The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  Marius looked at him with a scathing expression. "Call that a plan?"

  "You think of anything better?"

  "Yes." Marius nodded. "Not being here in the first place."

  "Too late for that. Come on."

  The chief centurion led the way inside the shrine, carefully feeling his way over the charred timbers and chunks of plaster that littered the floor. On one side a section of the wall had fallen in and now offered a view of the ramparts along the inner court. On the opposite wall, a small barred window looked out over the flag-stoned expanse towards the vast wall facing the part of the city still held by the Jewish rebels. Figulus dropped his wineskin by the window.

  "I'll take this side. You're over there."

  "Right."

  They set their wineskins down and were turning back towards the entrance when Figulus snagged his boot on a sliver of wood.

  "Shit!"

  "You all right, sir?"

  "Fine. Just caught my boot lace. You go on and keep watch."

  Marius nodded and then softly crunched his way outside. The chief centurion joined him a moment later and then beckoned him towards the wall that looked out onto the old town. The night was dark as pitch under the heavy clouds. A cold breeze had picked up, lifting ash and dust into the air in small whirling vortices, so that the two men had to squint and raise their neckerchiefs over their mouths. They moved slowly along the perimeter of the inner court, checking that each of the four sentries was still in position, and still alive. The dark silhouettes of the men with their helmets, shields and javelins were just visible in the gloom and, satisfied that all was well, Figulus led the way back to the shrine. As they crept over the inner court the first spots of rain pattered around them, and a white flash in the sky over the old town momentarily lit up the temple ruins. Then it was dark, and almost at once a deafening crack of thunder sounded across the city, slowly dying away in an angry rumble. The rain began to slash down, frozen, mid-air, in glinting steel-grey lances as the next burst of lightning filled the sky.

  The two officers hurried back to the shrine, Figulus jogging carefully to favour his wounded knee. Inside they made their way to their positions and looked out as the storm lashed the war-torn city. Figulus pitied the men on sentry duty; there would be little shelter for them up on the walls, and he could picture them soaked and shivering in the rising wind that now howled over the battlements.

  "Only a fool would be out on a night like this!" grumbled Marius. "I'd wager the killer is tucked up in his tent keeping himself dry and warm."

  "I'd take that bet." Figulus smiled. "Shall we say a gold piece?"

  Marius considered it for a moment, and then nodded. "If he doesn't show, you pay up."

  "Surely."

  As the night dragged on the two men kept watch over the inner court, occasionally sipping from their wineskins. The storm eventually passed and left a steady, dreary downpour in its wake. From time to time the sentries were visible as their beat brought them into view on the wall. But there was no sign of the killer, and at last, when the first faint hints of dawn gathered on the skyline Figulus slumped down and reached for his wineskin.

  "Seems you may start the day a richer man, Marius. Let me toast you."

  The centurion chuckled as his superior pulled out the stopper, raised the wineskin to his lips and squirted a jet of dark liquid into his mouth. When Figulus lowered the wineskin his face relaxed into a look of contentment as the last mouthful of fiery liquid passed down his throat. Marius started to drink from his own wineskin and Figulus waited for him to finish his first draught before speaking.

  "Rough stuff, that! Where'd you get it?"

  "Samaritan wine-seller. Comes to the camp gate each day with a small mule-train loaded with wine. Not cheap, mind you."

  "Nothing ever is on active service."

  "No . . . No, that's true."

  "They're like bloody vultures. Selling us crap like this for a small fortune. There's hardly a man in the legion who isn't dipping into his savings right now. Unless the general lets us loose on Jerusalem when the rebels finally give in we're all going to be a lot poorer."

  "True."

  Figulus looked at his subordinate as Marius took another swig. "You must be worried."

  Marius lowered the wineskin. "Worried? Me? Why's that, sir?"

  "You've less than a year's service to go, haven't you?" "Yes. So?"

  "So, this is your last chance to get hold of some loot, to see you through your old age. I doubt you've been finding this campaign cheap. If you're like me, you've spent a good deal on those merchants."

