Last seen in Massilia rsr-8 Read online

  "You may be right, Hieronymus," I granted. "But you may be wrong. I can imagine another scenario. The fleets do battle and Caesar's ships are destroyed. Why not? Pompey has officers every bit as clever as Caesar's, and fighting men who are just as brave. The blockade is broken. The Timouchoi regain control of the sea and the coastline. Trading vessels can come and go. The city's food stores are replenished; the famine is lifted. As long as the walls hold firm, Massilia can hold off Trebonius indefinitely. Or perhaps do better than that: If these eighteen ships from Pompey arrive in Massilia filled with soldiers, Domitius and Apollonides might even dare to mount a counterattack against Trebonius. Trebonius could be forced to retreat, might even be destroyed. If Massilia can be made into a secure stronghold for Pompey, then Caesar's route back to Italy would be blocked. He could be trapped in Spain. Meanwhile, Pompey could muster his forces in Greece and Asia, sail back to Italy to take on Marc Antony-"

  "'Might'…'Could'…'What if?'" Hieronymus shook his head. "In a universe ruled by capricious gods, anything is possible. But close your eyes. What do you hear? A child crying because it's hungry. Apollonides and the Timouchoi are responsible for that. When Caesar came knocking at our gates, they made a choice-and they chose wrongly. That was the moment to seek the gods' wisdom. Now it's too late…"

  So we spent the long day, talking politics and warfare. When those subjects paled, we moved on to others-our favorite Greek dramas and Roman comedies, the relative merits of various philosophers, the prose of Caesar compared to that of Cicero. Hieronymus delighted in being argumentative. Whatever side I took, he took the other, and usually got the better of me. To his advantage, he seemed freshly versed on every subject, like a schoolboy immersed in learning. In his role as scapegoat, his every pleasure had been catered to; books, denied him in his years as a beggar, were among those pleasures. Massilia was famous for its academies and had no shortage of books. They had been delivered to the scapegoat's house by the wheelbarrow-full. He had stuffed himself with scrolls just as he had stuffed himself with food.

  Hours passed. The chanting from the temples never ceased. Davus contributed little to the conversation, except for an occasional grumble from his stomach. I grew hungry too, if the stirring of appetite experienced by a well-fed man when he goes without food for a few hours is worthy of being called hunger. How did it compare to what the spectators along the battlements were experiencing? In a city under siege, noncombatants always receive smaller rations than their defenders. Women, children, and the old are the first victims of famine, and the least able to withstand it. To what level of daily, hourly craving had the spectators around us already descended? How much thinner would they be stretched, and how much longer would they have to endure it? Truly starving people will eat anything to fill their bellies-wood shavings, the stuffing from pillows, even dirt. Hunger robs its victims of every shred of dignity before it snuffs out their lives. And for those who survive starvation, pestilence inevitably follows. Then surrender to the besieger; then rape, plunder, slavery…

  Like the spectators along the battlements, I anxiously watched the sea.

  "Do you know the Fallacy of Enkekalymmenos?" Hieronymus suddenly asked.

  Davus furrowed his brow at the long Greek word. "The Fallacy of the Veiled One," I translated.

  "Yes. It goes something like this: `Can you recognize your mother?' `Of course.' `Do you recognize this veiled one?' `No.' `Yet this veiled one is your mother. Hence you can recognize your mother… and not recognize her.' "

  I frowned. "Whatever made you think of that?"

  "I'm not sure. Something I read recently. Aristotle, was it? Or Plato…?"

  Davus looked thoughtful. "I don't see the point. You could put a veil over any woman and trick her child into not recognizing her. But-it wouldn't necessarily work." He raised an eyebrow and looked uncommonly shrewd. "What if the child recognized her perfume?"

  "I suspect the veil is metaphorical, Davus."

  "The fallacy is an epistemological allegory," Hieronymus interjected, but this, too, was Greek to Davus.

