Catilina's Riddle (67 page)

"Ask Congrio," she cried. "The lying slave! Don't you see he's done something unspeakable with your little girl and he won't admit it?

Instead he makes up this ludicrous story. How dare you suspect me?"

"How dare you go on lying!" I said, barely able to keep from drawing the blade across her throat.

"If you think she's here, then find her. Go on, search to your heart's content. Your daughter is not here. You'll find nothing, I tell you." I suddenly realized that she must be telling the truth. Diana had been brought here, of that I had no doubt, but had she remained here?

No, Claudia was too clever and cautious to risk having Diana found on her property. Where then? Where would she hide a child—or a child's body? In my abstraction I must have loosened my grip, for she suddenly slipped free. When I tried to seize her, she bit my hand. I cried out and Meto and Eco came running out of the house, but too late to catch her.

She dashed into the midst of her slaves, who made a circle around her and held up their weapons.

Eco called out and his men came running. "We can take them, Papa. Her slaves will scream and run at the first drop of blood."

"Attack me and I won't be responsible for what follows, Gordianus,"

said Claudia, breathing hard. "Do you really want a blood feud with the Claudii?"

"Say the word, Papa!" said Meto, gripping his dagger so hard that his knuckles turned white.

"No, Meto! No bloodshed! Retribution can wait. The only thing that matters now is finding Diana, and I think I know where she is. Eco, stay here with your men. Make sure that Claudia stays where she is until we return. Meto, mount your horse and come with me."

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Claudia must have known of the mine all her life. As a place of remote concealment, it would have come to her mind at once. So I reasoned as we went thundering up the Cassian Way. So I hoped, and dreaded.

We rode past the hidden trail Catilina had used. It would be too slow, and I had no cause for concealment. Instead we took the open way onto Gnaeus's land, up into the foothills and the woods, past the house of the goatherds where poor Forfex had dwelled, past Gnaeus's gloomy villa, where his hounds stirred and howled to announce our passage.

We came to the end of the road, tethered our horse and proceeded on foot. Neither of us spoke a word. Our thoughts were too close, and what we were thinking we did not dare to say aloud.

The stream above the waterfall flowed quick and cold. The water came to our knees. When I stepped onto the farther bank, my feet were numb with pain, but I forgot it quickly enough as we rushed up the grueling series of switchbacks and then across the flank of the mountain.

What if she wasn't there? My heart was pounding too hard and my breath was too labored to think of what we would do next. And what if she was there? Surely she could have survived a single night, I told myself.

She could go without eating, and she would have been out of the wind, shielded from the worst of the cold. But in what condition had they left her, and what sort of terrors had she faced alone in the darkness? What if she had gone wandering, and stepped over an abyss—

Every step I took became a greater and greater torment, until I could no longer tell whether the anguish came from exhaustion or dread.

Meto ran on ahead of me. For a moment I wanted to drop to my knees, to wait passively, to let him find what there was to find and come back to tell me. But to stop now was impossible. I trudged on, cursing Claudia, hating the gods and whispering prayers to Fortune.

At last the entrance to the mine came in sight. Meto was not to be seen. He must have already scrambled over the wall that had been built to keep out wandering goats and that would easily keep a little girl prisoner inside. I began to run, though I thought my chest would explode.

You've become an old man and a fool, I told myself. You turned your back on the world, and look how the world struck back at you! Everything you love has been brought to the edge of disaster through your own neglect and your stubborn refusal to see clearly. Your vanity overwhelmed your judgment, and now you pay the price. You laid down your wits like a gladiator laying down his weapons; but a gladiator has no choice but to fight or else die, and you have no choice but to go on finding your way through the deceits of this vicious world or else be destroyed. What folly, fleeing from Rome, when this is where the flight led you. Diana!

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I came to the wall. I wanted to shout out her name, and Meto's, but I was afraid of the answer. I reached the top of the wall and fell against it, too tired to pull myself over. I took a deep breath and hoisted myself to the top. On the other side I looked down on Meto, holding something in his arms. He turned his face up to me, and I saw tears glittering in his eyes.

