Render Unto Caesar (32 page)

He played the first song that came into his head, an ever-popular drinking catch:

“Boy, bring me wine by the bowlful,

so I can drink without pausing for breath!”

The third string of the kithara slipped and played slightly flat by the end, and he knew that his voice was merely an indifferent tenor, but the Romans applauded loudly when he finished, and asked him what the Greek words meant. When he'd explained, everyone laughed and had more wine. The old man informed him proudly that Sentia could sing cantica most beautifully. Before long Hermogenes found himself playing a makeshift accompaniment as Sentia launched into a canticum, which, it seemed, was the term for an aria from a Latin mime. Rather to his surprise, the shapeless woman revealed herself to possess a beautiful voice, a clear sweet soprano which managed the difficult cadences of the music without straining. Her husband watched her proudly, nodding at intervals, his eyes alight with love.

After that, they took turns singing, until the wine was all gone and it was growing dark. Then Gellia's friends reluctantly said good night, all of them thanking their hostess for the wine and Hermogenes for the music. It had been, he thought as he struggled up the stairs, quite a good party. He had certainly enjoyed it more than he'd enjoyed the dinner Titus Crispus had given him, and it had kept his mind off Statilius Taurus, for which he was grateful.

Cantabra went into the room ahead of him, very silent. The dusk through the open shutters showed that the room had, as expected, not been cleaned. Hermogenes went to the window, gazed out and down into the narrow smelly alleyway, and realized that he'd forgotten to use the tub downstairs.

“Titus Statilius Taurus,” he said out loud, and pissed out the window. When he'd finished he turned to say something to Cantabra, and found that she wasn't there.

He went to the curtained alcove at the side and found her sitting on the floor under the window, hugging her knees. He hadn't known that she not only had no bed but no mattress either. When he appeared in the doorway she picked her head up and looked at him, her face shadowed in the half-light from the window behind her.

“Is something the matter?” he asked hesitantly.

“You are such a very strange man,” she replied. Her voice was thick.

“You keep saying that,” he told her. “Have I done something which hurt or offended you?”

She caught her tail of hair with one hand and twisted it around her fingers. “No. I am sad because of the music. Leave me alone.”

He came over very quietly and dropped to one knee beside her. “Why?” he asked softly. “Most of it was happy music.”

“Just that it … that it made me … to remember being at home. We took turns singing sometimes in the evening there. Just it made me sad.” She let go of her hair and added abruptly, “You didn't need to play for them. They'd already told you what you wanted to know. You didn't need to treat them like friends.”

“You sound like my father!” he exclaimed, in unhappy surprise.

She wiped at her eyes. “What?”

“My father was always telling me things like that.”

“Oh. Yes. Because you were brought up to be a gentleman.” She peered at his face through the gathering dark. “To be a rich man and a master, who gives orders and expects to be obeyed. Instead, you are always liking people, and trying to make them like you. Even me. That is not the way a gentleman behaves, is it? What is Alexandria like?”

The abrupt change of subject made him blink. “A lot like Rome, I suppose,” he said, after a moment. “It, too, is a very big city, and parts of it are dangerous. That is why I had a bodyguard to begin with. I suppose in some ways Alexandria is even worse than Rome—there are riots sometimes, between the Jews and the Greeks, or Romans and Egyptians, and I think that does not happen here. The city is more beautiful than Rome, though. It didn't just grow, one little street on top of another: it was founded to be great, and laid out with wide avenues. The Canopic Way is wide enough for four carriages to drive abreast of one another, and it is lined with porticos and public buildings for almost its entire length. There is nothing like that here in Rome.”

“And you, you have a house there.”

“Not on the Canopic Way. In the harbor district, not too far from the Heptastadion—that is the causeway that divides the two harbors, and goes out to the Pharos, the lighthouse that is one of the wonders of the world. It's a good big house, about the size of my friend Titus's. There would be space for you, if you wanted to come.”

“If you are not killed,” she said grimly, and rubbed at her eyes again.

