Roman Blood (30 page)

Together we lit the lamps—and though she showed a fearless face, again Bethesda insisted that every room be lit. I told her she should come with me down to the Subura to shop for a guard, but she insisted on staying 195

behind to cook the meal. I felt a pang of dread at the idea of leaving her alone in the house even for a short while, but she was adamant and only asked me to be quick. I could see that she was choosing to be brave and that in her own way she wanted to reassert her power over the house; in my absence she would burn a stick of incense and perform some rite learned long ago from her mother. After the door closed behind me, I listened to make sure she bolted it securely from within.

The moon was rising and nearly full, casting a blue light over the quiet houses on the hillside, making the tile roofs look as if they had been scalloped from copper. The Subura was a vast pool of light and muted sound below me, that swallowed me up as I quickly descended the hill until I stepped onto the busiest nighttime street in Rome.

I could have found a gang member on any corner, but I didn't want a common thug. I wanted a professional fighter and bodyguard from a rich man's retinue, a slave of proven worth who be could trusted. I went to a little tavern tucked behind one of the more expensive brothels on the Subura and found Varus the Go-Between. He understood what 1

wanted immediately, and he knew my credit was good. After I had bought him a cup of wine he disappeared. Not too long after he returned with a giant in tow.

They made quite a contrast walking into the dim little room side by side. Varus was so short he came only to the giant's elbow; his bald pate and ringed fingers shone in the light while his doughy features seemed to soften and run together in the glow of the lamps. The beast beside him looked hardly tamed; there was a brooding red light in his eyes that didn't come from the lamps. He gave an impression of almost unnatural strength and solidity, as if he had been built out of granite blocks or tree trunks; even his face had the look of having been chiseled from stone, a rough model discarded by a sculptor who decided it was too brutal to finish. His hair and beard were long and shaggy but not unkempt, and his tunic was made of good cloth. Such grooming bespoke a responsible owner. He looked as well cared for as a fine horse. He also looked capable of killing a man with his bare hands.

He was exactly the man I wanted. His name was Zoticus.

"His master's favorite," Varus assured me. " T h e man never steps outside his house without Zoticus at his side. A proven killer—broke the neck of a burglar only last month. And strong as an ox, to be sure. Smell the garlic on his breath? His master feeds it to him like oats to a horse.

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A trick the gladiators use, gives a man strength. His master is wealthy, respectable, owner of three brothels, two taverns, and a gaming hall all located in the Subura; a pious man without an enemy in the world, I'm sure, but he likes to protect himself from the unforeseen. Who wouldn't?

Never takes a step without his faithful Zoticus. But especially for me, because he owes a favor to Varus, the man will let me have this creature on loan—for the four days you requested, no more. To repay a long-standing debt he owes me. How very lucky you are, Gordianus, to be a friend of Varus the Go-Between."

We haggled over the terms, and I let him have too sweet a deal, being anxious to return to Bethesda. But the slave was worth the price; stepping through the crowds of the Subura I watched strangers draw back and give way before us, and I saw the cowed looks in their eyes as they stared above my head at the monster behind me. Zoticus spoke little, which pleased me. As we ascended the deserted pathway to my house, leaving the noise of the Subura behind, he loomed behind me like a protective spirit, ceaselessly peering into the shadows around us.

As we stepped within sight of the house I heard his breath quicken and felt his hand like a brick on my shoulder. Another man stood before the door with crossed arms. He shouted at us to stop where we were, then pulled a long dagger from his sleeve. In the blink of an eye I found myself behind Zoticus instead of before him, and as the world whirled past I glimpsed a long steel blade in his fist.

The door rattled open and I heard Bethesda laughing, then explaining.

It seemed that I had misunderstood Cicero. Not only had he offered to pay for a bodyguard; he had even gone to the trouble of sending the man over himself. Only minutes after I left Bethesda, there had been a bang-ing on the door. She had ignored it at first, then finally peered through the grate. The man had asked for me; Bethesda pretended that I was in the house but indisposed. Then he gave her Cicero's name and his compli-ments and told her he had been sent by Cicero to guard the house, as her master would recall. He took up his place beside the door without another word.

