Death in the Ashes

by Albert A. Bell, Jr.

  “Has anyone tried to get back into the towns that were destroyed?” Tacitus asked. “Are people going in to reclaim their property?”

  “Many of the owners were buried along with their property, sir. We’ve caught some looters, especially in the villas outside the towns, ones that aren’t so deeply covered. Some of them were in the batch of prisoners I transported to Ostia. The magistrates are doing everything they can to stop them. But there are temptations. The roofs of a few buildings—especially ones with two floors or more—are still visible in spots where the ash wasn’t so deep. Some of the buildings have collapsed from the weight of the ash. It’s very dangerous to go poking around over there.”

  “Poking around in deserted houses is definitely not what I’m here for,” I said. Poking around in a murder was my objective, and that could be just as dangerous.

  †

  We still had a couple of hours of daylight left when we sailed up to a dock on the south side of Naples, just where the coastline bends south. Thamyras told us it was the closest that we could land to the villa of Aurelia and Calpurnius. Because of the size of the trireme we couldn’t actually tie up at the dock. Our ship had only one small boat in tow for use in an emergency. Thamyras was rowed to shore in that and made arrangements for a larger boat to come out and ferry us in to shore. Transferring our gear didn’t take long.

  “How long will you be here?” Decius asked.

  “I have to be back in Rome on the Ides. I’m concerned about whether I can make it. My mother and my future mother-in-law will crucify me with their own hands if I’m late.”

  “Well, what a coincidence,” Decius said as we cast off. “I’m going to Rome on the day before the Ides. If you need transport, just let me know.”

  “Thank you,” I said with great relief. I hoped respect for my uncle would open other doors for me as easily around the bay. I took a seat so I could face away from the memory of death and destruction spewing out of Vesuvius.

  Tacitus couldn’t seem to get enough of the view, though. He cocked his head back, open-mouthed in awe. “The slope of the mountain is quite gentle. Makes it feel like it covers the whole end of the bay.”

  Thamyras nodded. “There were villas all up the sides of it, my lord. It was covered with vineyards, the most beautiful sight you ever saw. Now it looks like—well, if there are mountains on the moon, like some of those old Greeks said there are, I suspect this is what they look like.”

  When we reached shore I was the first one out of the boat, almost knocking Thamyras over.

  “You really couldn’t wait to get your feet on terra firma, could you?” Tacitus laughed.

  “Human beings don’t have wings or fins,” I said. “That’s proof enough for me that dry land is where we belong.”

  Thamyras found a carriage and driver to take us to the villa. “It’ll take about half an hour to get there, my lords. I’ll arrange for your gear and servants to be sent along.”

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll see you all there later this evening.”

  I didn’t like going alone into unfamiliar territory, but finding transportation for nine more people and all that we were carrying would take time. I wanted to get started on my investigation of whatever had happened before any more evidence was lost or destroyed.

  The villas on the shore of the bay looked like people were rebuilding after a war. As Decius had said, those that had been on the water were now inland—some only a few paces, but others, as I looked south, a considerable distance. What had happened, I wondered, to the water supply in those houses? If they depended on springs or wells, as my house at Laurentum does, had those been covered by the eruption?

  “Are people still living in these villas?” I asked our driver, a stolid man whose age I couldn’t determine, but whose left eyelid drooped.

  “For another mile or so to the south, yes, sir. Your friends Calpurnius and Aurelia have one of the last villas that’s still fit to live in. After that, most of them have been abandoned. Even if the houses weren’t badly damaged, the ash was just too heavy to clear out.”

  “My uncle died at Stabiae,” I said. “I was at Misenum when the eruption occurred. The ash was heavy and we felt severe shaking of the earth. I can’t even imagine how bad it was over here.”

  He looked at me with a bit more respect, as though we were soldiers who had fought in the same horrific battle. “Yes, sir. Those of us who survived can’t believe that we did. Some places collapsed. Others had to be torn down afterwards because they weren’t safe anymore. In Naples itself the shaking did as much damage as what the volcano was throwing out.”

