20

 

 

Which surprised me more—the spear from an unknown quarter that barely missed my nose, or the blinding speed with which Davus reacted?

However stiff-muscled and slow-witted he might appear, Davus had the reflexes of a chasing hound. He was across the courtyard and scrambling over a pile of bricks before I had time to blink. Even Eco, as quick and nimble as I was in my prime, was left looking after him like a dazed runner left at the starting block.

Davus reached the top of the brick pile and leaped open-armed into space. An instant later there was a sound of two bodies colliding and a sharp exhalation that turned into a yelp of pain. Then Davus called out, “Master! Come quick, I can’t hold him!”

Eco raced across the courtyard. I followed behind. He went one way around the brick pile, I went the other. I heard another collision, a grunt, a spray of flying gravel. I came upon Davus on the far side of the pile, just getting to his feet. Together we ran to find Eco, who stood clutching his middle, the breath knocked out of him. Lying flat on his back in front of Eco, his eyelids flickering, was a boy who could hardly have been more than ten years old.

“I didn’t touch him,” said Eco, catching his breath. “He ran straight into me, almost knocked me down. He fell back and must have hit his head . . .”

The boy was dazed but not seriously hurt. He gradually came to his senses and gave a start when he saw the three of us peering down at him. His first reaction was an attempt to scramble to his feet, rendered impossible by the fact that Davus stood with a foot on each sleeve of the boy’s tunic, pinning him down.

“You needn’t struggle, young man,” said Eco. “It doesn’t look like you’re going anywhere.”

The boy stuck out his jaw and narrowed his eyes, but his mask of defiance was all too easy to see through. His chin quivered and his eyes shifted constantly from face to face.

“We have no desire to hurt you,” I said, in a gentler tone than Eco had used. “What’s your name?”

The boy squinted up at me. From his point of view on the ground, we must have looked like giants, especially Davus. The squint was clearly for show, another way of masking his fear; his eyesight had to be perfect to have thrown a spear with such accuracy. “My name is Mopsus,” he finally said. His voice shook.

“And your friend? The boy in the stable, the one who screamed when he saw us. That’s why you threw the spear, wasn’t it, because he screamed and you thought he was in danger?”

The boy’s squint relaxed a bit. “My little brother, Androcles.”

“Ah, your brother. No wonder you were worried for him.” I looked toward the stable. The door, which was barely ajar, gave a little jerk. “Androcles must be quite worried for you right now. But he needn’t be. As I said, we have no desire to harm either of you.”

“Then what are you here for?” His gruff voice rose to a squeak. Davus laughed. The boy turned red with anger. He thrashed helplessly on the ground, which made Davus laugh again.

“Tell this big elephant to get off me!” Anger finally drove out fear and lent a surprising authority to his voice.

“Certainly, as soon as you’ve answered a few questions. Why does no one come to the door? Where is everyone?”

The boy shifted and wriggled, straining against his confinement. There was no way for him to escape from his long-sleeved tunic as long as Davus stood on the sleeves. Nor could he kick high enough to strike Davus.

“You really are stuck, I’m afraid,” I said.

“We could string him up, Papa. Perhaps start a fire under him, roast him like a pig—”

“Eco, don’t joke! He’ll take you seriously. Something tells me this young fellow has seen awful things done to helpless men. That’s why he’s so afraid of us. Am I right, Mopsus?”

The boy said nothing, but the look in his eyes answered for him.

“My name is Gordianus. This is my son, Eco. And that elephant, as you call him, is my bodyguard, Davus. We come to this house in peace, just the three of us. We did nothing to your brother. He saw us from the stable door, screamed and ran back in.”

Mopsus wriggled in a paroxysm of disgust. “Stupid Androcles! He always was a little screamer, afraid of his shadow!”

“I am not!” squeaked a voice from the breach of the stable door.

“Androcles, you fool! Get out of there! Run to the mill! Wake them up, tell them—” Mopsus bit his tongue.

