Saturnalia Part 1

SATURNALIA.

A Novel Of Marcus Didius Falco.

by Lindsey Davis.

ROME: DECEMBER AD76.

I.

If there was one thing you could say for my father, he never beat his wife.

'He hit her!' Pa was spluttering; he was so eager to tell my wife Helena that her brother was guilty of domestic violence. 'He came right out and admitted it: Camillus Justinus struck struck Claudia Rufina!' Claudia Rufina!'

'I bet he told you that in confidence too,' I snapped. 'So you come bursting in here only five minutes later and tell us!' Justinus must have gone for a bribe to reinstate himself Once Pa had sold the culprit an exorbitant 'forgive me darling' gift, my parent had rushed straight from his fine art warehouse at the Saepta Julia to our house, eager to snitch.

'You' d never catch me behaving like that,' he boasted self-righteously.

'Agreed. Your faults are more insidious.'

There were plenty of drunken male bullies in Rome, and plenty of downtrodden wives who refused to leave them, but as I licked the breakfast honey from my fingers and wished he would go away, I was glaring at a much more subtle character. Marcus Didius Favonius, who had renamed himself Geminus for reasons of his own, was about as complicated as they come. Most people called my father a lovable rogue. Most people, therefore, were bemused that I loathed him.

'I never hit your mother in my life!'

I may have sounded weary. 'No, you just walked out on her and seven children, leaving Mother to bring us up as best she could.'

'I sent her money.' My father's contributions were a fraction of the fortune he ama.s.sed in the course of his dealings as an auctioneer, antique dealer, and reproduction marble salesman.

'If Ma had been given a denarius for every foolish buyer of flaky Greek "original statues" you conned, we would all have dined on peac.o.c.ks and my sisters would have had dowries to buy tribunes as husbands.'

All right, I admit it: Pa was right when he muttered: 'Giving money to any of your sisters would have been a bad idea.'

The point about Pa is that he could, if it was absolutely unavoidable, put up a fight. It would be a fight worth watching, if you had half an hour before your next appointment and a piece of Lucanian sausage to chew on while you stood there. Yet to him, the concept of any husband daring daring to hit a feisty wife (the only kind my father knew about, since he came from the Aventine where women give no quarter) was about as likely as getting a Vestal Virgin to buy him a drink. He also knew that Quintus Camillus Justinus was the son of a respectable, thoroughly amiable senator; he was my wife's younger brother, in general her favourite; everyone spoke highly of Quintus. Come to that, he had always been to hit a feisty wife (the only kind my father knew about, since he came from the Aventine where women give no quarter) was about as likely as getting a Vestal Virgin to buy him a drink. He also knew that Quintus Camillus Justinus was the son of a respectable, thoroughly amiable senator; he was my wife's younger brother, in general her favourite; everyone spoke highly of Quintus. Come to that, he had always been my my favourite. If you overlooked a few failings--little quirks, like stealing his own brother's bride and backing out of a respectable career so he could run off to North Africa to grow silphium (which is extinct, but that didn't stop him)--he was a nice lad. Helena and I were both very fond of him. favourite. If you overlooked a few failings--little quirks, like stealing his own brother's bride and backing out of a respectable career so he could run off to North Africa to grow silphium (which is extinct, but that didn't stop him)--he was a nice lad. Helena and I were both very fond of him.

From the moment of their elopement, Claudia and Quintus had had their difficulties. It was the usual story. He had been too young to get married; she was much too keen on the idea. They were in love when they did it. That is more than most couples can say. Now that they had a baby son, we all a.s.sumed they would set aside their problems. If they divorced, they would both be expected to marry other people anyway. They could end up with worse. Justinus, who was the real offender in their stormy relationship, would certainly lose out, because the one thing he had acquired with Claudia was joyful access to her very large fortune. She was a fiery piece when she needed to be, and her habit nowadays was to wear her emeralds on every occasion, to remind him of what he would lose (apart from his dear little son Gaius) if they separated.

Helena Justina, my level-headed wife weighed in, making it clear where her sympathies would lie. 'Calm down, Geminus, and tell us what caused poor Quintus to be in this trouble.' She tapped my still excited father on the chest, to soothe him. 'Where is my brother now?'

'Your n.o.ble father has requested that the villain leave the family home!' Quintus and Claudia lived with his parents; it cannot have helped.

Pa, whose children and grandchildren rejected all forms of supervision, especially from him, seemed impressed by the senator's bravery. He a.s.sumed a disapproving air. From the biggest reprobate on the Aventine, this was ludicrous. Pa gazed at me with those tricky brown eyes, running his hands through the wild grey curls that still cl.u.s.tered on his wicked old head. He was daring me to be flippant. I knew when to hold my peace. I wasn't mad.

'So where can he go?' A curious note of hysteria squeaked its way into Helena's voice.

