Darrell Schweitzer is an American editor, reviewer and author. His work is primarily in the fantasy field, in which he scored a marked success with his novel The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995), but he has also written several stories with a Roman background. In ‘Last Things’, his first serious murder mystery, Schweitzer explores the rule of law at the very moment that the Roman Empire collapsed in the West in AD 476.
I can’t tell you how immensely pleased I was, though not really surprised, to see that the house of Plautia Marcella stood as it always had, nestled among trees on a ledge above a stream and a narrow valley, in the foothills of the Alps. Throughout my journey I had noted the general impoverishment of the countryside; the very few, stick-thin tenants still laboring in the fields; the burnt villages; the tracts of waste; but here, as my carriage inched across the ancient stone bridge and I gazed up through the dusk at the welcoming villa, time seemed never to have passed. Here was a place immune to the ravages and follies of men and the death-throes of empires. The sight was more comforting than I can put into words.
I had been a guest here many times in my youth, in the old days, when the third Valentinian wore the purple and Roman political fictions went on as they always had, like a stately dance of shadows. Here there was light. Here were solid things. The great lady Marcella’s husband had grown greater still in the imperial service, leaving her richer than dreams of avarice – and I think she had few of those, desiring only to live in the old way, without hindrance.
So, in her house, you might think that Trajan still ruled. Some genius hovered above the place, a guardian spirit who insured that the life of Plautia Marcella remained like the unrippled water in a tranquil pool.
She would survive, I used to believe, until the end of time, until the deaths of the gods.
But aren’t the gods already dead? Ah, I digress.
Suffice it to say that inside this house, strict decorum was always observed. A gentleman wore a toga, never daring to appear in the actually more practical Germanic trousers the twit Valentinian once tried to outlaw. (‘A few more attempts like that, and I shall actually believe he is alive, not a stuffed dummy,’ Lady Plautia once said, but softly, because in those days the emperor’s mother, the Christian gorgon Galla Placidia, was still among us, and everything was said softly.)
There one spoke perfect, classical Latin, rife with allusions. The eunuch-chamberlain Gregorius greeted one at the door. He was a dark, frail little thing, an Armenian with a whispering voice, whose beardless condition made him seem forever a child. It was his task to exchange initial pleasantries and small gifts to and from his mistress, then conduct the guests to the baths, where we would linger in sumptuous luxury, often accompanied by music, sometimes Gregorius himself on a lyre or pipe. And at last, at the appointed hour, one followed Gregorius and the other servants in stately procession into the triclinium, the dining hall, where Plautia Marcella held her court and the games (of wit and eloquence) were about to begin.
In those days, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I was the best friend of her favorite nephew Sabellianus. For all that I felt smothered in such company and had been more interested, as Sabellianus was, in hunting or riding, I genuinely liked her. The very artificiality of her condition appealed to my already ripening cynicism. Here was a lady who had style.
I was a would-be poet then, spinning vast tapestries of word-play and rhetoric, and if, sometimes, I lost all sense of what I was trying to say in the process, Plautia Marcella always praised my compositions. She too was a cynic, not in any strict philosophical sense, but someone who accepted mere surfaces and did not peer underneath, because she already knew there was nothing there.
Laughter, I associate with her, and very faint mockery, like the wind under the eaves. I could mock Virgil merely by not being Virgil. She could mock Galla Placidia by not being empress.
We became confidants. She was of a far higher social rank than I, which removed any sense of competition. There was no danger I would ever be asked to marry her daughter, Plautilla, who had the potential of becoming another gorgon. So she told me things she told no one else, particularly after my boyhood friendship with Sabellianus had ended, and he had gone off to become a priest and convert the heathen who were arriving across the Rhine in inexhaustible waves. I still visited. We two, together, had our little jokes and our secrets. But there was no possibility of scandal between us. She did not lust after me. She called me one of her puppies.
Once, when only Gregorius was present, she said to me, ‘I have seen the goddess Hecate, walking in my garden with her two black hounds.’
