Catilina's Riddle (62 page)

The slaves had done a good job of repairing the wall during the summer, but already the rains and the ice were taking a toll; I noticed several small cracks here and there in the mortar. I looked across the open fields that gradually rose toward my house, from which the smoke of wood fires rose into the still air. From such a distance, with the ridge

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behind it, it looked the very picture of a rich man's peaceful retreat from the city.

I came to the stream and turned south. Except for the evergreens, all the foliage along its course had been stripped naked by the winter, and the stream had frozen over, locking the waterwheel in place until the thaw. Someday, I thought, the controversy over the stream would be settled for good, and I could visit its banks without thinking of lawyers, law courts, and the sour countenance of Publius Claudius. A hill obscured my view of his property, but I could see a plume of smoke rising from his house. What was my neighbor doing on such a day? Probably keeping warm with his little Butterfly, I thought. The memory of my brief visit to his house caused me to shiver.

Following the stream, I came to the thicket at the southwestern corner of the farm, the secret place where I had buried Nemo. Amid the denuded branches it was not hard to find his stele. Who had he been, after all—a pawn of Cicero's, or Catilina's, or of Marcus Caelius?

Not far away we had buried the body of Forfex. Though we knew his name, I had buried him as a slave, with only a stone to mark the place.

I climbed the ridge and looked down over all. The view was pleasing, even to a melancholy eye, with its muted shades of gray and umber. I would have stayed longer on the hill, but the cold in my fingers and toes drove me back to the house.

Aratus met me at the door. "Master," he said in a low voice, "you have a visitor, waiting for you in your library."

"From the city?" I said, feeling a prickle of dread.

"No, Master. The visitor is your neighbor, Gnaeus Claudius."

"What in the name of Jupiter can he want?" I muttered.

I shrugged off my cloak and headed toward the library. I found Gnaeus seated in a backless chair, looking bored and fingering the little tag attached to a scroll tucked away in its pigeonhole, as if he had never seen a written document before. He raised an eyebrow when I entered but did not bother to stand.

"What do you want, Gnaeus Claudius?"

"Bitter weather we're having," he remarked in a conversational drawl. "Beautiful weather in its way, if a little harsh."

"Yes, harsh, that's what I meant to say. Like country living in general. It's a hard life, running a farm, especially if you don't have a home in town to retreat to. People from the city read a few poems and imagine it's all butterflies and fauns lurking in the woods. The reality is quite different. All in all, I gather you've had a very harsh year here on cousin Lucius's old farm."

"From where did you gather that idea?"

"So my cousin Claudia says."

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"And what concern is that of yours?"

"Perhaps
I
could help you."

"I don't think so, unless you have hay to sell me."

"Of course I don't! You know there are no decent fields on the mountain for growing hay!"

"Then what are you talking about?"

His sudden vehemence slowly faded into a smile. "I should like to make an offer to buy this farm."

"It's not for sale. If Claudia told you so—"

"I merely assumed you might be ready to give it up and go back where you belong."

"This is where
I
belong."

"I think not."

"I don't care what you think."

"This is Claudian land, Gordianus. It has been Claudian land since—"

"Tell that to the spirit of your late cousin. It was his will that I should have this land."

"Lucius was always different from the rest of us. He had more money and took everything for granted. No appreciation of his status; no understanding of the importance of keeping plebeians in their place. He'd have left this land to a dog if a dog had been his best friend."

"I think you should go, Gnaeus Claudius."

"I came here prepared to make a serious offer. If you're worried that I'll try to cheat you—"

"Did you come by horse? I'll have Aratus fetch it from the stable."

"Gordianus, it would be best for all concerned—"

"Go now, Gnaeus Claudius!"

I was still brooding over Gnaeus's visit the next day when a messenger arrived with a letter from Eco. Whatever the news, it would brighten my outlook to hear his sweet, gruff voice in my mind. Perhaps Meto had attached a note as well, I thought. I retired to the library and hastily broke the seal.

