SPQR VIII: The River God's Vengeance Read online

  “If we cross the river,” Hermes said apprehensively, “we may not be able to get back to the City for days.”

  “Nevertheless,” I assured him, “the Labyrinth is in the Trans-Tiber and that is where we must go. Don’t worry. The bridge will stay above water. If the river goes over the artificial embankment, it will settle in the low places. It may be deep in spots, but there will be little current. Look.” I pointed to the embankment, where already men were dragging small boats and barges cobbled together from scrap wood. “The river fishermen and other enterprising souls are already preparing to make some money ferrying people through the fiooded areas. We may have to get home by boat, but we will get home.”

  While I spoke these reassuring words, I was studying the huge theater of Aemilius Scaurus, just a short distance upriver of the bridge. The water was well up the support works we had seen being set in place that morning, which now seemed so long ago. Thought of that time span made my stomach growl, reminding me that we had eaten nothing since pausing at the tavern after our visit to the lumberyard of Justus.

  “Come along,” I said to Hermes, “enough sightseeing. We have important official business to see to.”

  “In a whorehouse?” he asked.

  “As it happens, yes.”

  The Trans-Tiber area lay outside the walls and therefore outside the City proper, but the authority of the aediles extended to the first milestone on each of the roads leading away from Rome, and those were well out into farmland. Compared to the vast sprawl of cities like Alexandria and Antioch, Rome was a rather compact city, although disagreeably crowded.

  As we walked, I informed Hermes of what I had learned at the widow’s house. “Why are you smiling?” I snapped.

  “Well, I was right this morning! The theater really is made of bad timber and by the same people who built that insula!“

  “You might take less satisfaction in the knowledge. Now I’m caught between two millstones. My Games could end in unprecedented catastrophe, or my family could disown me. It’s hard to choose.”

  “Too bad we can’t torch the place,” he said.

  “You would think of a criminal answer to this. Not only is arson the most heinous crime on the law tables, but that place would make a bigger, hotter fire than the Circus Maximus. Half the City would burn down.”

  “I was just speculating idly,” he said, the scheming little rogue.

  The relatively new Trans-Tiber district was a lively place. Over the centuries, successive censors and aediles had tried to expel from the City those elements seen to be parasitic or corrupting. These were the actors and gladiators, the whores, mountebanks, fortune tellers, and purveyors of foreign cults, in short, all the most interesting and entertaining people.

  The result of these purification efforts was to make the Trans-Tiber the most raffish district of Rome, where the entertainment facilities were concentrated. It was also where most of the rivermen lived, or at least stayed, while they were in Rome. It lacked the concentration of wealth, power, and politics that was to be found clustered around the Forum, and it had no important temples or other sacred sites, but the inhabitants did not seem to miss these things. It was less crowded as well as more lively.

  Best of all for my purposes that evening, most of it lay on higher ground than the eastern bank, and it did not suffer from the problem of jammed sewers and drains.

  Of all the lupanaria in Rome, within or without the walls, the Labyrinth was the most famed. It was the largest, had the most harlots, offered the widest variety of entertainments and perversions (depending upon your interpretation of that word, of course), and enjoyed the greatest and most varied clientele. People came from all over the world to see the place. There was nothing in Alexandria, Antioch, or, for all I know, India or Babylon to match it. If whorehouses were temples, the Labyrinth would be the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

  It sat in the center of a sizable square, surrounded by fruit trees planted in enormous ornamental tubs instead of the clutter of monuments that crowded every public space in the City within the walls. It was four stories high and painted a glaring scarlet. Most of the buildings nearby were small taverns and inns catering to the rivermen’s trade, as well as to foreign visitors who wanted to escape the high prices and general squalor of the opposite bank.

  The sign that let you know you had found the right place was infamous throughout the world. It was named the Labyrinth for the maze beneath the palace of Minos, and the sign was a statue depicting the most notorious queen of that palace, the insatiable Pasiphae. That queen, you will recall, was caused by Poseidon to conceive an inappropriate passion for an exceptionally beautiful bull, which her husband, Mi-nos, had refused to sacrifice to the god. Pasiphae sought the aid of Daedalus in consummating this difficult lust, which he accomplished by building a lifelike wooden cow and concealing the queen therein. The bull was deceived, the queen was presumably satisfied, and the result was the birth of the bull-headed Minotaur.

  The statue depicted this bizarre coupling, but the artificial cow was represented symbolically by a pair of horns bound to the queen’s brow and cleft hooves covering her hands and feet. Otherwise, the voluptuous queen was depicted as nude, and the bull was more than merely realistic. Both figures were life sized and rendered in the most exacting detail. This day had turned into an extended art lesson.

  “Come in, dears, come in!” cooed a woman in a blonde wig and a fiame-colored gown. In the subdued light, it took me a second look to realize that she was actually a man. “The Labyrinth features something for everyone!” as this person demonstrated amply. We joined the group of people of both sexes passing within. Nobody here was worrying about any trifiing fiood.

  We passed through a tunnel lined with niches. In each niche burned candles, illuminating small statues of couples and groups engaged in ecstatic copulation. Above each niche was painted the name of its particular variation, in Latin and Greek. Thus you could make a selection and name your pleasure when you negotiated with the management of this uninhibited place of business.

