Render Unto Caesar (29 page)

He remembered watching the day dawn in the garden of his own house in Alexandria, the morning that he left. Now it seemed like a scene from a painting, perfect and unreal: a cat staring into the small pond, fish shifting in its shadows, and the sky a delicate shade of rose. He remembered it in tiny, perfect detail: the vine trellis, the date palms, the whitewashed kitchen wall, the shadowed colonnade, and the smell of cardamom bread baking. He wondered if he would ever see it again.

Myrrhine had come out and begged him to take her with him, and he had comforted her and told her that he would only be away for a month or two; that it was summer now, and there would be no storms to sink his ship.
I will be home again soon,
he'd assured her. At the time he had believed it. He felt now as though he stood on the verge of a voyage to somewhere much, much further than Rome, looking back at her longingly, afraid to go, but unable to remain. He shivered.

“Where do we go now?” Cantabra asked him.

He shivered again, then shook himself, trying to clear his mind and bring his attention back to the present. “An inn,” he replied. “Somewhere where we can rest, and where they will not find us.”

“I know a good place,” she said at once. “It is over the other side of the forum, though. Can you walk that far?”

“I will have to.”

The carts had left the forum by the time they reached it, setting out in the small hours so as to be out of the city by dawn. A few goods were still being arranged for the morning, but most of the great plaza had fallen still. A few beggars and visiting carters slept in the porticoes of the temples, and stray dogs snapped up dropped scraps.

By that time the sore foot was hurting badly, and Hermogenes walked with the crutch under his left arm and Cantabra's shoulder under his right. He could feel the tension in her—the quick, wary glances at every alley mouth, the continual alertness to those shapes sleeping in the porticoes. It was not a good time of night to be about.

Near the bottom of the forum she drew him aside suddenly into an alleyway, then into the doorway of a building. They stood there for a couple of minutes, pressed against the door in the darkness. He could feel the warmth of her body, the curve of her hip against his own, and the unlikely desire tingled again. He began to speak, and she stilled him with an impatient finger across his lips.

They stood silent for another minute or two, and then she relaxed. She helped him out of the doorway and the alley and back into the forum.

“What was it?” he whispered.

“I thought someone was following us,” she replied. “Either they were not, or they lost interest.”

They skirted the Tabularium to the right and made their way along a narrow roadway which Cantabra said was called the Clivus Argentarius, then turned left, toward the river. Presently Cantabra turned right again, into a dirty alley, and knocked on the door of an insula.

There was no response, and she knocked again, more loudly. Hermogenes handed her the crutch and braced himself against the wall. She began to beat on the door with the handle.

A window opened, and a woman's voice called angrily, “Go rot, whoever you are! It's the middle of the night!”

“It's Cantabra!” the barbarian called back. “And it's nearly dawn.”

There was a silence, and then the woman at the window said, in a milder tone, “So you're back? What d'you want?”

“Rooms for myself and my employer,” Cantabra replied, stepping back from the door to look up at the window, though it was far too dark to make out much.

“Your
employer
, is it?” scoffed the woman at the window. “And what is it he employs you to do? You've seen reason at last, have you?”

“I am his
bodyguard
!” Cantabra replied fiercely. “Do you want to let us in or not?”

“Bodyguard? You're not going to tell me you want
two
rooms!”

“I am. A pair of rooms together. Two beds.”

“Heh! Who would've thought it? Payment in advance till the Kalends?”

“Fine!”

The window shut. Cantabra handed the crutch back to Hermogenes.

“What is this place?” he asked her in a low voice.

“It's a lodging house,” she informed him. “It belongs to a widow who lives on the ground floor and rents out the other apartments. I stayed here for a while when I was first discharged from the school. She was kind to me.” The door opened, and she went in. He followed her, wincing at each step.

The narrow entranceway was pitch-black and stank of urine. He could not make out the woman who stood holding the door.

“So you really did get work as a bodyguard,” the woman said wonderingly to Cantabra.

