A Mist of Prophecies Read online

  A little way off the road, atop a small hill, the pyre for Cassandra had already been prepared. While her bier was being laid upon it and the keepers of the flame set about stoking the fire, I stepped into the Temple of Venus Libitina, where the registry of deaths is kept.

  The clerk who attended me was officious and sullen from the moment he slammed his record book onto the counter that separated us. I told him I wanted to register a death. He opened the hinged wooden diptych with its inlaid wax tablets and took up his stylus.

  ‘Citizen, slave, or foreigner?’ he asked curtly.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Not sure?’ He looked at me as if I had entered the temple with the specific intention of wasting his time.

  ‘I didn’t really know her. No one seems to have known her.’

  ‘Not part of your household?’

  ‘No. I’m only attending to her funeral because—’

  ‘A foreigner then, visiting the city?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  He slammed shut his record book and brandished his stylus at me. ‘Then go away and don’t come back until you are sure.’

  I reached across the counter and grabbed the front of his tunic in my fist. ‘She died four days ago, here in Rome, and you will enter her death into the registry.’

  The clerk blanched. ‘Certainly,’ he squeaked.

  It was only as I gradually released him that I realized how hard I had been clutching his tunic. His face was red, and it took him a moment to catch his breath. He made a show of reasserting his dignity, straightening his tunic, and slicking back his hair. With great punctiliousness, he opened his register and pressed his stylus to the wax. ‘Name of the deceased?’ he asked, his voice breaking. He coughed to clear his throat.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

  His mouth twitched. He bit his tongue. He kept his eyes on the register. ‘Nevertheless, I have to put down something for a name.’

  ‘Put down Cassandra, then.’

  ‘Very well.’ He pressed the letters crisply into the hard wax. ‘Her place of origin?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know.’

  He clicked his tongue. ‘But I have to put something. If she was a Roman citizen, I have to know her family name; and if she was married, her husband’s name. If she was a foreigner, I have to know where she came from. If she was a slave—’

  ‘Then write, “Origin unknown.” ’

  He opened his mouth to speak then thought better of it. ‘Highly irregular,’ he muttered, as he wrote what I told him. ‘I don’t suppose you know the date of her birth?’

  I glowered at him.

  ‘I see. “Birthdate unknown,” then. And the date of her death? Four days ago, you said?’

  ‘Yes. She died on the Nones of Sextilis.’

  ‘And the cause of her death?’

  ‘Poison,’ I said, through gritted teeth. ‘She was poisoned.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, showing no emotion and hurriedly scribbling. ‘With a name like Cassandra,’ he said under his breath, ‘you might think she’d have seen it coming. And what is your name? I have to have it to complete the record.’

  I felt another impulse to strike him, but resisted. ‘Gordianus, called the Finder.’

  ‘Very well, then. There, I’ve written the entry just as you wished. “Name of deceased: Cassandra. Family and status unknown. Birthdate unknown. Death by poison on the Nones of Sextilis, Year of Rome 706. Reported by Gordianus, called the Finder.” Does that satisfy you, citizen?’

  I said nothing and walked away, towards the pillars that flanked the entrance. Behind me I heard him mutter, ‘Finder, eh? Perhaps he should find out who poisoned her . . .’

  I walked down the temple steps and back towards the funeral pyre, staring at the ground, seeing nothing. I felt the heat of the fire as I drew closer; and when I finally lifted my eyes, I beheld Cassandra amid the flames. Her bier had been tilted upright so that the funeral party could view the final moments of her physical existence. The musicians quickened their tempo from a mournful dirge to a shrill lament. The hired mourners dropped to their knees, pounded their fists against the earth, screamed and wailed.

  A gust of wind suddenly whipped the flames higher. The roar of the fire was punctuated with loud cracking and popping and sizzling noises. While I watched, the flames gradually consumed her, frizzling her hair, withering and charring her flesh, turning everything black, destroying her beauty forever. The wind blew smoke in my eyes, stinging them, filling them with tears. I tried to look away – I wanted to look away – but I couldn’t. Even this awful spectacle constituted one more moment, one final chance to look upon Cassandra.

  I reached into my toga and pulled out a short baton made of leather. It had belonged to Cassandra; it was the only one of her possessions that still existed. I clutched it in my fist for a moment, then hurled it into the flames.