  “Why don’t people leave?” Tacitus asked.

  “Where can we go, sir?” the driver said with a fatalistic shrug. “All we can do is get out of doors if the mountain so much as rumbles.”

  †

  The road we were on ran close to the shore, with room for houses but not much else between it and the water. There were no cliffs here, just a gentle slope into the bay. What was a beach five years ago was regaining that character, just farther out than it had been.

  “Here we are, sirs,” the driver said as he pulled off the road.

  In the dim light of early evening it seemed the color had drained out of this part of the world. Trees, buildings—everything—looked like a statue before it’s painted, except that it was all gray. We climbed down from the wagon and retrieved the two bags we’d brought with us. I gave the man a bit more than we’d agreed on, and he touched his cap in appreciation.

  Aurelia’s estate appeared to have recovered from the eruption as well as any property we’d seen since we touched land, which wasn’t saying a lot. The vegetation around the house was beginning to re-establish itself, but the overall impression of the place reminded me of being on the edge of a desert, like the one I’d seen when I served in Syria.

  The doorman admitted us with some surprise. “We didn’t expect you so soon, my lord.”

  I didn’t want to waste time on explanations. “Where is your lady?”

  “She’s in the garden, my lord.”

  He was about to lead us to her, but an older, heavyset Nubian woman with a bright, multi-colored cloth wrapped around her head stopped us in the atrium.

  “Welcome, my lords. I am Bastet, the lady Aurelia’s midwife,” she said in accented but elegant Latin with a slight bow of her head. “Forgive me, but I think it would be better if you saw her in the morning. I’m very concerned about her health and about the baby, because of all this…disturbance. She’s less than a month from the time when she should deliver the child, and it has not been easy for her all along. I’m afraid it may be an early birth and a difficult one.”

  “It might be best to wait then,” Tacitus said. “We don’t want to do anything to harm the child.”

  I knew he was thinking back to earlier in the year when his own wife had lost a child, but I couldn’t waste any time. “We need to see her right away. If you don’t talk to people immediately after a crisis, their memory of it starts to change. Sometimes their first recollections are inaccurate, but they’re important none the less. It’s already been several days.”

  “My lord, please,” the midwife said, “if you will only—”

  “Gaius Pliny, is that really you?” Aurelia stood in the doorway leading from the atrium to the back of the house, bracing herself with one hand on the doorpost. “I can’t believe you got here so soon.” She rushed to me and embraced me—or clung to me. I expected tears, but she wasn’t shedding any.

  When I felt her arms relax a bit I held her shoulders and stepped back, looking at her for the first time in over a year. Her face was puffy and she had gained weight, as women will do when they are bearing a child, but she was no less beautiful. I couldn’t look away from her eyes. They were still as green as young acorns, just like the first time I saw her. Now, though, I saw dark circles around them and a Maenad’s madness in them. Her golden hair—the origin of her name—was unpinned, lying loose aro
und her shoulders. It looked so natural I had to remind myself it was a wig, covering the fact that her hair had been whacked off the first time I saw her and hadn’t yet had time to grow back to its full length.

  “Thank the gods you’re here, Gaius Pliny,” she said. “And Cornelius Tacitus, it’s wonderful to see you again.” She took Tacitus’ hand and squeezed it. “You two are my only hope.”

  “Lady Aurelia, please don’t expect too much of us,” I said. “We’ll give you all the help we can, but there may not be much we can do.”

  She wrung her hands. “If you can just get my husband to talk, you’ll have done more than any of us.”

  “Where is Calpurnius now?”

  “He’s being held in the vigiles’ quarters. They won’t let me see him. They say he doesn’t want to see me.”

  “Tacitus and I will go there first thing tomorrow.” I deliberately did not promise her that I would talk to him because I didn’t know if they would let me, or if he would want to.

  “My lady,” the midwife said, “you should sit down. You need to rest.”

