The Venus Throw (34 page)

“Hurry!” He grabbed my hand and pulled me after him. He was surprisingly strong for one who looked so delicate. I tried to keep up, but he was faster, and ended up dragging me through the foyer and the atrium, across the central garden, under the portico and down a long hallway. Outside a doorway hung with a heavy curtain a group of slaves were gathered, murmuring among themselves. They parted for Trygonion, who pulled me past the curtain into the room beyond.

Outside was bright sunshine, but inside the room it might have been midnight. The windows, like the door, were covered with heavy curtains. The only illumination came from a few lamps, which burned very low.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw Clodia reclining on a sleeping couch with ornately carved ivory legs and plush pillows. She was covered with a woolen blanket. Her face and hands looked pale and waxen in the dim light. “Trygonion?” she whispered.

“Mistress!” he cried, addressing her as if he were her slave. He run to her side and took her hand. “I came back as quickly as I could.”

“Is Gordianus with you?”

“Yes. Save your breath, please.”

“Why? Do you think I have so little left?” She laughed
weakly. The gallus contorted his face. “Trygonion thinks I’m going to die,” she said, turning her glittering eyes to me.

“What happened, Clodia?”

“I think it must have been something I ate.” She made an arch expression, then winced.

“Have you summoned a physician?”

“My brother owns a very skilled healer who happen to know a great deal about poisons. Publius has reason to be concerned about poison, as you can imagine. The physician came while Trygonion was gone. He’s outside the door now, I imagine; I couldn’t stand having him in the room with me.”

“What did he say?” asked Trygonion frantically.

“He said, ‘I think it must have been something you ate.’ ” She smiled wanly. “He wanted to know how much of the powder I swallowed, and when. Early this morning, I told him, but I felt no ill effects until almost midday. He says I’m very lucky to have eaten so little of it. As it is—”

“What powder?” I said.

“Didn’t Trygonion explain?”

“No time. We ran all the way,” the gallus said.

“The powder that I came across in the kitchen,” she said. “Imagine that! How many mornings have I ventured into the kitchen before my breakfast is ready? Never. But today, for some reason, I was awake early, and hungry, and when I called for Chrysis she didn’t come, so I went to the kitchen myself. You should have seen how Chrysis jumped when I stepped into the room. She stood by a little table, and on the table was a bowl of honeyed millet. ‘Is that for me?’ I said. Chrysis said nothing. I walked to the bowl and saw the little box beside it, and the crumbly yellow powder inside the box. ‘Some sort of spice?’ I said. I suspected nothing, you see.”

“A crumbly yellow powder?”

“Yes, not like any spice I know of. I touched my finger
to my tongue, dabbed it in the powder and touched my tongue again. I did it without thinking. The powder didn’t taste at all bad, really, only a bit earthy. Then I saw the look on Chrysis’s face. All at once I knew.”

I heard a strange whimpering behind me. I turned my head. The whimpering seemed to come from the opposite corner of the room, from near the floor. I thought it might be a dog. Then my eyes caught a slight movement, higher up. I peered into the deep-shadowed gloom, confused, then suddenly perceived the shape of a body suspended upside down from the roof. It was a nude woman hanging from a rope tied around her ankles, twisting very slightly. She whimpered again.

“Silence!” shouted Clodia. She sat upright, then fell back against her pillows. Trygonion fretted over her until she slapped his fawning hands away. “I sent for Trygonion at once. He came running from the House of the Galli. He was the one who thought of sending for Publius’s physician. I waited and waited for the man to come; it turned out he was down at the herb market and no one knew where he had gone. At first I wasn’t worried. I felt fine. Then at midday the discomfort began, and the physician still hadn’t arrived. I took to my bed, and Trygonion kept fretting over me until I thought to send him for you, Gordianus.”

“Why me?”

“You must know more than most men about poisons. I thought you might be able to tell me something about the yellow powder. Fetch it, Trygonion.”

He tore himself from her side and went to a little table crowded with tiny boxes and bottles. A burnished mirror was hung on the wall above the table, reflecting the somber light of the lamps and affording a startling glimpse of Chrysis hanging from the ceiling across the room. Trygonion returned with a little pyxis. I stepped to the nearest lamp and studied the contents.

