The Legatus Mystery (26 page)

The steward was struggling bravely but they had him now. He stood there, breathing heavily, his cloak ripped from him and his tunic torn. Then one of them hit him savagely across the back and head, and suddenly he slumped, all opposition gone. Two slaves took him by the armpits and dragged him like a sack towards the house, his feet trailing uselessly behind him on the path. A trickle of blood ran down his face and his eyes were closed, but even though his head lolled forward he was breathing still.

‘They are not to bind him!’ I heard the high priest say. ‘Oh Jupiter, Greatest and Best! All this when we have a procession to arrange.’ And he tottered off in agitated pursuit, followed by a number of his slaves. Only Marcus remained under the canopy, accompanied by two attendants with their lights. They too seemed ready to retrace their steps.

I stepped forward. ‘Excellence?’ I could not have timed it with more precision. At that moment a flash of lightning lit the sky and a rumbling growl of thunder followed it.

There was pandemonium. Slaves began rushing to and fro, wailing and shouting. ‘Dear Hercules! The very voice of Jove!’ one of them exclaimed, and Hirsus – behind me – began to sob. ‘It is all fate. They will kill him. Everything is doomed.’

The first heavy drops of rain began to fall.

Marcus alone seemed unperturbed. He gestured me to come and join him under the canopy, though the slaves who were supporting it looked at me nervously.

‘Nothing to worry about now,’ he assured them breezily. ‘We’ve caught the man who’s responsible. Found him lurking here outside the gate, next to the pontifex’s house! He must have been here all the time, my old friend. Not like you to overlook something like that. Still, what does it matter, since we caught the scoundrel?’ He had that benevolent, self-congratulatory air which meant that he was inwardly delighted with himself.

The slaves seemed somewhat – though not wholly – reassured by this, and when he added, ‘Shall we go in and see what he has to say when he recovers consciousness?’ they had recovered themselves sufficiently to walk back through the gate, keeping the cover carefully over Marcus’s head.

It was raining really heavily by now, and I felt sympathy for poor Junio, who could only follow in the driving wet. Meritus, I noticed, had pulled up his hood, as though he were about to sacrifice again, but Hirsus was walking behind us like a man asleep – the water simply coursing down his face and mingling with his tears.

Marcus made no attempt to invite them to come and join our shelter. ‘I presume this is our murderer,’ he said cheerfully, as we picked our way back through the peristyle. ‘I see his tunic-edge is smudged with blood. He must have been responsible for it all.’

I shook my head. I still could not believe it. ‘Lithputh? I don’t understand.’ Water had seeped through the thick embroidered canopy and was beginning to drip uncomfortably on my head, while my hems were sodden with the bouncing spray, so I was glad when we reached the shelter of the house.

Marcus stepped through the door into the ante-room, leaving the shivering slaves outside to fold the canopy away. ‘You know the man?’ he said, without a backward glance, as the sudden withdrawal of the cover left me standing in the rain.

‘He is the steward of Honorius Optimus,’ I said, following him gratefully inside. ‘The ex-officer whose pavement I was laying’ – I was about to say ‘yesterday’, since it seemed impossible that so much had happened in a few short hours, but I caught myself in time – ‘earlier today.’

I sat down on the stool provided next to his, and gave him an account of what I’d witnessed, while a pair of slaves removed our wet sandals and washed and dried our feet. I saw Hirsus and Meritus come in, drenched with the rain, and be shown a place to sit and wait their turn. Junio had not appeared – bundled away to the servants’ waiting room, no doubt. I hoped that he was provided with a towel.

‘Well,’ Marcus said as – our warmed damp shoes having been returned to us – we were led away and the servants turned their attention to the seviri. ‘This must be a relief to you. No need for public self-flagellation, now that the guilty party has been found. I’ll have a proclamation made in the forum, since no doubt the procession will be delayed in any case. The thunder will be taken as a sign.’

I was tempted by this line of thought. If Lithputh was found guilty by popular acclaim, then Marcus was quite right, I would escape and this whole incident would quickly pass. Why not permit the Phrygian to take the blame, although it left so many questions unanswered? Why meddle with affairs which seemed to have so providentially arranged themselves? But the punishments for sacrilege were harsh – usually involving death by ordeal – and those for killing priests were harsher still. Lithputh was vain and self-important, but nobody deserved a fate like that.

Besides, I was beginning to develop a different theory of my own. I said as we were led towards the atrium, ‘Of course, even if Lithputh was involved, he cannot have done all this alone. A man would have to be familiar with the rituals, and know his way about the temple perfectly. I wonder what Lithputh was doing at the shrine?’

Marcus was sharp. ‘I should have thought that it was obvious. A bleeding corpse, a murdered priest – and then a man with bloodied clothes nearby? You have a better explanation, perhaps?’

He was rebuking me, and I deserved it, too. My suspicions were still not strong enough to voice. ‘Not that I can think of, Excellence,’ I said meekly, and followed him into the room.

Lithputh was there, still unconscious on the ground where they had thrown him face down in an ignominious heap. All the same, his arms were still restrained – a pair of hefty slaves had hold of them, ready to drag him to his feet the moment he woke, as he was showing faint signs that he might do. A group of other slaves was nearby, and so was the pontifex, who had ignored the chair that had been set for him, and was pacing abstractedly before the altar. He turned to face us as we entered.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘At last! Be pleased to seat yourself, Excellence, and then, please gods, send for your troops and have them take this accursed slave away. We should lock him up, before Jove visits any more miseries on us tonight. And you are here too, pavement-maker! What’s this I hear about a pile of bones? Don’t look so startled, citizen. One of your torch-bearers has been telling me.’

