SPQR VIII: The River God's Vengeance

by John Maddox Roberts

  “Is that so? I was wondering how a building constructed of new materials could fall, but I was learning that there are many foul little secrets to the builders’ trade.”

  “You aren’t supposed to build with wood this fresh,” he went on.

  “Really?” In truth, the only experience I had with construction was the army sort: putting up bridges and siege works. For that you used whatever timber was readily available, usually cutting it on the spot.

  “It’s supposed to age and dry out. Wood this new will warp and rot quickly, not to mention all that sap will make it burn hot as a potter’s kiln.”

  “You don’t say. Someone is going to have all sorts of fun prosecuting these people.” I wasn’t really that dense, just preoccupied. My mind was still reeling from the implications of Metellus Scipio’s daughter marrying Pompey. If there should come a break between Caesar and Pompey, the family could demand that I divorce Julia. What would I do then? I noticed that Hermes had been carving his name all over the timbers heaped on the cart.

  “I knew it was a mistake giving you that knife.” It had been a Saturnalia gift a couple of years before, a fine Gallic blade cunningly jointed to fold back into its handle. The blade was no longer than the width of a man’s palm, so I couldn’t be accused of arming a slave. “I suppose it gives you some satisfaction knowing that your name is destined to be immortalized at the bottom of a landfill.”

  He smiled. “I have to practice somewhere. You never give me enough time.”

  “You’ve never done an honest day’s work in your life, imp.” Hermes was a handsome, strapping young man at this time, in his early twenties, brown and fit from his time campaigning with me in Gaul and exercising in the ludus almost every day in Rome. Always an eager student of arms, this enthusiasm for writing was new. He had a lively, quick intelligence, which nicely complemented his many criminal proclivities. An uncle gave him to me as a present several years previously, when I set up my own household. He was Roman-born, despite his Greek slave-name.

  “More bodies here!” shouted the slave.

  “They’re getting down to the rich people’s quarters,” Hermes noted.

  “Then let’s see who we have.” I walked with him over to the rubble, which was beginning to take on a pitlike appearance as the debris of the roof and upper stories were carried away. The ground fioor had collapsed into the basement. As in most such houses only the ground fioor had water piped in. This had been shut off soon after the building fell, but enough had fiowed in to leave a foot or two in the basement and already bits of rubble could be seen sloshing around in it.

  The slaves were handing up bodies to workers above. Most, of course, would be slaves. A rich man’s household would contain far more slaves than family members. The corpses were mostly naked or nearly so, since the disaster had occurred when everyone was asleep. It can be difficult to distinguish between a slave and a poor freeman when both are naked, but there is seldom much problem in telling the servile and the wealthy apart, with or without clothes.

  Hermes paused by a row of bodies that had the look of household slaves, lacking both the marks of hard labor and the jewelry of the wealthy.

  “Whoever the master was, he wasn’t loved,” Hermes observed.

  “I noticed.” Many of the slaves had the collars of runaways riveted around their necks. I paused by a dead girl of no more than sixteen. Covered by plaster dust though she was, it was plain she had been extraordinarily pretty. She wore one of the neck rings. On an impulse, I beckoned to a pair of the public slaves. “Turn this one over.”

  The burly men stooped, took her by the shoulders and ankles, and rolled her onto her face. The girl’s back, buttocks, and thighs were crisscrossed with a net of deep, ugly whip marks. This had not been somebody playing games with a ceremonial ?agellum; that stings but doesn’t cut. These were the marks of a bronze-clawed ?agrum, laid on with a will. A hundred lashes from one of those can kill a grown man. Many of the wounds were so fresh that they had bled only hours before, and these were laid atop older, partially healed slashes.

  “What could a child like this have done to deserve such punishment?” I mused.

  “We haven’t seen the mistress of the household yet,” Hermes said. “If she was some ugly old bag, just being that young and pretty was reason enough.” His face and voice were as impassive as any well-schooled slave’s. We had grown close over the years, but I knew that I would never know what he felt looking upon such a sight.