“Is it too dark to see?” said Clodia. “I can’t have the lamps any brighter. The light hurts my eyes.”

“I can see well enough. I may be wrong, but I suspect this is a substance called gorgon’s hair. It comes from the root of a plant that grows wild on the shores of Mauretania. It used to be quite rare in Rome, but one sees it more and more nowadays. It’s very potent, acts fairly quickly, and has almost no flavor, so that it can be mixed with almost any kind of food.”

Clodia closed her eyes and nodded. “You see, Trygonion, I told you that Gordianus would know. The physician said the same thing.”

“Did he explain the effects?”

“He hardly needed to. I’ve discovered them for myself.”

“Dizziness, nausea, a sensation of coldness, a painful sensitivity to light?”

She nodded, keeping her eyes shut.

“How much did you swallow?”

“Only that single small taste. Once I saw the look on Chrysis’s face I knew what I’d done.”

Again, I heard the whimpering from the corner of the room. “Silence!” cried Clodia.

“If you swallowed no more than that—”

“Then I’ll survive, yes? That’s what the physician said.”

It would be a stupid physician who told a powerful, dangerous woman that she was going to die, if there was even the slightest possibility that she might survive. The powerful do not appreciate being given bad news, especially if it turns out to be false. Better for the physician to assure his master’s sister that she would live; if she didn’t, she would be in no position to vent her disappointment on him. But the physician was probably right. I knew something of gorgon’s hair and its effects, and such a small dose seemed unlikely to kill her.

“If the physician said you’ll be better, then I’m sure—”

“Don’t you have your own opinion?” Her voice was
sharp. “You recognized the poison. You must know how it works.”

“I know many poisons by sight, but it’s others who use them, not me.”

“Of course you’re not going to die!” Trygonion insisted. Clodia allowed him to fuss with her blanket and caress her hands.

“I thought you’d forestalled the poison plot against you,” I said.

“So did I. But that farce at the Senian baths must have been only a diversion staged by Caelius. He wanted me to think I had got the better of him, when all the time his viper was already at my breast. The slave I trusted more than any other!”

Over in the corner, Chrysis whimpered and twisted in space. My eyes had grown used to the darkness and I was able to see her more clearly. Her smooth, naked flesh was scored with mottled stripes.

“The little spy weeps because I had her beaten,” said Clodia in a low voice. “Her punishment has only begun.”

“She confessed to you?”

“Not yet. But Caelius must have spies in my house, just as I have spies in his. Who better than Chrysis? And I caught her in the act of poisoning my food! If I hadn’t happened to step into the kitchen at that moment—”

“Why do you think this poison came from Caelius?”

Clodia gave me such a withering look that I sucked in my breath. Had Catullus ever known that look? Then she shuddered and winced and shut her eyes. “Who else?” she demanded in a weak voice. “We know he already had the poison. What I didn’t know was the slave he would use to get the stuff into my house. Chrysis, not Barnabas!”

“You think this is the same poison that he tested on his own slave?”

“Of course.”

“It’s not.”

She bit her lips and shifted beneath the blanket. “What do you mean?”

“The poison Caelius administered to his slave acted very quickly. You told me so yourself, and I assume that your spies gave you an accurate report. The slave died in agony, you said, while Caelius watched. ‘It took only moments,’ you said. This can’t be the same poison. The Mauretanians say that gorgon’s hair is like ‘a coiled snake in the belly.’ Once ingested, it bides its time before striking. The victim feels no ill effects for a while, then the symptoms come on suddenly. You told me that you tasted the powder in the morning but felt no effects until midday. That hardly sounds like Caelius’s ‘quick-acting’ poison.”

“So? He decided to use a different poison.”

“Perhaps. If you’d let me, I’d like to take what’s left of this poison with me. If I remember correctly, I happen to have a bit of gorgon’s hair at my house, locked in a box where I keep such things.” My son Eco had been given the stuff months ago, by a man whose wife was trying to poison him. Eco passed it on for safekeeping to me; he won’t have poison in his house because of the twins. I’d almost forgotten about it. “I should like to compare this powder with the bit I have at home—”

Clodia hesitated. “Be sure to return it,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “It’s evidence against Caelius.”

