The Water Thief Read online

  A L S O B Y B E N P A S T O R

  Lumen

  Liar Moon

  Brink Tales (I misteri di Praga)

  Kaputt Mundi

  The Horseman’s Song (La canzone del cavaliere)

  The Dead in the Square (Il morto in piazza)

  The Venus of Saló (La venere di Saló)

  To the innumerable creatures, wild and tame,

  killed for sport throughout history, and to this day

  A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

  As most writers, I owe much to many people, too numerous to thank individually. Because of the love for antiquity they kindled in me, in this case I would like to express my gratitude to the internationally renown scholars I was fortunate to have as my teachers at the Università degli Studi La Sapienza of Rome, especially Achille Adriani, Giovanni Becatti, Ferdinando Castagnoli, Margherita Guarducci, Massimo Pallottino, and Romolo Augusto Staccioli. Gratias vobis ago. To my literary agent Piergiorgio Nicolazzini and to the staff of St. Martin's Press: thank you. Also, a debt of affection to Hadrian, Marguerite, Federico, Yukio, and the Boy.

  A U T H O R ’ S N O T E

  “To Diocletian Augustus, his Aelius Spartianus, greeting.” In the introduction to The Lives of the Later Caesars, classical scholar Anthony Birley thus quotes one of the authors of the Historia Augusta. This IV century CE compendium of imperial biographies, translated and richly annotated by Birley, derives in turn from previous historical works. Of Aelius Spartianus, we know close to nothing. With Sir Ronald Syme, I like to think he might have been a soldier, an erudite, and a collector. The story of this investigation is fictional, but the historical characters and the incidents of their lives are based on biographical truth.

  Antinous was from Bithynium, a town in Bithynia, also known as Claudiopolis. He had been the emperor's favorite and died in Egypt, either by accidentally falling into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or—which is the truth—by being offered up as a sacrifice.

  —Cassius Dio,

  Epitome of Roman History, Book lxix

  All these things, in truth, never happened. Yet they will exist forever.

  —Sallust

  P R O L O G U E

  You may call me Spartianus. I was born during the reign of Aurelian, restitutor exerciti at Castra Martis, in Moesia Prima, then called Moesia Superior or Dacia Malvensis. I grew up at Ulcisia Castra in Valeria, then called Pannonia Inferior, where my father served with the Legion II Adiutrix, and rose from the ranks to attain the position of tribune, that is colonel, of the Schola Gentilium Seniorum, Crack Regiment of the Senior Confederates. My aunt Mansueta, having through warfare become a widow, was taken as a wife by the dead man’s brother, and this is how, through her second marriage, she is to me aunt and mother, and I am—as it were—my half-sisters’ and my own first cousin. We are of Pannonian stock, but—as my name Aelius suggests—ever since the reign of the deified Hadrian my family has had ties with Rome, first as slaves, then as freedmen, and finally as free men. My paternal great-grandfather Aelius Spartus became a citizen under the rule of the deified Antoninus Caracalla, when citizenship was extended throughout the empire.

  As expected of one of my birth, I was trained as a cavalry soldier. Thanks to my father’s good name and accomplishments I was directly commissioned with the rank of protector domesticus, officer of the Guard, at the age of nineteen, and saw action against the Saracens during the Syrian campaign. Before the age of twenty-two, given my disposition naturally inclined toward study and an inherited attitude for the res militaris, I had already been promoted to praepositus Vexillationis Primae Pannonicae, commander of the First Pannonian Regiment, in which position I served under our Lord Diocletian Augustus in Egypt, when the rebellious Domitius Domitianus and Achilleus were defeated. This was nearly eight years ago, and between then and now I also served with our Lord Galerius Maximianus in the victorious second Persian campaign (which we began by traversing Armenia), as praefectus alae Ursicianae, colonel commanding the Bear-Standard Cavalry Regiment.

