SPQR VIII: The River God's Vengeance Page 9

  “Probably still warm, too,” Hermes added helpfully, his voice sounding odd because he was pinching his nostrils shut.

  The overseer scratched his shaven, malformed head. “Vulpus usually takes deliveries in that district. His wagon was here just a little while ago. Over here, I think—” We followed him around the rim of the excavation to its northern quadrant. Inside the pit was an unbelievably ghastly mess of putrescence: bodies and pieces of bodies in many stages of bloat and decay. Some were as dessicated as Egyptian mummies, some looked like infiated pig’s bladders, while yet others, more recently expired, looked as if they could get up and walk out of the pit. The legs of dead horses thrust upward like ship’s masts in a harbor.

  What made it all the more horrible, if anything could, was that the weight of the relatively whole corpses on top pressed down on the semiliquid mass of decayed fiesh mixed with lime below, forcing a disgusting, bubbling stew of putrefaction to the surface. The resulting mixture of slimy fiuid, recognizable human fragments and patches of fur all mixed together looked like the primal soup from which all life had been created.

  The air was full of fine, powdered lime. This kept us continually coughing, which made it all but impossible to breathe through our mouths. The hideous stench was unavoidable.

  “Is it always as bad as this?” I asked, just to be saying something. My wits were addled with disgust.

  “This is just the usual. You get so you don’t notice it after a while. You should’ve been here right after Pompey’s triumphal Games. We had dead elephants in the pits, then.”

  Hermes and I jumped involuntarily when the relative quiet of the ugly scene was disturbed. First came a faint rumble that seemed to come from beneath our feet. Then there was a roar as of a powerful, subterranean wind as, a hundred paces away, a fissure appeared in the ground and a plume of dirt and lime dust shot into the air.

  “Demons are escaping from the underworld!” I cried, my nerves already unsteadied by the infernal scene.

  “Just gas venting from an old pit,” the overseer assured me, as the pall of stench from the fissure beggared all that we had smelled thus far. “They’ll keep farting like that for years. Pay no mind.”

  He called to a little group of pit slaves, and they talked for a while in the shortened, simplified Latin spoken by the lowest of Rome’s poor. It sounded like something dogs would use to communicate among themselves and is a foreign language to most of us. Four of them descended into the pit, and the overseer came back to us.

  “They think they can reach the ones from Vulpus’s last load. They’ll drag your man up here. Of course,” he grinned crookedly, showing scummy teeth, “they’ll expect a little reward.”

  “Hermes, a sestertius for each man and a denarius for our friend here.” Hermes dug into my rapidly shrinking purse, clucking at this extravagance. I didn’t think it an opulent reward. I wouldn’t have gone into that pit for the loot of Tigranocerta.

  Within a few minutes the men returned, carrying a limp body, too recently dead to stiffen. Even in the dimming light I could tell that they had found the right man. They laid the burly body at our feet, and I crouched beside him. He was lightly dusted with lime, so that he resembled a statue carved from rather inferior white marble. Just below his breastbone was a small blotch.

  “Well, what have we here?” I mused. I grabbed up a handful of dry grass, absently amazed that anything could grow on this blighted ground. With it I scoured away at the mark, unafraid of contamination. The death rites would have been performed when he died at the temple. At least, I hoped so. With the clotted blood and lime scrubbed away, a neat little incision, less than an inch wide, was revealed.

  “Expertly done,” I said. “A dagger thrust beneath the breastbone, angled upward into the heart. Instant death and all bleeding internal.” I straightened up. “I’ve seen enough. Thank you, overseer.”

  He shrugged. “Always glad to be of service to Senate and People.” Then, to his men, “Toss this stiff back in.”

  “Can’t you do anything about this place?” Hermes asked, as we hastened back toward the Esquiline Gate.

  “Fortunately for me,” I told him, “an aedile has no powers or responsibility outside the walls of Rome. At least there is one awful mess that doesn’t come under the purview of my office.”

