, or stay away altogether.’ He leaned towards me, smiling, still holding my arm, and spoke in a confidential voice as if I were his closest friend. Such intimacy after his coldness of late unnerved me. ‘Look at the judges up there in the tiers, Gordianus. Half of them are bored to death; the other half are scared to death. To which half should I pitch my arguments?’ He laughed – not in a forced way, but with genuine good humour. The ill-tempered Cicero who had fretted and snapped ever since my return from Ameria seemed to have vanished with the Ides.

Tiro sat on Cicero’s right, next to Sextus Roscius, and carefully laid his crutch out of sight. Rufus sat on Cicero’s left, along with the nobles who had been helping him in the Forum. I recognized Marcus Metellus, another of Caecilia’s young relations, along with the esteemed nonentity and once-magistrate Publius Scipio.

‘Of course you can’t be seated with us at the bench,’ Cicero said, ‘but I want you nearby. Who knows? A name or a date might slip my mind at the last moment. Tiro posted a slave to warm a place for you.’ He gestured to the gallery, where I recognized numerous senators and magistrates, among them the orator Hortensius and various Messalli and Metelli. I also recognized old Capito, looking wizened and small next to the giant Mallius Glaucia, who wore a bandage on his head. Chrysogonus was nowhere to be seen. Sulla was present only by virtue of his gilded statue.

At Cicero’s gesture a slave rose from one of the benches. While I walked towards the gallery to take his place, Mallius Glaucia elbowed Capito and whispered in his ear. Both turned their heads and stared as I took my seat two rows behind them. Glaucia furrowed his brows and curled his upper lip in a snarl, looking remarkably like a wild beast in the midst of so many sedate and well-groomed Romans.

The Forum was bathed in long morning shadows. Just as the sun rose over the Basilica Fulvia, the praetor Marcus Fannius, chairman of the court, mounted the Rostra and cleared his throat. With due gravity he convened the court, invoked the gods, and read the charges.

I settled into that mental stupor that inevitably overtakes any reasonable man in a court of law, awash in an ocean of briny rhetoric pounding against weathered crags of metaphor. While Fannius droned on, I studied their faces – Magnus slowly burning like an ember, Erucius pompous and bored, Tiro struggling to suppress his eagerness, Rufus looking like a child amid so many grey jurists. Cicero, meanwhile, remained serenely and unaccountably calm, while Sextus Roscius himself nervously surveyed the crowd like a cornered, wounded animal too blood-spent to put up a fight.

Fannius finished at last and took his seat among the judges. Gaius Erucius rose from the accuser’s bench and made a laborious show of carrying his portly fame up the steps to the Rostra. He blew through his cheeks and took a deep breath. The judges put aside their paperwork and conversations. The crowd grew quiet.

‘Esteemed Judges, selected members of the Senate, I come here today with a most unpleasant task. For how can it ever be pleasant to accuse a man of murder? Yet this is one of the necessary duties that falls from time to time onto the shoulders of those who pursue the fulfilment of the law.’

Erucius cast his eyes downward to assume a countenance of abject sorrow. ‘But, esteemed Judges, my task is not merely to bring a murderer to justice, but to see that a far older, far deeper principle than the laws of mortal men is upheld in this court today. For the crime of which Sextus Roscius is guilty is not simply murder – and that is surely horrifying enough – but parricide.’

Abject sorrow became abject horror. Erucius furrowed the plump wrinkles of his face and stamped his foot. ‘
Parricide!
’ he cried, so shrilly that even at the far edges of the crowd men gave a start. I imagined Caecilia Metella quivering in her litter and covering her ears.

‘Imagine it, if you will – no, do not back away from the hideousness of this crime, but look straight into the jaws of the ravening beast. We are men, we are Romans, and we must not let our natural revulsion rob us of the strength to face even the foulest crime. We must swallow our gorge and see that justice is done.

‘Look at that man who sits at the bench of the accused, with armed guards at his back. That man is a murderer. That man is a parricide! I call him “that man” because it pains me to speak his name: Sextus Roscius. It pains me because it was the same name that his father bore before him, the father
that man
put into his grave – a once-honourable name that now drips with blood, like the bloody tunic that was found on the old man’s body, shredded to rags by his assassins’ blades.
That man
has turned the fine name his father gave him into a curse!

