CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A bath would be nice after Sestius. I rubbed my hands down my mantle and looked up. A few drops were falling, large and loud enough to make a satisfying splat on the golden stone. I didn’t have time for a bath. I needed to find a horse.

Thunder shook the town as I walked through the temple precinct. The cheap cloth covering the stalls flapped and snapped in the wind. Even here, the streets emptied except for a few souls so lost they couldn’t feel the rain. They wandered to the spring and watched the sky reach out a finger to touch the bubbling surface. I wrapped my mantle around me. At least the smell of Sestius would be washed away.

The rain emptied itself in small fits, drops hammering the soft clay soil, moving on to the next block, the next hill. I reached Secundus’s house undrowned. If Materna was home, I wouldn’t be let in. I had to mind the legalities around the cancerous bitch.

I knocked again. I told myself it was possible no one could hear me. So I tried the door. Not locked. I pushed it open and entered. An old slave woman, half asleep and all blind, was sitting in a chair, snoring like the thunder. A fire was dying in the main room. Looked around. Nobody but the old lady. So I started down one of the corridors.

Rain pounded against the thatched roof. A placid drip started in the entranceway, forming a puddle underneath the door slave. No sound inside except the ruminating snore of the old and tired. Until I passed a door at the end.

Loud grunt, and rhythmic squeaking. The rhythm was getting louder and quicker, and so was the grunting. It built to a small crescendo much too quickly, and a feminine voice giggled. I guess fucking on a rainy day was the thing to do in Aquae Sulis. I kicked a door open for the second time.

Secunda was still squatting on top of Mumius. They turned toward me, faces shocked and stupid. I grinned. “Don’t mind me. I’ll be in the barn.”

I left them stuck together and whistled a tune down the hallway. A servant ran out of the kitchen, saw me, ran back. The old lady at the door was still sleeping. I stepped over the puddle and saw myself out.

The barn was warm with hay and horses and smelled even better than the rain. A few slaves were sitting on stacks of straw and oats, one whittling something out of a stick. They quit talking when I walked in, and the biggest one got up to meet me.

“You want something?”

I looked him over. Burly fellow, with short grizzled hair and leathery skin. I didn’t want to get him in trouble. Although life in the mines might be preferable to living in the same house as Materna.

I took out a couple of denarii from a fold in my tunic.

“Tell you what, boys. I’m not here. You didn’t see me, and we didn’t talk.” I dropped the coins on the straw-strewn floor. “You found these in the street.”

The others watched the big one. He watched me. He spoke slowly.

“Seems a shame. Too easy, like. I like to earn my money. One way”—he looked toward a pitchfork propped against the barn wall—“or another.”

The others took the hint and got up to stand behind him.

“I work for the governor. I’m trying to figure out why people die in Aquae Sulis.”

One of the other slaves snorted out a laugh. The big one smiled gently. “They die ’cause they’re sick.”

“Or murdered.”

That shut them up.

“I was a guest here a few days ago. So was a small, dark man. He was killed—strangled. Out in the cemetery. He was leaving town, and he was riding a good black horse—small and fast.”

The one that snorted made another noise, nudging an old man with a beard. They huddled together behind the spokesman. His face was hard, not giving anything away.

“So why are you here?”

“Because I think he borrowed that horse from your master. Or mistress. I think the horse, being a hell of a lot smarter than the man who rode it, came back home by itself.”

The burly slave spoke to the others in whispers. I heard footsteps behind me. It was Secunda. The slaves scattered, some climbing the ladder to the upper floor. The big one bowed. “Beggin’ your pardon, miss, but this man—”

“I’ll take care of it, Grithol.”

He said nothing, just started mucking out a stall, every now and then looking at the denarii still on the floor.

She was out of breath, and her tunic was crooked. She’d worn a mantle over her head against the rain, and her face was flushed from the exercise. All of it. She said abruptly: “What do you want?”

“To find out who killed Faro. Don’t you?”

She was a stupid girl. She tried to give me a withering look but only succeeded in making herself look cross-eyed. “Mama says—”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what your mama says. Your mama feeds off hate and throws it back up on everyone she meets. And I suspect—I suspect very much, Secunda—you know it.”

Her eyes took on a kind of animal gleam. “She wouldn’t like you poking around.”

“She wouldn’t like you getting poked.”

