The Uncertain Hour (15 page)

Marsius stepped up and made his obeisance. Petronius nodded and turned from him so as to include the entire company in his statement.

“Men, I’m sure you know by now that tomorrow you will have a new master. Perhaps it will be my brother, Petronius Turpilianus, or perhaps the emperor. That will be at the pleasure of Nero Caesar. Either way, you will serve him loyally as you have me. Each of you will have five silver denarii from my estate. Marsius, you will have leasehold of your cottage and its kitchen garden, to revert to the estate upon your death, plus one gold denarius. Now you are all free for the evening. Enjoy the festivities.”

“Io Saturnalia!” the men responded gloomily, already shuffling toward the back door.

“Hail, Petronius!” Marsius tried halfheartedly to rally them to one expression of respect, but the muttered response was more curse than farewell, and Marsius was left to shrug sheepishly as he followed them out. In the end, even he owed nothing more to Petronius than this.

Petronius stood in the center of the room, quite at a loss about what to do or think. This feeling of dismay was new to him, and disturbing in its own right. Of course, in the army his men’s high opinion of him had been of great concern, but that had been for practical reasons of effective leadership; and, besides, the admiration had been largely mutual. He had never, for the most part, extended that concern to his own slaves. This was the second time today that he had felt himself disappointed by a slave’s lack of interest in his welfare, and he found it curious that his heart should choose to indulge this particular foible in its waning hours.

Petronius was put in mind of a story he had once heard Seneca tell. It concerned a vulgar, wealthy freedman, one Calvi-sius Sabinus, who had paid 100,000 sesterces apiece for slaves who had committed the entire life’s work of various poets to memory. One slave knew all of Homer, another Hesiod, and so on through each of the nine lyric poets. Sabinus had done this, Seneca insisted, because he believed that whatever any of his slaves knew, he himself also knew. It was not only their bodies and their labor, but their minds and everything therein that Sabinus claimed to own. Petronius remembered the moral that Seneca drew from the story—“No man is able to borrow or buy a sound mind, but depraved minds are bought and sold every day”—but Petronius had seen it differently. Sabinus had most surely not been motivated by generosity, but he had given these slaves a purpose in life. Each was trained to do only one thing, and to do it superlatively; had they been given any other task than the one their master assigned them, their gifts would have been squandered, their destiny thwarted. As it was, however, they were given the opportunity to fulfill that destiny—an opportunity afforded to so few on this earth, free or otherwise.

Petronius had no such gift for his slaves, and in consequence was never quite certain what it was he expected from them in return. Their labor, their loyalty, their cooperation, assuredly. And beyond that?

How foolish it would be to expect love from one’s slave! Petronius knew this as well as anyone, having been raised, educated, fed, clothed, and cosseted by them his entire life. The nature of the relationship between master and chattel was, ultimately, one of brute force, or at least its implicit threat. And yet even this affiliation was not entirely free of fuzzy, porous borders. After all, Plato and every other philosopher agreed that men love what is good, and Petronius liked to think of himself as a good man, or perhaps as a man aspiring to goodness. Was love between master and slave theoretically possible, then? What of Demetrius, who knew his intimate thoughts, in whom he had confided and to whom, in moments of doubt, he had even turned for advice and solace? What of Lucullo, who permitted himself liberties of address with his master that not even Martialis would entertain? What of Surisca, upon whom he had lavished expensive gifts, and whose pleasure in bed he catered to as assiduously as he did the most high-born of his lovers? He was genuinely fond of these people; he was protective and solicitous—more, surely, than what was merely required by the defining behavior of a “good master”? Could a master permit himself transgressions of intimacy that a slave must never reciprocate? If a master could be fond, could a slave also? Petronius doubted this, having seen so little evidence of it in his own life and that of society, so why now, of all times, did he feel it as an absence and a reproach that his slaves could not love him, nor even summon the energy to bid him a fond farewell? He recalled Demetrius’s face earlier in the evening, how he had misread the scribe’s fear as affection, and felt like a man who has left his home with something terribly important, yet something he is unable to identify, undone.

