"Gordianus! And Eco! How was your journey?"
"I'll tell you as soon as I get off this horse and discover whether I still have two legs."
Lucius Claudius let out a good-natured laugh. "Why, the ride from Rome is only a few hours! And a fine paved road all the way. And glorious weather!"
That was true enough. It was a day in late Aprilis, one of those golden spring days that one might wish could last forever. Sol himself seemed to think so; the sun stood still in the sky, as if enraptured by the beauty of the earth below and unwilling to move on.
And the earth was indeed beautiful, especially this little corner of it, tucked amid the rolling Etruscan countryside north of Rome. The hills were studded with oaks and spangled with yellow and purple flowers. Here in the valley, groves of olive trees shimmered silver and green in the faint breeze. The orchards of fig trees and lime trees were in full leaf. Bees hummed and flitted among the long rows of grape leaves. There was bird song or the air, mingled with a tune being sung by a group of slaves striding through a nearby field and swinging their scythes in unison. I breathed deeply the sweet odor of tall grass drying in the sun. Even my good friend Lucius looked unusually robust, like a plump-cheeked Silenus with frizzled red hair; all he needed to complete the image was a pitcher of wine and a few attendant wood nymphs.
I slipped off my horse and discovered I still had legs after all. Eco sprang from his mount and leaped into the air. Oh, to be a fourteen-year-old boy, and to never know a stiff muscle! A slave led our horses toward the stable.
Lucius gave me a hearty slap across the shoulders and walked me toward the villa. Eco ran in circles around us, like an excited pup. It was a charming house, low and rambling with many windows, their shutters all thrown open to let in the sunlight and fresh air. I thought of houses in the city, all narrow and crammed together and windowless for fear of robbers climbing in from the street. Here, even the house seemed to have sighed with relief and allowed itself to relax.
"You see, I told you," said Lucius. "Look at that smile on your face! The last time I saw you in the city, you looked like a man wearing shoes too small for his feet. I knew this was what you needed-an escape to the countryside for a few days. It always works for me. When all the politicking and litigation in the Forum becomes too much, I flee to my farm. You'll see. A few days and you'll be a reborn man. And Eco will have a splendid time, climbing the hills, swimming in the stream. But you didn't bring Bethesda?"
"No. She-" I began to say she refused to come, which was the exact truth, but I feared that my highborn friend would smirk at the idea of a slave refusing to accompany her master on a trip.
"Bethesda is a creature of the city, you know. Hardly suited for the countryside, so I left her at home, with Belbo to look after her. She'd have been useless to me here."
"Oh, I see." Lucius nodded. "She refused to come?"
"Well…" I began to shake my head, then gave it up and laughed out loud. Of what use were citified pretensions here, where Sol stood still and cast his golden light over a perfect world? Lucius was right. Best to leave such nonsense back in Rome. On an impulse I reached for Eco, and when he made a game of slipping from my grasp I gave chase. The two of us ran in circles around Lucius Claudius, who threw back his head and laughed.
That night we dined on asparagus and goose liver, followed by mushrooms sauteed in goose fat and a guinea hen in a honey-vinegar sauce sprinkled with pine nuts. The fare was simply but superbly prepared. I praised the meal so profusely that Lucius called in the cook to take a bow.
I was surprised to see that the cook was a woman, and still. in her twenties. Her dark hair was pulled back in a tight bun, no doubt to keep it out of her way in the kitchen. Her plump cheeks were all the plumper for the beaming smile on her face; she appreciated praise. Her face was pleasant, if not beautiful, and her figure, even in her loose clothing, appeared to be quite voluptuous.
"Davia started as an assistant to my head cook at my house in Rome," Lucius explained. "She helped him shop, measured out ingredients, that sort of thing. But when he fell ill last winter and she had to take his place, she showed such a knack that I decided to give her the run of the kitchen here at the farm. So you approve, Gordianus?"
"Indeed. Everything was splendid, Davia."
Eco added his praise but his applause was interrupted by a profound yawn. Too much good food and fresh air, he explained, gesturing to the table and sucking in a deep breath. He excused himself and went straight to bed.
Lucius and I took chairs down to the stream and sipped his finest vintage while we listened to the gurgling of the water and the chirring of the crickets and watched thin clouds pass like shredded veils across the face of the moon.
"Ten days of this, and I think I might forget the way back to Rome."
"Ah, but not the way back to Bethesda, I'll wager," said Lucius. "I was hoping to see her. She's a city flower, yes, but put her in the country and she might put out some fresh blossoms that would surprise you. Ah well, it will be just us three fellows, then."
"No other guests?"
"No, no, no! I specifically waited until I had no pending social obligations, so that we should have the place all to ourselves." He smiled at me under the moonlight, then turned down his lips in a mock frown. "It's not what you're thinking, Gordianus."
"And what am I thinking?"
