Render Unto Caesar (24 page)

“Give me the clothes,” he said. “We can get dressed outside.”

Xanthos said nothing, merely nodded, and Pyrrhus piled the clothing into his lap. They fled the bathhouse and hurried out into the long colonnade which led back to the main part of the house. A passing gardener looked at them curiously: two stark naked slaves carrying a naked visitor up the hill in a chair piled with clothes. Xanthos and Pyrrhus went about twenty paces, then seemed to decide that it was far enough, and set the chair down.

“Thank you,” Hermogenes told Xanthos, handing the slave his tunic. “And I am sorry. I knew he is prone to violence, and I shouldn't have said anything.”

Xanthos looked surprised. “The master said we were to keep you safe,” he replied. He examined the scrape on his shoulder, rubbed the blood off with his hand, then pulled on the tunic.

“If you can stand up, sir,” Pyrrhus said respectfully, “I'll help you with your clothes.”

Hermogenes stood up, balancing with one knee against the seat of the chair, and let the slave help him. He was still belting his tunic when Cantabra came down the colonnade at a run, her face flushed and her tunic hitched up above her knees. She stopped abruptly when she saw him, and dropped the folds of cloth. Pyrrhus began donning his own clothing hurriedly, his embarrassment at being seen naked by a strange woman the first normal human feeling he'd shown.

“Where have you been?” Hermogenes asked his bodyguard angrily.

“I heard that your enemy is here,” she replied breathlessly.

“Yes. I just met him.” The rage shook him again. Pollio had sprung him on Rufus like the worst sort of practical joke: open the steam room door, and whoops! here's the man you tried to kill, somewhat battered, as you see, but still alive to cause you trouble!

He suddenly wondered if his own death was likely to figure in any bargain Pollio made with Rufus: Do as I ask, and I will get the documents from the Alexandrian and hand him over to you.

“What is the matter?” asked Cantabra quickly.

He shook his head glumly: nothing he could discuss in front of Pyrrhus and Xanthos. “My foot hurts,” he said instead. “We should go back to my rooms.” He sat down in the chair again.

Back in the room, he sat silent, trying to puzzle it out.

Pollio was trying to blackmail Rufus into killing someone called Titus: that much was clear. Who, though, was Titus?

There were far too many possibilities; the Roman male population only had about half a dozen first names among them. Obviously Rufus's Titus wasn't Titus Fiducius Crispus, the first who'd leaped to his own mind. Pollio wouldn't need any help to kill a minor businessman. It had to be a rich and powerful Titus, someone Pollio couldn't get to without the consul's help.

It wasn't the emperor, whose first name had been Gaius when he was young, and was now officially Imperator. It had never made any sense that Pollio would want to harm the emperor, anyway. He owed everything to the fact that he had been useful to Augustus during his rise. A new emperor would lack the old one's tolerance of a creature who had served him well. Still, it was a relief. Anyone suspected of involvement in treason could be tortured, and the estate of anyone convicted of the offense was confiscated.

So who was Titus? The emperor's deputy and designated successor was a Marcus—Agrippa. Pollio's superior and rival in the imperial circle had been a Gaius—Maecenas—and he was now out of favor anyway, unless rumor lied. Who else was there? And what benefit did Pollio expect from his death?

He suspected that this plan, whatever it was, aimed at restoring Pollio to the imperial favor he had enjoyed before the incident of the crystal cups. Now that he thought about that story, it seemed less straightforward than it had when he first heard it. The emperor had known Pollio for years: he must have heard about the lampreys long before he came to dinner that night. That smashing of crystal suddenly seemed to hold a calculated message:
I no longer need you, and I will no longer tolerate you
. Pollio was a man from the humblest of backgrounds—the son of a freed slave!—who'd risen to power and enormous wealth through his service to Augustus. Without the emperor's friendship, what was he? He must find his fall from favor frightening as well as humiliating. He must long to get back into the charmed circle, to do something to show the emperor that he was still a necessary man.

Kill Titus. He did not know enough about court politics. Nobody did, apart from the players themselves. All the world ever heard was rumors, and the official proclamations in which there was never any trace of ambition or jealousy, greed or hatred or pride.

