The Seven Wonders: A Novel of the Ancient World (Novels of Ancient Rome) (27 page)

“Perhaps the head could be reconstructed,” said Antipater hopefully, but when we sifted through the bits and pieces, the only recognizable fragments were some broken sunbeams from Helios’s crown.

Without a word, Posidonius returned to his library, but emerged a moment later.

“Have either of you entered my library today?” he asked.

Antipater shook his head, as did I.

“Very odd,” said Posidonius. “I’m certain, before we headed for the ship this morning, that Gatamandix’s knife was on the small table where I left it. But it isn’t there now.”

“Perhaps Gatamandix took it with him before we left this morning,” suggested Antipater.

“Why would he do that, without telling me?”

A vague apprehension ran through me. “Why do you suppose the Gauls haven’t returned yet?” I looked at the dark, churning clouds above. “There’s a storm coming.”

“They probably drank themselves into oblivion at that waterfront tavern,” said Antipater. “Best to leave them to it and let them come home in their own time.”

I nodded. “And where do you think Cleobulus went?”

“Back to his father’s house, I’m sure,” said Posidonius, with a bitter edge to his voice. He returned to his study.

“What a day!” said Antipater. “I’m going to my room to take a nap. And you, Gordianus?”

“I’ll look at the statue a while longer,” I said, squatting down so as to view it from a low angle, as if I were on a ship sailing into harbor and the model were the full-size Colossus, towering above me. I tried to imagine the head intact, and looking very much like Vindovix, and felt that uncanny shiver of cognition one experiences when a statue suddenly seems no longer inanimate but a living, breathing entity. Was this the ancestor of Vindovix who stood before me, captured by the divinely inspired hand of Chares?

Clearly, as a proud Rhodian scholar, Cleobulus did not like the idea that a Gaul might have served as the model for Helios. But would he have done violence to Zenas, and deliberately deface a statue fashioned by the hand of Chares? Posidonius seemed to think so, but without proof, it was hard to see how he could punish Cleobulus, except by shunning him.

I remembered that the ritual knife was missing, and an unpleasant thought struck me: What if Gatamandix had decided to punish the Rhodian himself? Had he taken the knife for just that purpose? Then I realized this made no sense, for Posidonius had seen the knife in his study that morning, and Gatamandix had not returned to the house all day, so if the Druid took the knife, it was before we all set out for the ship. He could not have known then that he would want the knife later to punish the defacer of the statue.

Then another thought struck me, more chilling than the first: perhaps Gatamandix
had
taken the knife that morning, intending to use it—but not against Cleobulus.

The idea in my head was mad—or was it? I could have told Posidonius what I was thinking, but his study door was closed, and what if he refuted me? I thought of telling Antipater, but he was likely already asleep, and the old poet would only slow me down—for I suddenly realized that if I wished to act, I must do so at once. I might be too late already.

Without even fetching my cloak, I rushed to the vestibule and into the street, walking quickly at first, then running all the way to the harbor with the cold wind in my face.

After I pressed a few coins in his hand, the tavernkeeper had no trouble remembering the Gauls who had been getting drunk in his establishment all afternoon. “In fact, they left only a short while ago. The young giant was so drunk he could hardly stand. The older one practically had to carry him out.”

“Did you see which way they went?”

The tavernkeeper made a face. “I can’t see through walls, young fellow.”

“Never mind, I think I know,” I whispered.

The little hut beside the roped-off entrance to the mole was empty. On such a day, with the sky threatening to open at any moment and black waves lashing the boulder-strewn shoreline of the mole, no tourists were hiking out to have a look at the Colossus. I jumped the rope and ran toward the ruins.

On the way, I saw a thing I never anticipated—the body of Zenas. Whipped by the wind, the roiling water in the harbor must have separated his corpse from whatever had been used to weigh it down, and the waves had thrown it upon the shore. I stopped for just a moment to stare down at his lifeless, bulging eyes and the rope tied around his neck, which had surely been used to strangle him.

Gasping for breath, I ran on.

Why did I think Gatamandix had chosen this place to complete his purpose? It was close, for one thing; and here was the cause of all his grief, the Colossus itself. It was only a hunch on my part, but it proved correct. Deep within the ruins I rounded a corner, and in an open spot amid the huge fragments of bronze, hidden from the waterfront and the harbor but open to the stormy sky, I came upon the two Gauls.