That startled me. I said nothing. She waited for my response, but when I did not laugh, or ask if the hounds had left muddy prints or worse on the garden path, she smiled mysteriously, and the three of us rose and went out into the garden, which spread over a series of terraces behind the house. There Gregorius unearthed a small stone altar and the three of us, just for the fun of it I think, committed a capital crime. We sacrificed, just pouring a little wine over the stone. It was evening, dark very suddenly and the wind blew through the trees. Lady Plautia spoke of spirits, of daemones, which haunt every fold of the earth, whether the established Church likes it or not. She conversed with invisible gods as if they were her dinner guests. I could almost see them. The wind blew. The moon was covered with a cloud, and Hecate, goddess of the dead and of witchcraft walked nearby.
I did not even suggest to myself that the lady was mad. No, this was a performance, for my sake. I found it thrilling.
Later that night, in my chamber, I actually wrote a good poem.
Now that I am old and tell this story, I still wonder what, actually, Plautia Marcella believed. Certainly she worshipped Christ and even endowed a little church once, professing, as everyone did, that in the crucified Nazarene, Rome had found a powerful new ally. After all, she pointed out, the cross on which He died was now on the money, or else the christogram, the chi-rho, depicted on many imperial reverses as being inscribed by a winged victory – which already the vulgar called an angel – onto a shield. So if the penniless carpenter, who did not even own the robe He wore, now found His way onto the golden solidus of Rome and those solidi found their way into the purses of silken-robed churchmen, then clearly even God was moving up in the world.
But what did she believe? Did she, as I strove to, achieve the placidity of a still, secret pool by believing in nothing at all?
She believed in enough to write to me, without any elegant flourishes, Come at once. I need you.
It had begun to rain by the time my carriage reached the house. I ran to the door and knocked. There was no answer, but the door was unbarred, so in breach of all etiquette, I let myself in and stood dripping in the semi-darkness of the familiar atrium. A single lamp hung flickering from a stand. The room was filled with huge shadows. I could see, though, that the niches in the walls for the household gods were filled, as always, with flowerpots, though the flowers seemed to be dead.
The floor at my feet was muddy and wet. It would never have been so in the old days.
How long had it been? Twenty years? In the meantime Attila and his Huns had come and gone. The savior of Rome, the supreme commander Aetius, died at the actual hand of Valentinian, who no longer had his gorgon mother around to prevent such a rash deed. Lady Plautia’s husband, who had been a partisan of Aetius, perished soon thereafter, as did Valentinian and several of his successors, set up and knocked down like chess-pieces by the barbarian who had taken Aetius’ place, the formidable Count Ricimer. Rome was sacked twice more. Even Ricimer could not save it. The government cowered in Ravenna. People said the world was coming to an end. But the house of Plautia Marcella was still here, eternal, although the floor was dirty.
Somehow I began to find less comfort in mere survival.
I started at a sound. Another light flickered and drew near, and I saw that it was the lady’s chief servant Gregorius, who had grown white-haired and wizened, his head bobbing atop his thin neck like autumn’s last leaf clinging to a twig.
His dark eyes, however, sparkled as before.
‘Ah, welcome young master Titus.’
No mention of my own long list of pompous political titles. Here I was still Young Master Titus. I bowed.
‘Greetings to you and your lady.’
The eunuch jerked his head back, like a startled peacock, and his half-smile vanished. ‘Yes, from my lady.’ Then he did something which puzzled me. He crossed himself.
I hadn’t time to ponder what it meant. I took care of the preliminaries, making sure that my horses and my own servants were cared for. Two other servants I didn’t know, both of them elderly, shuffled off to carry out Gregorius’ instructions. Then we proceeded. There was no ritual bath. I wiped my wet face and hair with a towel. Gregorius offered me a fresh toga, fussing over me to make me presentable, as if I were still a child.
Then, without further ado, he ushered me into the dining room where the Lady Plautia Marcella waited like the timeless Sphinx among her pillows, her powdered face framed by the towering curls of an archaic wig, her eyes still alive behind it all as if she were peering out through a mask of stone.
