SPQR XII: Oracle of the Dead Read online

  Of course she didn’t shout. She was too proper a patrician wife for that.

  “Decius!” she hissed. “Have you lost your mind?” Her hiss could probably be heard in Rome. Maybe in Gaul. “What are you doing wandering off alone?”

  “I’m grown, my dear. I don’t require a pedagogues.”

  “You require bodyguards! In fact, you require a keeper, like those idiot children of the richest families! Have you any idea of the danger you are in? Quite aside from the local feuds you’re meddling in, there are probably idiots around here who think your head would make a fine gift to Pompey or Caesar or any of the other rivals for power. In any case, it is beneath the dignity of a Roman praetor to gad about like a carefree bachelor, without a following or even his lictors.”

  “Yet,” I told her with a broad smile for anyone who might be watching us, “one may learn things in this fashion that would be impossible otherwise. Let me tell you all about it.”

  “You’d better!” she hissed again. She led me to our quarters, a cluster of rooms with balconies overlooking one of the cliffs. The geography of the spit of land made the standard domestic design unfeasible, so the house was long and rather narrow in conformity with the plot, though it lacked nothing in luxury and splendor.

  “So,” she said, when we were alone, “what did you learn?” So I told her what the woman Floria had told me.

  “It seems too fortuitous,” I said, when I had finished my recitation. “What are the chances that I should just happen by the doorway of this woman who had information vital to my investigation? Yet I can’t imagine how she might have been planted in my path.”

  Julia nodded, her natural curiosity and prying instincts at last overcoming her righteous rage. “It does seem improbable. Still, there might be an explanation.”

  “What might it be?”

  “It is possible that this town and all the others around here are full of people with similar stories to relate, only they are afraid to approach you. Most of them are probably slaves, as this woman was when this vicious deed occurred. At least she was manumitted, and this may have given her the courage to approach you, even if in a fearful manner. At least, as a free woman, she can’t be made to testify under torture.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. “I may have passed the doorways of many people victimized by the Oracle. This one saw me alone and took a chance. But I am certain she gave me a false name.”

  “Nothing strange about that. She hopes not to be drawn into it at all, but you can find her house again.” She looked at me sharply. “Don’t tell me you didn’t memorize its location.” It was an order, not a question.

  “Have no fear, my dear. I could lead you there blindfolded on a moonless night.” This was a bit of an exaggeration, but I was pretty sure that I could find my way back. Stabiae was not as chaotic as Rome, but it wasn’t designed as a rigid grid like Alexandria.

  “And we now know something: The voice of the Oracle is false.” She seemed bitterly disappointed at this, whereas I was not at all surprised. Julia dearly loved her oracles, prophets, augurs, and haruspexes.

  “At least,” I said, “we know that it was ten years ago, assuming that this woman’s tale is true. I was surprised at her use of the word ‘priests.’ I should have questioned her more closely about it. Perhaps the Oracle had a different staff then. We shall have to make inquiries.”

  “Cordus may know, or at least he may know how to find out.”

  “I’ll send a letter to him at once,” I said, gratified to see that Julia’s anger had cooled, distracted now by a question to solve. She had philosophical leanings and considered these investigations to be philosophical conundrums. I approached them in a different way, knowing that they were shaped by human passions and weaknesses rather than by mathematics or natural forces at work, and I relied as much on instinct and inspiration as on rigid logic. Between us, we usually got to the bottom of whatever was going on. Unless, of course, it involved her uncle.

