SPQR VIII: The River God's Vengeance Read online

  “I felt safer when the Germans held us prisoner.”

  At last the creaky bundle of household goods swayed aloft and we passed beneath it, feeling none too safe in the process. This same activity was going on in all the valleys between the hills, and once in a while you heard the snap of parting ropes, accompanied by the smash of shattering furniture along with occasional screams from someone who didn’t step lively enough.

  “Just let me get to my arms,” I said, “and I will be ready to take on the whole pack of them!” The look Hermes cast at me in return for this boast was too eloquent to describe.

  Eventually, we made it home. Even though the Subura lay primarily in the valley between the Quirinal and the Esquiline, it was well away from the river, and little of it was low enough to be liable to serious fiooding. Even so, the streets were almost as chaotic as elsewhere. Jammed with people at the best of times, the load was doubled as those who lived near the river sought refuge with friends and relatives in the higher parts of the City, even if this just meant camping on the roof of a Subura slum.

  The cacophony was made all the more colorful because of the great variety of languages being shouted from all directions. Perhaps half of my neighbors were native citizens, speaking their own Suburan dialect of Latin. The rest were foreigners, either immigrants and resident aliens or recently freed slaves, all fiocking to the Subura for the cheapest housing within the walls. There were near-black Numidians, Gauls with yellow mustaches and twisted neck rings, wigged Egyptians, Syrians with oiled ringlets, many Jews wearing pointed caps and striped coats, and the usual Greeks looking Greek. When excited, they all forgot their broken, outrageously accented Latin and reverted to the barking, beastly sounds of their native tongues.

  Julia was in the colonnade surrounding the impluvium, apparently getting the household staff organized. Her eyes went wide when she saw me.

  “You’re home and the sun is still shining. Is anything wrong?”

  “Father Tiber is about to throw one of his occasional rampages, and I may soon be attacked by armed men.”

  “If you aren’t going to be attacked soon, perhaps you can suggest where we might put this.”

  She stood aside to show me what she had the slaves doing. They were prying boards away from a wooden crate, just under man height. Three boards had already been removed, and a litter of straw lay on the fioor tiles, revealing a beautiful statue of polished white marble. The subject was Venus, or rather the Greek Aphrodite, about two-thirds life size.

  “It’s lovely,” I said, my worries momentarily forgotten in the presence of such sublimity. The goddess was depicted nude except for her sandals, one of which she was fastening as she leaned on a smaller statue of Pan. It is one of the conventional poses of that particular goddess, and it takes a master sculptor to render it gracefully. This one had done the job perfectly. The white marble had been tinted so faintly that you had to look hard to make sure it was tinted at all. The result was the effect of genuine human fiesh, but made of a substance as pure and insubstantial as the clouds. Her nipples, lips, and hair were gilded, a treatment that looks garish on most statues, but on this one the effect was breathtaking. I later determined that the underlying marble on those areas had first been stained dark, then the gold leaf had been lightly stippled on, rather than laid on in sheets.

  “I’ve seen copies of this statue before,” Julia said, “but none so fine as this.”

  “It isn’t the work of a Roman shop,” I agreed. We had long since looted Greece of its best art works, and there were never enough of them to satisfy the growing wealthy classes of the Empire. So there were many workshops turning out copies of the scarce originals. Some of these were comparable in quality to the originals, but most of them were quite inferior. Then I got over the wonder of the thing and thought of what it must have cost.

  “Julia, have you bankrupted us buying this thing?”

  “I didn’t buy it,” she said. “A team of men delivered it this morning. It’s a good thing this district is full of metal workers. We had to borrow a pry bar just to get it open.”

  “But who sent it?” Even as I asked, I was relieved that Julia had taken the trouble to fetch a pry bar instead of employing one of her usual expedients, like using one of my swords.

  “The deliverymen said they were hired by a man named Farbus to deliver this from a warehouse near the Forum. My grandmother has a steward named Farbus. Perhaps this is a gift from her.” She meant Aurelia, the mother of Julius Caesar. The old dragon disliked me, but she doted on Julia.