"Oh, no, Meto!" I wailed.

"Papa, Papa, you've come for us! I knew you would!" The thing in Meto's arms began to wriggle wildly until Diana freed herself from his embrace and reached up to me. I dropped from the wall and fell to the ground, holding her.

"I told them you'd come, I told them!" she cried. I held her away from me to have a look at her. She was filthy and her clothes were torn, but there was nothing wrong with her. I held her close to me and sat back against the wall, my face covered with tears, so weary and relieved that I thought I might melt into the stone.

"I told them, I told them," she kept saying, until I asked her whom she meant.

"The others!" she said.

"Others?"

"The other little boys and girls." In the gloomy twilight of the mine, she pointed to a collection of skulls carefully stacked against one wall, the remains of long-dead slaves.

"I don't remember seeing them stacked up like that when we were here with Catilina, do you, Meto?" I said, puzzled.

"No," he whispered.

"I did it," said Diana. "I gathered them all up."

"But why?" I asked.

"Because they were lonely, and so was I. I was cold last night, Papa, but imagine how cold they must have been, without their skins."

I looked at her carefully. "Who do you think they are, Diana?"

"The other little boys and girls, of course. The ones that the wicked king brought for the Minotaur to eat. Look, he ate them all up and left only the bones! Poor little boys and girls. When Claudia's slaves brought me here yesterday, I knew this must be the Labyrinth. They dropped me over the wall and wouldn't help me back over, even though I screamed and told them they'd be sorry. Do you suppose they thought the Minotaur would eat me?"

"Oh, Diana," I said, holding her tight, "you must have been so frightened!"

"Not really, Papa."

"No?"

"No. Meto probably would have been frightened, because Meto would have been afraid of the Minotaur, but not me."

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"Why not, Diana?"

"Because the Minotaur is dead!"

"How did you know that?"

"Because you told me so, Papa. Don't you remember?"

"Yes. Yes, I do remember," I said, thinking back to a hot summer day when Diana had come to fetch me because an unexpected visitor had arrived from Rome, and we fell to talking about the Minotaur because Meto had been teasing her. "I told you that a hero named Theseus slew the Minotaur."

"Exactly. And that's why I wasn't frightened, only cold, and a little lonely, because the other poor children couldn't talk to me. And hungry.

Papa, I'm so hungry. Can't we get something to eat? But not from Congrio—Congrio wants to poison us. . . . "

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C H A P T E R F O R T Y - O N E

eto was of the opinion that we should carve Congrio into filets and make a banquet of him. I pointed out that the dinner would be much too fatty; besides, he might contrive to poison himself first and thus poison M us when we ate him. Bethesda thought we should drop him down the well and watch him slowly starve day by day. But why pollute the well again? Eco, ever practical, suggested we choose an enemy of the family and offer to sell Congrio to the unsuspecting party, knowing how treacherous he was. Now there was an idea, I thought, but whom did we dislike that much?

As for Claudia, no punishment could be severe enough. Numerous ideas were bandied about. Most of these elaborate fantasies began with kidnapping her in the middle of the night and ended with visions of exquisite cruelty and horror to rival the worst abuses of Sulla. Bethesda was especially creative in devising torments, which 1 thought odd, for the Egyptians are a relatively civilized and easy-going people compared to the Romans. She was truly a Roman matron now, plotting the destruction of another Roman matron, as surely as Meto had proved himself a Roman soldier on the battlefield of Pistoria. We were all Romans now; and so, I argued, why not take recourse in that great Roman institution, the law?

This suggestion met with no enthusiasm at all. We had defeated the Claudii in the courts once, Eco conceded, but that was with a will on our side and Cicero's help. We couldn't be certain of winning against them again, and besides, look at the sluggishness of the courts in dealing with the dispute over the stream. Roman courts and Roman justice had become mere tools for powerful men to attack one another with, more

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amenable to bribery and intimidation than to demands for truth and justice. As in the days before the Republic, men were being driven to take matters into their own hands if they wanted satisfaction, which is what we would have to do if Claudia was to suffer for what she had done.

