In the Shadow of Heroes Read online

  He knew he’d overstepped the mark. Tullus’s jaw twitched, but he didn’t rise to the provocation.

  ‘Is she here too?’

  ‘She’s outside.’

  ‘Does she have the fleece?’

  Cadmus nodded.

  ‘You must give it to me. And then you must go home, and keep out of sight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Please, Cadmus, hand it back. Nero isn’t easily appeased, but we may as well try.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Cadmus. I will beg if I must.’

  He looked into his master’s sad, grey eyes. They were the same colour as the bathwater.

  ‘It’s in the changing room. She’s looking after it.’

  ‘Good. I shall take it from her when we leave. And then you must embark on the first boat back to Rome. No, Antium. Go to my country house, it’ll be safer than the capital. I’ll give you any money you need. For the gods’ sake, just keep yourself out of trouble. Heaven knows I have enough blood on my hands as it is.’

  That caught Cadmus by surprise. ‘Blood, Master? Whose blood?’

  His master looked at him, pained, like he was swallowing something very sharp, very slowly. He looked down into bathwater miserably, condensation dripping from the end of his long nose.

  Suddenly there was an almighty splash from the opposite side, which sent a tide of warm scum floating towards them both. An enormously fat man had thrown himself into the bath, and a pair of slaves proceeded to scrub his back and shoulders with pumice stones.

  Cadmus’s blood ran strangely cold in the hot water. He recognized the newcomer at once. It was the merchant from the ship.

  ‘We should go somewhere more private, I think,’ Tullus said quietly.

  Cadmus nodded wordlessly and glanced at the merchant. The huge man was reclining with his eyes closed, the bathwater lapping at him like some vast, flabby island. His slaves looked faintly sick.

  Just as they were about to leave, Tullus stubbed his toe on something at the bottom of the bath and cried out in pain. The merchant’s tiny eyes snapped open. He looked at Cadmus, then at Tullus, then at Cadmus again. His face already showed that he knew something was amiss.

  ‘You?’

  Cadmus tried to summon the character of Quintus Domitius Tullus, but the cocky young Roman had abandoned him.

  ‘Hello, my, er, good man.’ No, not convincing at all. ‘A pleasant surprise.’

  Tullus screwed up his face. ‘Don’t be insolent, Cadmus! Why are you talking like that?’

  ‘Cadmus?’ said the merchant.

  ‘A nickname my father gives me,’ said Cadmus, laughing uneasily.

  ‘This is your father?’

  ‘Er. Yes?’

  ‘No!’ said Tullus.

  Cadmus looked at him with desperate, pleading eyes, but it was too late. The charade was over.

  ‘Of course you’re not his father,’ said the merchant. A smile spread over his face, and Cadmus could sense him going in for the kill. ‘His father is a consul of Rome. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Er.’

  ‘Can someone please explain to me what’s going on . . .’

  ‘This reprobate conned me out of ten denarii. No doubt he is planning to do the same to you.’

  ‘This is my slave,’ said Tullus, his eyes going wide at the man’s forwardness. ‘He is as honest as they come!’

  ‘He is a thief!’

  ‘How dare you? Where are your witnesses?’

  ‘I own half of this city. I don’t need witnesses.’

  A third shadow fell over the water.

  ‘I can be your witness,’ said a familiar, unctuous voice. ‘The boy is most definitely a thief. I saw him steal from the emperor himself.’

  Epaphroditus stood above them, flanked by two of his own slaves. The secretary must have come on a separate ship. And if he was here, there was a good chance Nero himself had come with him.

  ‘Seize him,’ said Epaphroditus, waving his hand nonchalantly.

  His slaves began to make their way around the edge of the bath. Cadmus jumped up, wriggled on to the grimy floor, and set off at a run.

  The steam was as thick as it had been when he’d arrived, and he found himself colliding with the other bathers every five or six steps. The sweat poured down him. At some point he must have taken a wrong turn among the columns, because he found himself looking across the palaestra, in blinding sunlight, where men were wrestling and throwing discuses and lifting weights. They all looked around in surprise. Behind him he heard the slap of the slaves’ feet.