  “I suppose it could be,” I acknowledged. “Caesar left several buildings full of art works from when he was refurbishing the house of the Pontifex Maximus and the house of the Vestals. She knows how much entertaining we’ll have to do when I stand for the praetorship, and she may want to dress up the house.” It was like her to let me know how little she thought of my personal taste.

  Julia dragged her attention away from the beautiful statue. “Are you serious about danger of attack?”

  “I seldom joke about personal danger. I am going to double bar the gate and station a lookout on the roof.”

  “My, you are serious. Are you going to be here at the house for the duration?”

  “I won’t let some pack of thugs make me a prisoner in my own home. This is just to secure the noncombatants, you and the household staff. I have some work to do here; then I will go right back out again.”

  She rolled her eyes upward. “You are going to be a hero again. Spare me!”

  I grabbed her and planted a kiss on her mouth. “I’m no hero. The streets are so confused right now that it will be easy to escape anyone who’s after me. I’ve been doing this all my life, dear. Trust me.”

  “The last time I trusted you, you ended up with that German princess.”

  I winced. I had fondly hoped Julia wouldn’t learn of that, but no such luck. “We weren’t married then. Besides, the woman was trying to kill me.”

  She shook her head in disgust. “The things men find attractive in barbarian women! Go, play with your weapons. I’ll warn everyone not to open the doors to strangers.”

  I took refuge in my study, where Hermes already had my arms chest open and its contents laid out. The law against bearing arms within the pomerium was about to suffer some bending.

  “You’d better begin by wearing this, for starters,” Hermes said, holding up a sleeveless, waist-length vest of mail. It was one of twenty such defenses given to Caesar as a present from a Gallic chieftain, and Caesar in turn had passed some of them on to his favored officers. The Gauls invented mail, that ingenious armor of interlinked iron rings that is fiexible as cloth and stronger than plates of bronze. My regular, legionary mail shirt was knee length, with short sleeves and shoulder straps that gave a double thickness on that vulnerable area, and it weighed more than thirty pounds. This vest was made of links one-?fth the size of those on legionary armor, and it weighed less than five pounds.

  A hard-cast spear would pass right through it, but it was just the thing for stopping a dagger in the street. It would even resist the thrust of a short sword, if the attacker didn’t get his full weight behind it. It shone with silver plating, which was as much practical as decorative. It needed no oiling and would not stain my clothes with rust and the inevitable grime that always adheres to iron armor.

  “I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “I’ve always avoided going around as if I were afraid of my fellow citizens.”

  “That’s just who might want to kill you,” he pointed out. “Be reasonable. Wear it under your tunic and nobody will know you have it on unless you get killed, and then what do you care who knows?”

  “You’ve convinced me.” I stripped, put on a thin tunic of the sort I usually wore for exercising, then slipped the steel vest over my head. It was exquisitely tailored so that it tapered at the waist and rested neatly atop my hip bones, feeling even lighter than it was. Then I put on my usual tunic, and the armor was invisible. I belted
it with several turns of narrow leather straps, wound back and forth through heavy brass rings, charioteer-style. This gave me a secure place to tuck my sheathed dagger and my caestus, the spiked bronze knuckle bar worn by boxers, minus the elaborate strapping the boxers use.

  “Do you want to pack a sword?” Hermes asked, holding out the light, wasp-waisted arena sword I sometimes carried in preference to the broad, heavy gladius.

  “No, that would be too obvious. This is unobtrusive beneath a toga. A blind man wouldn’t miss a sword. And find my oldest toga. It won’t look dignified, but I won’t miss it, either.” A toga is nothing but an encumbrance to a fieeing man. If I should need to run, I would have to abandon it, and the formal garment I had worn in public since assuming office was far too expensive to throw away.