"That for all his homely virtues, your friend Lucius Claudius is still a patrician and subject to the snobbery of his class; that I chose a time to invite you here when there'd be no one else around so as to avoid having you seen by my more elevated friends. But that's not the point at all. I wanted you to have the place to yourself so that you wouldn't have to put up with them! Oh, if you only knew the sort of people I'm talking about."
I smiled at his discomfort. "My work does occasionally bring me into contact with the highborn and wealthy, you know."
"Ah, but it's a different matter, socializing with them. I won't even mention my own family, though they're the worst. Oh, there are the fortune-hunters, the ones on the fringes of society who think they can scrape and claw their way to re-spectability like a ferret. And the grandpas, the boring, self-important old farts who never let anyone forget that some ancestor of theirs served two terms as consul or sacked a Greek temple or slaughtered a shipload of Carthaginians back in the golden age. And the crackpots who claim they're descended from Hercules or Venus-more likely Medusa, judging from their table manners. And the too rich, spoiled young men who can't think of anything but gambling and horse racing, and the too pretty girls who can't think of anything but new gowns and jewels, and the parents who can't think of anything but matching up the boys and girls so that they can breed more of the same.
"You see, Gordianus, you meet these people at their worst, when there's been a dreadful murder or some other crime, and they're all anxious and confused and need your help, but I see them at their best, when they're preening themselves like African birds and oozing charm all over each other like honey, and believe me, at their best they're a thousand times worse! Oh, you can't imagine some of the dreadful gatherings I've had to put up with here at the villa. No, no, nothing like that for the next ten days. This shall be a respite for you and me alike-for you from the city, and for me from my so-called circle of friends."
But it was not to be.
The next three days were like a foretaste of Elysium. Eco explored every corner of the farm, as fascinated by butterflies and ant beds as he was by the arcane mechanics of the olive oil press and the wine press. He had always been a city boy-he was an abandoned child of the streets before I adopted him-but it was clear he could develop a taste for the country.
As for me, I treated myself to Davia's cooking at least three times a day, toured the farm with Lucius and his foreman, and spent restful hours lying in the shade of the willows along the stream, scrolling through trashy Greek novels from Lucius's small library. The plots all seemed to be the same-humble boy meets noble girl, girl is abducted by pirates/giants/soldiers, boy rescues girl and turns out to be of noble birth himself-but such nonsense seemed to fit my mood perfectly. I allowed myself to become pampered and relaxed and thoroughly lazy in body, mind and spirit, and I enjoyed every moment.
Then came the fourth day, and the visitors.
They arrived just as twilight was falling, in an open traveling coach drawn by four white horses and followed by a small retinue of slaves. She was dressed in green and wore her auburn curls pinned in the peculiar upright fan shape that happened to be stylish in the city that spring; it made a suitable frame for the striking beauty of her face. He wore a dark blue tunic that was sleeveless and cut above the knees to show off his athletic arms and legs, and an oddly trimmed little beard that seemed designed to flout convention. They looked to be about my age, midway between thirty and forty.
I happened to be walking back to the villa from the stream. Lucius stepped out of the house to greet me, looked past me and saw the new arrivals.
"Numa's balls!" he exclaimed under his breath, borrowing my own favorite epithet.
"Friends of yours?" I said.
"Yes!" He could not have sounded more dismayed if he was being paid a visit by Hannibal's ghost.
He, it turned out, was a fellow named Titus Didius. She was Antonia, his second wife. (They had both divorced their first spouses in order to marry each other, generating enormous scandal and no small amount of envy among their unhappily married peers.) According to Lucius, who took me aside while the couple settled into the room next to mine, they drank like fish, fought like jackals, and stole like magpies. (I noticed that the slaves discreetly put away the costliest wines, the best silver, and the most fragile Arretine vases shortly after they arrived.)
"It seems they were planning to spend a few days up at my cousin Manius's place," explained Lucius, "but when they arrived, no one was there. Well, I know what happened-Manius went down to Rome just to avoid them."
"Surely not."
"Surely yes. I wonder that they didn't pass him on the way! So now they've come here, asking to stay awhile, 'just a day or two, before we head back to the city. We were so looking forward to some time in the country. You will be a dear, won't you, Lucius, and let us stay, just for a bit?' More likely ten days than two!"
I shrugged. "They don't look so awful to me."
"Oh, wait. Just wait."
"Well, if they're really as terrible as that, why don't you let them stay the night and then turn them away?"
"Turn them away?" He repeated the phrase as if I'd stopped speaking Latin. "Turn them away? You mean, send away Titus Didius, old Marcus Didius's boy? Refuse my hospitality to Antonia? But Gordianus, I've known these people since I was a child. I mean, to avoid them, like cousin Manius has done, well, that's one thing. But to say to them, to their faces-"
"Never mind. I understand," I said, though I didn't, really.
