Very soon, one of the soldiers came running in. He was holding up a shoe, a fancy thing that belonged to a dead Syrian by the name of Vibius Maecenas. Things didn’t look good for Sextus Narbo.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Narbo wouldn’t talk. Among his clothes they found a green scarf and a gold pin of Apollo, with one of the points of his crown broken. Stricta recognized them immediately. Again, the back of my neck tingled. I put it down to not having bathed.
He was being held in a small room in the principia. Corvus didn’t want word to spread among the others, particularly if they connected him to the temple pollution. He wouldn’t last the night.
He assigned two tough-looking guards, senior men, to watch him. They confronted him with the slipper, and he just shook his head. Corvus asked him: “Why did you kill the Syrian? Why did you put him in the temple? Are you protecting someone? Answer me!”
Narbo just looked at him dully, his thin face held tight, his flesh sallow and his eyes burnt out. Whatever flame was inside him wasn’t lit by threats.
When Corvus came out of the room exasperated, I asked if I could question him. The short, dark chief-of-staff raised an eyebrow. “Why do you think he’ll talk to you?”
“I don’t know. He tried to kill me. That gives us a kind of bond, I guess.”
He frowned. But Corvus was no Meditor. “Well, go ahead and try. We’ll piece this thing together bit-by-bit if we have to, but if we can get any information out of him it’ll save us a lot of time and effort. I don’t want to have to use the quaesitor. The man is an officer.”
My tongue hurt when I bit it. “Thanks.”
I walked into the room and sat down on a folding chair. Narbo was standing up, still, not even pacing. Any fight had been used up in trying to escape.
I watched him. He stared straight ahead, his cheek and eyelids twitching a little, trying to fight the impulse to claw the wall. He was the kind of insane that was nearly undetectable-as long as no one got too close. That’s what made my skin want to crawl off in a corner and scratch itself.
“So why did you kill him? The message or the money?”
The shock of the question didn’t work. He stared at me and wriggled his little finger. I rubbed my chin and began again.
“I’m the man you tried to kill. My dog’s all right, too, though I should kick you in the teeth for that.”
Still nothing. He was blanker than a new wax tablet. I was getting nowhere, so I took a chance.
“Are you a Christian?”
The fire flickered on. The green in his eyes started to smolder, and he stood straighter, looking ahead, but not at me, not at the wall, at something I couldn’t see that wasn’t there.
“Iesus Christus is the one true god. All others will fail.”
“Is that why you did this? For your god?”
“Iesus Christus is the one true god. He is the Alpha and the Omega. All others will fail.”
“Did he tell you to do this?”
“Iesus Christus is the one true god. All others will fail.”
“Most gods don’t like murder.”
“Iesus Christus is the one-”
“Yeah, I know. So why did you kill the Syrian?”
“All others will fail. It is his plan, it is his will. Iesus Christus is the one-”
I got up to leave before I got sick. Someone, somewhere, had an invisible leash on the poor bastard, a leash called Iesus Christus. He wouldn’t talk. He didn’t know how to. Someone had put him up to this, someone had used him and squeezed him until there was nothing left but a dry husk of a man repeating some small words of comfort that served as reason and explanation and defense. Maybe he’d even helped plan some of it, once upon a time, but he was beyond planning, now. He wasn’t even here.
When I came out of the room, the bad taste in my mouth was made worse by seeing Meditor. I turned to Corvus. “You heard Narbo.”
He scratched an eyebrow. “I did. What was it you asked him? Something about a message and money?”
“Ask Agricola. I can’t talk about it here.” He looked at me thoughtfully, his coal-black eyes searching my face. Meditor felt the need to interrupt.
“Are you going to allow me to question-”
Corvus snapped around. He didn’t like Meditor, either. Practically no one did. And yet he lived, or at least pretended to. “No, I am not. This is an internal affair of the cohors praetoria. We have our own methods of handling things.”
“The Druid probably put him up to it. Both of them anti-Rome, both hating the Emperor and Agricola. If you’d only let me take him to the jail-”
“I said no, Meditor. Now kindly quit wasting my time, and go back to beating up drunks for racing tips.”
Meditor glowed a very attractive shade of red, and turned so fast his heel left a mark on the floor. Avitus, Bilicho, Stricta and Corvus and I watched him retreat into the distance with varying degrees of pleasure.
“I’ll stay in touch as I learn more, Corvus.”
We grasped arms, and left, Avitus staying behind to make plans on what to do with Narbo. There weren’t many choices.
The hospital was on the road home, so I stopped by to check on Arian. He was asleep, but his head was cool, and his cheeks were a healthy pink. He’d be all right. Cleones watched me, and then asked as I left: “You’re Arcturus? Agricola’s medicus, and the one who operated on this boy last night?”
He was about forty or fifty, with grizzled grey hair that smelled of scented oil. His Latin was a little sing-song, with a light accent. “Yes. Please keep using honey on the wound.”
He nodded. “I’d like to talk to you some time. You’re quite gifted.”
I smiled. “Thanks. I’m just lucky.”
He shook his head and said evenly: “There is no luck, and if there is, we make our own. Be seeing you.”
“Vale.”
Greeks were like that. Always curious, always with a philosophy to peddle. Bilicho and Stricta were waiting for me. He was holding her up. She was weak and wrung out, and we needed to get her home before dark.
They talked softly together on the way home and I decided not to throw a wet bucket of urgency at them. I was getting desperate to hear what Bilicho had found while I was gone-other than Stricta-but I figured I could spare them an hour or two of peace.
We were only a few blocks from my house when I saw a familiar bundle of rags leaning against a corner wall.
I turned to Bilicho and said: “Madoc’s over there, and I want to talk to him. Go on home with Stricta. Tell Gwyna I’m going to see the governor before I come home for the evening.” He nodded, peering through the thick mist at the Druid. Rain had stopped falling, but was still hanging around like an unwanted guest. He held on to Stricta’s elbow as if she were a cross between a new-born kitten and a cult statue. He’d be lucky if he remembered where we lived. Stricta smiled at me, tired, her face drawn, the fine lines around her mouth deep. She’d see him home.
I crossed the street to where Madoc was waiting. He inclined his head to me, and I did the same. Then I said: “How did you know he was a Christian?”
He fished around in one of the many folds in the rags, and pulled out a bronze disk. It looked like a coin, but was perforated in the top so that it could be hung on a string. The design struck on it was Greek-the letters chi and rho, with an alpha and an omega at the sides.
“This was in the dirt by the doorway. He must have lost it when he carried the Syrian down the stairs. I found it when we followed them.”
“What does it mean?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure. But it is the symbol of their faith, and I know these letters-” He pointed to the alpha and the omega “-mean the beginning and the end of all things, which is how they think of their god.”
“He babbled something about an alpha and an omega when I questioned him. He’s no good, Madoc. His mind’s gone.”
He nodded. “I feared as much. He bore all the signs.”