"It all started a couple days ago, when young Tratius came home from universitas. Seems he almost passed his final exams." 

Urbanus Legendae by P.K. Graves

Crassus Minutius returned from his guided tour of the ruins of Pompeii to find his neighborhood on the Palatine Hill overturned by chaos. Not even his preeminent status as a Senator of Rome cleared away the confusion of carts, horses, and slaves. Home late, jostled, and footsore, he asked of Bevus Minius, his promus, "What is going on out there?"

"Well, boss, that Markus Gullibus decided to pick up and move again."

Crassus groaned. Shaking the dust from his fine linen toga, he proceeded to the house’s peristyle. The fountain and small shrine to Zeus, set amid a growth of ficus, calendula, and ornamental grasses, never failed to soothe him.

"That family moves so often that when his chickens see a cart for hire they roll over and tie up their own legs, just to be ready to move to the next stopping place," Crassus said, seating himself on a comfortable bench.

Bevus shook his head. "Not this time. This time, they’re leaving the city herself."

The good Senator eyed his old slave. "What do you know about it?"

"It all started a couple days ago, when young Tratius came home from universitas. Seems he almost passed his final exams."

"Hhmph. Almost-passed is a condition that any universitas-trained rhetorician can argue into a barely passed with one philosopher tied behind his brain." Crassus sat back, letting his eyes relax into a view of the stars above the open-roofed peristyle.

"But young Tratius had himself a plan. You know those blue wax tablets the universitas likes to give its students to take their exams on? Well, Tratius gets his two tablets, just like everybody else. Then the scholar gives them their questions: one on the history of Attica and one on the social implications of combining Zeus’ temple with Mithras’. Tratius, being of a mind to study the serving girls in the caupona down the street rather than the street itself, slept, daydreamed, and doodled his way through the section on Attic history, but figures any fool can bamboozle his way through a comparative religion question. So he writes a couple of words on the second wax tablet, labels it Tablet 2, and writes a beautiful essay on the second question. When the hourglass empties he hands in one wax tablet, hurries to the Forum, asks a couple of greybeards about Attica, writes down what they say on wax tablet 1, being very careful to remember the words he put at the top of wax tablet 2. Then he stomps a big old sandal print on a corner of it and gets one of his cronies, who has a class in the same room later that day, to say he "found" the wax tablet in the back of the room and hand it in as the "lost" first wax tablet of Tratius’ test."

"Good plan," Crassus snorts. "Nice touch, with the sandal print. Boy ought to make Senator. Or maybe Caesar."

But Bevus shakes his head. "Right fine plan, boss, ‘till Tratius gets to bragging to everybody with an ear about what he did. Word not only got back to the scholar, it beat down his door to tell itself to him. Now Tratius is out on his glutius maximus from universitas, his father’s money is wasted, and the family is in disgrace."

"That’s bad, but hardly a reason to move," Crassus slipped his sandals off. Two maidservants appeared with an amphora of wine, his favorite heavy green glass goblet, and a silver-rimmed glass bowl of honeyed figs. Setting the food and wine on a table at Crassus’ elbow, they began massaging olive oil into his tired old feet. He smiled at them, almost forgetting Bevus was there.

"To cheer hisself up, Tratius takes his betrothed out that night to a nice little spot down by the Tiber. Don’t have to tell you which one." The men exchanged deep winks. "They take his father’s special covered plaustrum, the one he uses to bring all those high-price silks to the emporia. They drive to that special spot under all those weeping willow trees."

"Nobody’s around. They unhitch the horses, figuring the animals deserve some fun, too, and settle down to business. They’re there ‘til real late. When they finally want to leave, they can’t find the horses. Tratius decides to go for help, leaving the girl safe and sound in the plaustrum. Well, she’s a little nervous about all this, being the kind of girl she is, more hairdo than wit. But she does what she’s told."

"Sooner rather than later she starts hearing all these strange, scraping noises. She tells herself its just the willow branches on the plaustrum’s roof. Toward morning she hears more strange sounds, this time of liquid dripping onto the roof. She figures it’s raining. Just after sunrise who should pull up with a centurion but Markus Gullibus. The centurion throws open the plaustrum’s flaps and pulls the girl out. Holding her tight, he tells her not to look around, but of course she does."

