Catilina's Riddle (55 page)

not with water, but with demolition!' "

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His voice was shaking with emotion. His eyes glittered. I had never seen him so stripped of his composure. Tongilius knelt beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder. We were silent for a long time. The flame needed to be rekindled, but no one moved.

At last I spoke. "Are you telling me, Catilina, that you are completely innocent of conspiracy? That your secretive comings and goings, your alliance with all the discontents of the city, your military link with Manlius—that these things exist only in Cicero's feverish imaginings?

Are you telling me that you have no intention of bringing down the state?"

His eyes reflected the firelight but somehow seemed to sparkle from within. "I claim no false innocence. But I do say that my enemies have manipulated me into a position where no other option is open to me. I have always worked within the political system of the Roman state.
I
have suffered the indignities of spurious trials, I have made endless compromises with men like Caesar and Crassus; I have submitted myself to electoral campaigns of ferocious ugliness. Twice I have run for consul; twice the Optimates have engineered my defeat. No one can say that I looked to violent action until no legitimate recourse remained. The Republic is a shambles, a tottering pile of bricks about to fall, with the Optimates standing jealously on top. Who will bring it down? Who will pick up the pieces and refashion it to their choosing? Why should it not be me, and why should
I
not use whatever tools are called for?

"Yes, for some time I have contemplated the possibility of violence, but to say that
I
have a plot afoot is absurd. I have met in secret with friends; I have consulted with Manlius about the readiness and loyalty of his troops. Call it conspiracy if you want, but so far it has remained a vague expression of a shared will for creating a change, with no consensus about how to do it. Manlius is eager to use his veterans. Lentulus favors inciting slaves to revolt, an insanity I utterly reject. Cethegus, always hotheaded, would resort to burning Rome." He shook his head.

"Do you know what my dream is? I think of those ancient revolts of the plebeians, when to claim their rights they banded together and simply walked out of Rome, leaving the patricians to cope for themselves and ultimately to seek compromise. If I could draw all the discontented to me—the poor, the indebted, the powerless—and bring the Optimates to their knees without shedding a drop of blood, I would do it. But that is only a sentimental folly; the Optimates will never give up a shred of their power. The leaders of a peaceful withdrawal would be massacred and their followers enslaved.

"It's Cicero who has forced matters to a crisis. Where there was no evidence of a plot, he invented evidence. Where my colleagues and I have procrastinated, he has forced us to take a stand. He has set the stakes; he must die, or we must die, and there can be no middle ground.

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He provokes a premature conflict, for his own purposes. He thinks that if he can destroy us now, during his term as consul, he will have achieved true greatness; the people will love him, the Optimates will kiss his feet, he will be the savior of Rome.

"Yet even now I waver. From his speech, from his repeated demands that I go into exile, I wonder if Cicero would be satisfied with that.

Would that sate his appetite for exercising power? Would that be a great enough achievement for the New Man from Arpinum, to have saved Rome from a conspiracy that never existed and to have driven a dangerous rebel into exile before he ever had a chance to rebel!"

"Will you go into exile, then?" said Meto, drawing closer to the fire.."Or will you take up arms?"

"Exile . . . " said Catilina, not as an answer but as if he were testing the quality of the word. "Before I left Rome, I dispatched letters to several men of rank—former consuls, patricians, magistrates. I told them that I was leaving for Massilia, on the southern coast of Gaul—not as a guilty man fleeing justice, but as a lover of peace eager to avoid civil strife and no longer able to defend myself against persecution and trumped-up charges. I could go to Massilia—if they allow it, if they don't block the passes to Gaul. To take up arms—I'm not ready, I'm still uncertain. Cicero has pressed the crisis to his own advantage; he has made a fugitive of me against my will. He wants me to take desperate action, and in doing so, stumble."

"And what of your wife?" I said.

He turned his face so that the fire no longer lit it. "Aurelia and her daughter I commended to the care of Quintus Catulus. He is one of the staunchest of the Optimates, but an honest man. She'll be safe with him, whatever happens; he will not harm her, and no one could ever accuse him of colluding with me."

