Steven Saylor - Arms of Nemesis

Fabius knocked. The door opened just enough for a blinking eye to peer out, and then was pulled wide open by an unseen slave who cowered behind it. Fabius raised his hand in a gesture that invited us to follow and at the same time demanded silence. My eyes were used to the sunlight, so that the hallway seemed quite dark. I saw the wax masks of the household ancestors in their niches only as vague shadows on either side of us, like ghosts without bodies peering from little windows.

The dark hallway opened into an atrium. The space was square, surrounded by a colonnaded portico on the ground floor and a narrow walkway on the floor above. Cobblestone pathways meandered through a low garden. There was a small fountain at the centre, where a bronze faun threw back his head in delight as tiny jets of water splashed from his pipes. The workmanship was exquisite. The creature seemed to be alive, ready to leap and dance; the sound of bubbling water was almost like laughter. At our approach, two yellow birds who were bathing themselves in the tiny pool flew in a startled circle about the faun's prancing hooves, then upwards to perch nervously on the balustrade that circled the upper storey, and then upwards again into the blue sky.

I watched them ascend, then lowered my eyes to the garden again. That was when I saw the great funeral bier at the far end of the atrium, and the body that lay upon it.

Fabius walked through the garden, where he paused to dip his fingers into the basin at the faun's feet and then touch them to his forehead. Eco and I followed his example and joined him before the body. 'Lucius Licinius,' said Fabius in a low voice.

In life, the dead man had possessed great wealth; either that or his funeral arrangements were being provided by someone with a remarkable purse. Even very wealthy families are usually content to lay their deceased upon a wooden bed with ivory legs and perhaps some decorative ivory inlays. This elegantly carved bed was made entirely of ivory, from head to foot. I had heard of such lavishness, but had never before seen an example. The precious substance glowed with a waxen paleness almost as smooth and colourless as the flesh of the dead man himself.

Purple blankets embroidered with gold lay upon the bed, along with adornments of asters and evergreen branches. The corpse was dressed in a white toga with elegant green and white embroidery. The feet were clad in freshly oiled sandals and pointed toward the door of the house, as prescribed by tradition.

Eco wrinkled his nose. An instant later I did the same. Despite the perfumes and unguents with which the body had been anointed, and the pan of incense set above a low brazier nearby, there was a decided odour of decay in the air. Eco moved to cover his nose with the hem of his sleeve; I batted his hand away and frowned at his rudeness.

Fabius said in a low voice, 'This is the fifth day.' It would be two more days until the funeral then, to allow the seven days of public mourning. The body would be quite pungent by then. With such an ostentatious display of wealth, surely the family had paid for the best anointers to be found in Baiae, or more likely had brought them over from bustling Puteoli, but their skill had not been good enough. There was an added irony in the carelessness with which the deceased was displayed; a few stray tendrils of ivy had fallen over his head, obscuring not only half his face but any laurel crown that he might have been wearing in remembrance of some earthly honour.

'This ivy,' I said, 'looks almost as if it had been placed over his face on purpose…'

Fabius did not stop me as I gently lifted the green tendrils that had been so skilfully arranged to hide the dead man's scalp. The wound beneath was of the sort that makes anointers of the dead throw up their hands in despair — almost impossible to purify and seal, too large to be hidden in any subtle way, too deep and ugly to be looked at for long. Eco made an involuntary sound of disgust and turned his face away, then leaned back to take a closer look.

'Hideous, isn't it?' whispered Fabius, averting his face. 'And Lucius Licinius was such a vain man. A pity he can't look his best in death.'

I steeled myself to look at the dead man's face. A sharp, heavy blow or blows had destroyed the upper right quadrant of his face, tearing the ear, smashing the cheekbone and jaw and ruining the eye, which despite any efforts to close it after death remained narrowly opened and clotted with blood. I studied what remained of the face and was able to imagine a handsome man of middle age, greying slightly at the temples, with a strong nose and chin. The Lips were slightly parted, showing the gold coin that had been placed on his tongue by the anointers — the fee for the boatman Charon to ferry him across the river Styx.

'His death was not an accident?' I offered.

'Hardly.'

'An altercation that came to blows?'

'Possibly. It happened late at night. His body was found here in the atrium the next morning. The circumstances were obvious.'

'Yes?'

'A runaway slave — some fool following the example of Spartacus, it appears. Someone else will explain the matter to you in more detail.'

'This was done by an escaped slave? I am not a slave hunter, Faustus Fabius. Why was I brought here?'

He glanced at the dead man, then at the bubbling faun. 'Someone else will explain.'

'Very well. The victim — what did you call him?' 'Lucius Licinius.'

'He was the master of the house?' 'More or less,' said Fabius. 'No riddles, please.'

Fabius pursed his lips. 'This should have been Mummius's job, not mine. I agreed to escort you to the villa, but I never agreed to explain the matter to you once you arrived.'

'Marcus Murnmius isn't here. But I am, and so is the corpse of a murdered man.'

Fabius grimaced. Patrician or not, he struck me as a man used to being stuck with unpleasant jobs, and he did not like it. What had he called himself — the left hand of Crassus? 'Very well,' he finally said. 'This is the way things were with Lucius Licinius. He and Crassus were cousins, closely linked by blood. I gather they hardly knew one another growing up, but that changed when they became men. Many of the Licinii were wiped out in the civil wars; once things got back to normal under Sulla's dictatorship, Crassus and Lucius formed a closer relationship.'

'Not a friendship?'

'It was more in the nature of a business partnership.' Fabius smiled. 'But then everything is business with Marcus Crassus. Anyway, in any relationship there must be a stronger and a weaker partner. I think you must know enough about Crassus, if only by hearsay, to imagine which of them was subservient.'

'Lucius Licinius.'

'Yes. Lucius was a poor man to start with, and he would have stayed that way without Crassus's help. Lucius had so little imagination; he wasn't the sort to see an opportunity and seize it, unless he was pushed. Meanwhile, Crassus was busy making his millions in real estate up in Rome — you must know the legend.'

I nodded. When the dictator Sulla finally triumphed in the civil wars, he destroyed his enemies by seizing their property and rewarded his supporters, Pompey and Crassus among them, with villas and farms; thus had Crassus begun his ascent, driven by an apparently boundless appetite for property. Once in the streets of Rome I had come upon a burning building, and there was Crassus bidding on the tenement next to it. The owner, confused and desperate and believing he was about to lose his property to the spreading flames, sold it to Crassus on the spot for a song, whereupon the millionaire called out his private fire brigades to put out the flames. Such tales about Crassus were commonplace in Rome.

'Everything Crassus touched seemed to turn to gold,' Fabius explained. 'His cousin Lucius, on the other hand, muddled about trying to make a living off the land, like all good, old-fashioned plebeians. He lost and lost until he was bankrupt. Finally he begged Crassus to save him, and Crassus did. He made Lucius a kind of factotum, a representative to look after some of Crassus's business enterprises on the Cup. In a good year — without pirates or Spartacus — there's a great deal of business transacted on the Cup; it's not all luxurious villas and oyster farms. Crassus owns mines in Spain, and a fleet of ships that bring the ore to Puteoli. He owns metalworkers in Neapolis and Pompeii who turn the ore into utensils and weapons and finished works of art. He owns ships that transport slaves from Alexandria to Puteoli. He owns farms and vineyards all over Campania, and supplies the hordes of slaves that ate needed to work them. Crassus can't oversee all these small details himself; his interests extend from Spain to Egypt. He delegated responsibility for local business here on the Cup to Lucius, who oversaw Crassus's investments and enterprises in a plodding but adequate manner.'