Catilina's Riddle (25 page)

The last I heard is that the election will probably be the day after tomorrow."

"What!"

"Yes, the same day as the election for praetors. That's why I'm heading back today. I figure that instead of two days from now, they'll try to have it tomorrow, you see, so they can fool me into showing up a day late! But I won't be fooled by those dirty Optimates. I'll be at the Field of Mars outside the voting stalls bright and early tomorrow morning, ready to be counted with the rest of my tribe, and if need be, I'll be there again the next day and the next. For Catilina!" he abruptly shouted, raising his fist.

Around us, among the small circle who could hear the man's voice above the din, a number of fists went up in the air and I heard the name

"Catilina!" shouted again and again, until several voices took it up as a sort of chant.

The man smiled at the demonstration of support he had set off, then turned back to me. "Of course, not everybody can stay in Rome

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indefinitely," he said, his smile fading. "That's why you see all these people going in the opposite direction. Common citizens have to get back to their farms, don't they? They have to worry about making a living and looking after their families. Not like Optimates, who can travel about at whim and never miss an election." He looked me up and down suspiciously. "I don't suppose you're one of the 'Best People'?"

"I don't have to justify myself to you, citizen," I snapped, and then realized I was not angry at the man, but at what he had told me. So it now appeared that the one thing I had most scrupulously avoided would take place, and
I
would be in Rome for the consular election! The gods were having a joke at my expense, I thought. No wonder we had suffered no mishaps on the journey—the gods insisted I get to Rome so that I could suffer through the election! I started to laugh.
I
stopped myself, then realized that it felt good to laugh, and so I let the laughter out.

The stranger started to laugh, too, interrupted by a loud burp.

He raised his fist again. "To Catilina!"

My laughter stopped. "To the day when this madness is finally over,"

I said under my breath.

"What's that?" the man said, leaning toward me.
I
merely shook my head, slowed my horse, and waved as he moved on ahead of me.

We made slow but steady progress into the city. Great clouds of smoke and dust rose from the Field of Mars, where thousands of voters from outside Rome had pitched their camps; on a normal day one would have seen chariot racers practicing or soldiers staging mock battles. The Villa Publica, the open space where voters gathered, and the adjoining voting stalls, built like a maze of sheep runs, were closed off and empty. Traffic slowed again at the Flaminian Gate, but once through its portals we were at last within the old walls of the city, in Rome itself.

The sun was lowering in the west, casting a red haze over the rooftops, but Rome was still very much awake, especially on the bustling Subura Way. The notorious street took us into the beating heart of the city, not to the place where its temples and palaces are proudly gathered, but into the district of butcher shops and brothels and gambling dens.

The smells of the city assaulted my nostrils—horse dung and furnace smoke, raw fish and perfume, a whiff of urine from a public privy mingling with the aroma of freshly baked bread. In a single block I saw more faces than I had seen all year in the countryside. I saw bodies that were old, fat, young, supple, clothed in costly tunics and gowns, or in rags, or almost naked. Women leaned out of the upper-story windows of cheap tenements and gossiped with one another across the street. Little boys

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played trigon in an open square, standing in a triangle and tossing their leather ball back and forth. An Ethiop in a red gown, her skin the color of lustrous ebony, gathered water at the public fountain.

The fountain caught my eye. It was the chief ornament of the neighborhood it served, with a trough below for horses and a spout above for people. The spout was made of marble, carved in the likeness of a kneeling dryad pouring water from an urn. The fountain had been there since I was a boy. More times than I could possibly count I had put my lips below the spout to get a cool drink of water, had filled my wineskin from it, had watered my horses from the trough. Nothing on earth could be more mundane, yet the fountain, and not just the fountain but everything around me, seemed at once familiar and strange. I had left Rome for good, I thought, and now I was back, and there was no denying that no matter how far afield I strayed or how long I stayed away, it would always be home.