  Naked as a baby, he sprinted around the colonnade of the exercise yard and re-entered the baths via a different doorway. He passed the massage rooms, the snack sellers, the cold plunge pool, and skidded to a halt in the changing room.

  Tog was gone.

  He went to the alcove where he had left his possessions. His toga, his tunic, his sandals, the fleece, even the little bag of coins he had taken from the merchant. Everything was there, apart from Tog.

  He heard the shouts and footsteps of his pursuers echoing down the passage behind him. He threw on his tunic and sandals, grabbed the fleece and the purse, and fled across the mosaic floor. Just as he reached the steps of the baths, he felt something tug on his shoulder. One of the other slaves had taken hold of the bag with the fleece inside. Cadmus spun and let the strap fall from his arm, then kicked his assailant hard in the shin and half-staggered into the street.

  Outside everything was too bright, too loud. His head was still hot and fuzzy from too long spent stewing in the caldarium. He felt almost as naked as he had in the baths. No toga. No Golden Fleece. He was just a slave now, and a small and feeble one at that.

  He set off at a run, hardly knowing what direction he was heading in.

  XVI

  Cadmus was on the other side of the city before he was sure he was no longer being followed. At the Diomeian Gate, in the eastern wall of the city, he slumped behind a watering trough and caught his breath. The afternoon was drawing on, and the area to the north of the Acropolis was lost under a landslide of shadow.

  A stray, flea-bitten dog came nosing along the wall and looked up in surprise, as though he hadn’t been expecting Cadmus to be there. He began sniffing around Cadmus’s lap, and then pushed his wet muzzle into his face.

  ‘Go away!’ Cadmus said miserably. He swatted him with the back of his hand. ‘I don’t have any food. And if I did, I wouldn’t give you any.’

  The dog lowered its ears, but didn’t move.

  ‘Leave me alone!’

  He raked in the dirt for a stone to throw, but the thought of Tog stopped him. She would never have done that. If she were here, she would probably have wanted to take the dog with them.

  He wondered where she’d got to. Of course she’d run away. Good on her. She deserved to be rid of him, after the way he’d treated her.

  Perhaps, he thought, he should return to Italy after all. He wasn’t doing any good here. He’d lost Tog. He’d lost the fleece. He’d probably landed Tullus in all kinds of trouble. The dog was still staring at him, his eyes strangely judgemental.

  ‘I know,’ said Cadmus. ‘I’m useless.’

  Going back seemed impossible, though. There wasn’t enough money in his ill-gotten purse to pay for a journey of that distance. If he didn’t pay his way, he hardly fancied trying to slip aboard a ship in secret again – he knew Fortune didn’t favour him that much.

  He was completely at a loss. Perhaps now was the time to turn to the gods in earnest. Perhaps he should go to a temple, make an offering, pray to Apollo for guidance.

  Suddenly he sat up, and made a faint, mocking smile. He didn’t need to pray to Apollo, he realized. He could talk to him directly.

  Cadmus’s memory was one of few gifts the gods had granted him, and one that had never ceased to amaze Tullus. He could transcribe an entire session of the Senate – a whole day’s worth of speeches – without any notes, hours after the event, if the need arose
. On the rare occasions that Tullus attended a dinner party, Cadmus was able to remember the names and faces and careers of men he had met years ago.

  When it came to Silvanus’s map, he only needed to think of it and it was as though he were holding the papyrus in front of him. If he went to the Sibyl’s shrine, he was bound to meet up with Nero’s party sooner or later, and hopefully Tullus would be with them. But there was more to it than that. He wanted to meet the Sibyl herself.

  He scooped a few mouthfuls of water from the trough and set out on foot. To his annoyance, the dog insisted on accompanying him.

  He didn’t really know what he was looking for. The longer he walked, the more foolish he felt. The prophets and prophetesses in Rome were charlatans, for the most part, out to make a quick couple of sesterces by exploiting the hopes and the fears of the poor. There was the famous prophetess at Delphi, but he’d always thought of her as little more than a tourist attraction. The Sibyls – priestesses of Apollo, divinely elected women who spoke with voice of the god himself – were the stuff of poetry and myth.

