The Roman Conspiracy Page 7

  Then Cicero appeared. If I had thought the cheers were deafening before, they rose even louder and longer now. “Father of Rome,” the people cried as he descended, “Father of your Country, Protector of Liberty!” He acknowledged the adulation of the people with a smile, and a wave, but no more, as Tullia and I sat watching. Even she could not believe her eyes; but they were filled with tears.

  “Do you understand now, Spurinna?” she said proudly. “Do you see the power of words in Rome? Those with armies and gladiators may be strong. But those who fight with words can never, ever be stopped.”

  The Unlikely Magician

  nfortunately, my lack of sleep caught up with me on the way back. They carried me, fast asleep, to a guest bedroom in Cicero’s house. I remember dreaming that I was trapped in Volturcius’ house, with all the conspirators pointing up at me. And then I was flying over the Market like a bird, gazing across the sprawling city.

  “Master Spurinna? Please wake up. Sir, please wake up,” came the voice of another bird flying beside me, but it was only the steward shaking me awake. He was much more friendly than before, for he was under the impression that my javelin had saved the house he guarded so jealously.

  “Yes?” I asked groggily.

  “I’m afraid we need you, sir. Very sorry to wake you up, but there is rather an awkward situation in the garden.”

  I stumbled beside him toward the garden, where I had found Tullia the evening before as she was sitting with Marrucinus and Fulvia. The place was empty now, except for a waiter holding a tray of boiled eggs.

  “You woke me up to feed me eggs?”

  “No, sir, over there,” whispered the steward, pointing to the dense planting of ferns in the far corner. At that moment there came a shout of wild laughter from behind them, and the voice of the philosopher Pantolemos calling, “You there! More, more of those eggs!”

  Confused, I picked a couple of eggs off the tray and walked round the clump of ferns. There, to my still greater confusion, sat Pantolemos, who seemed to be drunk; and the man he was slapping on the shoulder affectionately was my own slave, Homer. He seemed to be even more drunk than Pantolemos, and he was busy smashing hardboiled eggs against the elaborate mosaics on the garden floor.

  “Homer!” I cried. “What are you doing here? And what on earth is going on?”

  “Oh, there, sir, it is you! Very glad you’re alive, I may say. Heard all about it, I did, from this gentleman, this learned gentleman here. We are proving the theorems of that great mathematician from Alexandria who – extraordinary insight – look now, if we double the angle …”

  I saw that they had arranged the eggs into various triangles. No doubt each egg diagram illustrated some profound point of philosophy.

  “Homer,” I said sternly, “it is clear that you have had too much to drink. There have been complaints. Your philosophy is making a lot of noise, and the steward tells me the kitchen is running out of eggs.”

  To his credit, Homer was instantly sober, or just about. He and Pantolemos postponed their speculations, and he told me how he had come to be here. It seemed that he had waited in the street outside Volturcius’ house for a long time the night before – had even heard the thud in the alley when I fell off the vine – but decided he should report back to Tullia. Then he went to the apartment he had rented, where he fell asleep. When I had not appeared there by noon, he returned to Cicero’s house once more, where the only person he could find was Pantolemos. Somehow the servants mistook them for two important Greek philosophers from Athens, perhaps the Consul’s guests, and he and Pantolemos had drunk half a big jug of the best wine in Rome. It was at that point, it seemed, that they started calling for hardboiled eggs.

  “Well, I’m glad you two are now friends, at least,” I replied. “Now tell me, where is Tullia?”

  She was, Homer said, in the library with her father, but maybe, he suggested, I would like to put on my toga first? He had carried it halfway across the city for me, after all.

  “Quite right,” I said, and returned to the guest bedroom where it was lying, neatly folded. Then, looking a little more like a Roman, I headed off toward the library.

  Before I got there, however, I heard Tullia’s voice floating down the stairs.

  “But we can get their names, in writing!” she was saying. “He assured me himself …”

  “He did not assure me,” came her father’s reply. “Why is that fat man dealing only with you? I’m the Consul, after all.”

