SPQR XII: Oracle of the Dead

by John Maddox Roberts

  Some tents, sheds, and lean-tos housed nothing but individuals and families. These were the ones who had come with questions for the Oracle. I was tempted to tell them to watch out for oracular advice concerning money, but forebore. I was certain that my trial, when I should hold one, would expose the fraud sufficiently. The larger and more colorful shelters belonged to traveling merchants and mountebanks who lived on the roads all the year round, stealing when they could and selling when they had to. Italy had veritable tribes of these peripatetic folk, whom no one trusted but who seemed to serve a necessary function and were therefore tolerated, albeit with suspicion.

  An itinerant cutler displayed his wares from an ingenious upright chest that opened out into three large panels on which hung everything from sickles to cleavers to daggers. Leaning against the chest were a dozen or so fine swords, some with jeweled sheath mounts suitable for officers and centurions. These piqued my interest and I spoke with the man, a bald-headed Bruttian.

  “Do you always travel with so many swords?” I asked him. “I would think agricultural implements would be your stock in trade in this area.”

  “You think that’s a lot of swords, Praetor?” he said, inclining his shiny head toward the display. “That’s just the fancy pieces for officers and the rich men’s sons who’ll be joining the cavalry. In my wagon I have six chests of plain legionary’s swords and now Pompey’s here I imagine I won’t have a single one in ten days. I wish now I’d brought more.”

  “Men of your trade have been preparing for trouble, eh?” I said.

  “If you deal in arms, you keep your ear to the ground. War’s been in the air this last year and every cutler and arms maker in Italy’s been laying in swords, daggers, spearpoints, and arrowheads for a long time. Go to a port and you’ll see pig lead coming in from everywhere it’s mined. Do you think it’s all for plumbing pipes and roofs?”

  “Slingstones?” I said.

  “There you are. Men who make it their business to know such things say war is coming and a wise man had better be ready to meet the demand for arms.”

  “Civil war, you mean,” I said.

  “Well, that means you can sell to both sides, doesn’t it? Most wars, you only get to sell to one.” This simple commercial philosophy was fairly typical of the times. Deplorable as the situation might be, it presented wonderful possibilities to a man of enterprise.

  Of course, it presented noncommercial possibilities as well, especially for men of my own class. My family had been prominent in Roman political life for centuries, but we had become the greatest of the plebeian families when we backed Sulla against Marius. There is much to be said for picking the right side. Now my family had thrown in their lot with Pompey, which I thought an unwise move. Yet, should I choose to join Caesar, the great men of the family would not object. Why? Because it is always a good idea to have a family member or two on the other side, just in case. That way, should the majority have chosen wrongly, at least the family would survive and would not lose all its lands. Such were the realities of politics and family in those days.

  At other vendors’ booths I saw a similar enterprise at work: soldiers’ tunics and belts, hobnailed boots, canteens, oil flasks suitable for hard campaigning, all the gear a man needed for war. The legion would have stores from which to draw such gear, but it was often ill-fitting and overpriced, so a wise soldier showed up at muster with all his own equipment.

  Not all the itinerant business people were so sanguinary in their wares. There were the usual souvenirs of the site, statuettes of Apollo and Hecate, lamps decorated with those deities or their symbols. One such vendor had no stall but sat on the ground with her wares displayed on a cloth before her. Among them were a number of the little arrows I had seen near the mundus on Porcia’s estate. Alongside them were bundles of fresh and dried herbs and small amulets made of bone, intended to ward off the evil eye or protect health. The woman was some sort of saga: a low-level witch.

  “How is business here?” I asked her. “People seem to be on edge, so I suspect it has been brisk.”

  “Oh yes, sir,” she agreed, smiling to show a small number of yellow teeth. “Just since you’ve been here I’ve had to go home three times to replenish my stock. Between the murders here at the temple and all this talk of war, people can’t have enough protection.”

  I nudged the arrows with my toe. “And these?”