"And there’s Tratius, hanging upside down from that big weeping willow, his hands dragging back and forth, back and forth, dripping blood all over that plaustrum’s roof."

"That’s terrible!" Crassus jerked up, spilling the olive oil.

"The boy don’t have no head. Looks like it’s been tore off, from the way the spine’s all twisted coming out of his neck."

Crassus gagged, but forced it back down. He pushed the bowl of figs away, but drained the goblet and gave it to a girl to refill. "I understand, Bevus. But why move? The murder happened so far from here."

Bevus slouched and folded his arms across his skinny chest. Crassus felt a frown cross his face, then wiped it smooth. "The boy wasn’t the only one to meet with an accident that night. Markus Gullibus’ daughter, Sabina, was home from visiting her mother’s folks in the country. She’d brought a new female slave with her, one that wasn’t used to citified ways."

"It was storming that night, and the girl forgot to shut the shutters upstairs. So this big old wind comes racing down the stairs and blows out all the oil lamps. After giving the slave’s ears a good boxing, Sabina orders her to shut the shutters. Then they hear noises, like somebody’s moving around upstairs. Except there’s nobody but them in the house."

"Sabina gives the girl a little knife and sends her up. The girl’s one of those northern types that always wear that hair-on skin. The girl goes on up. Sabina waits all alone in the dark. After a long time, she hears footsteps coming down the stairs. She breathes a huge sigh of relief, then thinks, ‘what if it isn’t what’s her name?’ Then she remembers the hairy skin and thinks, ‘I’ll just sneak over by the stairs and when she comes down I’ll feel for that. That way I’ll know if it’s her."

"The steps get closer and closer. Sabina holds her breath. When she can smell somebody she reaches out and grabs. And she finds that hairy skin."

Crassus breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh, thank Mithras," he began. But Bevus shook his head.

"The skin’s all wet and sticky. Sabina touches a little higher. All she feels is a bloody stump where the slave girl’s head should be."

"Oh my Gods!" Crassus leapt to his feet. "This is ridiculous. None of this happened, Bevus! You’re making it all up!"

Bevus shook his head, slow and sad. "Wish to gods I was, O Mighty Crassus. Then the girls would be alive and Tratius still in school and our good neighbors still our good neighbors, instead of people we only used to know."

Crassus let his slave girls pull him back down. Their soft brown hands soothed him, and their young, vibrant breasts against his neck drove out all thoughts of dead girls. "I can certainly see wanting to change houses. But why leave the city?" He winced, for Bevus was opening his mouth to tell him, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear any more.

"When Markus Gullibus comes home and finds his daughter mad and gibbering in the corner and her slave girl walking around with no head, he wants more than anything to place his hands on his son and make sure the boy’s safe. So he sends a slave over to the centurion down the street and gets that good man out of bed in the middle of the night."

"That centurion, he’s got that four-seat currus he’s so proud of, and those shiny black horses that look like Pluto left them behind when he took Ceres’ daughter for his wife. So those two men high-tail it for the Tiber, where Markus Gullibus is pretty sure his son’s taken his bride-to-be."

"Things are fine ‘till they cross Via Primus at Cardo, that intersection you wise Senators saw fit to put stepping stones into, to keep all us pedestrians safe from speeding horses and carts." Bevus smiles ingratiatingly. "Now its storming to tear the Theatre of Apollo down. As they drive, Markus Gullibus sees what looks like a woman through all the rain and wind, just standing on the street corner. They get closer. It is a girl, dressed in nothing but a flimsy silk stola. Markus Gullibus figures she must be freezing, so he gets the centurion to stop and take her up with them."

"The girl is white with cold. They wrap her in a spare robe and ask her where she’s going. She says she’s going to the Greek quarter, to number XXI Via Demitria. It’s on their way, so they’ll take her. They try to get her to talk, but she’s quiet as a statue."

"‘Bout halfway there, Markus Gullibus turns around to ask her a question. Girl’s not there anymore. Just the robe, all wet from the rain. They figure maybe she jumped out, or fell. But they can’t go back. Markus Gullibus wants his son."

