by Albert Noyer
Abinnaeus went to pick up one of the scrolls. “Blank sections are cut from this old papyrus. And here are new vellum sheets with the names and seals of both Eusebios and Cyril embossed at the top.” He reached into the desk’s storage shelves and pulled out new papyrus sheets with Latin alphabet letters inked on them. He handed one to Getorius. “This look like a student’s practice sheet, yet the penmanship is an older style.”
“It’s similar to the Kashat document. “ Getorius imitated the prefect in his excitement. “Zeus Cassios! This evidence is…is hardly believable and yet inescapable. Your secretary is our forger of the papyrus! And I noticed something lying on the bed.” He went back to pick up a small clamshell-like container molded of clay. The two halves opened to reveal a crude human figure fashioned in beeswax. “Prefect, what is this?”
Abinnaeus recognized a type of talisman he had seen before. “It’s a curse-doll lying inside its coffin. In this curse, the victim’s effigy is melted on a brazier to destroy his power. Yes…there’s a ritual inscription under the doll, probably ending with a magic incantation.” He unfolded the vellum and read aloud, “It begins in Greek, ‘I deposit with you, Nepheros, this all-binding curse of the underworld gods, Pluto, Persephone, and powerful Anubis who’―”
“Sergius…” Dorothea’s voice interrupted him from the doorway. Her face was haggard, gray, with her normal serene beauty marred by an apparent sleepless night. “Sergius, what is going on in here?”
Not surprised at seeing his wife in the secretary’s room, Abinnaeus rebuked her. “You would know your way into this chamber.”
Rather than refute him, she turned to Getorius. “Karitina told me you came here. What is this about? Where is Nepheros?”
“Domina…” He looked toward Abinnaeus for a reply to his wife’s questions.
The governor lashed out, “It seems your former lover is the one who forged the Kashat papyrus.”
She gasped disbelief, “Im…impossible.”
Getorius affirmed the charge. “Domina, I’m afraid that is the truth.”
Abinnaeus went on, “Whatever his reasons, we fortunately had left the document in the bishop’s possession.”
A nervous Paulos corrected him. “Ex…Excellency, I…I believe your secretary persuaded His Holiness to give him the papyrus.”
“What, Deacon? Why would Bishop Eusebios do that?”
“Nepheros said he wanted it for…for safekeeping.”
Livid at this further betrayal, Abinnaeus tossed the curse-doll back onto the bed. “My secretary certainly didn’t come back here with the document!”
Getorius considered a possibility after surmising why the critical papyrus might be missing. “If Nestorios did succeed in escaping from exile, Nepheros may have taken the papyrus to meet him at Myos Hormos.”
“Zeus!” Abinnaeus fumed. “Alert that no-good tribune Orestes to send a cavalry wing after the man. I’ll flay his treacherous hide until its raw meat!”
“Wait, Sergius…” Dorothea touched his arm. “I…I may be able to help.”
Her husband looked at her to smirk, “You, ‘carita’?”
She ignored his sarcasm. “The morning you went to the hospital, Nepheros again came late to take breakfast. He said he had to complete a task.”
“And we can guess that the ‘task’ was to finish that forged note from Cyril to Bishop Eusebios―”
Dorothea stamped a foot in frustrated anger. “Listen to me, Sergius. I…I told him you knew about us and we…we quarreled. I will not go into details, yet hubris may have caused him to boast about his plans to me.” She looked toward Getorius. “Surgeon, you surmised correctly, yet instead of Hormos, Nepheros believes that the heretic will go to Alexandria and confront the Patriarch. He will take the Kashat papyrus there.”
“Alexandria? That’s through the west gate.” Abinnaeus turned to the deacon. “Paulos, what time did my secretary meet with your bishop?”
“Last evening, Excellency. I…I believe just after darkness.”
“Then, if Nepheros rode toward Alexandria, he has what, a…a twelve-hour gain on pursuers? Even by last night’s moon a determined horseman could travel three-quarters of the way to the city in that time.” Abinnaeus slumped onto the bed, massaging his temples in helpless frustration. “And Nepheros has access to all our imperial post stations for…for a change of horses.”