  Aurelia slipped her arm through mine and let me escort her to the exhedra at the end of the garden. The garden itself must have been quite lovely at some time, but now it showed signs of a lack of care. Shovels and rakes leaned against the walls at random, as though waiting for someone to put them to use. The scraggly plants were struggling to recover from neglect as well as from the effects of the eruption. The plaster on the walls of the rooms surrounding the garden was cracked in places. Here and there a few chunks had fallen out. In the fresco to my right Venus, cradling the dead Adonis, was missing her face and her right shoulder and breast. In a far corner of the garden ash had been piled up more than half as high as the wall.

  “This was one of my father’s houses,” Aurelia said, “the one where I grew up. Since I was his only child, he left it to me when he died. It’s very dear to me. My husband’s house was farther south. It was buried in the ash by the eruption. He lived with his father west of Naples for a few years until we married.”

  “So Calpurnius has lived in this house for only a year or so?” I asked.

  “Yes. Is that significant?”

  “I’m not sure. Before he came here, would he have had any contact with the woman who was murdered?”

  “None that I know of. Bastet, you’ve served my husband’s family for so long. Did Calpurnius know that poor woman?”

  “No, my lady. None of us who came here with him knew her.”

  While I was weighing what I had just learned, Tacitus said, “I take it you’ve combined households since your marriage.”

  Aurelia nodded. “The arrangement has worked well, I think. We are one family now.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I tried to study Bastet’s face for a reaction to what Aurelia had just said, but I couldn’t read anything. I wished I could keep my face that impassive when I was playing ­latrunculus.

  “I’m sorry for the appearance of the house,” Aurelia said. “We just haven’t gotten everything repaired, even yet. Calpurnius did a lot of work right after we married, but he seems to have given up now. My father had to pile up that ash just to get it off the plants. Calpurnius keeps telling me he’s going to have the rest of it removed, but no one has touched it in months.”

  “It’s clear the damage was extensive,” I said. “At least you didn’t have to abandon the place, since it means so much to you.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if that wouldn’t have been the wiser thing to do.” Aurelia sighed heavily, then gathered herself. “Now, I suppose you need to see poor Amalthea.”

  “As soon as possible, yes.” I hadn’t wanted to rush her, but I couldn’t have let her go on talking much longer.

  “I’ll have her brought up here.”

  “Is there a room you can put her in?”

  “That would be better, wouldn’t it?” Aurelia said. “It will give you privacy to work and spare poor Amalthea from being made a spectacle. You can use that last room.” She pointed across the garden. “It’s empty. And we’ll make sure you have plenty of light.”

  “Maybe it would be better to examine her where she is now,” Tacitus said, “just to avoid moving her any more than we have to.”

  “I put her in a little cave, like a cellar, below the house,” Aurelia said. “You would find it much too cramped to work in.” She summoned her steward and told him to have the woman’s body brought to us.

  While we waited Aurelia offered us bread, cheese, and wine. I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat much, considering the condition I expected the woman’s body to be in. Normally the sight of a body doesn’t make me queasy, but I still wasn’t entirely recovered from an entire day spent on the water.

  “How old was she?” I asked.

  “About thirty-five, I think,” Aurelia said.

  “Had she been in this house all her life?”

  “According to his records, my father purchased her and her mother when Amalthea was about ten.”

  “Do you know of any diseases or other problems she might have had?” Knowing such things beforehand helps me to understand what I’m seeing in a situation like this.

  Aurelia shook her head. “As far as I know, she was in good health.”

  In a few moments two servants entered the garden from the direction where I thought the kitchen must be, carrying a woman’s body between them. She was limp, V-shaped. The death rigor had already passed. That would make our work easier. Aurelia directed them to the room where we would examine her. Two lampstands were set up and Tacitus closed the door.

  VII

  Lying before us on the bed was the body of a nondescript woman of medium height. I doubt that I would ever have noticed her if we’d passed one another on the street. She was still wearing the gown she’d had on when she was killed, the front of it soaked in blood.