  But then, so was the Golden Fleece, and he had seen that with his own eyes. Seen it, held it, lost it again.

  Cadmus trudged on, the dog still trotting happily beside him. The city receded and the day waned. Behind him, atop the Acropolis, the massive bronze statue of Athena Promachos raised her spear in challenge to the setting sun. He passed beyond the roadside tombs into the olive groves and the farmhouses, disordered and scattered like chips off a sculptor’s block. The chatter of the crowds disappeared and was replaced with the burr of cicadas. The sky in the east turned the colour of a ripe peach.

  Then he saw it. A farmhouse, set back from the road, burnt out, half-demolished. Its roof had caved in, and one of its walls was a mound of blackened stones. This was the spot that had been marked on the map, he was sure of it. It didn’t look much like a shrine to Apollo.

  He walked up to the farmhouse through the short, brittle grass and scattered stones. A few goats emerged from behind the walls and then ran away into the olive trees, followed by the lonely clang of the bells around their necks. The dog chased after them and disappeared from sight.

  Cadmus felt as though he was in a dream. There was something unsettling about the house, but he was drawn to it all the same. The half-light of dusk only made the scene feel more unreal.

  Everything was very quiet. He wished Tog was with him.

  There was a courtyard at the front of the house. Charcoal and bones and bits of pottery cracked under his sandals as he made his way across to the rooms at the rear. They were empty of furniture, and what remained of the walls and ceiling was stained with soot. He couldn’t see into the gloom of the kitchen and the storerooms, but they smelt of death – dust and blood and rotten eggs. There were stairs up the other side of the building, but the upper floor had completely collapsed, and the room beneath was half-exposed to the sky. He went back across the courtyard to investigate. The threshold was covered with bits of broken timber. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  ‘Gods below . . .’ he muttered.

  The floor was covered with the burnt remains of animals. In the middle of the room, illuminated by a single shaft of dull light, was an altar. It was smeared with ash and blood, and on top of its feebly glowing embers rested a large bronze dish. Hanging from the ceiling were bunches of dried herbs and flowers. At the rear, in the deepest darkness, Cadmus could just make out a table and a chest, both of them black and cracked and strangely glossy from the ravages of a fire. When he got closer he saw the tabletop was scattered with glass bottles, a tiny bronze tripod, an oyster shell, and the wrinkled form of something that Cadmus thought was a fig, but found was in fact a desiccated, headless frog. There was, tantalizingly, a box of half-charred scrolls underneath the table.

  From the doorway came a noise that sounded like a sneeze. Cadmus whirled around. The dog was there again, sitting on his haunches in the doorway. He barked, and it seemed to split the twilight in two.

  ‘Shush, Orthus . . .’

  An airy voice drifted into the farmhouse from the courtyard. Someone was following the animal. Cadmus leapt through a hole in the opposite wall and crouched behind it, trying not to breathe.

  The dog sat for a moment, watching the space where he had just been. The voice came again.

  ‘Orthus!’

  Behind the dog a woman appeared, dimly silhouetted against the doorway. Her voice had sounded young, but from where Cadmus sat it was impossible to tell her age. Her hair was unbound and so dirty it was clinging together in thick strands the size of her fingers, like tree roots growing from the top of her head. She also seemed to be wearing a toga; or rather several togas, layered over each other, crimson, purple, black, hanging in countless folds around her body. She was shorter than Cadmus, and slight under all of her robes.

  In one hand, at waist height, she held one of the goats by its horns.

  The priestess led the animal to the altar a little unsteadily, the blackened carcasses snapping under her bare feet. When she fanned the embers and the orange light was cast on her face, Cadmus saw why. A piece of rough-spun fabric concealed her eyes. She was completely blind.

  He watched her shuffle around. She piled up the fire with sticks bundled next to the altar, and then, still holding on to one of the goat’s horns, felt her way slowly to the table where Cadmus had been nosing around her possessions. She led the animal back to the fire. She began to chant, her song matched by the victim’s bleating.