" T w o will be better than one, anyway," Bethesda insisted, and I felt a pang of jealousy as she looked from one to the other; perhaps it was that tiny twinge of jealousy that blinded me to the obvious. I would have been hard-pressed to have said which of the two was uglier, or bigger, or more intimidating, or which Bethesda seemed to find more fascinating.

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Except for his red beard and ruddy face the other might have been Zoticus's brother; his breath even carried the same odor of garlic. They regarded each other as gladiators do, with locked jaws and basilisk eyes, as if the least twitch of a lip might mar the purity of their mutual contempt.

"Very well," I told her, "for tonight we'll use them both, and sort it out tomorrow. One to circle the house and patrol the pathway, another to stay in the vestibule, inside the door."

Cicero had told me to make my own arrangements for a guard; I remembered that quite clearly. But perhaps, I thought, in the heat of his excitement over the news I had brought him, Cicero had forgotten his own instructions. All I could think of were the smells that came from Bethesda's kitchen and the long, careless night of sleep to come.

As I left the vestibule I glanced at the redbeard sent by Cicero. He sat in a chair against the wall, facing the closed door with his arms crossed. The naked dagger was still in his fist. Above his head was the message written in blood, and I could not help reading it again: " B e silent or die." I was sick of those words; in the morning I would tell Bethesda to scrub the wall clean. I glanced into Redbeard's unblinking eyes and gave him a smile. He did not smile back.

Often in comedies there are characters who do foolish things that are painfully, obviously foolish to everyone in the audience, to everyone in the universe except themselves. The audience squirm in their seats, laugh, even shout aloud: " N o , no! Can't you see, you f o o l ? " The doomed man on the stage cannot hear, and the gods with great merriment go about engineering the destruction of yet another blind mortal.

But sometimes the gods lead us to the brink of destruction only to snatch us back from the abyss at the last moment, as richly amused by our inexplicable salvation as by our unforeseen death.

I woke all at once with no interval between sleep and waking, into that strange realm of consciousness that reigns between midnight and dawn.

I was alone in my own bedchamber. Bethesda had led me there after a long meal of fish and wine, stripping off my tunic and covering me with a thin wool blanket despite the heat, kissing me on the forehead as if I were a child. I stood and let the blanket fall behind me; the night air was heavy with heat. The room was dark, lit only by a single beam of 198

moonlight cast through a tiny window high in the wall. I walked by memory to the corner of the room, but in the darkness I couldn't find the chamber pot, or else Bethesda had emptied it and never put it back.

It did not matter. In the weirdness of that night a chamber pot might turn into a mushroom or disappear into thin air and it would have seemed a little thing. It was the same strangeness I had felt earlier, lying with Bethesda in the vestibule. I saw and sensed everything around me with absolute clarity, and yet it seemed mysterious and unfamiliar territory, as if the moon had changed her color, as if the gods themselves drifted from the earth in heavy slumber and left existence to its own devices.

Anything at all might happen.

I pushed aside the curtain and stepped into the atrium. Perhaps I wasn't awake after all and dreamed on my feet, for the house possessed that unreality of familiar places turned askew by the geography of the night. Blue moonlight flooded the garden and turned it into a jungle of bones casting shadows as sharp as knives. Here and there -about the peristyle lamps burned low, like withered suns on the verge of extinction.

The brightest of the lamps shone from behind the wall that hid the vestibule, casting a thin yellow light around the corner like the glow of campfires beyond a ridge.

I stepped to the edge of the garden and pulled up my tunic. I was as quiet as a schoolboy, aiming for the soft grass and making hardly a sound.

I finished and let my tunic drop and stood gazing across the field of bones, transformed by the shadow of a passing cloud into the ashen ruins of Carthage on a moonless night.

Amid the smells of earth and urine and hyacinth, I caught the faint odor of garlic on the warm, dry air. The lamplight from the vestibule flickered and moved, and cast the wavering shadow of a man onto the wall that enclosed Bethesda's room.

Like a man in a dream I walked toward the vestibule; as in a dream, I seemed to be invisible. A bright lamp was set on the floor, casting weird shadows upward. Redbeard stood before the defaced wall with its threatening message, peering into it as if it were a pool and moving one hand over the surface. The hand that moved was wrapped in a red-stained cloth that dripped something dark and thick onto the floor. His other hand clutched his dagger. The glittering blade was smeared with blood.