One of the slaves stifled a guffaw. Some straw from the loft fell through a crack and rocked in the air until it landed. Secunda swallowed a couple of times. She was pretty, if you liked them dumb. “You—you—”

“Don’t worry. I won’t write about it on the temple wall. All I want to know is if you have a black horse that came home riderless the other night.”

She stared at me, her face red. Then she decided to pretend I didn’t exist and turned around and marched out the other end. The slaves trickled back to the main room. The big one cleared his throat.

“I—I think you might like the third stall on the right. Nice stall, isn’t it, Hamus?”

“Yeah. Damn nice stall.”

They all looked at me expectantly. I walked to the third stall.

Inside was a small black horse with a fine-boned, intelligent head. I climbed in with him, calming him down because he didn’t recognize me.

“ ’S’all right, boy. Easy.”

I stroked his neck while his nose took in my equine history. He decided I was all right. I rubbed him under the heavy part of the jaw and scratched a spot on his right front flank. He extended his neck for me. Now he knew I knew the secret spots of horses, so he let me pick up his hooves.

They’d been cleaned, but he was the one. I explored his haunches, found a minor scrape. Probably went through a bramble on his way home. I scratched between his ears, while he rubbed his head on my chest. I murmured: “I wish you could tell me what you saw.”

A sharp whistle from one of the slaves brought me out of the stall in a hurry. Hustling down the barn to meet me was Mumius, still hiking his belt into place. His face looked dipped in beet juice.

“Arcturus. You should know—Secundus left for Londinium. Yesterday. I wouldn’t—Secunda said—”

“I don’t care who you fuck, Mumius. I’m just here to do a job.”

He drew himself up, which was difficult considering his belt was still falling down. “I—I just want you to know—I didn’t talk. You know—about Faro. I didn’t.”

“You want a prize for valor?”

He kicked at a clump of horse manure and didn’t say anything. I studied him for a few minutes. He was still staring at the floor when he muttered: “I’m going back to camp.” His voice held disgust. “I’m through with that family.”

“Well, at least you got something out of it.”

He shrugged and grinned. “Any port in a storm.”

Then he laughed and held out his hand. Considering where it had been, I didn’t want to grasp it, but I figured the rain would clean me off again.

He turned around and disappeared back inside the house. I gave the black gelding one more pat over the stall door. The slaves were nowhere to be seen. I stared up at the loft. More straw was falling like snow. Time to get home.

*   *   *

The rain didn’t touch me. All I could see was Faro, and somebody nailing that mask on his face. Not sure why it bothered me so much. Maybe because I wanted to hurt him, and finding his dead body on my doorstep made me feel guilty. Because despite what he did to my wife, I felt—pity. Pity for him, and this whole goddamn town.

That old bastard haruspex at dinner, the first night. He was right. The place was rotten. Maybe not once, when it was younger and not so famous, but now it was as soft and swollen and stinking as a dead man in the summer sun. I wondered if the mine poisoned Aquae Sulis or whether the venom was old and always there, waiting to be dug up like silver.

Grattius was just a stooge, a nobody who could be pushed and pulled and led around. Someone else in town was doing the leading. I wondered who.

A lot of people seemed to know about Bibax. Vitellius. Grattius. Sestius and Sulpicia. Whoever told Grattius to arrange Aufidio’s death. Calpurnius knew, and knew enough to die for it. And wherever you turned in Aquae Sulis, whatever mean, crooked street you walked down, you always came back to the temple. The temple where the goddess collected her blackmail payments to the tune of bubbling water. Where the head priest drank Caecuban wine.

And there were the baths, of course. Notes left in cubicles, notes directing murder, and payoffs, and other business not clean enough to be done in the water. Octavio was always ready to bow and scrape at the important ones, patching a pipe here and picking up a note or two there, running errands like a rat in a sewer. I wondered about Octavio.

I wondered, too, about Bibax. Was he, after all, a murderer for hire, the netherworld’s assassin? Or was he a tool, like Grattius, who was paid to curse certain people, and maybe started to believe in his own powers—until the belief got in the way? Bibax. He was the root of what was growing in Aquae Sulis.

The rain stopped, and the world was at that silent point between storms, when the wind isn’t blowing anymore but the birds are still afraid to sing. I took the mantle off my head and smelled the air. The earth was cleaner—the town still filthy.

