Last Seen in Massilia: A Novel of Ancient Rome Read online

  The soldier puffed out his chest. “We know, my comrade Marcus and me, because we two are stationed to guard this place. While the siege is on, our job is to keep this temple and the surrounding grove safe from bandits and looters—though what anybody would take I can’t imagine, and you can see for yourself how the Massilians have let the place go to ruin. But once the siege is over, Caesar doesn’t want Pompey or anybody else to be able to say he was disrespectful of the local shrines and temples. Caesar honors all the gods—even rocks that fall from the sky.”

  I peered at the soldier’s ugly face. “You’re an impious fellow, aren’t you?”

  He grinned. “I pray when I need to. To Mars before a battle. To Venus when I throw the dice. Otherwise, I don’t imagine the gods take much notice of me.”

  I dared to touch the thing on the pedestal. It was made of dark, mottled stone, shiny and impermeable in some places and in other places riddled with fine pores. Riding through the valley, I had seen phantom shapes, illusions of light and shadow, but none had been as strange as this.

  “It has a name, that sky rock,” offered the soldier. “But you have to be a Greek to be able to pronounce it. Impossible for a Roman—”

  “Xoanon.” The voice came from somewhere within the temple. The strange word—if word it was, and not a cough or a sneeze—boomed and echoed in the small space. The soldiers were as startled as I was. They clutched their helmets, rolled their eyes, and rattled their swords.

  A cowled figure stepped from the shadows. He must have been there when Davus and I entered, but in the dimness we both had failed to see him.

  He spoke in a gruff, hoarse whisper. “The skystone is called a xoanon, and xoanon is what the Massilians call the images of Artemis they carve from wood.”

  The soldiers exhibited sudden relief. “Only you!” said the one who did the talking. “I thought—I didn’t know what to think! You gave us a start.”

  “Who are you?” I asked. The man’s face was hidden by the cowl. “Are you the priest of this temple?”

  “Priest?” The soldier laughed. “Whoever saw a priest dressed in such rags?” The cowled figure, without answering, stepped past him and out the door. The soldier pointed to his head and made a gesture to indicate that the man was mad. He lowered his voice. “We nicknamed him ‘Rabidus.’ Not that the fellow’s dangerous, just not right in the head.”

  “Does he live here?”

  “Who can say? Showed up in camp not long after Caesar began the siege. Word came down from on high that we were to leave him alone. Comes and goes as he pleases. Disappears for a while, then pops up again. A soothsayer, they call him, though he doesn’t say much. As strange as they come, but harmless as far as I can tell.”

  “Is he Massilian?”

  “Could be. Or could be a Gaul. Or a Roman, for all I know; speaks Latin. He certainly knows a thing or two about local matters, as you’ve just seen demonstrated. What’s that he called the lump on the pedestal?” The soldier tried to duplicate the word without success. “Anyway, why don’t you and your son-in-law step out of the temple. It’s getting so you can’t see your hand in front of your face in here.”

  We followed the soldiers onto the porch and descended the steps. The soothsayer stood outside the gate, where there were now five horses tied to the pylons.

  “So, Gordianus of Rome, what’s your business in being here?” asked the soldier.

  “My immediate business is to find a way out of this valley.”

  He laughed. “Easy enough. Marcus and I will escort you out. In fact, we’ll escort you all the way to my commander’s tent. You being on a first-name basis with ‘Gaius Julius,’ maybe you’ll feel more comfortable explaining yourself to an officer.” He looked at me sidelong. “Whoever you are, I don’t mind saying I’m glad you turned up today. It’s slow out here, so far away from the action. You two are the first visitors we’ve had to the temple. Are you sure you’re not looters? Or spies? Only joking!”

  We readied our horses. The soldiers did likewise. The soothsayer conferred with them for a moment. The soldier called to us over his shoulder. “Rabidus says he wants to ride alongside us for a while. You don’t mind, do you?”

  I watched the cowled figure mount his swayback nag and shrugged.