  I picked up a five-foot, cylindrical case of leather. It contained a half-dozen light javelins. I tossed it to Hermes. “Here. Take this up to the roof and keep an eye on everyone who gets near the gate. If they look like they’re going to try to break it down, skewer one or two of them.”

  He slung it over his shoulder by its carrying strap. “As you yourself keep reminding me, I can be crucified for touching arms within the walls.”

  “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t. Besides, any slave can pick up arms to defend his master’s house. Out on the street is another matter. Now get up there. Send word if anyone comes by, even if they look friendly.”

  I sat at my desk and began to go through the tablets and scrolls from the Tabularium. It was bureaucratic record keeping of the dullest sort, mostly the censors’ copies of contracts let to various publicani, much of it for work that I had never known came under the purview of the office. There were, for instance, contractors who hauled off dead horses and oxen from the City’s streets and squares. There were perfumers who paid handsomely just to sweep up the fiower petals after a festival. The fullers were licensed to empty the public pisspots. I didn’t even like to think what those people did to my togas with that stuff.

  I glanced at a small scroll written in a fine hand and was about to set it aside when an unexpected name caught my eye. I was about to examine it more closely when Hermes appeared at the doorway.

  “A pack of Milo’s gang are at the gate,” he reported.

  For a moment, I felt a pang of betrayal. Surely Milo hadn’t turned against me! “How many and what do they want?”

  “Ten of them, but it looks like they’ve just cleared the way for Fausta.”

  “Oh. Well, back up to the roof then.” He trotted off, and I set the little scroll aside for later examination.

  In the atrium, I saw Milo’s boys taking their ease, dressed in their new, white tunics. They were not bothering to disguise their occupation these days. Each man had his forearms wrapped in studded leather straps, all wore military-style boots, and each wore a skullcap of iron, bronze, or hardened leather. They carried five-foot oak staves in gnarled hands, and some of them wore spiked caesti as well. It looked as if Milo’s men had shifted to wartime status, unless this was some special treatment Fausta had insisted upon. When she traveled the streets of Rome in her oversized sedan chair, it was like a warship cruising toward the enemy. It was get out of the way or be rammed.

  I found Julia and Fausta by the pool, looking at the statue. Fausta was squatting unself-consciously, her gown hiked well up her long thighs.

  “This is no copy,” she reported. “It’s an original, at least two hundred years old, from Aphrodisias.” That Greek colony in Asia produces the finest sculpture currently made. “You can tell by the detail work. I’ve seen clever Greeks who can provide that polish, and the subtle gilding is something I’ve seen in high-quality copies, but look at this.” Julia squatted to see what she was pointing at. “Look at Pan’s scrotum. Every tiniest wrinkle is carefully carved in. Only a master includes such careful detail where nobody is likely to look.” Trust Fausta to spot something like that.

  “And her toenails aren’t marble. They’re alabaster, slotted into place.” She stood. “Unless I miss my guess, this is the original Aphrodite Fastening Her Sandal, by Aristobulus the Second. As I recall, it was commissioned by one of the Seleucid monarchs, Antiochus Epiphanes or one of those.”

  “How did it end up here?” I asked. I wasn’t accepting her evaluation all that easily. Fausta loved to show off and pretend that her knowledge of cultural matters was comprehensive. She might have made up the whole thing on the spot.

  “Considering what part of the world it resided in, it may have ended up with old Mithridates, and Lucullus came home with most of his property. But for years the East has been our biggest source of Greek art since we conquered Greece itself. Gabinius could have plundered this or Pompey. It couldn’t have been one of my father’s acquisitions; he’d have kept it. But it could have been extorted by one of our governors or given as a bribe to a proconsul. Who knows? It might have been bought as an investment by a traveling businessman.” A simple commercial transaction would be the last thing to occur to a daughter of Sulla.

  “I must send word to Aurelia,” Julia said. “She can probably explain this.”

  Fausta looked me over with a thousand years of patrician cynicism in her eyes. “Oh, I don’t know. An aedile is in a position to acquire any number of trinkets like this.”

