Free Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) by Steven Saylor Page A

expected to be circulating with high nobles like the Metelli and Messalli. I looked down at the garments I wore, a common citizen’s toga over a plain tunic. The only touch of purple was a wine stain near the hem. Bethesda claimed to have spent hours trying to remove it without success.
    By the time we reached the summit, even Tiro was showing signs of fatigue. His dark curls were pasted to his forehead with sweat. His face was flushed with exertion – or perhaps with something more like excitement. I wondered again about his eagerness to reach Caecilia Metella’s house.
    ‘This is it,’ Cicero huffed, pausing to catch his breath. The house before us was a sprawling mass of rose stucco, ringed about by ancient oaks. The doorway was recessed beneath a portico and flanked by two helmeted soldiers in full battle gear with swords at their belts and spears in their fists. Grizzled veterans from Sulla’s army, I thought, and gave a start.
    ‘The guards,’ Cicero said, making a vague gesture with his hand as he mounted the steps. ‘Ignore them. They must be sweltering beneath all that leather. Tiro?’
    Tiro, who had been staring in fascination at the soldiers’ gear, sprang ahead of his master to rap at the heavy oak doors. A long moment passed in which we all caught our breaths and removed our hats beneath the shaded portico.
    The door opened inward on silent hinges. Cool air and the scent of incense wafted out to greet us.
    Tiro and the door slave exchanged the typical formalities – ‘My master comes to see your mistress’ – then we waited for another moment before the slave of the foyer came to usher us inside. He relieved us of our hats, then disappeared to fetch the announcer. I looked over my shoulder at the doorkeeper, who sat on a stool beside the portal busying himself with some sort of handicraft, his foot attached to the wall by a chain just long enough to allow him to reach the door.
    The announcer arrived, obviously disappointed to find that it was Cicero and not some grovelling client from whom he might extort a few denarii before allowing further admission to the house. From small signs – his high voice, the visible enlargement of his breasts – I realized he was a eunuch. While in the East they are an indispensable and ancient part of the social fabric, the unsexed remain a rarity in Rome and are looked on with great distaste. Cicero had said that Caecilia was a follower of Oriental cults, but to keep a eunuch in her household struck me as a truly bizarre affectation.
    We followed him around the central atrium and up a flight of marble steps. The announcer pulled back a hanging curtain, and I followed Cicero into a chamber that would not have looked too out of place in a high-priced Alexandrian brothel.
    We seemed to have stepped into a large and overdecorated tent, plush and pillow-strewn, with carpets and hangings everywhere. Brass lamps hung from standing braziers in the corners and exhaled trickles of smoke. It was from this room that the smell of incense permeated the house. I could hardly breathe. The various spices were being burned without the least sensitivity to their individual proportions and properties. The crude concentrations of sandalwood and myrrh were nauseating. Any Egyptian housewife would have known better.
    ‘Mistress,’ the eunuch whispered in a high voice. ‘The esteemed Marcus Tullius Cicero, advocate.’ He quickly withdrew.
    At the far end of the room was our hostess, sprawled face down amid cushions on the floor. Two female slaves attended her, kneeling on either side. The slaves were dark-skinned and dressed in Egyptian style, wearing diaphanous gowns and heavily made-up. Above them, dominating the room, was the object before which Caecilia prostrated herself.
    I had never seen anything quite like it. It was clearly an incarnation of one of the Oriental earth goddesses, Cybele or Astarte or Isis, though I had never before seen this particular permutation. The statue