  “Why, they’re offerings to Apollo, Praetor. He’s Apollo the Archer at this temple.”

  “Doesn’t this offering have a specific meaning?” I asked her.

  She lowered her eyes. “None I know of, sir. Just an offering, like. To ask the favor of the god.”

  I didn’t blame her for prevaricating. Selling baleful charms might get her charged as an accomplice in murder, for which the penalties were severe. They were not as bad as those for selling poison, but bad enough. People fear supernatural evil more than a dagger in the back. Important persons fear poison most of all. Poisoners are regarded as witches of the worst sort.

  So somebody wanted revenge. People always want revenge, for some reason, good or bad, but usually bad and not only bad but petty and unworthy. It told me nothing. Fortune-tellers were doing a thriving business as well. Fortune-tellers were the poor man’s oracle. Oracles are not paid, of course. That would be sacrilegious. They do, however, accept gifts, and if you aren’t able to offer a generous gift, you might as well not even ask the priests for access to the Oracle. Fortune-tellers, on the other hand, will oblige you for a few copper coins. There were diviners who threw bones, those who gazed into bowls of clear water, even some who used the behavior of small animals or snakes to foretell the future.

  Fortune-tellers were frequently banned and driven from Rome by the aediles for fomenting popular discontent and influencing politics. After all, if the fortune-tellers get the populace to believing that some calamitous event will happen, it just might. Naturally, they always came back. Somehow, when there is a demand for services, the services always appear.

  It was as if all Italy was sick with anticipation.

  That afternoon I called Hermes to my side. “We’re missing something,” I said.

  “You’ve been saying that for some time,” he said. “What do we do about it now?”

  “You know what I’ve taught you. We can’t expect new evidence to come to us. The woman Floria was a stroke of luck unless she was something more sinister. We have to find it ourselves. So how do we do that?”

  He thought a bit. “We go back and reexamine what we’ve already seen and look for what we missed.”

  “Right. We’ll start where this all started, in the tunnel of the Oracle. This time with no mumbo-jumbo to distract us. No drinks, we bring our own torches and make our own smoke, and it had better be clean smoke with no funny colors in it. Come to think of it, get new torches with linen-wrapped heads and soaked in the best olive oil. I don’t care about the expense, I want as little smoke as possible. Same oil for the lamps. No chanting, no prayers, no uncanny voices. It will be just like when I was an aedile and we went down to inspect the sewers or the basements of buildings.”

  He grinned. “I always loved sewer-crawling.”

  “Bring three or four of our best men to carry torches and lamps; I want plenty of light. All armed. We know that there are people who don’t want us finding out things. They’ve committed a number of murders already and won’t scruple at a few more.”

  An hour later we were in the valley of funerary growth and standing before the tunnel. Our purposeful little band, clinking with swords and daggers on bronze-studded military belts, had attracted some attention and a number of idlers, bored with the ongoing festival, had followed in hopes of seeing some action.

  Iola rushed up to us with some of her acolytes or whatever they were, robes disheveled and dignity lost in their haste. “Praetor! What is going on?”

  “Iola, I am going down into your tunnel to find out whatever is to be learned there. Everyone here has bee
n lying to me or at least withholding the truth. I intend to get to the bottom of this and I propose to begin at the literal bottom, in the chamber of the Oracle.”

  “You cannot do this!” she shouted, eyes and hair wild. “It is sacrilege!”

  “Iola, Roman law recognizes sacrilege only as an offense against the gods of the state. Hecate is not a god of the state, but a foreign deity. My good friend Appius Claudius is censor this year and he is purging Rome and Italy of evil influences. He is a very upright and energetic man and he hates foreign cults. If you don’t want to be driven from Italy and your tunnel filled with rubble, you had better not hinder my investigation in any way. Do I make myself clear?”

  She looked fit to have a stroke, but abruptly she caved in. “Very well, Praetor.”