Whatever their faults, the couple had one overriding virtue: they were charming. So charming, indeed, that on that first night, dining in their company, I began to think that Lucius was wildly exaggerating. Certainly they showed none of the characteristic snobbishness of their class toward Eco and me. Titus wanted to hear all about my travels and my work for advocates like Cicero. ("Is it true," he asked, leaning toward me earnestly, "that he's a eunuch?") Eco was obviously fascinated by Antonia, who was even more remarkably beautiful by lamplight. She made a game of flirting with him, but she did so with a natural grace that was neither condescending nor mean. They were both witty, vibrant and urbane, and their sense of humor was only slightly, charmingly, vulgar.
They also appreciated good cooking. Just as I had done after my first meal at the villa, they insisted on complimenting the cook. When Davia appeared, Titus's face lit up with surprise, and not just at the fact that the cook was a young woman. When Lucius opened his mouth to introduce her, Titus snatched the name from his lips. "Davia!" he said. The word left a smile on his face.
A look of displeasure flashed in Antonia's eyes.
Lucius looked back and forth between Davia and Titus, speechless for a moment. "Then you… already know Davia?"
"Why, of course. We met once before, at your house in the city. Davia wasn't the cook, though. Only a helper in the kitchen, as I recall."
"When was this?" asked Antonia, smiling sweetly.
Titus shrugged. "Last year? The year before? At one of Lucius's dinner parties, I suppose. An odd thing-you weren't there, as I recall. Something kept you home that night, my dear. A headache, perhaps…" He gave his wife a commiserating smile, and then looked back at Davia with another kind of smile.
"And how is it that you happened to meet the cook's helper?" Antonia's voice took on a slight edge.
"Oh, I think I must have gone into the kitchen to ask a favor of the cook, or something like that. And then I… well, I met Davia. Didn't I, Davia?"
"Yes." Davia looked at the floor. Though it was hard to tell by the lamplight, it seemed to me that she was blushing.
"Well," said Titus, clapping his hands together, "you have become a splendid cook, Davia! Entirely worthy of your master's famously high standards. About that we're all agreed, yes? Gordianus, Eco, Lucius… Antonia?"
Everyone nodded in unison, some more enthusiastically than others. Davia muttered her thanks and disappeared back into the kitchen.
Lucius's new guests were tired from traveling. Eco and I had enjoyed a long, full day. Everyone turned in early.
The night was warm. Windows and doors were left open to take advantage of the slight breeze. There was a great stillness on the earth, of a sort that one never experiences in the city. As I began to drift into the arms of Morpheus, in the utter quiet I thought I could hear the distant, dreamy rustling of the sheep in their pen, the hushed sighing of the high grass far away by the toad, and even a hint of the stream's gentle gurgling. Eco, with whom I shared the room, began to snore very gently. Then the fighting began.
At first I could hear only voices from the next room, not words. But after a while they started shouting. Her voice was higher and carried better than his.
"You filthy adulterer! Bad enough that you take advantage of the girls in our own household, but picking off another man's slaves-"
Titus shouted something, presumably in his defense. She was not impressed. "Oh, you filthy liar! You can't fool me. I saw the way you looked at her tonight. And don't you dare try to bring up that business about me and the pearl-diver at Andros. That was all in your own drunken imagination!"
Titus shouted again. Antonia shouted. This went on for quite some time. There was a sound of breaking pottery. Silence for a while, and then the shouting resumed.
I groaned and pulled the coverlet over my head. After a while I realized that the shouting had stopped. I rolled onto my side, thinking I might finally be able to sleep, and noticed that Eco was standing on his knees on his sleeping couch, his ear pressed against the wall between our room and theirs.
"Eco, what in Hades are you doing?"
He kept his ear to the wall and waved at me to be quiet.
"They're not fighting again, are they?"
He turned and shook his head.
"What is it, then?"
The moonlight showed a crooked smile on his face. He pumped his eyebrows up and down like a leering street mime, made a circle with the fingers of one hand and a pointer with the opposite forefinger, and performed a gesture all the street mimes know.
"Oh! I see. Well, stop listening like that. It's rude." I rolled to my other side and pulled the coverlet over my head.
I must have slept for quite some time before the moonlight, traveling from Eco's side of the room to mine, struck my face and woke me. I sighed and rearranged the coverlet and saw that Eco was still up on his knees, his ear pressed fervently against the wall.
The two of them must have been at it all night long!
For the next two days Lucius Claudius repeatedly drew me aside to fret over the intrusion on my holiday, but Eco went about his simple pleasures, I still found time to read alone down by the stream, and to the extent that Titus and Antonia intruded on us, they were in equal measure irritating and amusing. No one could be more delightful than Titus at dinner, at least until the cup of wine that was one cup too many, after which his jokes became a little too vulgar and his jabs a little too sharp. And no one could be more sweetly alluring over a table of roasted pig than Antonia, until something happened to rub her the wrong way. She had a look which could send a hot spike through a man as surely as the beast on the table had been spitted and put on to toast.
I had never met a couple quite like them. I began to see how none of their friends could refuse them anything. I also began to see how they drove those same friends to distraction with their sudden fits of temper and their all-consuming passion for each other, which ran hot and cold, and could scald or chill any outsider who happened to come too close.