  From the tunnel, we emerged into a vast courtyard filled with tables, overlooked by the galleries of the three upper stories. There was constant traffic between the courtyard and the upper fioors, with whores of both sexes leading their customers, also of both sexes although predominantly male, to the rooms conveniently provided by the management.

  Everywhere, torches burned in sconces, lamps stood on stands, and candles burned by the hundreds. Here was one place where candles, rare elsewhere in Rome, were used in abundance. By their light, I could see that the decor, like the statue outside, conformed, after a fashion, to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. The wall paintings illustrated the doings within the original Labyrinth. The legend relates that the Athenians each year had to pay as tribute seven youths and seven maidens to be given to the Minotaur. The legend is not specific concerning what use the Minotaur made of these youths and maidens, but the paintings left no doubt. The Minotaur, though manlike in form, inherited more than just his father’s head.

  “How may we entertain you?” The questioner was a young whore wearing a beautiful smile and little else.

  “If we are to have the strength to go on,” I said, “we’ll have to eat. Then we can see about stronger entertainment.”

  “This way.” We followed her twinkling, white buttocks to a small table in a corner. As we made our way, I scanned the somewhat loud but generally orderly crowd. Aside from the professionals, the clientele included more than just the rivermen and visiting foreigners. I saw a few of my fellow senators there as well, none of them taking any pains to conceal their identities.

  I took a seat at the table indicated, and without needing to be told, Hermes pulled up a stool behind me. Since I was there in my official capacity, there was no question of the two of us sitting together as we had at lunch that afternoon. There is an unspoken but understood protocol in these matters. Immediately, slaves set food and wine on the table.

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��Be so good as to send the owner to me,” I told the whore.

  She looked me over doubtfully. “And who might I say is making this request? It’s most unusual.” She spoke like a native of Cyprus. It is more musical than most foreign accents.

  “The Plebeian Aedile Metellus,” I said. Her winglike false eyebrows went up a bit, but she did not challenge me. Perhaps, I thought, the dingy old toga hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.

  The food and wine were uniformly excellent. There were shellfish in garlic sauce, bread baked with fennel seed, cheeses and dried fruits, most of the foods being the ones believed to stimulate the carnal appetites. For once I went easy on the wine, which was Cossian.

  I was pushing the dishes aside, when I saw a woman coming across the courtyard toward me. She paused from time to time to speak with the customers seated all around, smiling, caressing a shoulder here, a bald head there, clearly the madame making sure all her guests are happy and well looked after. Crossing that distance, passing seated people, I understood how tall she was only when she was a few paces from my table.

  Andromeda, the famous proprietress of the Labyrinth, was taller than all but the very tallest men in Rome, a good six inches taller than I, and I was not considered short. Adding to her already imposing height was an amazing wig made from the hair of several different German and Gallic women, golden, fiaxen, and red locks mixed together and piled high. She did not wear the peplos of a respectable woman, but rather the feminized toga Roman law requires prostitutes to wear when in public. Unlike the plain, citizen’s toga, hers was a brilliant aquamarine with a Greek fret embroidered on the hem in gold thread. Her many jewels were worth a good-sized country estate.

  She stopped at my table, placed the back of one hand in the palm of the other, and bowed gracefully. “Aedile, you do us an unexpected honor.”

  “I am here on a matter of official business,” I said. “Please be seated.” She folded her long form into a chair, leaned forward, and patted me. I thought she was being fiirtatious, then her fingers dug in at my waist. She withdrew the hand and sat back, wearing a serious expression.

  “You came ready for a fight,” she said. “The ludus is three streets away. This is a place for joy, for abandoning everyday cares. Yet you come here with weapons in your belt and armor under your tunic and a toga cast off by your poorest freedman.”

  I fingered the worn wool. “Oh, come now, it’s not that bad. I’ll not prevaricate. The times are dangerous, and, like every public personage these days, I have enemies. I may have to fight, and I may have to run.”

  She nodded. “That is understandable. But I’ll have no disorder in my establishment.” She inclined her head toward an alcove in the painted wall. There were several such and in each stood a huge man with a heavy cudgel thonged to his wide, nail-studded belt. They were gladiators from the nearby ludus, earning extra money as bouncers. “I insist on good behavior; and at the first sign of trouble, I throw the troublemaker out, whether sailor or senator. My girls are clean, my wine is unadulterated, and I keep plenty of water and sand handy in case of fire, more than the law requires. I pay all my fees on time, and if your fellow officeholders think I should give them a little more, I don’t argue.” Her look was defiant, but she had the wrong idea about why I was there.

  “From what I hear, things aren’t always peaceful here.”

  This took her aback. “But I just said—oh, there was a murder here awhile back, but it was just one murder in the six years I’ve been in business. Other than that, no more than an occasional bloody nose or black eye, maybe a cracked pate if one of my boys has to get rough, nothing worse.”