  “There’s dirt all over her,” Tacitus said. “It looks like she was buried and dug up.”

  I pinched some of the dirt between my fingers. “It’s clay. Very dry. We’ll have to ask Aurelia about that.”

  “I thought she would be much more…decayed,” Tacitus said.

  “I did, too. It looks like she hasn’t been dead more than a few hours.” I raised one of her arms and found it limber. “I wonder if this clay has dried her flesh and prevented it from rotting. The death stiffness has passed, though.”

  “Should we…take her gown off?” Tacitus’ hesitancy—almost a sense of decency—surprised me. I also felt much more reluctance to undress the woman than I had ever felt about undressing the body of a dead man. But it had to be done.

  “Do you have your knife on you?”

  In light of our experiences the last two years Tacitus and I have taken to carrying a weapon at all times, something that men of our class don’t ordinarily do. Tacitus carries a knife. My weapon is the short legionary sword I used when I was a military tribune in Syria. In spite of some discomfort, I keep it strapped under my tunic. I’m not particularly adept at using it, but I feel safer having it at hand. I wasn’t wearing it at the moment because I hadn’t figured I’d need it on the trireme. Tacitus gave me his knife and I began cutting Amalthea’s gown off of her, starting at the top and working down.

  The first thing I noticed was the red marks around her neck. “Someone grabbed her by the throat,” I pointed out to Tacitus.

  “From in front or from behind? Can you tell?”

  “Not immediately, but we’ll have to figure that out.”

  As I got to the bottom of the gown we discovered that Amalthea had soiled herself, as people often do in the agony of a violent death. We raised her body and slipped the gown out from under her, dropping it in a wad beside the door.

  “Not what you’d call a pretty woman, was she?” Tacitus said. “She might have been at one time, though. You know, Herodotus said that Egyptian embalmers weren’t allowed to work on the women until they’d been dead for several days. Apparently they caught one of them coupling with a
fresh corpse.”

  At my look of dismay, he raised his hands and said, “I’m merely reporting what Herodotus said. Surely you don’t think I’m that depraved.”

  “I know you have lines you won’t cross. Some of them, I’ve learned, are pretty far out on the frontier.”

  I pulled a blanket from under Amalthea and laid it over her, covering as much as I could. The wound in her chest was the only thing we needed to look at.

  “Aurelia didn’t say anything about her having a child,” Tacitus said.

  “What makes you think she had a child?”

  Tacitus raised the blanket. “Her belly. Those silvery marks are where the skin stretched when she was pregnant and then didn’t return to its normal size.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You really should get out of your house and go to the baths, Gaius Pliny. Now that Domitian encourages men and women to bathe together, there’s much to be learned. I should think you would have, shall we say, a scientific interest.”

  “My only interest right now is in finding out how this woman was killed.” I pulled the blanket back over the lower part of her body.

  “There’s not much to puzzle over, is there?” Tacitus said. “A knife wound near the left breast, just as Thamyras said.”

  “It’s above the breast, not below it. That means the blow was struck down. Let me have your knife.” I inserted Tacitus’ knife slowly into the wound, not pushing but letting it follow the path made by the knife that killed Amalthea.

  “What are you doing?” Tacitus cried.

  The knife handle was pointing upward, toward the woman’s face, and toward her right side. The blade ran down into her chest.

  “I think whoever killed her was standing behind her,” I said. “He grabbed her around the neck and reached over her and drove the knife in.”

  “Couldn’t someone standing in front of her have stabbed her with a downward motion?”

  I turned Tacitus so we were standing face-to-face. “See how the knife is angled to the woman’s right? If the person who killed her was standing in front of her, as I am standing in front of you, he would have had to be left-handed to inflict that sort of wound. And remember, he’s holding her by the throat, so his own right arm might get in the way. Someone stabbing her from the front would be more likely, I think, to use an underhand motion. The wound would be below her breast and would go straight in.”