  I felt Diana’s presence beside me, then the touch of her hand on my arm. ‘Papa, look.’

  I finally tore my eyes from the funeral pyre. I looked blankly at my daughter’s face. Her eyes – so beloved, so vibrantly alive – met mine, then turned elsewhere. I followed her gaze. We were no longer alone. Others had come to witness Cassandra’s end. They must have arrived while I was in the temple or staring at the flames. The separate groups stood well away from the fire, scattered in a semicircle behind us. There were seven entourages in all. I looked at each in turn, hardly able to believe what I was seeing.

  Seven of the wealthiest, most powerful, most remarkable women in Rome had come to the necropolis to see Cassandra burn. They had not joined in the public funeral procession, yet here they were, each woman seated in a litter surrounded by her own retinue of relatives, bodyguards, and litter bearers, not one of them acknowledging the presence of any of the others, all keeping their distance from ourselves and from each other, each gazing steadily straight ahead at the funeral pyre.

  I took stock of them, looking from left to right.

  First, there was Terentia, the pious, always proper wife of Cicero. With her husband off in Greece to side with Pompey in the civil war, Terentia was said to be hard-pressed to make ends meet, and in fact her litter was the most modest. The draperies that surrounded the box were no longer white but shabby grey, with tatters here and there. But her litter was also the largest, and squinting, I made out two other women in the litter with her. One was her daughter, Tullia, the apple of Cicero’s eye. The other was farther back in the shadows, but from her distinctive clothing and headdress, I saw she was a Vestal Virgin. No doubt it was Fabia, Terentia’s sister, who in younger days had very nearly met her end for breaking her sacred vow of chastity.

  In the next litter I saw Antonia, the cousin and wife of Marc Antony, Caesar’s right-hand man. While Caesar had been off fighting his enemies in Spain, Antony had been left in charge of Italy. Now both men had departed for northern Greece to do battle with Pompey. Antonia was said to be a very attractive woman. I had never formally met her and might not have recognized her except for the bronze lions’ heads that surmounted the upright supports at each corner of her litter. The lion’s head was Antony’s symbol.

  Her presence was all the more remarkable because of the woman whose litter was next in the semicircle. Anyone in Rome would have recognized that gaudy green box decorated with pink-and-gold tassels, for Cytheris, the actress, always made a show of her comings and goings. She was Antony’s lover, and he had made no secret of that fact while he ruled Rome in Caesar’s absence, travelling all over Italy with her. People called her his understudy-wife. Cytheris was famous for her beauty, though I myself had never seen her close enough to get a good look. Those who had seen her perform in mime shows for her former master, Volumnius the banker, said she was talented as well, able by the subtlest gestures and expressions to evoke a whole range of responses in her audience – lust not least among them. She and Antonia cast not a single glance in each other’s direction, apparently oblivious of one another.

/>   I looked to the next litter, which was draped in shades of deepest blue and black suitable for mourning, and recognized Fulvia, the twice-widowed. She had been married first to Clodius, the radical politician and rabble-rouser. After his murder four years ago on the Appian Way and the chaos that followed – the beginning of the end of the Republic, it seemed in retrospect – Fulvia had eventually remarried, joining her fortunes to Caesar’s beloved young lieutenant, Gaius Curio. Only a few months ago, word had arrived from Africa of Curio’s disastrous end; his head had become a trophy for King Juba. Some called Fulvia the unluckiest woman in Rome, but having met her, I knew her to possess an indomitable spirit. Seated with her in her litter was her mother, Sempronia, from whom Fulvia had inherited that spirit.