  “Now tell me something, Iola. Who was the chief sacerdote here ten years ago? Was it you?”

  “No, Praetor. I came here from Thrace, homeland of the goddess, seven years ago. The priest ten years ago was Agathon, but he died right about that time. Then Cronion succeeded to the high priesthood. He was quite old and perished about the time I arrived. Hecabe became high priestess then and made me her acolyte. She died three years ago from the bite of a serpent and I succeeded her.”

  “Yours is a hazardous priesthood.” I observed.

  She shrugged. “People die. It happens all the time.”

  “You stay up here. I want none of your people in the tunnel while we are there.”

  She closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh. “As you will, Praetor. But this is a terrible violation of our shrine. I shall make protest to the Senate.”

  “Feel free to do so. But you have no idea how busy they are going to be soon. They will have very little attention to spare for the likes of you.”

  I got my men together at the entrance of the tunnel. “I want two of you to precede us with torches. We will descend very slowly. I want to examine everything very closely—the walls, the ceiling, the floor, everything.”

  “What are we looking for, Praetor?” asked one of the men.

  “Anything that doesn’t have an obvious reason for being there. If you see any sort of opening, anything that looks like a door or access to some other place, I want you to draw it to my attention. Now, let’s go.”

  The two torchbearers went ahead, one before the other due to the narrowness of the tunnel. The uncommonly fine torches I had specified indeed made almost no smoke as we crept slowly down the passageway. I examined every niche, lifting its lamp and feeling the level spot and its back. Hermes and my other men ran their fingers over the walls and felt the ceiling, trying to find any irregularity. The work was so exacting that we felt none of the supernatural trepidation of my previous visit, and little even of the natural discomfort that comes with being in cramped quarters underground.

  “Here, Praetor,” said one of the men. He had found a narrow slot in the ceiling. It was as long as a finger and no wider. I held a torch to it and the flame fluttered slightly away from it.

  “Probably a ventilation shaft,” I said. “But I can’t imagine how they cut so fine a hole. Whoever did this did things with stone I can’t comprehend.” We found more such slots, evenly spaced about every five paces along the shaft. The walls, however, yielded no secrets, nor did the floor. In this laborious fashion did we make our way to the chambers at the bottom. First, we searched of Hecate’s shrine. The men were apprehensive at first, working under the gaze of the uncanny statue of Hecate.

  “It’s just stone,” I said. “And not very well carved stone at that.”

  “Maybe you should perform a little propitiatory rite,” Hermes whispered. “It might make them feel better.”

  So I asked the goddess’s indulgence for thus profaning her shrine, pleading the necessity of one bound by duty and on the service of the Senate and People of Rome. Then I cut off a small lock of my hair and burned it on her altar among all the other rubbish. Then my men set about their work with lightened spirits. I resented losing the lock. My hair had been getting thinner of late and I could ill afford to lose more.

  This work was even more tedious than searching the tunnel, though far less cramped. The roughness and irregularity of the stone walls made it difficult to detect cracks or protuberances that did not belong there. Polished or at least smooth stone would have been far more accommodating.

  “There’s something odd about this,” Hermes said, as the other men worked over walls, ceiling, and floor.

  “You mean there’s something about this that isn’t odd?” I said.

  “It’s just that the tunnel is so straight and relatively smoothsided—a bit rough, but flat and true all the way down, while this chamber and the Styx chamber below are no more regular than a cow’s stomach. They’re more like natural caves.”

  “It’s another oddity to go along with all the others,” I commented. “I suppose it should be no surprise. If the tunnelers could drive their shaft through solid stone straight to the river, why shouldn’t there already be some natural caves already down here to make their task a bit easier?”

  I personally searched Hecate’s altar and her statue. First I had one of the men clear away all the accumulated rubbish from the altar, a task he performed efficiently but with no small repugnance. I could hardly blame him. Along with everything else, I inspected the altar litter and it was as strange an assortment of items as I had ever run across. Predominating were bones, some of them quite familiar, including the aforementioned skeletons of infants. These gave us pause.