'He told me he has camped out in your uncle's old house.' The senator had inherited this property next door to his own. I knew that house was currently empty. The senator needed the rent, but the last tenants had left suddenly.

'Well, that's convenient.' Helena sounded brisk; she was a practical woman. 'Did my brother say what caused him to lash out at dear Claudia?'

'Apparently,' my father's tone was lugubrious--the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d was enjoying every moment of this--'your brother has an old girlfriend in town.'

'Oh "girlfriend" is putting it far too strongly, Geminus!' I gazed at Helena fondly and let her commit herself: 'I know who you mean of course--Veleda is her name--' All Rome knew the past history of this notorious female--though, so far, few people realised she and Quintus had ever been connected. His wife must have heard something, however. I guessed Quintus himself had stupidly told her. 'Quintus may have met the woman once,' Helena declared, trying to rea.s.sure herself, 'but it was a long time ago, long before he was married or had even heard of Claudia--and anything that occurred between them happened very far away!'

'In a forest, I believe!' Pa smirked, as if trees were disgusting. Helena looked hot. 'Veleda is a barbarian, a German from beyond the frontier of the Empire--'

'Isn't your sister-in-law also from outside Italy?' Pa now produced a leer, his speciality.

'Claudia comes from Hispania Baetica. Absolutely civilised. An utterly different background and position. Spain has been Romanised for generations. Claudia is a Roman citizen, whereas the prophetess--'

'Oh this Veleda is a prophetess?' prophetess?' Pa snorted. Pa snorted.

'Not good enough to foresee her own doom!' snapped Helena.

'She has been captured and brought to Rome for execution on the Capitol. Veleda offers no hope of romance to my brother and no threat to his wife. Even Claudia at her most sensitive should be able to see that he can have nothing more to do with this woman. So what in Hades can have driven him to hit her?'

A wily look appeared upon Pa's face. People say we are alike physically. This was an expression I had certainly not inherited.

'It could be,' my father speculated (knowing the reason full well, of course), 'because Claudia Rufina hit him first.'

II.

Saturnalia was a good time for a family quarrel; it could easily be lost among the seasonal rumpus. But not this quarrel, unfortunately.

Helena Justina played down the incident for as long as Pa stayed around. Neither of us told him any more gossip. Eventually he gave up. The minute he left, she pulled on a warm cloak, called up a carrying chair, and rushed off to confront her brother at their late uncle's empty, elegant house by the Capena Gate. I did not bother to go with her. I doubted she would find Justinus there. He had enough sense not to place himself in a losing position, like a doomed counter on a backgammon board, right where furious female relatives could jump on him.

My darling wife and mother of my children was a tall, serious, sometimes obstinate young woman. She described herself as 'a quiet girl', at which I openly guffawed. Still, I had heard her describe me to strangers as talented and of fine character, so Helena had good judgement. More sensitive than her outward calm revealed, she was so upset about her brother she failed to notice that a messenger from the imperial Palace had come for me. If she had realised, she would have been even more jumpy.

It was the usual washed-out slave. He was underdeveloped and rickety; he looked as if he had stopped growing when he hit his teens, though he was older than that--had to be, to become a trusty who was sent out alone on the streets with messages. He wore a crumpled loose-weave tunic, bit his dirty nails, hung his lousy head, and in the customary manner, claimed to know nothing about his errand.

I played along. 'So what does Laeta want?'

'Not allowed to say.'

'Then you admit it is Claudius Laeta who sent you to get me?' Out-manoeuvred, he cursed himself 'fair do's, Falco... He's got a job for you.'

'Will I like it?--Don't bother answering.' I never liked anything from the Palace. 'I'll fetch my cloak.'

We buffeted our way through the Forum. It was packed with miserable householders, taking home green boughs for decoration, depressed by the inflationary Saturnalia prices and by knowing they were stuck with a week when they were supposed to forget grudges and quarrels. Four times I rebuffed hard-faced women selling wax candles from trays. Drunks were already littering the temple steps, celebrating in advance. We had nearly two weeks to get through yet. I had worked on imperial missions before, usually abroad. These jobs were always terrible and complicated by ruthless scheming among the Emperor's ambitious bureaucrats. Half the time their dangerous in-fighting threatened to ruin my efforts and get me killed.

Though designated a scroll secretary, Claudius Laeta ranked high; he had some undefined oversight of both home security and foreign intelligence. His only good point, in my opinion, was that he endlessly struggled to outwit, out-manoeuvre, out-stay and do down his implacable rival, Anacrites the Chief Spy. The Spy worked alongside the Praetorian Guard. He was supposed to keep his nose out of foreign policy, but he meddled freely. He possessed at least one extremely dangerous agent in the field, a dancer called Perella, though generally his sidekicks were dross. Up to now, that had given Laeta the upper hand.