  The soldiers led the way to a narrow cleft in the stone wall. The opening was impossible to see unless viewed straight on. I doubted that Davus and I would ever have found it by ourselves, even in broad daylight. A rocky path led between sheer limestone walls so close I could have touched both sides with outstretched arms. The passage was deep in shadow, almost as dim as the interior of the temple. My horse began to jerk in protest at being ridden over rough, unfamiliar ground in near darkness. At last a vertical slash of pale light appeared ahead of us. The path descended, dropping like a staircase.

  We emerged from the fissure as abruptly as we had entered it. Behind us rose a sheer cliff of limestone. Before us was a dense forest, brooding and dark.

  “How can we ride through that wilderness at night?” I asked Davus in a hushed voice. “These woods must go on for miles!”

  A voice startled me. It was the soothsayer. I had thought he was ahead with the soldiers, but suddenly he was alongside me. “Nothing in this place is what it appears to be,” he whispered hoarsely. “Nothing!”

  Before I could answer, the soldiers doubled back, edging out the soothsayer and hemming Davus and me in on either side like sheep to be herded. Did they really think we might try to escape into that deep, dark wood?

  But the forest was not as vast as it appeared to be. We rode through the enveloping gloom for only a moment, then suddenly emerged into a vast clearing. The last glow of twilight illuminated a landscape of endless tree stumps. The forest had been razed.

  The soldier saw my confusion and laughed. “Caesar’s doing!” he said. “When the Massilians refused to open their gates to him, he took one look at those thick city walls and decided an attack by sea might be advisable. Only problem: no ships! So Caesar decided to build a navy overnight. But to build ships you need big trees—cypresses, ash trees, oaks. Not many such trees in this rocky land; that’s why the Massilians declared this forest sacred and never touched it, not for all the hundreds of years they’ve been here. Gods lived in this wood, so they said, gods who’d been here since long before the Massilians came, gods so old and hidden in the gloom that even the Gauls had no names for them. The place was rank and wild, powdery beneath your feet from so much rotted heartwood over the years, with cobwebs the size of houses up in the branches. The Massilians built altars, sacrificed sheep and goats to the unknown gods of the forest. They never touched the trees for fear of some horrible, divine retribution.

  “But that didn’t stop Caesar. Oh, no! ‘Cut down those trees,’ he ordered, ‘and build me my ships!’ But the men he ordered to do the cutting got spooked. They froze up, couldn’t bring down their axes. Stood staring at each other, quivering like schoolboys. Men who’d burned cities, slaughtered Gauls by the thousands, scared Pompey himself out of Italy—afraid to attack a forest. Caesar was furious! He grabbed a double-headed ax from one of the men, pushed the fellow out of the way, and started hacking at the biggest oak in sight. Wood chips flew through the air! The old oak creaked and groaned! Caesar didn’t stop until the tree came crashing down. Everyone fell to chopping after that. Afraid Caesar might come after them with that ax!” The soldier laughed.

  I nodded. My horse seemed glad to be away from narrow, rocky places. He had no trouble picking his way between tree stumps. “But if this wood was sacred…I thought you said Caesar was making a point of respecting the Massilians’ holy places.”

  The soldier snorted. “When it suits him!”

  “He has no fear of sacrilege?”

  “Was it sacrilege to cut down an old forest full of spiders and mulch? I wouldn’t know. Maybe the soothsayer can tell us. What do you say, Rabidus?”

  The soothsayer was keeping to himself, riding a little ways off. H
e turned his hooded head toward the soldier and spoke in a hoarse, strained voice. “I know why the Roman has come here.”

  “What?” The soldier was taken aback, but recovered with a grin. “Well, tell me then! You’ll save us the trouble of torturing him to find out. Only joking! Go on, soothsayer, speak up.”

  “He’s come to look for his son.”

  The strange voice emerging from the faceless hood chilled my blood. Wings fluttered in my chest. Involuntarily, I whispered the name of my son: “Meto!”

  The soothsayer reined his horse and turned about. “Tell the Roman to go home. He has no business here. There’s nothing he can do to help his son.” He rode off at a slow pace in the direction from which we had come, back toward the last redoubt of the forest.

  The soldier grimaced and shivered like a dog shaking off water. “There’s a weird one. Not sad to see the back of him!”