  I let this insult pass because it set off a tingle in the back of my mind, and I didn’t want my dislike of the woman to distract me. She and Julia were close friends despite Fausta’s contempt for me. But then, Julia detested Milo, my friend of many years. It all worked out.

  “But where can we put this?” Julia said, straightening and brushing a few leaves from her hands.

  “Don’t move it an inch until you’ve studied it in several lights,” Fausta advised. “Then place it where the most favorable light will strike it, but make sure it’s under a roof so the finish won’t be ruined. Something this exquisite was never intended for outdoor display.” This made excellent sense.

  “I don’t think it should be in this house at all,” Julia said. “We should take it to the country estate near Fidenae and build a little shrine for it, a round one in the Italian style with slender Ionic columns and a circle of poplars all around it.” She turned to me. “If we do that this summer, the poplars will be well-grown by the time you inherit the estate.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. “I’ll talk to the old man about it; I’m sure he’ll have no objection.” But I already had reservations about this lovely work of art with its murky past. I was not at all sure that it had been sent to me as a friendly gesture.

  I returned to my study, new suspicions boiling in my already overburdened mind. I have known men who allowed their minds to become so distracted by suspicion, seeing plots and conspiracies at every hand, that they became incapable of action. For the first time in my life, I felt myself approaching that paralytic stage. To calm my mind, I picked up the scroll I had abandoned and studied it carefully.

  It was written in a clumsy hand by an official who clearly had performed this task himself rather than delegating it to a secretary. Young Roman men destined for public life are trained for public speaking, not how to write gracefully. We usually leave that to professionals. Still, I was able to forge my way through the report’s ill-formed letters and awkward phrasing.

  It was addressed to the censors Vatia Isauricus and Messala Niger, from the plebeian aedile Aulus Lucilius, a man completely unknown to me. The subject was the condition of the theater of Aemilius Scaurus. In bald, unsparing prose, it described the findings of his investigation: The all but new theater, beneath its unprecedented ornamentation, was built entirely of wood that was green, rotten, termite-chewed, or otherwise unfit for any sort of construction, much less for a structure in which a very large proportion of the citizenry would be seated, at peril of their lives, on festival days.

  In considerable detail for so small a document, it went on to detail the bricks used as footing on the landward side of the theater, which were made o
f wretched clay, ill-?red, and easily crumbled in the hands of a strong man. He had sunk shafts in several locations and found nothing beneath except river mud, the whole weight of the theater resting upon either more of the inferior brick or, worse, on water-soaked timbers that were deteriorating by the day.

  It was a thing of wonder, Lucilius concluded, that the structure had survived the Games celebrated by Scaurus in the year of its construction; and he went on to list the names of those he knew to be malefactors in this affair, with the recommendation that the results of his investigation be passed on to the urban praetor for prosecution. The names were: Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, builder; Lucius Folius, dealer in building materials; and—here my stomach sank while the hair on the back of my neck rose, a most disorientating phenomenon—Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica, owner of the lumberyard and brickworks whence had come almost all of the structural components of the theater.

  Appended to the bottom of the scroll was a note written by another hand: “From M. Valerius Messala Niger. Censor to the urban praetor. This man is a notorious political enemy of Scaurus and Pompey. We can safely ignore this scurrilous rant.”

  I slid the scroll aside and buried my face in my palms. My world was crumbling around me. My long-planned Games were to be held in a structure that was a death trap for the audience. If I were to expose this matter, which was my clear duty, I would bring a terrible disgrace upon my own family, just when they were arranging a political compromise that might save the City from chaos and the Empire from civil war.

  This explained much, especially Scipio’s sudden change of heart about prosecuting the fraudulent builders and my family’s vehement objection. Scipio was a Caecilius Metellus by adoption, but among the great families, adoption was as firm as blood descent. He bore the name, and the name was everything. He had been adopted by the great Metellus Pius, Pontifex Maximus before Caesar and a man revered for that most primal of Roman virtues, pietas.