I looked back at the cart. Diana was exhausted. She lay curled up against her mother, fast asleep despite the bumpy ride. Bethesda held one of her small hands and stroked her hair. She felt my gaze, looked up and smiled back at me. I knew in that moment that we shared the same sensation of homecoming, but she was less afraid to feel it, and less afraid to show it. The city was our city, no matter how much I might deny it or how deeply I might bury myself in the countryside. I breathed in deeply and smelled the Subura; I opened my eyes wide and tried to see everything before me at once. I turned and saw that Meto was looking at me oddly, the way I must so often look at him when I see him staring at the world around him in wide-eyed amazement. There is no place in the world like Rome.

We arrived at my old house on the Esquiline Hill dirty, hungry, and exhausted. The fading daylight had turned from red to hazy blue. The lamps in the house had already been lit. We were later than I had expected to be, but Eco, knowing the chaotic state of the roads into the city, told me he was surprised to see us so soon.

"You must have come by the Flaminian Way," he said, clapping his hands to summon slaves to help with the unpacking. I nodded. "A good thing," he said. "The bridges down by the Aurelian Way are said to be a complete nightmare. They say there are wagons with skeletons at the reins."

"With skeleton oxen to pull them?"

Eco laughed and nodded. "That's the joke they're telling down in the Subura."

"So very typical of the Subura," I said dryly. The macabre sense of

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humor was familiar yet strange, like the city itself, like the house in which I found myself. My house it had been for many years, and before that my father's. Here was the atrium and the garden where I had played host to so many callers over the years, and where
I
had first met my dear old friend, Lucius Claudius, when he came to consult me after seeing a dead man walking about in the Subura.

"The garden looks very well kept,"
I
said, with a slight catch in my throat.

"Yes, Menenia oversees the gardening herself. She's fond of growing things."

"The walls have a new coat of wash.
I
see you replaced those loose tiles along the roof and straightened the hinges on the front door. Even the fountain seems to be working."

Eco smiled and shrugged. "I wanted everything to be just right for Meto's special day. Ah, here's Menenia now."

My daughter-in-law approached with lowered eyes, greeting me with all the deference due a Roman patriarch. She had been quite a catch for Eco, considering his humble origins and the antiquity of her family name. He had picked a dark-haired beauty with olive skin, like Bethesda, which I think pleased his adoptive mother, whether she showed it or not. The open sky above the garden quickly darkened to a deep blue pierced by stars that twinkled like bits of frost. Tables and couches were brought into the open air, and the slaves served a hearty meal fit for weary travelers, though we were almost too tired to eat it. Before the sky had turned from deep blue to black, everyone was abed except Eco and me.

Once we were alone he asked me a few questions about Nemo and about Catilina's visit. I answered him wearily, and once he learned that the situation seemed to have come to a harmless if not very satisfactory conclusion, he did not press me with questions. He did inform me that the latest word on the elections was that they would be held on the day after the morrow—in other words, on the day after Meto's toga ceremony, while we would still be in Rome.

"Ah, well,"
I
sighed, "it can't be helped. Rome on an election day!

We shall certainly get a full taste of the big city."

He showed me to my old room, where Bethesda was already asleep, and which he and Menenia had vacated for our visit. Meto and Diana were sleeping in the room next door. Where Eco himself was going to sleep and how he had juggled his household slaves to make room for mine
I
was much too tired to try to figure out.
I
lay down beside Bethesda, who sighed in her sleep and shifted her hips to accommodate me, and
I
fell asleep as my head touched the pillow and my lips pressed against her scented hair.

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A strange sobbing woke me.

I
woke in slow, fitful stages, as men of my age do when drawn from the black sleep of utter weariness. For a moment I didn't know where I was—a strange thing to experience in a house where I had lived most of my life. The furniture had been moved about, that was the problem, and the bed was different.

The sobbing that woke me came from the room next door.

I thought of Diana. The image of her finding the beheaded corpse of Nemo sprang into my mind, and I was awake all at once, conscious but still disoriented. My heart raced, but my limbs lagged behind. I stood up, banged my elbow against the wall, and cursed King Numa.

But it was not Diana who sobbed—the noise was not high-pitched or childlike enough. Nor was it exactly sobbing, but a kind of rhythmic, choking cry that came through clenched teeth and tightly pressed lips, the sort of frightened whimper made by someone in a nightmare.