Dearest Papa:

Your slave Orestes has arrived with no real explanation for being here. He claims that he set out from the farm with Meto the other day, but that Meto soon turned back, ordering him to go on to Rome without him and to tell me that you were making a gift of him to the household. It seems that Orestes originally thought that he was accompanying Meto to

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Rome, but at any rate he says that you did intend for him to stay with me for good. (He's strong as an ox, I grant, but not very bright.) Can you explain?

The mood in the city continues to oscillate wildly. I do not think there can be any return to normalcy until Catilina is soundly defeated. At times this seems inevitable, only a matter of days; then one hears rumors that Catilina's forces now include thousands of runaway slaves and his army has grown larger than that of Spartacus at its peak. It is hard to know what to believe from day to day. There even appears to be a kind of backlash against Cicero, at least among those who are not busy proclaiming him to be the greatest Roman who ever lived. . . .

I continued to read long after the words stopped making sense to me.

At length, when I put down the letter, I noticed that my hand was trembling.

If Meto was not in Rome, then where was he?

The moment I let myself ask the question, I knew the answer.

"How far away are they? How long will you be gone?" Bethesda demanded.

"How far? Somewhere between here and the Alps. How long?

There's no way of knowing."

"You're sure he's gone to join Catilina?"

"As certain as if he had told me so aloud. What a fool I've been!"

Bethesda did not contradict me. As I hurriedly gathered the things I would need, she watched me from the doorway, her arms crossed, her back straight, but with a lurking wildness in her eyes that indicated she was secretly distraught and struggling to hide it. I had seldom seen her so upset; to look into her eyes unnerved me. "What will we do here without you, and without Meto? There could be danger, from runaway slaves, from soldiers. Perhaps Diana and I should go to Rome—"

"No! The roads are too dangerous now. I don't trust the slaves to protect you."

"But you trust them to protect us here in the house?"

"Bethesda, please! Eco will come. I've already written to him. He could be here as soon as the day after tomorrow, or even late tomorrow night."

"You should stay until then, to make sure he gets here."

"No! Every moment that passes—the battle could already be taking place, this very minute—you want Meto to come back, don't you?"

"And what if neither of you comes back?" Her voice was suddenly

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shrill. She pressed the back of her hand against her lips and shuddered.

"Bethesda!"
I
clutched her and pressed her hard against me.

She began to sob. "Ever since we left the city, nothing but trouble . . . "

I felt a sudden tugging at my tunic and looked down to see Diana's immense brown eyes staring up at me. "Papa," she said, somehow obli-vious of her mother's anguish, "Papa, come see!"

"Not now, Diana."

"No, Papa, you
must
come see!" Something in her voice compelled me. Bethesda heard it, too, for she drew back, holding in her sobs.

Diana ran ahead of us. We followed her through the atrium and out the front door. She paused in front of the stable, waved for us to catch up, and ran on ahead. My heart began to pound.

We came to the far side of the stable and turned the corner, out of sight of the house. Empty barrels were stacked against the wall. Diana stood beyond them, pointing at something we could not yet see. I took another step. Beyond the barrels, on the ground against the stable wall, I saw two naked feet.

"Oh, no." Another step, and I saw the legs as well. "No, no, no!"

Another step, and I saw a white, bloodless torso. "Not now, not here, not again—
impossible!"
I took another step and saw all there was to see.

It was a naked corpse, and it had no head.

I buried my face in my hands. Bethesda, oddly, seemed to gain composure from the hideous sight. She took a deep breath. "Who can it be, I wonder?"

"I have no idea," I said.

Diana, her mission accomplished, reached up to hold her mother's hand. She looked at me with an expression of mild accusation and disappointment. "If Meto were here," she said,
"he'd
figure out who it was!"

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C H A P T E R T H I R T Y - E I G H T

he man who travels alone has a fool for a companion," runs the ancient proverb, but in the heat of my urgency to reach Meto I felt oddly invincible, as if no ordinary obstacle on the road, no waylaying team of bandits or desperate gang of T escaped slaves, could stop me.

