Many days later, I returned to the place and drove a slender stele made of marble into the gravesite, which was almost hidden by thorns. On the stele, reading downward, were inscribed these letters:
N E M O
The artisan in the village had complained that it was an odd request, engraving a stele for Nobody, but he had accepted my silver readily enough.
The feverish spell of lovemaking between Bethesda and myself was definitely over, as I discovered that night. She turned her shoulder to me when I came to bed, and when I tried to talk to her about the body in the stable, she pulled a pillow over her head.
‘I complained that the circumstance was not of my devising; that I knew no more about the body and how it came to be there than she did; that I would do all I could to protect her and the children. She made no answer. Eventually I heard her snoring. Insulted and angry, I left the room.
I paced for a long time in the formal courtyard, circling the pond over and over. I paced for so long that I was able to watch the moon shadow of the roof slide slowly across the paving stones. Half the world was black shadow and the other half a soft, hazy silver, and I strode back and forth between the two.
At last I left the courtyard. I looked in on Meto and Diana in their little rooms and found each of them sleeping soundly and apparently without dreams.
I followed the short hallway to my library. I lit a lamp and hung it above my writing table. I spread a piece of parchment before me and pulled the inkstand nearer. I dipped a reed into the ink and began to write. Aratus did most of my letter writing; my hand was clumsy and I made a number of spots on the parchment before I got the reed to flow properly. I wrote:
To my beloved son Eco at his house in Rome, greetings from his beloved father at the farm in Etruria.
Life here in the countryside continues to be full of surprises. It is not nearly as dull as you might imagine. I know you love the excitement of Rome, but I think you would be surprised at how much goes on here.
Keep in mind that we celebrate Meto's sixteenth birthday next month, when he will put on his manly toga. The house in Rome will need to be at its best to receive a number of distinguished (and some not-so-distinguished) visitors. The distinguished visitors will need to be impressed by the family's best ornaments and plate; the not-so-distinguished ones will need to be kept from stealing them. I trust your new wife will be up to the task of organizing and overseeing such an event. Bethesda will probably take over matters anyway.
By the way, I have a small favour to ask. Do this discreetly, please. There is a young man named Marcus Caelius, a protege of Cicero and of Crassus. Send him a message for me. Say: 'The body without a head.' I realize this makes no sense; it is in the way of a private joke. He will understand.
I think of you often. You are missed by everyone. I know you are busy in the city. I hope you are exercising all reasonable caution and keeping yourself sate from harm, as is
your loving father.
I sat for a while to let the ink dry, then rolled up the parchment and slipped it into a cylindrical case, tied it and sealed it and pressed my ring into the soft wax. In the morning I would dispatch a slave to take it to Rome.
I stepped into the herb garden. No bees hovered there, having all retired to their hives for the night, but a pair of great luminous moths flitted among the vines. The hour was very late, but I did not feel sleepy. Instead I felt as I had earlier that day in the stable — preternaturally alert, seeing and hearing everything around me with an uncanny clarity. The full moonlight was so bright that I could see everything almost as if by daylight, as if the sun had simply turned to blue fire instead of yellow. All was normal, and yet not normal at all. As earlier in the day, I felt the same strange numbness in the midst of acute perception.
I passed through the gate and walked towards the hillside until I found myself at the southwest comer of the estate, not because that was where we had buried the stranger, but because it was the most secluded place on the farm.
I had tried to flee from Rome, but Rome was too great. Within this world, there is no escape from her. Rome is like a net, and men are fish caught in her sweep. Even if a man could make himself so small as to pass through the net, he would only find himself the prey of larger men; and even if he could be so clever and so fast as to escape those other men, he would still find himself at the mercy of Fortune, which is the sea in which we swim, and of the Fates, which are the crags upon which we are pounded. There is no escape.
And so I sat on a rock and gathered up the hem of my tunic and rolled it into a ball, then pressed it to my mouth and screamed into it. I screamed as loudly as I could, and no one heard — not Bethesda softly snoring, nor the slaves, nor Meto and Diana sound asleep in their beds. All day I had held that scream inside me. Something unexpected and terrible had occurred. I had examined the situation, learned what I could from it, attempted to control it. But from the first moment I saw the headless corpse, all I had really wanted to do was to scream — the furious anguished scream of the wolf caught in a trap, of the eagle thrust into a cage.
Part Two
Candidatus
VIII
For the next several days I waited in anticipation of a visitor who did not come.
In the meantime life resumed its normal rhythm. Work on the farm continued as always. Aratus oversaw the field slaves and worked on my accounts, Congrio cooked, the house slaves went about their business.
The days grew longer and hotter, and the nights grew warmer, except in my bed, where things were quite chilly. Bethesda never once queried me about the body in the stable; she had decided long ago, and rightly, since I was then her master, that if my work brought danger into our lives, then dealing with it was my worry, not hers. Her outburst in the stable had been a rare occurrence, and she clearly did not intend to repeat it and would bite her tongue rather than mention it again. Her unspoken attitude announced that she simply saw no point in wasting her breath on interrogating or chastising me; secretly I knew she was deeply worried.
