In the time it was taking for the woman’s thoughts to broach the grape-clogged path from brain to speech, I managed to invent and try out various sickly protests about the official nature of my mission, the high level of support I could command, and the urgency of finding Gaia Laelia, through whatever unorthodox means it took. I made myself out to be, in this search, actually a servant of the Vestals. Reduced to the lowest depths, I even muttered that old sad plea about no harm having been done.
Indubitably, a waste of breath.
Then Aelianus came up with a winner.
“Ma’am…” His tone was meek and respectful. He knew how to playact, apparently. I would never have thought it; he had always seemed so bad-tempered and prim. “I am a mere observer brought to this scene by chance”-Overdoing it, Aulus!-“but the man does appear to have an official mission; his need to collect information was urgent and desperate. His efforts on behalf of the small child are completely benign. If his motives were well meant, can I appeal to you? Am I not correct that if a Virgin meets a criminal she has, by ancient tradition, the power of interceding for his reprieve?”
“You are correct, young man.” The Chief Vestal surveyed Aelianus through those heavy lids. “There is a condition, however, or the Vestals would be subject to constant harassment by convicts. It has to be proved that the meeting between the criminal and the Virgin was a complete coincidence.” She turned back to me, triumphant with spite. “ Breaking into the House of the Vestals with ladders makes this meeting far from coincidental. Take him to the Mamertine Jail-the condemned cell!”
It had been a good try by Aelianus, but I could see her point. Without more ado the lictors and their henchmen massed around me, and I was marched out.
“What an absolutely terrible woman!” Always be friendly to your guards. Sometimes they find you a better cell.
Her personal lictor leered at me. “Lovely, isn’t she?”
I barked my shin on a builder’s trestle. “Having some work done? Progress seems slow. Don’t tell me Vespasian is reluctant to pay for it?”
“The Chief Vestal has a full set of working drawings for complete remodeling. She’ll wait. She’ll get exactly what she wants one day.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“What a shame!” They guffawed as they dragged me along the Sacred Way, knowing that I only had about one day’s life left to me.
When we arrived under the Gemonian Stairs in the shadow of the Capitol, it took them hours to find and fetch the custodian, who was not expecting customers. All too soon, though, I was being installed in the dungeon which normally houses foreigners who have rebelled against Roman authority, that bare, stinking hole near the Tabularium from which the public strangler extracts his victims when they pay the final, fatal price for being enemies of Rome. My arrival dismayed the jailer, who normally makes a small fortune from showing tourists the cells where barbarians are so briefly dumped at the end of a Triumph. He would still admit the gamblers, but he realized that for the short time I was in occupation before I was exterminated, I would expect to share the fees. He went off gloomily, back to wherever he had been enjoying himself.
The Mamertine is a crude prison. Strong stone walls enclose irregular cells that used to form part of a quarry. Water runs through it. At least the jailer’s lack of interest meant he just left me in the upper cell, not shoved down through the hole in the floor into the fearsome lower depths. It was pitch dark. It was chilly. It was solitary and depressing.
This was still, just about, the eighth day before the Ides of June. Behind me lay the longest day I could ever remember, and now I was facing death. I toyed with a few none-too-serious plans for escaping. Once I would have had a go. The problem with being the wellknown equestrian Procurator of the Sacred Geese and Chickens was that I could never again merge into anonymity. If I did escape, either I would have no life, even on the Aventine, or I would be recognized by the public and thrown straight back in here.
In the absence of anything optimistic to contemplate, I rolled myself up in my toga and went to sleep.
L
DAWN STRAGGLED OVER the Palatine and the Capitol, ushering the seventh day before the Ides of June. At last. It had to be less tiring and depressing than the eighth. I hoped the journey to the Styx would be an easy one.
Had I been at home, my calendar would have reminded me it was the start of the Vestalia. Today Vespasian would hold the lottery for a new Virgin. Today, that is, but only after some frantic rejigging of the favorites list by clerks in the pontifical offices, to take account of the absence of Gaia Laelia. Today, perhaps, the Emperor would be told about me.
Perhaps not. I was history.