This was an illusion, of course, and a dangerous one, and the wiser part of me knew it, but it gave me the fortitude to leave behind the slaves I might have taken as bodyguards, to protect the farm instead. If I could trust them to do so! There was supposed to have been a slave keeping watch atop the stables the night before, and if he had been there he might have seen how the headless body was delivered, and by whom. Saying the night had grown too bitterly cold, with tears in his eyes the slave told me he had abandoned his post and begged me not to let Aratus beat him. What else should I have expected?

The man was a slave, not a soldier. Even so, I left his punishment to Aratus, whom I charged with making certain there were no such lapses in my absence, or else I would sell him to the mines. I was angry when I said it, and must have sounded convincing; Aratus turned the color of chalk. As for the new corpse which Diana had discovered, I was able to learn nothing significant from a cursory inspection. I told Aratus to keep the body until Eco arrived; perhaps he would be able to make some sense of it.

It is a strange experience, to travel alone through a countryside braced for war in the dead of winter. The fallow fields on either side were empty and abandoned, and so was the highway. There normally should have been some traffic despite the cold, especially with the sky

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clear and no prospect of rain, but for hours at a stretch I saw no one.

The farmhouses I passed had their doors shut and their windows shuttered, with all the animals put away in barns or in pens hidden from the road. There were not even any dogs to bark a greeting or a warning as I passed. The only signs of life were the unavoidable plumes of smoke that rose from hearth fires. The inhabitants wanted to show no signs of wealth or provisions or even occupancy to anyone passing on the road.

They were like the ostriches one sees sometimes at spectacles in the Circus Maximus, digging a hole in the sand and then burying their heads, thinking to hide themselves from the roaring crowd. Had I been any different, thinking I could escape Rome by hiding on my farm? It had certainly not worked for me. Nor, I thought, would it work for these nervous country folk if a ravaging army should happen to pass through.

Yet what choice remains to a bird who has wings but cannot fly—unless, I thought, he should summon up the will to fight.

The towns through which I passed sometimes seemed as abandoned as the farms, with all the houses shut up tight and no one in the streets.

Yet each town had a tavern or two, and it was in these that all the life seemed to have concentrated. Inside these establishments there was no end to the arguing and debate of the locals who congregated to assure one another that all the battles would be fought elsewhere and all the troops would requisition their provisions from some other hapless town.

They were eager to press for news from a stranger passing through, though I had little to give them. And though I was passing through a region where Catilina could claim his greatest support, I heard few words spoken in his favor. Those most enthusiastic for his cause would have gone to join him already, I thought, or else had done so once but had now abandoned him and fled back to where they came from.

I made the journey by long, hard stages, stopping over in towns whose names I never knew, always seeking word of Catilina's movements.

Since the executions in Rome, his army had moved back and forth between the Alps and Rome, evading confrontation with the regular armies sent to engage them. At one time his forces were thought to have numbered two full legions, or twelve thousand men, but after the executions and the failure of a general uprising in Rome, the opportunists and adventurers had quickly deserted. Exhausted by forced marches, left hungry by lack of provisions, even those most devoted to its cause began to abandon the rebel army, until there remained only those for whom there could be no turning back. "I don't think you'll find Catilina and Manlius with more than five thousand men, if that, and many of them poorly armed," a tavern keeper in Florentia told me. He also said that the Roman army under Cicero's fellow consul Antonius had passed through only a few days earlier, pursuing Catilina northward.

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I found them encamped in the foothills of the Apennines, outside a small town called Pistoria. Antonius's much larger force was only a few miles away. In order to reach Catilina, I had to make a great circuit on side roads and across open country, avoiding Antonius's men.

I feared that I might be challenged and attacked as I rode in plain sight down the rocky hillside toward the village of camp fires and tents, but no one took much notice of a lone man on horseback, wrapped in a heavy cloak and wearing no armor. Once within the camp I found myself surrounded by many men who looked no more like soldiers than I did, whose only weapons appeared to be hunting spears and carving knives or even sharpened stakes. Some were younger than I, but many were older. Among these were Sulla's veterans, many of whom wore ancient armor that might have fit them once but no longer did. Mixed with the ragtag bands were groups of men in decent legionary dress, well-armored and well-armed, who had the look of disciplined troops.