  Marius watched the chief centurion silently for a moment, and then shrugged. "I'll be all right. Even if there's not much left in my savings there's the gratuity to look forward to . . . I'll be all right."

  "I'm sure you will," Figulus replied quietly. "How much have you found so far?"

  Marius stared at him. "Sir?"

  "How much of the temple treasure have you found so far?"

  "I don't understand, sir."

  "Come now, Centurion, don't be coy. I just wanted to know how much you've discovered. You've been hard at it. Three nights' work, not to mention twelve murders. I don't know how you keep going. Must be even tougher than you look. So, how much?" asked Figulus, before he drank some more wine.

  "All right then," Marius's craggy face slowly smiled. "Enough for a small estate at Baiae."

  "Nice!" Figulus whistled. "Where have you been putting it?"

  "Somewhere safe. Somewhere secret from the Jews, and our side. Somewhere not a million miles from where we're sitting, as it happens."

  "Really?"

  "Yes, really. You're almost on top of it." Marius nodded towards the floor in the centre of the shrine. "Of course it's taken a lot of hard work to haul it across from the temple." "The kind of work that draws unwanted attention." "Precisely."

  Figulus suddenly shivered. "Shit! It's getting cold." "Isn't it?" Marius grinned. "And it'll get colder yet." "It was a neat idea to take the heads. I suppose you started the rumour about the demon?"

  "Didn't have to. Knew I could count on the more superstitious amongst us to do that for me. Worked like a dream. Apart from the sentries everyone's been keeping well away from the inner court, leaving me to get on in peace."

  "Didn't it bother you, killing your own men?"

  "I've had a lifetime of killing. Got used to it. The first one was a little difficult, but they stood in the way of a fortune. It became easy . . . How did you find out?"

  "Took a while," Figulus admitted. "I never believed in the demon. But the problem was how any killer could take all his victims by surprise. One sentry might be a bit dopey and not detect the killer, but all twelve? Somehow, he managed to get them to stand still while he took a free swing at the back of their heads with a club . . . or maybe a centurion's vine staff. Then, once they were down the killer could cut the head off easily enough. As you say, you've had practice. Thing is, the neck guard on a legionary helmet should prevent any blow to the back of the neck, yet the head you were good enough to leave behind yesterday had a bruise right on the hairline, above the ragged flesh where the head had been severed. Looked to me like someone had knocked the sentry down before removing the head. Incidentally, where are all the heads?"

  Marius nodded towards the floor again.

  "Good. We'll need them back so the lads can have a proper funeral. Be a bit unseemly for them to enter the Underworld minus a head."

  "What makes you think you're going to live to tell anyone about this?" Marius said evenly. His hand trembled a little as it rested on the pommel of his short sword.

  "You'll see," Figulus replied, nodding towards the centurion's sword. "You won't need to use that."

  "No, I won't," said Marius. "Do go on."

  "As I was saying, how could it be that any sentry would willingly bare their neck to a killer? Unless they were ordered to do it. Ordered by a centurion. The sestertius dropped this afternoon while I was watchi
ng some men on the parade ground. Must have been awfully easy for you."

  "It was. I just turned up, told them to stand to attention, gave them a bollocking for not tying their laces properly and told them to sort it out. Once they were bent over looking down it was easier than taking sweet cakes from a baby. When they were all dealt with I could get on with it."

  "How did you know where to look?"

  "That rabbi told me."

  "Thought you didn't speak their tongue?"

  "I don't. But there are other ways of making people very eloquent indeed. The old man couldn't take me to the treasure fast enough."