  Davus tugged at my sleeve. “Fatherin-law, the fellow really is a soothsayer! How else could he have known—”

  I hissed at Davus to silence him. For a mad moment I considered turning back to pursue the hooded figure, to see what else he could tell me. But I knew that the soldiers, for all their joking, would never have allowed it. For the moment, we were their prisoners.

  We ascended a small hill. At the summit the soldier halted and pointed straight ahead at a distant hilltop ablaze with campfires. “You see that? There’s Caesar’s camp. And beyond that lies Massilia, with her back against the sea. She’ll open her gates to us, sooner or later. Because Caesar says so!”

  I looked behind us. A sea of tree stumps shone white beneath the rising moon. The soothsayer had vanished into the night.

  II

  “Says his name is Gordianus. Claims to be a Roman citizen. Calls the imperator ‘Gaius Julius,’ as if he knows him. Says he won’t say more, except to Trebonius himself. What do you think, sir?”

  The soldier had passed me on to his centurion; the centurion had passed me on to his cohort commander; the cohort commander was now conferring with the next officer above him. It was suppertime in the camp. From where I stood, just inside the officer’s tent, I could peer out the flap to see a line of men queued up with metal bowls in their hands, shuffling forward at a steady rate. A torch was mounted on a pole at the nearest intersection in the grid of pathways between tents; the light shone on weary, smiling faces of men happy to have reached the end of the day, though some were practically asleep on their feet. Many were smudged with dirt, and some looked as if they had been rolling in mud. Soldiering during a siege means endless digging: trenches, latrines, tunnels beneath the enemy’s walls.

  From somewhere toward the far end of the queue I heard the dull, repetitious knocking of a wooden spoon against metal bowls. I caught whiffs of a stew of some sort. Did I smell pork? Davus and I had eaten only a handful of bread since we’d left the tavern that morning. Beside me, I heard Davus’s stomach growl.

  From his folding chair, the officer perused us grudgingly. We were keeping him from his own supper in the officers’ mess. “Really, cohort commander, couldn’t this have waited until morning?”

  “But, sir, what shall I do with these two in the meantime? Treat them like honored guests? Or prisoners? Or release them and send them out of camp? Granted, the older one looks pretty harmless, but the big one he calls his son-in-law—”

  “You must be as stupid as you look, cohort commander, though that hardly seems possible, if you’re going to base your treatment of loiterers and trespassers on how they look. That’s a sure way of getting a knife in the back from some Massilian spy.”

  “I’m not a Massilian spy,” I said. My stomach growled to punctuate the assertion.

  “Of course not,” snapped the officer. “You’re a Roman citizen named Gordianus—or so you say. Why were you loitering at the Temple of Artemis?”

  “We were headed for Massilia. We lost our way.”

  “Why did you leave the road?”

  “The tavernkeeper told us that brigands rule that stretch of road. We attempted a shortcut.”

  “Why were you headed for Massilia in the first place? Do you have family there, or business connections? Or is it someone in the camp you’re seeking?”

  I bowed my head.

  The cohort commander threw up his hands. “This is where he clams up, sir. He’s hiding something, clearly.”

  The officer cocked his head. “Wait a moment. Gordianus—I’ve heard the name before. Cohort commander, you’re dismissed.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Go. Now, before the cooks spoon all the good bits out of that swill they’re slopping tonight.”

  The cohort commander saluted and left, casting a last, suspicious look at me.

  The officer rose from his folding chair. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m starving. Follow me.”

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “You said you wanted to speak to Caesar himself, didn’t you? And failing that, to the officer in charge of the siege? Come along, then. Gaius Trebonius never misses supper in his tent.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “If I’m lucky, he’ll invite me to join him.”

  The officer was not lucky. No sooner had he announced who I was and stated the circumstances than Trebonius, who sat chewing on a shank of pork, summarily dismissed him. The officer cast a last lingering glance not at me, but at the pork shank.