There was, of course, the matter of the other Claudii, I pointed out, who surrounded us like an enemy army. None of them struck me as likely to sit idly by if we harmed Claudia, no matter what our justification.

They hated us enough already; what would they do if Claudian blood was spilled? Were we to spend the coming years killing and kidnapping one another? What sort of life was that?

It was a good thing to let everyone shout and throw up their arms and goad each other to devise more and more terrible torments for the guilty. After the fright we had suffered, we all needed such a shared release. It also bought me time, for after Diana was found they had all been eager to take drastic action at once. But I wanted that night and at least another day and night to pass before we proceeded on any course.

While our anger cooled and left us with clearer heads, Claudia could spend a couple of sleepless nights wondering what we were up to.

On the second morning after Diana had been rescued, having heard all their arguments and cries for action, I exerted my prerogative as father of the household and announced that I would handle the matter in my own way. My decisions would be final and beyond appeal. Having made this clear, I retired to my library and wrote a brief note, then dispatched a slave to carry the message, telling him he would be wise to approach Claudia's house with his hands in the air and an announcement that he was armed only with a letter:

Claudia:

There are matters we must discuss in private, and on neutral ground. Meet me at midday at our usual place on the ridge. I will come alone and unarmed, and I vow by the memory of my father to cause you no harm. Your presence there will indicate that you come under the same conditions.

There is nothing to be gained by further acrimony, and I believe that we can come to terms of mutual acceptance. That is the earnest hope of your neighbor,

Gordianus

The day was cloudless, and there was no wind on the ridgetop, as I had feared there might be. All in all, it was a mild day for the end of Januarius, a month that had already seen enough turmoil for the whole year to come. I sat on a stump and looked out over the farm, such a placid scene that it was hard to believe so much deceit and wickedness could lurk

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among the innocent grapevines and the cold, gurgling stream. The sun at its zenith was low in the sky and seemed to hang motionless while I waited. It was a long time, so long that I thought my guest had refused the invitation. Then I heard a rustling among the branches nearby and Claudia emerged from the bushes.

She looked as she usually looked: sausage-fingered, plum-cheeked, and cherry-nosed, with a careless clump of frazzled orange hair atop her head. She was wearing a long woolen tunic with a heavy cloak wrapped around her. She approached without a word, took a seat on the neighboring stump, and joined me in studying the view. I looked at her face, but she did not look back at me. I noticed a few horizontal cuts on her throat, where I had pressed too hard with my blade. She reached up from time to time to touch the marks.

After a moment she said, "Where shall we begin?"

"At the beginning. Before we say anything else, I want you to tell me the truth: did you have anything to do with the death of your cousin Lucius?"

This caused her to turn her head and look into my eyes, but only for a moment. "How could you even think—"

I held up my hand. "No pretty protests, Claudia. The question requires only a simple answer: yes or no."

"Did I murder Lucius? What a question! No, of course not. He died in the Forum, with hundreds of people around, clutching at a pain in his chest. Men die that way every day. It's perfectly natural."

"You did nothing to help nature along? A bit of poison . . . "

"Gordianus, no!"

I studied her profile while she stared fixedly down on the farm. "I believe you. I had no particular reason to think that you might have murdered poor Lucius, but I wanted to know for sure. He was my friend, you know. It would matter to me if someone had caused his death."

We both gazed at the view for a while in silence. It was clear that I would be asking the questions and that she would be answering. I was in no hurry.

"When I lent you Congrio to help cook for your family gathering,"

I finally said, "that was when you suborned him, wasn't it?"

She shrugged. "It wasn't hard to do. Congrio doesn't like you, and he despises your wife. Some slaves can't stand working for an ex-slave; Congrio hated it, simply on principle. Pride comes with talent, which he has in abundance, as I'm sure you'll agree. He had worked all his life in the respectable household of a patrician master, then suddenly found himself the property of—well, Gordianus, your ancestry is hardly worth mentioning, is it?"