"Still, the good man feels for a parent worried about a lost child. He decides to go to her house, number XXI Via Demitria. They knock on the door. An old woman opens it. She’s so poor, she doesn’t have a slave. The place is a hovel. But they’re gentlemen, and they ask about the girl. The old woman collapses and starts to cry."

"It was her daughter?" Crassus asks. The slave girls had by now stripped off the tops of their stolae and were massaging the olive oil into his shoulders with their breasts.

"It was indeed," Bevus nodded. "She’d died exactly a year ago, on the corner of Via Primus and Cardo. Under the wheels of a cart."

"So Markus brings Tertius’ body home, only to find that Sabina dead."

"Driven mad, even unto death," Crassus quoted a popular love song.

"Not quite. Spiders had got into one of those fancy hairpieces she wore and burrowed on through all her curls and plaits and buns and whatnot. Them spiders just bit and ate and bit and ate themselves right into her brain."

Crassus shuddered. "Poor Markus Gullibus."

Crassus dismissed his slaves for the night and sat alone with his grief and wonderment for a while. Then he lifted his weary bones off the bench, carried one of the lamps into the bibliotheca and began the finishing touches on some leftover Senate business.

The sounds of packing continued through the night. Somewhere around dawn the street grew silent once again. Still up, Crassus watched alone as Markus Gullibus’ plaustrums caravanned away down the street. He shook his head sadly.

Two days later the plaustrums and Markus were back.

"Seems the family – what’s left of it – didn’t get hardly out of the city wall before their bad luck found them again," Bevus began, lounging against a shelf crammed with scrolls. Crassus kept his face blank. "They’re heading down the Via Apia, out of Rome, of course, when Markus Gullibus’ wife takes sick and dies all of a sudden. Seems she got hold of a bad fig. Some of those well-traveled chickens are dead, too. So Markus Gullibus, wanting to put as much distance as he can between himself and Rome, doesn’t take the time to build a monument to her on the road, but ties her on top of one of the plaustrums, and the whole caravan rolls on."

"Somewhere about halfway to Ostia, they decide to make camp. They’re all pretty tired by now, after all that tragedy and traveling. They have supper, tell a few good tales about Tratius and Sabina, have a good cry, and go to sleep."

"The next morning they wake up to find the plaustrum with Markus Gullibus’ wife gone." Markus Gullibus sends his fastest slaves up and down the road, and a couple of trackers into the hills around, but nobody found anything."

Crassus hoped that a few nights’ sleep would make the tragedies easier to take, but he was as shocked as when he’d first come home. "Dear Gods," he murmured.

"Best I can figure, the old lady’s out driving around in the wagon, not really dead after all. Worst thing is, isn’t it seven years or so before Markus Gullibus can have her declared legally dead and all her property falls to him?"

Crassus nodded absently. "What a terrible stroke of evil to befall one family. One wonders which god they offended."

Bevus nodded soberly. "Old Markus Gullibus’ would surely give you a bargain now, considering the bloodshed."

Crassus frowned. Bevus’ words and Markus’ refusal of his bids over the last few weeks clattered in his brain. "Bevus. Did you commit these heinous crimes?"

Bevus bowed his head. "I live only to serve you, O Master."

Crassus smiled. "What a good Bevus," he purred, and embraced the wiry little man. Bevus smiled, too, then shrieked. Crassus held him close as he turned the small pugio in his gut and jerked up, forcing the blade past the ribs into the heart. When Bevus stopped twitching Crassus let his body slip to the floor. He wiped the pugio off on Bevus’ hair, just like the northern barbarians were rumored to do.

"One thing my good friend Markus Gullibus says," he murmured. "Never keep a snake close to your bosom without expecting it to bite you."

As an afterthought Crassus picked up Bevus body and carried it to a window. A line of Markus Gullibus’ plaustrums still passed. With a quick prayer to the gods Crassus let the body fall. It landed on the roof of one of the plaustrums. The driver looked around but saw nothing else, and kept going.

Crassus smiled. A new urban legend for the minds of Rome to puzzle out.

The end