‘What can I tell you about . . . Sextus Roscius?’ Erucius infused the name with all the considerable loathing his voice and countenance could muster. ‘In Ameria, the town he comes from, they will tell you he is far from a pious man. Go to Ameria, as I have done, and ask the townsfolk when they last saw Sextus Roscius at a religious festival. They will hardly know of whom you speak. But then remind them of Sextus Roscius, the man accused of killing his own father, and they will give you a knowing look and a sigh and avert their eyes for fear of the gods’ wrath.

‘They will tell you that Sextus Roscius is in many ways a mystery – a solitary man, unsociable, irreligious, boorish, and curt in his few dealings with others. In the community of Ameria he is well known – or should I say notorious? – for one thing and one thing only: his lifelong feud with his father.

‘A good man does not argue with his father. A good man honours and obeys his father, not only because it is the law, but because it is the will of heaven. When a bad man ignores that mandate and openly feuds with the man who gave him life, then he steps onto a path that leads to all manner of unspeakable crime – yes, even to the crime that we have assembled here to punish.

‘What caused this feud between father and son? We do not really know, though the man who sits beside me at the accuser’s bench, Titus Roscius Magnus, can attest to having seen many sordid examples of this feud at first hand; as can another witness I may call, after the defence has its say, the venerable Capito. Magnus and Capito are each cousins of the victim, and of
that man
as well. They are respected citizens of Ameria. They watched for years with dread and disgust as Sextus Roscius disobeyed his father and cursed him behind his back. They watched in dismay as the old man, to protect his own dignity, turned his back on the abomination that had sprung to manhood from his own seed.

‘Turned his back, I say. Yes, Sextus Roscius
pater
turned his back on Sextus Roscius
filius
, no doubt to his ultimate regret – for a prudent man does not turn his back on a viper, nor on a man with the soul of an assassin, even his own son, not unless he wishes to receive a knife in the back!’

Erucius pounded his fist against the balcony of the Rostra and stared wide-eyed above the heads of the crowd, held the pose for a moment and then drew back to catch his breath. The square was strangely hushed after the thunder of his voice. He had by this point worked himself into a fine sweat. He clutched at the hem of his toga and dabbed it against his streaming jowls. He raised his eyes and looked to heaven, as if seeking relief from the gruelling ordeal of seeking justice. In a plaintive voice, pitched just loud enough for all to hear, he muttered, ‘Jupiter, give me strength!’ I saw Cicero cross his arms and roll his eyes. Meanwhile Erucius pulled himself together, stepped forward to the Rostra with bowed head and began again.

‘
That man
– why bother to say his befouled name when he dares to show his face in public, where any decent man may see it and recoil in horror? –
that man
was not the only offspring of his father. There was a second son. His name was Gaius. How his father loved him, and why not? From all accounts he was the exemplar of what every young Roman should be: pious towards the gods, obedient to his father, aspiring to every virtue, a young man in all ways agreeable, charming, and refined. How strange that a man could have two sons so different from each other! Ah, but then the sons had different mothers. Perhaps it was not the seed that was polluted, then, but the grounds in which it was planted. Consider: two seeds from the same grape are planted in different soil. One vine grows strong and lovely, bearing sweet fruit that yields a heady wine. The other is stunted and strange from the first, gnarled and pricked with thorns; its fruit is bitter and its wine is poison. I name the first vine Gaius, and the other Sextus!’

Erucius mopped his face, shuddered in revulsion, and went on. ‘Sextus Roscius
pater
loved one son and not the other. Gaius he kept close to him always, proudly displaying him to the finest society, showering him in public with kindness and affection. Sextus
filius
, on the other hand, he kept as far from him as he could, relegating him to the family’s farms in Ameria, keeping him from view as if he were a thing of shame not to be shown among decent folk. So deep did this division of affections run that Roscius
pater
thought long and hard about disinheriting his namesake completely and naming Gaius his sole heir, even though Gaius was the younger of his sons.

‘Unfair, you may say. It is better when a man treats all his sons with equal respect. When he goes about choosing favourites he asks for nothing but trouble in his own generation and the next. True, but in this case I think we must trust the judgment of the elder Sextus Roscius. Why did he despise his firstborn so much? I think it must be that he, better than any other man, could see what wickedness lurked in the breast of young Sextus Roscius, and he recoiled from it. Perhaps he even had a presentiment of the violence that his son might one day wreak on him, and that was why he kept him at such a distance. Alas, the precaution was not enough!