A hand gripped my arm. I turned and saw Tiro leaning on his crutch. 'Good,' he said, 'you came after all. I was afraid — well, no matter. I saw you from across the way. Here, follow me.' He hobbled through the crowd, pulling me after him. An armed guard nodded at Tiro and let us pass beyond a cordon. We crossed an open space to the very foot of the Rostra itself. The copper-plated beak of an ancient warship loomed over our heads, fashioned in the shape of a nightmarish beast with a horned skull. The thing stared down at us, looking almost alive. Carthage had never lacked for nightmares; when we killed her, she passed them on to Rome.
The space before the Rostra was a small, open square. On one side stood the crowd of spectators from which the statue of Sulla rose like an island; they stood and peered over one another's shoulders, confined behind the cordon maintained by officers of the court. On the other side were rows of benches for friends of the litigants and for spectators too esteemed to stand. At the corner of the square, between the spectators and the Rostra, were the respective benches of the advocates for the prosecution and defence. Directly before the Rostra, in chairs set on a series of low tiers, sat the seventy-five judges chosen from the Senate.
I scanned the faces of the judges. Some dozed, some read. Some ate. Some argued among themselves. Some fidgeted nervously in their seats, clearly unhappy with the duty that had fallen on them. Others seemed to be conducting their regular business, dictating to slaves and ordering clerks about. All wore the senatorial toga that set them apart from the rabble that milled beyond the cordon. Once upon a time, courts were made up of senators and common citizens together. Sulla put an end to that.
I glanced at the accuser's bench where Magnus sat with his arms crossed, scowling and glaring at me with baleful eyes. Beside him, the prosecutor Gaius Erucius and his assistants were leafing through documents. Erucius was notorious for mounting vicious prosecutions, sometimes for hire and sometimes out of spite; he was equally notorious for winning. I had worked for him myself, but only when I was very hungry. He paid well. No doubt he had been promised a very handsome fee to obtain the death of Sextus Roscius.
Erucius glanced up as I passed, gave me a contemptuous snort of recognition, then turned about to wag his finger at a messenger who was awaiting instructions. Erucius had aged considerably since I had last seen him, and the changes were not for the better. The rolls of fat around his neck had become thicker and his eyebrows needed plucking. Because of the plumpness of his purple lips he seemed always to pout, and his eyes had a narrow, calculating appearance. He was the very image of the conniving advocate. Many in the courts despised him. The mob adored him. His blatant corruption, together with his suave voice and unctuous mannerisms, exerted a reptilian fascination over the mob against which homespun honesty and simple Roman virtue could not possibly compete. Given a strong case, he would skilfully whip up the mob's craving to see a guilty man punished. Given a weak case, he was a master at sowing corrosive doubts and suspicions. Given a case with political ramifications, he could be relied upon to remind the judges, subtly but surely, exactly where their own self-interest lay.
Hortensius would have been a match for him. But Cicero? Erucius was clearly not impressed with his competition. He yelled out loud for one of his slaves; he turned to exchange some joke with Magnus (they both laughed); he stretched and strolled about with his hands on his hips, not even bothering to glance at the bench of the accused. There Sextus Roscius sat hunched over with two guards at his back — the same two who had been posted at Caecilia's portal. He looked like a man already condemned — pale, silent, as inanimate as stone. Next to him, even Cicero looked robust as he stood and clutched my arm in greeting.
'Good, good! Tiro said he had spotted you in the crowd. I was afraid you'd be late, or stay away altogether.' He leaned towards me, smiling, still holding my arm, and spoke in a confidential voice as if I were his closest friend. Such intimacy after his coldness oflate unnerved me. 'Look at the judges up there in the tiers, Gordianus.
Half of them are bored to death; the other half are scared to death. To which half should I pitch my arguments?' He laughed — not in a forced way, but with genuine good humour. The ill-tempered Cicero who had fretted and snapped ever since my return from Ameria seemed to have vanished with the Ides.
Tiro sat on Cicero's right, next to Sextus Roscius, and carefully laid his crutch out of sight. Rufus sat on Cicero's left, along with the nobles who had been helping him in the Forum. I recognized Marcus Metellus, another of Caecilia's young relations, along with the esteemed nonentity and once-magistrate Publius Scipio.
'Of course you can't be seated with us at the bench,' Cicero said, 'but I want you nearby. Who knows? A name or a date might slip my mind at the last moment. Tiro posted a slave to warm a place for you.' He gestured to the gallery, where I recognized numerous senators and magistrates, among them the orator Hortensius and various Messalli and Metelli. I also recognized old Capito, looking wizened and small next to the giant Mallius Glaucia, who wore a bandage on his head. Chrysogonus was nowhere to be seen. Sulla was present only by virtue of his gilded statue.
At Cicero's gesture a slave rose from one of the benches. While I walked towards the gallery to take his place, Mallius Glaucia elbowed Capito and whispered in his ear. Both turned their heads and stared as I took my seat two rows behind them. Glaucia furrowed his brows and curled his upper Hp in a snarl, looking remarkably like a wild beast in the midst of so many sedate and well-groomed Romans.
The Forum was bathed in long morning shadows. Just as the sun rose over the Basilica Fulvia, the praetor Marcus Fannius, chairman of the court, mounted the Rostra and cleared his throat. With due gravity he convened the court, invoked the gods, and read the charges.
I settled into that mental stupor that inevitably overtakes any reasonable man in a court of law, awash in an ocean of briny rhetoric pounding against weathered crags of metaphor. While Fannius droned on, I studied their faces — Magnus slowly burning like an ember, Erucius pompous and bored, Tiro struggling to suppress his eagerness, Rufus looking like a child amid so many grey jurists. Cicero, meanwhile, remained serenely and unaccountably calm, while Sextus Roscius himself nervously surveyed the crowd like a cornered, wounded animal too blood-spent to put up a fight.
Fannius finished at last and took his seat among the judges. Gaius Erucius rose from the accuser's bench and made a laborious show of carrying his portly frame up the steps to the Rostra. He blew through his cheeks and took a deep breath. The judges put aside their paperwork and conversations. The crowd grew quiet.
'Esteemed Judges, selected members of the Senate, I come here today with a most unpleasant task. For how can it ever be pleasant to accuse a man of murder? Yet this is one of the necessary duties that falls from time to time onto the shoulders of those who pursue the fulfilment of the law.'