The door to the house was wide open. Sprawled against it, as if to prop it open, was the massive body of Zoticus, his throat so severely slashed 199

that his head was almost detached from his body. A great pool of blood had poured from his neck onto the stone floor. The rug was soaked with it. While I watched, Redbeard stepped back and stooped down to dip the cloth into the pool of blood, never taking his eyes from the wall, as if he were an artist and the wall a painting in progress. He stepped forward and began to write again.

Then, very slowly, he turned his face and saw me.

He returned the smile I had given him earlier with a horrible, gaping grin.

He must have been upon me very quickly, but it seemed to me that he moved with a ponderous and impossible slowness. I had all the time in the world to watch him wield the dagger aloft, to note the sudden blast of garlic in my nostrils, to ponder the taut and quivering rictus of his face, and to wonder stupidly what possible reason he could have to dislike me so very much.

My body was wiser than my brain. Somehow I managed to grip his wrist and deflect the dagger. It barely grazed my cheek, slicing a thin red track that I felt only much later. Suddenly I was flat against the wall with the breath knocked out of me, so confused that I thought for an instant I was flat on the floor with the full weight of Redbeard's body on my chest.

With a great wrenching twist, as if we were acrobats out of step, we reeled to the floor. We grappled like drowning men pounded by surf, so that I never knew up from down. The tip of the dagger kept nipping at my throat, but each time I managed to push his arm off-course. He was absurdly strong, more like a storm or an avalanche than a man. I felt like a boy struggling against him. I had no hope of defeating him. It was all I could do to stay alive from one moment to the next.

I suddenly thought of Bethesda, and knew she must already be dead, along with Zoticus. Why had he saved me for last? That was when the truncheon came crashing down against Redbeard's skull.

While he swayed atop me, dazed, I caught a glimpse of Bethesda over his shoulder. In her hands she held the wooden slat for barring the door.

It was so heavy she could barely wield it. She began to lift it again and then tripped beneath the weight and staggered backward. Redbeard regained his senses. Blood ran downward from a cut in the back of his head, trickling into his beard and mouth, making him look like a crazed animal or a wolf-man gorged on blood. He rose to his knees and twisted 200

around, raising his dagger. I struck at his chest, but I had no leverage.

Bethesda stood upright with the truncheon raised. Redbeard slashed with the dagger, but he only succeeded in slicing her gown. Quickly he spun around the other way and clutched a fistful of cloth with his free hand. He yanked hard and Bethesda fell backward. The truncheon descended, powered by its own weight. By aim or accident it struck Redbeard square on the crown of his head, and as he toppled onto me I seized his stabbing arm and twisted it toward his chest.

The blade plunged hilt-deep into his heart. His face was above mine, his eyes rolled up, his mouth wide open. I reeled from the stench of garlic and rotten teeth as he sucked in a desperate, rattling breath. Then he jolted and pitched atop me as something exploded inside him. An instant later blood poured from his open mouth like the discharge from a sewer.

Somewhere far away Bethesda screamed. A great massive dead thing lay slick and heavy atop me, convulsing and belching venom, blinding me and flooding my nostrils and mouth, even clogging my ears with its blood. I struggled to escape and lay helpless until I felt Bethesda pushing alongside me. The great corpse rolled onto its back and stared slack-jawed at the ceiling.

I staggered to my knees. We clutched each other, both trembling so badly we could hardly connect. I spat blood and snorted and wiped my face on the bodice of her clean white gown. We stroked each other and babbled pointless words of comfort and assurance, like mutual survivors of a great devastation.

The lamp burned low and sputtered, casting lurid shadows and making the rigid corpses seem to twitch. The weird geography of the night reigned unbroken: We were lovers in a poem, one naked and the other half-dressed, hugging on our knees beside a vast, still lake. But the lake was made of blood—so much blood that I could see my own reflection in it. I stared into my eyes and with a shock I came to my senses, and finally knew that I was not in a nightmare but in the very heart of the great, slumbering city of Rome.