  I had some of the other bodies turned over. Many of them were marked as the girl had been, even some who did not wear runaway collars. One was different. She was a plump, middle-aged woman wearing a few cheap bangles, unmarked by punishment. Her hands had never washed clothes or dishes, and she was well fed.

  “This is the one who told on the others,” Hermes said, “the housekeeper.”

  “Ah, well, my office doesn’t regulate the happiness of households. It does, however, have supervision over buildings. I want a look at these foundations as soon as the wreckage is cleared away.”

  Not long after this, two more bodies were brought up and laid out. “I think we have the master and mistress now,” I noted.

  The man was portly, baldheaded, with a fringe of gray above the ears. He wore a citizen’s ring but no other jewelry, no marks of military service either. Even minimal soldiering usually leaves a few scars.

  The woman, likewise, had considerable heft. Her hair was hennaed and had once been elaborately dressed. She wore an abundance of rings, bracelets, necklaces, and earrings, which she apparently slept in. Even in death her face, with its piggy eyes and small, downturned mouth, was that of a vile-tempered shrew.

  “Look there,” Hermes said, pointing to a smashed chest from which had spilled some white tunics, one of them now fioating in the shallow water. The tunics bore the narrow red stripe of an eques, Rome’s wealthy but not noble class, those who made their fortunes through business rather than land.

  “Now we know his rank, anyway,” I said. The bodies were laid out side by side, but their heads were turned away from one another, as if they disliked each other as much in death as in life. The angle was unnatural though.

  “Their necks were broken,” I commented. “Must have happened when they fell through into the basement.”

  “Most likely,” Hermes said, probably wishing they had died of something more lingering.

  “Find me somebody who might be able to confirm the identity of these two,” I told him. “I’m surprised no relatives have come to inquire about them yet. News of this must have been all over Rome before noon.”

  A few minutes later, Hermes returned with a shopkeeper in tow. “I couldn’t find any neighbors who knew about them,” he reported, “but this man says he dealt with some of their slaves.”

  “Is this possible?” I said. “This is Rome. Everybody knows all their neighbors’ business. Did none of the neighbors know these people?”

  “They only moved in less than a month ago, Aedile,” the shopkeeper said. “I don’t think they were from this district, maybe not from Rome at all. Never called on their neighbors that I ever knew about.” He was a stooped little man, smelling pungently of rancid oil. There was no need for me to inquire as to the nature of his business. “Fact is, sir, nobody wanted to have much to do with them.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “Well, sir, there was sometimes a lot of noise from that place, disagreeable noise, screams and such. I think they were pretty rough with their slaves. Some people complained, and there wasn’t quite so much noise after that; but maybe they just gagged ‘em before they started whipping. I know you have to discipline slaves from time to time, but there’s got to be a limit. There were times it sounded like they had Spartacus and all his rebels getting crucified in there.” The man clearly had a Roman’s love for hyperbole.

  “Did you ever have contact with anyone from the household?” I asked.

  “That woman”—he pointed to the slave Her
mes had identified as the housekeeper—”did their marketing. She was always with a big slave”—he trailed off and scanned the line of bodies—”well, I don’t see him here. Probably still down there in the rubble. He carried the purchases. She bought oil a few times at my shop. I never saw any of the other household slaves.”

  It didn’t surprise me that they hadn’t let the slaves get out much. “How is it that you can identify the owners?”

  “My shop is right there.” He pointed to a stall directly across the plaza from the main entrance to the ruined house. It had one of those mildly risque signs Roman shopkeepers love: Eros pouring oil on the outsized phallus of Priapus. “I saw them just about any time they went out. She was always carried in a chair, usually one without hangings. He mostly walked.”

  “Names?”