He was not sure, anyway, that he really cared who Titus was or how the struggle between Rufus and Pollio turned out. If he could be certain that the consul would be forced to pay his debt in some form, and that he himself would get some benefit from it, he would take his money and go home. He found that he no longer believed, though, that anyone was going to allow him to do that.

Was he himself
important
enough for his life be part of the price for “killing Titus”? Would Rufus really insist on getting him, as well as the documents? The consul was a violent man, arrogant and easily moved to hatred, but he must hate many people, and he couldn't go around killing all of them.

With a sinking of the heart he decided that yes, he probably
was
important enough. His appearance in Rome, and his stubborn insistence on his rights, had caused the consul's current crisis, and his very existence was an accusation. Rufus would want him permanently silenced. And Pollio, he was quite certain, wouldn't hesitate to oblige if it got him what he wanted.

They still needed the documents and his letter. He shivered. If this suspicion hadn't occurred to him, he would have fetched them from the record office and the priest the moment Pollio agreed to buy the debt.

Of course, he didn't
know
that Pollio planned to give him to Rufus. The idea was mere suspicion. Perhaps the consul would even resist the blackmail, and the whole matter would come to court. He didn't expect it, though—and he knew that he was not going to risk giving those documents to Pollio. The more he saw of the man, the less he trusted him. He needed to make plans to escape. He needed to speak to Cantabra—privately.

He looked up, and saw the barbarian woman sitting quietly on the floor in a corner of the room, frowning over one of her much-mended sandals. Pyrrhus and Nestor were perched on stools in the other corner, playing in silence a game that involved trying to match each other's gestures. Xanthos had gone back to whatever other duties he had been given.

“Cantabra,” he said, and forced a smile as she looked up. “You told me that at the gladiatorial school they know a kind of massage which is good for muscle injuries. May I try it? I think I knocked my foot against something during that unwelcome meeting, and now my whole leg hurts.” Understand me, he pleaded silently with his eyes; don't suspect me of wanting to seduce you, and take offense.

She put the sandal down and gave him a hard blue stare. “If you like,” she said. “I need some oil.” She glanced at the two slaves. “Lamp oil will do, if it's clean.”

“Pyrrhus will fetch some massage oil,” Nestor told her. Pyrrhus at once stood up and went off to do so.

Cantabra shrugged, but went over to the sleeping cubicle, and drew back the curtain. “You should lie down,” she told her employer. “Let me see the leg.”

He got up quickly, hobbled into the cubicle, and lay down on the bed on his back. She knelt down on the floor beside him and ran a hand fastidiously down his right leg below the knee. “The muscles are in knots,” she told him. “Turn over on your stomach.”

He did so. Pyrrhus came back with a flask of oil, and Cantabra poured some on her hands and set to work kneading the back of Hermogenes' calf. Her fingers were very strong, and the muscles
were
sore. He made a noise of protest.

“It will help,” she told him severely, then glanced up at the two slaves, both watching from the doorway.

Hermogenes dismissed them with a wave. “Go back to your amusement.”

They went back into the dressing room, drawing the curtain. Cantabra paused to put more oil on her hands, and as she did so, lowered her mouth to his ear and whispered, “They are still listening.”

He closed his eyes a moment in relief.

“I used to do this to my fellows in the hall,” Cantabra went on, in a normal tone of voice, “to some of them, that is. It is good for muscle strains. You should eat ashes, too.”

“Eat ashes?”

“The ashes of beef bone. It is good for injuries. The barley broth the doctor is giving you is good, too, but I don't think he should have given you so strong a purgative.” She moved her head near his so he could whisper to her.

“I want to get out of here as soon as possible,” he whispered, and said, in a normal tone, “It was certainly very powerful.”

Her face didn't change. “I have found a place to cross the garden wall,” she whispered back. “Also, I have stolen and concealed a rope.” In the normal tone: “It was more powerful than it needed to be.”

