The King's Gambit (2 page)

His new democratic ideals raised no few eyebrows, since the ancient Julian gens, although it had produced no men of public distinction in many generations, had always been of the aristocratic party. Young Caius was breaking with family tradition in siding with the
Populates
. True, his uncle by marriage was Marius, that same general in whose service my father had earned his nickname. That murderous old man had terrorized Rome in his last years as Consul and leader of the
Populares
, but he still had many admirers in Rome and throughout Italy. I also reminded myself that Caesar was married to the daughter of Cinna, who had been Marius's colleague in the Consulate. Yes, young Caius Julius Caesar was definitely a man to watch.

"May I inquire after the health of your esteemed father?" he asked.

"Healthy as a Thracian," I answered. "He's in court today. When I left him, the Basilica was packed with Senators suing to get back their property confiscated by Sulla."

"That's a business that'll take years to sort out," Caesar said wryly. When he had been a very young man and Sulla was Dictator, Sulla had ordered him to divorce Cornelia, Cinna's daughter. In a rare moment of personal integrity, Caesar had refused and was forced to flee Italy until Sulla's death. That act of defiance had made him celebrated for a short time, but those had been eventful days in Rome, and most of the survivors had nearly forgotten him.

We descended the Capitoline, and Caesar asked my destination. He seemed oddly interested in my affairs. But then, when he was running for office Caius Julius could be as amiable and ingratiating as a Subura whore.

"Since I'm so near," I answered, "I might as well look in on the Ludus Statilius. I have to investigate the death of a man who may have come from there."

"A gladiator? Does the demise of that sort of trash really rate the time of a public official?"

"It does if he's been freed and is a citizen on the grain dole," I said.

"I suppose so. Well, let me accompany you, then. I've been meaning to make the acquaintance of Statilius for some time. After all, you and I will one day be aediles, in charge of the Games, and we'll need these contacts." He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder, as if we had been dear friends for life instead of virtual strangers.

The Statilian training school consisted of an open yard surrounded by barrack-buildings arranged in a square. There were three tiers of cells for the fighters, and the school maintained nearly a thousand at any one time. The Statilian family was devoted to the sports of the amphitheater, and the school was run so tightly that even during the slave rebellion of the three previous years, the school had remained open, supplying a steady stream of expert swordsmen for the public Games.

We stood for a while in the portico, enjoying the practice of the fighters in the yard, where the beginners fought the post and the more experienced fought each other with practice weapons. The veterans fenced with real swords. I have always been a devotee of the amphitheater and the Circus, and I had even taken some sword instruction myself at this school, before my military service. The Ludus Statilius stood where the Theatre of Pompey now stands, and it now comes back to me, after all these years, that we must have been standing that morning almost on the spot where Caius Julius died twenty-six years later.

The head trainer came to greet us, an immense man in a coat of bronze scales with a helmet the size of a vigile's bucket under his arm. His face and arms bore more scars than the back of a runaway slave. Obviously, a champion of years past.

"May I help you, my masters?" he asked, bowing courteously.

"I am Decius Caecilius of the Commission of Twenty-Six. I wish to speak to Lucius Statilius, if he is here." The trainer shouted for a slave to run and summon the master.

"You are Draco of the Samnite School, are you not?" Caesar said. The trainer nodded. I knew the name, of course, it had been famous for years, but I had never seen him without his helmet. "You had ninety-six victories when I left Rome ten years ago."

"One hundred twenty-five when I retired, master, and five
munera sine missione
." Allow me to explain this term, which has fallen out of use. Before they were forbidden by law,
munera sine missione
were special Games in which as many as a hundred men fought until only one was left on his feet, sometimes fighting in sequence, sometimes all against all. This man had survived five such, besides his one hundred twenty-five single combats. This may help to explain why I prefer that such men be confined except when employed in their official public capacity. While we waited for Statilius, Draco and Julius chatted about the Games, with the swordsman predictably lamenting the sorry state to which the art of mortal combat had fallen since his day.

