'Who? Who?' Clarus demanded.
'I'm afraid he didn't reveal a name to me, sirs,' she said. 'But I can imagine it would be easily expected of so appealing a fellow.'
'What too do you mean by Caesar's health?' Suetonius queried.
'There are many at Court who express concern about Hadrian's coughing bouts. They are no longer a mere nuisance to him. They are known to draw blood from his chest,' Perenna stated confidently. 'His young consort was troubled by this circumstance and hoped someone such as I would have a herb or decoction to treat such ailments. But this is a physician's art, not a priestess of Anna Perenna. We concentrate on fertility, romance, beauty, and divination, not sickness.'
'Tell me, madam, you use your name objectively in the third person? Why is this so?' Suetonius queried.
The tall woman faced him blankly for a few moments. She cleared her throat before responding while Suetonius looked intently at the brightly colored gem upon a finger of her right hand. He felt the gemstone reminded him of something or someone. It was familiar.
'The name Anna Perenna, good sirs, is as much a title as a personal name. All senior priestesses of the cult of Anna Perenna are named Anna Perenna. I am Anna Perenna at Alexandria. My teacher and leader at Rome is Anna Perenna at Rome. Two others are elsewhere in the Empire,' the pockmarked matron clarified pertly. 'But each of us is guided by the invocation 'for leave to live in and through the year to our liking'. It is our motto.'
She returned to silence.
'Then you have a previous name and family after all? Before you became Anna Perenna, that is?'
'No that I recall, sir. Since childhood I have always been Anna to my priestly community at Rome. I have been raised to receive and enact the hallowed duties of an Anna Perenna,' she explained. 'The priestesses adopt orphans and out-of-wedlock infants of good family to train them in this manner, unless they prove unsuitable to the task. I was eminently suitable.'
'Then you cannot throw any light at all on the death of the Bithynian, madam?' Suetonius now finalized his line of questioning.
'Not I, Inspector. Perhaps the wizard Pachrates can cast such light as you may require,' she offered. A sense of remoteness appeared in her eyes. She continued.
'I am told we have been instructed by Caesar to attend the reception platform before his chambers an hour ahead of dawn on tomorrow's Third Day?
The third day of The Isia begins the days of celebration, the day when Osiris is restored to life in Isis's arms after his journey in the Underworld. Seth and evil are defeated. Life is restored to this land and its Pharaoh. It is an apotheosis. Caesar is assembling his key advisors and colleagues for this dawn's arrival.'
'Life is restored to its Pharaoh, did you say?' Suetonius queried.
'This is what these people believe in this land,' Perenna claimed.
'We too are obliged to attend the dawn assembly,' Clarus interjected, 'so we'd better get a move on with our interviews. Time is passing.'
Suetonius was reluctant to depart. He was not entirely satisfied with the woman's testimony. He also wondered where he had previously seen a striking ring similar to the one on the priestess's hand.
CHAPTER 23
'Well what do we make of her?' Suetonius asked the others. 'She's a very cool lady, despite the afflictions beneath the pastes and the kohl.?'
The biographer scanned his three companions for a response. They had alighted from a gondola ferrying their return to shore from The Alexandros.
The runabout to the Governor's barque was an elegant vessel whose single sail was emblazoned with the Governor's symbol of an Alexandrine eight-pointed golden star upon a field of sky blue. A wharf patrol in similar colors carefully recorded the group of four's return from The Alexandros. Their return was inscribed in the patrol's papyrus list of movements to-and-fro from the riverside jetty. Suetonius noted this clerical diligence, but had other things on his mind.
'Surisca, my dear, from a woman's perspective do you have an opinion of this Grandmother of Time?'
The Syri entertainer held her own counsel momentarily.
'Well, what did you think?' he pressured again. 'Don't be shy, my dear, we've come to value your views.'
'This lady is a dissembler, Master. She is lying to you, I'd say,' Surisca quietly offered.
'Lying? A liar? In what way, Surisca? What makes you think so?'
'It's my intuition, Master. A woman senses these things. She often knows when another woman is hiding a truth,' was the young woman's reply. 'There's something amiss with the Lady Priestess in my view, my lords.'
Clarus and Suetonius paused in suspended agreement to the statement. Strabon now interrupted.
'I agree, gentlemen. I don't know why I believe so, but as I notated her words I sensed she was holding something back. It was in the tone in her voice. It was a feigned confidence. I have listened intently to many voices in my time and can often detect fraud.'
'What sort of thing, I wonder?' Suetonius asked. 'We can't judge a woman merely on the tone of her voice.'
Surisca again raised her hand to speak.
'Were you aware of the blood, Masters?' she asked.
'Blood? Blood!? What blood?' Clarus yelped.
'If I'm not mistaken, my lords, there were droplets of blood or something similar oozing from the amphora up on the wall niche. They were leaking through a fine crack in the clay lip and dripping down the timbers behind. Perhaps it was some other dark fluid such as wine or garam sauce?' she proposed.
'Did anyone else notice a fluid?' Suetonius asked. 'I certainly didn't, though I did notice a thin dark line running down the hull. You sense it was blood, was it? My eyes aren't what they once were.'
'But what would a respectable Roman priestess companion of the Prefect Governor be doing with a jug of blood in her workshop?' Clarus asked. 'Is the juice of life a component of her priestly pharmacopeia, or does she store the gore of her daily divination victims for sanctification? Theurgists are known to harvest and hoard many odd materials. But stored blood goes off very speedily. It gels and rots. It smells very badly very quickly, like an arena's sands or a charnel house. It's not a pleasing odor, I assure you.'
'But not if it was relatively fresh,' Suetonius said. 'Yet the jar seemed to be enshrined in some way? It was being venerated by the Governor's consort. It was being adored with a votive lamp and a talisman or two.'
'What did you make of her facial lesions?' Clarus asked his companions. 'Surisca?' he invited again.
Clarus was warming to the courtesan's opinions.
'The lesions? Are they a pox? A canker? Leprosy?' Clarus added. 'Or some nightmare Egyptian affliction not worth contemplating?'
'I have never seen such abrasions before, my lord,' Surisca said, 'except, perhaps, her abrasions are similar to the scars left by surgeons who try to scrape away a freed slave's branding or owner's tattoo.'
'Scrape away?' Clarus repeated.
'And what to make of the three rings? Or the beautiful stone on her right hand?' the Special Investigator put forward. 'Three fine iron rings on consecutive fingers. Iron, not silver or gold. Is this a local Egyptian fashion, young lady?'
'I do not know of such a fashion, Master,' Surisca replied, 'neither here in Egypt nor elsewhere in the East. Perhaps fine ladies wear such things at Rome, or they are tokens of her sacred vocation.'
Suetonius became darkly serious.
'The Lady Anna Perenna made two comments of interest to me. One was her observation about the deceased youth's resolve. What could she mean by his resolve, I wonder? Resolve to do what? And separately, she spoke of the night of his death. She, without any advice from us, had concluded his death had occurred at night, not some other time of day. Is this a justifiable query?'
'She explained his resolve by suggesting the Bithynian was on a mission to regain his erastes' favor in some way,' Clarus explained. 'Yet I too sensed she was talking of some other purpose in the lad's intentions. What could