  Like Marc Antony, Trebonius was part of that younger generation who had attached themselves to the comet tail of Caesar’s career early on, and were now determined to ride it to glory or disaster. In the political arena, Trebonius had carried water for Caesar when he was a tribune, helping to extend Caesar’s command in Gaul beyond constitutional limits. In the military arena, he had served as one of Caesar’s lieutenants in Gaul, helping to crush the natives. Now that civil war had begun, he had once again cast his lot with Caesar. If his appetite was anything to judge by, he suffered no nagging regrets; the pork shank in his fist was gnawed to the bone.

  I recognized him in a vague way from having glimpsed him on the rare instances when I had visited my son Meto in Caesar’s camps. I suddenly remembered an occasion in Ravenna when Meto told me in passing that Trebonius kept a dossier of Cicero’s witticisms, which he published for his friends. Trebonius had a sense of humor, then; or at least he appreciated irony.

  He peered at me curiously. There was no reason he should have recognized my face, but he did know my name. “You’re Meto’s father,” he said, pulling a string of pork from his teeth.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t look like him. Ah, but Meto was adopted, wasn’t he?”

  I nodded.

  “And this one?”

  “My son-in-law.”

  “Looks big enough.”

  “I feel safer when I travel with him.”

  “Tell him to step outside the tent.”

  I nodded. Davus frowned. “But, fatherin-law—”

  “Perhaps these men could accompany Davus to the officers’ mess,” I suggested, referring to the soldiers who sat and stood about the tent, eating their supper. “That way we won’t have to listen to his stomach growling outside the tent.”

  “A good idea,” said Trebonius. “Everybody out!”

  No one questioned the order. A few moments later, Trebonius and I were alone.

  “I had hoped to find Caesar still here,” I said.

  Trebonius shook his head. “Left months ago. Has more important things to do than sit here and starve out a bunch of Greeks. Didn’t you get the news in Rome?”

  “The gossip in the Forum isn’t always reliable.”

  “Caesar was here at the outset, yes. He politely asked the Massilians to open their gates. They hemmed and hawed. Caesar demanded they open the gates. They refused. Caesar laid the groundwork for the siege—conferred with engineers on a strategy for bringing down the walls, oversaw the shipbuilding, instructed the officers, addressed the ranks. Then he hurried on. Urgent business in Sp
ain.” Trebonius smiled grimly. “But as soon as he disposes of Pompey’s legions there, he’ll be back—and I shall have the privilege of presenting Massilia to him, cracked open like an egg.”

  “Back in Rome I heard that the Massilians simply wanted to remain neutral.”

  “A lie. When Pompey sailed east toward Greece, his confederate, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, sailed here. Domitius arrived before Caesar did. He convinced the Massilians to side with Pompey and close their gates to Caesar. They were fools to listen to him.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Summer has come and almost gone. The gates of Massilia are still shut and the walls, I presume, are still standing.”

  Trebonius ground his jaw. “Not for much longer. But you haven’t come all this way to ask about military operations. You’d like to see Caesar, would you? So would we all. You’ll have to settle for me in his stead. What do you want, Gordianus?”

  The tent was empty. There was no one but Trebonius to hear. “My son, Meto.”

  His face stiffened. “Your son betrayed Caesar. He plotted to kill him even before Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his troops. It all came out after Pompey fled Italy and Caesar took Rome. That’s the last we’ve seen of him. If your son came to Massilia, he came on his own. If he’s inside the city, you can’t possibly reach him until the walls come down. And when that happens, if we find Meto, he shall be arrested, to be dealt with by Caesar himself.”

  Did he believe what he was saying? Did he not know the truth of the matter? Even I had been fooled for a while into believing that Meto had betrayed Caesar—Meto, who fought for Caesar in Gaul, transcribed the great man’s memoirs, and shared his tent. But the truth was far more complicated. Meto’s betrayal had been an elaborately constructed sham, a ruse meant to trick Caesar’s opponents into trusting Meto and taking him into their ranks. Meto had not betrayed Caesar; Meto was Caesar’s spy.

  That was why I had hoped to find Caesar. Caesar himself had concocted the scheme to fake Meto’s betrayal. With Caesar alone I could have spoken freely. But how much did Trebonius know? If Caesar had kept him in ignorance, then I would never be able to convince him of the truth. Indeed, it might be dangerous to do so—dangerous to Meto, if he still lived….