Her brocaded gown rustled as she shifted herself slightly. Then, another surprise. She fingered a golden cross she wore around her neck. She seemed, I thought, distracted and even afraid.
I bowed and she nodded.
‘So you dropped everything and came. I am deeply touched.’
I did not trouble her with the news that all discipline was breaking down in the City, crimes went unprosecuted, the law courts too often addressed empty air, and if one of the assistants to the urban prefect disappeared for a few weeks, no one would much notice.
‘I wish I had the time to keep up a proper correspondence.’
She clutched her cross and made a bony, spotted fist. Her wrist shook, and her face twitched slightly, uncontrollably, reminding me that for all her façade, she was truly ancient, possibly as old as eighty.
She jerked her head and seemed to be trying to remember something, then said suddenly, ‘And what about your poetry? Dear boy, you were going to conquer the world with poetry, once upon a time.’
I shook my head sadly, both amused and melancholy that I was still her Dear Boy past the age of forty.
‘No?’ she said. Did I detect a genuine regret?
‘Alas, I must leave the poetry to Sidonius Apollinaris. Have you heard of him? I’ve attended a few of his readings. His work is the perfection of eloquence, and doesn’t threaten to mean anything at all.’
The lady’s face flickered, and for just an instant she seemed her old self. But there was no witty epigram, no wrenching parody of Sidonius’ latest, merely a sigh.
‘I’ve always enjoyed you, Titus. I really have.’
‘And I you, Lady. Truly.’
I bowed again. She held out a trembling hand for me to kiss her ring.
Then I took my place on the couch adjoining hers. Two elderly servants came and laid out a simple meal. I observed that they set three places. I raised an eyebrow.
Plautia cleared her throat.
Now I received my third surprise of the evening, more alarming than the other two.
Someone else bellowed in a hoarse voice. ‘So he’s finally here? This isn’t a social call you know, just some stupid police business.’
Another lady raised herself up on her elbow. She had been lying on the third couch, out of sight. She was red-faced and visibly drunk. She held up her wine-cup for a refill, and one of the servants reached for a pitcher, but Plautia shook her head and he put it down again.
‘Mother, you treat me like a child!’
It took me quite a while to convince myself that this really was the once-beautiful, if terrible-tempered Plautilla, daughter of my hostess, half-sister to the now martyred Sabellianus. She had grown stout in middle age. Her beauty was utterly gone. She had been married, I knew, to a certain Valerius Aper, about whom, I knew in my police capacity, no one had ever had anything good to say, save that he was rich. Nor was anything good said about how he spent his money or the way he licked Ricimer’s boot-heels until the barbarian finally tired of him and my men found Aper face-down in a sewer with his throat cut.
So here was Plautilla, a widow, living in the house of the widow of a much more honorable man. She had never had patience for anything other than her own whims. She surely felt buried alive.
To me she virtually spat, ‘You managed to tear yourself away from your pet menagerie of informers and slaves. How very good of you to come.’
‘Child!’ exclaimed Plautia Marcella.
‘I said, Mother, that I am not a child!’
‘You are what I say you are. Now greet our guest politely.’
Plautilla rose to her feet and waved the cup in an exaggerated salute. ‘Greetings, oh greetings and more greetings, to the illustrious Titus Vibius Balbinus Pompous Tedious Preposterous whatever-the-hell-the-rest-of-your-names-are, favorite of the gods, lackey of the Caesars ever since you served as one of Tiberius’ little fishies –’
Her mother gasped, genuinely shocked at this reference to an obscenity of four hundred years ago. I was startled that Plautilla was that well-read.
‘And now, I think,’ said the daughter, ‘I shall take my leave, so you two can chew over old times and rot.’
She lurched from the room, first grabbing one of the servants and pointing back at the table. The servant fetched Plautilla’s plate of food after her.
When she was gone, and the noise of her voice faded, Lady Plautia sighed and said, ‘Good riddance. Do you think I could get rid of her by marrying her off to the king of the Vandals? It might put some fear of Rome in him.’