  “The housekeeper said he was Lucius Folius, and he was some sort of shipper—not foreign trade, I think. Owned a lot of river barges. I never heard her name. The woman just called her ‘Mistress.’ “

  “That’s enough to establish identity,” I said, as Hermes scratched the names onto a tablet. “Do you know who owned this building? Even the people in the fianking houses don’t seem to know.”

  “Well, the building that used to stand there burned down awhile back. Crassus bought the lot, but he sold it when he was raising money for his foreign war. I heard the buyer was a speculator from Bovillae, but whether he built the insula, I don’t know.”

  “Might the owner have been Folius himself?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “If I were rich and could build a whole insula to live in, I’d build it better than that.”

  “That makes sense. Well, we—” I stopped short at a bellow from one of the slaves clearing wreckage from the basement.

  “There’s a survivor here!”

  “Under all that!” Hermes exclaimed in wonderment.

  “This should be a prodigy worth seeing,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I took off my toga, folded it, and handed it to Hermes. “Don’t drop it in the water, or I’ll buy a ?agrum myself.” Since I was a plebeian aedile, it was an ordinary citizen’s toga without a purple border, but it was a good one and I had no desire to see it ruined. Hermes was used to this duty by now. My office took me into all the filthiest cellars, drains, and sewers in Rome. Most aediles delegated these chores to their slaves; but in my experience, slaves are even more amenable to bribery than aediles, so I always took a personal hand in serious inspections.

  We descended the ladder into what now resembled a crater made by one of Jupiter’s thunderbolts. The contractor’s slaves had carted away the wreckage with antlike efficiency. The chain of bucket men had reduced the water level to no more than an inch or two, and we splashed our way to a heap of slanting timbers where some slaves were levering up a beam. Beneath it could be seen a large foot, bloody but undeniably twitching.

  “Surviving the collapse is remarkable enough,” I said. “How did he avoid drowning?”

  As the beams were cleared away, we saw why. The man had apparently landed in the basement on his feet and was pinned against a wall in a slanting but near-standing position. The water had never risen higher than his waist. As he was pulled free, we saw that he wore a tunic that covered one shoulder.

  “This one was dressed,” I remarked.

  “Probably on night watch against fires,” said Hermes. “Look, he’s big, and no scars on his back. What do you want to bet that this was the one who went marketing with the housekeeper?”

  “Right. If he was awake when it happened and was favored enough by the master to escape fiogging, he may be able to give us some answers, if he lives.” The man was badly bloodied, able to make only tormented, incoherent noises.

  I shouted up to the slaves from the Temple of Aesculapius, who hovered over the pit with their stretchers: “I want this man taken to the Island and given special care. Until a legal heir of the owner comes to claim him, he is the property of the State. I declare this as plebeian aedile!” Actually, I was not at all sure that I had authority to do any such thing, but in those days you could accomplish a lot just by sheer assertiveness. The man made a sound almost like a word, and I leaned close.

  “Gala—gala—” He sounded like a man gargling a handful of nails. His throat was full of plaster dust.

  “Hermes, give him a drink. Perhaps the poor wretch can talk after all.” Hermes always carried a small skin of watered wine, just in case I should come across someone who needed a drink. Carefully, he trickled some into the man’s mouth. There was a long period while the half-dead slave choked, drooled, and tried to vomit, but Hermes patiently sloshed out his throat after each spasm. Soon he was at least breathing easier. He began to mutter something, and I leaned close; but the man was barely whispering.

  “Hermes, your ears are younger. See if you can make out what he’s saying.”

  Now Hermes leaned close, frowning with concentration. Finally he straightened. “I can’t hear much, and he’s got an accent. Sounded to me like he was saying, ‘Accursed, accursed,’ over and over again.”

  A moment later the man’s eyelids sprang open, staring with round-eyed terror; then, the eyeballs rolled up to show whites alone.

  “Is he dead?” Hermes asked.

  “Unconscious again,” I told him. Then, to the slaves who stood by, “You heard what I want. Take him away.”

  “Now,” I said to Hermes, “let’s have a look at this place.”