Getorius continued his speculation, “Shandi must be involved in this plot. When the Kushite informed your secretary about Nestorios’s planned escape, he timed his treachery to that eventuality.”
Somewhat heartened by the explanation, Abinnaeus stood up. “A good observation, Surgeon. That may be exactly what happened and Papnouthios arranged for the mummy to be found in anticipation of Nestorios leaving Hebet.”
“Sir, Arcadia was sure your physician was involved in the papyrus’s discovery. When we spoke with Nepheros yesterday, he insisted that Papnouthios was responsible, yet now I realize it was to divert suspicion from himself. We need to find out if Shandi is still at Pelusium and locate the physician.”
“Papnouthios?” Dorothea, still shocked at discovering Nepheros’s treachery, grasped Getorius’s sleeve. “Surgeon, while crossing the courtyard to come here, I saw the physician and his loathsome assistant slithering through the corridor toward your room. I assumed he was going to treat your wife’s fever.”
“To Arcadia’s room?” Getorius recalled her dream of being threatened by temple crocodiles and unable to find him when she needed his help. “Zeus, she could be in danger! I must get to Arcadia!”
The door to their room was unlocked. When Getorius burst inside, Arcadia lay on the bed, trembling. She had crouched as far back as possible toward the wall behind her. Her husband’s arrival eased only a little of the fear in her eyes.
Agathe, her pale blue eyes defiant, sat helplessly in a chair next to her. The flax spindle lay idle on the floor.
Papnouthios stood near Skoros, who held a small lance pointed at Arcadia’s mid-section. After the physician saw Getorius, he mocked, “The Latin ‘surgeon’. Have you in the West an antidote for the poison on the tip of my assistant’s weapon?”
Getorius saw a blackish smear coating the lance blade.
When Abinnaeus arrived in the doorway with Dorothea and Paulos, Skoros glanced back at them and took a threatening step toward Arcadia.
“Exso…outside!” Papnouthios screamed at the three, and then abruptly relented. “Wait. Prefect, I see you are unarmed. Stand at that far wall. A pity that you shun bodyguards. One might have been useful to you here.” He uttered a feeble chuckle at what he considered a jest, and then his expression was hostile again. “Dorothea, stand with him. You also, Deacon.”
Despite a racing heartbeat, Getorius realized it was not a time to antagonize the physician and spoke to him as calmly as possible. “Papnouthios, my wife and I have done you no harm. Why are you threatening her?”
The man’s dull eyes tracked the governor and his wife until they were standing in place next to the deacon, then he turned to Getorius. “Harm? Threaten? You meddled, Surgeon, discovered that the mummy I found in a Moeridis necropolis was of a female. You raised questions about the condition of the papyrus and suspected a forgery. You convinced the bishop to close my hospital.”
“No, you’re mistaken—”
“Then,” Papnouthios raved on without hearing, “I learned that Nestorios had escaped.”
“You are a disciple, then?” Getorius asked, gauging his distance from the physician and trying to distract him from harming Arcadia.
Papnouthios’s snort of contempt followed the question. “A friend of the heretic? Fool, medical knowledge is my god. Theological diseases are beyond my interests, yet I welcome this Nestorios because he could rid me of interference by the Egyptian Church.” He tittered at his next thought. “Surgeon, you and your wife arrived at an inopportune time, yet the cast of our drama must intrigue you. A concubine–loving Prefect bribes officials and becomes w
ealthy smuggling pearls and perfume. His disaffected wife”―Papnouthios called to Dorothea―“Domina, did you not yourself garrote your pet kitten to punish your husband by implicating the Kushite woman?”
Dorothea’s face drained of color, yet she did not dispute his charge.
The physician went on, chuckling in glee at his clever explanation of the situation. “The Kushite concubine’s brother murders his sister and attempts to blame the prefect for her death.”
Arcadia found enough courage to ask, “What of Nepheros?”
At her question Skoros inched closer with his lance. Arcadia pressed back against a wall whose coldness penetrated her night tunic and sent more shivers through her body.
Getorius noted the assistant’s threatening move. “Arcadia, I…I love you. Please…don’t aggravate the physician.”