  "I see." Figulus was suddenly very tired of playing this game. Tired, and finally very angry. Life in the legions was precarious. The chief centurion had served with thousands of men over the years. Most, he knew, were dead. Killed in action, killed in accidents, killed by disease. Only a few had been killed by their comrades, and even then it was mostly as a result of a drunken brawl. Those who served with the eagles knew the odds were against them. The prospect of death was far more certain than the chance of retirement to a small farm and the slow, fading serenity of old age. Living face to face with death, in its many guises, the men of the legions formed a peculiarly close bond with each other. Beneath the rough, hard exterior of the soldier burned a compassion and sentimentality that most civilians never guessed at, as the chief centurion well knew. Men who could kill with merciless ferocity one day, could act with great compassion and gentleness the following day. But valued above all other qualities was loyalty to your comrades. Which is what made Figulus sick to the pit of his stomach as he sat opposite Centurion Marius in the thin cold light of dawn.

  "You'll die for this, Marius. It'll be painful, and you'll deserve it."

  The centurion laughed, and Figulus smiled grimly as he saw that the man was shivering. Marius laughed again, this time edged with a distinct sneer. "I deserve it, all right. But it's not going to happen to me. Not for a while at least. You should be more worried about yourself, sir."

  "I presume you're referring to this crap." Figulus raised his nearly empty wineskin. "From the symptoms, I'd say you used hemlock, or something very similar."

  Marius stared at him. "You knew? You knew and you still drank it?"

  "Yes, of course . . . After I'd switched the wineskins round."

  "Switched them?" Marius whispered. "When?"

  "Before we checked on the sentries. Remember my bootlace? Must admit I was worried that you might try to do to me what you did to the others, but I was ready to react if you'd made a move. Unlike those poor bastards. Anyway, I had my suspicions about the wine. When you came clean about the killings I knew it had to be poisoned. I'm glad you had the chance to confess before you died."

  Marius glared at him, and there was no hiding the cold trembling that had taken charge of his limbs. There was a terrible apprehension in the centurion's expression now, and his glance darted towards his hands, shaking uncontrollably as they clenched in his lap. He looked up.

  "You bastard . . . You bastard. You'll pay for this!"

  Marius reached for his sword, and in the faint light his face looked ashen. His fingers wrapped round the handle and with a great effort he wrenched the blade free of its scabbard and the sword quavered as the point struggled to rise in the direction of the chief centurion. Figulus watched it all with an expression of cold contempt.

  "I don't think so."

  "Bastard!" Marius spat, and suddenly lunged forwards. But the chief centurion was ready for him and ducked the blow, knocking the other man's arm to one side. The blade clattered to the rubble-strewn ground and its owner collapsed beside it, struggling for breath with ragged shallow gasps. Figulus stood over him for a moment, watching the icy hand of death tighten its grasp on the centurion. Then he bent down and stretched his hand towards the purse hanging from Marius's belt.

  "I think you owe me something."

  Marius reached down towards his belt, shaking fingers scrabbling to defend his purse, but Figulus calmly knocked the dying man's hand aside, then helped himself to one gold coin.

  Great Caesar's Ghostby Michael Kurland

  This story follows on just a year after the last one and we find Vespasian still trying to settle into his role as Emperor. Vespasian was a no-nonsense man, not one who felt comfortable with all the trappings of high rank. His sons Titus and, especially, Domitian were far more smitten with the imperial life. The following story features the great orator Quintilian, who lived from about AD 34 to AD 95. In later years he became the tutor of Pliny the Younger who appears in a later story. Michael Kurland has established a solid reputation in the fields of science fiction, crime fiction and rock music — he edited the music paper Crawdaddy for some years. He has also written a short detective series set in the 1930s starting with Too Soon Dead (1997) as well as the useful guides How to Solve a Murder (1995) and How to Try a Murder (1997). His earlier story about Quintilian, "Blind Justice", will be found in my anthology The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits.

  It was on the Nones of September in the second year of the reign of Emperor Vespasian, many years ago now, that our involvement in the events that I am recounting here began. For reasons that will become clear as I continue my narrative, I could not record this at the time, as is my custom — as, indeed, is my task. As is, I fear, my excuse for being.