  “He is afraid, Father, that you will blame him and ruin his people.”

  “I will not,” Cicero said. “But you know I cannot act without proof.”

  “But I can get you just that – eventually!” Tullia answered. “That is what he wants, to deliver the proof through me.”

  “Through you?” he responded gruffly. “This is no game, daughter. We need hard, tangible proof. Don’t forget that half the Judges are Catiline’s own brothers-in-law or great-uncles, or heaven knows what. It will take more than a girl’s promise to move them to act!”

  I was just about to retreat when Cicero hurried out of the library and saw me coming up the stairs. His worried expression lightened somewhat.

  “Ah, Spurinna, I am glad to see your face,” he said. “Tullia tells me you heard the speech fairly well today.”

  “Allow me to congratulate you, sir,” I answered warmly.

  “Thank you, thank you. Yes, it is not every day a Consul is greeted as Father of his Country, it’s true. But your congratulations may be somewhat premature. Tullia will tell you, I have no doubt.” But then he frowned. “What’s all this noise I’ve been hearing from the garden? They tell me it’s a Greek slave of yours.”

  “He was carried away in a discussion, sir – it’s over now, sir,” I replied hastily.

  “Discussion? Ah, well, the Greeks will do that,” Cicero said with a smile. And he excused himself and descended the stairs, chuckling.

  I found Tullia inside the library. She was fiddling with a writing tablet.

  “Aulus, you’re awake!” she smiled.

  “Luckily,” I said. “I would have missed all the celebrating otherwise.”

  “Celebrating?” she said. “Oh, the speech, yes.”

  “Isn’t it a great victory?” I said. “Catiline is gone, the conspiracy is finished. We should be celebrating.”

  She put down the writing tablet and sighed. “Aulus,” she said – I noticed that she was calling me ‘Aulus’ now and not ‘Spurinna’ – “Aulus, if that’s your impression, I’m glad. Not because it’s true, but because that’s exactly what my father’s speech was supposed to make the people think.”

  “You mean Catiline isn’t finished?”

  “This is politics, Aulus. If the people thought Catiline had a chance, then we might be in trouble. But he doesn’t, because they don’t. Do you follow me?

  “Of course,” I said, lying. “It makes sense. But why isn’t Catiline finished?”

  “Well, to begin with, he’s got Manlius and the army in Etruria! That’s something. But it’s impossible to have a conspiracy of just one person. There have to be other men who are with him, here in Rome. You told me yourself there were two dozen people at Volturcius’ house last night.”

  “But your father knows who they are,” I persisted, rattling off some of the names I had heard. “Even that Druid who was here – why can’t your father send guards to arrest them?”

  “Because, Aulus, you can’t just arrest people with no proof.” she said impatiently. “They’re not nobodies, they have friends, they’re Senators and Roman knights. It may even be that Julius Caesar supports them.” She sighed again. “No, my father’s right, of course. Without proof, our hands are tied. You can’t go before the Senate with nothing but …” she looked at me blankly “… with nothing but a girl’s fancy.”

  “Well,” I said, “then we wait. Let’s go down to the Market. If you recall, you promised to show me around.”

  And wait we did �
� for ten days. Tullía insisted that I sleep in one of the guest bedrooms at Cicero’s house, and they found Homer a comfortable spot in the slaves’ quarters. She did show me the Market, several times – though mainly, I suspected, in order to have me as an escort while she looked into a hundred shops, for it seemed that Roman ladies were not supposed to stroll around by themselves. I learned a lot about perfume and silk, and Tullia often went to a Celtic merchant who sold beautiful amber gems. But she would not say much about politics. She often disappeared in the evening, sometimes with her friend Fulvia, sometimes alone.

  I began to enjoy living in the great city, in spite of its dirt, and its noise, and its peculiar smell. On all sides I heard that things were dull, that commerce was dwindling, and that no one was reveling because of the threat that Catiline still posed. There was a sense of impending danger. Rumors spread that Catiline’s friends walked the streets after nightfall, trying to recruit for him. To me the city seemed lively enough during the day, though I did take Tullia’s advice to stay inside after supper. Then I labored to amuse myself, usually reading or playing backgammon.

