Steven Saylor - Catilina's riddle

The mood in the city continues to oscillate wildly. I do not think there can be any return to normalcy until Catilina is soundly defeated. At times this seems inevitable, only a matter of days; then one hears rumours that Catilina's forces now include thousands of runaway slaves and his army has grown larger than that of Spartacus at its peak. It is hard to know what to believe from day to day. There even appears to be a kind of backlash against Cicero, at least among those who are not busy proclaiming him to be the greatest Roman who ever lived….

I continued to read long after the words stopped making sense to me. At length, when I put down the letter, I noticed that my hand was trembling.

If Meto was not in Rome, then where was he?

The moment I let myself ask the question, I knew the answer.

'How far away are they? How long will you be gone?' Bethesda demanded.

'How far? Somewhere between here and the Alps. How long? There's no way of knowing.'

'You're sure he's gone to join Catilina?'

'As certain as if he had told me so aloud. What a fool I've been!'

Bethesda did not contradict me. As I hurriedly gathered the things

I would need, she watched me from the doorway, her arms crossed, her back straight, but with a lurking wildness in her eyes that indicated she was secretly distraught and struggling to hide it, I had seldom seen her so upset; to look into her eyes unnerved me. 'What will we do here without you, and without Meto? There could be danger, from runaway slaves, from soldiers. Perhaps Diana and I should go to Rome—'

'No! The roads are too dangerous now. I don't trust the slaves to protect you.'

'But you trust them to protect us here in the house?'

'Bethesda, please! Eco will come. I've already written to him. He could be here as soon as the day after tomorrow, or even late tomorrow night'

'You should stay until then, to make sure he.gets here.'

'No! Every moment that passes — the battle could already be taking place, this very minute — you want Meto to come back, don't you?'

'And what if neither of you comes back?' Her voice was suddenly shrill. She pressed the back of her hand against her lips and shuddered.

'Bethesda!' I clutched her and pressed her hard against me.

She began to sob. 'Ever since we left the city, nothing but trouble…'

I felt a sudden tugging at my tunic and looked down to see Diana's immense brown eyes staring up at me. 'Papa,' she said, somehow oblivious of her mother's anguish, 'Papa, come see!'

'Not now, Diana,'

'No, Papa, you must come see!' Something in her voice compelled me. Bethesda heard it, too, for she drew back, holding in her sobs.

Diana ran ahead of us. We followed her through the atrium and out of the front door. She paused in front of the stable, waved for us to catch up, and ran on ahead. My heart began to pound.

We came to the far side of the stable and turned the corner, out of sight of the house. Empty barrels were stacked against the wall. Diana stood beyond them, pointing at something we could not yet see. I took another step. Beyond the barrels, on the ground against the stable wall, I saw two naked feet.

'Oh, no.' Another step, and I saw the legs as well. 'No, no, no!' Another step, and I saw a white, bloodless torso. 'Not now, not here, not again — impossible!' I took another step and saw all there was to see.

It was a naked corpse, and it had no head.

I buried my face in my hands. Bethesda, oddly, seemed to gain composure from the hideous sight. She took a deep breath. 'Who can it be, I wonder?'

'I have no idea,' I said.

Diana, her mission accomplished, reached up to hold her mother's hand. She looked at me with an expression of mild accusation and disappointment, 'If Meto were here,' she said, 'he'd figure out who it was!'

XXXVIII

'The man who travels alone has a fool for a companion’ runs the ancient proverb, but in the heat of my urgency to reach Meto I felt oddly invincible, as if no ordinary obstacle on the road, no waylaying team of bandits of desperate gang of escaped slaves, could stop me.

This was an illusion, of course, and a dangerous one, and the wiser part of me knew it, but it gave me the fortitude to leave behind the slaves I might have taken as bodyguards, to protect the farm instead. If I could trust them to do so! There was supposed to have been a slave keeping watch atop the stables the night before, and if he had been there he might have seen how the headless body was delivered, and by whom Saying the night had grown too bitterly cold, with tears in his eyes the slave told me he had abandoned his post and begged me not to let Aratus beat him. What else should I have expected? The man was a slave, not a soldier. Even so, I left his punishment to Aratus, whom I charged with making certain there were no such lapses in my absence, or else I would sell him to the mines. I was angry when I said it, and must have sounded convincing; Aratus turned the colour of chalk. As for the new corpse which Diana had discovered, I was able to learn nothing significant from a cursory inspection. I told Aratus to keep the body until Eco arrived; perhaps he would be able to make some sense of it.

It is a strange experience, to travel alone through a countryside braced for war in the dead of winter. The fallow fields on either side were empty and abandoned, and so was the highway. There normally should have been some traffic despite the cold, especially with the sky clear and no prospect of rain, but for hours at a stretch I saw no one. The farmhouses I passed had their doors shut and their windows shuttered, with all the animals put away in barns or in pens hidden from the road. There were not even any dogs to bark a greeting or a warning as I passed. The only signs of life were the unavoidable plumes of smoke that rose from hearth fires. The inhabitants wanted to show no signs of wealth or provisions or even occupancy to anyone passing on the road. They were like the ostriches one sees sometimes at spectacles in the Circus Maximus, digging a hole in the sand and then burying their heads, thinking to hide themselves from the roaring crowd. Had I been any different, thinking I could escape Rome by hiding on my farm? It had certainly not worked for me. Nor, I thought, would it work for these nervous country folk if a ravaging army should happen to pass through. Yet what choice remains to a bird who has wings but cannot fry — unless, I thought, he should summon up the will to fight.

The towns through which I passed sometimes seemed as abandoned as the farms, with all the houses shut up tight and no one in the streets. Yet each town had a tavern or two, and it was in these that all the life seemed to have concentrated. Inside these establishments there was no end to the arguing and debate of the locals who congregated to assure one another that all the battles would be fought elsewhere and all the troops would requisition their provisions from some other hapless town. They were eager to press for news from a stranger passing through, though I had little to give them. And though I was passing through a region where Catilina could claim his greatest support, I heard few words spoken in his favour. Those most enthusiastic for his cause would have gone to join him already, I thought, or else had done so once but had now abandoned him and fled back to where they came from.

I made the journey by long, hard stages, stopping over in towns whose names I never knew, always seeking word of Catilina's movements. Since the executions in Rome, his army had moved back and forth between the Alps and Rome, evading confrontation with the regular armies sent to engage them. At one time his forces were thought to have numbered two full legions, or twelve thousand men, but after the executions and the failure of a general uprising in Rome, me opportunists and adventurers had quickly deserted. Exhausted by forced marches, left hungry by lack of provisions, even those most devoted to its cause began to abandon the rebel army, until there remained only those for whom there could be no turning back. ‘I don't think you'll find Catilina and Manlius with more than five thousand men, if that, and many of them poorly armed,’ a tavern keeper in Florentia told me. He also said that the Roman army under Cicero's fellow consul Antonius had passed through only a few days earlier, pursuing Catilina northwards.