Steven Saylor - A Mist of Prophecies

And then it all came crashing down. After a skirmish with Milo's entourage on the Appian Way a few miles outside Rome, Clodius was murdered. Milo and Fausta were at the scene, and whether Milo literally bloodied his hands or not, he was blamed for the murder of his enemy. Angry rioters burned down the Senate House and demanded Milo's head. Pompey, called upon to keep order, put Milo on trial and did nothing to help him. The Best People washed their hands of him. Loyal to the end, Cicero took on Milo's defense, but his efforts were to no avail; attempting to give his oration, he was shouted down by the mob. Accompanied by a large band of hardened gladiators, Milo fled from Rome before the guilty verdict was announced and headed for the Greek city-state of Massilia, the destination of so many Roman political exiles.

He left behind a fortune in property that was confiscated by the state, a bitterly disappointed wife who by all accounts was glad to see the last of him, and a hopelessly divided city. Looking back, it seemed to me that the murder of Clodius and the trial of Milo marked the last gasp of the dying Republic and the beginning of the end of the Roman Constitution. Certainly it had marked the end of Milo; even amid the turmoil of civil war, no one could doubt that Milo's career was over for good. When Caesar conquered Massilia, he had declared amnesty for all the Roman political exiles in the city, with the conspicuous exclusion of only one: Milo.

Abandoned by Pompey, rebuffed by Caesar, beyond the help of Cicero, Milo had become the forgotten man of Roman politics.

Now rumors were reaching the city that Milo had managed to escape from Massilia, despite the garrison of Caesar's soldiers, who had instructions to keep him there. Not only had he escaped, but he had managed to do so with the large band of gladiators who had accompanied him into exile.

Even more bizarre than these rumors was the further assertion that Milo was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Marcus Caelius. Milo's entire career had been based on pandering to the interests of the most rigidly conservative clique among the Roman elite. The idea that he would join forces with Caelius, who had made himself the champion of wholesale revolution, was ludicrous. Or was it? In such times, old friendships and bonds of trust might count for more than differing political philosophies, and men as desperate as Milo and Caelius might take whatever allies they could get. What, after all, did Milo owe to the Best People or to Pompey? In the crisis that followed Clodius's murder, they had cast him aside like a hot coal.

In my own household, all else was overshadowed by Bethesda's illness. Its prognosis and cure were as elusive as the whereabouts and future plans of Marcus Caelius. To pay for physicians, I borrowed more money from Volumnius. They examined Bethesda's tongue. They studied her stools. They poked and prodded her various parts. They prescribed this treatment and that, all of which cost money. I went further into debt. Nothing seemed to help. Bethesda had good days and bad days, but more and more often she kept to her bed.

Her symptoms were obscure. There were no sharp pains, no visible rashes, no vomiting or foul excreta. She felt weak and out of sorts-"uncomfortable in my skin," she said. She was sometimes dizzy, sometimes short of breath. She had no faith in the physicians or their treatments. When she bit one of them for pinching her tongue too hard, I told the quack he was lucky to leave my house with all his fingers, and I decided to send for no more physicians.

A household is not unlike a human body, with a head and a heart and a sense of well-being that depends on the harmony of its various parts. The disposition of my household changed from day to day, depending on Bethesda. Her bad days were bad days for everyone, full of gloom and foreboding. On her good days the household stirred with a cautious sense of hope. As time passed and bad days outnumbered good, hope receded, so that even the best days were tempered by a deep anxiety.

To please Bethesda, I kept to the house as much as possible. For long hours I did little more than sit beside her in the garden, holding her hand while we reminisced. It was in Alexandria that I had found her. I had been a young man, footloose in the world. She had been a slave, hardly more than a child. At the first sight of her I was hopelessly smitten, as only a young man can be. I was determined to purchase her and make her my own, and I did. When I returned to Rome, I brought Bethesda with me. It was not until she became pregnant with Diana that I made her a free woman and married her so that my child would be born free. Why had I waited so long? Partly because I feared that such a drastic change in Bethesda's status would also throw our relationship out of balance; she already wielded quite enough power over me as my slave! But our marriage and the birth of our daughter had only strengthened the bond between us, and freedom had strengthened Bethesda's character in every way. Where before she had seemed willful, she became strong willed; where before she had seemed petulant, I came to see her as fiercely determined. Did these changes take place in Bethesda or merely in my perceptions of her? I couldn't say, and Bethesda was the last person to ask. Paradox and irony held no fascination for her.

When we reminisced, it was not to remark about subtle states of mind or the way things changed but stayed the same. Our conversations served to remind one another of a vast, shared catalogue of people, places, and things. The mere summoning up of these memories brought us a shared pleasure.

"Do you remember the beacon atop the Pharos lighthouse," she would ask, "and how we sat on the deck of the ship the night we sailed from Alexandria and watched it dwindle to nothing?"

"Of course I remember. It was a warm night. Even so, you shivered, so I held you next to me."

"I shivered because I was afraid to leave Alexandria. I thought that Rome would swallow me up."

I laughed. "Do you remember how awful the food was, on that ship? Bread like bricks, salty dried figs-"

"Nothing like our last meal in Alexandria. Do you remember-"

"— the little shop on the corner that sold sesame cakes soaked with honey and wine? The memory makes my mouth water even now."

"And the funny little woman who ran the shop? All those cats! Every cat in Alexandria came to her shop!"

"Because she encouraged them," I said. "She put out bowls of milk. The day before we left, she showed us some kittens, and you insisted on smuggling one of those kittens on board the ship with you, even though I expressly forbade it."

"I had to bring something of Alexandria with me. The Romans should have thanked me for bringing them a new deity! Imagine my surprise when we arrived and I saw not a single statue of a proper god anywhere in the whole city, no falcon-headed Horus or dog-headed Anubis-only images of ordinary men and women. I knew then that you had brought me to a very strange place indeed…"

At some point we would both realize that we had had this exact conversation before, not once but many times over the years; it was like a ritual that once begun had to be pursued to its conclusion; and like most rituals its mere observance brought us a curious comfort. One memory would lead to another and another, like links in a chain that wound around and around us both, cinching us together at the very center of the time and space that encompassed our two lives.

And then… the shadow of her illness would pass over Bethesda. The corners of her mouth would constrict. Her brow would furrow. Her hand would tighten, then loosen, in mine, and she would say that she was suddenly weary and light-headed and needed to lie down. I would draw a deep breath, and it would seem to me that the very air was thick with worry and repining.