  My latest assignment has been as commander of a thousand-man cavalry wing attached to our Lord Diocletian Augustus at his headquarters and capital of Nicomedia. Presently, having all along continued my studies, I am being afforded for a time the opportunity to lay down the sword for the pen, in order that I may take up a narrative of the lives of those who were called by the name of caesar, princeps, or augustus. As tribunus vacans, colonel on special duty and imperial envoy, it is with gratitude to our Lord Diocletian Augustus that I prepare myself to follow this new course in my life.

  F I R S T C H A P T E R

  Aspalatum, Dalmatia,

  15 May (Ides), Monday, a.d. 304

  The pounding of mattocks and mallets followed Aelius Spartianus as he entered the compound, so much like a military camp that he wondered whether all of them, from the emperor to the last recruit, were so shaped by their duties as to think exclusively in those terms. The foursquare shape, secure and solid, to be multiturreted in the end no doubt, enclosed him with the old safety that held in without dwarfing, although its perimeter must be a mile and half at least. At once the impeccable seaside sky was locked into a rectangle of sun-filled brightness above, run by swallows and quarrelsome gulls.

  “Your credentials, Commander.” A noncommissioned officer held out his hand, and when Aelius obliged, he saluted and let him pass.

  Against the massive perimeter walls, some of the apartments in the imperial compound had been built already, and from what it seemed, a series of arched courtyards would dissect the floor plan soon. Freshly hewn limestone cornices, pedestals, and steps lay orderly according to their kind, numbered and ready to be fitted.

  “Commander, may I see your credentials?” Same uniform, another face, another proffered hand.

  “Here.”

  Aelius was curious to see that every square piece of land not specifically taken up by the workers or their tools, was carefully tended and watered, and even without much familiarity with gardening, he could tell it was cabbage that grew in neat, pale green rows.

  “Soldier, who put these here?”

  “His Divinity.”

  “The cabbage, I mean.”

  “His Divinity planted it.”

  Having presented his credentials to a third guardsman, Aelius walked past the vegetables and between heaps of ground pumice stone, lime, and sand, smelling cement being mixed. Columns lay side by side just ahead, more stacked stone. For the past twenty miles—that is, from the turnoff from the main road, where a path led to the quarries—he’d overtaken ox carts laden with squared and dressed blocks, local tufa, and a cream-colored stone meant perhaps to highlight the facings of the court. Bricks were arriving, too, by the thousands, and Aelius had asked the soldiers escorting the mule pack how far they’d come. “Aquileia,” they’d answered, though of course they must have picked up the loads at the harbor of Salonae up the road, if not immediately across from the building site.

  In what would likely become the second courtyard, a matter-of-fact, balding secretary halted his progress. His Divinity was inside, he said, overseeing the laying of pipes in the baths, so he should wait here. “Just get in line.” He handed him a chalk disk with a number. “When I call your number, follow me inside.”

  Aelius looked at the number, which read a discouraging 36. “Very well. Is there a place where I can spend the night?” he asked.

  “You can check with the barbers outside the gate. They rent cots on the side.”

  It was common knowledge that Diocletian did not care for curls and bangs, so that barbers within the environs of whatever imperial residence he happened to be in, made a small fortune by promptly shearing off the locks of those who arrived fashionable, but had to enter the precinct dismally tradi
tional. Even here, one could tell by the pale swatches of skin on their necks, how the fair Batavians and Swabians serving on this or that general’s staff had had to submit to shearing. As in Aelius’s case, they were here for official business, and waited their turn in the courtyard alone or in small groups, talking under their breath in their native language, or the army Latin familiar to all. The round felt army cap, dark red, common to all ranks but for the quality of its knit, stood planted like a cork on the head of some, pushed back from the forehead on others, slightly cocked to the side on most, as the song went:

  You’ll know us by our jaunty caps

  Tipped to the side, eià eià

  You’ll know us by the steely swords

  Hung at our side, eià eià!