  That evening, we were entertained by Sabinilla. For the evening she had chosen a startling silver wig, and in the odd fashion of such things, this set me to pondering almost obsessively what her real hair might look like. This is one of my many failings, though I hope a minor one. She took us on a tour of the strange villa, which was built on several levels to accommodate to the slope of the stony spit. We climbed many stairs and saw odd-shaped dining rooms and reception areas, colonnades and courtyards. All of the walls were decorated with beautiful frescoes, none of them the then-popular black walls decorated sparsely with fantastic vegetation and spindly pillars, a style I found intensely depressing. These were colorful paintings of the doings of gods and goddesses, heroes, demigods, nymphs and satyrs, fauns and other sylvan deities. Campanians like color, as do I. The floors were uniformly covered with vivid picture-mosaics, mostly displaying marine subjects. To my astonishment, even the ceilings were painted, this time with Olympian gods disporting themselves among the clouds, and one astonishing room had its floor decorated with night-blooming plants while on the ceiling above Diana and her retinue hunted constellations in the night sky. Julia immediately wanted our ceilings painted.

  Most unusually, Sabinilla showed us her personal gladiator troupe. Many wealthy Campanians invest in gladiators, but seldom keep them in their own houses. The schools are usually located in the countryside, well away from the towns. She had a barracks for twenty of them, and an oval exercise yard surrounded by a low stone wall lined with seats. For our amusement she had them come out and go through their paces, mock-fighting with wooden practice swords. They fought almost naked, wearing only the bronze belt and brief subligaculum traditional to Campanian gladiators, their skins oiled to catch the torchlight prettily. They were all Gauls, which was no surprise. Caesar’s wars had flooded the market with cheap Gallic slaves, many of them warriors too dangerous for domestic service. They were armed in their native fashion, with a long, narrow, oval shield and a long sword. They wore no protective armor at all save for a simple pot-shaped helmet.

  “How can you sleep,” Julia asked, enthralled, “with such men so nearby?”

  “Oh, these fellows seem quite content with their lot,” Sabinilla assured her. “You should have seen them when I bought them: filthy and verminous and wearing enough chains to anchor a ship. Once I had them washed, barbered, and fed decently, and I assured them all they had to do was fight, they couldn’t have been more grateful.”

  “I could name you their tribes,” I said. “These are warriors, Julia. Gallic warriors do no work, unless it involves horses. All their lives they do nothing but fight and train to fight. They are aristocrats, by their own reckoning. Their lands are worked for them by slaves. To them, fighting to the death is nothing. Being set to work would be an unthinkable degradation. They’d commit suicide before they’d pick up a shovel. No, these men wouldn’t want to be doing anything else, since they can no longer be warriors in Gaul. Sabinilla, who is your trainer?”

  “Astyanax. He’s the best trainer in Campania. In his fighting days he contended as a Thracian, but he’s expert at all the styles. He had fifty-one victories. He comes here three days in ten to work with my men. He trains several of the small private troupes in the district.” This evening her nails were silver-gilt, and she wore all silver jewelry in place of the bronze she had worn earlier. Her gown was a shimmery white, about as close to silver as you can get with cloth.

  Dinner was the usual lavish affair, with a huge number of guests. Sabinilla couldn’t resist showing all her neighbors that she had the Roman praetor under her roof. There were local officials, some of whom I’d already met, priests from various temples, the most prominent equites, even a few senators who had villas in the area. As it Romanized, the district was becoming more and more popular with the Roman elite, with its resorts, its beautiful landscape, and its wonderful climate. After all the meeting and a lengthy dinner, at which I was uncharacteristically moderate, I found myself huddled with the senators. This
was inevitable. No matter the location, Roman politicians have to get together to talk politics and intrigue.

  “Praetor,” began a man named Lucullus, who was a distant relation to the great Lucullus, “what do you think Caesar will do next?” As ranking man, they all deferred to me. Plus, through Julia, they expected me to know all about Caesar’s doings.

  “He’ll cross the Rubicon and he’ll bring his army with him and there will be civil war.” I was heartily sick of the subject and wanted to keep my answer short.

  “Surely not!” all of them chorused.

  “Surely so,” I said.

  “It will be the days of Marius and Sulla come again,” said one, his face pale. “All Italy will be devastated. The carnage will be terrible.”