On the third day of their visit, Lucius announced that he had come up with something special that we could all do together.
"Have you ever seen honey collected from a hive, Eco? No,
I thought not. And you, Gordianus? No? What about you two?"
"Why, no, actually," said Antonia. She and her husband had slept until noon and were just joining the rest of us down by the stream for our midday meal.
"Does that water have to gurgle so loud?" Titus rubbed his temples. "Did you say something about bees, Lucius? I seem to have a swarm of them buzzing in my head this morning."
"It is no longer morning, Titus, and the bees are not in your head but in a glen downstream a bit," said Lucius in a chiding tone.
Antonia wrinkled her brow. "How does one collect the honey? I suppose I've never given it much thought-I just enjoy eating it!"
"Oh, it's quite a science," said Lucius. "I have a slave named Ursus whom I bought specifically for his knowledge of beekeeping. He builds the hives out of hollowed strips of bark, tied up with vines and then covered with mud and leaves. He keeps away pests, makes sure the meadow has the right kind of flowers, and collects the honey twice a year. Now that the Pleiades have risen in the night sky, he says it's time for the spring harvest."
"Where does honey come from? I mean, where do the bees get it?" said Antonia. Puzzlement gave her face a deceptively vulnerable charm.
"Who cares?" said Titus, taking her hand and kissing her palm. "You are my honey!"
"Oh, and you are my king bee!" They kissed. Eco made a face. Confronted with actual kissing, his adolescent prurience turned to squeamishness.
"Where does honey come from?" I said. "And do bees really have kings?"
"Well, I shall tell you," said Lucius. "Honey falls from the sky, of course, like dew. So Ursus says, and he should know. The bees gather it up and concentrate it until it becomes all gooey and thick. To have a place to put it, they gather tree sap and the wax from certain plants to build their combs inside the hives. And do they have kings? Oh, yes! They will gladly give their lives to protect him. Sometimes two different swarms go to war. The kings hang back, plotting the strategy, and the clash can be terrific-acts of heroism and sacrifice to rival the Iliad!"
"And when they're not at war?" said Antonia.
"A hive is like a bustling city. Some go out to work in the fields, collecting the honey-dew, some work indoors, constructing and maintaining the combs, and the kings lay down laws for the common good. They say Jupiter granted the bees the wisdom to govern themselves as repayment for saving his life. When baby Jupiter was hidden in a cave to save him from his father Saturn, the bees sustained him with honey."
"You make them sound almost superior to humans," said Titus, laughing and tracing kisses on Antonia's wrist.
"Oh, hardly. They're still ruled by kings, after all, and haven't advanced to having a republic, like ourselves," explained Lucius earnestly, not realizing that he was being teased. "So, who wants to go and see the honey collected?"
"I shouldn't want to get stung," said Antonia cautiously.
"Oh, there's little danger of that. Ursus sedates the bees with smoke. It makes them dull and drowsy. And we'll stand well out of the way."
Eco nodded enthusiastically.
"I suppose it would be interesting…" said Antonia.
"Not for me," said Titus, lying back on the grassy bank and nibbing his temples.
"Oh, Titus, don't be a dull, drowsy king bee," said Antonia, poking at him and pouting. "Come along."
"No."
"Titus…" There was a hint of menace in Antonia's voice.
Lucius flinched in anticipation of a row. He cleared his throat. "Yes, Titus, come along. The walk will do you good. Get your blood pumping."
"No. My mind's made up."
Antonia flashed a brittle smile. "Very well, then, have it your way. You will miss the fun, and so much the worse for you. Shall we get started, Lucius?"
"The natural enemies of the bee are the lizard, the woodpecker, the spider and the moth," droned the slave Ursus, walking beside Eco at the head of our little procession. "Those creatures are all jealous of the honey, you see, and will do great damage to the hives to get at it." Ursus was a big, stout man of middle years with a lumbering gait, hairy all over to judge from the thatches that showed at the openings of his long-sleeved tunic. Several other slaves followed behind us on the path that ran along the stream, carrying the embers and hay torches that would be used to make the smoke.
"There are plants which are enemies of the bees as well," Ursus went on. "The yew tree, for example. You never put a hive close to a yew tree, because the bees will sicken and the honey will turn bitter and runny. But they thrive close to olive trees and willows. For gathering their honey-dew they like red and purple flowers; blood-red hyacinth is their favorite. If there's thyme close by, they'll use it to give the honey a delicate flavor. They prefer to live close to a stream with shaded, mossy pools where they can drink and wash themselves. And they like peace and quiet. As you will see, Eco, the secluded place where we keep the hives has all these qualities, being close by the stream, surrounded by olives and willows, and planted with all the flowers that most delight the bees."