Her manner was cool and distant, like that of soldiers' wives who must live with the terrible prospect of losing their husbands and yet partly blame their husbands for such a possibility in the first place, and thus feel anxiety and anger and helplessness all together. Feigned apathy is a protection, a steeling of the will against the implacable Fates. Bethesda's aloofness I had experienced before and grown used to, but mixed with it was a harsh new strain of suspicion and hard scrutiny, as if I were guilty of a deliberate breach of faith and were directly responsible for subjecting her to the shock of Nemo's arrival.
She was playing a game of patience, I thought, waiting for me to break and tell her all I knew about the corpse and its appearance. I gave in to her more than once, and with an oblique mention of what had happened in the stable let her know I was ready to confide in her, but every time this happened she responded by loudly changing the subject, slamming doors, stalking from the room, and generally making life miserable for everyone in the household. "This wouldn't be happening if I had kept you a slave instead of marrying you,' I would grumble halfheartedly under my breath, but of course there was no one to hear me, and I did not quite believe the words myself
Meto did not seem particularly upset by the body's unexplained appearance. His having grown to manhood in my household in Rome had apparently so inured him to such madness that he could take it for granted. As with Bethesda, it was not his worry; in his offhand, unspoken way he let me know that he fully trusted his father to deal with any such contingency, no matter how menacing or outrageous. His faith in me was touching, and all the more so because it was considerably deeper than my faith in myself
Diana, on the other hand, grew moody and cross, though I think her unhappiness was more to be attributed to the discord between her parents than to the shock of having found Nemo. Or was I fooling myself, minimising the awfulness of the shock of witnessing such a grotesque intrusion into her. secure little world, because to contemplate such ugliness perpetrated on a child, my child, was enough to send me back to the brambles howling into my tunic? I tried my best to show her as much attention as I could, holding her and combing her hair, giving her treats of curdled cream and honey, but she squirmed in my lap, threw her sweets on the ground, and displayed a querulous dissatisfaction with all the world. I sighed and remembered that she was the daughter of her mother, after all.
Meanwhile, as subtly as I could, I queried the slaves to discover anything they might know about Nemo. I came up with nothing. Aratus, who vowed to keep his mouth shut and his ears open, had no more success. It was as if only we five had ever seen him, and otherwise Nemo had never existed.
The month of Junius waned. The month of Quinctilis approached, and with it high summer. All the world turned hazy with heat. Mount Argentum to the east shimmered like a wavering reflection in a pond. The stream grew smaller in its banks, and its gurgling voice became a low murmur. Even in the shade it was almost too hot to sleep at midday.
A visitor arrived at last.
He did not come through the gate but left the Cassian Way where it veered closest to the ridge at the southeast comer of the farm, and: picked his way through the brambles and oak woods. He was not alone, but accompanied by a hulking giant with straw-coloured hair who looked almost too big for his horse. Together they approached slowly and cautiously, surreptitiously examining the main house and the adjoining fields from a distance before coming closer.
By chance I happened to see them before they saw me, for I was up on the ridge that afternoon, sitting and gazing down on the form. The ridgetop sometimes catches a faint breeze even when the air is still down below, and so, with a skin of cooled wine, it can be a comfortable place to pass the waning of a hot, cloudless day.
Claudia had joined me a few moments before, coming up from her side of the hill. She wore a long, loose brown tunic and a farmer's straw hat with a brim almost as wide as she was tall, so that she gave the appearance of a giant mushroom. We sat in the shade and talked idly about animal ailments and temperamental slaves and the weather — not about Nemo or politics or her hostile cousins, for the heat was much too strong for confiding secrets or stirring up controversy. It was Claudia who first saw my visitors.
'Oh, Gordianus, those can't be two of your slaves, can they?'
'Where?'
'Those two men on horseback, down at the foot of the ridge. No, you can't see them now for the treetops — but now, there,' she said, pointing with a down-crooked finger.
'What makes you think they're not my men?' I asked, peering down but still unable to see them.
'Because as I was climbing up the other side of the ridge I sat down to rest for a moment and saw them over on the Cassian Way, riding up from the south.'
"The same two men? You're sure?'
'Only because one rides a white horse and the other a black, and the one on the black is positively enormous. I don't think you have any slaves that big on your estate.'
I finally saw them, at rest on their horses beneath the olive trees down below. They faced away from us and seemed to be watching the farmhouse.
'Ah, yes,' I said uneasily, 'visitors from Rome, I suspect.' Catilina, I thought, come at last.
'Anyone I know?'
I cleared my throat, trying to think of an answer, and meanwhile peered down at the men on horseback. All could see were their shoulders and their round-brimmed hats.
Claudia laughed. 'Forgive me for being so nosy. Country habits; if I'd been raised in the city I suppose I'd have learned to mind my own business. Or maybe not. Well, I shall leave you to go and greet your visitors.' She rose and put on her hat. Though why they should be approaching your house through the woods like a pair of bandits, instead of using the road, is a puzzlement You do know who they are, Gordianus?'
'Oh, yes,' I assured her, wondering if I did.
I waited for her to leave, then stood and took a sip of wine from the skin. Down below me, the men on horseback did the same, passing a skin between them. They seemed content to sit and watch from their vantage point beneath the shady olive trees, so I sat and watched them in turn. This went on for quite some time, until I began to grow impatient and a little angry. After all, invited or not, they had no business being on my property without my knowledge, and to spy upon my house, whatever their reason or intent, was inexcusable.