  6

  WE WERE ALL BUT STAGGERING with fatigue by the time we reached my doorway. Inside, Julia rushed forward to greet me, then stood back.

  “Decius, where have you been?” Her expression was almost comically horrified.

  “The Puticuli,” I told her. “Actually, I feel rather lucky. That’s usually a one-way trip for those who go out there.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think I want to hear about this.” She all but snatched my toga off, sending me spinning. She tossed it to a slave and said, “Take this up to the roof and spread it out on the arbor to air. Decius, take that tunic off and put on a clean one. We have guests.”

  “Guests? I wasn’t expecting any.” She hustled me into our bedroom, yanked my tunic off over my head, opened a chest, drew out another, gave it a shake, drew it down over my head, settled and belted it, all with amazing speed and talking the whole time.

  “How can you expect anything? It’s still dark when you leave the house in the morning, and it’s dark before I see you again. I’ve had slaves out looking for you all evening, but they couldn’t locate you.”

  “It’s been a busy day, as they’ve all been lately. Who is here?”

  “Your father, for one, and some other distinguished men. They were about to leave in a bad temper, but I refilled their cups and persuaded them to stay just a little while longer.”

  “Just what I needed,” I said. “Father in a good temper is unpleasant enough. Who are the others?”

  “You’ll see for yourself, won’t you?” she said, impatiently. “Now stop wasting time.” With a palm at my back, she pushed me into the triclinium, where my father and the others sat sipping wine around a brazier of glowing coals, brought in to take the chill off the air. Even if the African breeze was melting the mountain snows, Roman evenings were still cool at that time of year. With him were two other Metelli, Scipio and Nepos, and a man I recognized from the Senate meetings he had presided over a few years previously.

  “About time,” Father groused. “You haven’t been out carousing as usual, have you?” My father, Decius Caecilius Metellus the Elder, who had held every public office including the censorship, still treated me as a child even though I held office. Legally it was his right to do so, since he had never seen fit to go through the manumission ceremony that would have granted me full adult status. By law, I married and held property only at his whim. This was yet another of those quaint old customs that cause me to wonder how we Romans ever amounted to anything in the world.

  “Your son is an incredibly busy man,” said Marcus Valerius Messala Niger. “Especially since, unlike too many of our aediles, he is so attentive to the duties of his office.” This from a man who, as I was rapidly learning, had used his own offices only to enrich himself at sore cost to the citizens. I hated to think what his provincial administrations must have been like. He was a burly, balding man with a ready smile and blue eyes that twinkled merrily.

  “We all remember what it was like to be an aedile,” Nepos said. His presence was almost as great a puzzle as that of Messala. He was a lifelong adherent of Pompey’s, making him the only prominent member of my family who was not of the anti-Pompeian faction. Here was yet another evidence of the family’s new tilt.

  I took a cup from the table and tried to get some of the taste of the Puticuli out of my mouth. “What brings such distinguished visitors at this odd hour?” I asked. “Not that you would not be welcome at any hour, of course. And such an oddly assorted company, too.”

  “A number of things,” Father said. “Surely you have not forgotten that the three of us”—he indicated himself, Scipio, and Nepos—”are all contributing substantia
lly to your Games?”

  “I could hardly forget. Speaking of which—” and I told them about Milo’s pet thugs. They listened carefully to the list of names, nodding with enthusiasm.

  “This is splendid news,” Scipio said. “I’ve seen all of those men fight, and they’re at the top of the first rank. Celer will have the best funeral games ever.”

  “And to get them so cheap!” Father gloated.

  “Clodius will be enraged,” said Messala. “He’ll say these are Milo’s games.”

  “Forget Clodius,” Nepos advised. “He’s just Caesar’s dog, and Caesar is kicking in for Decius’s munera, as his wedding present for his niece. Now, if you would like something really unusual to liven up the proceedings, I know two senators who’ve fallen out over some mutual accusations of bribery. They’re eager to fight it out, and they’ve told me they’ll volunteer to fight in your munera, Decius.”

