“If someone will ask me,” Sabina said, “I will answer.”
“Are you growing this flower in our woods?” Crassus asked.
“Yes. I was.”
“You
were
growing it,” I said. “But not anymore, for your purpose has been achieved.
Dominus
, last night, I went back into the woods, taking Drusus Malchus with me. The site which Sabina had refused to show me had been concealed. We had to dig up the entire plot to discover this solitary flower. No leaves, no roots, just this single bloom. It is clear that Sabina did not want the place found.” Malchus affirmed that I spoke truly.
“This herb,” Sabina interjected, “has many beneficial uses,
dominus
. It can reduce fever, excessive beating of the heart, and I have used it many times to reduce the pain of scrapes and superficial wounds. But the
atriensis
is correct to say that it can be highly poisonous if misused. Naturally I planted it far from the house so that no one would come in accidental contact with it. And once I had harvested an ample supply for the clinic, what else should I do but remove all trace of it? I planted it far away from the house and discarded the remains so that no one would accidentally come upon it and make themselves ill.”
The household stirred, leaves rustling in a wind that had turned against me. Crassus said, “Alexander, I don’t know what petty grievance you may have against our healer, but I am disappointed in myself to find that I may have misjudged you.”
“
Dominus
,” Sabina called out above the murmuring of the
familia
. “Alexander had good reason to wish me ill, if you will hear it.”
“Go on.”
Sabina spoke of her plan to buy her freedom and that of her daughter, of my love for Livia and of the fact because of Sabina, the two lovers must eventually be parted.
Crassus shook his head slowly from side to side. The
familia
grew quiet. Finally
dominus
said angrily, “Get those dogs out of here.”
“May I speak, lord?” Drusus Malchus said. He was holding a rake.
“What is it?”
“With humbleness, to end this hearing now would be unfair. Our proof is not yet complete.”
“What more do you have to say?” Crassus asked impatiently.
“Sabina,” I said, earning an instant glare from the master that made me stutter, “Sabina was jealous of Tessa.” While I spoke, Malchus began scraping away the top layer of soil in the flower bed closest to the
tablinum
. “I noticed it the first day I came before Pío.” I spoke rapidly. “Tessa stormed into the house, right through your tablinum. I remember because she did not stop to put on house slippers. She was barefoot.”
When Malchus had cleared a sufficient space he picked up one of the bitches who, as he neared the flower bed began whining, complaining and struggling against him. Malchus forced it down in the cavity he had made, kneeling to hold it still with his massive arms.
“I can’t remember a time I ever saw Tessa wearing sandals,” I continued. “The day of the Vulcanalia, Sabina and I passed each other in the atrium. She had her cleaning supplies and must have been returning from Ludovicus’ quarters where she had been tidying up. She loves to clean,” I added weakly. “As she passed me, she was muttering angrily to herself, but one word was plainly clear: ‘barefoot.’” The whispers swelled again. “Sabina was clutching something in her free hand, something which I believe Malchus and I discovered last night in the woods.”
“Yes, Crassus said, irritated. “We know all about the poisonous flower.”
“No,
dominus
. It was this.” I reached inside my tunic and dropped the cut and mangled daisy onto the table. Everyone craned to see it, and everyone knew instantly what it meant.
Betto said, “Tessa would rather have shaved her head than wear her hair without those daisies.”
“Ludovicus,” I called, “did Tessa come to you on or before the Vulcanalia?”
“Answer,” Crassus said when the battalion commander hesitated.
“She did, but ...”
“Sabina,” I asked, “did you find a daisy in Ludovicus’ room and assume they were lovers?”
Before the healer could answer, the dog held down by Malchus howled in obvious agony and scrambled free. It ran in circles, panting and flinging spittle in all directions before it stopped, vomited and fell to the ground, shaking violently.
“Put that animal out of its misery,” Crassus ordered. Malchus slit its throat.
“This is ridiculous,” Sabina said, unnerved. “All right, yes, I admit I was jealous. And perhaps I wanted to make her sick. But kill her? Never! Walking barefoot in
lykotonon
can’t kill you.” Livia was staring open-mouthed at her mother.
“It can with a little help from your poison antidote.”
“You are a fool, Alexander. You said it yourself:
theriake
cures poisoning, it doesn’t cause it.”
“May I explain,
dominus
?” Crassus nodded. “
Lykotonon
slows the heart and breath. The primary ingredient of
theriake
is opium, which depresses most bodily functions, including respiration. To administer this medication to a person knowing they were suffering from
lykotonon
poisoning can only be construed as an attempt to kill them.”
Finally, the healer was silent. “I am so sorry, Sabina,” I said. “Forgive me, Livia, I had no choice.”
“You always have a choice!” Livia shouted through her tears.
