Catilina's Riddle by Steven Saylor Page B

hearing everything around me with an uncanny clarity. The full moonlight was so bright that I could see everything almost as if by daylight, as if the sun had simply turned to blue fire instead of yellow.
    All was normal, and yet not normal at all. As earlier in the day, I felt the same strange numbness in the midst of acute perception.
    I passed through the gate and walked toward the hillside until I found myself at the southwest corner of the estate, not because that was
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    where we had buried the stranger, but because it was the most secluded place on the farm.
    I had tried to flee from Rome, but Rome was too great. Within this world, there is no escape from her. Rome is like a net, and men are fish caught in her sweep. Even if a man could make himself so small as to pass through the net, he would only find himself the prey of larger men; and even if he could be so clever and so fast as to escape those other men, he would still find himself at the mercy of Fortune, which is the sea in which we swim, and of the Fates, which are the crags upon which we are pounded. There is no escape.
    And so I sat on a rock and gathered up the hem of my tunic and rolled it into a ball, then pressed it to my mouth and screamed into it.
    I screamed as loudly as I could, and no one heard—not Bethesda softly snoring, nor the slaves, nor Meto and Diana sound asleep in their beds.
    All day I had held that scream inside me. Something unexpected and terrible had occurred. I had examined the situation, learned what I could from it, attempted to control it. But from the first moment I saw the headless corpse, all I had really wanted to do was to scream—the furious anguished scream of the wolf caught in a trap, of the eagle thrust into a cage.
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    P A R T T W O
    CANDIDATUS
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    C H A P T E R E I G H T
    or the next several days I waited in anticipation of a visitor who did not come.
    F In the meantime life resumed its normal rhythm. Work on the farm continued as always. Aratus oversaw the field slaves and worked on my accounts, Congrio cooked, the house slaves went about their business.
    The days grew longer and hotter, and the nights grew warmer, except in my bed, where things were quite chilly. Bethesda never once queried me about the body in the stable; she had decided long ago, and rightly, since I was then her master, that if my work brought danger into our lives, then dealing with it was my worry, not hers. Her outburst in the stable had been a rare occurrence, and she clearly did not intend to repeat it and would bite her tongue rather than mention it again. Her unspoken attitude announced that she simply saw no point in wasting her breath on interrogating or chastising me; secretly I knew she was deeply worried.
    Her manner was cool and distant, like that of soldiers' wives who must live with the terrible prospect of losing their husbands and yet partly blame their husbands for such a possibility in the first place, and thus feel anxiety and anger and helplessness all together. Feigned apathy is a protection, a steeling of the will against the implacable Fates. Bethesda's aloofness I had experienced before and grown used to, but mixed with it was a harsh new strain of suspicion and hard scrutiny, as if I were guilty of a deliberate breach of faith and were directly responsible for subjecting her to the shock of Nemo's arrival.
    She was playing a game of patience, I thought, waiting for me to
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    in to her more than once, and with an oblique mention of what had happened in the stable let her know I was ready to confide in her, but every time this happened she responded by loudly changing the subject, slamming doors, stalking from the room, and generally making life miserable for everyone in the household. "This wouldn't be happening if I had kept you a slave instead of marrying you," I would grumble halfheart-edly under my breath, but of course there was no one to hear me, and I did not quite believe the words