I heard the bees before I saw them. Their humming joined the gurgling of the stream and grew louder as we passed through a hedge of cassia shrubs and entered a sun-dappled, flower-spangled little glen that was just as Ursus had described. There was magic to the place. Satyrs and nymphs seemed to frolic in the shadows, just out of sight. One could almost imagine the infant Jupiter lying in the soft grass, living off the honey of the bees.
The hives, ten in all, stood in a row on waist-high wooden platforms in the center of the clearing. They were shaped like tall domes, and with their coverings of dried mud and leaves looked as if they had been put there by nature; Ursus was a master of craft as well as lore. Each hive had only a tiny break in the bark for an entrance, and through these openings the bees were busily coming and going.
A figure beneath a nearby willow caught my eyes, and for a startled instant I thought a satyr had stepped into the clearing to join us. Antonia saw it at the same instant. She let out a little gasp of surprise, then clapped her hands in delight.
"And what is this fellow doing here?" She laughed and stepped closer for a better look.
"He watches over the glen," said Ursus. "The traditional guardian of the hives. Scares away honey-thieves and birds."
It was a bronze statue of the god Priapus, grinning lustfully, with one hand on his hip and a sickle held upright in the other.
He was naked and eminently, rampantly priapic. Antonia, fascinated, gave him a good looking-over and then touched his upright, grotesquely oversized phallus for luck.
My attention at that moment was drawn to Eco, who had wandered off to the other side of the glen and was stooping amid some purple flowers that grew low to the ground. I hurried to join him.
"Be careful of those, Eco! Don't pick any more. Go wash your hands in the stream."
"What's the matter?" said Ursus.
"This is Etruscan star-tongue, isn't it?" I said.
"Yes."
"If you're as careful about what grows here as you say, I'm surprised to see it. The plant is poisonous, isn't it?"
"To people, perhaps," said Ursus dismissively. "But not to bees. Sometimes when a hive takes sick it's the only thing to cure them. You take the roots of the star-tongue, boil them with wine, let the tonic cool and set it out for the bees to drink. It gives them new life."
"But it might do the opposite for a man."
"Yes, but everyone on the farm knows to stay away from the stuff, and the animals are too smart to eat it. I doubt that the flowers are poisonous; it's the roots that hold the bee-tonic."
"Well, even so, go wash your hands in the stream," I said to Eco, who had followed this exchange and was looking at me expectantly. The beekeeper shrugged and went about the business of the honey harvest.
As Lucius had promised, it was fascinating to watch. While the other slaves alternately kindled and smothered the torches, producing clouds of smoke, Ursus strode fearlessly into the thick of the sedated bees. His cheeks bulged with water, which he occasionally sprayed from his lips in a fine mist if the bees began to rouse themselves. One by one he lifted up the hives and used a long knife to scoop out a portion of the honeycomb. The wafting clouds of smoke, Ursus's slow, deliberate progress from hive to hive, the secluded magic of the place, and not least the smiling presence of the watchful Priapus gave the harvest the aura of a rustic religious procession. So men have collected the sweet labor of the bees since the beginning of time.
Only one thing occurred to jar the spell. As Ursus was lifting the very last of the hives, a flood of ghostly white moths poured out from underneath. They flitted through the smoky reek and dispersed amid the shimmering olive leaves above. From this hive Ursus would take no honey, saying that the presence of the bandit moths was an ill omen.
The party departed from the glen in a festive mood. Ursus cut pieces of honeycomb and handed them out. Everyone's fingers and lips were soon sticky with honey. Even Antonia made a mess of herself.
When we reached the villa she ran ahead. "King bee," she cried, "I have a sweet kiss for you! And a sweet reason for you to kiss my fingertips! Your honey is covered with honey!"
What did she see when she ran into the foyer of the house? Surely it was no more than the rest of us saw, who entered only a few heartbeats after her. Titus was fully dressed, and so was Davia. Perhaps there was a fleeting look on their faces which the rest of us missed, or perhaps Antonia sensed rather than saw the thing that set off her fury.
Whatever it was, the row began then and there. Antonia stalked out of the foyer, toward her room. Titus quickly followed. Davia, blushing, hurried off toward the kitchen.
Lucius looked at me and rolled his eyes. "What now?" A strand of honey, thin as spider's silk, dangled from his plump chin.
The chill between Antonia and Titus showed no signs of abating at dinner. While Lucius and I made conversation about the honey harvest and Eco joined in with eloquent flourishes of his hands (his evocation of the flight of the moths was particularly vivid), Antonia and Titus ate in stony silence. They retired to their bedchamber early. That night there were no sounds of reconciliation. Titus alternately barked and whined like a dog. Antonia shrieked and wept.
Eco slept despite the noise, but I tossed and turned until at last I decided to take a walk. The moon lit my way as I stepped out of the villa, made a circuit of the stable and strolled by the slaves' quarters. Coming around a corner, I saw two figures seated close together on a bench beside the portico that led to the kitchen. Though her hair was not in a bun but let down for the night, the moon lit up her face well enough for me to recognize Davia. By his bearish shape I knew the man who sat with one arm around her, stroking her face: Ursus. They were so intent on each other that they did not notice me. I turned and went back the way I had come, wondering if Lucius was aware that his cook and his beekeeper were lovers.
