"I suppose I could go… lie down… for a bit." She looked Rupa up and down, and sighed. "Especially if you men are talking about boring old books."
"Actually, we were talking about death and murder," I said.
"Oh!" The girl gave an exaggerated shudder, causing her breasts to quiver. They were surprisingly large for a fifteen-year-old.
"Gordianus, you've frightened her!" protested Cicero. "You should be more careful what you say. Publilia is hardly more than a child."
"Indeed!" I said under my breath.
"Run along, my honey. Have a drink. Cool yourself; call one of the slaves to come fan you. I'll join you a bit later. You can show me that cloth you bought for your new gown."
"Red gossamer from Cos," she said, "so light and gauzy, you can see right through it!"
The lump protruding from Cicero's throat bobbed up and down as he swallowed. He blinked. "Yes, well, run along, my honey."
"Your bride is utterly charming," I said, after Publilia had gone. "Did she bring a large dowry?" In the social circles to which Cicero aspired, this was not a rude question.
"Enormous!" he said. "But that is not why I married her."
"Oh, I can believe that," I assured him. "Still, it must have been painful, after so many years together, to end your marriage with Terentia."
Cicero smiled wryly. "I'm a strong man, Gordianus. I survived Sulla. I've survived Caesar-so far. And, by Hercules, I survived thirty years with Terentia!"
"Still, the divorce must have been painful for her, if not for you."
His smile vanished. "Terentia is a rock." The way he said it, the word was not a compliment. "She's indestructible. She'll live to be a hundred, mark my words. Don't worry yourself about Terentia."
If I were to worry, I thought, it would be about you, Cicero. What do the Etruscans say? "There is no fool like an old fool!" I bit my tongue.
"I'm happy, don't you see?" Cicero crossed the room with a swagger. I had never seen him so cocky, not even in court, and Cicero orating before a jury could be very cocky indeed. "Despite the dismal state of the world, despite the end of everything I've fought for all my life, about my personal life I have no complaints. In that sphere-after so many reverses, disappointments, outright disasters-at last, everything is going my way. My debts are all paid. Terentia is finally out of my life. And I have a wonderful new bride who adores me. Oh!" His eyebrows lifted. "And at long last, my dear little Tullia is expecting a child. Soon my daughter shall make me a grandfather!"
"Congratulations," I said. "But I heard that her marriage to Dolabella-"
"Is finally over," he said. "And Tullia is well rid of the beast. He caused her nothing but heartbreak. He shall come to a bad end."
Under normal circumstances, a respectable public figure like Cicero would hardly boast that his daughter was about to give birth out of wedlock. But circumstances were no longer normal-not in a world where Calpurnia consulted a soothsayer and Cicero was married to a vapid teenager.
In such a world turned utterly askew, could the vacillating, timorous, stay-at-home Cicero pose a genuine threat to Caesar? It occurred to me that his new marriage might be both symptom and cause of a major shift in Cicero's behavior. Might the old goat be thinking like a young goat-stamping the ground and getting ready to take a reckless run at Caesar with horns lowered? With a new bride-and a grandchild-to impress, did the husband of Publilia feel sufficiently virile to take a stand as savior of the republic?
And if that were the case, could Cicero have been behind the killing of Hieronymus? When I spoke of the murder, his response had seemed entirely innocent. But Cicero was an orator-Rome's greatest-and what was an orator but an actor? I had heard him boast of throwing dust in a jury's eyes. Was he throwing dust in my eyes even now?
If I could stay a bit longer, conversing and drawing him out, he might yet let something slip. I nodded to Rupa, who reached into the shoulder bag he carried and pulled out some documents.
"I was wondering, Cicero, if you might take a look at something I found among Hieronymus's private papers."
"A literary work?" Cicero raised an eyebrow. "Was our friend secretly composing a tragedy? An epic poem?"
"No, this is something more in a scientific vein, I think, though I'm not really sure. That's why I want to show it to you. With your vast knowledge, drawn from your wide reading, perhaps you can make sense of it."
Cicero smiled broadly. Did Publilia find it this easy to lead him by flattery?
I handed him the documents. He pursed his lips, squinted, clucked his tongue, and hummed as he perused them. He was stalling, I thought; he could no more decipher the arcane symbols and calculations than could I.
But at last he nodded and slapped the documents with the back of his hand, as if to indicate he had cracked the code. "Well, I can't make it all out-I'm hardly an astronomical expert-but clearly this has something to do with the calendar."
"The Roman calendar?"
"The Roman, yes, but also the calendars of the Greeks and the Egyptians and perhaps of others as well. There are many calendars, Gordianus. Every civilization has come up with its own way of reckoning the passage of time, dividing years into seasons, seasons into months, months into days. It was King Numa who devised the Roman calendar and established the priesthoods to maintain it. Numa was both a holy man and a king. The whole point of his calendar was to make sure that religious rites were remembered and performed on time.
"But as you must know, no one has yet devised a perfect calendar-that is to say, a reckoning of days that works equally well for every year. Irregularities inevitably creep into the process, and no one quite knows why. You'd think the movements of the stars in the heavens would be as precise and predictable as the measurements of a water clock, but it's more complicated than that. Which is why Numa's calendar has become such a mess. For most of my lifetime and yours, it's been at least slightly out of step with the seasons, and nowadays it's worse than ever."
"But aren't there priests who fix the calendar as we go along?" I said. "Every year they decide whether to introduce an extra month, and the month is as long as they wish-they add however many days they deem necessary to bring the calendar back into alignment with the planets."
"That's correct, Gordianus," said Cicero in a patronizing tone, as if he were surprised that a fellow like myself could grasp such an abstract concept. "You may remember, in the year that Clodius was killed on the Appian Way, we had an intercalary month between Februarius and Martius; twenty-seven days, as I recall." He hummed thoughtfully and looked toward the doorway. "I wonder if I should invite Publilia to join us. She could learn a great deal from this discussion. It's good for a female to stretch her mind occasionally."
Cicero was in pedagogic mode, craving a worthy audience. It struck me that few topics were more likely to bore Cicero's honey than this one.
"Ah, but she's probably napping." Cicero sighed and shrugged. "Where was I? Oh, yes-even with the addition of intercalary months, the Roman calendar has grown more and more out of step, so that nowadays the harvest festivals of our ancestors occur during the summer, which makes no sense, and the holidays that are supposed to relieve the tedium of midwinter arrive in the autumn, when everyone is busy with the harvest. And so on. This is the middle of September, yet the weather is sweltering and the days are long."