Anacrites and I had occasionally worked together. Don't let me give the impression I despised him. He was a festering fistula of pestilential pus. I treat anything that venomous only with respect. Our relationship was based on the purest emotion: hate.

Compared with Anacrites, Claudius Laeta was civilised. Well, he looked harmless as he rose from a couch to greet me in his highly painted office, but he was a silken-tongued twister I had never trusted. He saw me as a grimy thug, though a thug who possessed intelligence and other handy talents. We dealt with one another, when we had to, politely. He realised that two of his three masters--the Emperor himself and the elder of Vespasian's sons, t.i.tus Caesar--both had a high regard for my qualities. Laeta was far too astute to ignore that. He held on to his position by the old bureaucrat's trick of feigning agreement with any views his superiors held strongly. He only stopped short of the pretence that hiring me had been his recommendation. Vespasian could spot that sort of creep.

I was quite sure that Laeta had managed to find out that the younger princeling, Domitian Caesar, had a deep-running feud with me. I knew something about Domitian that he would dearly love to expunge: he once killed a young girl, and I still possessed the evidence. Outside the imperial family it remained a secret, but the mere fact that such a secret existed was bound to reach their sharp-eyed chief secretaries. Claudius Laeta would have buried a coded note in some scroll in his columbarium, reminding himself to use my dangerous knowledge against me one day.

Well, I had information on him too. He schemed too much to stay in the clear. I wasn't worried.

Despite this plotting and jealousy, the old Palace of Tiberius always seemed surprisingly fresh and businesslike. The Empire had been run from this fading monument for a century, through good emperors and debauched ones; some of the slick slaves went back here for three generations. The messenger had dropped me off almost as soon as we entered through the Cryptoporticus. With barely a wave of a spear from the guards, I wound my way up into the interior, through staterooms I recognised, and on into ones I could not remember. Then I hit the system.

An invitation was no guarantee of a welcome. As usual, working through the flunkeys was a frustrating grind. Vespasian had famously abandoned the paranoid security Nero used to protect himself from a.s.sa.s.sination: now, n.o.body was searched. It may have impressed the public; I knew better. Even our most lovable old emperor since Claudius was too shrewd to take risks. Power draws lunatics. There would always be one crackpot ready to run amok with a sword in the perverted hope of fame. So as I sought Laeta's office I was pushed around by Praetorian Guards, held up while chamberlains consulted lists upon which I did not feature, stuck alone in corridors for hours, and generally driven crazy. At which point Laeta's tidily dressed minions had let me in.

'Next time you want me, let's meet on a park bench!'

'Didius Falco! How pleasant to see you. Still frothing at the mouth, I see.'

Arguing was about as useful as demanding a recount of your change in a busy lunchtime food bar. I forced myself to simmer down. Laeta saw he had nearly pushed me too far. He caved in. 'So 'So sorry to keep you waiting, Falco. Nothing changes here. Too much to do and too little time to do it--and a panic on, naturally.' sorry to keep you waiting, Falco. Nothing changes here. Too much to do and too little time to do it--and a panic on, naturally.'

'I wonder what that can be!' I implied I had private information about it. I didn't.

'I'll come to that--'

'Keep it brisk then.'

't.i.tus Caesar suggested I talk to you--'

'And how is the princely t.i.tus?'

'Oh--wonderful, wonderful.'

'Still s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g beautiful Queen Berenice? Or have you dreamed up some stratagem to whisk her back to her desert and avert embarra.s.sment?'

Nursemaids must give a potion in babies' little pottery feeding bottles, one that makes aristocratic Roman males hanker after exotic women. Cleopatra had worked her way through enough Roman top bra.s.s. Now t.i.tus Caesar, like me a handsome lad in his thirties, was an amiable prince who ought to be marrying a fifteen-year-old pretty patrician with good hips so he could father the next generation of Flavian emperors; instead, he preferred to dally on purple cushions with the voluptuous Queen of Judaea. It was true love, they said. Well, it must certainly be love on his part; Berenice was hot stuff, but older than him, and had a terrible reputation for incest (which Rome could cope with) and political interference (which was bad news). Conservative Rome would never accept this hopeful dame as an imperial consort. Astute in all other matters, t.i.tus stuck with his no brain love affair like some b.l.o.o.d.y-minded teenager who had been instructed to stop smooching the kitchen maid.

Bored with waiting for an answer, I had lost myself in these gloomy thoughts. Without any obvious signal, Laeta's minions had all melted away. He and I were now alone and he had the air of a sword swallower at the high point of a trick: 'Look at me; this is terribly dangerous! I am about to disembowel myself. 'Look at me; this is terribly dangerous! I am about to disembowel myself. . .' . .'

