The Venus Throw (8 page)

Having dispatched my guests, I was faced with the chore of finishing my packing for the trip to Illyria to see Meto. Bethesda had done much, but certain preparations can be
made only by the traveler. With the short winter days allowing less daylight for travel, I planned an early start and so had hoped to be abed early, but the preparations kept me up until midnight. It was just as well; once I finally did crawl into bed I couldn’t sleep, thinking about Dio and his plight. I reached out to touch Bethesda’s shoulder, but she turned away from me, peeved about something.

As I pondered the strange visit, it occurred to me that there were some things I had neglected to find out. Someone had recommended that Dio come to see me. Who? And what was he doing in the company of the little gallus? The two of them seemed ‘like oil and water, and yet Dio obviously trusted Trygonion enough to go out with him in disguise.

Ah well, I thought drowsily, these questions could wait until I returned from Illyria and saw Dio again. But as soon as this thought crossed my mind, I remembered the look I had seen in the philosopher’s eyes—the look of a man already dead. I gave a start and was suddenly wide awake.

I turned on my side and reached for Bethesda. She exhaled noisily and pulled away. I called her name softly, but she pretended to be asleep. What had I done wrong? At what had she taken offense? A bit of moonlight strayed onto the bed, illuminating her hair. She had rinsed it with henna that morning, to give it luster and to cover the gray. The smell was familiar, comforting, erotic. She could have helped me to fall asleep, I thought, but she seemed no more willing to comfort me than I had been willing to help Dio. I stared into the tangle of her hair, an impenetrable forest, pathless and dark.

I tossed and turned and at last rolled out of the bed and onto my feet. I was already wearing a long tunic to keep warm. I stepped into my shoes and reached for a woolen cloak.

Out in the atrium, beneath the shadowed gaze of Minerva, I looked up at the firmament of bright twinkling stars. The air was cold and clear. I studied the constellations, and to
tire my mind I tried to remember all their names, both Latin and Greek, which I had learned when I was young in Alexandria: the Great Bear, which Homer called the Wagon and others call the Seven Ploughing Oxen; the Little Bear, which some call the Dog’s Tail; the Goat, which some say has the tail of a fish . . .

Still I couldn’t sleep. I needed to walk. A few circuits around the fountain in the atrium was hardly enough to drain my restlessness. I walked to the front door and unbolted it. I stepped over the threshold and onto the smoothly paved street.

At night, the Palatine is probably the safest neighborhood in Rome. When I was a boy, it was as mixed as any other neighborhood in the city, with rich and poor, patricians and plebeians all crowded together. Then Rome’s empire began its great expansion, and some families became not merely wealthy but phenomenally so, and it was the Palatine, with its proximity to the Forum and its elevation above the less wholesome airs of the Tiber and the cramped valleys, which became their neighborhood of choice. Over the years tall tenements and cramped family dwellings were torn down block by block, and in their places were built great houses separated here and there by strips of green and little gardens. There are still humble dwellings among the mansions on the Palatine, and occupants who are far from wealthy (I’ m proof of that), but by and large it has become an enclave of the rich and the powerful. I live on the southern side, just up the hill from the House of the Vestals down in the Forum. In a circle of no great circumference around my house—hardly further than an arrow’s flight—I count among my neighbors Crassus, Rome’s wealthiest man, and my old patron Cicero, who the previous September had made a triumphant return from political exile and was busy rebuilding the house which an angry mob had destroyed two years before.

Such men own bodyguards—plenty of them, and not
merely brutes but well-trained gladiators—and such men demand order, at least in their immediate vicinity. The roving, drunken gangs of troublemakers who terrorize the Subura at night know better than to bring their rowdiness to the Palatine. Rapists and petty thieves practice their crimes in other places on more vulnerable prey. And so, after dark, the streets of the Palatine are quiet and mostly deserted. A man can take a brink stroll up the street on a chilly winter’s night beneath a waxing moon, alone with his thoughts, and not fear for his life.

Even so, when I heard the sound of drunken voices approaching, I felt it prudent to conceal myself until they passed. I stepped back against a wall, beneath the deep shadow cast by the branch of a yew tree. I was just across the street from a venerable old three-story tenement at the end of my block. The place was exceptionally well built and well maintained, the property of the Clodii, an ancient and distinguished patrician family. It had withstood the changes on the Palatine, and was still divided between shops on the ground floor and apartments above. The whole of the middle floor was rented to Marcus Caelius, the young man who had embroiled me a few years before in Cicero’s battle of wits with Catilina. It was his voice, together with another, that I now heard approaching from the eastern end of the street.

I stayed hidden in the shadows. I had nothing to fear from Caelius, but I was in no mood for company, especially drunken company. As he and his friend drew closer, careening up the street, I saw their shadows first, cast before them by the moonlight like spidery, elongated wraiths. They walked with their arms around each other’s shoulders, twisting this way and that, laughing and conversing in shouts and whispers. It wasn’t the first time I’d chanced to see Marcus Caelius coming home in such a state. Not much more than thirty years old and uncommonly good-looking—remarkably handsome, actually—Caelius was of that particular
class of young Romans whom Dio had spoken of that afternoon when he described Publius Asicius, the man he suspected of trying to poison him: charming, quick-witted young men with good backgrounds but uncertain prospects, notorious for their complete lack of scruples, witty and well educated with a taste for hard drinking and scandalous poetry, affable, ingratiating, and never under any circumstances to be trusted. Caelius and his friend were probably returning from a late-night party at some fashionable house nearby. The only surprise was that they hadn’t brought a young woman or two with them, unless, of course, they were satisfied to make do with each other for the night.