Surrounding us, like the standing stones of the Druids, were strange, gigantic pieces of anatomy—a finger pointing skyward, a bit of a shoulder, the crook of an elbow, and a long, hollow section of thigh to complete the magic circle. In the center, lying across one of Helios’s broken sunbeams as if it were a sacrificial altar, was Vindovix, his glassy eyes barely open, insensible from consuming great quantities of wine. Over him stood Gatamandix, holding his ritual knife with both hands raised high above his head, muttering an incantation in his barbarous tongue.

A sudden flash of lightning lit the scene, making it seem garish and unreal. An instant later, a thunderclap shook the ground beneath my feet.

I gave a cry. The Druid saw me and froze. I rushed toward him. He brought down the knife.

I hurtled through the air. The descending blade caught against my tunic and ripped the cloth. It must have grazed my side, for I felt a sudden, searing pain across my ribs. I collided with Gatamandix, and together we tumbled across the uneven ground. I braced myself for a tremendous struggle—but then I heard a loud clanging sound, together with a sickening crack.

Gatamandix went limp. With some difficulty, I extricated myself from the dead weight of his arms, and stood over him. He stared up at me with lifeless eyes. He had struck his head on the giant finger of the Colossus and broken his neck. With his features distorted by a fierce grimace, the Druid’s enormous moustache looked more ridiculous than ever.

Spots swam before my eyes. I struggled to fill my lungs, and realized I had not caught a proper breath since I left Posidonius’s house. In my dizzy state, surrounded by flashes of lightning, the anatomical ruins around me looked weirder than ever. It seemed to me that I surely must be in a dream.

“Gordianus—you saved my life!”

Vindovix had roused himself enough to sit upright on the sunbeam. For a long moment he looked utterly stunned, then he flashed a lascivious grin. “Gordianus, what a man you are! For this, you deserve a reward—the kind of reward only a true man, a man with a moustache, can give you.”

He staggered to his feet and took a few steps toward me, leering at me with half-shut eyes.

“But Vindovix,” I said, still gasping for breath, “you no longer have your moustache.”

“What?” Perplexed, he reached up to touch his clean-shaven upper lip. Then his eyes rolled up, his knees gave way, and Vindovix the Gaul fell flat on his face.

*   *   *

That night I met with Posidonius in his library. Antipater and Cleobulus were there, as was Vindovix, who sat in a corner, still a bit befuddled by wine and nursing the cuts on his brow and the swollen lip he had suffered when he fell.

I explained what had happened, relying partly on reason and partly on conjecture.

“Gatamandix hated the idea that a Gaul had posed for the Colossus even more than Cleobulus did. According to the story, the ancestor of Vindovix had been a slave—and if a Gallic slave had been used by a Rhodian sculptor to create a monument to a Greek god, that was not a cause for pride, but for shame. To Gatamandix, then, what was the Colossus but a monument to the failure of the Gauls to conquer Greece, and a bitter reminder that a man of the Segurovi had been enslaved by the Greeks? No doubt he had long been irked by the family of Vindovix and their fantastic story, stubbornly repeated down the generations. It was Vindovix who really wanted to come to Rhodes, not Gatamandix. But if Vindovix returned home, not only having seen the Colossus with his own eyes but bearing some proof that his ancestor was the model, there would never be an end to the story. Gatamandix—as Druid, judge, and executioner—decided to take action. That was the real reason he accompanied you back to Rhodes—not to explore the world of the Greeks, but to thwart Vindovix’s quest to prove the historical reality of his family’s legend. Toward that end, he first destroyed the evidence of the plaster statue; to do that, he didn’t hesitate to murder Zenas and throw his body overboard. Then he set out to eliminate Vindovix, getting him too drunk to resist and preparing to murder him as a ritual sacrifice. Only he, Gatamandix, would return to the Segurovi, with a story that would refute and forever put an end to the tale of a Gallic slave who posed for the Colossus of Rhodes.”

Posidonius shook his head. “The tale as you reconstruct it makes perfect sense, Gordianus. How could I have been so blind to Gatamandix’s treachery? I was ready to accuse Cleobulus!”