  I cleared my throat, willing to debate the fallacy out of simple boredom. "How do we know what we know? How can we be sure of what we know? And what do we mean by `knowing,' anyway? Very often we say we `know' a person or a thing, when all we really mean is that we know what they look like. To truly know a thing, to know its essence, is knowledge of a different order."

  Hieronymus shook his head. "But that's not the point of the fallacy. The point is that you can both know and not know at the same time. You can be in a state of knowledge and in a state of ignorance about the same subject simultaneously."

  I shrugged. "That merely describes most people, about most subjects, most of the time. It seems to me-"

  "Look!" said Davus. "Look there!"

  A ship had appeared, sailing around the headland from the direction of Taurois. By the pale blue pennant atop its mast, we knew at once that it was a Massilian vessel.

  A great cheer erupted from the spectators. Old men stamped their feet. Children let out shrill screams. Women who had stood for hours beneath the hot sun swooned and fainted. Although the ship was still too far off to appreciate the sight, many of the spectators waved their bits of cloth in the air.

  The cheering grew louder as the vessel approached the harbor entrance. But no other vessel was seen to be following, and the cheering began to fade. Of course, the fact that the ship was arriving alone did not necessarily forebode something sinister; perhaps it was a messenger ship sent ahead of the rest to carry news of victory. Still, there was something disturbing in the way the ship approached, not on a steady course but veering back and forth erratically, as if the crew were shorthanded or completely exhausted. As the vessel drew nearer, it became evident that it had suffered considerable damage. The ramming beak at the prow was in splinters. Many of the oars had been lost or broken, so that the long row along the waterline had as many gaps as a beggar's grin. The remaining oars moved out of time with each other, as if the rowers had no drummer to keep them to a rhythm. The deck was a shambles, with overturned catapults and broken planking, scattered with prostrate bodies that did not move. The crewmen who manned the sail did not wave as they approached the harbor entrance but kept their eyes downcast and their faces averted. One figure in particular I noticed, an officer wearing a light blue cape. He stood alone at the prow of the ship, but instead of facing forward he kept his back to the city, as if unable to bear the sight of Massilia.

  The cheering dwindled until it died altogether. A cold silence descended upon the spectators.

  All eyes turned toward the headland, watching for the next ship to appear. But when ships were sighted-many ships, a whole fleet sailing in formation-they were not where anyone expected to see them. They were well out to sea, far beyond the offshore islands, barely within sight. They were sailing with all speed in a westerly direction, away from the scene of the battle and away from Massilia.

  "Davus, you brag about your keen eyesight. What do you see out there?" I asked, though I already knew what the answer must be.

  He shaded his brow and squinted. "Not Massilian ships; no pale blue pennants. And not those rough-hewn galleys of Caesar's, either. But they are Roman warships."

  "How many?"

  He shrugged. "Quite a few."

  "Count them!"

  I watched his lips move. "Eighteen," he finally announced. "Eighteen Roman galleys."

  "The so-called relief ships from Pompey! All together. All intact. Sailing off toward Spain. They didn't take part in the battle at all! They must have hung back, watching and waiting. If the Massilian fleet had looked a fair match for Caesar's, surely they would have joined the fight. This can only mean-"

  I was interrupted by a sound so strange, so full of hopeless despair, it froze my blood. The damaged, returning vessel must have reached the harbor and been boarded by those anxiously awaiting it. The crew had delivered their news. The sound I heard must have originated there, with the fi
rst men to hear that news. They moaned. Those who stood behind them heard the noise they made and repeated it. That wailing moan was a message without words, more devastating than any words could be.

  It spread through the city like flames through a forest, growing louder and louder. It reached the pious in their temples, whose chanting abruptly turned to shouts and screams. It reached the spectators on the wall and moved toward us so rapidly and so palpably that I cringed as it approached and broke over us like a wave of pure despair.