  “That I rather doubt,” I said, enjoying the offshore evening breeze. We stood on a beautiful terrace behind the main house. It stood at the very tip of the spit of rocky land, high above the sea, and was rimmed by a marble balustrade topped with beautiful Greek statues of heroes, also of marble. The surf crashed musically below, foaming over jagged rocks.

  “How can that be?” said the pale-faced one. “The minute Caesar crosses that river, the Senate will declare a state of civil war and Pompey will raise his legions to meet him.”

  “Pompey has not seen Caesar move and I have. He’ll come down on Italy faster than the Gauls or the Carthaginians or the Teutones or Cimbri ever did. Pompey won’t have time to get his troops together, much less drilled and provisioned for war. He’ll have to run for it and have his men join him elsewhere, maybe Greece, maybe Illyria. There will be plenty of fighting and it will be bloody, but I doubt there will be much of it in Italy.”

  I am not trying to appear prescient in hindsight. It is exactly what I said that evening, and events bore me out. This is because I did indeed know Caesar well, insofar as anyone really knew that man. He was perfectly happy to exterminate whole nations of barbarians on Rome’s behalf, but he had a strange reluctance to kill citizens and applied the death penalty more sparingly than most ordinary judges. It was, incidentally, this magnanimity that eventually got him killed. He was assassinated by a conspiracy of men most of whom he had spared or called back from exile when he had every reason and every right to kill them. Let that be a lesson to anyone who seizes absolute power: Always kill all your enemies as soon as you have the power to. You’re just making trouble for yourself if you don’t. It was a lesson our First Citizen certainly took to heart.

  Sabinilla appeared like a silver vision and suddenly I understood why she had chosen her fantastic color scheme. It was so that she would be dazzlingly visible after the sun was down and everyone was gathered outside, on the terraces or in the formal gardens and courtyards. It was a clever bit of planning. She outshone every other woman there.

  “You men shouldn’t be huddled here plotting,” she said. “Come and enjoy the evening’s entertainments.”

  “You mean there’s more?” I said.

  “Of course there is! And you gentlemen must let me borrow the praetor for a while. Come along, now.” She took my arm in an elegant but viselike grip and dragged me away from the clump of white togas.

  “I had to rescue you,” she said. “I heard them bringing up Caesar and I knew you’ve had your fill of that.”

  “I can only express my gratitude,” I said, sure that she had some other motive. I was getting suspicious of everyone lately.

  Abruptly, a crowd of dancers and mountebanks stormed the terrace. Like every other bit of the evening’s festivities this was contrived to be spectacular at night, for all of the acts involved fire. The outdoor lamps and torches were extinguished and fire-eaters rushed among the guests, breathing flame like mythical beasts, making the ladies scream delightedly. Then dancers performed an act I had never seen before. They were all women, naked and sparkling with oil in which flecks of mica glittered like stars all over their lithe bodies. They twirled short torches with flames at both ends, so swiftly that they formed great, glowing circles, and they did this without ever missing a step of their elaborate, acrobatic dances. After that, tightrope walkers traversed and did handsprings high above the terrace on ropes that flamed furiously, yet their hands and feet seemed to be unburned, and the ropes never burned through.

  “How do they do that?” I said, like a yokel who had never seen such mountebanks before.

  “It’s the secret of their art,” Sabinilla answered. “My master of ceremonies devised this entertainment some time ago and scoured Italy and Greece and Sicily for entertainers with the requisite skills.”

  Something occurred to me. “You only learned this morning that I would be coming to Stabiae. Surely you didn’t throw this evening’s entertainment together just since we met by chance on the road?”

  She laughed at my cloddish lack of subtlety. “Of course not! As soon as I heard that you would be visiting Campania and staying at the Hortalus Villa, I started planning this. I knew you’d eventually make your way to Stabiae for the assizes, so I had all in readiness for that day.”

  “You mean you’ve been housing all these people here for months?”