I walked into the hallway. The sound ceased for a moment, then I heard it again through the thin curtain draped across the doorway to the room shared by Meto and Diana. A lamp set into the wall still burned with a low flame—placed there by thoughtful Eco, I was sure; he knew his father would have to rise in the night and pass water and might trip or bump his knee. I took the lamp, pulled aside the curtain, and stepped into the tiny room.

Diana was sitting up in her little sleeping couch, her back against the wall, blinking the sleep from her eyes as if she had just woken up.

She pulled the thick coverlet up to her neck and looked at Meto with grave concern. "Papa, what's wrong with him?"

I looked down at Meto, who rocked back and forth on his bed. His coverlet was all twisted and tangled; his hands had become trapped in the cloth. His forehead was beaded with sweat, and his jaw was tightly clenched. Behind his shut lids his eyes seemed to twitch and dart about.

He began to whimper again.

Once before I had seen him this way, not long after I had taken him into my household and before
I
had manumitted him and made him my son.

"Papa?" said Diana again, her voice very small. "Is Meto—"

"He's all right," I said softly. "He's only dreaming. It must be a very bad dream, but that's all it is. You mustn't worry. Here, I'll take care of him. Why don't you go sleep with your mother tonight?"

The suggestion pleased her immensely. She gathered up her coverlet, draping it around her like a grown woman's stola, and hopped out of her

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bed. She stopped so that I could give her a kiss and then hurried to the door. "You're sure he's all right, Papa?"

"Yes," I said, and Diana, her expression still grave but not frightened, hurried off to join her mother.

I stood over Meto, watching his tormented face by the lamplight, uncertain whether I should wake him. Suddenly he gave a start and opened his eyes.

He sucked in a ragged breath. He reached to cover his face, but his hands were caught in the twisted cloth. For a moment he panicked, whimpering as if he still dreamed and jerking wildly at the coverlet so that he only became more entangled. I put down the lamp and gripped his arms to stop his thrashing. After a moment he relaxed, and together we extricated his hands.

He reached up to his face, then pulled his hands away, blinking in confusion at the sweat that glittered on his fingertips.

"You were having a nightmare," I said softly.

"I was in Sicily," he said in a hoarse whisper.

"I thought so. You had a dream like that once before, long ago."

"Did I? But I never think about Sicily. I hardly even remember the time I spent there. Why should I dream about it, especially now?" He sat up and blinked at the sweat that trickled into this eyes.

"I don't know. Here, use the coverlet to dry your forehead."

"Look, the whole pillow is wet! I'm so thirsty. . . . "

I looked about and glimpsed the dull gleam of a copper ewer and a cup on a small table by the door. I poured a cup of water and put it in Meto's hand. He drank it down in a single draft.

"Oh, Papa, it was horrible. Each of my hands was bound up in rags, just as the farmer used to do when he made me stand in the orchard to scare away the crows. He bundled my hands so I couldn't pick the fruit.

The day was hot as an oven. The earth was so parched and broken that it was like a field of bricks—I kept stumbling and falling and skinning my knees. My lips were blistered from the sun. Sweat ran into my eyes, and I couldn't wipe it away. I was so thirsty, but I couldn't leave the field to get water or the farmer would beat me. I ran to the well anyway, but I couldn't pull up the bucket. I kept dropping it because my hands were all bound up and clumsy. And then the crows came—thousands of them.

They swept over the orchard like horrible, shrill locusts until every tree was stripped bare. I knew the master would beat me. He would beat me until I died."

Meto shuddered. He stared raptly at the dancing flame of the lamp.

"And then I was no longer in the field. I was back in Baiae. Not in the villa but in the arena that Crassus built especially to put his slaves to

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death. It was like being in a well, hemmed in by high walls all around with the sun beating on us. The sand was slick with blood. The mob leaned over the rail and jeered down at us. Their faces were hideous, all twisted with hate—and then the crows again! Thousands of crows, so many that the sky was black with them. They swarmed over everything.