I said softly, ‘King Gaiseric is already married, I believe.’
‘Too bad. How about the king of the Goths?’
‘Him too.’
She smiled. That was, I think, the very last flicker of her old self that I saw.
Her manner became grave. She dismissed the two servants. Gregorius came in and sat down in Plautilla’s place. She offered him a few morsels from her own plate, a sign of great honor to a servant.
Gregorius watched me, expectantly.
‘The actual reason I have summoned you here, Titus,’ the lady said, ‘is that I feel death very near. Now wait, before you start reciting clichés about what a wonderful life I’ve led or how death is but the twin of sleep, or the usual poeticisms, or even a remonstrance that someone my age should at least get used to the idea of my own demise, let me explain what I am afraid of. I am bewitched, Titus. Someone is trying to murder me by witchcraft. Demons whisper at my window. There are apparitions, portents. It’s very clear –’
‘But –’ I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. Not from her. Witchcraft and the gods had been toys for her, one more subtle joke. Did she actually want me to believe that Hecate walked in the garden? I concluded, with great sorrow, that Plautia’s mind had gone soft. For her, senility would be far worse than death, because she would lose her dignity.
Yet she continued, forcefully and coherently, and I deferred judgment.
‘I am not afraid to die, of course, if death means that I can rest, but you know perfectly well that the victim of witchcraft does not rest. Of that, I am truly afraid. I would be condemned to haunt this place, until the time of the deaths of the gods.’
Aren’t the gods already dead? I wanted to ask, reverting likewise for the very last time to my own former self. Instead I said, ‘How can you be certain?’
She seemed very tired all of a sudden, almost unable to speak. She nodded to Gregorius. ‘Tell him.’
The eunuch’s head bobbed more precariously than ever. ‘I found them. The signs.’
‘Tell him what signs.’
‘The head of a rat nailed to the door. A bundle of bloody feathers in the Mistress’s bedclothes. A mirror with a nail driven through it. And, most recently, her name written in secret places inside her private chambers, each day appearing with one letter removed, diminishing.’
‘Today there was just the “P”. I know I shall die very soon.’
‘And the apparitions?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Gregorius. ‘I have seen them.’
I wanted to ask more, but events moved too swiftly. The Lady Plautia felt suddenly ill and Gregorius hurried her off to bed. It was only half an hour later that he came to me in my room, tearfully and in secret, and whispered that his mistress was dead.
So she was. I followed him at once to her room and beheld her sprawled across the bed. She had tried to get up and had fallen back, and lay staring at the ceiling with an expression the vulgar might take for abject terror. But of course her eyes were merely open, and glassy, rolled up so that only the whites showed. I closed them with her hand. Her mouth hung open, slack, of course, because the facial muscles of a dead person lack the energy to hold any expression.
I didn’t think she had died of terror, though by the terrified manner of Gregorius, he obviously did. More likely, poison. I didn’t have time to worry about how much I might have consumed myself at supper. Most likely it had been cumulative, administered on many occasions.
To Gregorius, I said, ‘Does anyone else know of this?’
‘Not yet – not yet, Sir. Not yet.’
So I was no longer Young Master Titus. All things must pass, in time.
‘Then – can you do what I require of you?’
He nodded his head so eagerly I thought it might fall off. Now his manner was that of a child again, a scared child, but, I hoped, an obedient one.
‘Good. Give out to the servants that the mistress is ill, but very much alive . . . Say that she is delirious, both cursing her daughter and demanding to see her. Say that she commands her daughter’s attendance, and that Plautilla must come alone. Then keep everyone in their rooms and away from the corridor outside. Can you do this?’
‘Yes, Sir, I can. My poor lady!’ He crossed himself.
‘Do it for her.’
Then he was gone and I knew what I had to do.
Now in my old age, as I tell you this story, I tell you also that it is total disbelief which opens the eyes. The scales fall away. The ugly, unpoetic truth is revealed, all mysteries are unravelled, and even the secrets of the dead and of the gods fail to deceive.
If you believe in nothing, all is light.