"In the old days," he said, smiting his chest with his fist and making the scales rattle, "we fought in full armor, and it was a contest of skill and endurance. Now they fight with the breast bared and the fights are over before they fairly begin. Soon, they will just push naked slaves out into the arena to kill one another with no training at all. There's no honor in that." It has been my observation that even the most degraded of men have some notion of honor which they cling to.

Statilius arrived, accompanied by a man in Greek dress who wore a fillet around his brow, plainly the school's resident physician. Statilius was a tall man, dressed in a decent toga. He introduced the physician, who rejoiced in the grandiose name of Asklepiodes. Briefly, I asked Statilius about Marcus Ager.

"You mean Sinistrus? Yes, he was here for a while. Just a third-rate daggerman. I sold him a couple of years ago to someone looking for a bodyguard. Let me consult my records." He hurried off to his office while Caesar and I conversed with the trainer and the physician.

The Greek studied my face for a moment and said: "I see you've been in battle against the Spaniards."

"Why, yes," I said, surprised. "How did you know?"

"That scar," he said, indicating a jagged line along the right side of my jaw. It's still there, and has plagued my barbers for the sixty years since I received it. "That scar was made by a Catalan javelin." The Greek folded his arms and waited to receive our awestruck applause.

"Is it true?" Julius asked. "When was that, Decius? Sertorius's rebellion?"

"Yes," I admitted. "I was a military tribune in the command of my uncle, Quintus Caecilius Metellus. If something hadn't attracted my attention and made me turn my head, that javelin would have gone right through my face. All right, Master Asklepiodes, how did you guess?"

"I did not guess," the Greek said smugly. "The marks are there to see, if one knows what they mean. The Catalan javelin has a serrated edge, and that scar was made by such an edge. It traveled at an upward angle. The Catalans fight on foot, and this gentleman is clearly of a rank worthy to go into battle on horseback. Furthermore, he is of the right age to have served as a junior officer in the campaigns of Generals Pompey and Metellus in Spain of a few years ago. Hence, the gentleman was wounded in Spain in recent years."

"What's this?" I said, vastly amused. "Some new form of sophistry?"

"I am compiling a work describing the infliction and treatment of every imaginable warlike injury. With my staff of surgeons, I have worked and studied in the ludi of Rome, Capua, Sicily and Cisalpine Gaul. I have learned more in this way in a few years than twenty years with the legions could have taught me."

"Most sagacious," Caesar said. "In the arena fights, you get to see the effects of many kinds of foreign weapons without having to take the time and trouble to visit all those places in time of war."

This discussion was interrupted by the return of Statilius. He held some scrolls and wax tablets and proceeded to display them to us.

"Here is what you want," He opened the tablets and unrolled the scrolls. There was the bill of sale, stating that Statilius had bought a healthy Gallic slave who had all his teeth and was about twenty-five years of age. His name was something unpronounceable and he had been given the slave-name Sinistrus. Another scroll held the man's school and amphitheater records. He had shown little aptitude for the sword and spear, and had been enrolled in the Thracian School as a dagger fighter. His record in the arena had been undistinguished except for his survival: a couple of wins, two adjudged ties and three defeats in which he fought well enough to be spared. He was wounded frequently.

One tablet was a record of a sale to the steward of one H. Ager. There was much official documentation to go with the transfer of ownership. I remembered that that had been a year of the slave rebellion, and the sales of slaves, especially males of military age, had been under severe restrictions. While I studied the documents, Caesar proceeded to ingratiate himself with Statilius, spoke of his future aedileship and asked for "something different" in the way of combats for the Games he intended to sponsor. Five years later, I was to witness this "something different," and it was to be the biggest sensation in the history of the Games.

"Here's where he got his freedman's name," I remarked. "With your permission, Lucius, I would like to keep these for a while, until my investigation is finished. This is a trivial business, so I should be able to return them by one of my freedmen in a few days."

"Please feel free," Statilius said. "Now that I won't be buying him back, I'd probably just destroy the records, except for the bill of sale, in any case."