  “Could we prosecute them for human sacrifice?” Hermes asked. “It’s strictly forbidden.”

  “Do you see any traces of blood?” I asked him. “As near as I can see, nothing living has been sacrificed here. These could be the skeletons of stillborns for all we know. It’s bizarre, but in violation of no law familiar to me.”

  There were other bones, the skeletons of birds, of small animals, nothing bigger than a fox, a great many dogs, and some of creatures never native to Italy, at least not in many generations. One appeared to be the skeleton of a tiny man, but I recognized it as a monkey. I had seen the skeletons of monkeys and apes on display in the Museum at Alexandria. There were reptiles of conformations I had never seen anywhere.

  “Remind me to ask Iola about this,” I told Hermes.

  “I will. Speaking of that woman, she says she’s from Thrace, but she doesn’t have a trace of Thracian accent.”

  “She has a rather odd accent,” I said, “but I agree it doesn’t sound Thracian.”

  “I think it’s fake,” he said. He would know. As a slave, he had socialized with other slaves from the far parts of the world. We masters tend not to notice these things.

  The altar itself, cleared of its exotic detritus, was a natural block of stone, hewn from the same rock as the floor. At first it seemed awfully convenient that an altar-shaped stone should be here, but then I saw that the statue of Hecate, too, was in one piece with the floor. I saw how they lined up, and that the wall behind Hecate was planed smooth, unlike the rest of the chamber wall.

  “There used to be a rock outcropping coming out from that wall,” I said. “The tunnelers, or at least whoever converted this place into Hecate’s shrine, carved the altar and the statue from that outcropping.”

  “You don’t think it was the same people?” Hermes said.

  “Unlikely. The tunnel is unthinkably ancient. You can feel it. This statue is old, but nowhere near that old. If the Aborigines carved the tunnel, it was for some Aboriginal purpose, incomprehensible to us. This must have been carved within recent generations, maybe a few centuries ago.”

  “Do you think there’s anyone who could tell us when it was made?” Hermes said. “I don’t know much about sculpture, but it looks pretty crude to me.”

  “Probably not,” I said. “I know a lot of art connoisseurs, but they always think that there was no sculpture worth noticing before the great age of Athens and don’t pay much attention to the older stuff. I doubt it’s
very important to our investigation in any case. It just tells us what I expected: that this unbelievable place has served a number of peoples in a number of functions over the centuries. That means there’s nothing terribly sacred about the relationship of the Hecate cult with this place. They’re just another pack of immigrants who moved in and adapted it to their own purposes.” In addition I was beginning to suspect that the Hecate cult itself, or at least some of its adherents, had been using this convenient facility for a number of differing purposes, among them murder and robbery.

  We found a few more of the vent holes, but nothing more. “All right,” I said. “To the river chamber.” So we made our way lower into the chamber where this had all begun, when the priest Eugaeon had surfaced in the bubbling water. Here I had extra torches ignited and lamps lit. Soon we had a very tolerable light, dimmed and diffused somewhat by the ever present mist from the water. While I set the other men to searching walls, floor, and ceiling, Hermes and I stripped and went into the water. In the excellent light, this was quite pleasant, making up for the lack of a decent bathing facility near the temples.

  I went first to the place where the water, as we now knew, emerged from the other place, an unknown distance away, where it was accessed from the other tunnel. The current was quite strong, making it difficult to hold my place. The water was chest-deep to me, the bottom perfectly smooth beneath my feet. There seemed to be no growth of lichen or any of the usual slimy stuff that grows where water and stone meet. The heat of the water may have accounted for that, or possibly its sulfur content. The channel where the water entered seemed to be almost as wide as my outspread arms, and the same distance from the surface of the water to the floor. I felt that, had I been able to make my way against the current, I might have walked to the access from the other temple.