"Yes, Caelius," I said quietly, "but what about the accusation itself?"
Catullus suddenly looked up from his wine cup and showed signs of life. Caelius gave me a supercilious grin. "Gordianus, a Roman court has declared me to be an innocent man, wrongfully accused. What more do you need to know?"
"The truth," I said. I reached for his arm. The force I used caught him by surprise.
He dropped his cup. Wine splashed on the floor. Caelius's body-guards lurched forward. He kept them back with a shake of his head and spoke to me through gritted teeth.
"Gordianus, you're hurting my wrist. Let go, or I shall tell them to cut your hand off."
"The truth, Caelius. It goes no further than me. I swear by the shade of my father."
"The truth? Licinius here very nearly got caught with a pyxis full of poison at the Senian baths. He managed to empty the stuff into one of the tubs on his way out-a waste of good poison! But I put the pyxis to good use later."
"Caelius, shut up!" Licinius clenched his fists.
"And the second attempt?" I said. Catullus stared at Caelius.
"The truth?"
"Tell me!"
He jerked his arm free and rubbed his wrist. "The second attempt almost succeeded. I'm glad now that it didn't. Cicero was right. Dead, Clodia would have been truly dangerous to me, an object of sympathy. Alive, she was an object of scorn, an asset to me in spite of herself. So it worked out for the best. Clodia got off with a bit of indigestion, and I got the sympathy of the judges."
"The poison you used for the second attempt-"
"Different from the first time. I'd wanted to use something very quick to act; I didn't want her to suffer. But Licinius threw that batch away, so I ended up trying something called-what is it called, Licinius?"
"Gorgon's hair."
"Yes, that's it. It would have taken a bit longer, I'm told, but been just as effective. I am sorry that Chrysis got caught, poor thing. She's so delicate, and now Clodia will take it all out on her."
Catullus spoke in a slurred voice. "Caelius, you told me-" "What you wanted to hear, Catullus, and you never want to hear the truth, do you? So what if I tried to poison her? What do you care? She despises you even more than she does me."
"Caelius, you lying bastard!" Catullus lurched toward him.
Caelius drew back and lifted his hands, a signal for his bodyguards to rescue him. It happened so quickly that I experienced the journey from the bench to the street outside as a blurred moment of levitation, followed by a hard landing on my posterior. When my head stopped spinning I saw that Catullus was sitting on the paving stones beside me. After a moment, he rolled forward onto his hands and knees, crawled to the gutter and was violently ill.
A little later he crawled back to me. "You should try that," he said, wiping his chin. "You'd feel better."
"I don't want to feel better."
"Self-pitying bastard. You sound like me. What have you got to be sad about?"
"Woman trouble." "At your age?"
"Live long enough, whelp, and you'll see. It never ends." "Then how do men stand it?" The brief relief of vomiting gave way to his usual misery.
"So Caelius really did try to poison her?" "Not once, but twice. He told you otherwise?" "He lied to my face."
"Imagine that! What were you doing in his company tonight, anyway?"
Catullus looked even more miserable.
"Don't tell me," I said. "Let me guess. You were sharing in the celebration, since you helped him write his speech. You helped Cicero write his speech as well."
"How did you know?"
"The look on your face at the trial today. You couldn't help but en-joy hearing your phrases spoken aloud. That business about 'Clytemnestra-for-a-quadrans' and 'Medea of the Palatine'-it had to come from you. Likewise the reference to those lovers' trophies Clodia keeps in her secret treasure box under her statue of Venus. You told me no one knew about that but you, and you only found out by accident. I saw her face when Cicero mentioned it. So did you. That was the last straw for her, the moment she broke. He stripped her naked, and you helped. You knew the jokes that would hurt her the most. The crudest puns, the nastiest metaphors. Are you the poet of love, Catullus, or the poet of hate?"
" 'I hate and I love. If you ask me how, I do not know-' "
"Stop quoting yourself! Why did you do it?"
"Don't you know?"
"I thought you loved Clodia. I thought you hated Caelius." "Which is precisely why I had to help him destroy her." "You baffle me, Catullus!"
"She had to be destroyed. It was the only way. Now I can reclaim
her."
"What are you talking about, Catullus?"
He clutched my arm. "Don't you see? As long as she had this burning passion for Caelius, I could never get her back. She'd put up with anything from him, any abuse. But now he's gone too far. Now she can't possibly love him anymore, not after what they did to her at the trial today. Caelius and his advocates have made her the laughingstock of Rome! Yes, I helped. I went to Caelius the morning after we ran into him here at the tavern. I told him I had some ideas for his speech. Cicero was quite excited to have me along. The three of us had quite a time, going through the orations, adding jokes, wondering just how far we should go. That pun about the pyxis-"
"Don't make me hear it all again!"
"It's not that I'm proud. But it had to be done. She had to be brought down. She'd become too full of herself, too proud, too arrogant, ever since Celer died and she started running her own household. Now she's been broken, in the only way it could be done. We took everything that made her strong-her beauty, her pride, her love of pleasure-and turned it against her. Her own ancestors were turned against her, the ones she's always gloating about! She'll never be able to brag about the family monuments again without everyone snickering behind her back. She can't even turn to Clodius, not in public. It's me she'll turn to."
I shook my head. "Catullus, you are surely the most deluded man I ever met."
"You think so? Come with me right now, to her house. You'll see."
"No, thank you. Clodia's house is the last place on earth I'd care to be at this moment. No, that's not quite true. The last place I'd want to be is in my own house. But then, it's also the only place I want to be."
"Now who's not making sense?" Catullus staggered to his feet. "Are you coming with me or not?"
I shook my head, which seemed to go on spinning after I stood up. "Farewell then, Gordianus."
"Farewell, Catullus. And-" He turned and looked back at me blearily. "-good luck."
He nodded and stumbled off into the darkness. I waited for my head to stop spinning and tried to figure out the direction to Eco's house. The Subura seemed a long way off.
Chapter Twenty Seven
I woke late the next morning. My head felt as if a whole toga had been stuffed inside it; I could taste scratchy wool on my tongue. Dunking my head in cold water helped. So did eating a bit of food. I stepped shakily into the garden at the heart of Eco's house and found a place to sit in the sun. After a while Menenia walked by, beneath the portico. She acknowledged my presence with a nod but did not smile. A little while later Eco sauntered out to join me.
"You came in awfully late last night, Papa." "Who's the son here, and who's the father?" "Can we talk now?" "I suppose so."
"About Dio, and how he died. You never told me yesterday what you think."
I sighed. "You were right, about the poison in my house being used to kill him."
"But who did it?"
I took a deep breath, then another. It was hard to say it aloud. "Bethesda."
Eco looked at me steadily, less surprised than I expected him to be. "Why?"
I told him about the conversation I had overheard in my house, between Clodia and Bethesda. "It must have been Dio she was talking about. Dio was the powerful, respected man who owned her mother. She