  I thought this intriguing. Men of high rank sometimes contended as gladiators to get around the laws against dueling. Since the fights were religious observances, voluntary sacrifices, so to speak, they could not be prosecuted for it afterward.

  “I forbid it!” Father said, emphasizing his words with a chopping motion of his hand. “It is infamous that senators and equites are seen performing in public! There has been too much of that lately, and I will not be a party to such scandalous behavior.” What a spoilsport.

  “When Scipio Africanus celebrated his funeral games for his father and uncle,” Metellus Scipio said complacently, “all the combatants were free men who volunteered to honor the dead and Africanus himself. There were senators, centurions, and other ranking soldiers among them, as well as the sons and other high-born warriors of allied chieftains.” He was never slow to remind people of his glorious ancestors.

  “That was a hundred and fifty years ago,” Father objected, “before the rules of the munera were settled as they are now. And those Games were not celebrated at Rome, but at Cartago Nova.”

  Valerius Messala seemed highly amused. “Besides, there are no Romans of such distinction to honor in this generation.” A subtle jab at both the Scipios and the Metelli. “Anyway, I know the two you mention, and they are both fat and unskilled. It would be laughable, and we can’t have the citizens laughing at senators. We give them too much to laugh about as it is.”

  Father held his silence sullenly. He always hated it when someone agreed with him for the wrong reason. So do I, for that matter. I hadn’t expected to find Messala such an agreeable sort. Admittedly, my taste in these matters was not shared by many. I’d liked Catilina, too. I don’t consider this to be a lapse of judgment on my part. Often, the very worst men are the most likable, and the upright and incorruptible ones the most repulsive. Marcus Antonius and Cato are two excellent cases in point.

  “So much for the Games,” Father said. “They shall be celebrated, and they shall be a success. My boy, I understand you have wasted the bulk of two valuable days looking into the collapse of a single, shoddily built insula.”

  “Your boy,” I informed him acidly, “spent the morning in a sewer and the evening in a charnel pit. Activities, you will agree, in which I seldom indulge on normal days. My office, however, demands it.”

  “Your office involves the whole City,” Father said, “not the prosecution of a single crooked builder. Assign a client or freedman to investigate the matter and get on with your job!”

  “I am not investigating a single builder,” I said, trying to rein in my temper. “I am investigating what looks to be vicious corruption suffusing the whole residential building trade in Rome.” I did not want to argue openly in front of a nonfamily outsider, but Father was forcing the issue. This was extraordinarily tactless of him. Old age was catching up with him at last, I decided.

  “The late Lucius Folius was the builder of that insula,“ said Valerius Messala. “I know because he was awarded his licenses and contracts during my censorship. It seems he’s been killed by his own greed, like a character in a Greek play.”

  I had been expecting something like this. I said nothing about the murdered slave. “Sometimes the gods dispense justice. But no contractor builds only a single house.” I thought of the stack of archival documents in my study and decided that I had better not mention them to these three. Of course, it was likely that Messala already knew all about them. To change the subject, I said, “Does anyone besides me and the rivermen know that Rome is about to be fiooded?”

  “I’ve heard some talk of it,” Father said. “It happens every few years, and there’s nothing much we can do about it.”

  “It’s going to be worse than usual this year,” I informed them, “because the drains are going to be all but useless. They haven’t been scoured in years, and the water could stand in the lower parts of the City for weeks, and then we’ll have pestilence on top of everything else.” I looked at Messala as I said this. He looked back blandly.

  “You are too easily alarmed. Even if we’re inconvenienced for a while, it’s no catastrophe,” Nepos insisted. “The forums are easily evacuated, the temples and basilicas are built well up on their platforms, and only the poorest people have their homes on low ground. Give them fine Games when it’s all over, and they’ll forget all about their troubles. Concentrate on that.”