“Master?” It was Vellia, still in her corner.

“What is it?”

“I only wish to say, sir, that you have been a good master to us, and we all know it.”

“Thank you, Vellia.”

“And we’ll all be very happy for you when you die like a man tonight.”

“Thank you, Vellia.”

Petronius turned and left the room.

The granite slabs of the dark hallway were cold against his bare feet and silent, absorbing all sound like a tomb. Petronius thought of his own tomb, dark and ungiving like this, wherein he would be laid tomorrow. He felt, impatiently with himself, as if he were already his own ghost, wandering the subterranean halls that connected his vault to the rest of the necropolis, the temple of Apollo, the acropolis, and ultimately to the cave of the Sibyl and its hidden entrance to the underworld. How long would he wander, padding silently like this, searching for the way out? Months, years? Having crossed the threshold, would he even remember what it was he was supposed to be looking for, or who he was or had been? He paused, and allowed the chill to seep up into the bones of his feet. There would be no ache like this, of that he was reasonably certain, and possibly no sensation of any kind, no sense of pressure, weight, temperature, humidity, breath entering and leaving the body, light pushing against the ragged edges of shadow. The very walls and archways, perhaps, would seem as insubstantial as mist, translucent and shifting, their layout arbitrary and mystifying. What purpose could they serve to a spirit who can walk in a straight line through mountains and seas, through the center of the earth? And yet he was quite convinced that he would be wandering them dutifully this time tomorrow, that even in the daze of the newly dead he would somehow recognize the patterns they traced, their dim echo of some immutable law of nature, as a newborn bird somehow knows to open its beak skyward to receive its first meal. Yes, surely the dead have instincts to guide them through their new world, and quite probably they heed those instincts the way animals in this world heed theirs, with unthinking trust, instead of ignoring and despising them the way living men do. But do they have memories?

Petronius passed along the corridor to the little room where Commagenus awaited him in the lamplight. The brass krater and the gold-hilted dagger had been washed and polished. There was a clean roll of bandages on the table beside them.

“Let’s go,” he said, stepping forward through the doorway. He held his wrist out and Commagenus began to unroll the bandage. The first few layers of cotton were white and loose and came away readily, but then it began to turn brown—in patches first, finally solid—stiff and recalcitrant; nearer the skin, it became hopelessly glued, both to itself and to the wound. Any attempt to force it, both men saw, would result in a messy, uncontrolled opening of the gash, blood everywhere. It must be done cautiously, with dignity and an eye to posterity, even with no one but a slave as witness.

“I’ll fetch some warm water,” Commagenus muttered, and slipped from the room. Petronius propped his damaged wrist in the palm of his right hand, as if it were a dying child, though he felt no sympathy for it, and looked vacantly about the spare chamber. There was nothing to catch his eye but a small round window, high up on the outer wall, that framed a few bright, indeterminate stars. Had he followed a more traditional career path, Petronius would have studied for some priesthood or other, he would have learned to identify the constellations in their multitudes, and they would not be such strangers to him as they were tonight. Was it possible, after all, that they held a message for him? Or that, on some other night—one spent, perhaps, lying on one’s back at the side of a sleeping lover, wondering how to draw blood from a stone—they had been speaking to him of alternate ways and he had been deaf to their advice? How unlikely it all seemed, yet even if it were true he doubted there was any consolation to be found there, or in the flights of wild birds, the steaming entrails of sacrificial beasts, the omens that served as currency to the augurers. The omens were always bad. You didn’t need to be a priest to know that.

Commagenus returned with a bowl of water and some hand towels draped across his forearm. Petronius sat on the edge of the bed and the slave knelt at his feet. Moistening a towel, Commagenus began dabbing delicately at the encrusted wound, and shortly the soiled bandage fell away into the bowl, immediately turning the water a sickly pink. The exposed gash, some two inches long, was raw and pulsing, almost a living thing in its own right, and clearly ready to reopen at the slightest pressure. Commagenus continued to swab it lightly.

“Get on with it,” Petronius snapped, although he was rather touched by the slave’s solicitude. “It doesn’t need to be clean. Get the krater.”