  “Actually, the dancers only arrived about ten days ago. They’re from Spain, where all the greatest dance troupes are trained. I’m so glad they arrived in time for this. The evening wouldn’t have been complete without them. Oh, look!” She pointed to a sidespit of rock that jutted out from the main formation about a hundred paces away. A tongue of flame had sprung up and now it spread with incredible speed until a huge bonfire was burning at furnace heat. It lit up the terrace like a rising sun and was almost as unbearable to look at directly. A blast of heat reached us even across that distance and the flames leapt into the sky as high, it seemed, as the Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria. I knew that only oil-soaked pine could blaze so high, so fast.

  “Surely,” I said, “this is the climax of your evening. I must say it’s awe-inspiring. It’s like watching an enemy city burn.”

  “Not quite the end,” she said, “but soon.”

  I looked around. “Where is Hermes? I haven’t seen him since dinner. He’s supposed to attend me at functions like these. If I know the scamp, he’s sparring with your gladiators. He’s never been happy about his proficiency with the Gallic longsword. If you will excuse me for a moment, I must look for him.”

  “Oh, don’t bother, Praetor! I’ll send a slave to fetch him.”

  “No, I want to catch him red-handed so I can punish him savagely.”

  She laughed happily, giddy with the success of her evening’s entertainment, which would make her the envy of the local aristocrats and parvenus for months. “Oh, go on, then. But be back soon. You don’t want to miss the real climax.”

  In truth, I wanted to be away from the press on the terrace, as I had wanted to be away from my entourage that morning. The rest of the villa, all but deserted, seemed dreamlike as I passed through its strung-out, meandering rooms and courtyards, so different from the usual square or rectangular villa plan.

  Sure enough, when I came to the training pen, there was Hermes, stripped to a loincloth, his body covered with glowing welts that would soon be bruises from strikes by the long sticks they used for swords. A goodly knot of fight fans were gathered, cheering on the combatants. Campania is the home of what might be called the gladiatorial cult. The bustuarii, to use the old term, were fighting here for centuries before the first munera was displayed at Rome. There were people here from all walks of life, from slaves to senators, who were happy to miss the spectacular entertainment on the terrace in order to watch a good fight.

  For a while I stood in the dimness of a colonnade, content to watch Hermes as he contended with a tall, long-armed Gaul who grinned happily as he fought, the way Gauls usually do, even after they’ve been mortally wounded. The boy was a joy to watch, strong and graceful as a panther. He was a match for anyone save these professionals. The Gauls had been fighting all evening for the entertainment of the guests, and they were unwinded, scarcely even
sweating. That is what training all day, every day, at nothing but swordplay will do for a man, especially one who is a born athlete and swordsman in the first place, which pretty much describes Gauls of the noble class. Finally, I decided I had indulged him enough. I stepped from the colonnade into the light.

  “Hermes!” I barked in my best parade-ground voice.

  He paused and turned his head, a mistake a professional never would have made. The long-armed Gaul landed a blow on his helmet that rang like Vulcan’s hammer on an anvil and must have had him seeing stars.

  “Let that be a lesson to you!” I shouted. “Never take your eyes off your opponent, even when the patron calls. Now stop making a spectacle of yourself and come attend me as is your duty.”

  Amid raucous laughter from the spectators and the Gauls, Hermes put on his best falsely sheepish, repentant manner and went to the bench where he’d left his clothing. Once he was decently dressed, he joined me in the little courtyard above the fighting pen where I was sitting on the rim of a little fountain.

  “You should have seen me earlier, Patron,” he said, unable to keep up his humble facade, bubbling with enthusiasm. “I almost beat one of them! And the Brigante named Isinorix or something taught me the most amazing maneuver with the longsword. You don’t even need a shield to pull it off—”

  “Do be quiet,” I said. “And go find me some wine. I’ve been politicking all evening and Julia has been keeping her eagle eyes on me the whole time. I could feel her gaze all over me from clear across that terrace.”