  And we did play a lot of backgammon, Homer and I, sitting in the garden on quiet evenings as November wore away. Cicero had no more dinner parties that month, or at least none at his house. We saw him only a few times, still wearing the chain-mail shirt under his Senator’s toga. But I enjoyed the backgammon games less than I might have done, for I was thinking more and more about Volturcius, and Homer usually won. Every time he did, he would quote another line from Hesiod.

  “At this rate, sir, I shall get through the complete works of that immortal poetic genius,” he remarked at one point. “‘These days are blessed for men upon the earthy,’ as he so aptly puts it. But perhaps I can interest you in the poems they merely claim that he composed?”

  So it was with great relief that I saw Tullia and Fulvia approaching us in the garden late one afternoon. I rose to greet them.

  “How is the game going?” asked Fulvia. “I hope you are beating the Greeks like a good Roman, Spurinna.”

  “They must be Greek dice,” I said.

  “Enough of the game for today,” said Tullia. “Aulus, I wish to ask you something. It concerns Volturcius.”

  “Volturcius?” I put the board away.

  “That’s right,” Tullia said. “I thought you’d be interested. You’re still eager to …”

  “To get him? The murderer?” I cried. Of course I was. I had been thinking of nothing else.

  “Good. Well, our plans are coming together again. As you know, Volturcius is a trusted man among these friends of Catiline. They used his house for that meeting. And they have been using him to carry messages between Catiline and Manlius. Fulvia here heard about it.”

  “How did you hear?” I asked Fulvia. “Surely you’re not mixed up in this.”

  “Strange you should ask,” Fulvia answered, taking a deep breath. “It was four days ago, when Marrucinus was strolling with me by the theater, and we met our friend who was walking there … and she said Volturcius was her husband’s-Protector here in the city, but he was never home for days on end … and her husband had asked all about it, and Volturcius has been traveling, and her husband asked where, and no one would tell him, so he kept asking, and finally they said Faesulae … and that’s what my friend told me. By the theater. Four days ago.” Fulvia stopped long enough to breathe again.

  “So you see, Aulus, Volturcius has been to Faesulae since the conspirators had their meeting,” continued Tullia. “But Fulvia and I think he’s a weak link in their schemes. You see, as everyone knows, he is very superstitious.”

  “That’s true enough,” I replied. “You should have seen his study. The little golden dolls, the astrology, the diagrams of animal guts – it was like a temple.”

  “Right,” said Tullia. “He’s superstitious. Always wondering what the gods are thinking, the impious brute. His appetite for consultations, for séances and so on, is enormous.”

  “What does this have to do with avenging my uncle’s death?”

  “We think we’ve found a way to crush Volturcius, to trap him and get that proof my father needs. Besides hurting Catiline’s cause, that will finish Volturcius, believe me. You see, we know that the conspirators want to bring in Celtic allies …”

  “I overheard something about that at the meeting. Those ‘ten thousand warriors’ – that’s what you mean?”

  “That’s it,” said Tullia. “But the Celts want proof themselves, proof of good faith, a signed letter from the conspirators asking for their help. Otherwise they won’t come.”

  “A letter? What good is that?”

  “It’s a sign of trust, Aulus. It would mean they trust the Celts not to betray them. A token.”

  “Hmm. Alright, but how do you know all this?”

  “Patience, Aulus. We’ve been busy, and we know that much. And we also know that it’s Volturcius who is going to deliver the letter!”

  “And,” interrupted Fulvia, taking another deep breath, “when we heard that, Spurinna, I went back to the theater, not with Marrucinus, and found my friend there. And she and her husband had been to Volturcius’ house, just last night … for dinner … and he was incredibly nervous the whole time! He must be terrified about his mission. He kept asking his guests if they knew any way to make the gods guarantee something important would work – a priest, or a magician, or something. And my friend told me that, and I told her to tell Volturcius there was a wonderful magician in the city who could do anything.”