Commagenus lowered the bowl to the floor and replaced it with the brass krater beneath Petronius’s wrist. He held it by the stem in both hands, his fingers splayed along the underside as if he were a priest receiving a libation. With his right hand, Petronius grasped his own left forearm, pressing his thumb into the soft flesh above the wound. He pulled the thumb back toward the elbow, and the scab gave way with only the mildest sensation of tearing. The blood immediately poured forth as it had earlier, splashing raucously into the hollow of the krater. Petronius felt a bubble of nausea rise in his belly and subside. He willed himself to focus on the matter at hand and to closely monitor the flow of blood, lest he spill too much and incapacitate himself for the rest of the dinner.

It was only as the krater began slowly to fill that he noticed that it had been assiduously washed and polished since the first bloodletting. Had Commagenus done it himself, or had he delegated the distasteful chore to a lower-ranking member of the household staff? What had happened to the blood? Had it been poured down the courtyard drain, to be sluiced away into the sea? Petronius was abruptly struck by the odd image of its being carried to the kitchen, where Lucullo might set it aside to allow the fat to separate and congeal, later to be incorporated into his justly famous black pudding, or as a thickening agent for one of his rich wine-and-honey-based sauces. Alternately, it might be fed to the pigs on the farm, who would surely be grateful and perhaps, like the vineyard slaves, enjoy some short-lived thrill of vindication.

Petronius had tasted human blood before—both his own and that of friend and foe, whipped into his face and open mouth in the frenzy of hand-to-hand combat—and it evoked little fascination or revulsion in him. But was blood sacrificially spilled different somehow? Was there something hallowed about it, or accursed? He searched his mind for some forgotten instruction or ritual exaction. Oh, let the pigs have it, then! Or maybe Mar-tialis would want it, should he ever return to Spain, where certain ancient Celtic practices were said to still be practiced. Perhaps it could be used to summon his spirit from the underworld? It was only when the absurdity of this last thought struck him that Petronius realized that his mind had been wandering, and that he had already drained the requisite pint, and a little surplus.

“That’ll do,” he said curtly, and even in these brief words heard the slurring in his voice.

Again, Commagenus pressed a thick wad of cotton on the wound and wrapped it tightly in linen. Again, the dressing held. Petronius dismissed the slave with a flick of the wrist, and continued to sit with his head slumped between his shoulders. The nausea had returned, his face felt hot and prickly, his sandals as heavy as lead slabs. Two more pints would kill him off. Two more pints, two more pints. It sounded like a marching song, and for a moment he thought himself on horseback at the head of a column riding to Volandum in Armenia, where great things awaited him if only he could rid himself of these damned locusts chirping in his ears. It was a brutally hot summer’s day on the high plateau, his cheeks burned, but water was short and it would hurt morale if he were seen to be abusing the rations. His mouth was parched and evil-tasting; he rode with his head bowed to maximize the shade upon his neck and chest. Two more pints, two more pints, the men sang. He tried to harness his attention to the marching rhythm.

Melissa stood at the door with a bowl of wine in her hands. He could hardly place her at first, but then the room and the night snapped into focus, and he knew that he would be all right.

“Is this a place for you, Melissa?” Petronius said coldly, turning his back to her. “Is it right that our guests should be left unattended?”

There was a light rustle of fabric, and then he felt her hand on his shoulder. It was not the first time she had touched him all evening, and it still felt wrong, ill-balanced.

“Would this be a good time to talk?”

“You pick your moments.”

“There aren’t many left.”

She held the wine to his lips, and he drank. It was cold, and sweetened, and tasted good.

“You are angry with me tonight, Titus. Why is that?”

“I am not angry with you, Melissa Silia.”

Melissa considered him pensively. “We expect a great deal of you tonight, Titus, as much as you expect of yourself,” she said. “And as for all this silly, secretive bloodletting, I don’t think you should go through with it.”

“I’m surprised at you, Melissa. You know better than that. Of course I have to do it. I
want
to do it.”

“No, Titus …”