  The whole city joined in a great collective moan. I had never heard anything like it. If the gods have ears, they surely heard it, too, yet the heavens gave no response; the sky remained a blank. Even a hard-hearted man can be stirred to pity by a bleating lamb or a whimpering dog. Are the gods so much higher than mortals that they can hear the despair of a whole city and feel nothing?

  A kind of madness gripped the spectators along the wall. Women dropped to their knees and tore their hair. An old man climbed atop the wall and jumped into the sea. People turned toward the Sacrifice Rock, pointed at the scapegoat and screamed curses in Greek too fast and too crude for me to follow.

  "I think perhaps it's time for me to go home," said Hieronymus. His voice was steady but his face was pale. He had slipped off his shoes while sitting cross-legged on the rock. He stood and bent over to slip them on again, then gave a little cry and reached down. He had stepped on something.

  "Pretty," was all he said as he held it up and peered at it. It glinted in the sunlight: a ring made of silver, quite small, as if for a woman's finger, and set with a single stone. The stone was dark and shiny. He slipped it into the pouch that had contained the stuffed dates. I wanted to have a closer look, but Hieronymus was in a rush. More curses were shouted at him. The crowd on either side was gradually converging toward the Sacrifice Rock.

  The way down the slanting rock face was simple compared to the method by which Davus and I had climbed onto the summit from the wall. We descended more swiftly than I would have preferred, but I never felt the sort of danger I had felt swinging over empty space with Davus's hand clutching mine. Above and all around us the moaning continued. As we descended, the noise, echoing off the city walls, grew even louder and more unearthly.

  Near the base the way grew steeper, so that we had to climb down backwards, facing the rock. As we neared the bottom I looked over my shoulder and was relieved to see that the area looked deserted; I had feared that an angry crowd might await the scapegoat. But where was the green litter that had brought him? It appeared that his litter bearers had panicked and taken flight.

  Then I glimpsed a figure in the shadows of a nearby building and almost lost my footing. Davus was beside me. I gripped his arm.

  "Look there!" I whispered. "Do you see?"

  "Where? What?"

  It was the same cowled figure we had first seen outside the city, then again on the way back from Verres's house. "Enkekalymmenor," I whispered.

  "What?"

  "The veiled one."

  The figure haltingly stepped from the shadows and moved toward the base of the rock as if to meet us. He raised his hands. For a moment it seemed that he intended to push back the cowl and show his face.

  Suddenly he stiffened and looked over his shoulder toward the shadows from which he had come. He bolted in the opposite direction, his cloak billowing after him, and vanished.

  A moment later I saw what had caused him to flee. A troop of soldiers appeared from the shadows and marched straight to the foot of the Sacrifice Rock.

  Their commander signaled for his men to halt, then crossed his arms and glowered up at us. "Scapegoat! Reports reached the First Timouchos that you were seen on the Sacrifice Rock, trespassing on sanctified ground. By order of the First Timouchos, I command you to vacate the site immediately. The same goes for your two companions."

  "Well, really!" said Hieronymus, sounding petulant and a little out of breath. The rock flattened considerably at the base, so that he was able to turn about and take the last few steps facing the officer head-on. Davus followed him, hanging back a bit to make sure that I stepped off the rock safely.

  "There, we're off the rock. Now that you've done your job, you can run along," Hieronymus snapped at the officer. "Unless you're here to escort me safely home. My litter seems to have vanished, and there's an ugly mob forming along the battlements-"

  "I'm here to escort you, but not to your house," said the officer, sneering.

  Hieronymus's sarcasm suddenly deserted him. From behind I saw his fingers tremble. He clenched his hands to stop the shaking. He swayed as if he were dizzy.