“I did,” she agreed. “This is my employer.”

“Herophilos, son of Hermesianax,” Hermogenes put in smoothly. “I apologize for the suddenness of our arrival. I have had a falling-out with my business partner.”

There was a startled silence, and then the landlady asked dubiously, “A Greek?”

“Is that a problem?” he asked.

“No, no!” she exclaimed. “It just seems odd to find a
Greek
hiring Cantabra. She's not much for culture. I'll show you the rooms.”

The rooms were on the fourth floor of the insula. He struggled up them with the aid of Cantabra and the crutch. The landlady must have realized that something was the matter as soon as he started, but she said nothing. When the long agonizing climb finally ended she opened a doorway and showed them into an indistinguishable darkness, then crossed to a window and opened the shutters. The night illumined the dimness just enough for him to make out a tiny box of a room with a couch under the window and a curtained doorway to one side.

“Two rooms,” said the landlady triumphantly. “This one, and that one.” Apparently “that one” was through the curtain. “No cooking fires allowed, and you can fetch your own water or have it fetched for an as extra a day. Cost you six denarii till the Kalends.”

“What is the date today?” Hermogenes asked.

The landlady harrumphed. “At dawn it'll be the twenty-fifth. But I'm charging for tonight, even if it is nearly dawn. Payment in advance.”

“I cannot see you to pay you,” he pointed out. “Payment in advance, but in daylight.”

“Fair enough,” she conceded. “You speak good Latin.”

“So I have been told.”

“Herapolis, you said your name was?”

“
Herophilos.
”

“Never could pronounce Greek names. I'll see you in daylight, Herapilus.”

She went out. He hobbled over to the couch, collapsed onto it, and hauled his sore foot up onto his lap. The ankle had swollen so much that the bandages were biting into the flesh, and he began to loosen them. Something hopped against his thigh. The bed had fleas.

He sat still for a moment, then laughed: it was that or burst into tears. “Oh, Zeus, oh, Lady Isis!” he exclaimed. “What would my father say if he saw me now?”

Cantabra came over silently and squatted beside him. “I am sorry. I thought we should stay away from the inns where rich men go, and Gellia calls me a friend, so I thought this place would be good.”

“I am sure you are right. Gellia? That is the name of that … person?”

“Gellia Bibula. She was kind to me when I was first discharged.” A shrug, more sensed than seen in the darkness. “When I took a room here I had a little money—they give you prize money when you win. It ran out, though, after a couple of months. She shared food with me then, and tried to find small jobs for me, and never pressed me about the rent.”

“Apart, that is, from urging you to prostitute yourself to obtain it?”

A hesitation. “She told me I would never get work as a guard, and there wasn't anything else I knew to do in Rome. There are men who will pay to sleep with a woman gladiator. She thought that was the way I could best get money to live on.”

“But you wouldn't.”

“No.” There was pride in her voice. “I have never willingly slept with any man but my husband, and those who took me against my will had to tie me up or beat me senseless first. So in the spring, I sold my cloak, and paid her the rent, and went off to sleep in temple porches and make what living I could.”

It was what he'd been beginning to suspect. “You're a very brave and honorable woman,” he said quietly.

She touched his ankle. “That is swollen again.”

“It will go down, if I rest it. My girl, I am going to try to get a few hours' rest before making war on all those stairs to go to the bank. Which of us has which room?”

“You have this room. There is no bed in the other. I saw these rooms when I was here before.”

“No bed? Then where will you sleep?”

“My people don't use beds. I will sleep on the floor.”

“Probably wise,” he sighed. “There will be fewer fleas. Sleep well, then.”

“Sleep well.”

The curtain rustled as she went through into the adjoining room. Hermogenes lay down on the lumpy, flea-infested mattress and arranged his cloak over himself as a blanket, then lay staring into the darkness. His ankle throbbed. He was suddenly possessed by a nightmarish sensation that the bed was horrendously tall, and that he hung suspended above an unimaginable gulf, into which he would tumble at the first incautious movement.