“Tender sentiments,” Papnouthios smirked, but his squinting eyes were black slits devoid of emotion. The lack of expression on his smooth-shaven face, which rarely betrayed a reaction to events, now seemed fixed, almost like that of an embalmed corpse. “You ask about Nepheros, Domina? Yes, I helped that ambitious secretary with his Kashat forgery because Nestorios could establish a church that would accommodate my experiments. Surgeon, it was the secretary who struck you unconscious and tried to transfer guilt to Tanutamun. A master of confusion, Nepheros, yet I have put a spell on him…” He reached inside his purse and brought out a duplicate of the clay coffin-doll Getorius had found on the secretary’s bed. After mumbling an unintelligible curse over the charm, Papnuthios stooped to place the container on the brazier’s glowing heat. The figure inside smoked before molten wax sizzled from the crack separating the two halves and blazed up on the coals. Heat had moved the top slightly to one side; he straightened it with the flick of a fingernail.
The physician’s erratic speech and behavior reminded Getorius of what he had read about the symptoms of insanity, while researching fevers in Cornelius Celsus. Celsus observes a continuous dementia that develops in the patient as his mind becomes at the mercy of strange imaginings. Some, like Papnouthios, have an appearance of saneness, yet their insanity is abruptly revealed in violent actions. Years of his horrifying experiments have snapped the physician’s reason like a dry twig. Getorius observed his opponent. The well-groomed, arrogant physician I met a few days ago is wearing a bloodstained tunic and stoops to watch the last of the wax flames die out. What might he do next? I must distract him. “Papnouthios, you mentioned a poison. Is it solanum? Digitalis?”
“Digitalis?” The physician stirred enough to repeat the word in a sneer, as if insulted. “It is salok. The Kushite promised, but…but has not given me an antidote.”
“Shandi brought it to you?”
“From beyond India…further than Tapropane. I….” His voice trailed off as if he had forgotten the question.
“Prefect,” Dorothea murmured to her husband, “you refused bodyguards because you were stupid enough to believe that a competent official needs none. Even your demented physician realizes the folly in that thinking. He’ll kill the Latin woman.” She whispered a desperate plea. “Sergius, do something!”
Papnouthios heard her and hissed back, “Silence, woman! Si…silence.”
Skoros, visibly tiring at holding the heavy lance, changed his grip on the handle and looked back for an instruction from his master.
Getorius realized he was the only one who could help his wife. But how? I haven’t much dealt with insanity before, yet know that those so afflicted are unpredictable. I…I must try to distract the physician again. “Papnouthios, I’m sure you can come to an agreement with the bishop about continuing your experiments.”
“Experiments?”
“Were you not given limited permission to dissect bodies by Bishop Eusebios?”
“Eusebios!” On hearing the hated name, the physician recalled his humiliation at being forced to concede authority to the bishop, with his continual threats to close his hospital. “Τora!” he screamed at Skoros, and pushed him forward.
Agathe understood the Greek word, “Now.” Realizing Arcadia’s danger, she lunged to her right and placed her frail body in front of Arcadia to protect her from a deadly wound. Skoros’s lance caught the old woman under the left armpit. A bloodstain welled onto her woolen tunic.
Getorius sprang forward to shove Skoros aside and pull out the lance. He was too late: in moments Agathe’s body twitched from the effects of the poison. She slid from the bed to the floor and began to convulse violently. Her red-rimmed eyes stared into space. In the throes of death, before gasping out a final breath, the old woman was able to murmur two names.
Although transfixed by what had happened so quickly, Dorothea heard what the old woman had said. “Our twin sons, Antony and Agathon! Agathe mentioned our dead sons.”
Paulos signed himself on the forehead and heart.
Abinnaeus started across the room to grapple with Papnouthios. Before he could interfere, the physician had unplugged the wax stopper from a glass phial hanging around his neck and gulped its contents. The Egyptian sagged to the floor, his body grotesquely convulsing as Agathe’s had done. A moment later he lay still.
Dumbfounded, Abinnaeus exclaimed, “Great Zeus! Th…the man committed suicide. Killed himself.”
Getorius released Skoros and knelt beside Agathe to listen at her chest. “The heart is stopped. I…I’ve never seen a poison act this rapidly.”