What a contrast their silent devotions made to the couple in the room next to me. When I returned to my bed, I had to cover my head with a pillow to muffle the sounds of Titus and Antonia arguing.
But the morning seemed to bring a new day. While Lucius, Eco and I ate a breakfast of bread and honey in the little garden outside Lucius's study, Antonia came walking up from the direction of the stream, bearing a basket of flowers.
"Antonia!" said Lucius. "I should have thought you were still abed."
"Not at all," she said, beaming. "I was up before dawn, and on a whim I went down to the stream to pick some flowers.
Aren't they lovely? I shall have one of my girls weave them into a garland for me to wear at dinner tonight."
"Your beauty needs no ornament," said Lucius. Indeed, Antonia looked especially radiant that morning. "And where is- mmm, dare I call him your king bee?"
Antonia laughed. "Still asleep, I imagine. But I shall go and rouse him at once. This day is too beautiful to be missed! I was thinking that Titus and I might take a basket of food and some wine and spend most of the day down by the stream. Just the two of us…"
She raised her eyebrows. Lucius understood. "Ah yes, well, Gordianus and I have plenty to occupy us here at the villa. And Eco-I believe you were planning to do some exploring up on the hill today, weren't you?"
Eco, not quite understanding, nodded nonetheless.
"Well, then, it looks as though you and the king bee will have the stream all to yourselves," said Lucius.
Antonia beamed. "Lucius, you are so very sweet." She paused to kiss his blushing pate.
A little later, as we were finishing our leisurely breakfast, we saw the couple walking down toward the stream without even a slave to bear their basket and blanket. They held hands and laughed and doted on each other so lavishly that Eco became positively queasy watching them.
By some acoustical curiosity, a sharp noise from the stream could sometimes carry all the way up to the house. So it was, some time later, standing by Lucius in front of the villa while he discussed the day's work with his foreman, that I thought I heard a shout and then a hollow crack from that direction. Lucius and the foreman, one talking while the other listened, seemed not to notice, but Eco, poking about an old wine press nearby, pricked up his ears. Eco may be mute, but his hearing is extremely sharp.
The shout had come from Titus. We had both heard his raised voice too often over the last few days not to recognize it.
The spouses had not made up, after all, I thought. The two of them were at it again…
Then, a little later, Antonia screamed. We all heard it. It was not the familiar shriek of Antonia in a rage. It was a scream of pure panic.
She screamed again.
We ran all the way, Eco in the lead, Lucius huffing and puffing in the rear. "By Hercules," he shouted, "he must be killing her!"
But Antonia wasn't dying. Titus was.
He was flat on his back on the blanket, his short tunic twisted all askew and hitched up about his hips. He stared at the leafy canopy above, his pupils hugely dilated. "Dizzy… spinning…" he gasped. He coughed and wheezed and grabbed his throat, then bent forward. His hands went to his belly, clutching at cramps. His face was a deathly shade of blue.
"What in Hades!" exclaimed Lucius. "What happened to him, Antonia? Gordianus, what can we do?"
"Can't breathe!" Titus said, mouthing words with no air behind them. "The end… the end of me… oh, it hurts!" He grabbed at his loincloth. "Damn the gods!"
He pulled at his tunic, as if it constricted his chest. The foreman gave me his knife. I cut the tunic open and tore it off, leaving Titus naked except for the loose loincloth about his hips; it did no good, except to show us that his whole body was turning blue. I turned him on his side and reached into his mouth, thinking he might be choking, but that did no good either.
He kept struggling until the end, fighting to breathe. It was a horrible death to watch. At last the wheezing and clenching stopped. His limbs unfurled. The life went out of his staring eyes.
Antonia stood by, stunned and silent, her face like a petrified tragedy mask. "Oh, no!" she whispered, dropping to her knees and embracing the body. She began to scream again and to sob wildly. Her agony was almost as hard to watch as Titus's death throes, and there seemed as little to be done about it.
"How in Hades did this happen?" said Lucius. "What caused it?"
Eco and the foreman and I looked at each other dumbly.
"Her fault!" wailed Antonia.
"What?" said Lucius.
"Your cook! That horrible woman! It's her fault!"
Lucius looked around at the scattered remains of food. Crusts of bread, a little jar of honey, black olives, a wineskin. There was also a clay bottle, broken-that had been the hollow crack I had heard. "What do you mean? Are you saying Davia poisoned him?"
Antonia's sobs caught in her throat. "Yes, that's it. Yes! It was one of my own slaves who put the food in the basket, but she's the one who prepared the food. Davia! The witch poisoned him. She poisoned everything!"
"Oh, dear, but that means-" Lucius knelt. He gripped Antonia's arms and looked into her eyes. "You might be poisoned as well! Antonia, do you feel any pain? Gordianus, what should we do for her?"
