He must have been upon me very quickly, but it seemed to me that he moved with a ponderous and impossible slowness. I had all the time in the world to watch him wield the dagger aloft, to note the sudden blast of garlic in my nostrils, to ponder the taut and quivering rictus of his face, and to wonder stupidly what possible reason he could have to dislike me so very much.
My body was wiser than my brain. Somehow I managed to grip his wrist and deflect the dagger. It barely grazed my cheek, slicing a thin red track that I felt only much later. Suddenly I was flat against the wall with the breath knocked out of me, so confused that I thought for an instant I was flat on the floor with the full weight of Redbeard’s body on my chest.
With a great wrenching twist, as if we were acrobats out of step, we reeled to the floor. We grappled like drowning men pounded by surf, so that I never knew up from down. The tip of the dagger kept nipping at my throat, but each time I managed to push his arm off-course. He was absurdly strong, more like a storm of an avalanche than a man. I felt like a boy struggling against him. I had no hope of defeating him. It was all I could do to stay alive from one moment to the next.
I suddenly thought of Bethesda, and knew she must already be dead, along with Zoticus. Why had he saved me for last?
That was when the truncheon came crashing down against Redbeard's skull.
While he swayed atop me, dazed, I caught a glimpse of Bethesda over his shoulder. In her hands she held the wooden slat for barring the door. It was so heavy she could barely wield it. She began to lift it again and then tripped beneath the weight and staggered backwards. Redbeard regained his senses. Blood ran downward from a cut in the back of his head, trickling into his beard and mouth, making him look like a crazed animal or a wolf-man gorged on blood. He rose to his knees and twisted around, raising his dagger. I struck at his chest, but I had no leverage.
Bethesda stood upright with the truncheon raised. Redbeard slashed with the dagger, but he only succeeded in slicing her gown. Quickly he spun around the other way and clutched a fistful of cloth with his free hand. He yanked hard and Bethesda fell backwards. The truncheon descended, powered by its own weight. By aim or accident it struck Redbeard square on the crown of his head, and as he toppled onto me I seized his stabbing arm and twisted it towards his chest.
The blade plunged hilt-deep into his heart. His face was above mine, his eyes rolled up, his mouth wide open. I reeled from the stench of garlic and rotten teeth as he sucked in a desperate, rattling breath. Then he jolted and pitched atop me as something exploded inside him. An instant later blood poured from his open mouth like the discharge from a sewer.
Somewhere far away Bethesda screamed. A great massive dead thing lay slick and heavy atop me, convulsing and belching venom, blinding me and flooding my nostrils and mouth, even clogging my ears with its blood. I struggled to escape and lay helpless until I felt Bethesda pushing alongside me. The great corpse rolled onto its back and stared slack-jawed at the ceiling.
I staggered to my knees. We clutched each other, both trembling so badly we could hardly connect. I spat blood and snorted and wiped my face on the bodice of her clean white gown. We stroked each other and babbled pointless words of comfort and assurance, like mutual survivors of a great devastation.
The lamp burned low and sputtered, casting lurid shadows and making the rigid corpses seem to twitch. The weird geography of the night reigned unbroken: we were lovers in a poem, one naked and the other half-dressed, hugging on our knees beside a vast, still lake. But the lake was made of blood — so much blood that I could see my own reflection in it. I stared into my eyes and with a shock I came to my senses, and finally knew that I was not in a nightmare but in the very heart of the great, slumbering city of Rome.
22
'Clearly,' I said, 'the message was meant as a warning to you, Cicero.'
'But if he intended to murder you and your slave, why didn't he get the bloodshed over with first? Why didn't he go ahead and kill you in your sleep and then write the message?'
I shrugged. 'Because he already had enough blood at hand, pouring out of Zoticus's slashed throat. Because the house was still, and he had no fear that I would wake. Because by having the message already written, in case there was some unforeseen complication or if we died screaming, he could flee the house immediately. Or perhaps he was waiting for another assassin to join him. I don't know, Cicero, I can't speak for a dead man. But he meant to kill me, of that I'm certain. And the warning was for you.'
The moon had fallen. The night was at its darkest, though dawn could not be far off. Bethesda was somewhere in the slave quarters, fast asleep, I hoped. Rufus, Tiro, and I sat together in Cicero's study surrounded by sputtering braziers. Our host paced back and forth, grimacing and rubbing his chin.
His face was haggard and his jaw was covered with stubble; but his eyes were bright and glittering, far from sleepy — so he had looked when Bethesda and I had come rapping at his door after fleeing across half the city in the middle of the night. Remarkably, Cicero had still been awake and his house brightly lit. A puffy-eyed slave had led us to the study, where Cicero paced with a sheaf of parchment in his hands, reading aloud and drinking from a bowl of steaming leek soup — Hortensius's secret recipe for sweetening the voice.
With Tiro transcribing, he had almost finished his first provisional draft of his oration in defence of Sextus Roscius, having worked at it ceaselessly all night. He had been trying it out for Tiro and Rufus when we arrived, blood-soaked and shivering, at his door.
Bethesda had quickly disappeared, huddled against Cicero's chief housekeeper, who promised to take care of her. Cicero had insisted that I wash and put on a fresh tunic before I did anything else. I had done the best I could, but in the lamplight of his study I kept noticing tiny flecks of dried blood on my fingernails and bare feet.
'So now there are two dead bodies in your house,' Cicero said, rolling his eyes. 'Ah, well, I'll send someone over tomorrow to take care of the corpses. More expenses! No doubt the owner of this Zoticus won't be pleased at having a dead body returned to him; there'll have to be a settlement. You're like a bottomless well I keep pitching coins into, Gordianus.'
'This message,' Rufus interrupted, looking pensive, 'how did it read again, exactly?'
I shut my eyes and saw each word in vivid red, lit by a wavering lamp: ' "The fool disobeyed. Now he is dead. Let a wiser man take a holiday come the holy Ides of May." He also appeared to have been touching up the older message with fresh blood.'
'Quite meticulous,' said Cicero.
'Yes, and a better speller than Mallius Glaucia. His letters were well made, and he seems to have been working not from paper but from memory. A slave from a better class of master.'
'They say Chrysogonus keeps gladiators who Can read and write,' said Rufus.
'Yes, too bad you had to kill this Redbeard,' Cicero said reproachfully. 'Otherwise we might have learned who sent him.'
'But he said he came from you, Cicero.'
'You needn't take that sarcastic tone, Gordianus. Of course I didn't send him. You were to hire a bodyguard on your own and I would pay, that was our agreement. To be quite honest, I forgot about the arrangement entirely once you were gone. I started working on my notes for the defence and didn't give it another thought.'
'And yet, when he came to my door, he distinctly told my slave that he had been sent by you. It was a deliberate ruse, calculated to deceive me; that means whoever sent him knew of the arrangement we had made only hours before, that you would pay for a single guard to protect my house. How can that be, Cicero? The only people who knew of that discussion were the same ones who are in this room at this moment.'