We bade goodbye to Statilius and the Greek and retraced our steps toward the Forum, I to check the records at the Grain Office and Caius Julius to continue his politicking. It seemed that even this item of dull routine was to be interrupted. A Senate messenger was standing on the base of the rostra, scanning the passing throng. He must have had eagle eyes, for he spotted me almost as soon as I entered the Forum along the Via Capitolinus. He hopped to the pavement and ran up to me.

"Are you not Decius Caecilius Metellus of the Commission of Twenty-Six?"

"I am," I said resignedly. The arrival of such a messenger always portended some unpleasant task.

"In the name of the Senate and People of Rome, you are summoned to an extraordinary meeting of the Commission of Three in the Curia."

"No rest for one on the business of Senate and People," said Caius Julius. I took my leave of him and made my way the short distance to the Curia. With the Senate messenger preceding me, nobody sought to detain me for conversation.

I have always felt a certain awe for the Curia. Within its ancient brick walls had occurred the debates and the intrigues that had brought us victory over Greeks, Carthaginians, Numidians and a score of other enemies. From the sacred precincts had issued the decisions and orders that had changed Rome from a tiny village on the Tiber into the greatest power in the world that borders the inland sea. I am quite aware, naturally, that it is also a sewer of corruption and that the Senate has brought Rome to near-ruin at least as often as it has decided nobly and wisely, but I still prefer the old system to that currently, and I hope temporarily, prevailing.

The great Senate chamber was empty and echoing, unoccupied except for the bottom row of seats, where sat my two colleagues on the Commission of Three, and beside them Junius, the Senate freedman who acted as secretary. As always, Junius had stacks of wax tablets beside him and a bronze stylus tucked behind his ear.

"Where have you been?" asked Rutilius. He was Commissioner for the Trans-Tiber district, a cautious and conventional man. "We've been waiting since the second hour."

"I was sacrificing at the Temple of Jupiter and then conducting an investigation into a murder in my district. How was I to know an extraordinary meeting was called? What has happened that requires such prompt attention?"

"What murder?" asked Opimius. He was my other colleague, in charge of the Aventine, Palatine and Caelian districts. He was a supercilious little climber who came to a bad end several years later.

"Just some freed gladiator who was found strangled this morning. Why?"

"Forget the scum for the moment," Rutilius said.

"There is a matter demanding your immediate attention. You've heard about the fire down near the Circus last night?"

"Who talks of anything else this morning?" I said, annoyed. "We're Police, not Fire Control. What has the fire to do with us?"

"The fire started in a warehouse on the river. There is every appearance of arson present." Opimius spoke with the indignation which Romans reserve for fire-raisers. Treason is treated much more leniently. This was serious, indeed.

"Please go on," I said.

"The fire, of course, was in my district," Opimius continued, "but it seems that the owner of the warehouse lived in the Subura."

"Lived?" I said.

"Yes. A messenger sent to notify the man of the fire found him in his lodgings, dead. Stabbed."

"Peculiar, isn't it?" said Rutilius. "Junius, what was the fellow's name?"

Junius glanced at one of his tablets. "Paramedes. An Asian Greek from Antioch."

"Just a moment," I said, sensing a chance to shift the whole business to someone else. "If the man was a foreigner, this case properly belongs to the Praetor Peregrinus."

"There seem to be complications," Opimius stated, "that hint of a certain"--he made wavy gestures with his hands--"delicacy to the affair."

"It has been determined," Rutilius said, "that the investigation should be carried out at a lower level, with as little public disturbance as possible." It was plain that ours was not the first meeting to be held that day. Some very frantic conferences had been convened uncommonly early in the morning.

"And why all this intrigue?" I asked.

"There are international implications here," Rutilius explained. "This Paramedes, or whatever his name was, was not just the importer of wine and oil that he pretended to be. It seems that he also had contacts with the King of Pontus." That was indeed something to ponder. Old Mithridates was a thorn in the Roman side and had been for many years.