  As I moved my eyes to the occupant of the next litter, the incongruities multiplied. There, reclining amid mounds of cushions in a typically voluptuous pose, was Fausta, the notoriously promiscuous daughter of the dictator Sulla. Thirty years after his death, the dictator’s brief, blood-soaked reign still haunted Rome. (Some predicted that whoever triumphed in the current struggle, Caesar or Pompey, would follow Sulla’s merciless example and line the Forum with the heads of his enemies.) Sulla’s ghost haunted the Forum, but Sulla’s daughter was said to haunt the more dissolute gatherings in the city. Fausta was still married, though in name only, to the banished gang leader Milo, the one political exile whom Caesar had pointedly excluded from the generous pardons he’d issued before leaving Rome. Milo’s unforgivable crime had been the murder four years ago of his hated rival Clodius on the Appian Way. According to the court, it was Fausta’s husband who had made a widow (for the first time) of Fulvia. Were the two women aware of one another’s presence? If they were, they gave no more indication of it than did Antonia and Cytheris. At that moment Milo was very much on everyone’s mind, for he had escaped from exile and was said to be raising an insurrection in the countryside. What did Fausta know about that? Why was she here at Cassandra’s funeral?

  Next to Fausta’s litter, surrounded by the largest retinue of bodyguards, was a resplendent canopy with ivory poles and white draperies that shimmered with golden threads, hemmed with a purple stripe. It was the litter of great Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia. Now that Marc Antony had left Rome to fight alongside Caesar, many thought it was Calpurnia who functioned as the eyes and ears of her husband in his absence. Caesar had married her ten years ago, purely for political advantage some said, because in Calpurnia he had found a woman to match his own ambition. She was said to be an uncommonly hardheaded woman with no time for superstition. Why had she come to witness the funeral of a mad seeress?

  One litter remained, a little farther off than all the others. When my eyes fell on it, my heart skipped a beat. Its occupant couldn’t be seen, except for a finger that parted the closed drapes just enough for her to see out. But I knew that litter, with its red-and-white stripes, all too well. Eight years ago its occupant had been one of the most public women in Rome, notorious for her flamboyance and high spirits. Then she had dragged her estranged young lover into the courts and made the grave mistake of crossing Cicero. The result had been a disastrous public humiliation from which she had never recovered. Then her brother (some said lover) Clodius met his end on the Appian Way, and her spirit seemed to have been snuffed out altogether. She had retreated into a seclusion so complete that some thought she must be dead. She was the one woman in Rome – before Cassandra – who had threatened to break my heart. What was Clodia – beautiful, enigmatic Clodia, once the most dangerous woman in Rome, now all but forgotten – doing there that day, lurking incognito amid the litters of the other women?

  I gazed from litter to litter, my head spinning. To see these particular women all gathered in one place at one time was more than remarkable; it was astounding. And yet, there they all were, their various litters scattered before the burning pyre like the pavilions of contending armies arrayed on a field of battle. Terentia, Antonia, Cytheris, Fulvia, Fausta, Calpurnia, and Clodia – the funeral of Cassandra had brought them all together. Why had they come? To mourn Cassandra? To curse her? To gloat? The distance made it impossible to read the expressions on their faces.

  Beside me, Diana crossed her arms and took on the hard, shrewd look so familiar to me from her mother. ‘It must have been one of them,’ she said. ‘You know it must have been one of those women who murdered her.’

  I felt a chill, despite the heat of the flames. I blinked at a sudden swirl of smoke and cinders and turned to look again at the burning pyre. The fire had consumed yet more of Cassandra, had taken another portion of her away from me, and I had missed it. I opened my eyes wide despite the burning smoke. I stared at the blackened remains upon the upright bier reduced now to a bed of glowing coals. The musicians played their shrill lament. The mourners raised their cry to heaven.

  How long I stared at the flames, I don’t know. But when I finally turned to look behind me again, all seven of the women with their litters and their entourages had vanished as if they had never been there.

  II

  The last time I saw Cassandra – truly saw her, looked into her eyes and beheld not just her mortal shell but the spirit that dwelled within – was on the day of her death.

  It was shortly after noon on the Nones of Sextilis, a market day, or what passed for a market day in Rome in those times of shortage and mad inflation. Bethesda felt well enough to go out that day. I went along as well, as did Diana. My son-in-law, Davus, accompanied us. In those uncertain days, it was always wise to bring along a big, hulking fellow like Davus to play bodyguard.

  We were on a quest for radishes. Bethesda, who had been ill for some time, had decided that radishes, and radishes only, would cure her.