Davus and Eco looked to me. I put a finger to my lips. I walked in a circle around the brick pile, retracing my earlier steps to the courtyard, then approached the stable door from a direction that couldn’t be seen from the breach. I yanked the door open, thrust out my arm and put my hand gently but firmly on the shoulder of a little boy who looked up at me with eyes like moons.

“Don’t be afraid, Androcles. You’re not a screamer, like your brother says, are you?”

The child looked at me solemnly and shook his head.

“I thought not. Here, take my hand. Good. Now, let us go and talk some sense into your silly older brother.”

Mopsus writhed in disgust. “Androcles, you idiot! Now they’ve captured you, too.”

Androcles looked up at me solemnly, then at Eco and Davus in turn. “I think they may be all right, Mopsus. Not bad, like the others.”

“The others probably sent them, you stupid ass, to ambush us and finish us off!” Mopsus’s voice squeaked out of control again, making Davus laugh.

“The big elephant is funny.” Androcles gazed up at Davus with a look of awe.

“You won’t think it’s very funny when they flay us alive, like they did to Halicor!” said Mopsus.

Androcles shuddered at the idea, but when I squeezed his hand he seemed reassured. “Halicor was the tutor of young Publius Clodius, wasn’t he?” I said.

“How would you know that, unless they sent you?” Mopsus practically spat the words. Having his little brother for an audience gave him the courage to keep up a pretense of toughness.

“By they, you mean the men who killed Halicor?”

“Who else? Milo’s men! Maybe Milo himself sent you—”

“No!” The sternness in my voice silenced him. “Look at me, Mopsus. And you, Androcles. I swear to you, by the shade of my own father, that Milo did not send me here and I have not come on his behalf.”

“Who did send you, then?” said Mopsus warily.

“The day before I left Rome, I had a long talk with your mistress. Fulvia asked me to do some work for her.” It was true, after all, if not the entire truth. I saw no need to complicate matters by mentioning the Great One.

Mopsus softened a bit. “The mistress sent you?”

“Fulvia asked me to investigate a certain aspect of your late master’s death. I’m called the Finder. I have experience in such matters.”

“Maybe he can find the men who killed Halicor!” suggested Androcles, looking at his brother with wide eyes.

“Don’t be ridiculous, screamer, we know who killed him. We saw them do it with our own eyes.”

“Did you, indeed? Your mistress didn’t tell me that, only that Halicor had been killed, along with the foreman and two other slaves. She mentioned no witnesses.”

“That’s because no one knows that we saw,” said Mopsus.

“Until now!” Little Androcles put his hands on his hips and looked accusingly at his older brother, as if to ask which of them was the stupid screamer now.

“I shall want to hear all about it,” I said, “but first I want to know what you meant when you told Androcles to run to the mill and wake the others. What others?”

Mopsus looked up at me, biting his lip and debating whether to cooperate. I could almost see his thoughts at work. His little brother seemed to be in no harm, and no real threats had been made against them; his captors had disavowed any allegiance to Milo and instead had invoked the name of his mistress in Rome, a lady probably as remote and exotic to such a boy as a goddess from Olympus. Perhaps most importantly, he was beginning to get very tired of being pinned to the ground.

“Let me up and I’ll tell you,” he said.

“You won’t run away? Because if you do, Davus will run after you—I can hardly stop him, he’s like a dog without a leash—and when he catches you, he’ll never stop laughing.”

Androcles covered his mouth and giggled at the thought. Mopsus turned red. “I won’t run. Just get the elephant off me!”

“Davus, step back.”

Davus did so, but remained poised to chase after the boy, his long muscular legs ready to spring. He looked like one of those magnificent giant cats one sees at exotic animal shows in the arena, except for his grin, for such beasts never smile. Where had the crippling stiffness of the morning gone to? Ah, to be that young again, invulnerable like Achilles.

Mopsus got to his feet and dusted himself off. He made a sour face at Davus, who showed the good sense to suppress his laughter. “What were you saying?”

“The others you mentioned—down at the mill . . .”

“Asleep, probably. Like they usually are at this time of the morning after they’ve been drinking the night before, which they have been ever since they broke into the little house where the master stored his wine.”

