“He may have been too shocked, or too stupid, but I think it may have been another reason.” His fingers worked nimbly on the string, fashioning a knot. “You remember the spot on the back of Paulus’s neck I showed you?”
I nodded. Asklepiodes stepped up to me and his hands moved swiftly. Then I was strangling again, only this time the Greek was standing before me, hands behind his back and smiling. My hands went to my neck, clawing at the cord, but it was buried in the flesh and I couldn’t get them under it. Black spots appeared before my eyes and the inside of my head thundered like the Nile cataracts. I could feel the strength draining from my knees and I fell to all fours, no longer able even to feel my hands. I felt hands at the back of my neck and, suddenly, breath filled my lungs, sweet as water to a man dying of thirst.
Asklepiodes helped me to the couch and handed me a cup of watered wine. “You see,” he said, holding the bowstring before my clearing eyes, “it is a noose rather than a true garrote. The Syrian slipknot tightens and will remain tight after it is released. Yet one who has the skill may loosen it in an instant.”
“You must be the terror of your students,” I croaked. “I hope you don’t demonstrate the sword that way.”
“I have found that a strong object lesson need not be repeated.”
I had indeed learned not one but two valuable lessons, one of which was that it was unwise to rely upon my own limited assessment of any situation in which the circumstances were bizarre or unprecedented. At such times there is always a tendency to give one’s own ignorance and prejudice the weight of knowledge. I vowed always to seek out informed and expert opinion, as one customarily does in legal, medical and religious matters.
I thanked Asklepiodes for half-killing me and departed. My puzzle had now been simplified to a small degree. The murderer of Sinistrus had also slain Sergius Paulus, and it was the same foreign boy who had broken into my house and attacked me. At this point, even a minor simplification was desirable.
My anger, on the other hand, was growing. Great men were conspiring to thwart my investigation. Claudia had, in some way I could not yet fathom, made use of me. Most illogical of all, I was angry at Paulus’s murder. I had met him only once, and I suspected him of involvement in conspiracy, but I had liked the man. In a city of self-seeking politicians and military brigands who styled themselves patriots, I had found him a refreshingly honest vulgarian, a man devoted to the acquisition of property and the pleasures of the flesh as only one raised in slavery can be.
I had questioned many of Paulus’s slaves before I left his house. They had been, of course, terrified at the prospect of crucifixion should the murderer not be found. They seemed to wish the eunuch no ill, but I could tell that they hoped he would be found guilty, because then they might be spared. Through all this, there was a pathetic hope in them, for Paulus had promised many that they would be freed in his will, should he die untimely.
I had not the heart to tell them that their hope was almost certainly futile, that many powerful men coveted their master’s property, and they were part of that property. The will would almost certainly be broken. They had seemed honestly grief-stricken that Sergius was dead, and it takes a man as hard-hearted as Cato (the Senator) to remain untouched by such devotion. He had never remarried after losing his slave-wife, and while he had disported himself freely with his many pretty slave girls, he had never deceived any of them with promises of marriage, as so many heartless men do. He had never produced children by any woman, a curse which he attributed to a fever he suffered about the time he shaved his first beard.
To my taste, one Sergius Paulus was worth ten of Publius Claudius, a vicious lout born with every advantage but consumed with the belief that he had somehow been denied something. At least Rome gave a man like Paulus a chance to rise from servile status and make something of himself, as Paulus had. The Greeks have always looked down their Attic noses at us and called us uncouth barbarians, but I never heard of an Athenian slave in the greatest days of Pericles gaining his freedom, becoming a citizen and having a good prospect of seeing his sons sitting with purple-bordered togas in the Curia, debating the high matters of state with the other Senators.
You have to grant us that. We Romans have practiced cruelty and conquest on a scale never attempted by any other people, yet we are lavish with opportunity. We have enslaved whole nations, yet we do not hold a previous condition of servitude as a bar to advancement and high status. The patricians make much of their superiority, yet what are they but a pitiful remnant of a decrepit, priestly aristocracy long discredited?