Steven Saylor - The judgement of Caesar

Meto's face grew long. Caesar stiffened his jaw and nodded. "Of course, Your Majesty. It shall be done. I shall call my lictors and see to it at once."

"No! I summoned Apollodorus for the purpose. Apollodorus shall search him."

Caesar worked his jaw back and forth. "I think, Your Majesty, that in these circumstances, it would be best-"

"This is my home," said Cleopatra. "It's my slave who lies dead. It was my cup that was poisoned-"

"A cup intended for my lips," said Caesar.

"Filled with wine poured by your man-the same glum-looking Roman who carried the wine here. No, Caesar, I must insist that one of my men perform the task of searching Meto's person."

Caesar considered this for a long moment. He turned toward Meto but did not quite look him in the eye, then turned back to Cleopatra. "Very well, Your Majesty. Let Apollodorus search him. Step forward, Meto. Raise your arms and let the fellow do what he must."

Meto looked indignant, but obeyed. His jaw twitched; I knew he wanted badly to cast a scathing look at the queen, but his discipline held firm, and instead he kept his gaze straight ahead.

Apollodorus ran his hands over Meto's shoulders, limbs, and torso, poking his fingers among the leather straps and buckles. Meto grunted and ground his jaw. Cleopatra stepped closer and watched intently. Caesar's gaze shifted apprehensively from Meto to Cleopatra and back again. Merianis, who had withdrawn to another part of the terrace, hid her face and began to weep.

Apollodorus stiffened. "Your Majesty…"

"What is it, Apollodorus? What have you found?"

From between two straps of leather attached to Meto's breastplate, Apollodorus produced a small white object, cylindrical in shape. Caesar leaned forward, as did Cleopatra. I rose from the couch, still light-headed, and moved toward Meto, feeling a sudden premonition of catastrophe.

Apollodorus held the object aloft between his thumb and forefinger. It was a tiny vial made of alabaster.

I could not stop myself; I gasped.

As one, all four turned their gazes on me-Caesar, Cleopatra, Apollodorus, and Meto, whose eyes finally made contact with mine for the first time that day. The look on his face froze my blood.

"Papa!" he whispered hoarsely.

Caesar snatched the vial from Apollodorus. He thrust it under my nose. "What is this, Gordianus?"

I stared at it. The stopper was gone. Though the vial was empty, I caught a faint whiff of the not unpleasant odor I had smelled when I sniffed its contents aboard Pompey's ship. There could be no doubt; this was the vial Cornelia had given me.

Caesar's nose was almost touching mine. "Speak, Finder! I command you! What do you know about this?"

From behind him, I heard the calm, but demanding, voice of Cleopatra. "Yes, Gordianus. Tell us what you know about this alabaster vial that Apollodorus found upon the person of your son."

An hour later, in a kind of stupor, I was back in my room, sifting through the contents of my traveling chest. Roman soldiers dispatched by Caesar stood by, watching my every movement. Rupa stood across the room, and the boys sat on the windowsill. I had not yet told them the details of what had transpired, but they knew that something terrible must have occurred. The boys were calming themselves by stroking Alexander the cat, who sat purring between them, oblivious to the tension in the room.

"It's not here," I muttered. Carefully, methodically, I had removed every item from the trunk and spread them across my bed. Now, just as methodically, I replaced each object into the trunk, shaking tunics to make sure nothing was hidden in the folds, opening Bethesda's little trinket boxes to be certain that no alabaster vial was hidden inside.

The search was fruitless. The vial Cornelia had given me was no longer in my possession; Apollodorus had discovered it upon Meto's person. Nonetheless, I had been praying for some miracle whereby I would find the vial in my chest after all, with its stopper and contents intact. Now there could be no doubt. The poison Cornelia had given me-quick to act, relatively painless-must have been the same poison that killed Cleopatra's taster.

My reaction when I first saw the vial in Apollodorus's hand had been so spontaneous, so damning, that dissembling was futile. No lie fabricated on the spot would have satisfied Caesar. Nor was silence an option; refusing to speak would have pitted my will against his, and against the will of Cleopatra as well. Both of them had long experience in obtaining information from unwilling subjects. I might have withstood a degree of suffering, but there were Rupa and the boys to consider. I would not allow harm to be done to them, even for the sake of protecting Meto.

And there lay the bitter irony: After all my protestations that Meto was no longer my son, that our relationship was over, and that he meant nothing to me, my first instinct had been to protect him. Caesar had seen through me at once. "If Meto truly means nothing to you, Finder, then why do you not speak?" he had demanded. "A woman lies dead. But for the queen's action, it would have been me! What do you know about this alabaster vial? Speak! If I have to force you to talk, I will. Neither of us wishes for that to happen, do we, Finder?"

So I told him where the vial had come from and how it had come to be in my possession. When had I last seen it? I couldn't say for certain. (In fact, my last memory of seeing it was the day that Meto had noticed it, when I gave him a keepsake from Bethesda.) How had it come to be in the possession of Meto? I attempted to dissemble, saying I had no idea; but hearing the threat in Caesar's tone, Meto himself spoke up.

"I saw it among Papa's things, on the night I went to visit him in his room. He kept it in his trunk. I told him to get rid of it. I was thinking he might be tempted… to use it himself. But from that moment to this, I never saw it again-not until this Sicilian produced it out of thin air, like a magic trick!"

"Are you saying Apollodorus himself was carrying the vial?" said Caesar.

"We know already how talented he is at making things appear from nowhere." Meto glowered at the queen.

"Enough!" said Caesar. "The one thing we know for certain is that father and son both knew of this poison, and here you both are, together with the vial that contained it and the slave who died from drinking it. Meto, Meto! I never imagined…"

"Consul, wait!" I shook my head. "Perhaps there's been a mistake."

"What sort of mistake?"

"Let me return to my room and look through my things. An alabaster vial is a common-enough object. Perhaps the one in my room is still there, after all." I tried to speak with conviction, but the chance seemed far-fetched even to me.

Caesar, to his credit, allowed me to pursue the possibility. While his men took Meto into custody, another group of soldiers accompanied me back to the mainland, escorted me to my room, and watched as I conducted a futile search of the things in my trunk. The only result had been to give further evidence that Meto must have purloined the poison at some point after he first saw it in my trunk.

But how had the poison come to be in the wine? And for what purpose? I sat on the bed, numbed by the enormity of what had happened. Was it really possible that my son had attempted to take the life of Julius Caesar?

My son: The words came to my mind unbidden and remained there, unchallenged. As I had wept for Bethesda, now I wept for Meto, knowing he must surely be lost to me forever. I realized in that moment why I had so steadfastly resisted a reconciliation with Meto since seeing him again in Alexandria. It was not stubborn pride, or an irreconcilable disgust for Meto himself; it was my fear of a moment just such as this. Having lost Bethesda, how could I open myself a second time to the chance of losing the person I loved most in the world? Meto, who lived such a perilous existence, who exposed himself again and again to the dangers of war and espionage, who had bound his fate to the fiery comet of Caesar's career-since I had at last shut him out from my life, surely it was better to keep him out for good, or else I might face the intolerable prospect sooner or later of losing him altogether. So it had come to pass, despite all I had done to harden my heart against him. What an ill-starred voyage had brought me to Alexandria!