  We made our way from my house on the Palatine down to the market on the far side of the Capitoline, not far from the Tiber. We walked from vendor to vendor, searching in vain for a radish that would satisfy Bethesda’s discriminating gaze. This one was pitted with black spots. That one was too elongated and soft. Another had a face on it (leaves for hair, straggling roots for a beard) that looked like a dishonest cobbler with whom Bethesda had once had a row. To be sure, none of these radishes looked particularly appetizing to me, either. Despite the best efforts of the magistrates put in place by Caesar before his departure, the economy was in constant turmoil, with no end in sight. I make no claim to understand the intricacies of the Roman economy – production of food, transport to market, borrowing against future crops, the care and feeding of slaves and the cost of replacing runaways (a particular problem these days), the constant, grinding tug of war between creditors and debtors – but I do know this much: A war that splits the whole world in two results in a paucity of radishes fit to eat.

  I suggested that Bethesda might look for carrots instead – I had seen one or two of those that looked edible – but she insisted that the soup she had in mind would allow no substitutions. Since this was a medicinal soup, meant more for her recovery than for my nourishment, I kept my mouth shut. A vague, lingering malady had been plaguing Bethesda for months. While I doubted that any soup would rid her of it, I had no better cure to suggest.

  So the four of us strolled from vendor to vendor, searching for radishes. It was just as well that we weren’t looking for olives, since the only ones to be had were selling for the price of pearls. Mouldy bread was easier to find, but not much cheaper.

  Behind me I heard Davus’ stomach growl. He was a big fellow. He required more food than any two normal men to fill his belly, and in recent days he hadn’t been getting it. His face had grown lean, and his waist was like a boy’s. Diana made a fuss over him and fretted that he would dry up and blow away, but I suggested we needn’t worry about that as long as Davus still had legs like tree trunks and shoulders like the arch of an aqueduct.

  ‘Eureka!’ Bethesda suddenly cried, echoing the famous exclamation of the mathematician Archimedes, although I doubt she had ever heard of him. I hurried to her side. Sure enough, sh
e held in her hands a truly admirable bunch of radishes – firm and red, with crisp, green leaves and long, trailing roots. ‘How much?’ she cried, startling the vendor with her vehemence.

  He quickly recovered himself and smiled broadly, sensing a motivated buyer. The price he named was astronomical.

  ‘That’s robbery!’ I snapped.

  ‘But look how fine they are,’ he insisted, reaching out to caress the radishes in Bethesda’s hands as if they were made of solid gold. ‘You can still see the good Etruscan earth on them. And smell them! That’s the smell of hot Etruscan sunshine.’

  ‘They’re just radishes,’ I protested.

  ‘Just radishes? I challenge you, citizen, to find another bunch of radishes in all this market to match them. Go ahead! Go and look. I’ll wait.’ He snatched the radishes back from Bethesda.

  ‘I can’t afford it,’ I said. ‘I won’t pay it.’

  ‘Then someone else will,’ said the vendor, enjoying his advantage. ‘I’m not budging on the price. These are the finest radishes you’ll find anywhere in Rome, and you’ll pay what I ask or do without.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Bethesda, her dark brows drawn together, ‘perhaps I could manage with just two radishes. Or perhaps only one. Yes, one would do, I’m sure. I imagine we can afford one, can’t we, Husband?’

  I looked into her brown eyes and felt a pang of guilt. Bethesda had been my wife for more than twenty years. Before that she had been my concubine; she was practically a child when I acquired her in Alexandria, back in the days of my footloose youth. Her beauty and her aloofness – oh yes, she had been very aloof, despite the fact that she was a slave – had driven me wild with passion. Later she bore my daughter, the only child of my loins, Diana; that was when I manumitted and married her, and Bethesda settled into the role of a Roman matriarch. That role had not always been a comfortable fit – a slave born in Alexandria to an Egyptian mother and a Jewish father did not easily take to Roman ways – but she had never embarrassed me, never betrayed me, never given me cause for regret. We had stood beside one another through many hardships and some very real dangers, and through times of ease and joy as well. If we had become a little estranged in recent months, I told myself it was merely due to the strain of the times. The whole world was coming apart at the seams. In some families a son had taken up arms against his own father, or a wife had left her husband to side with her brothers. If in our household the silences between Bethesda and me had grown longer, or the occasional petty arguments sharper, what of it? In a world where a man could no longer afford a radish, tempers grew short.