  There was a small commotion from the direction of my gateway, but I ignored it. Doubtless some petitioner, I thought. An aedile’s lack of privacy was not as extreme as that of a tribune of the people. At least we were allowed to close our doors. But in an office that concerned the public weal, the public was not shy about expressing its wants.

  “The hour grows late,” Messala said, “and we should not detain the aedile. He has work to attend to.”

  “Right, right,” Father said, shaken from his grumpy reverie. “Decius, there is something you should know, since it concerns both the family and your tenure of office.”

  At last they were getting to it. “I confess I was puzzled by the presence of so distinguished a gathering. Two ex-censors and a pontifex, no less. May I assume this has something to do with our family’s growing warmth toward Pompey?”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself!” Father barked. “We have to get this awful year done with first.”

  “And the great difficulty with this year,” Messala slid in smoothly, “is that the past election scandals have yet to sort themselves out. We’ve been forced to appoint an inter-rex“—he nodded toward Scipio—”and it looks as if we shall have to continue the Interregnum for some time to come.”

  “Is there a constitutional limit on the period of an Interregnum?“ I asked. “I confess that I’ve never looked into it.”

  “Cicero and Hortensius Hortalus have researched the matter, and there seems to be no limit that’s ever been spelled out.”

  “The real limit,” Scipio said, “is that it’s such a disagreeable office. There is great prestige, of course, since the Senate only chooses interreges from among the most distinguished members, but”—he threw up his hands in disgust— “you have all the duties and responsibilities of both consuls, only no imperium and no province to govern afterward. It’s a great burden.”

  When the Republic was founded, we expelled our kings, and Rome has been very hostile to the concept of monarchy ever since. Only two very ancient offices survive with the title “rex“ in them: the interrex, the “king-between,” and the Rex Sacrorum, “King of Sacrifices.” Neither office is invested with any real power for the very good reason that no Roman would confer power on anyone called a king of any sort.

  “For that reason,” Scipio went on, “I will step down from this office at the end of next month.”

  “Will the consuls be able to assume office at that time?” I asked.

  “Not without violence,” Father said. “Valerius Messala will take up the Interregnum. There will, of course, be a pro forma vote in the Senate, but it is foregone. No one else really wants the office in a year as disorderly as this one.”

 
Messala smiled. “One does what one must in the service of the Senate and People.”

  “The consuls,” Father continued, “when they finally do assume office, will have no more than half a term. Forget about them. They are nobodies. It is next year we must be prepared for.”

  “Scipio hinted at something of the sort yesterday,” I said.

  “Exactly.” Father rubbed at the great scar that all but halved his face. “The City is in chaos, and this disorder must be suppressed before civic life can return to normal. It’s tearing the Empire apart. There is only one man with both the military prestige and the popularity to do the job, and that’s Pompey.”

  “You can’t be proposing a dictatorship!” I objected. “Not after all our family’s opposition to him!”

  Father favored us with one of his very rare smiles, the sort he allowed himself only after pulling some superlatively underhanded bit of political chicanery. It was a ghastly sight. “Not precisely. What we are going to do is make Pompey sole consul for next year. Full imperium and no colleague to overrule or interfere with him.”

  I let the political implications sink in, saying nothing. Pompey would be virtual dictator except in one all-important factor: A dictator held an unaccountable office. Not only did he have full imperium, but he could not be called to account for his actions when he stepped down from office. As sole consul, Pompey would have a free hand to take whatever corrective measures he pleased, but he could not abuse the office because he would be an ordinary citizen when he stepped down and could be sued for his actions by any other citizen. Pompey would take only the necessary measures because he was a truly gifted administrator, when he wasn’t besotted by military glory.

  “Excellent,” I said at last. “It’s an inspired compromise.” Barbarians, with their traditions of monarchy or tribal wrangling, never understand that our Republic was powerful, not because of our rigid adherence to principle, but because of our ability to compromise.

  Father nodded. “I knew you’d catch on quickly. You are a Caecilius Metellus after all, in spite of all appearances.”