“Of course, we still don’t know the truth of the question that set off this sequence of events,” said Antipater. “Was Vindovix’s ancestor the model for the Colossus, or not?”

“You forget that I saw the statue before it was defaced,” said Vindovix. “I have no doubt whatsoever. Vindovix, my great-great-great…” He lost track, blinked a few times, and went on. “He
was
the model for Chares.”

“I also saw the statue, and I have no doubt either,” said Cleobulus. “It looked nothing like you, Vindovix. You merely saw what you wanted to see.”

“But surely Gatamandix also thought it looked like Vindovix, or else he would never have gone to such lengths to destroy it,” observed Antipater.

“That bit of logic counts for something,” said Posidonius. “But the truth remains elusive. We have only legend, hearsay, and subjective observation to guide us. In this instance, empirical reasoning yields no definitive conclusion. Alas!”

*   *   *

It took Vindovix only a day to recover from his hangover, but I developed a fever from the wound I received from the Druid’s knife and was sick for days. With care from my host and Antipater, the fever passed, and I gradually recuperated.

Several days later, during a break in the stormy weather, I sat in the garden. Posidonius and Antipater were nearby, discussing a philosophical question. The slight warmth of the wintry sunshine felt good on my face.

Vindovix strolled across the garden. If anything, the lingering scars from his fall added character to his rugged features. He had begun to grow his moustache, but it would take a long time to regain its former glory.

He tugged at the silky hair above his lip, gave me a long, languid look, then walked on.

“Poor Vindovix,” said Antipater, “betrayed by a man he trusted. He must be lonely now, the only Gaul on an island of Greeks. I do believe he’s rather smitten with you, Gordianus.”

“He’s certainly persistent,” I said.

Posidonius raised an eyebrow. “And winter has only just begun. You’ll have to give in to his advances sooner or later.”

“What makes you think I haven’t done so already?”

Antipater blinked. “
Have
you?”

I smiled and shrugged, feeling quite sophisticated and at home among these worldly Greeks.

VII

STYX AND STONES

(The Walls and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon)

“In Babylon, we shall see not one, but two of the great Wonders of the World,” said Antipater. “Or at least, we shall see what remains of them.”

We had spent the night at a dusty little inn beside the Euphrates River. Antipater had been quiet and grumpy from the moment he got out of bed that morning—travel is hard on old men—but as we drew closer to Babylon, traveling south on the ancient road that ran alongside the river, his spirits rose and little by little he became more animated.

The innkeeper had told us that the ancient city was not more than a few hours distant, even accounting for the slow progress of the asses we were riding, and all morning a smudge that suggested a city had loomed ahead of us on the low horizon, very gradually growing more pronounced. The land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and for miles around is absolutely flat, without even low hills to break the view. On such a vast, featureless plain, you might think that you could see forever, but the ripples of heat that rose from the earth distorted the view, so that objects near and far took on an uncertain, even uncanny appearance. A distant tower turned out to be a palm tree. A pile of strangely motionless—dead?—bodies suddenly resolved into a heap of gravel, apparently put there by whoever maintained the road.

For over an hour I tried to make sense of a party approaching us on the road. The shimmering heat waves by turns appeared to magnify the group, then make them grow smaller, then disappear altogether, then reappear. At first I thought it was a company of armed men, for I thought I saw sunlight glinting on their weapons. Then I decided I was seeing nothing more than a single man on horseback, perhaps wearing a helmet or some other piece of armor that reflected a bluish gleam. Then the person, or persons, or whatever it was that approached us, vanished in the blink of an eye, and I felt a shiver, wondering if we were about to encounter a company of phantoms.

At last we met our fellow travelers on the road. The party turned out to consist of several armed guards and two small carts pulled by asses and piled high with stacks of bricks, but not bricks of any sort I had seen before. These were large and variously shaped, most about a foot square, and covered on the outward-facing sides with a dazzling glaze, some yellow, some blue, some mixed. They were not newly made—uneven edges and bits of adhering mortar indicated they had been chiseled free from some existing structure—but except for a bit of dust, the colored glazes glimmered with a jewel-like brightness.