SPQR XII: Oracle of the Dead

by John Maddox Roberts

  “I doubt you’ll find the killer here, anyway,” I muttered.

  “Eh? What was that, Praetor?”

  “Nothing. Just talking to myself, for which I have no excuse in such good company.” I laid aside the scroll I had been reading. “It’s getting too dark to read.”

  “So it is,” Belasus said. “Come to my house for some dinner, you and your men. I’m a widower, my daughters are married, my sons are with the eagles in Macedonia, and I’ve nothing but room. We’ll make a boy’s night of it.”

  “That is the finest offer I’ve had in months,” I told him, truthfully.

  I called my men out of the office and the duumvir put an official seal on the door. We went to a market and stopped by a caterer’s shop where Belasus ordered up a small banquet to be delivered to his house. The caterer was a man who knew the duumvir’s likes and dislikes and needed to be told very little. Belasus explained that, as an elected duumvir he did a good deal of entertaining, but didn’t like to be troubled with a great staff of servants, so he had all his larger meals catered. This made eminently good sense to me. In the street we encountered some friends of his whom he invited to dinner in the usual fashion of politicians. “All bachelors and widowers,” he confided to me, “and all good conversationalists. They won’t bring along any women.”

  His house proved to be modest but very adequate for any reasonable need. It was in the old-fashioned design, just a square surrounding a courtyard with an atrium, a large triclinium for entertaining, and a dozen or so bedrooms, most of them now vacant. He ordered the servants to set up chairs and tables in the courtyard by the pool, and there we sat, drinking his excellent wine and snacking on nuts and dried octopus while the servants set up the triclinium and the caterer’s people brought in dinner.

  Our host, not quite formally, bade us all drink a health to the Republic, which really needed some drinking to that year. That done, we relaxed. The courtyard was of the usual design: a square with a pool in the middle. And in the middle of the pool was a pedestal supporting one of the most delightful sculptures I have ever seen. It was a dancing faun, no more than three feet high, its pose so lively and lifelike that its pedestal seemed inadequate to hold it.

  “So, Praetor,” Belasus began, “what’s going on up there at the temple? I’ve been hearing the most lurid stories about the murders and the countryside’s rife with rumors that there’s a veritable battle of gods going on.”

  “Nothing as grand as that, I’m afraid.” I gave him a bald outline of what had happened and what we knew and some of the things we had speculated about. This may seem unwise in the middle of an investigation, but I had often found that it paid to have the counsel of a person uninvolved in a case, who might look at the evidence with eyes unclouded by the prejudices and assumptions that clutter the thinking of those too close to the events under examination.

  He whistled. “What a story! So you think there may be some sort of robbery ring operating up there?”

  “I think that’s a part of it, but I can’t make a lot of things fit. The Hecate cult poses few problems. Foreign cults are always suspect, greed and larceny are everywhere. A number of things have me stymied. For one thing, how have they gotten away with it for so long? For another, what is the connection with the priests of Apollo? Granted Apollo is a foreign god, but the god himself, his worship, and his priests for centuries have practically defined respectability.”

  He thought about that for a while, taking an occasional sip of his own excellent wine. “Well, you know, a temple can fall on hard times, just like a business or a family. They don’t live on the largesse of the god. They need patronage or they can go under. It wouldn’t be the first time a temple got a bit underhanded to keep afloat. I’m told there’s temples in the east that run whores and call them priestesses, just charge for their services right out front like any brothel.”

  “That’s true,” I said, pondering. The mention of patronage stirred up some thoughts. “What do you know about a family named Pedarius?”

  “They live north of here. Don’t see much of them, but they’re patricians and they go all the way back to Aeneas, if you can believe them. Poor as hedgehogs, from what I hear, ashamed to show themselves around much, since they can’t flaunt the style a patrician’s supposed to have.”

  “Then why,” I wondered aloud, “are they the patrons of the Temple of Apollo?”

  “Couldn’t say,” said Belasus. “But if that family were my patrons, I’d steal, too.”