  If the soldiers did not mean to escort him home, then where? Massilia had lost its navy. Massilia had been betrayed by Pompey. Her people already faced starvation and pestilence; now they could look forward to capitulation and total catastrophe. Their city was older than Rome, her ancient ally; older even than their mutual enemy, Carthage. But Carthage had been destroyed, obliterated so completely that no trace of that once-great city, or its proud people, remained. Massilia could be destroyed just as completely. Until now, hope had staved off that cruel realization. Now hope was gone. Was this the moment for the scapegoat to earn his name? Had the priests of the xoanon Artemis determined that now, in this darkest hour, the time had come for the scapegoat to take all the sins of the troubled city upon his shoulder and, with him, into oblivion? Had these soldiers come to drive him back up the rock, onto the precipice, and over the edge-no longer trespassing, but enacting his destiny-while all Massilia watched and cursed his name?

  I held my breath. At last the officer spoke.

  "You're not to return to your own house, Scapegoat. I'm to take you directly to the house of the First Timouchos. And I have orders to bring along these two as well." He glared at Davus and me. "Come along!"

  Meekly, we obeyed. The soldiers drew their swords and formed a phalanx around us. At a quick pace we headed away from the Sacrifice Rock toward the house of Apollonides.

  XVI

  As we made our way through the heart of the city, I had cause to be thankful for our armed escort.

  The streets were crowded with men and women rushing aimlessly about in panic. Hieronymus in his green robes was quickly recognized. Shouts of "Scapegoat! Scapegoat!" preceded, us. At first, the citizens we passed were content to yell curses, shake their fists, and spit on the ground. Then a few of them began to dog our little retinue, running alongside us, waving their arms and screaming hysterically, their faces twisted with hatred. Soon we were surrounded by a roving mob. Urged on by their fellows, a few men, and even some women, dared to rush the moving phalanx. The soldiers shoved them roughly back with their shields, but several of them managed to thrust a hand past the soldiers. They reached for the scapegoat; failing to clutch him, they made obscene gestures. One managed to wriggle his head through. He spat in Hieronymus's face before being thrown back into the crowd.

  Finally the commander ordered his men to use their swords if necessary. When the next man rushed the phalanx, there was a flash of steel and a piercing scream. My face was spattered with warm drops. I wiped my cheeks. Beyond the blood on my fingertips, I caught a glimpse of the wounded man as he fell back, howling and clutching his arm.

  The mob kept its distance after that, but began to throw things at us, using whatever was at hand-fistfuls of gravel and small rocks, bits of broken paving stones and fragments of roofing tiles, scraps of wood, even household items like small clay pots, which exploded with a loud pop when they struck the soldier's shields and helmets. The rain of objects became so thick that the commander ordered his men into tortoise formation. A roof of shields closed over our heads. A solid wall of shields surrounded us, with swords thrust through the breeches.

  It was dark within the tortoise. I was jostled from all sides as we trudged forward. The smell of sweat from the soldiers filled my nostrils. The crashing of hurled debris was like the din of a hail storm.

  "Impious fools! Hypocrites! Idiots!"
Hieronymus clenched his fists and shouted at the top of his lungs. "The person of the scapegoat is sacred! Harm me now and you only curse yourselves!" His cries were drowned by the clatter and the screams of the mob.

  At last we reached our destination. The commander shouted orders. The soldiers contracted into an even tighter formation. We passed through a portal of some sort. Bronze gates clanged shut behind us, muffling the cries of the mob outside. The soldiers broke formation.

  We were in a small, graveled courtyard. Relieved to be free of the tortoise and the mob, I turned my eyes upward and for a brief, incongruous moment I was struck by the beauty of the sky above us. It was the hour of twilight. The firmament was dark blue at its zenith, lightening toward the horizon to shades of aquamarine and an improbable orange, streaked with high bands of tenuous, elongated clouds suffused with the blood-red glow of dying sunlight.

  I was drawn back to the moment by the clatter of debris hurled against the closed gate behind us. The mob had not dispersed. The soldiers were busy making sure that the crossbar securing the gates was properly in place. Their commander, looking a bit unnerved, mounted the short flight of steps that led up to the porch of a grand-looking house. Its door was open. On the threshold, Apollonides stood with his arms crossed, looking down at us.