Sabina looked up at me with such hostility that I understood in that instant that I had never known her. She leered at me and made to put her arm about her daughter, but Livia jumped as if she’d been bitten. “Get away from me!” she screamed. She leapt up and fled the peristyle. No one, not even Crassus, made an attempt to stop her.
Sabina’s face melted from hatred to humility. “Marcus Licinius Crassus,” she said, “master of this
familia
, I beg mercy. I confess to jealousy. I confess to hatred. Of these things I am guilty. But I do not confess to murder. I
did
try to save Tessa’s life. I swear. Anyone could have poisoned the soil. The evidence before you is tattered, full of supposition, spoken by a man who would do anything to keep my daughter near him.”
“Now I am convinced,” Crassus said. “You are right, slave, there is evidence here of a circumstantial nature. But this is not a court and I am in need of no proof in order to pass judgment. Yet shall you have it. The single unassailable, indisputable fact in all that I have heard today is that Alexander himself has brought this case against you. What more proof do I need of your guilt? He loved your daughter. She has fled, not just from you but from him. Look at what he has sacrificed in the name of justice.
“Alexander, I do not like being wrong, and I do not like apologizing. More than once you have placed this meal before me and forced me to eat.” He rose from his gilded chair and sighed. “Before this assembly, before my
familia
I say to you – apologies.
“Now, to Sabina I say this: you have killed an innocent girl. You have committed a heinous and brutal murder based on an assumption. Did you even confront the commander with your suspicions? It matters not. An attack on a member of my family is tantamount to an attack upon my person. But I want to hear you say it. So tell me, tell everyone here assembled: did you kill our Tessa?”
Sabina held Crassus’ gaze but remained silent. A guard who had moved up beside her prodded her with his finger. Almost imperceptively, she nodded. “Say it,” Crassus commanded.
“I killed her.”
“Do you have anything to add before I pronounce judgment?”
Sabina turned to me. “Alexandros of Elateia, I curse you. You have betrayed a sister to these Roman scum. May Hermes give you no rest, no peace of mind, no love for all your days. I curse you, and bind it with my blood. May all the gods below harken to me and conspire against you.” With her teeth she tore at her hand in the fleshy part between thumb and forefinger. She spit a bloody glob in my direction. “
Dominus
, I am finished.”
“I should have you crucified on the street and let the children throw stones at you to assist in your agony.”
From somewhere in the crowd, a voice shouted out, “Do it! Crucify the fucking whore! And hoist Alexander up beside her!”
“Nestor, how good of you to remind me of your continued presence in my house. Step up and stand beside the healer.” Nestor did as he was told, persuaded by the butt of Betto’s gladius in his back. “The sight of you has offended my eyes from the day you were branded. Why I have suffered your employment for so long is a mystery. Perhaps out of some lingering respect for Pío. No matter. Your impudence has settled your fate.
“Sabina, your blameless daughter has suffered enough on this day. For her sake, I will be merciful. You will not die on Roman soil, which I trust will please you. I am sending you home. Just last week I concluded negotiations for a silver mine near Laurion. There you will spend the rest of your days in contemplation of your sins.”
“No!” The scream came from behind us. Livia had returned and was standing at the far end of the peristyle, behind one of the arcade columns.
Sabina cried, “Mercy,
dominus
. Kill me here. Kill me now. I offer you my throat,” she said, tilting her head back. “I beg of you, do not send me to the mines.”
“Do you want your daughter to keep you company? No? Then do not speak again. You will go, but you will not travel alone. That
fugitivus
will go with you,” Crassus said, flicking a finger at Nestor. “We are done here.”
•••
When her mother and father arrived at the estate, they found that Crassus had prepared Tessa as if she were his own daughter. She lay in state on a funeral couch in the atrium, surrounded by the flowers she had nurtured with her own hands. Incense burned at each corner of the
lectus
. There followed a day of prayers and mourning, then Crassus, who would not have her sent to the grave pits on the eastern slope of the Esquiline, paid instead for the expense of having the young girl cremated. Tessa’s parents returned to Ostia, but not before they fell at the feet of their benefactor. He bid them rise, assuring them that he grieved with them. He instructed me to slip a purse heavy with coins into the father’s hand as they set out for the journey home.
70 BCE - Fall, Baiae
Year of the consulship of
Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus
“I don’t hate him, sweet,” Crassus said. “It isn’t hatred to wish he had tripped and fallen beneath one of his Hispanic war-wagons. That’s not hatred, is it, Alexander?”
“It isn’t undying love,
dominus
.” I stood against one of the portico’s scalloped columns which was half-draped in waxy ivy. The sun was turning the leaves green-gold.
“What use are you to me if you won’t agree with me?” Crassus said.