I looked at him blankly. I had no idea.
Antonia showed no symptoms. She was not poisoned, after all. But something had killed her husband, and in a most sudden and terrible fashion.
Her slaves soon came running. We left her grieving over the body and went back to the villa to confront Davia. Lucius led the way into the kitchen.
"Davia! Do you know what's happened?"
She looked at the floor and swallowed hard. "They say… that one of your guests had died, Master."
"Yes. What do you know about it?"
She looked shocked. "I? Nothing, Master."
"Nothing? They were eating food prepared by you when Titus took ill. Do you still say you know nothing about it?"
"Master, I don't know what you mean…"
"Davia," I said, "you must tell us what was going on between you and Titus Didius."
She stammered and looked away.
"Davia! The man is dead. His wife accuses you. You're in great danger. If you're innocent, the truth could save you. Be brave! Now tell us what passed between you and Titus Didius."
"Nothing! I swear it, by my mother's shade. Not that he didn't try, and keep trying. He approached me at the master's house in the city that night he first saw me. He tried to get me to go into an empty room with him. I wouldn't do it. He kept trying the same thing here. Following me, cornering me. Touching me. I never encouraged him! Yesterday, while you were all down at the hives, he came after me, pulling at my clothes, pinching me, kissing me. I just kept moving away. He seemed to like that, chasing me. When you all finally came back, I almost wept with relief."
"He harassed you, then," said Lucius sadly. "Well, I'd believe that. My fault, I suppose; I should have told him to keep his hands off my property. But was it really so terrible that you had to poison him?"
"No! I never-"
"You'll have to torture her if you want the truth!" Antonia stood in the doorway. Her fists were clenched, her hair disheveled. She looked utterly distraught, like a vengeful harpy. "Torture her, Lucius! That's what they do when a slave testifies in a court. It's your right-you're her master. It's your duty-you were Titus's host. I demand that you torture her until she confesses, and then put her to death!"
Davia turned as white as the moths that had flown from the hive. She fainted to the floor.
Antonia, mad with grief, retired to her room. Davia regained consciousness, but seemed to be in the grip of some brain-fever; she trembled wildly and would not speak.
"Gordianus, what am I to do?" Lucius paced back and forth in the foyer. "I suppose I'll have to torture the girl if she won't confess. But I don't even know how to go about such a thing! None of my farm slaves would make a suitable torturer. I suppose I could consult one of my cousins…"
"Talk of torture is premature," I said, wondering if Lucius would actually go through with such a thing. He was a gentle man in a cruel world; sometimes the world's expectations won out over his basic nature. He might surprise me. I didn't want to find out. "I think we should have another look at the body, now that we've calmed down a bit."
We returned to the stream. Titus lay as we had left him, naked except for his loincloth. Someone had closed his eyes.
"You know a lot about poisons, Gordianus," said Lucius. "What do you think?"
"There are many poisons and many reactions. I can't begin to guess what killed Titus. If we should find some store of poison in the kitchen, or if one of the other slaves observed Davia doing something to the food…"
Eco gestured to the scattered food, mimed the act of feeding a farm animal, then vividly enacted the animal's death-an unpleasant pantomime to watch, having just witnessed an actual death.
"Yes, we could verify the presence of poison in the food that way, at the waste of some poor beast. But if it was in the food we see here, why wasn't Antonia poisoned as well? Eco, bring me those pieces of the clay bottle. Do you remember hearing the sound of something breaking, at about the time we heard Titus cry out?"
Eco nodded and handed me the pieces of fired clay.
"What do you suppose was in this?" I said.
"Wine, I imagine. Or water," said Lucius.
"But there's a wineskin over there. And the inside of this bottle appears to be as dry as the outside. I have a hunch, Lucius. Would you summon Ursus?"
"Ursus?But why?"
"I have a question for him."
The beekeeper soon came lumbering down the hill. For such a big, bearish fellow, he was very squeamish in the presence of death. He stayed well away from the body and made a face every time he looked at it.
"I'm a city dweller, Ursus. I don't know very much about bees. I've never been stung by one. But I've heard that a bee sting can kill a man. Is that true, Ursus?"
He looked a bit embarrassed at the idea that his beloved bees could do such a thing. "Well, yes, it can happen. But it's rare. Most people get stung and it goes away soon enough. But some people…"
"Have you ever seen anyone die of a bee sting, Ursus?"
"No."
"But with all your lore, you must know something about it. How does it happen? How do they die?"
"It's their lungs that give out. They strangle to death. Can't breathe, turn blue…"
Lucius looked aghast. "Do you think that's it, Gordianus? That he was stung by one of my bees?"
"Let's have a look. The sting would leave a mark, wouldn't it, Ursus?"
"Oh, yes, a red swelling. And more than that, you'd find the poisoned barb. It stays behind when the bee flies off, snagged in the flesh. Just a tiny thing, but not hard to find."
