Catilina's Riddle by Steven Saylor

straw. A moment later Bethesda appeared in the doorway. Bright sunlight silhouetted the stray tendrils of her coiffed hair and the long, loose stola belted beneath her breasts and again at her waist. She paused in the doorway and then walked resolutely forward like a woman expecting the worst. When she saw the body her nostrils dilated, her eyes grew wide, and she pressed her lips together until all the color was gone from them. She clutched at her stola and stamped her foot. Bethesda's manner is often imperious or brusque, but I have seldom seen her truly angry. It was a sight to make even the staunchest Roman turn to jelly.
    "You see!" she cried. "Even here! You said that life would be different in the country. No more mobs, no more murders, no more lying awake at night wondering if my children were safe! Ha! All lies!" She spat upon the corpse, then turned and swept out of the stable, hitching up her stola to protect it from the dung.
    Meto staggered back, agog. Diana began to cry. In the sunlit doorway, motes of dust swirled in Bethesda's wake. I then turned my gaze to the corpse, clenched my fists, and muttered a curse against the gods.
    Meto must have overheard, for when I looked up, he had turned as pale as the headless body at my feet.
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    Later, I would tell myself that I should have kept the discovery of the body from Bethesda. Life would have been simpler that way. But that was never an option, of course; Diana would have told her sooner or later, and why not? After such a shock the child needed to be reassured and comforted by her mother. Diana could not be expected to keep such a momentous and terrible discovery to herself.
    It did seem best, if at all possible, to keep the slaves from knowing.
    Such an incident would inflame their superstitious natures and undermine my own authority, making them unwieldy at best and at worst unreliable or even dangerous. Cato would probably have gotten rid of the whole lot after such a shock to the household, selling those he could and setting any others free to starve along the roadside. For me, such drastic measures seemed both impractical and cruel, and besides, the slaves might know things I did not. If any of them had betrayed me, I needed to discover why, and for whom. If they had not betrayed me, they still might have seen more than they knew. I might ultimately need their knowledge and their help. Something terrible had been unleashed, and I could see neither where it came from nor where it might lead.
    I had to confide in someone, and I chose Aratus. He was, after all, my steward. I swallowed my mistrust, telling myself that I had probably been unfair to him all along. Besides, if he was somehow complicit in the appearance of Nemo, perhaps I could read it in his eyes. When Meto brought Aratus to the stable, the shock on Aratus's face looked quite genuine.
    Aratus knew nothing, had seen nothing; so he assured me. He would tell none of the other slaves; so he vowed. I told him to take a few slaves from their work on the north wall and to dig a hole for the body amid the brambles in the secluded southwest corner of the farm, where the stream cut through the ridge.
    "But what reason shall I give them?" he asked.
    "Think up a reason!" I told him. "Or give them no reason at all.
    You're the foreman, aren't you? I leave it to you to handle the slaves.
    But not one of them is to know of this, do you understand? And if any of them seems to have any knowledge of it, report to me at once!"
    That afternoon, after the trench was ready, I instructed Aratus to set the slaves to some task at the far corner of the farm. Meto, Aratus, and I wrapped the corpse in a sheet and tied it to a cart, then pushed the cart over the rocky soil to the place where the hole had been dug.
    It did not take us long to cover the body with the moist soil, and then to scatter rocks and uprooted brambles over the torn earth. It would have
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    been unseemly to consign even a naked, anonymous, and