in the belly.' Once ingested, it bides its time before striking. The victim feels no ill effects for a while, then the symptoms come on suddenly. You told me that you tasted the powder in the morning but felt no effects until midday. That hardly sounds like Caelius's 'quick-acting' poison.' 'So? He decided to use a different poison.'
'Perhaps. If you'd let me, I'd like to take what's left of this poison with me. If I remember correctly, I happen to have a bit of gorgon's hair at my house, locked in a box where I keep such things.' My son Eco had been given the stuff months ago, by a man whose wife was trying to poison him. Eco passed it on for safekeeping to me; he won't have poison in his house because of the twins. I'd almost forgotten about it. 'I should like to compare this powder with the bit I have at home — '
Clodia hesitated. 'Be sure to return it,' she whispered, closing her eyes. 'It's evidence against Caelius.'
The interview seemed to be over.
Clodia turned uncomfortably on the bed. Chrysis twisted from the ropes. Then Trygonion bent close to Clodia's ear and said in a low voice, 'The other box.' She frowned.
'Mistress, the other box,' he said again.
The grimace she made came from something other than physical discomfort. 'Yes, show him. Let him see for himself.'
Trygonion took the box of poison from me. He went to the little cosmetics table and came back holding a different pyxis in the palm of his hand, with his nose wrinkled and his arm extended, as if to keep the thing as far from himself as possible. I recognized it at once.
'It's the same pyxis Licinius was carrying at the Senian baths,' I said. 'Are you sure?' whispered Clodia.
'Bronze, with raised knobs and inlays of ivory. Exactly the same.' 'The brute! The monster!' said Trygonion, thrusting the box at me. 'Go on, look inside.'
'It arrived this morning,' said Clodia. 'Left by a messenger on the front doorstep. What was he thinking? To torture me with this obscene joke while I lay dying? Is he laughing even now?' She sucked in a shuddering breath and began to sob.
I took the tiny box from Trygonion and opened the lid. Within was a pearly, opalescent liquid, perhaps a kind of lotion or cream, I thought. I touched my finger to it and gave such a start that I dropped the box, spilling its contents on the floor. Trygonion stared at the globules of congealed semen with fascinated revulsion.
'Damn him!' Clodia thrashed on the bed. Trygonion rushed to her. I backed away and bumped into the cosmetics table. I turned and stared blindly at the unguents and philters. Among them I noticed a little clay figurine of Attis, Cybele's eunuch consort, exactly like the ones I had seen in the room of Lucius Lucceius's wife. The dim lamplight caught his red cap and lit up his serenely smiling face.
Clodia continued to moan and curse. Trygonion hovered over her. The dropped pyxis lay on the floor, its spattered contents glistening in the lamplight.
I backed away again. One of the lamps began to gutter and the room grew darker. I bumped into something solid but yielding. The rope made a cracking noise above and behind me. A low whimpering rose from below. With a start I turned and realized I had collided with the suspended body of Chrysis. Seen upside down in the flickering light, her staring eyes and nostrils were so grotesque that her face became inhuman, unreadable. Her lips moved. I bent my head, straining to hear, but her whisper was drowned by Clodia's sobbing cry behind me.
'Punish her! Punish her again!'
Beyond the heavy curtain that blocked the door I heard a murmur and a rustling among the slaves gathered in the hall. I stared at Chrysis's soundlessly moving lips, hardly knowing what I was seeing, then finally came to my senses. I stepped toward the door and pushed my way past the curtain.
The slaves in the hallway scattered and regrouped like brooding hens. As I made my way down the hall a figure approached and passed me, taking long, quick steps toward Clodia's room. It was the slave Barnabas, clutching a leather whip between his fists. He stared straight ahead, his jaw tightly clenched. His face was drained of all emotion except for his eyes, in which I glimpsed a strange mixture of determination and dread.
At home, I found Bethesda going through her wardrobe, trying to find something suitable to wear for Clodia's party. 'What do you think, the blue stola or the green one? And for a necklace-the carnelian beads, or the lapis lazuli ones you gave me last year?'
'I'm afraid it's rather unlikely that there'll be a party after all.'
'But why not?'
'Clodia is ill.' To explain what had just transpired at Clodia's house was beyond my energy.
'Perhaps she'll feel better in the morning,' said Bethesda, frowning.
'Perhaps. We'll see whether she shows up at the trial tomorrow morning.'
'Yes, the trial! She won't miss that. She'll have to feel better, and then she'll have the party after all. She's put so much planning into it.'
'Into the trial?'
'Into the party, silly.'
I nodded. 'No word from Eco?'
'None.'
I suddenly realized that I had forgotten the box of gorgon's hair which I had intended to borrow from Clodia, to compare with the poison stored in my own strongbox. I had no desire to go back for it. For the moment, I forgot about it.
Chapter Twenty
Bethesdawas prescient. In the morning, when we went down to the Forum to watch the trial, Clodia was already there in the great square in front of the Rostra, seated behind the prosecutors in the midst of a great many of her retainers. She was pale and her eyes were listless, but the crisis had apparently passed. She looked in our direction and smiled wanly-not at me, I realized, but at Bethesda, who nodded and smiled in return. For me Clodia had no smile, only a raised eyebrow, as if to ask if I had any last bit of information to give her. I pursed my lips and shook my head. Eco had still not returned, and none of my nets had snagged a fish.
It was the day before the beginning of the Great Mother festival. For six days Rome would celebrate with games and competitions, religious processions and plays, private parties and public ceremonies. After the festival, members of the Senate would briefly reconvene before taking their traditional Aprilis holiday at their country estates. Rome would shut down, like a great gristmill grinding to a halt. On the eve of all this, the mood in the Forum was a combination of rush and relaxation- hectic hurry to take care of final business together with the delicious anticipation of the coming days of indolence and pleasure.
This giddy mood was heightened even more by the raucous atmosphere which always attends a major trial, especially a trial as rich with the promise of scandal as this one. With no other courts in session, every advocate in Rome was in attendance, and with so much recent debate over the Egyptian situation and Dio's death, most of the Senate had come to watch. Those wise enough to plan ahead had sent slaves to the Forum at dawn to put down folding chairs and hold places for them. I had sent Belbo to do just that for Bethesda and myself. I scanned the cluttered rows and spotted him waving to us from an excellent place near the front, just behind the benches where the seventy-odd judges would sit. We made our way to our seats. Before Belbo withdrew to the great crowd of gawkers and idlers that continued to gather at the periphery, I told him to keep an eye out for Eco, who might still show up at the last moment.
Before us, beyond the judges' benches, was the open square, from which the advocates would deliver their speeches. To the left sat the prosecutors with their assistants and witnesses. This was where Clodia sat. Barnabas sat next to her, and nearby I recognized 'Busy Fingers' Vibennius and several others who had taken part in the fruitless chase at the Senian baths.
Directly opposite the prosecutors, to our right, were the benches of the defendant, accompanied by his advocates, family, supporters and character witnesses. The parents of Marcus Caelius were dressed all in black, as if in mourning. His mother's eyes were puffy and red and her cheeks were wet with tears; his father had white stubble on his jaw and unkempt hair, giving him the look of a man half crazy with worry. The parents of every accused man show up in court looking just the same. If Caelius had children, they would have been standing in rags, weeping. Such traditional means of evoking pity in the judges began so long ago that no advocate would