“Mopsus!” His little brother frowned at him and shook his head.

“What do I care? It’s only the truth. It’s their job to guard the house, our job to take care of the stable. They should get into trouble!”

“Then there’s no one in the house at all?” I said.

“No. It’s all locked up. After what happened, the mistress called all the servants back to Rome, except for the men to guard the building.”

“And us, to look after the animals,” added his brother. “Tell her we’re doing our job.”

“I shall do that,” I promised.

“But don’t tell on the others,” said Androcles, suddenly very earnest. “Not if it means they’ll be punished.” He suddenly began to cry.

“Oh, shut up,” said Mopsus. “He’s remembering what Milo’s men did to Halicor and the foreman. That’s not how the mistress would punish drunken guards, stupid. She’d have them whipped a bit. She wouldn’t cut their limbs off.”

“How do you know?” The child sniffed.

“Because I’m not stupid like you.”

“Androcles doesn’t seem stupid to me,” said Eco, putting his hands on his hips. “He’s not the one who threw a spear at three perfectly peaceable strangers.” How like him to take the underdog’s side, I thought; was this how he kept peace between the twins at home? But it occurred to me that the boys’ squabbling was also a way of skirting the ugly subject of Halicor and his fate, even as they kept bringing it up. What exactly had they witnessed?

“You were here on the day of the battle, then? You remember it well?”

“Of course we were here, tending the stable as always,” said Mopsus. “It turned into a busy day, what with the master and his men getting packed and ready to go.”

“What time of day was that, when your master set out for Rome?”

“In the afternoon.”

“What hour?”

The boy shrugged.

“Closer to the ninth hour, or later, around the eleventh hour?”

Androcles tugged at my hand. “The ninth hour.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“There’s a sundial behind the stable. After the master set out, I went to look at it because I was hungry and I wondered how long until dinner.”

“And when your master set out, did it seem that he had planned to leave at that time?”

“Not at all,” said Mopsus, before his brother could answer ahead of him. “He was going to stay another day or two. He left because the messenger came.”

“And what was the messenger’s news?”

“About the old architect, Cyrus. He was dead, and the mistress wanted the master back in Rome.”

“You seem to know a lot about your master’s business for a stableboy,” said Eco, who seemed determined to needle him.

“I’ve got eyes and ears. Besides, who do you think is the first person a messenger on horseback sees when he arrives at the villa? Me, because I’m the one who takes his horse.”

Eco looked skeptical. “And this messenger felt compelled to share his news with you, even before he’d delivered it to Clodius?”

“He said, ‘Better get the horses ready for your master and his friends,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because the mistress wants him back in Rome,’ and I said—”

“Yes, I think we understand,” said Eco.

“So your master received the message,” I said, “decided to head back to Rome and rounded up his retinue. But wasn’t his son with him, the boy, Publius Clodius? I suppose he must be about your age, Androcles.”

“Of course Publius was here,” said Androcles. “With his tutor, Halicor. Halicor kept him busy most of the time, but sometimes Publius would slip away and come find Mopsus and me. We told him we had work to do, but he said as long as he was with us, it was all right to go off with him. So we’d go play in the woods, or over at the ruins of the witches’ house.”

“Witches?”

“I think he means the Vestals, Eco. That day, after the messenger came, did Publius set out with his father?”

“No, he stayed behind with Halicor. Mopsus and I were glad, because that meant he’d be wanting to play with us and we wouldn’t have to work so much, and the foreman and Halicor might get angry, but so what, because Publius was always getting into trouble and then getting out of it again.”

“Taking after his father,” said Eco under his breath.

“And as soon as the master and his men rode off, Publius came and found us in the stable—”

“We had a lot of work to do,” said Mopsus, “cleaning up after they were gone. Quite a few of the men had slept in the stable, and men make more of a mess than beasts.”

“But Publius came and wanted to play. Mopsus told him we had work to do, but Publius said he was hiding from Halicor and we had to help him hide. So Mopsus and I went to a corner and had a talk, and we decided to show him the secret passage. Can you imagine, even Publius didn’t know about it, the master’s own son!”