We examined Titus's chest and limbs, rolled him over and examined his back. We combed through his hair and looked at his scalp.
"Nothing," said Lucius.
"Nothing," I admitted.
"What are the chances, anyway, that a bee happened to fly by-"
"The bottle, Eco. When did we hear it break? Before Titus cried out, or after?"
After, gestured Eco, rolling his fingers forward. He clapped twice. Immediately after.
"Yes, that's how I remember it, too. A bee, a cry, a broken bottle…" I pictured Antonia and Titus as I had last seen them together, hand in hand, doting on one another as they headed for the stream. "Two people in love, alone on a grassy bank- what might they reasonably be expected to get up to?"
"What do you mean, Gordianus?"
"I think we shall have to examine Titus more intimately."
"What do you mean?"
"I think we shall have to take off his loincloth. It's already loosened, you see. Probably by Antonia."
As I thought we might, we found the red, swollen bee sting in the most intimate of places.
"Of course, to be absolutely certain, we should find the stinger and remove it. I'll leave that task to you, Lucius. He was your friend, after all, not mine."
Lucius located and dutifully extracted the tiny barb. "Funny," he said. "I thought it would be bigger."
"What, the stinger?"
"No, his… well, the way he always bragged, I thought it must be… oh, never mind."
Confronted with the truth, Antonia confessed. She had never meant to kill Titus, only to punish him for his pursuit of Davia.
Her early morning trip to the stream, ostensibly to gather flowers, had actually been an expedition to capture a bee. For this purpose she used the clay bottle, plugged it with a cork stopper, then hid it beneath the flowers in her basket. Later, Titus himself unwittingly carried the bee in the bottle down to the stream, hidden in the basket of food.
It was the Priapus in the glen that had given Antonia the idea. "I've always thought the god looks so… vulnerable… like that," she told us. If she could inflict a wound on Titus in that most vulnerable part of the male anatomy, she thought, the punishment would be not only painful and humiliating, but stingingly appropriate.
As they lazed on their blanket beside the stream, Antonia drew Titus into an amorous embrace. They cuddled and loosened their clothing. Titus became aroused, just as she planned. While he lay back, closing his eyes with a dreamy smile, Antonia reached for the clay bottle.She shook it, to agitate the bee, then unstoppered it and quickly pressed the opening against his aroused member. The sting was inflicted before Titus realized what was happening. He bolted up, cried out and knocked the bottle from her hand. It broke against the trunk of a willow tree.
Antonia was ready to flee, knowing he might explode with anger. Instead, Titus began to clutch at his chest and choke. The catastrophe that swiftly followed took her utterly by surprise. Titus was dead within moments. Antonia's shock and grief were entirely genuine. She had meant to hurt him, but never to murder him.
But she could hardly admit what she had done. Impulsively, she chose Davia as a scapegoat. Davia was ultimately to blame anyway, she thought, for tempting her husband.
It was agreed that Lucius would not spread the whole truth of what had happened. Their circle of friends would be told that Titus had died of a bee sting, but not of Antonia's part. His death had been unintentional, after all, not deliberate murder. Antonia's grief was perhaps punishment enough. But her scape-goating of Davia was unforgivable. Would she have seen the lie through all the way to Davia's torture and death? Lucius thought so. He allowed her to stay the night, then sent her packing back to Rome, along with her husband's body, and told her never to visit or speak to him again.
Ironically, Titus might have been spared had he been a little more forthcoming or a little less amorous. Lucius later learned, in all the talk that followed Titus's death, that Titus had once been stung by a bee as a boy and had fallen very ill. Titus had never talked about this boyhood incident to his friends or to Antonia; only his old nurse and his closest relatives knew about it. When he hung back from seeing the honey harvest, I think he did so partly because he wanted time alone to pursue Davia, but also because he was (quite reasonably) afraid to go near the hives, and unwilling to admit his fear. If he had told us then of his extreme susceptibility to bee stings, I am certain that Antonia would never have attempted her vengeful scheme.
Eco and I saw out the rest of our visit, but the days that followed Antonia's departure were melancholy. Lucius was moody. The slaves, always superstitious about any death, were restless. Davia was still shaken, and her cooking suffered. The sun was as bright as when we arrived, the flowers as fragrant, the stream as sparkling, but the tragedy cast a pall over everything. When the day came for our departure, I was ready for the forgetful hustle and bustle of the city. And what a story I would have to tell Bethesda!
Before we left, I paid a visit to Ursus and took a last look at the hives down in the glen.
"Have you ever been stung by a bee yourself, Ursus?"
"Oh, yes, many times."
"It must hurt."
"It smarts."
"But not too terribly, I suppose. Otherwise you'd stop being a beekeeper."
Ursus grinned. "Yes, bees can sting. But I always say that bee-keeping is like loving a woman. You get stung every so often, but you keep coming back for more, because the honey is worth it."
"Oh, not always, Ursus," I sighed. "Not always."