  “Many a senatorial mansion cannot boast of so clean a record,” I told her, “but it is that very murder I have come to discuss. An aedile named—”

  She held up a hand for silence. “No! A private citizen named Aulus Lucilius was found dead here. If he had previously been an aedile, that means nothing once he was out of office, you know that perfectly well.”

  “I grant your point. Anyway, I want to hear about the circumstances surrounding that gentleman’s death. Be so good as to enlighten me.”

  “But the urban praetor’s man questioned me about that long ago,” Andromeda protested. “Why don’t you just read his report?”

  “I don’t trust other people’s reports,” I told her. “They don’t ask the right questions in the first place, and then they make mistakes when they record the results. After that, often as not, the report gets misfiled or lost or destroyed altogether, so why don’t you just tell me what happened?”

  She smiled and blinked her gilded eyelids. “Your business is far more disorderly than mine, Aedile. Well then, on the night this happened, Lucilius arrived awhile after sunset. It was dark and the lamps were lit, just like now. He had his toga pulled over his head, but I recognized him from the year before, when he’d inspected twice.”

  “Had he ever been here as a customer?”

  “Not to my knowledge, but look around you. We have a hundred customers on a slow night, a thousand or more during the big festivals. I try to give them all personal attention, but that’s futile. The ones I know by sight are the regulars.”

  “I see. Go on, please.”

  “Well, a girl named Galatea met him at the door. She led him to a table over in that corner,” she pointed to one opposite from where we sat. “There was already a man seated there, wearing a cloak with the hood pulled over his head.”

  “Do your customers usually hide their identities like that with togas and cloaks? I would think that would arouse your suspicions.”

  “Hardly. Remember, this was between the nones and the ides of December. Everyone was pretty well wrapped up, that being one of the colder winters of recent memory. I remember Galatea was wearing a wool gown. The girls don’t go around naked until spring, normally. They’ve only left their clothes off these last few nights because of this African wind that’s made it so warm.”

  “All right. So the girl Galatea conducted Lucilius to the table of the cloaked man. What then?”

  On a stage in the center of the courtyard, beneath an enormous candelabra in the shape of the Hydra with multiple candles atop each of its heads, a troupe of Iberian dancers appeared like a vision and began to perform the famous dances of Gades to the frantic music of fiutes and the rhythm of the little, wooden clappers they held in their palms. These women, like most of the inhabitants of Gades, were of mixed Greek-Phoenician ancestry and had all the most salacious qualities of those nations.

  The girls of the dancing families were raised from birth to perform in public, and their dances were the most lubricious imaginable. Actually, they also performed sacred dances with perfect decorum, but not in the Labyrinth, needless to say. Each woman was not only a dancer, but an acrobat and contortionist, a combination I have always liked.

  “Aedile, are you listening?” Andromeda waved her fingers before my eyes.

  “Eh? Of course. Just got distracted a bit, that’s all.”

  She laughed. “They’re pretty distracting, all right. That’s the troupe of Eschmoun, the oldest of all the Gadean dance troupes. They’re on their way to dance at the Great Dionysia in Athens, and then to the court of Ptolemy before they return to Iberia. That beauty on the top of the pile is Yeroshabel, said to be the finest dancer in the world.”

  “I can believe it,” I said, my throat gone oddly dry. I took a hefty slug of wine to wet it. I considered myself to be more worldly than most, and I had seen Gadean dancers before; but these women were doing the most shockingly orgiastic things I had ever beheld. The strangest thing was that it was all in pantomime, but with none of the broad, farcical gestures you see when Italians practice that art. The women’s faces remained as serene as those of sculptured Muses, their movements had swanlike grace, and nothing was really happening if you looked closely enough (I did). They simply left you with the impression that you had seen something only gods should look upon without being struck blind.


  When the performance ended, I jumped to my feet and applauded as vociferously as the rest. Even the most hardened whores were struck with admiration, and I instructed Hermes to go and toss some coins onto the stage. He complied eagerly, before they could get away.

  I resumed my seat. “Now, where were we?”

  “Would you like to meet Yeroshabel? I can arrange it.”

  “Alas, duty forbids, not to mention my wife.”

  “Most men don’t,” she said.

  “Don’t what?” I was still slightly befuddled by the spectacle. I know it wasn’t the wine. “Mention their wives, you mean? I suppose not. Well, mine is Caesar’s niece, and she shares many of his qualities.”

  She whistled. “I’d be careful around a woman like that, too. Caesar has been among my patrons, too. One of the best, in fact.”

  “I can believe that,” I assured her, now thoroughly relaxed in this woman’s company. It was her profession to be agreeable, I suppose.

  “Actually, he usually came here when he was entertaining important foreigners. In sizable parties most often. He saw to their entertainment, but his own feats weren’t quite up to his reputation, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I suppose his inroads among senatorial wives left him with little energy.” Somehow, I felt I should come to his defense.

  “I think little excites him except that which increases his power. He doesn’t care a bit about food, wine, or comfort, you know, despite his reputation as a rake.”

  “I know that better than most,” I said ruefully. “I’ve campaigned with him in Gaul.”

  “It’s the same with women or boys. He’ll go through the motions of being congenial, but I think he’s always planning his next election or campaign.”