Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (96 page)

‘Never mind. I understand,’ I said, though I didn’t, really.

Whatever their faults, the couple had one overriding virtue: they were charming. So charming, indeed, that on that first night, dining in their company, I began to think that Lucius was wildly exaggerating. Certainly they showed none of the characteristic snobbishness of their class towards Eco and me. Titus wanted to hear all about my travels and my work for advocates like Cicero. (‘Is it true,’ he asked, leaning towards me earnestly, ‘that he’s a eunuch?’) Eco was obviously fascinated by Antonia, who was even more remarkably beautiful by lamplight. She made a game of flirting with him, but she did so with a natural grace that was neither condescending nor mean. They were both witty, vibrant and urbane, and their sense of humour was only slightly, charmingly, vulgar.

They also appreciated good cooking. Just as I had done after my first meal at the villa, they insisted on complimenting the cook. When Davia appeared, Titus’s face lit up with surprise, and not just at the fact that the cook was a young woman. When Lucius opened his mouth to introduce her, Titus snatched the name from his lips. ‘Davia!’ he said. The word left a smile on his face.

A look of displeasure flashed in Antonia’s eyes.

Lucius looked back and forth between Davia and Titus, speechless for a moment. ‘Then you . . . already know Davia?’

‘Why, of course. We met once before, at your house in the city. Davia wasn’t the cook, though. Only a helper in the kitchen, as I recall.’

‘When was this?’ asked Antonia, smiling sweetly.

Titus shrugged. ‘Last year? The year before? At one of Lucius’s dinner parties, I suppose. An odd thing – you weren’t there, as I recall. Something kept you home that night, my dear. A headache, perhaps . . .’ He gave his wife a commiserating smile, and then looked back at Davia with another kind of smile.

‘And how is it that you happened to meet the cook’s helper?’ Antonia’s voice took on a slight edge.

‘Oh, I think I must have gone into the kitchen to ask a favour of the cook, or something like that. And then I . . . well, I met Davia. Didn’t I, Davia?’

‘Yes.’ Davia looked at the floor. Though it was hard to tell by the lamplight, it seemed to me that she was blushing.

‘Well,’ said Titus, clapping his hands together, ‘you have become a splendid cook, Davia! Entirely worthy of your master’s famously high standards. About that we’re all agreed, yes? Gordianus, Eco, Lucius . . . Antonia?’

Everyone nodded in unison, some more enthusiastically than others. Davia muttered her thanks and disappeared back into the kitchen.

Lucius’s new guests were tired from travelling. Eco and I had enjoyed a long, fall day. Everyone turned in early.

The night was warm. Windows and doors were left open to take advantage of the slight breeze. There was a great stillness on the earth, of a sort that one never experiences in the city. As I began to drift into the arms of Morpheus, in the utter quiet I thought I could hear the distant, dreamy rustling of the sheep in their pen, the hushed sighing of the high grass far away by the road, and even a hint of the stream’s gentle gurgling. Eco, with whom I shared the room, began to snore very gently.

Then the fighting began.

At first I could hear only voices from the next room, not words. But after a while they started shouting. Her voice was higher and carried better than his.

‘You filthy adulterer! Bad enough that you take advantage of the girls in our own household, but picking off another man’s slaves – ’

Titus shouted something, presumably in his defence.

She was not impressed. ‘Oh, you filthy liar! You can’t fool me. I saw the way you looked at her tonight. And don’t you dare try to bring up that business about me and the pearl-diver at Andros. That was all in your own drunken imagination!’

Titus shouted again. Antonia shouted. This went on for quite some time. There was a sound of breaking pottery. Silence for a while, and then the shouting resumed.

I groaned and pulled the coverlet over my head. After a while I realized that the shouting had stopped. I rolled onto my side, thinking I might finally be able to sleep, and noticed that Eco was standing on his knees on his sleeping couch, his ear pressed against the wall between our room and theirs.

‘Eco, what in Hades are you doing?’