“A secret passage?” said Eco. “I think these boys are telling us stories, Papa.”

“No, it’s true!” insisted Androcles.

“Yes, it’s true,” said Mopsus, crossing his arms and sounding very adult. “We’re probably the only two people alive who know about it, except Publius, now that both the master and Cyrus are gone, because they were the only ones who were supposed to know, except of course for the slaves who did the actual building, but who knows where they are now? Not even Halicor or the foreman knew about it. I’ll bet that even the mistress doesn’t know.”

His brother scoffed, but I thought young Mopsus might be right. Fulvia had said nothing of a secret passage to me, nor had she mentioned these two boys; she had only said that her son somehow managed to elude Milo’s men when they came to the villa and terrorized the slaves. Possibly her son had been unforthcoming with details, and she had not wanted to press him; or perhaps young Publius was as good at keeping secrets as his father.

“So you took Publius off to the secret passage, to hide from Halicor. I wish that you could show me. Of course, if the house is locked—”

“Oh, but that’s the wonderful thing about the secret passage,” said Androcles. “You don’t have to go into the house to use it. You can enter the passage from outside the house. Come, I’ll show you.” He took my hand. His older brother looked dubious, and shot a wary glance at Eco, but followed along, persuaded by a newfound trust, or else by his fear of being chased down and tackled again by a laughing Davus.

Androcles led us around the corner of the house and down the steep hill into the woods at the base of the house. From a distance, this side of the house appeared almost featureless except for the long portico along the top. Closer at hand, I could see numerous openings set in rows, not so much windows as apertures for ventilation and light, set too high in the wall to be reached and too small for even a child to climb through. The foundation was largely hidden by trees and dense thickets. It was amid this growth that Androcles showed us a path, and at the path’s end, in what appeared at first sight to be a featureless wall, was a hidden entrance. A section between two upright posts appeared to be immovable but in fact was a sliding panel that could be opened just enough to allow a man to slip inside. I have seen several examples of hidden doors in my life, especially in my early travels, but seldom had I seen one as well concealed. Most so-called secret entrances are not really hidden, but are daunting because the means of opening them is secret. This door was simple to open, but would have been almost impossible to detect unless one knew of its existence.

The opening led to an ascending stairway, and then through a very narrow, dark hall that seemed to run through the very heart of the lower floors of the villa, those subterranean sections which had been constructed in the excavated hillside. The way was lit only by tiny openings which served as spyholes into the various rooms we passed. The rooms themselves were mostly undecorated and empty except for a few crates and odd pieces of furniture. Some were pitch black. Some had not yet been properly finished by the carpenters. Like Clodius’s house in the city, the villa had been in a state of expansion at the time of its master’s death, full of the promise of his grandiose schemes for the future.

“All these gloomy underground chambers—what did Clodius need them for?” said Eco.

“This was obviously to be more than a simple country villa,” I said. “More of a stronghold, I imagine—a place to store treasure, stockpile weapons, house a private army of gladiators . . .”

“Or keep prisoners?”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, it’s not hard to imagine these rooms as cells or torture chambers.”

“Perhaps his city house has secret passageways in the walls as well.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. More work for Cyrus the architect!”

We ascended more stairs, which were lit by tiny openings with direct sunshine, indicating that the stairwells were located at one end of the building. We walked down more narrow corridors, looked into more cavernous, gloomy, unfinished chambers. At last there was a change in the pattern and we found ourselves in a labyrinthine passage that snaked this way and that. We were somewhere in the upper, older part of the villa now, where the addition of a hidden passage between the existing walls had required the architect Cyrus to exercise considerable ingenuity. The rooms now revealed by the spyholes were adorned with opulent decorations and furnishings, full of all the things that make a home—except people to live there. The rooms were silent and still. Even on a sunshiny day such as this, with the first hint of an early spring in the air, all the shutters were closed, casting the whole house in a deep-shadowed gloom.

At last Mopsus gestured for us to stop. “Here—this is where we were when it happened.”