  Dinner was a fine, convivial affair. The caterer knew his business and laid on fresh fish from the bay, roast kid, suckling pig, and something rather rare in those days—beefsteaks. We tend to think of cattle as work animals too tough to eat except for the youngest veal, but some local farmer had a pampered herd of cattle that he never set to work but instead let them laze about eating grass and a special preparation of grain soaked in wine so that they put on flesh at an astounding rate. The very idea of tender beef may seem to be a contradiction in terms, but this was as tender as the finest lamb and had a subtle flavor such as I had never encountered. The Gauls and Britons eat a lot of beef, of course, but they boil the tough joints until they are nearly tasteless and only the broth is worth anything.

  Anyway, the evening was a resounding success. We all ate and drank far too much, which men must do once in a while, or else the world gets out of balance. We kept the world well on an even keel that night.

  As I went to bed in one of those vacant rooms that night, I knew that something was not quite right. Then it occurred to me. It was something that I had mentioned to Julia. Nobody had tried to kill me. That seemed wrong. In my career it always seemed that, when you looked into the wrongdoing of evil people, sooner or later some of them tried to kill you. It was only reasonable.

  Despite this anomaly, I went to sleep easily. Nevertheless, the next day, when someone really did try to kill me, it came almost as a relief.

  9

  THE NEXT MORNING, HEADS RINGING and hands a bit shaky, we rode from Pompeii. The weather was no longer as fine as it had been, a drizzle had set in, but a little rain in the face was just what we needed. By noon, we were almost recovered. Every five miles along the road there was a pleasant alcove where travelers could rest. Each one had stone tables, a fountain of clear water, and plane trees for shade.

  When we judged that the sun was at zenith (it was not visible, but the rain had stopped), we paused at one of these. We dismounted, put the horses to graze, and unpacked the luncheon Belasus had thoughtfully provided from the leftovers of the previous night’s banquet. My men spread a cloth on one of the stone tables while I sat on the ground at the base of one of the trees. The morning’s drizzle had not been heavy enough to penetrate the plane tree’s dense foliage, and the ground was dry.

  “Ready to join us, Praetor?” one of the men asked when all was ready.

  “No, I like it here. Just bring me—” and at that moment I was struck by an arrow.

  I’ve been wounded many times in my long and belligerent life. I’ve been speared, clobbered by slingstones, stabbed, cut, clubbed, bashed with fists, hit with stones and roof tiles, and even run over by a chariot, but this was the first time I had been struck by an arrow. I had never worried much about arrows. For one thing, Italians are, by and large, wretched archers. We specialize in close-in work with cold steel. The legions usually hire archers from places like Crete or the East where people favor the bow.

  So here I was, in southern Campania, sitting beneath a plane tree, and out of nowhere an arrow flew through the remains of a morning mist and skewered me through the upper chest, just below my left collarbone. One second I was peacefully awaiting my lunch, mildly hungover but at peace with the world, the next I was looking down in amazement at the end of a feathered shaft protruding from my own all-too-mortal flesh. Sometimes life is just like that.

  “Praetor!” shouted some of my men. They rushed over to me. All but Hermes, of course. He wasted no time in such foolish
ness. He had his sword out and was running toward the brush on the other side of the road, where the arrow had come from.

  “Go help him!” I managed to get out. All of them did except one, a boy named Manius Silvius, son of a family ally. I had slumped over sideways and he gently raised me and leaned me against the trunk of the tree.

  “You don’t have much future in Roman politics, Manius,” I managed to grate out, “if you’d rather nursemaid a soon-to-die praetor than chase a murderer, which at least holds an element of fun.”

  “You’re not going to die, Praetor,” he stammered with an utter lack of conviction.

  “Why not?” I demanded. “Look. I’ve been shot through with an arrow. People die that way.”

  “But who could have shot you?” he asked.

  “It might have been Cupid, but I doubt it. No women around, for one thing.”

