The sun descended. I felt a gnawing in the pit of my stomach, but I could not stand to eat. The air became thin and cool in the gathering twilight. I found myself before the entrance to the Baths of Pallacina, that favoured haunt of the late Sextus Roscius.
'Busy day,' said the young attendant as he took my clothing. 'Hardly any business at all the past few days — too hot for it. No hurry this evening. We'll be staying open late to make up for the loss.' He returned with a drying cloth. I took it from him and said something to distract him while I draped the towel over my left arm, making sure it concealed my knife. Even naked I had no intention of going unarmed. I stepped into the caldarium, and he shut the door behind me.
The fading sunset cast a strange orange glow through the high window. An attendant with a burning taper lit a single lamp recessed in one wall, then was called away before he could light the others. The room was so dim and the steam on the water so thick that the score or so of men who lounged about the pool were as indistinct as shadows, like statues seen through a dull orange mist- I lowered myself into the water slowly, bit by bit, hardly able to tolerate the heat, until the swirling water lapped at my throat. Around me men groaned as if they were in pain or ecstasy. I groaned with them, merging into the obscurity of the warmth and vapour. The glow from the window railed by imperceptible degrees. The attendant never returned to ignite the lamps, but no one complained or shouted for light. The darkness and the heat were like lovers whom no one dared to separate.
The lamp sputtered. The flame leaped up and then grew small, leaving the room even darker than before. Water lapped quietly against tile, men breathed in sighs and soft groans. I looked about and saw nothing but vapour, featureless and infinite except for the single point of light cast by the lamp, like the glow of a lighthouse on a faraway hilltop. Shapes bobbed in the distance like floating islands or monsters of the deep prowling the surface.
I sank deeper in the water, until I could feel the breath from my nostrils swirl against the surface. I narrowed my eyes, stared across the gulf of mist at the flickering flame, and for a while I seemed almost to dream without shutting my eyes. I thought of no one and nothing. I was a dreaming man, a floating, moss-covered island in a humid sea, a boy playing at fantasy, a child in the womb.
Against the background of mist, one of the shapes drew nearer — a head floating on the water. It approached, and stopped; approached and stopped again, each time accompanied by the almost imperceptible sound of flesh parting water, followed by me advancing caress of tiny waves against my cheeks.
He drew so near that I could almost make out his face, outlined by long, dark hair. He rose a bit, just enough so that I glimpsed broad shoulders and a strong neck. He seemed to be smiling, but in that light I might have imagined anything.
Then he slowly sank beneath the water with a soft fuming of bubbles and a swirl of mist — Atlantis sinking into the sea. The surface of the pool closed over him and the water merged into the mist, undisturbed. He had vanished.
I felt something brush against the calf of my leg, like an eel slithering through the water.
My heart began to pound. My chest grew; tight. I had wandered the city for hours, so blindly that the clumsiest assassin could have followed me and I never would have known it. I turned and reached for the towel on the edge of the pool, and the knife concealed beneath it. Just as my hand closed on the hilt, the water boiled and splashed behind me. He touched my shoulder.
I whirled about in the water, splashing, slipping against the floor of the pool. I reached out blindly and seized him by the hair, then brought the blade to his throat.
He cursed aloud. Behind me I heard the curious murmur of the crowd, like a blind beast stirred from its sleep.
'Hands!' I shouted. 'Out of the water!' The surrounding murmur turned to a commotion. On either side of me two hands leaped out of the water like snapping fish, empty and blameless. I pulled my blade away from his throat. I must have cut him; a thin dark line marked the indent of the blade, and beneath it was a smeared trickle of blood. I was finally close enough to see his face — not Magnus at all, just a harmless young man with startled eyes and gritted teeth.
Before the chief attendant could come, before the lamps could be lit, exposing me for all to see as the fool I was, I let him go and pulled myself from the water. I dried myself as I hurried towards the door, taking care to conceal the knife before I stepped into the light and demanded my clothes. Cicero was right. I was unsettled and dangerous and unfit to be on the streets.
29
It was Tiro who answered the door. He looked exhausted but exultant, so thoroughly pleased with himself and with existence in general that I could see it took him an effort to put on a disapproving face. In the background the voice of Cicero droned on, stopping and starting, an ambient noise like the sound of crickets on a summer night.
'Cicero is furious with you,' Tiro whispered. 'Where have you been all day?'
'Looking for bodies amid charred rubble,' I said. 'Chatting with friends of the great. Visiting ghosts and old acquaintances. Lying with whores; excuse me, lying to whores. Brandishing knives at amorous strangers. .'
Tiro made a face. 'I don't have the least idea what you're talking about.'
'No? I thought Cicero had taught you everything there is to know about words. And yet you can't follow me.' 'Are you drunk?'
'No, but you are. Yes, look at you — as giddy as a boy after his first cup of wine. Drunk on your master's rhetoric, I can tell. You've been going at it for eight hours straight, probably on an empty stomach. It's a wonder you could find your way to answer the door.'
'You're not making sense.'
'I'm making perfect sense. But you're so intoxicated with gibberish that a little common sense must seem as insipid to you as spring water to a hardened drunkard; Listen to him — like a knife against slate, if you ask me. Yet you act as if it were a siren's song.'
I had at last managed to eradicate the cheerfulness from Tiro's race and replace it with a frown of consternation. At that moment Rufus looked tentatively around the corner and then strode into the vestibule, flushed and smiling and batting his heavy-lidded eyes. He looked utterly exhausted, which at his age only served to make him look more charming, especially as he could not stop smiling.
'We've finished the second draft,' he announced. The constant droning from Cicero's study had abruptly stopped. On Rufus's face was the transported look of a child who might have seen a centaur in the woods and could not possibly hope to describe it. 'Brilliant,' he finally said. 'Of course, what do I know of rhetoric? Only what I've learned from teachers like Diodotus and Molo, and what I've heard with my own ears, sitting in on the Senate and the courts since I was a child. But I swear to you, he'll bring tears to your eyes when you hear him at the trial. Men will come to their feet with clenched fists, demanding that Sextus Roscius be set free. There's no final version, of course; we have to contend with all sorts of possibilities, depending on whatever tricks Erucius comes up with. But Cicero's done what he can to foresee every contingency, and the core of his final argument is there, finished and perfect and ready, like pillars awaiting the dome of a temple. It's brilliant, there's no other word for it. I feel so humble simply to have been a witness to it.'
'You don't think it's too dangerous?' Tiro said in a low voice, stepping from behind me and drawing closer to Rufus, whispering so as to hide his doubts from Cicero in his study.
'In an unjust state, any act of decency is by its nature dangerous,' said Rufus. 'And also brave. A brave man will not fail to put himself into danger, if he has just cause.'