“I thought you said that would not happen,” he replied after a moment.

She caught at her hair again. “You are going to try to see Statilius Taurus tomorrow, yes?”

“I will write him a letter asking for an appointment.”

“I have been thinking,” she said slowly. “What if he does not believe what you tell him, and sends you to his friend Tarius Rufus?”

So she'd seen that now. “That is a danger. I can only hope that he does not.”

She made no reply, only sat staring at the floor in front of her feet.

“The other choice is to go to Maecenas.”

“No. That way you would be sent back to Pollio.”

“If you can think of a better course,” he said impatiently, “please tell me!”

“You should have abandoned the fight before it came so far!”

“I couldn't do that.”

“Men!” she exclaimed, in fierce disgust. “It is always
honor
with you, and
freedom,
and other fine, brave, empty
words
! You never care for your families, for the people who will suffer when you are gone!”

“That's not true! And you are a fine one to complain. If bare
life
is so important that we ought to preserve it at the cost of honor and freedom, why didn't
you
do what Gellia urged, and prostitute yourself?”

“I would have done it, for my babies,” she said in a tight voice. “I would have. But when the soldiers came and threw me on the ground, my son tried to fight them, to protect me, and they killed him. He was seven. They ran him through with a spear, and he screamed, and tried to pull it out, and kicked at the ground, and then he died. And then my little girl cried and cried, so they killed her, too, because she would not be quiet. She was only three, and they killed her with swords; her little head was broken, and there was blood and brain all over the blades, all over her beautiful hair that I used to comb. After that I didn't care. It didn't matter what happened to me, after that; I fought them. They said, ‘Since she is so fond of fighting, send her to the arenas.'”

“Oh, Lady Isis!” He touched her shoulder in the darkness. “Ai, talaina!”

She began to cry, and knocked his hand away. “This is
your
fault!” she said bitterly. “Playing
music,
and making me think of it again. Leave me alone!”

He knelt next to her in the darkness, looking at her unhappily. She hugged herself, rocking back and forth a little and swallowing the sobs now. “Go away!” she ordered him.

He got up, then stared at her a moment longer where she sat huddled on the bare floor. He took off his cloak and draped it over her shoulders. “You'll sleep more comfortably with that,” he told her. “I'll use my other one.”

He had to feel around the couch for the bundle that was his good cloak and his letters of credit: it was now almost completely dark. Eventually, however, he draped the Scythopolitan linen over himself and lay down on the flea-infested bed. He imagined the soldiers raping Cantabra and murdering her children, and opened his eyes wide, staring up into the darkness. He felt suddenly that the power of Rome was a vast cloud of choking smoke, a gas which had erupted from this dark city and covered the whole earth. How did
he
expect to get free of it?

Taurus owned the gladiatorial school which had owned Cantabra. She hadn't made any comment on the fact that the current plan involved saving his life, but she must have noticed. He wondered how she felt about that.

Probably they would not succeed. Statilius Taurus sounded no better a man than Tarius Rufus or Vedius Pollio. Either he would refuse to listen to the warning of a despised Egyptian, or he would hear the warning but abandon the man who delivered it. There wasn't really much hope. Perhaps he'd do better to try Maecenas, after all: the diplomat at least had the reputation of being a gentleman.

Cantabra did have a point, though, with her gladiatorial advice against making the move a stronger opponent would anticipate. She had some knowledge of Taurus, too, and she seemed to think he constituted an acceptable risk: honest and honorable, she'd called him, if bloodthirsty. He would have to trust that. Probably, though, they would not succeed.

He thought of Myrrhine. Menestor had thought to write his family, and probably such a letter would be a comfort to them if he never came back. He ought to write to Myrrhine. He ought to explain that he loved her, and that he hadn't decided to risk his life because he didn't care about what happened to her but because he couldn't endure feeling that she was the daughter of a slave.