“None whatsoever,” I replied. “I shall have myself thrashed directly after you’ve supped.”
“Hush! Both of you! I’m trying to enjoy the sunset,” Tertulla said.
Crassus, now forty-five, leaned on the outer wall of the portico wrapped in a large Egyptian towel dyed in patterns of apricot and lemon. Perspiration glistened on the golden hairs of his tanned arms. Tertulla stood behind him, reaching up to massage his exposed shoulders. After his successful but arduous campaign against the rebellious slave Spartacus that ended the year before, his features had taken on the hard, weathered look that only combat can press through the flesh and into the soul of a man. “
Columba
,” he whispered, reaching behind to pull her curves more tightly against his back. “My dove.”
After a languorous interlude that sent my eyes to the horizon to count the colors of the darkening sky, Crassus broke their embrace to lean far out over the balustrade, turning his eyes toward Bauli, just two miles to the south. “I can’t see it,” he said. Pompeius’ villa was hidden by the intervening hillside. “It’s smaller, isn’t it?”
Tertulla slapped his rump. “Miniscule. Like his balls.”
“And much farther down the slope,” I added.
Tertulla laughed. “All right, Alexander, from now on if there is any massaging to be done, be it to hubris or parts more accessible,” she said, continuing to press her fingers over her husband’s oiled shoulders, “then I shall see to its administration.” As she worked, evoking another grunt of pleasure, her own towel gradually came undone. She slid her left hand under his arm, slipped it through the opening in his wrap and brought it down across his chest, letting it come to rest where the fine hairs of his lower abdomen started to thicken. She pulled him back against herself, pressing with her hand while pushing her hips forward, rising up and down on her toes.
“You are a marvelously perverse woman,” he said, twisting around to nuzzle her cheek. “Isn’t she marvelously perverse, Alexander?”
“As a Thracian gymnast,
dominus
.”
“I hear they’re the best,” Tertulla said.
“I have no personal experience,
domina
.”
“Then let us attempt something, husband, so that should you ever have the opportunity, you may compare.” She gripped Crassus in such a way that his answer was more throaty gasp than agreement.
“Who claims I have not?” he managed.
“Have not what?” Tertulla asked.
“Had the opportunity to compare.”
“Isn’t he comical?”
domina
asked of me, expecting no reply.
The sweat from the
calidarium
was rapidly evaporating from their limbs in the soft evening breeze. Throughout the estate, many of my staff were lighting oil lamps and any remaining
praefurnia
not already heating the baths from below. I preferred to manage the household in a more hands-on fashion, but Crassus almost always kept me by his side. No matter what he was doing.
The night promised to be chilly. Crassus sighed. “I wish,” he said, addressing Tertulla, “you’d have talked me out of begging that aggravating little pebble to propose me for consul. Thank the gods the year is almost over.” Crassus waggled his empty cup. I snapped my fingers and a wine bearer hurried forward bearing a large blue, blown-glass amphora. As his cup and then Tertulla’s was refilled, Crassus said, “Unfortunately, I wager he’ll hold that little favor over my head till I’m as bald as Caesar. Wait a moment, Tranio,” he said, as the servant replaced the stopper and was about to withdraw. Crassus lifted the delicate chain which hung over the neck of the amphora and inspected the writing on the hammered silver label. It was a local red, and to indicate the vintage, the names of that year’s consuls were inscribed on the metal. Crassus’ lip curled at the sight of his name next to that of Pompeius. “’Don’t think much of this new wine,” he said, waving Tranio back to his station.
Tertulla let her hand drift still lower, but it was clear that her husband was as yet preoccupied with thoughts of his rival and co-consul, Pompeius. She rested her cheek against his back, curling his pubic hairs in her fingers. “You didn’t beg,” she said. “You asked, and he acceded, because he was afraid of what might happen if he didn’t. He wants your legions by his side, not opposing him.”
“That’s a wife talking, albeit one who would have made as fine a senator as any patrician.” He reached back and laid his hand on her thigh. “When the clarion call of war sounds, love, my legions fight always for Rome, never for Crassus. Rome is all we have, all we are.”
The sun had surrendered to dusk, and shadows now slipped down the eastern slope of the hill where their Baiaen villa sprawled. Across the little bay, the light was still frantically painting the town of Puteoli in impossible shades of pink and orange. The sea was deepening to blue-black, glinting here and there as a crest rose to wink impertinently one last time at the setting sun. In the distance, a thin rope of rosy smoke drifted straight up from the summit of Vesuvius until Zephyr, lying in wait for just such a plaything, bent it sharply and blew it to the darkening east. Two servants entered and lit the portico lamps.