He kept his ear to the wall and waved at me to be quiet.

‘They’re not fighting again, are they?’

He turned and shook his head.

‘What is it, then?’

The moonlight showed a crooked smile on his face. He pumped his eyebrows up and down like a leering street mime, made a circle with the fingers of one hand and a pointer with the opposite forefinger, and performed a gesture all the street mimes know.

‘Oh! I see. Well, stop listening like that. It’s rude.’ I rolled to my other side and pulled the coverlet over my head.

I must have slept for quite some time before the moonlight, travelling from Eco’s side of the room to mine, struck my face and woke me. I sighed and rearranged the coverlet and saw that Eco was still up on his knees, his ear pressed fervently against the wall.

The two of them must have been at it all night long!

For the next two days Lucius Claudius repeatedly drew me aside to fret over the intrusion on my holiday, but Eco went about his simple pleasures, I still found time to read alone down by the stream, and to the extent that Titus and Antonia intruded on us, they were in equal measure irritating and amusing. No one could be more delightful than Titus at dinner, at least until the cup of wine that was one cup too many, after which his jokes became a little too vulgar and his jabs a little too sharp. And no one could be more sweetly alluring over a table of roasted pig than Antonia, until something happened to rub her the wrong way. She had a look which could send a hot spike through a man as surely as the beast on the table had been spitted and put on to roast.

I had never met a couple quite like them. I began to see how none of their friends could refuse them anything. I also began to see how they drove those same friends to distraction with their sudden fits of temper and their all-consuming passion for each other, which ran hot and cold, and could scald or chill any outsider who happened to come too close.

On the third day of their visit, Lucius announced that he had come up with something special that we could all do together.

‘Have you ever seen honey collected from a hive, Eco? No, I thought not. And you, Gordianus? No? What about you two?’

‘Why, no, actually,’ said Antonia. She and her husband had slept until noon and were just joining the rest of us down by the stream for our midday meal.

‘Does that water have to gurgle so loud?’ Titus rubbed his temples. ‘Did you say something about bees, Lucius? I seem to have a swarm of them buzzing in my head this morning.’

‘It is no longer morning, Titus, and the bees are not in your head but in a glen downstream a bit,’ said Lucius in a chiding tone.

Antonia wrinkled her brow. ‘How
does
one collect the honey? I suppose I’ve never given it much thought – I just enjoy eating it!’

‘Oh, it’s quite a science,’ said Lucius. ‘I have a slave named Ursus whom I bought specifically for his knowledge of beekeeping. He builds the hives out of hollowed strips of bark, tied up with vines and then covered with mud and leaves. He keeps away pests, makes sure the meadow has the right kind of flowers, and collects the honey twice a year. Now that the Pleiades have risen in the night sky, he says it’s time for the spring harvest.’

‘Where does honey come from? I mean, where do the bees get it?’ said Antonia. Puzzlement gave her face a deceptively vulnerable charm.

‘Who cares?’ said Titus, taking her hand and kissing her palm. ‘You are my honey!’

‘Oh, and you are my king bee!’ They kissed. Eco made a face. Confronted with actual kissing, his adolescent prurience turned to squeamishness.

‘Where
does
honey come from?’ I said. ‘And do bees really have kings?’

‘Well, I shall tell you,’ said Lucius. ‘Honey falls from the sky, of course, like dew. So Ursus says, and he should know. The bees gather it up and concentrate it until it becomes all gooey and thick. To have a place to put it, they gather tree sap and the wax from certain plants to build their combs inside the hives. And do they have kings? Oh, yes! They will gladly give their lives to protect him. Sometimes two different swarms go to war. The kings hang back, plotting the strategy, and the clash can be terrific – acts of heroism and sacrifice to rival the
Iliad
!’

‘And when they’re not at war?’ said Antonia.

‘A hive is like a bustling city. Some go out to work in the fields, collecting the honey-dew, some work indoors, constructing and maintaining the combs, and the kings lay down laws for the common good. They say Jupiter granted the bees the wisdom to govern themselves as repayment for saving his life. When baby Jupiter was hidden in a cave to save him from his father Saturn, the bees sustained him with honey.’