  “So,” said Tullia smoothly – those two girls were quite a team – “so what do we do? We get you in there to read the letter, and then you swear before my father and the Judges that the letter exists, and then my father can be authorized to seize it! To get the proof, Aulus!”

  There was a pause. “And how on earth are you going to get me in to read it?” I asked, dreading the answer, which I knew they must have ready for me.

  “Haven’t you been paying attention?” asked Tullia. “Obviously, if the man is superstitious, worried about delivering the letter and the mission, we just disguise you as that priest or magician and he’ll show it to you, so you can bless it, in the name of the gods. It’s all arranged. In fact, you’re having dinner there tonight.”

  “Tonight? Me? Dinner at Volturcius’ house? You can’t be serious!”

  “Fulvia has arranged it, as she always does,” Tullia said with a smile. “Isn’t that a fine piece of work? You should thank her for it.”

  “It wasn’t easy,” Fulvia confirmed. “My friend had to describe your stupendous magic at great length, Spurinna. She said that you’re on intimate terms with all the seven planets. And the moon, too.”

  My mouth fell open. What in heaven’s name were these rash young women getting me into? It was madness.

  “Now look,” I said, recovering. “In all reason, how is Volturcius going to believe I have this stupendous magical knack when I’m not even twenty years old?” Another pause. The girls bit their lips. “I’ve seen pictures of these fortune-tellers,” I went on, seizing my advantage, “I even saw a couple of them in the Market yesterday. They’re all at least sixty years old! They’re from some place out East you’ve never heard of! They’ve got beards as long as my arm! They do not,” I concluded, “look like respectable young Roman citizens. Like me,” I added, for emphasis.

  Now Tullia and her friend looked positively discouraged, and I almost felt sorry for the failure of their scheme.

  Meanwhile, Homer had been sitting beside me the whole time, playing idly with the backgammon dice. But when he heard me describe myself as a respectable young Roman citizen, he couldn’t help coughing heavily. That cough was his undoing.

  Tullia’s eyes lit up. “Steward!” she called. “Yes, steward, bring me the holiday beard, it’s in the small storeroom. Here,” she said, when the steward returned with a dusty gray false beard, which did look suitable for a carnival. It hooked on behind the ears, with no mo
ustache. “Here it is,” she said.

  I backed firmly away. “Nothing will convince me …” I began.

  “Not you, Aulus. You there, philosopher, stand up a moment.” She gestured to Homer. “Try this on.” Homer glanced at me in terror, but obeyed. “Yes,” said Tullia with delight. “Yes, oh yes, that’s it! If we just add a bright red shirt … no, embroidered, with strange signs … and a staff … no, a wand … and a hat, a floppy felt hat. Where will we find that, I wonder? Steward, send down to the Market and buy a fortune-teller’s clothes. The price doesn’t matter. And send for my seamstress.”

  If it were not for the fact that two pretty girls were gazing at him with admiration, I think Homer would have torn the beard off at this point and run screaming from the garden. He had heard the whole conversation, of course, and he knew as well as I did they were going to dress him up like a sorcerer and send him straight into the lion’s den.

  “You know,” I said carefully, “I think this just might work.”

  “Sir, please,” said Homer, turning to me. “I understand what is happening here, and I beg you, sir, I entreat you, do not dress me up as a carnival attraction! I am a student of the Muses, sir, and your humble secretary, not some …”

  “Yes indeed,” I said to Tullia. “A stroke of genius. He’s perfect.”

  Homer was still sulking heavily by the time the slave returned from the Market, with a set of robes so exotic they were one great heap of purple. But Tullia took so much pleasure in helping him into them, adjusting his beard, and teaching him how to wave his wand that he only scratched the back of his head under his floppy felt hat and complained that he didn’t know anything about sorcery.

  “That doesn’t matter, Homer,” I informed him. “Dress makes the man. You look splendid, a genuine magician.”