“Rome is a child, Marcus.” Listening to his wife, Crassus admired the splendid exit Helios was making over the bay this evening, but Tertulla’s eyes were closed. “The plebs’ gaze will follow any bright object till the next one steals their attention. It’s true,” she said, squeezing him tightly, “for this brief moment they are dazzled by the man they call victor of the Hispanic wars, but I never knew anyone who followed anything but their nose when their stomach was growling. Pompeius may claim the hearts of the people for a day, but you rule their bellies and their minds. He is a distraction. You are their true champion.”
Crassus turned to face Tertulla, his smile brimming like the cup of wine he now tipped to her lips. As he watched the graceful curve of her neck tilt while she drank, he said, “The Rome I serve is no child. She stands here before me, elegant, precious. You are the foundation upon which all my work stands. Without you in my life, it would all crumble into a meaningless heap.”
Tertulla handed the cup back to Crassus with a look upon her face so sublime that it hurt my eyes to behold it. Once, a girl had blessed me with that same expression, but no more. Crassus leaned in to gently clean the thin line of purple from Tertulla’s upper lip with a kiss. Then he emptied what remained of the wine in one exuberant swallow and tossed the cup to Tranio. Husband and wife kissed, and for a moment, the only sounds were the sputter of the torch flames and the song of the year’s last, brave nightingale. Their embrace ended; their impassioned gaze lingered. Suddenly, Crassus began to laugh.
“It
was
an inspiration, wasn’t it? Pompeius may have pranced into the city with a triumph for supposedly subduing Hispania, but never in ten lifetimes could he ever match such a display as our sacrifice to Hercules.”
“A triumph you deserved but never received. At least we have the satisfaction of knowing your offering soured his moment of glory.”
“Indeed. A feast for the people laid out on ten thousand tables: it did leach attention from that strutting charlatan, at least for the time it took the plebs to chew and swallow the meal.”
“When will you ever see yourself as others do?” she asked, hugging him. “As I do? You know, it’s three months now, and the slaves tell me it is still the talk of the city.”
“The feast? Merely my thanks for all that Rome has given us.”
“The feast, yes, but also the three months’ supply of corn you lavished on every citizen.”
“The people are our children, and children must be fed. Besides, the cost was a mere trifle.”
She shook her dark curls and smirked, intertwining her fingers in his. “Your sense of proportion is sadly skewed.”
“All right, call it an investment.” He gestured with his chin to take in the villa, its fountains and gardens, and by inference, the literally hundreds of homes, businesses, quarries and mines throughout Italy and beyond which he either owned outright, or controlled through his clients. “I am no fool, dove. Who here is the true master, and who the slave? Our happiness is tied to Rome’s by a Gordian knot not even Alexander the Macedonian could sever. One will endure only as long as the other prospers, and not a heartbeat longer. The Republic has become a frail old man, ruled by the fickle whims of its needy grandchildren. If you doubt me, just ask Alexander.”
“Give your servants more credit than that,
dominus
.”
“Why should I? Look what happened with Spartacus. If the urban slaves ever rose up with one voice, Rome would cease to exist.”
“Which is why you keep them well fed and well entertained,” Tertulla said.
“I wonder, dove, is it enough? Tell me, are you happy, Alexander?”
“I am lucky to be alive. I am grateful.”
“Answer the question.”
“I am as happy as my condition allows,
dominus
.”
“There, you see, dove, what a scoundrel he is? I can always count on you, can’t I, Alexander, to deliver a sentence well-honed on both sides.”
“Brrr, let us go in, love,” Tertulla said. “Don’t let Alexander toy with you. He is the luckiest slave in Rome, and he knows it. See how the light and warmth have fled the sky - now they await within. I’m ready for the
tepidarium
. Bring your intellectual sparring partner with you, if you must, but let us go in.”
Crassus kissed the top of Tertulla’s head, readjusted her towel about her and together they padded back into the house holding hands.
“Oh, Livia. Good,” Tertulla said as they passed through the smaller
calidarium
and into the large, circular space of the
tepidarium
. I followed discretely behind, nodding slightly to Livia as I passed, whose straightforward gaze never wavered.
It almost didn’t hurt anymore. In Livia’s eyes, I had become a child of Dis, a spirit of the underworld, a barely visible shade to be shunned. If not shunned, ignored. If not ignored, deterred. It had been thus for the past six years.
The poets sing of love as if it were forged of iron, incorruptible, shining, eternal. Perhaps it is so, perhaps the love of which the ancients sing is a love so strong it endures beyond life itself. Or perhaps the ancients were so focused on their poetry that they had never really experienced love themselves and had no idea what they were singing about. For us poor mortals, ordinary love is a fragile, delicate wisp of a thing with a very poor life expectancy.
I had not so much fallen out of love with Livia as been pushed. Was there no way I could scale the heights back in to the refuge of her affection?