I lifted the lady’s corpse out of the bed and concealed it, unceremoniously, in a chest half-filled with gowns. She weighed almost nothing. She felt like a bundle of sticks. Then I wrapped one of her gowns about myself and put on her wig, not the towering one she’d worn at dinner, but a smaller one she’d worn to bed. Plautia Marcella was that vain, even in private, even as she’d come to her room in distress. That my hairline had receded past my ears cannot cause much surprise, because I am a man, but she was balding too, and the effect was undeniably hideous. It was something she could not allow. Her whole life had been a matter of things she had not allowed: time passing, decay, the loss of beauty, death by witchcraft. At the very end she had commanded, and the Fates and Furies did not obey. These were her last things.
I merely disguised myself thus, extinguished the lights, and lay beneath the covers, waiting.
I did not have to wait long. When I heard shuffling footsteps outside in the corridor, I rolled over to face the door, so I could watch what followed through half-opened eyes.
When the door opened, I deliberately rustled the bedclothes and let out what I hoped was a convincingly soft moan, so that whoever stood in the doorway and peered into the darkened room would know that the occupant was indeed and perhaps unexpectedly still alive.
I beheld an apparition. A glowing face, wild in its aspect, with eyebrows raised to silvery points floated into the room. The eyes were heavily shadowed, outlined in black. The thing wore a golden tiara in piled, dark hair, to suggest the crescent moon rising in the night sky. (But wait a minute, I thought, isn’t that supposed to be Diana who wears the moon, not Hecate?) I discerned, too, a flickering lamp held in one outstretched hand. In the other, a bronze dagger gleamed faintly.
The thick, rustling form swayed around the bed, performing what was perhaps supposed to be a dance, chanting in what might have been bad Greek, or the unknowable language of Olympus, or even the secret speech of the underworld, which is heard only by the shades or by those about to die, and spoken by the dark Goddess of Death.
This goddess was somewhat heavier than those depicted in classical statuary, and reeked of wine.
When the dagger drew near enough, I reached up and seized the wrist of the hand that held it.
The would-be divinity shrieked as I leapt out of the bed. The moon-tiara clanged to the floor. I lost the wig I was wearing. Though my opponent was considerably heavier than I was, I easily wrestled her out of the room and into the corridor, where there were lamps lit in some of the alcoves and I could see what I was doing.
I snatched Plautilla’s own lantern from her and set it down on a table.
‘Look at you!’ I said. ‘What did you think you were doing?’
She rolled her eyes and laughed. ‘Look at you! Dressed up in Mama’s clothes. I knew you were like that all along.’
I let the mistress’s nightgown slide from my shoulders, onto the floor.
Plautilla howled and spoke some more of the language of the gods. She wrestled with me, still holding the dagger.
‘Fear me!’ she said, reverting to ordinary Latin. ‘Titus, be afraid. I am possessed by the spirit of Hecate!’
I twisted the dagger out of her grasp and slapped her across the face with the back of my hand.
‘I think the Goddess would find a more suitable vehicle to ride in.’
Plautilla’s resistance ceased. She sobbed. ‘But you believe in these things! Mother certainly did. You should have seen her shiver and shake. She even started saying her prayers like a good, pious Christian. I had to laugh. But the old mummy wouldn’t die. I couldn’t wait for ever.’
‘You thought you would inherit her fortune.’
‘Who else? What else could the bitch do with it?’
Still holding her by the wrist, I pulled her face close to mine, and said in as vicious a tone as I could manage, ‘Maybe she was going to endow a home for retired gladiators.’ I don’t think she appreciated my joke, that the gladiators would have to be very old indeed, and very few, since there had been no such performances in Rome in about seventy years.
She spat in my face.
‘No goddess would behave thus,’ I said. ‘And once it is clear that there is no goddess . . . you have made no attempt to conceal anything, have you?’
Indeed, there was no labyrinth of clues, no puzzle. Everything was as clear as writing on the walls, the letters diminishing to a single, final truth.