He forced himself to drop one hand off the mattress, and brushed the dirty floorboards with the backs of his fingers.
A bed in a room in a Roman insula,
he told himself.
That's all it is.
He forced himself to close his eyes.

He remembered Pollio picking his teeth at the end of their meal together, watching him with those rheumy, calculating eyes.
You should be careful, Alexandrian
.… He saw the circular mouth of a lamprey, the ring of needle-sharp teeth and the wet black tunnel of its gullet.

He remembered Rufus erupting from his chair on their first meeting, and the impact of that ringed fist against his face. Scylla and Charybdis, he thought, with a kind of horror: the sucking whirlpool and the violent monster, and somehow a ship had to steer a course between them, if it was to survive. Not even Odysseus's ship had managed that unscathed:

—screaming

in deadly pain they stretched out their hands to me:

of all the sights my eyes beheld in all my toil

upon the salty water, that one was the worst.

How was a banker supposed to succeed where a hero had failed?

No, no, no, he told himself wearily. Rufus and Pollio are not mythological monsters any more than I am a hero. They are men, and all men make mistakes. Rufus made one when he named somebody called Titus, and Pollio when he gave me the opportunity to escape. There is, still, a chance.

Again he touched the floor: he was not falling. He had escaped, he was in safe in bed in a place where his enemies couldn't find him, and he was not falling. In the morning he would wake, and decide what to do. He would be careful, he would be wise, he would not fall. It might even be enough.

 

He woke with a start to find himself lying on a shabby couch in a small and dirty room. His ankle ached, his head ached, the stitches on his cheek pulled, his mouth felt furry, and his skin itched and felt too tight all over. There were fleabites, too.

He sat up, ran his hands through his hair, then reached over to open the window shutters. From the light it was early afternoon. He groaned. The banks would be shut by now.

Cantabra appeared, pulling aside the curtain to the adjacent room. She was holding a leatherworker's needle, threaded. “You slept a long time,” she pointed out. “How is your foot?”

He picked it up and had a look at it. “Better,” he observed. The swelling had gone down, anyway. “Cantabra, you should have woken me. The banks will be shut.”

She gave him a look he couldn't interpret. “Why must you go to a bank?”

“To get coin,” he said impatiently. “Your friend Gellia wants six denarii in advance, and I gave Menestor all I had with me.”

“I paid Gellia. You can repay me later.”

“Oh!” he said, taken aback. After a moment he added, “Thank you.” He rubbed at his face again. “I think I will pay her the extra to fetch water.”

Cantabra pointed at a large amphora in the corner. “I fetched it.”

“Oh!” he said, again. He hobbled over to the amphora. There was no cup and no basin. He tipped the container and drank directly from its mouth, then poured water into his hands and splashed it repeatedly over his face. The excess trickled down his neck and made a damp patch on the bare boards of the floor. He wiped his hands against his thighs, since there was no towel. He glanced around.

“There's no chamber pot,” he said unhappily.

“There's a tub downstairs,” Cantabra informed him, “but I think men mostly piss out the window.”

“Herakles!” he exclaimed in disgust. He thought of dragging his sore ankle down all those stairs and back up again, winced, and went to the window. It opened onto a narrow stinking alleyway, and nobody was watching. He pissed out of it quickly, then sat down on the couch, feeling coarse, common, and contemptible.

Cantabra was grinning at him. “It's very well for you,” he told her with dignity. “
You
weren't brought up to be a gentleman.”

She laughed. “Do you want food? I bought rolls.”

They were small narrow rolls, flavored with celery seed, moist inside and very good. Halfway through the first of them he remembered that he was supposed to spend another day eating only barley broth, and nearly choked. Cantabra gave him a questioning look from her seat on the floor.

“I remembered I am supposed be convalescing on barley broth,” he told her. “Isis! Was that dinner only last night?”

She nodded and put the rest of her own roll in her mouth. “You do not need more broth,” she told him, chewing. “You need good food, to make your wits strong.”