'And there's Veleda,' said Claudius Laeta in his polite bureaucratic accent.

I stopped daydreaming.

III.

'Veleda...' I pretended I was trying to remember who she was. Laeta saw through it.

I took a free couch. Relaxing at the Palace always made me feel like an unpleasant grub that had crawled in from the gardens. We informers are not meant to spread ourselves on cushions stuffed with goose-down, embroidered in luminous silks with imperial motifs. I had probably brought in donkey dung on my boots. I didn't bother to check the floor marble.

'When t.i.tus suggested you, I looked at your record, Falco,' Laeta pointed out. 'Five years ago, you were sent on a mission to Germany to help batten down any persisting rebels. The scroll box has been mysteriously weeded--one wonders why--but it's clear you met Civilis, the Batavian chief, and I can work out the rest. I presume you crossed over the River Rhenus to negotiate with the priestess?'

Back in the Year of the Four Emperors, when the Empire had collapsed in b.l.o.o.d.y lawlessness, Civilis and Veleda had been two German activists who tried to free their area from Roman occupation. Civilis was one of our own, an ex-auxiliary, trained in the legions, but Veleda opposed us from alien territory. Once Vespasian a.s.sumed the throne and ended the civil war, they had both remained troublemakers--for a while.

'Wrong direction,' I smiled. 'I went across from Batavia, and then worked south to find her.'

'Details,' sniffed Laeta.

'I was trying to stay alive. Formal negotiations were difficult when the rampaging Bructeri were after our blood. No point ending up decapitated, with our heads hurled in the river as sacrifices.'

'Not if you can make friends with a beauteous blonde at the top of a signal tower, and then borrow her boat to sail home.' Laeta knew all the details. He must have seen my 'confidential' report. I hoped he did not know the facts I had omitted.

'Which I did, very fast. Free Germany is no place for a Roman to linger.'

'Well, things have moved on--'

'For the better?' I doubted it. 'I left both Civilis and Veleda grudgingly reconciled to Rome. At least neither was intending any more armed revolts, and Civilis was pinned down in his home area. So what's the problem with the buxom Bructeran now?'

Claudius Laeta balanced his chin on his hands thoughtfully. After a while he asked me, 'I believe you know Quintus Julius Cordinus Gaius Rutilius Gallicus?'

I choked. 'I've met parts of him! He wasn't using that whole scroll of names.' He must have been adopted. That was one way to improve your status. Some wealthy patron, with a desperate need for an heir and not much judgement, had given him a step up in society and a double signature. He would probably drop the extra names as soon as he decently could.

Laeta pressed out a pitying smile. 'The estimable Gallicus is now Governor of Germania Inferior. He's gone formal.' Then he was an idiot. The six-name wonder would still be the same anodyne senator I first met in Libya when he was an envoy surveying land boundaries to stop tribal feuds. I had since shared a poetry recital with him. We all make mistakes. Mine tend to be embarra.s.sing.

'As I recall, he's not special.'

'Are any of them?' Now Laeta was being chummy. 'Still, the man is doing an excellent job as governor. I don't suppose you've kept up with developments--the Bructeri are active again; Gallicus crossed over to Germania Libera to put a clamp on that. While he was there, he captured Veleda--' Using my my map of where she was holed up, no doubt. map of where she was holed up, no doubt.

I was annoyed. 'So it made no difference at all that--acting on Vespasian's orders--I promised the woman there would be no reprisals once she stopped her anti-Roman agitation?'

'You're right. It made no difference.' Still pretending we were friends, Laeta showed his cynicism. 'The official explanation is that since the Bructeri were threatening the stability of the region again, it was presumed she had not not stopped stirring.' stopped stirring.'

'Alternatively,' I suggested, 'she and her tribe have had a falling out. When the Bructeri put on war gear nowadays, it is nothing to do with her.'

There was a pause. What I said was correct. (I do do keep up with developments.) Veleda had found herself increasingly at odds with her countrymen. Her local influence was waning, and even if he thought he needed to put down her fellow-tribesmen, Rutilius Gallicus could have-- keep up with developments.) Veleda had found herself increasingly at odds with her countrymen. Her local influence was waning, and even if he thought he needed to put down her fellow-tribesmen, Rutilius Gallicus could have--should have--left her alone. have--left her alone.

He needed her for his own purposes. Veleda was a symbol. So she stood no chance.

'Let's not haggle, Falco. Gallicus made a brave foray into Gennania Libera and legitimately removed a vicious enemy of Rome--'

I finished the story. 'Now he's hoping for a Triumph?'

'Only emperors have Triumphs. As a general, Gallicus will be ent.i.tled to an Ovation.' Same deal as a Triumph, but a shorter procession: done on the cheap. Even so, an Ovation was rare. It marked extraordinary civic thanks to a general who had courageously made war in unconquered territory.