Dorothea shrieked, “Sergius, get two slaves to carry Agathe to her room.”
“I…I couldn’t find two slaves. You wanted most of them to go on to Hormos and prepare our villa.”
“Then you and the surgeon do so. I…I’m going to our quarters.”
“Go then,” her husband said. “Surgeon, we’ll come back and decide what to do about Papnouthios’s corpse.”
Arcadia, still trembling, offered, “I’ll go with you and stay with Agathe’s body. She was so…so considerate of me, so caring. Like…like a mother.”
“Cara, you’re too ill.”
“Agathe saved my life, Getorius.! I insist that I stay with her body.”
No sense arguing. “Then, Arcadia, put on sandals and your heavy cape.”
He heard Abinnaeus tell the deacon to take Skoros to the bishop’s residence; the man had many sins to confess and much explaining to do.
The governor motioned, “Surgeon, take her feet and I’ll lift Agathe under the arms. Be careful of blood on her tunic. The room is down the corridor and past a courtyard, in the slave quarters at the pretorium’s far end.”
The hallway was dim—only a gloomy light angled in from the court’s roof opening. Torches that normally burned had not been lighted for lack of staff.
The old woman’s shrunken body was nearly weightless. Abinnaeus thought of the two horrendous deaths while he and Getorius carried her body along the corridor. On the near side of the courtyard he stopped to rest. “Surgeon, have you now any idea of the kind of poison used?”
Because of the deaths, Getorius thought of a year-old incident. “I saw a victim die at Ravenna very shortly after being given atropa.”
“Sigisvult was the man’s name,” Arcadia recalled, “and the poison was put in Eucharist wine.”
Abinnaeus persisted, “The other poisons you mentioned?”
“Digitalis and solanum? I’ve read about those and others whose symptoms are similar. Yet this…this salok, as the physician called it, acted instantaneously.”
“A lance thrust was all it took,” Abinnaeus said, “and both victims were dead in a few moments.” He renewed his grip on Agathe. “Let’s continue.”
The old slave woman’s residence was the first room on the left. Although not a freed-person, she had been given quarters separate from the slave dormitory. Even so, a straw-mattress cot, bedside table, chair, and storage chest were her only furnishings.
After Agathe’s body was laid on her cot, Arcadia fully closed the woman’s eyes and crossed both of her thin arms over her chest.
Abinnaeus noticed a diptych on a table next to the cot. “Portraits of two children?” he asked, picking up the hinged wooden tablet. “Why…these…these are my sons! Our sons. Agathe was their nurse until…” His voice faltered. “I didn’t know she had this memento of them.”
Arcadia sat on a chair. “Didn’t Agathe mention their names a moment before dying?”
“Eh? Yes, Dorothea heard her.”
“Sir, what happened to the boys?”
His reply was curt as he replaced the diptych. “An incident seven years ago that has haunted our marriage ever since.”
Getorius realized the governor might not wish to relive the past at this time. “We should go and take the physician’s body back to his residence now.”
As Abinnaeus nodded, he turned away to wipe a tear with his sleeve.
Getorius rubbed Arcadia’s cold hands as he bent to kiss her. “Cara, I’ll come back as soon as we take Papnouthios back. He may still be alive.”
She looked toward the wooden chest. “I’ll try to find a clean tunic to put on Agathe for burial.”
Passing back through the courtyard, Getorius cast his glance at a sky of gray storm clouds that still shown through the roof’s open square. “Excellency, I swear by your Kassios that I just saw a snowflake drift down. I didn’t realize you might have snow in Egypt.”
“No, not during my lifetime, although I recall my father spoke of it happening once before.” Abinnaeus stopped, obviously affected by his physician’s death. “Admittedly, Papnouthios was a man difficult to speak with unless you shared his medical interests, yet I can’t believe he would take his own life.” He indicated a door to the left. “Those are his rooms, across from the library.”
And thus with access to numerous medical and occult texts. Getorius tried to explain the suicide in medical terms, “Celsus equated insanity with the delirium caused by fever, but I believe that the physician’s years of hideous failed experiments, and this Kashat forgery, finally destroyed his mind. Still, I’m surprised at the rapidity of the deterioration …only a few days.”