He closed his eyes again, so deeply relieved that he feared he might break down. So that was what she'd been doing that morning! It was more than he had hoped for, much more. He had given no instructions, but she had anticipated, considered the possibilities, acted. He supposed that was the difference between a free employee and a slave. It might well be the difference between death and escape. “Thank you,” he whispered.

Cantabra smiled widely. “That was only a small infection,” she said dismissively. “In the school we would not do anything about one like that, except keep it clean.” Whispering again: “I do not know what we do about the slaves. I do not think I can overcome both of them silently, and if there is any sound, there are many, many others who will hear it, and come.”

He whispered, “I'd prefer it if we could avoid hurting them,” and added, “Gladiators are much tougher than businessmen—Let me think.”

“You are not so soft,” Cantabra told him, and pinched a muscle in his calf. He yelped. “Your legs have muscles like a runner.”

“It's true I used win races at school,” he told her. “Until Demodokos's son Aristarchos grew taller than me, that is. Then he won them all. Now all the exercise I get is playing ball games with my slaves and trudging about the city to business meetings—and now I can't even do that.”

“Will your foot bear you?” whispered Cantabra.

“It must,” he replied grimly.

There was a brief silence, during which they both realized that the massage would have to go on a bit longer if it were to look natural, and that they had said as much as they wanted to risk in the hearing of the eavesdroppers.

“What happened when you met Tarius Rufus?” Cantabra asked.

He began to tell her, at first just to reassure the listeners, then, as the account progressed, because the ridiculousness of it struck him, and it satisfied him to reduce his own terror and rage to a scene from a farce. When he reached the point where Pyrrhus had picked him up and carried him bodily from the room, Cantabra laughed. She had a loud, hooting, thoroughly uncivilized laugh, and it made him grin.

“All of you naked?” she asked.

“All of us,” he confirmed, “though Rufus wore all his rings—which, I assure you, are a deadly weapon. They marked poor Xanthos. Anyway, Pyrrhus snatched all the clothes from the shelves like a thief in the public baths, and we ran out into the colonnade, to the amazement of the gardeners—and there you found us.”

Cantabra, grinning, slapped his leg. “The story is done, and so is the massage.”

He sat up, caught her oily hands, pressed them, and said loudly, “Thank you. Thank you very much. I feel much better now.”

She grinned back at him conspiratorially.

Pollio's doctor came in a little later. He examined the cut and the ankle—again without undoing the splints—and expressed his satisfaction. He cleaned and anointed the wound again, and recommended rest, plenty of fluids, and a diet restricted to barley broth for the next day. Hermogenes thanked him politely, then said tentatively, “That purgative you gave me was very strong.”

“Yes,” agreed the doctor with satisfaction. “I brew them that way. It worked well, didn't it?”

“Indeed,” Hermogenes agreed. “Very well, and I'm grateful. My guts are still upset, though, and I don't know whether I
will
be able to rest as you recommend. To tell the truth, I've been having trouble sleeping anyway, what with this crisis in my affairs. I was wondering if you could give me something to dry up my guts and perhaps help me sleep.”

The doctor had no objections to this. He rummaged in his leather bag of supplies and brought out a small redware flask with a stopper. “Have you ever had opium before?” he asked.

“No,” said Hermogenes, who'd taken it several times for an enteritic fever.

“A very useful drug, and, I think, exactly what you want. It dries and tightens the bowels and promotes sleep. Here, I'll leave you a dose, and when you're ready to go to bed, just mix it with some of your barley broth and drink it down.”

“Make it a good dose,” Hermogenes told him. “I haven't slept well for months.”

The doctor smiled and poured a good dose into a cup. Hermogenes covered it with a cloth. Now he had to think of a way to make sure the slaves drank it.

The doctor left. The steward Socrates arrived. He nodded to Pyrrhus and Nestor, smiled at Cantabra, who was sitting on the floor in the corner again looking bored, and inclined his head respectfully to Hermogenes. “Sir,” he said politely, “my master invites you to eat dinner with him.”

“That is very kind of him,” Hermogenes replied, forcing himself to smoothness, “but the doctor has just advised me to eat nothing but barley broth for another day.”