Faro was paid off. By Materna or Secundus. Who was now on a suddenly convenient trip to Londinium, out of reach from suddenly inconvenient questions.

I scratched my chin. The night he was killed, Faro was given a horse—a good horse, from their precious stable. It was as if—as if someone knew they’d be getting it back.

I swallowed the bile that crept up my throat when I thought about her. There was no one in this place, no one I had ever seen, who was more eaten away by hatred than Materna. It was her lover, her bed partner, her constant companion.

And she sat in her house, and brooded, and squatted in the bath, and brooded, and threw her parties, and played the social scene, and all the time she plotted and planned and desired, her thoughts and wants stretching to Faro, to other men and women she could trap and snare and jerk like pet birds on a string.

My doorway was solid and warm, and it comforted me when I shivered. I’d been looking for cobwebs. Maybe it was time to look for the spider.

*   *   *

I dreamed of horses. Manes danced in the wind, the ripples on their flanks shimmering with the pulse and throb of their hooves. Black and chestnut brown, dark gray and cream, they outran the sun, and their shadows fell on the wheat field like the passing clouds.

They were running too fast. The leader, a strong black horse with fine bones, was galloping toward a cliff that stretched to the sea. Nimbus was beside him, and all the horses were mad and joyful, even the donkey, twitching her ears and cantering at the back of the herd.

The wheat gave way to gorse and shrub. Dust rose like smoke, and still they wouldn’t stop. I was running, too, trying to get in front, trying to keep them from falling, but they were too fast, and too glad, and they didn’t see me. I was shouting, but my mouth was full of dirt, and still the horses kept on running.

I woke up to a hand on my forehead. My chest hurt.

“Ardur—are you—are you all right? You were turning back and forth in bed and breathing hard and—and whimpering. My poor darling—I wish I could keep the bad dreams away—”

I took her hand off my forehead and kissed the fingers while I caught my breath. “What time is it?”

“Almost the tenth hour. We should be getting ready.”

“When did you get home?”

“Not too much later after you arrived. I bought you another tunic for tonight.”

I grinned at her. “If it doesn’t smell like dead fish, I don’t want it. I like my clothes to be lived in.”

“You’ve been living a little too much. Ardur—stop it. We don’t have time. We have to talk about the mmmff—”

She was sitting next to me on the bed, so I just reached over and pulled her on top of me and covered her mouth with my own. After a while, she was out of breath, too.

“Ardur—we don’t have time—”

“We would if you quit telling me we didn’t.”

“But—but the case—”

“We’ll talk about it. Afterward. Besides—it’s raining. And in Aquae Sulis—”

“Oh. Oh, yes, Ardur—”

“—the thing to do when it rains—”

“Don’t—don’t stop—right there—”

“Is this.”

*   *   *

I liked rain. I sat against the wall of the bedroom and thought about it while Gwyna nestled on my chest. I looked down and stroked her hair while she stretched an arm out over the side of the bed and made a sleepy, satisfied noise.

“Now we really need to get ready.”

“We have been. When we get to Philo’s, I want my smell all over you.”

She turned red and tried not to smile. “You’re such a beast.”

“It’s why you love me.”

This time she gave me a sideways look. “One of the reasons.”

“So tell me what happened at the baths.”

“I always go first. You tell me what you found out from Sestius.”

While I put on the new blue tunic she bought me, and she started putting on powders and fixing her hair, I told Gwyna about my day.

She made noises of disgust at Sestius, and incredulous ones at my description of Hortensia. Her eyes got big over Mumius and Secunda, and finally narrowed when I told her my suspicions. Then she nodded and put down the mirror.

“Ardur—Ardur, it makes sense. Prunella told me this morning—Materna is the one whose cloak was stolen. You know, the theft that boy Dewi was blamed for. She bought a generic thief curse—‘whoever stole my robe, slave or free, male or female,’ et cetera. Prunella didn’t know whether Bibax wrote it or not. That’s not the kind of thing anyone remembers, especially anyone like Prunella. Bibax was too low for her to notice—until he was murdered, anyway. She knows Dewi’s grandmother, and she said there was a rumor the thief was Dewi, and then—then he just died. You said he was killed. So there must be a connection. Materna must be guilty of something!”

“Other than a capital case of the mean and uglies. I think so, too.”

“What do we do now?”