He wondered how much he'd
decided
to do any of this, anyway. Certainly he had known that he was taking a risk, but almost until the moment he'd left Pollio's house he had believed that he would win in the end. He wondered if he would have made the same choice, given what he knew now.

He remembered Myrrhine as a baby in his arms; remembered her toddling to the door shrieking “Daddy! Daddy!” when he came home; remembered her sobbing against his chest at her mother's funeral; remembered her clinging to him as he said good-bye. He wished he had a lamp, and a table, and ink and papyrus to write to her at once.

*   *   *

He slept badly, waking before dawn and lying on the couch for a long time, scratching at the fleabites and waiting for the morning. At last the darkness became a little less black, and there came the sounds of people getting up in the neighboring apartments. Voices sounded in the street outside as the households of the neighborhood went to fetch water and start the day. He rose, washed his face and hands with water from the amphora, then sat down to examine the bindings on his foot, still working mostly by touch. The ankle was finally beginning to feel usable again, and he unwrapped it, took off the last splint and began wrapping the joint with the linen bandage alone, looping it across his instep so it wouldn't slip.

Cantabra came in, shadowy in the gray predawn. She watched him a moment in silence, then said quietly, “I am sorry. Last night I said things to you that a hired attendant should never say to her employer.”

“You have suffered terribly,” he replied, tactfully watching the bandage instead of her. “I can understand how it must grieve you that while you finally have a chance to escape to a better life, that chance depends upon a man who may already have thrown it away.” He tied the bandage.

“I do not want you to die,” she said, in a low voice, almost frightened. “Yesterday, when you insisted that you would go out, for no reason, just to have a bath—I felt so angry with you. It has been a long time since I cared that much about a man's life. I want you to live, and I want to go to Alexandria with you and get away from this terrible city. Thank you for asking me.”

He felt suddenly and shockingly happy. “Well, then,” he said, smiling at her. “I will do my best to stay alive, and take you there.”

She seemed to relax at that. She smiled back at him, her teeth white in the dimness. “If you agree to do your best to stay alive … may I say another thing? You should not go to your bank. You say that Pollio will have men out asking for news of you in barbershops; won't he have sent them to the banks? I don't know much about banks, but it seems to me that the letters you have can't work at all of them, so he would not have many to watch.”

He hesitated. “You are right about that,” he admitted, “but I need coin. I think probably he has not done anything about them yet, and that it will still be safe if I go early this morning.”

“‘Probably'!” she protested. “I don't like ‘probably.' I have coin, more than enough for the next few days. You do not need to take the risk!”

“I gave you that coin for saving my life,” he told her unhappily. “I hate to borrow it back.”

“Huh! You are a moneylender; you should not mind borrowing.”

“Most of my money is in ships, not loans,” he said, and sighed. “But—well, I admit, I don't like ‘probably' either, and if you do honestly urge this, I accept, and thank you for it.”

“Good!” she exclaimed, and smiled again. “Good. I have been thinking, too, about what we should do, how we should approach Taurus. If you write him a letter, then it will go through his office and his secretaries, and there will be delays, and perhaps your enemies will find out. What you must do is see him when he goes to visit the school. He goes there most mornings. I can get the Savage to introduce you.”

“The Savage?” he asked, with misgiving.

“Gaius Naevius Saevus,” she explained: the cognomen, saevus, or savage, was unheard-of, and he wondered if it was a true nickname. “The lanista in charge of the gladiatorial school. He knows me, and I will ask him to introduce you to Taurus.”

“What is a lanista?”

“A man in charge of a gladiatorial school!” she said impatiently. “The Savage is hard and merciless, but he likes me because I helped him get his job. He will introduce you to Taurus, and you will find a clever way to convince Taurus that you are telling the truth about Rufus. Then we will be safe.”

“I hope you are right,” he told her, and considered her proposal. She was right that it would be better to contact Taurus quickly and quietly through an introduction, rather than by sending him a letter which someone might report. He just wished he didn't have to contact the man at all. He wondered again how she felt about trying to save the life of someone she had every reason to hate.