The storm grew worse. The wind howled outside the mine like a screaming chorus of lemures. Thunderbolts pounded the mountain and made it shudder like the belly of a drum. Water poured down the steep slopes in great sheets, carrying uprooted trees and rocky debris. Bethesda would be mad with worry, I thought, and felt a pang of dread. In such a storm, even the dogged pursuers of Catilina might have turned back. What if they had sought shelter in my home and found me gone? Spinning out the consequences of such thoughts kept me far from sleep.

The hours passed uneasily. Catilina's men took turns trying to sleep, wrapping themselves in the blankets I had brought and pressing against one another for warmth. The watch at the entrance grew lax; not even a Titan would have dared to scale the mountain and attack us on such

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a night. Catilina sat against a stone wall. Tongilius lay curled on his side, clutching a blanket, his head on Catilina's lap. Catilina's face was in shadow, but I could see that his eyes remained open; now and again they caught the flicker of the flames.

Meto dozed, but at one point he opened his eyes and was wide awake. He stared at something set atop a rock against one of the walls.

The cloth in which it was wrapped had come loose, exposing a glint of silver. "What is that?" he whispered, rising to a crouch and stepping toward it with an odd look on his face.

Catilina slowly turned his head. "The eagle of Marius," he said in a low voice.

I peered at it through the gloom. It was an eagle with its beak held high and its wings spread. But for the glimmer of silver, it might have been a real bird, frozen in glory. Meto reached toward it, almost but not quite touching it with his fingertips.

"Marius carried it in his campaign against the Cimbri, when you and I were boys, Gordianus."

"It's absurdly heavy," murmured Tongilius sleepily. "I know; I carried it up the mountain."

Catilina ruffled the youth's hair and then gently stroked it. "If it should come to battle, I intend to carry it atop a pole as my standard.

An extraordinary object, is it not?"

"How did you ever come to possess it?"

"That is a long story."

"The storm rages; we have all night."

"Suffice to say that it came to me through Sulla, during the proscriptions. It has a bloody history. Cicero told the Senate that I keep it in my house as some sort of shrine, bowing down to worship it before commencing with my murders. He tarnishes even pure silver with his acid tongue."

"An eagle," said Meto, turning his face toward me so that the firelight reflected from the silver lit his face like a strange mask.

"Yes," I murmured, suddenly sleepy.

"But an
eagle,
Papa—don't you see?"

"Yes, an eagle," I said, closing my eyes.

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C H A P T E R T H I R T Y - F O U R

he storm abruptly lifted to reveal a sky littered with clouds shredded like torn pennants, lit from beneath with a pale orange glow by the first rays of dawn. Catilina's men roused themselves, gathered up their things, and helped one an-T other scale the wall that blocked off the mine. The only evidence left behind of their stay were some bread crumbs and apple cores, scattered pieces of charcoal and the tangy smell of a wood fire.

The path was littered with small rock slides and broken branches, but these were minor impediments. A greater handicap for me was the aching in my legs. After climbing the mountain, my knees had turned to rusty hinges and my shins to splintered wood. When I was a boy, my father told me that it was a joke of the gods that going downhill was more painful than going uphill. I had not understood him then. Now, looking at the younger men around me who had ridden from Rome, gotten a desultory sleep in a dank mine, and were now tramping down the path with smiles on their faces, I understood him only too well. Each step sent a little thunderbolt quivering through my knees.

I dreaded the crossing of the swollen stream. As I had feared, it was more turbulent than before, or at least looked that way in the light of dawn, which picked out every scudding eddy and treacherous hole.

But the task was made easy by our numbers. By linking arms, clasping hands to wrists, we formed a chain stronger than the rushing waters.

The young men of Catilina's company seemed exhilarated by the plunge into icy water up to their thighs. I bore it as best I could and laughed along with them, if only to still the chattering of my teeth.

At the place where the path diverged, leading one way to Gnaeus's

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house and the other way down the disused, steep descent to the Cassian Way, I pulled Catilina aside. "Which path do we follow here?" I said.

He raised an eyebrow. "We go down the way we came, of course."

