"I suppose I should see him, then," I said dully.
"That's the spirit!" Hieronymus clapped his hands and sent a slave to fetch the visitor.
Arausio was a man of middle age with thinning brown hair, a ruddy complexion, and a drooping mustache. He wore a plain white tunic; but to judge by the well-made shoes on his feet, he was a man of means; and to judge by his gold necklace and gold bracelets, not averse to advertising it. His manner was skittish and he kept his distance from Hieronymus, who remained nearby on the terrace. He had a superstitious fear of the scapegoat, I realized, a dread of contagion. What, then, had induced him to enter the scapegoat's house?
He took stock of his surroundings. Did I imagine that he gave a start when he saw the view of the Sacrifice Rock in the distance? "My name is Arausio," he said. "Are you Gordianus, the one they call `the Finder'? "
"I am. I didn't realize that anyone in Massilia had heard of me."
He flashed an unpleasant smile. "Oh, we're not all quite as ignorant in this backwater town as you might think. Massilia may not be Athens or Alexandria, but we do try to keep abreast of what's happening in the great world beyond."
"I'm sorry. I never meant to suggest-"
"Oh, that's quite all right. We're used to Romans turning up their noses when they come here. What are we, after all, but an outpost of second-rate Greeks and barely civilized Gauls just off the road to nowhere?"
"But I never said-"
"Then say no more." The man held up his hand. "I'll state my business, which you may or may not deign to find of interest. My name, as I said, is Arausio, and I'm a merchant."
"In slaves or wine?" I asked. Arausio raised an eyebrow. "I'm told it's one or the other here in Massilia."
Arausio shrugged. "I handle a little traffic in both directions. My grandfather used to say, `Romans get lazy; Gauls get thirsty. Send slaves in one direction and wine in the other.' We've done well enough. Not quite as well as this." He gestured to the house around us. His eyes swept the view. Again I saw him focus sharply on the Sacrifice Rock, then tear his eyes away.
He suddenly dropped his abrasive manner like a shield he no longer had strength to carry. "They say… you saw it
happen," he whispered. "Both of you." He ventured a glance at Hieronymus.
"Saw what?" I asked. But of course he could mean only one thing.
"The girl… who fell from the rock." His voice was strained. Hieronymus crossed his arms. "She didn't fall. She jumped."
"She was pushed!" Davus, who had been standing discreetly out of sight inside the doorway, felt obliged to step forward.
I gazed at the Sacrifice Rock. "Girl, you say. But why `girl,' and not `woman'? The three of us saw a figure in a woman's gown and a hooded cloak. We couldn't see her face or even the color of her hair. She was fit enough to climb the rock, but she did so haltingly. Perhaps she was young, or perhaps not." I looked at Arausio. "Unless you know more than we do."
He thrust out his jaw to stop it from quivering. "I think… I may know who she was."
Hieronymus and Davus both stepped closer.
"I think… the girl who fell… was my daughter." I raised an eyebrow.
Arausio's voice was suddenly choked and bitter. "He led her on, you see. Right up until the moment he married that monster, he led Rindel to think he might choose her instead."
"Rindel?" I said.
"My daughter. That's her name. Was her name.",Who led her on?"
"Zeno! The son of a whore said he loved her. But like every other lying Greek, all he cared for in the end was bettering himself."
Zeno. Where had I heard the name recently? From Domitius, I recalled, when he told me the tale of Apollonides and his hideously deformed daughter, Cydimache. The young man who had recently married Cydimache was named Zeno.
"Do you mean the son-in-law of the First Timouchos?"
"That's the one. We weren't good enough for him. Never mind that I could buy and sell Zeno's father if I wanted. Never mind that Rindel was one of the most beautiful girls in Massilia. We're Gauls, you see, not Greeks; and no one in our family has ever been elected to the Timouchoi. In this town, that puts us just one step above the barbarians in the forest. Even so, Zeno could have married Rindel. Greeks and Gauls do marry. But Zeno was too good for that. Curse his ambition! He saw his chance to leap to the top, and he took it, over the head of my poor Rindel."
A part of me, frozen with grief for Meto, simply wanted the man to go away. But another part of me grudgingly stirred. I was curious. Looking at Arausio, his face now nakedly showing his misery, I felt a pang of sympathy as well. Were we not both fathers grieving for lost children? If I understood correctly, his daughter and my son had ended their lives within a few hundred feet of each other, beneath the same wall, claimed by a plunge into the same unforgiving sea.
"She was desperately in love with him," Arausio went on. "Why not? Zeno's handsome and charming. He dazzled her. The young can't see beneath the surface of things. When he told her he loved her in return, she thought that was the end of it. She'd found her bliss and nothing could spoil it. I can't say I wasn't pleased myself; he'd have made a good match. Then Zeno stopped calling on her. And the next thing we knew, he'd married Cydimache. It broke Rindel's heart. She wept and tore her hair. She shut herself away; wouldn't eat or talk to anyone, not even to her mother. Then she took to slipping out of the house, disappearing for hours at a time. I was furious, but it did no good. She said it helped her to take long walks alone. Imagine that, a young girl walking the streets in broad daylight by herself, unescorted! `People will think you've gone mad,' I told her. Perhaps she was going mad. I should have kept a closer eye on her, but with everything in such chaos,…" He shook his head.
"What makes you think it was Rindel we saw on the Sacrifice Rock?" I asked. "And how did you hear about it? How did you know that we saw it happen?"
"Massilia is a small town, Gordianus. Everyone's talking about it. 'The scapegoat has two Romans staying at his house, and you won't believe what the three of them saw-a man chased a woman up the Sacrifice Rock, and over she went. And one of these Romans is a character named Gordianus, called the Finder; investigates for people like Cicero and Pompey, digs up scandal and snoops under people's sheets.' "
That was not exactly how I would have described my livelihood, but I felt curiously flattered to discover that my name was sufficiently well-known to provide fodder for gossip in a city where I had never previously set foot. Of course, anything to do with the scapegoat would be of interest to the locals, and any death at the Sacrifice Rock would excite speculation.
"As for why I think it must have been Rindel… There was a catch in Arausio's voice. He cleared his throat and pressed on. "That morning she went missing again. Out for another of her long walks, I thought. But I had other things to worry about. That was the day the Romans brought up the battering-ram. For all we knew, the walls of the city might come down at any moment. As it turned out, the walls held; our soldiers even captured the battering-ram for a trophy. But Rindel… He cleared his throat. "Rindel never came home. Night fell, and the curfew, and still no sign of her. I was angry, then worried, then frantic. I sent slaves to search for her. One of them came back with the rumor about a girl who had been seen on the Sacrifice Rock pursued by a soldier-an officer in a blue cape." His eyes bored into mine. "Is it true? Is that what you saw?"
"The man wore a pale blue cape," I acknowledged. I remembered it fluttering in the wind.
"Zeno! It must have been him. I knew it! Rindel must have found him and confronted him. He'd led her on, betrayed her, broken her heart-married that monster instead. Who knows what Rindel said to him, or what he said to her? And it ended with him driving her up the rock, and then-"