  “What?” Sometimes I waste my best wit on such people.

  Shortly thereafter, Hermes and the others returned without any trophies. “Let him get away, did you?” I said bitterly. “I’m going to die without the satisfaction of knowing that I’m at least avenged.”

  Hermes knelt, took out his knife, and cut my tunic away from the wound. He punched me rudely on the chest.

  “Ow! What are you doing, wretch?”

  “I’m seeing how bad it is. Asklepiodes taught me this.” He took the arrow by the shaft and wiggled it. The world turned red before my eyes. He punched me lightly in the stomach and I began to vomit.

  “No blood in your puke. Good.”

  “Good?” I raged in a very weak, strangled voice. “That’s good? I’ll have you crucified, you monster! I knew I never should have given you your freedom.”

  “Oh, be quiet. It missed your lung and your heart and your major pipes. We’ll get the arrow out, and if you don’t bleed to death inside and the infection doesn’t kill you, you’ll be fine. Just another scar to impress the voters at election time.”

  Somehow, I almost took comfort in this. “You’re going to yank out that arrow, aren’t you?”

  “Unless you’d rather keep it,” he said. Snide little bastard.

  “Give me a gallon or two of wine and go ahead.” Something occurred to me. “You know what? My hangover is gone.” And that was the last I remembered for a while.

  Sometime later I awoke and wished I hadn’t. My chest and shoulders felt like molten lead. It hurt to breathe. I tried turning my head and my neck hurt; so did my head. I had the feeling that someone had just rushed from the room. At least that meant that I was in a room. I was in a bed, for that matter. I tried to look around, moving nothing but my eyes. They hurt, too. I recognized the wall paintings. I was in the villa Hortalus had lent us.

  Julia came in. “You see what comes of talking about someone trying to kill you? Now they’ve tried and came within an inch of succeeding.”

  “So this is my fault, is it? How long have I been unconscious?”

  “Three days. The physician had your wound treated and bandaged and he forced some drugged wine into you. That’s why you’ve slept so long.”

  I had a horrible thought. “You didn’t let him run a hot iron through the wound, did you?” I’d seen that done before and it’s far worse than getting skewered in the first place.

  “No, this physician doesn’t favor such drastic methods; just drugs and poultices for wounds like yours.”

  “Better than some army surgeon, anyway. How is it healing?”

  “It wasn’t as red and swollen this morning as when you were brought in. But you won’t be going anywhere for a while. Hermes has canceled all your court appearances and sent word to Rome that you’ve been attacked and wounded. Pompey sent his personal physician, but I wouldn’t let him treat you. He’s one of those who favor hot iron.”

  “That was good of Pompey and better of you. I want to sit up.”

  “You’d better stay as you are until the wound has healed a bit more.”

  “No, I’m not looking forward to it, but I’d better sit up. I’ve seen a lot of wounded men die from lying flat too long. Even if the wounds are healing, they get fluid in their lungs and soon they can’t breathe.”

  “Very well, but it’s going to hurt.”

  “I hurt anyway.” She left and moments later was back with Hermes, a burly house slave, and one of her slave girls. Hermes and the man took me by the arms and hauled me up while Julia and the girl piled cushions behind my back. A great wave of red washed over me and I clenched my teeth to keep from crying out. I settled back against the cushions and the agony began to fade, but the sweat rolled down my face in torrents. Julia gave me a cup of heavily watered wine with ice in it (the Villa of Hortalus lacked no amenities) and soon I felt able to talk again.

  “Have you learned anything?” I asked Hermes.

  “I took the arrow to a fletcher and he said that it was locally made, but it’s a common type used for hunting. I borrowed some huntsmen and their dogs and took them back to where you were shot, but you’ll recall that it was raining that day and it rained hard that night. They were able to find where he crouched in the brush to shoot, but that was all.”

  “He must have followed us. Do you remember who was near us on the road?”

  “There was a good deal of traffic but most was on foot. Whoever followed us must have been on horseback.”