His men waited for him at the head of the narrow trail. He waved for them to proceed without him. "Otherwise we should end up stealing on tiptoe by the house of that awful neighbor of yours, with all those howling dogs. Surely you remember—"

"I do. But there are other things I remember as well."

"Gordianus, what are you talking about?"

"You must never come to my house again. Your enemies will watch for you there—"

"I understand."

"My family—I must think of their safety."

"Of course. And I must think of keeping my head on my shoulders!"

"Catilina, no jokes, no riddles!"

He mirrored the distress on my face. "Gordianus—"

"Lucius, are you coming?" Tongilius waited at the trailhead, with Meto beside him.

"Go on without me," said Catilina over his shoulder, in a jovial voice. "The old men must rest their legs for a moment."

Tongilius pursed his lips thoughtfully, then nodded and ducked out of sight. Meto followed, but not before looking me in the eye and hesitating, long enough to be invited to join us. At last he followed Tongilius, scowling. Why did he have to take everything I did as a personal affront?

"Now, Gordianus, what is this all about?"

"Ever since Marcus Caelius first approached me about playing host to you, strange things have been transpiring on my farm. The first was a headless body discovered in the stable." I paused and studied his face.

He only stared back at me blankly. "Then came the body in the well—"

"Yes, you told me about that. The poor goatherd who showed us this path. What did you call him?"

"No, what did
you
call him, Catilina?"

"What do you mean?"

"What did you call poor Forfex? Was he your spy, your confederate, your dupe? Why did he die? Why was his head cut off before he was dropped down my well?"

Catilina looked at me gravely. "You do me an injustice to ask me such questions, Gordianus. I have no idea what you're talking about."

I took a breath. "You have no secret relationship with Gnaeus Claudius?"

"Your disagreeable neighbor? I saw the man only once, and that was with you! Afterward I told Crassus about the mine. I advised him to make an offer on this property, but I told you, he wasn't interested in dealing with the Claudii. So I never came back."

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"But you're here now, hiding on Gnaeus's property."

"Without his knowledge. Though not for much longer if we linger here; one of his goatherds will come along and raise an alarm. When I first saw the mine, I knew it would make an ideal hiding place, especially if Crassus bought the property. Of course, that was postulated on Crassus's remaining loyal to me." His eyes flashed with bitterness. "Still, the place turned out to be useful, didn't it? As for these strange happenings on your farm, what have they to do with me?"

"They occurred at key moments, when
I
resisted Caelius's pressure to put you up."

"Pressure? Are you saying that you never wanted to have me?"

I shook my head, not wanting to speak. How could I say that the idea had come from Cicero?

"Gordianus, I never told Caelius to strong-arm you into having me.

Caelius told me you were happy to do so."

"But your riddle in the Senate, about the headless masses and the Senate with its withered body. The coincidence of the headless bodies on my farm . . . "

"Gordianus, are you telling me that all this time, you've hosted me only because Caelius forced you to? Well, there you have your villain.

Someone told Cicero's henchmen to go looking for me on your farm last night: Caelius, obviously. He must have been loyal to Cicero all along.

By Jupiter, when I think of the confidences I divulged to him . . . " He threw back his head with a pained expression. "Gordianus, have you then no affection for my cause at all? Were you merely doing Caelius's bidding when you let me into your house?"

Now it was my turn to mirror his look of consternation. I might have said yes and not told a lie, but the truth no longer seemed as simple as that.

"Never mind," he said. "The important thing is that you didn't betray me last night, when you had the chance. Unless—" He looked at the trailhead, and his face turned gray. "Unless Tongilius and the others are descending into an ambush!"

He put his hand on the hilt of his sword. I felt a quiver of panic.

He turned to me with murder in his eyes, and for the first time I saw the true depth of his despair. Lucius Sergius Catilina was a patrician, born into privilege and respectability. Trust was his birthright and highest value—trust in the gods, trust in the immutability of his station, trust in the high regard of his fellow citizens; trust, also, in the invin-cibility of his own innate charm. Now these layers of trust had been stripped away from him one by one; gods and men alike had betrayed him. I laid my hand on his. I had to grit my teeth with the effort to keep his sword in its scabbard. "No, Catilina, your men are safe. I haven't