The interview seemed to be over. Clodia turned uncomfortably on the bed. Chrysis twisted from the ropes. Then Trygonion bent close to Clodia’s ear and said in a low voice, “The other box.”

She frowned.

“Mistress, the other box,” he said again.

The grimace she made came from something other than physical discomfort. “Yes, show him. Let him see for himself.”

Trygonion took the box of poison from me. He went to the little cosmetics table and came back holding a different
pyxis in the palm of his hand, with his nose wrinkled and his arm extended, as if to keep the thing as far from himself as possible. I recognized it at once.

“It’s the same pyxis Licinius was carrying at the Senian baths,” I said.

“Are you sure?” whispered Clodia.

“Bronze, with raised knobs and inlays of ivory. Exactly the same.”

“The brute! The monster!” said Trygonion, thrusting the box at me. “Go on, look inside.”

“It arrived this morning,” said Clodia. “Left by a messenger on the front doorstep. What was he thinking? To torture me with this obscene joke while I lay dying? Is he laughing even now?” She sucked in a shuddering breath and began to sob.

I took the tiny box from Trygonion and opened the lid. Within was a pearly, opalescent liquid, perhaps a kind of lotion or cream, I thought. I touched my finger to it and gave such a start that I dropped the box, spilling its contents on the floor. Trygonion stared at the globules of congealed semen with fascinated revulsion.

“Damn him!” Clodia thrashed on the bed. Trygonion rushed to her. I backed away and bumped into the cosmetics table. I turned and stared blindly at the unguents and philters. Among them I noticed a little day figurine of Attis, Cybele’s eunuch consort, exactly like the ones I had seen in the room of Lucius Lucceius’s wife. The dim lamplight caught his red cap and lit up his serenely smiling face.

Clodia continued to moan and curse. Trygonion hovered over her. The dropped pyxis lay on the floor, its spattered contents glistening in the lamplight.

I backed away again. One of the lamps began to gutter and the room grew darker. I bumped into something solid but yielding. The rope made a cracking noise above and behind me. A low whimpering rose from below. With a start I turned and realized I had collided with the suspended body
of Chrysis. Seen upside down in the flickering light, her staring eyes and nostrils were so grotesque that her face became inhuman, unreadable. Her lips moved. I bent my head, straining to hear, but her whisper was drowned by Clodia’s sobbing cry behind me.

“Punish her! Punish her again!”

Beyond the heavy curtain that blocked the door I heard a murmur and a rustling among the slaves gathered in the hall. I stared at Chrysis’s soundlessly moving lips, hardly knowing what I was seeing, then finally came to my senses. I stepped toward the door and pushed my way past the curtain.

The slaves in the hallway scattered and regrouped like brooding hens. As I made my way down the hall a figure approached and passed me, taking long, quick steps toward Clodia’s room. It was the slave Barnabas, clutching a leather whip between his fists. He stared straight ahead, his jaw tightly clenched. His face was drained of all emotion except for his eyes, in which I glimpsed a strange mixture of determination and dread.

At home, I found Bethesda going through her wardrobe, trying to find something suitable to wear for Clodia’s party. “What do you think, the blue stola or the green one? And for a necklace—the carnelian beads, or the lapis lazuli ones you gave me last year?”

“I’m afraid it’s rather unlikely that there’ll be a party after all.”

“But why not?”

“Clodia is ill.” To explain what had just transpired at Clodia’s house was beyond my energy.

“Perhaps she’ll feel better in the morning,” said Bethesda, frowning.

“Perhaps. We’ll see whether she shows up at the trial tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, the trial! She won’t miss that. Shell have to feel
better, and then she’ll have the party after all. She’s put so much planning into it.”

“Into the trial?”

“Into the party, silly.”

I nodded. “No word from Eco?”

“None.”

I suddenly realized that I had forgotten the box of gorgon’s hair which I had intended to borrow from Clodia, to compare with the poison stored in my own strongbox. I had no desire to go back for it. For the moment, I forgot about it.