‘You make them sound almost superior to humans,’ said Titus, laughing and tracing kisses on Antonia’s wrist.

‘Oh, hardly. They’re still ruled by kings, after all, and haven’t advanced to having a republic, like ourselves,’ explained Lucius earnestly, not realizing that he was being teased. ‘So, who wants to go and see the honey collected?’

‘I shouldn’t want to get stung,’ said Antonia cautiously.

‘Oh, there’s little danger of that. Ursus sedates the bees with smoke. It makes them dull and drowsy. And we’ll stand well out of the way.’

Eco nodded enthusiastically.

‘I suppose it would be interesting . . .’ said Antonia.

‘Not for me,’ said Titus, lying back on the grassy bank and rubbing his temples.

‘Oh, Titus, don’t be a dull, drowsy king bee,’ said Antonia, poking at him and pouting. ‘Come along.’

‘No.’

‘Titus . . .’ There was a hint of menace in Antonia’s voice.

Lucius flinched in anticipation of a row. He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, Titus, come along. The walk will do you good. Get your blood pumping.’

‘No. My mind’s made up.’

Antonia flashed a brittle smile. ‘Very well, then, have it your way. You will miss the fun, and so much the worse for you. Shall we get started, Lucius?’

‘The natural enemies of the bee are the lizard, the woodpecker, the spider and the moth,’ droned the slave Ursus, walking beside Eco at the head of our little procession. ‘Those creatures are all jealous of the honey, you see, and will do great damage to the hives to get at it.’ Ursus was a big, stout man of middle years with a lumbering gait, hairy all over to judge from the thatches that showed at the openings of his long-sleeved tunic. Several other slaves followed behind us on the path that ran along the stream, carrying the embers and hay torches that would be used to make the smoke.

‘There are plants which are enemies of the bees as well,’ Ursus went on. ‘The yew tree, for example. You never put a hive close to a yew tree, because the bees will sicken and the honey will turn bitter and runny. But they thrive close to olive trees and willows. For gathering their honey-dew they like red and purple flowers; blood-red hyacinth is their favourite. If there’s thyme close by, they’ll use it to give the honey a delicate flavour. They prefer to live close to a stream with shaded, mossy pools where they can drink and wash themselves. And they like peace and quiet. As you will see, Eco, the secluded place where we keep the hives has all these qualities, being close by the stream, surrounded by olives and willows, and planted with all the flowers that most delight the bees.’

I heard the bees before I saw them. Their humming joined the gurgling of the stream and grew louder as we passed through a hedge of cassia shrubs and entered a sun-dappled, flower-spangled little glen that was just as Ursus had described. There was magic to the place. Satyrs and nymphs seemed to frolic in the shadows, just out of sight. One could almost imagine the infant Jupiter lying in the soft grass, living off the honey of the bees.

The hives, ten in all, stood in a row on waist-high wooden platforms in the centre of the clearing. They were shaped like tall domes, and with their coverings of dried mud and leaves looked as if they had been put there by nature; Ursus was a master of craft as well as lore. Each hive had only a tiny break in the bark for an entrance, and through these openings the bees were busily coming and going.

A figure beneath a nearby willow caught my eyes, and for a startled instant I thought a satyr had stepped into the clearing to join us. Antonia saw it at the same instant. She let out a little gasp of surprise, then clapped her hands in delight.

‘And what is this fellow doing here?’ She laughed and stepped closer for a better look.

‘He watches over the glen,’ said Ursus. ‘The traditional guardian of the hives. Scares away honey-thieves and birds.’

It was a bronze statue of the god Priapus, grinning lustfully, with one hand on his hip and a sickle held upright in the other. He was naked and eminently, rampantly priapic. Antonia, fascinated, gave him a good looking-over and then touched his upright, grotesquely oversized phallus for luck.