  “He might have been in front of us and doubled back when we stopped.”

  “If it was a huntsman hired for the job,” Hermes said, “he could have been keeping up with us on foot but off in the fields somewhere. We were just ambling along at no great speed.”

  “As usual,” Julia said, “there are too many possibilities.”

  “This has not been a case distinguished by good luck,” I noted.

  When word got around that I had returned to the land of the living, I got a lot of visitors. All the head men of the towns showed up, as did the major landholders. Pompey dropped by to see how I was getting along and told me I should have taken the hot iron treatment, that it would make me heal faster. I didn’t ask him if he’d ever tried it personally. Sabinilla visited, this time wearing a black wig. Porcia showed up with an armload of medicinal herbs from her own garden and she gave Julia careful instructions on how to prepare and administer them. I thanked her for her thoughtfulness, but I seemed to be healing well enough and didn’t take them. Medical concoctions always taste vile.

  Within ten days I was up and walking around and could breathe almost normally. By great good fortune the infection had been mild and had cleared up early. I had feared that infection would bring on months of convalescence. Not to mention death.

  As soon as my chest and shoulder could bear the weight, I took to wearing armor beneath my clothes when I went out. It was a reasonable precaution and Julia insisted on it. My men now accompanied me armed at all times. I was nervous any time I walked past a clump of bushes. Indeed, I was as jumpy as a dog with piles. I had been attacked many times, but I’d always felt that I was a match for the situation, blade to blade. Yet there is something profoundly unsettling about being shot from a distance, by an enemy you don’t even see.

  Once I was well enough recovered, the physician prescribed a regimen of exercise. The villa had every sort of facility, and a gymnasium was among them, but I was a serving praetor and a man in public life is not supposed to shut himself away from the people, so I elected to use a public facility. Near Baiae there was a large, Greek-style palaestra that was used by the inhabitants of several neighboring towns. It had all the usual provisions for running, wrestling, boxing, and so forth, and this being Italy it had a field for arms training complete with practice weapons and shields, and targets for javelins and arrows. I vowed to keep an eye on those people with bows.

  Since exercise was the order of the day, we did not ride there but walked and ran alternately. Some of my men insisted on carrying shields to either side of me. I thought this was a bit excessive and lacking in dignity, but then I thought of how that arrow
had felt and indulged them. As we drew near the gymnasium, though, I had them fall in behind me. Couldn’t have the people thinking the Roman praetor was scared, after all.

  Because of the Greek influence, the Campanians are passionately fond of athletics, and the place was well attended with men and boys sweating mightily as they heaved balls, lifted stone or bronze weights, swung wooden clubs, jumped, sprinted, and otherwise exerted themselves. They went silent at sight of my heavily armed little troupe. “Hey!” some local wag shouted. “This is the palaestra. The ludus is down the road there!” This sally raised a general laugh and I acknowledged it with a wave.

  I was already tired from the trek, but I gritted my teeth, doffed my toga and armor, and stripped to a subligaculum. I wasn’t about to work out stark naked like a Greek. My multitude of scars drew whistles of admiration, especially the fresh, still-red one on my upper chest.

  I began to run around the outdoor track, followed by my men like so many hunting dogs. I didn’t last long, but at least I didn’t disgrace myself either. When I’d had enough of that, I went to the target range and threw javelins for a while. I had always excelled at this art, but I found that I’d lost range and aim. Well, I was still recovering from a serious wound. I vowed to keep at it until I had my old strength and skill back. We sparred with wooden swords and wicker shields for a while. Hermes took great delight in whipping the other men one after another, but he took it easy on me. The ludus had taught him how to be a good trainer as well as a fighter.

  By the end of all this I was half-dead from fatigue, so greatly had my wound sapped my energy. “I’m going to do this every day until I can run and fight all day long,” I told Hermes.

  “I’ve never known you to be in any condition that good,” he said, “but we’ll see what we can manage. Let’s go get cleaned up.”