  Spotted dogs—they were the emperor’s own, bred at Nicomedia—ran freely on the grounds, sniffing and playing, collar-free and friendly. The story was that Diocletian had trained them to smell perfume on his visitors (another of the things he did hot abide), but even though Aelius knew it to be a tale, still there were those officers who stopped by the closest facility before walking in, and washed their faces and necks to remove the reek of scent and bath oil.

  Aelius was about to retrace his steps to inquire about lodgings when, by the way the men in the courtyard turned and stood at attention, he could tell the imperial retinue was in sight. Indeed, Diocletian himself was looking out from an unfinished doorway to the side. “Ha!” He called out. “My historian—come, come! Let him through, boys; he’s my historian, just in from Nicomedia. Aelius, how are you coming along with the drowning of the Boy?”

  The words were shouted, which created an effect. Aelius knew what Diocletian meant, but was surprised that he should recall the subject of their last correspondence. The death of an imperial favorite nearly two centuries earlier was hardly of interest to anyone but a researcher. He said apologetically, passing between the rows of frowning officers who’d have to wait even longer now, “It’s the least clear episode in the life of the deified Hadrian, Your Divinity”

  “Well, you’ll have to say something about it. If it was an accident, you have to say that. If it was murder, then you have to say that, too.”

  “The sources are ambiguous, Your Divinity.” Having come within a few steps of the emperor, Aelius greeted him showing the palms of his hands, slightly cupped, resting his forehead against the fingertips.

  “The sources might be, but the Nile is not.” Diocletian laughed at his own joke, waving him closer. “It happened there, so you’d be well advised in traveling to Egypt, all the more since there are things I want you to look immediately into.”

  This was altogether news.

  Within moments they were walking toward the other end of the compound, far from the waiting visitors. Diocletian looked well, carrying his bull-necked and tanned sixty years on a solid pair of legs. “Well, I figured it was high time for me to have a house,” he was saying. “After all, a house I have never really had. A palace is not a house, and as for Rome, the whole damn thing is a palace! You may quote me, for all this calling me domine, a ‘lord of the house’ I have not in fact become until now. And as you can see, bad habits die hard. The military camp follows me in my own house; I had to design it in a way that was comfortable for me.” That this was the same man in the presence of whom one adored the Sacred Purple was difficult to believe. Diocletian had an old tunic on, threadbare at the elbows and stained here and there. On his head, as in his old military days, hair stood short and straight, an enlisted man’s haircut. Even his boots were army boots, scuffed arid worn, and the left leg of his trousers hung out while the other was tucked in. “Palaces are not efficient. In the army, it’s all square angles: no fumbling about, no wondering where it’s at. It’s either here, or there. So, as the imperial pensioner I aim to. be eventually, I get to have my own kind of quarters at last. They tell me diplomats and such will look down on the vegetable patch, but if I want to grow cabbages by the window, by God, I will.”

  Aelius agreed promptly. “There’s a lot to be said for growing one’s own.”

  “That what I think. Have you seen the north gate? You have to see it. I’m showing it to everyone who comes. All the gates are going to be beautiful, but the north gate is special, my golden gate. I’m going to have four statues on top of it—me and the three others—and cornices and consoles and plinths and niches and all that. It all looks big but it isn’t, you know. You could fit it six times or so inside a full-sized legionary camp.”

  The sightseeing continued, and as he listened to the emperor, Aelius Spartianus discovered that traveling here held its own melancholy for him. He’d gone around with the army so much, he, too, hungered for a place to call home, though he had no clear idea of what “home” might be, since army camps and officers quarters were really all he’d known. In that sense, being requested to start his book with a biography of the deified Hadrian intrigued him, because that ruler had done nothing but travel for years on end. And, having come to the only place that—as far as Aelius’s readings to date showed—he could call “home,” he’d named its many buildings after the many places he’d visited. As if, even at home, he needed to feel that he traveled. Which of course might also mean that, everywhere Hadrian had journeyed to, he’d been thinking of his Tiburtine home. It was this disquietude and this longing that allowed him to discern Hadrian’s nature, which in every other sense—its cruelty, its fickleness, its obsessive love for the Boy who’d drowned during a pleasure trip along the Nile—was so different from his own. Ever the soldier, he made ready for the travel as soon as he left the emperor’s palace.