“Who was here?”

“Androcles and I. And Publius, of course, hiding from Halicor. Publius thought it would be great fun to spy on the grown-ups. He could hardly stop giggling whenever he looked through the hole.”

The nearest spyhole was at eye level for a boy, closer to waist high on a man, so that I had to stoop to look through it. The floor of the secret passage was substantially higher than that of the adjacent rooms, so that I actually found myself looking down into the room beyond. It appeared to be an office for transacting business and keeping records. Pigeonhole scroll cases lined one wall, but were mostly empty, their contents scattered on the floor along with various writing materials—wax tablets, styluses, jars of ink and sheets of papyrus spattered and smeared with something that looked more like blood than ink. The room reminded me of my own ransacked study.

“So the three of you were here,” I said. “What did you see?”

“Halicor and the foreman, talking about Publius,” said Mopsus.

“And not too nicely, either!” added Androcles.

“What did they say?”

“A lot of things,” said Mopsus. “They talked about how impossible it was going to be to control Publius, especially with his father gone. They argued. The foreman said it was Halicor’s fault for letting Publius out of his sight. Halicor said that he was a tutor, not a bodyguard, and it wasn’t his job to keep Publius safe, and that was what the master really cared about. That sort of thing. Lots of yelling. Grown-up talk.”

“And then?”

In the deep shadows of the corridor I saw Androcles’s eyes glitter with tears as he stepped behind his older brother, holding on to him like a shield. Mopsus straightened his back and put on a hard face. “Then there was yelling from somewhere else in the house. I don’t think Halicor and the foreman heard it at first, because they were yelling at each other. Then the door flew open, so hard it banged against a shelf and knocked some things off. Men ran in. They carried swords—”

“And there was already blood on the swords!” said Androcles, peering around his brother’s shoulder.

Mopsus wrinkled his brow. “And then Milo came in—”

“How did you know it was Milo?”

“Because that’s what Halicor called him. ‘Milo!’ He shouted the name as if Hades himself had come up through the floor. I whispered to Publius, ‘Who is Milo?’ and he whispered back, ‘The worst man in the world, except for Cicero!’”

“Clodius was already teaching the boy to know his enemies,” observed Eco.

I nodded. “And then what happened?”

“Milo and his men swarmed into the room like bees. They pushed Halicor and the foreman against the wall and poked their swords at them. Milo was angry. ‘Where is he?’ he shouted. ‘Where is Publius Clodius?’ And the foreman said, ‘He’s not here, we don’t know where he is,’ but that just made Milo angrier. ‘You!’ he said to Halicor. ‘Who are you?’ And Halicor said, ‘I’m just a tutor, the boy’s tutor, but the boy has run off, he’s hiding from me.’ And Milo shouted at him to shut up and knocked him down and kept yelling, ‘Where is Publius Clodius?’ And then they were stabbing the foreman, and cutting off pieces of Halicor’s fingers—”

“It was awful,” said Androcles. “I thought I was going to throw up, but my belly was empty. I was glad when they dragged Halicor and the foreman into the hall. At least we couldn’t see what they were doing.”

“But we could hear the screaming,” said Mopsus. “We all covered our ears. Poor Publius. He could have spoken up, you see, shouted out, ‘Here I am!’ Maybe he could have saved Halicor.”

I shook my head. “If the men came for Publius and found him, they’d have had no reason to leave Halicor alive.”

“What would they have done to Publius?” said Androcles.

“Taken him for a hostage, probably,” said Eco grimly. “Or else finished him as they finished his father.”

“Two of the men were so big,” said Mopsus, shivering as he remembered. “Even bigger than the elephant here. They were the ones who did most of the cutting.”

Eco looked at me. “Eudamus . . .”

“. . . and Birria. Never one without the other.”

“Halicor screamed and screamed,” said Mopsus. “I bet he would have told them where Publius was, if he’d known! But he didn’t, so they just kept cutting off pieces.”

His little brother began to weep. I put my arm around him.

