Steven Saylor - A murder on the Appian way

She looked at me wryly. "And you think I don't? I know who you are, Finder. I'm more aware of my husband's affairs than you seem to think. He was quite bent on killing you, you know. It was all he talked about for days."

"Really?" Her candour about her lovers was not nearly as startling as her candour about her husband's plots.

"Oh, yes. Milo considered you to be quite a menace. You should be honoured, I suppose. Of course, towards the end, he was seeing an assassin in every cupboard and a spy behind every bush. You obsessed him for a while. Cicero kept telling him that he was blowing any threat you posed out of all proportion. Cicero said that your reputation was grossly inflated, that you were barely competent, really, and that Milo should stop worrying about you."

"How kind of Cicero."

"He was trying to protect you, you fool. But Milo was determined to see you dead, in a cold sweat about it. In the end Cicero made him agree to a compromise, and Milo simply had you abducted But you must be as clever and persevering as he thought — you escaped before the trial came up. By Hercules, what a fright you must have given Cicero when you popped up on the road right in front of him!" She emitted a short, barking laugh.

"I only wish I could have appreciated the humour at the time."

"Can't we all say that, in retrospect? If only I'd known that marrying Milo would turn into such a joke! And that horrible day on the Appian Way, when I thought I was living through a nightmare, it was really all a grotesque farce from beginning to end. The cruellest irony of all was that Milo never intended to kill Clodius. The fight broke out on its own, and when Milo sent his men after Clodius, he ordered them to spare him! The gladiators still swear that they didn't touch Clodius at the inn."

"Is that a fact?"

"Do you doubt it? Come, I'll let them tell you the story themselves." She took me back to her room. "Boys! You can come out of the bath now. My visitor has promised not to bite you."

First one appeared, then the other; the two of them could not possibly have fitted through the door at once. They wore-loincloths but were otherwise naked and still damp from their bath, two great steaming masses of hairy flesh, each of them twice the size of an ordinary man. I noticed that they were nicked with little scars here and there, but were mostly unmarked, as one might expect of gladiators who had never lost a match. They moved with surprising lightness and grace considering their bulk. Unlike Fausta, nothing shook or jiggled when they walked; for all their fleshiness, their muscles were as solid as marble.

I winced to see their famously ugly faces so close. "Eudamus and Birria," I whispered.

They walked across the room with supreme nonchalance, pushed aside the diaphanous drapery and lay down side by side on Fausta's sleeping couch. The frame groaned and sagged under their weight.

"My husband intends to take them with him to Massilia," said Fausta wistfully. "He'll need protection, of course. But gods, I shall miss the two of them!"

"I take it that you don't intend to accompany your husband into exile?"

"Follow Milo to Massilia, to live among Greeks and Gauls and washed-up Roman windbags? I had sooner live out my days on Milo's pig farm down in Lanuvium."

I looked at Eudamus and Birria warily. "Are you sure they can talk?"

"It seems almost too much to expect, doesn't it, given all their other talents? But yes, they can actually speak — though it's Birria who does all the talking. Eudamus is the shy one, because he's so much prettier, I suppose." The less repulsive of the two made a simpering smile and actually blushed. The uglier one wrinkled his nose and grunted. "Boys, this is Gordianus. I was telling him a few things about the day that Clodius died, and he didn't believe me."

"Do you want us to tear his head off his shoulders?"

"No, Birria. Perhaps some other time. Do you remember how the fight started that day?"

"Of course." Birria crossed his arms behind his head, showing off biceps as big as his head. "We met that fool Clodius on the road, which might have been trouble right off, but we passed without a hitch, everything as smooth as silk. But the fool couldn't let the opportunity pass to shout an insult at us at the last moment."

"And you lost your temper, didn't you?" Fausta commiserated.

"I did. I threw my spear at him. I meant it to whizz by his head, but he made a move and it hit his shoulder." Birria laughed. "Knocked him clean off his horse, and I didn't even mean to. Then it was Mars in charge and every man for himself. We got the best of them. Pretty soon they were running like rabbits into the woods and down the road."

"Then the master sent you after them," prompted Fausta.

"After he threw his tantrum," agreed Birria.

"And what were his instructions?"

Birria stretched on the couch. His legs reached so far over the end that he was almost able to touch his toes to the floor. "The master said, 'Kill all the rest if you have to, but take Clodius alive. Don't harm a hair on his head, or I'll send the lot of you off to the mines.' So we chased the fool down to Bovillae, where he was holed up inside the inn. We had to go in and drag his men out, one by one. The stupid innkeeper got in the way; Eudamus took care of him. We had the situation under control, and all that was left was to drag Clodius out of the inn by the scruff of his neck. Then that fellow Philemon and his friends came along. He pitched a fit, shouted some threats and shook his fist at us, but as soon as we took two steps towards him he let out a squeal and turned tail. He and his friends scattered all over the place. So we went after them. What else could we do? Eudamus chased one, I chased another, and all our men followed along. You'd think that someone would have had the sense to stay and keep a watch on Clodius, but no one thought to." He shrugged, bunching a great mass of muscles around his oxlike neck. "Everything was crazy that day."

I shook my head at the simplemindedness of it. "And when you finally rounded up the witnesses and came back — "

"Clodius was gone."

I nodded. "Because Sextus Tedius had already come along and dispatched him to Rome in his litter, while you were off chasing Philemon…"

"Yes, but we didn't know that," protested Birria. "When we got back to the inn, we couldn't figure out where in Hades Clodius had got to."

"So you argued about it for a while; that was the hushed argument Philemon only half overheard without understanding."

Birria shrugged. "We decided to head back and ask the master what to do. Clodius was wounded. We figured he couldn't get far."

"And on the way, you passed Sextus Tedius, resting below the House of the Vestals, and he saluted you, while his daughter — "

"We just ignored the old senator and hurried back to the master. He took one look at the prisoners, saw that we didn't have Clodius, and threw another tantrum. While he paced up and down we loaded the prisoners into a wagon and sent them on to the master's villa at Lanuvium, along with the mistress. Then the master decided that Clodius would probably make a run back to his villa on the mountain, so that's where we headed."

"But when you got there, you didn't find Clodius."

"We searched everywhere — in the stable, behind the rock piles, all through the house. We started threatening the slaves in charge, the foreman and that fellow Halicor. 'Where's Publius Clodius?' the master kept yelling."

"You were looking for Clodius at the villa — not for his son!"

"That was a dirty lie the Clodians put out afterwards, saying the master went on a hunt for Clodius's little boy. What would we have done with him? We didn't even know the boy was there, and we certainly never saw him. It was Clodius himself we were hunting for. The master was frantic that we couldn't find him. He kept asking us how badly Clodius was wounded. He figured that Clodius must be hiding in the hills-"