“What we’ve been doing. We need proof. And remember, whatever she’s done, she didn’t do it alone.”

Gwyna thought for a few minutes while she rubbed some rouge on her cheekbones. “Ardur—I didn’t learn much today—”

“That was enough!”

“No, I mean the women weren’t so gossipy around me—they didn’t want to talk. Sestius’s girlfriend was complaining about how he wouldn’t take her anywhere, or buy her presents—”

“That reminds me, I’ve got something for you.”

“You’re sweet. Thank you. But let me finish.”

“Go on.”

“Well, I did find out from Prunella—after bringing her another bottle from the cellar—”

“Agricola will think I’m a lush.”

“Will you quit interrupting? Anyway, she said Octavio hasn’t been sleeping well—”

I started to say something, and she shut me up with a glance. “And—it’s true—he gambles. He’s in debt.”

“She told you that?”

Gwyna shrugged her shoulders elegantly. “In so many words. She’ll talk to herself. If you get her drunk enough.”

I smoothed the nap on the tunic down. “Will I do?”

“Brush your hair, and put some oil on it. You look like a wild man from the hill country.”

I uncorked a flask and started to pour a liberal amount onto my palm, then Gwyna made a horrified noise and got up from her chair.

“What are you doing, Ardur?”

“Putting oil on my hair, like you said.”

“Not that much!”

She shook her head and took the flask away from me. “How you were able to look as good as you did before we were married—”

I grinned. “Did I look good?”

She answered my vanity by scraping the oil from my hand into hers. My palm had already absorbed some of it.

“You’re too dry all over.”

“Not all over.”

“Will you stop it? Now, hold still.”

She pushed me toward the bed and made me sit while she rubbed my scalp and hair, then stepped back to look at me. “Go comb it—and use the mirror.”

I fished out a comb. My hair was wavy and thick, but Gwyna had gotten the oil all through it, so I didn’t pull out too much. She was pinning her own hair up, and I came over to nibble on her neck.

“Is this better?”

“Yes, but use the mirror and straighten out that lock on your forehead. You look like Pan.”

I looked in the mirror and wiped the leer off my face—and fixed the horns.

“We need to find out as much as we can about Octavio. See how well he knows Materna.”

“We have a chance to tonight. They’ve been invited to Philo’s.”

I was frowning. “That’s convenient.”

“Not really. This is a small town, after all. Grattius is shut in his house, waiting for Rome to call, and Secundus is tainted by association and has run away, and Philo knows you don’t like Papirius. That left Octavio.”

“How come Philo knows I don’t like Papirius? I never—”

“Darling, it’s obvious when you don’t like someone.”

“Is it obvious when I do?”

“Ardur—get your hand off my—”

“Oh—your present.”

I took the small package out of my old tunic. It was still damp from the rain. “Open it.”

She unwrapped the twine, gasping when she saw the green glass against the dark brown piece of scrap leather he’d wrapped it in. “It’s lovely.”

“Let me put it on you.”

I draped the necklace around her neck and fastened it. She was holding up the mirror and studying the effect. “Who made it? The one that—”

“Yeah. The gemmarius at the foot of the hill. Nice old man. Good work, too.”

“It certainly is.”

She turned the mirror back and forth to catch the waning light better and wrinkled her brow.

“What is it? Don’t you like it?”

“Of course I do. It’s just—it makes me sad for some reason.”

“Sad? Sad!? I’ll have you know I paid—”

“Hold me, Ardur. I love the necklace, I just got melancholy for a moment.”

She settled herself in my arms. I held her and tried not to wonder about women too much. Then she took a deep breath and seemed to be herself again.

“See? Just a passing fancy. Don’t pay attention. It was so thoughtful of you—and I truly love the piece—”

“Hmm. Me, too.”

She pushed away, pretending to scold me. “How can I get dressed if you keep—”

“Am I presentable now?”

She looked me up and down. “Yes. You are. If you put on a ring.”

I stuck an onyx signet on my finger. “If I stay in the room with you we’ll be late. I’ll wait for you outside.”

She smiled at me. “Thank you, Ardur. Don’t you dare smell like the barn when I come out.”

I turned around to look at her from the doorway.

“How did you know—”

“You were talking about that donkey in your sleep. Go on.”

She closed the door on me gently. I thought I’d better check on Draco and take him to the barn with me—and tell him to forget I ever said I could teach him about women.