She had concealed nothing. With utter contempt she showed me where she had left more chicken feet bundled above the door, and yet more places where she had traced mysterious sigils and curses on the walls with charcoal. And there were other masks she had worn, to provide other apparitions. There were even two black dogs kept tied up in a shed behind the garden. The poor creatures seemed starving. I unleashed them and let them run.
At the very last, Plautilla showed me the place in the cellars where she had set the skull of a child on an altar and traced signs on it in blood with her finger.
This alone had not been designed for her mother to discover. This alone, she had done in private. I wondered if Plautilla might not be the credulous one, even slightly mad. What did she believe?
‘So, what are you going to do?’ she said. ‘If this is all rubbish and doesn’t have any effect, then how are you going to prove that I murdered my mother? I just did a little show and dance for her. She always wished we could have theatrical entertainments again, like in the old days. So I am innocent of any crime. Let me go. And get out. This is my house now.’
I let go of her and picked up the skull. It felt fresh, boiled to make it bare, rather than one from which, over time, the flesh has naturally decayed. Plautilla almost had a point. I could not prove poison. There was a case here for criminal witchcraft, but if Plautilla argued that she did not believe in these things, that they were only evidence of a much lesser crime, a sort of fraud, and no heathen gods or demons had been seriously invoked, she might win. She had enough money now to bribe any judge I had ever encountered.
What then?
The skull. It was fresh, the one thing she had too-brazenly flaunted. She had at the very least desecrated a recent grave, or, more likely, murdered some unknown child, perhaps because she truly believed, or merely to make her own performance more convincing.
These matters become so simple when one detail is enough, and you don’t have to prove anything more.
But now that the world is coming to an end, there are signs and portents everywhere, and we who do not believe still see them, just like everyone else.
In the morning I conducted Plautilla to my carriage, bound. As I was now serving in my official capacity, I put on the uniform of my office, which included a military helmet and a mailed cuirass. I wore a sword, which clinked and clattered as I walked. I looked up at the house one last time, certain I would never see it again. I wondered if the ghost of its mistress would haunt the place.
In the course of our journey, Plautilla cursed me, sometimes speaking in her supposed supernatural speech, still trying, I think, to awaken some superstitious fear in me. Sometimes she spoke of old times, pretending we had been friends once. It was all I could do not to strike her.
We came to a main road, then to an imperial posting station. In my official capacity, I could draw on supplies here, have my horses looked after, or even get fresh horses if I were in that much of a hurry.
But the German lout in charge laughed when I showed him the badge of my office.
‘Haven’t you heard?’
Several of his barbarian companions gathered around, snickering.
‘Heard what?’
‘Your little Augustus has been booted out.’ The German sashayed, as if to indicate a little girl. ‘The army in Ravenna killed Orestes the patrician, and his little baby emperor is gone . . . away.’ The Germans laughed. Some of them drew their fingers across their throats.
Actually the emperor Romulus was about sixteen at the time, and I later found out that he was not killed, merely sent to live near Naples, but he was indeed the last.
‘What’s more,’ the German said, ‘our general Odoacer decided to make himself king. So there isn’t any Roman Empire anymore, and there’s no Roman law, and we don’t have to obey you.’
Again the Germans laughed.
‘I think I know what you will obey,’ I said. I flipped a golden solidus onto the counter. It fell reverse side up, with the cross showing.
Later, I unbound Plautilla and let her eat dinner across from me, seated at a table in the German manner. I hoped she found this an unbearable hardship.
‘You have to let me go,’ she said. ‘You heard what the man said. There’s no law anymore. At least none that you represent.’
‘I ought to kill you then, and it wouldn’t be murder.’
She almost laughed, but her laughter froze in her throat.
Yet I did not kill her, if only because by doing so my hands would be indelibly soiled.
So I left her there. I gave the Germans a couple more coins and implied that they should do with Plautilla whatever they felt appropriate.
Never mind law and conscience. Thus we are compromised.
Can a soul be damned which does not believe in souls or damnation? A puzzle. A labyrinth. I am without a clue and deduce nothing.
Jesus Christ have mercy.