  Antinoe, also known as Antinoopolis,

  Heptomania Province, Egypt (Aegyptus Herculia),

  6 Payni (I June, Thursday), 304

  In the eight years of his absence, Egypt had changed the way a mountain changes when a grain of dust is removed from it. Since landing at Canopus on the Nile Delta, all the way through the temple-dwarfed, tourist-ridden, named-after-animals cities of Leontopolis, Crocodilopolis, Oxyrhynchus, Cynopolis, he arrived in the city named for the dead Boy nearly eight generations ago. The river was already in flood at the First Cataract, they told him, and was expected to break through it and other such dams before reaching Antinoopolis in a couple of weeks, at the healthy level of eighteen cubits. So as not to contravene local superstitions, for the last forty miles Aelius had foregone traveling by water, leaving the well-rigged navy launch that battled the current like a shuttle through a rebellious weave.

  Everything along the river was old, old, old. The world itself seemed to have started here.

  It was the weight of the ages that he most remembered about Egypt. All was overshadowed by it, so that for all its being a land so dry and sun-drenched, still the past cast across it a long shadow of incomprehensible or only half-understood antiquity. His campaign days here had been like serving anywhere else: an objective to be reached, the means to do so, and going at it as by training and temperament. He had been busy meanwhile, and put them out of his head. Yet, then as now, place names haunted him, the slow procession of riverside villages enormously ancient, choked by sand at the back, with their outlying measly oases where shade was as precious as water. Crocodiles still sunned themselves openmouthed, and the murkiness of the river itself remained—today as it was eight years ago—more treacherous and unnerving than the seas one had to cross to get here. He remembered the swiftness underwater of the reptiles that moved like hideous living driftwood, and bore the name of gods, their lumbering advance on the ground, divested of the means that gave them speed in water and made them conquer; their sleeping in the sun looking for the world like this country, grizzled and hard-skinned, immensely powerful if only one let one’s guard down, not to be trusted, intriguing, and divine.

  At the command post none of the recruits knew him, but rank and uniform—not his being here to study history and the mysterious death of an imperial lover more than a century earlier—ensured that all appropriate
deference was shown to him. The head of the unit was away, so Aelius deposited his credentials with his adjutant and headed for his quarters; these, he had already picked out across from the city mall, a vast ground-floor flat with everything in it, including private baths. And it so happened that as he prepared to leave the command post, the officer of the day should meet him at the entrance. “Aelius Spartianus?” he half-shouted in recognition, staring him in the face. “It’s Gavius, old man! Why, it’s good to see you! What are you doing in this neck of the—and what’s happened to your hair, for crying out loud? How do you mean, ‘gone gray’? You’re younger than I am!”

  They embraced, clumsily, in the crowded space of the street. “Well, it’s gray.” Aelius smirked. “At first I thought it was just bleached from the sun, but there’s no fooling myself.”

  Gavius Tralles led him back inside by the arm, and preceded him down the hallway. A brother officer from the days of the Egyptian campaign, he was, like himself, an army brat of Pannonian descent. Light-haired, yellow-eyed, with the build of a wrestler, he looked much as he’d looked years earlier, good-natured, perennially in need of a shave, ready to laugh. “Welcome to Tau country.” He glanced back, using the army slang that described Egypt by the T-shape of the Nile and its delta. “You’re here on official business, no doubt.”

  “Partly, yes.”

  “A-ha! It’s the Christians, isn’t it?” From his friend’s silence, Tralles seemed to recognize the inopportune nature of his question, and corrected himself. “Well, you’re not here to sightsee.”

  “That, too.” Aelius kept his eyes to the brightness of the window at the end of the hallway, that made the command post look dark even at this hour. Politely, he mentioned his history project, and neutrality returned to the conversation.