  We went to one of the cellar walls where the support timbers were plainly visible, only a thin layer of plaster covering the wooden wall between them. I set my elbow against one and laid my forearm horizontally. The next beam was three or four inches past my fingertips.

  “That’s a bit wider than an Egyptian cubit,” I remarked, “but not all that much. Somebody was stretching the code without violating it fiagrantly.”

  Hermes took out his knife again and made a long scratch in one of the timbers. Immediately, sap began to fiow. “Green wood again,” he said. “But it’s strong enough. It hasn’t had time to rot or warp.”

  “What’s underfoot?” I asked. Hermes stooped and came up with a handful of gravel. “I don’t know good gravel from bad,” I said, “but that is undisputably gravel. As soon as this wreckage has been cleared away, I want workmen to dig here and find out how deep the gravel extends. What’s all this stuff?”

  The falling water level had revealed a litter of tools of all sorts: hammers, mallets, chisels, saws, boxes of nails, masons’ squares, and things the function of which I could not even guess.

  “A lot of builders in this quarter,” Hermes said. “They often take their tools home with them after work.”

  “Maybe this was Vulcan’s punishment,” I said, “for being such sloppy workmen.”

  “I’ll bet it was these,” Hermes said, walking to one of the big horizontal beams that had once supported the ground fioor. “There must be rotten timber here someplace, some squirrel or woodpecker den that made a weak place.”

  “I see your little time in the forests of Gaul made you an expert on arboreal matters.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” He stooped once again and came up with a couple of pale cylinders about the length and thickness of a man’s thumb.

  “What are those?”

  He held them out to me on his palm. “Candle stubs. They must be from the ground-?oor apartment. Poor people don’t use them much.”

  I took one and examined it. Its base was dark from whatever it had been stuck to when it was in use. “Rich people don’t use them much either,” I commented. Most people prefer lamps because, not only are candles expensive, but they drip. They do burn more brightly than lamps, though. For some reason candles are a traditional Saturnalia gift, so most people use them for only a week or two after that holiday.

  “It’s getting dark.” I looked up and yelled, “Marcus Caninus!”

  Moments later the man looked down into the cellar. “Aedile?”

  “I want the
se big support timbers, these joists or whatever you call them, taken to the Temple of Ceres and placed in the courtyard as evidence. I want to examine them tomorrow in daylight.”

  He made a sour face. “Whatever you say, Aedile.”

  Hermes was poking at one of the timbers with his knife. “Look at this.” He scratched an X with his knife so I could see where to look in the fading light. Where the lines crossed was a hole in the wood big enough to stick my middle finger in without fear of splinters. “I’ll bet this timber is full of boreholes like this.”

  “Somebody,” I said, “allowed all these citizens to die just to save a few wretched sesterces. Our laws have become entirely too lenient of late. I am going to search the law codes and find absolutely the most savage, primitive, vicious punishment ever laid down for such a man, and then I am going to see it applied to whoever is responsible for this atrocity.”

  2

  WHEN I ENTERED MY HOUSE, Julia began to make a comment on my dirty, disheveled appearance, caught the expression on my face, and thought better of it. She clapped her hands and sent a couple of slaves scurrying for my dinner. We had agreed that, for the year of my aedileship, we would give up any thought of regular meal hours.

  “A bad day, I see,” she said, taking my hand and leading me to the triclinium. “Was there fighting?”

  “No fighting this time,” I told her as I collapsed onto a couch. “An insula fell. Two hundred thirty-three dead at the final count. A lot of injured, and some of them won’t live.”

  She gasped. “Infamous! As plebeian aedile can’t you condemn those rickety old buildings and have them pulled down? They cause more deaths in a year than a foreign war.”

  “I could if I had the time and the staff and the manpower, which I don’t. This was a new one anyway. A crooked contractor, inferior materials, no doubt a fat bribe to one of last year’s aediles, all the usual factors.”