They stopped in the street before the entrance to Caelius’s private stairway. Caelius banged on the door, and while they waited for a slave to come open it I overheard some of their drunken conversation. When I heard Caelius say the name “Asicius” I gave a start. Probably, I thought, I merely imagined it, putting it together from a sigh and a hiss; I had just been thinking about Dio’s description of Publius Asicius, and so had the name in my mind. But then I heard it again. “Asicius,” Caelius said, “you ass, you very nearly flubbed it this time as well! Two disasters in a row!”

“Me?” cried the other man. I couldn’t see him well for the darkness, but like Caelius he appeared to be tall and broad-shouldered. His words were slurred, some shouted, some muttered, so that I could catch only fragments of what he said.
“I’m
not the one who . . . you neglected to
tell
me that we’ d have to . . . and then, to find . . .
already! . . .
and the look on his . . . oh go on, off to Hades with you, Caelius, along with that pitiful Egyptian . . .”

The door rattled and opened. Caelius and his friend moved to enter simultaneously and bumped into each other. Something clattered on the pavement; moonlight flashed on steel. Caelius turned back, stooped down and picked up the dagger that had been dropped. That was when he looked up and saw me in the shadows across the street.

He squinted drunkenly and turned his face sidelong, trying to decide whether I was a man or merely a shadow. I held my breath. He stepped slowly toward me, holding the dagger in his hand.

“Where in Hades are you off to now?” moaned Asicius. “Come on, Caelius, it’s cold out here. You said you’d warm me up!”

“Shut up!” Caelius whispered hoarsely. He was halfway across the street, staring straight at me.

“Caelius, what—is someone there?”

“Shut up, Asicius!”

The night was so still I thought they might be able to hear the pounding of my heart. Caelius’s dagger glinted in the moonlight. He stepped closer and tripped on a paving stone. I flinched.

“It’s only me, neighbor,” I said, through gritted teeth.

“Only—you, Gordianus!” Caelius grinned and lowered his dagger. I sighed with relief.

“Who is he?” demanded Asicius, swaggering up behind Caelius and reaching inside his tunic. “Trouble?”

“Oh, probably not,” said Caelius. In the moonlight, with a smile on his lips, he looked like Apollo done in white marble. “You’re not looking for trouble tonight, are you, neighbor?”

“Out for a walk,” I said. “I leave on a trip tomorrow. I can’t sleep.”

“Cold for a walk, isn’t it?” said Asicius.

“Not too cold for you to be out,” I said.

Asicius growled, but Caelius slapped him on the shoulder and laughed. “Go home and get some sleep, Gordianus! Only people up to no good are out at this time of night. Come on, Asicius. Tune to warm you up.” He put his arm around his companion’s shoulder and drew him back to the doorway. They disappeared inside and the door slammed shut.

In the stillness of the night, through the closed door, I
heard their muffled voices and the dump of their heavy footsteps on the stairway. These sounds quickly faded, and the empty street seemed almost preternaturally quiet. The cold suddenly penetrated my cloak, making me shiver. I walked back to my house taking quick, careful steps. Everything was bland oyster-white and fathomless black shadow. Cold moonlight had turned the world to stone.

I slipped back into bed. I might have stayed awake for a long time, staring into the darkness above, but Bethesda rolled toward me and snuggled against me, and I fell asleep almost at once.

As planned, my son Eco came calling before daybreak. Belbo brought horses from the stable, and the three of us set out through the quiet gray streets of the waking city. We took the Flaminian Way and passed through the Fontinal Gate, leaving the dangers and deceits of the city behind us, at least for a while.

T
he journey was without incident, except for a brief but wave-tossed crossing from Fanum Fortunae, at the terminus of the Flaminian Way, across to the Illyrian shore. In winter there are only a handful of boatmen who will ferry passengers across the Adriatic Sea, and on this trip we discovered why, for we very narrowly escaped a sudden squall that easily could have sent boat, Belbo, horses, Eco and myself to the bottom of the sea.

Before we left Fanum Fortunae, I had insisted on visiting the famous grounds consecrated to the goddess Fortune and leaving a few coins at her temple. “Better spent tipping the boatman,” Eco had muttered under his breath. But after surviving the wet, windy crossing, it was Eco who suggested we give thanks at the nearest temple of Fortune. Pounding rain turned the wooden roof into a drum. Inside the rustic little temple incense swirled, coins jangled, and the goddess smiled, while the trembling in my knees and the queasiness in my stomach gradually subsided.

With our feet back on solid ground, even the arduous, rain-soaked journey up the rugged coastline and over the windswept hills to Caesar’s winter quarters seemed like a holiday.

After he became a soldier in the legions of Gaius Julius Caesar in Gaul, I didn’t see my son Meto for months at a time, though we conversed often by letter. This was fortuitous in a way that I could never have foreseen.

Meto’s letters came to me by military messengers. This is a common way to send all sorts of correspondence, since only very wealthy men can afford to have slaves merely for the purpose of carrying letters, while military messengers range far and wide throughout the empire and are more reliable than merchants or pleasure travelers. Letters leaving Caesar’s camp, as it turned out, were not entirely private; the messengers who carried them usually read them to make sure that they contained no compromising information. One of Caesar’s most trusted messengers, impressed by Meto’s style and observations, passed a copy along to one of Caesar’s most trusted secretaries, who thought it worthwhile to pass it along to Caesar himself, who then moved Meto out of the tent where he had been ordered to polish newly minted armor and into the commander’s staff.