“We couldn’t even run away, or else they might have heard us,” said Mopsus. “We just had to stay very still. Finally, the screaming stopped.” Mopsus shivered. “The three of us just stayed here, afraid to even whisper. Every now and then I looked through the spyhole, thinking that maybe Halicor or the foreman would come back, but they didn’t. Androcles started whining, saying he had to take a piss—”

“No I didn’t! It was Publius who had to go!”

“Whatever. Yes, maybe it was Publius. But I told him he would be crazy to go outside, because Milo and his men were probably looking for him all over the place. And then I think we all started to wonder about the master, because how was it that Milo had dared to come breaking into the house, and why hadn’t the master come back to stop him? I think we all started to realize that something really terrible must have happened, but I didn’t want to say anything, and neither did Publius, I guess, because he was very quiet. It was dark by that time, and there didn’t seem to be anyone in the house at all. We got very hungry. Finally I sent Androcles to sneak into the kitchen to get us some food—”

“Because you were afraid to go yourself!”

“No, because I had to stay and protect Publius. And finally Androcles came back and said that some of the slaves were hiding in the stable, and at least two of them had been killed besides Halicor and the foreman, and some of the bodyguards who left with the master that afternoon had come back and they were wounded because there had been a terrible battle with Milo, and they said that they didn’t know where the master was, but that he’d been hurt and gone to Bovillae but wasn’t there any longer, and all the men who had been with him were dead . . .”

“I think Publius was very brave,” said Androcles quietly. “He didn’t even cry. And he wouldn’t eat anything. He said Mopsus and I could eat all the food I’d brought back.”

“So we spent the night hiding in the secret passageways, even though it was awfully cold and dark. And the next day, the mistress sent some men from Rome for Publius, and then later she shut down the house. Everyone left except for us.”

“And those lazy guards,” said Androcles. “They’re probably awake by now. They’ll be wondering where we are.”

“Let them wonder,” said his brother. “Maybe they’ll think the witches came and got us. Imagine if that happened, and it was their fault, sleeping when they should be keeping watch. They’ll be worried sick.”

“Tell me,” I said, “do you know of any prisoners who were taken by Milo?”

“Prisoners?” said Mopsus. He shook his head. “Not that we ever heard about. Milo killed quite a few of the master’s men, but everyone who wasn’t killed came back sooner or later, at least the men from this villa.”

The cramped, dark passageway had begun to close in around me. I was ready to be outside again. The boys led the way back through the winding corridors and down the stairways. When we finally stepped through the hidden door and emerged into bright sunlight, I heard distant voices calling out from up the hill: “Mopsus! Androcles!”

“You see, I told you they’d be worried,” said Mopsus.

“These so-called guards—were they here the day that Milo came?” I said.

“No. They’re all new, all from the city. They hate it here. They’re always complaining, saying they’re bored and there are no women about except the witches in the house down the hill, and they won’t have anything to do with men.”

“Then I’ve no need to talk to them. Will you and your brother be all right? They won’t be angry at you?”

“Afraid of that bunch of drunks and cowards?” said Mopsus. He had regained his former bravado. “I’ll tell them we heard a funny noise in the woods and went to take a look, and they’ll all go scurrying back to the mill.”

“Very well. Then I have a request: tell them nothing of our visit—”

“I certainly wouldn’t tell them about the secret entrance!”

“Exactly. And when I get back to Rome, I shall make sure that your mistress knows what a clever and valuable pair of boys she has serving her, here at her Alban villa.”

We left Mopsus and Androcles and returned up the hill, skirting the courtyard in front of the villa’s entrance to avoid the guards. As we made our way around a pile of stones and rubble, I stubbed my toe against something and looked down in some surprise to see the face of a goddess staring back at me.

It was the marble head of Vesta, separated from the headless statue we had seen at the remains of the House of Vestals. Her expression was warm and serene, as befits the protector of the family hearth, but as I looked at her more closely I could not help thinking that there was the faintest glimmer of malevolence in her lapis lazuli eyes, and in the set of her mouth a hint of satisfaction at the way Fate had dealt with the mortal who had treated her and her attendants so shabbily.