  Cadmus looked away, as he always did at public sacrifices. He heard the familiar sounds – the rough slice of the blade, the slop and spatter as the animal was gutted, the hiss as its insides were heaped on to the blazing altar – and didn’t turn back until he was sure the whole ritual was complete, and the body was spitted and roasting over the flames.

  ‘Come,’ said the priestess suddenly. ‘Eat.’

  Cadmus froze.

  ‘Aha. I know you’re there.’

  He peeped through a gap in the stones. She was facing him.

  ‘You have been witness to the sacrifice, so it is only right that you eat the sacrificial meat and take the Hecate’s blessing.’

  She beckoned in his direction.

  The Hecate. Goddess of the dead, of night, of magic. This woman wasn’t a Sibyl. She could hardly even be called a priestess. She was a witch.

  Cadmus came out slowly, his muscles stiff from crouching for so long, his heart rattling behind his ribs.

  The priestess tore off strips of meat with her curved knife and held them blindly in front of her. Cadmus took a piece and nibbled it tentatively. The dog, Orthus, again began sniffing around his knees with great interest.

  ‘He likes you,’ said the woman. ‘He doesn’t usually like anyone.’

  Even though her eyes were covered, she seemed to be staring at him, frowning, as if trying to picture him through force of will alone. The fabric of the blindfold twitched erratically. She took a couple of paces towards him and then laid her hands upon his face. Her fingers were cold and calloused. Cadmus shivered, despite the heat from the fire.

  ‘I like you too,’ she said. She caressed him a moment longer and then withdrew her hands. ‘But then, I already know you.’

  It took him a moment to compose himself.

  ‘You know me?’

  ‘Mmm hmm.’ She felt her way around the room with surprising ease and selected herbs and powders and unguents. She began mixing them in a small clay crucible. ‘I have seen you a thousand, thousand times. In the vapours. They come from below, below, below . . .’

  She threw the contents of the crucible into the bronze dish and set it on the fire. It sent up plumes of acrid, sea-green smoke.

  Cadmus didn’t know what to say. She didn’t seem entirely sane.

  ‘Yes, we like you. Much more than the other one.’

  ‘The other one?’

  ‘You’re not going to shout at us, are you? Like he did?’

&n
bsp; ‘Do you mean Silvanus?’

  ‘I tried to help him. I tried to steer him from his fate. But he was stubborn, and the fleece blinded him. Like it always has done. And now his thread is severed, and he has gone below.’

  Cadmus watched her face twitching in the firelight. Her skin was white and unblemished as Parian marble – she couldn’t have been much older than him, he thought. As she nodded, a thick loop of hair fell from her head and swayed heavily in front of him. He looked closer and saw the glint of a tiny polished eye. It wasn’t hair. It was a snake, binding her tresses in its muscular coils.

  She kissed it lightly on its head and gently pushed it out of the way. Cadmus’s skin broke out in goose-flesh.

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  The priestess inhaled the bitter-smelling fumes rising from the altar. She inclined her head as though lost in thought, or perhaps listening carefully for something beyond Cadmus’s senses.

  ‘Mmm,’ she said.

  Not for the first time, Cadmus began to wish he had never come. To the house. To Athens. He wished he’d stayed at home under his blanket.

  He swallowed drily, and when he next spoke his voice was hoarse. ‘Why?’

  ‘He came to us twice,’ she said. ‘He was looking for things that didn’t belong to him.’ Her voice was calm and distant. ‘Sacred things. Sacred places. A tomb. I told him what he needed to hear and sent him on his way. But he returned, some days later. He was angry. He had followed my directions, but did not find what he needed to find. It was in front of him, and he did not see it.’

  ‘The Golden Fleece?’ said Cadmus.

  ‘That was what he wanted. Not what he needed.’ She chuckled quietly. ‘He wanted me to tell him exactly where it was. He said he wanted to keep it safe, but I could read his heart. He desired the fleece for himself, like all men do. He tried to force the answers from me, but the goddess refused to speak. Fool. He should have known what happens when an asp is cornered.’

  She stroked the snake again, whispering something under her breath, and it slithered back into the masses of her hair.