  I am Plautus Maximilianus Aureus, a member of the household of the great orator and barrister Marcus Fabius Quintilianus and, as I describe myself, his perpetual student. Somewhat higher than a servant, and somewhat lower than a protégé, I earn my keep by taking down on wax tablets, in my own special shorthand, such speeches, comments, and ideas of Quintilian as are worth recording for use in the series of texts for the training of youth that Quintilian is writing, intends to write, or may someday get around to writing. When I am not attending my patron Quintilian, I transcribe my shorthand onto scraps of parchment or papyrus and organize the comments into a variety of different categories, such as: oratory, law, government, nature, music, human conduct, instruction for the young, instruction for those who would teach the young, and humour. The humour category is not overly crowded.

  The fame of my patron as a barrister and rhetorician had been on the rise for the past few years, but I don't believe that even he had any idea just how high it had risen until that morning, when a squad of the praetorian guard appeared at the gate of Quintilian's villa. "I would speak with Fabius Quintilianus the orator," the decurion in charge told Penis, our gatekeeper.

  Penis yawned and stretched, and tried to act as if having six men in bright, shiny armour appear at our gate was an everyday affair. "It is barely past sunrise," he told the decurion. "I doubt whether my master is yet up."

  "I am on the emperor's business," the decurion replied sternly. "For me, he will arise."

  There was a time, and not so long ago, when having a squad of the emperor's praetorian guard appear at your front gate was a good reason for fleeing out the back gate, no matter how noble your family or how high your position. But the days of Caligula and Nero are in the past, and our present emperor is not known for intemperate rages or random murders. Still, the gods themselves have been known to fly into sudden fits over minor misunderstandings, so to my mind a sudden summons from Emperor Vespasian might not be cause for flight, but a little moment of sheer terror might be understandable.

  The decurion told my mentor, who came grumbling to the door of his bedroom, that his orders were to take Quintilian directly to the emperor, and as quickly as possible. With that, Quintilian dressed, splashed some water on his face, threw a cloak on over his toga, and said, "Lead on!"

  I was already dressed, so I grabbed my sack of fresh wax tablets and fell in behind my mentor. I was so accustomed to accompanying Quintilian everywhere he went that we were halfway to the imperial palace before I realized that I had not been included in the summons, and Quintilian had not actually asked me to join him. Quintilian strode along, impatient with t
he measured tread of the guardsmen. I scurried to keep up, the sensation in my left leg, crippled from a childhood illness, progressing from a dull ache to a sharp, jarring pain with each step. But I have learned to live with pain.

  The thoughts that were a great jumble in my head were of more concern than the pain in my leg, and I will admit they were unworthy of the lessons I have learned at the feet of the great Quintilian. If my mentor had somehow incurred the emperor's displeasure, would Vespasian throw him into a dungeon, or send him home to commit honourable suicide, or have him dispatched by the short sword of, perhaps, this very decurion that was taking us to the court? And, since I

  was with him, would the emperor include me in his displeasure, however expressed, as a matter of course?

  We arrived at the east gate of the Golden House, the great palace that Nero had built (although he had died before it was finished, to the relief of all Rome), and were rushed through a series of rooms and courtyards, going deeper and deeper into the inner palace. At each doorway the decurion lifted his left hand, exposing to the guard a sigil he kept cupped in his palm, and announced, "At the emperor's command!" And the guards stood aside as we hurried through. Shortly we reached what I assumed were the private living quarters of the emperor himself. There were guards scattered all through the vast structure, like golden raisins in a porridge, but here they were clustered closer together and they stood straighter, and their armour was even more highly polished.

  The decurion handed us off to a gold-plated centurion, amid much saluting and foot-stomping, and the centurion clasped hands with Quintilian. "They call me Sabatinus," the centurion told him. "I am to take you directly to the emperor."

  "Do you know what this is about?" Quintilian asked.

  "Not a clue. Have you met Vespasian before?"

  "Once, briefly. A ceremonial occasion."

  "Then for your information: he dislikes being called 'emperor', or 'Caesar', or 'princeps', or any of the other titles he has to use in public. Call him 'General Vespasian', or just 'General'."