The little slave who had fled the shrine, I guessed. I gulped, ready to tell the story once again, but Marcus (who had taken the proffered chair) was already telling it – how Lithputh had killed the messengers, and tried to hide his crimes by smuggling the first body from the shrine, and changing the other for the beggar’s corpse. ‘No doubt, if we had them search the public pit, we’d find the other body we were looking for,’ he finished. He looked at me triumphantly. ‘Well, Libertus, what have you to say? You disagree with my analysis?’

I did, on several counts, but I know better than to ‘disagree’ with Marcus, especially since Meritus and Hirsus were now being ushered in. Marcus did not like to be contradicted even in private. In front of witnesses I must be a dozen times more circumspect.

‘I’m sure you’re absolutely right, Excellence,’ I said. I gave him time to smile before I added, apologetically, ‘In some respects.’

His smile grew tight, but I had done enough. He nodded.

‘Had you considered, Excellence,’ I ventured, ‘that there might be only one body here?’ An appeal to his intelligence was better than a simple explanation, as I knew.

He frowned for a moment, and then his forehead cleared. ‘I see. You mean that the body yesterday might be the same one as the priests saw today?’ I was aware of a tense hush around the room. Everyone was listening carefully to this. Then the smile reappeared, more broadly. ‘Indeed it might! Perhaps the substitution was intended to take place earlier – after all, the body of the tramp was there! But why? Simply to terrify the populace?’

Marcus could be a clear thinker when he tried, though his account was not exactly accurate.

‘Something very much like that, Excellence,’ I said. There was a rustle of relief around the room.

‘One body, then,’ he said. ‘Two if you include Trinunculus.’

I bowed my head. ‘Exactly, Excellence.’

The high priest had whirled around. ‘Trinunculus!’ he gasped, and I realised with horror that this was the first the old man had heard of the death of his assistant priest. It had shocked him deeply, by the look of him – his face was whiter than his robes, and his pale eyes seemed to have lost their gleam.

This time it was Meritus who explained – his voice so resonant that even the pontifex could hear – ‘Strangled, Mightiness! Probably a cord, or band – the soldiers found him lying in the grove. He must, I now realise, have been coming here – there was an angry mob outside the gate, and it would have been difficult for him to pass. I know you told him, Pontifex, to summon other priests to the procession. I imagine he had simply hoped to go out this way. But this worthless wretch’ – he gestured to the inert figure on the floor – ‘must have been loitering, and encountered him.’

‘Who is he, anyway?’ the high priest asked, his voice no more than a ghostly whisper. ‘I seem to have seen him somewhere before.’ He came forward to have a closer look, and the two slaves lifted up the lifeless form for him to see, then dropped it back cruelly, so that the head struck the floor.

‘Lithputh,’ I murmured, but Hirsus stepped forward. His anxious rat-face was more strained than ever, but he found an uncharacteristic courage from somewhere.

‘Don’t hurt him any more,’ he begged. ‘He didn’t kill anyone, not Luce . . .’ His voice broke and he burst into sobs. For two
quadrans
, I realised, he would have flung himself to the floor beside the Phrygian and bathed him in tears.

But he had started to say ‘Luce . . .’ and I was staring like a fool. The scattered pattern settled into place, and I saw what I should have seen hours before. The slave that Hirsus loved and hoped to ‘set up a household with’ – why had I assumed that it was a woman? Hirsus, who visited Optimus’s house when its owner wasn’t there. I’d seen him walking from there in a cloak, and taken him for a female myself!

I turned to face the pontifex.

‘I called the prisoner Lithputh, Mightiness,’ I said. ‘But that is not rightfully his name – merely a nickname I gave him with my slave. I think his slave name is Lucianus. “Lucianus the wretched” as he calls himself.’

I was rather pleased with my deduction and expected my statement to cause a little stir, but I had forgotten that the steward’s identity was no surprise to anyone but me.

Hirsus nodded tearfully, and Meritus said, ‘Indeed, Sacredness, it’s true. Lucianus was a penitent of mine. His master would not release him, and he felt that he had mortally offended the Imperial gods. He has made handsome offerings to the shrine.’

‘I have seen some of them,’ I said. ‘Gold, silver, jewellery . . . all kinds of things. That’s why I was so slow to recognise his identity. How could a mere slave afford such offerings?’

Marcus was tapping his baton on his hand. ‘Stealing from his master, doubtless? Sevir, you are an expert in the metal trade. You must have known the value of such things? Did you not ask where he obtained them from?’

The sevir said coldly, ‘It is not my place to ask him, Excellence. If a man comes to the temple, and offers repeated sacrifices in good faith, it does not occur to me that he may be a thief. That is a crime with heavy penalties. If that were proved . . .’

‘There is no need to look for explanations, Excellence. I helped him,’ Hirsus said, with unexpected dignity. ‘He had no need to steal from Optimus. I am a wealthy man.’

Marcus looked at me, with an expression which said that he believed none of it.

‘Excellence, I think he’s telling you the truth,’ I said. ‘When we were working at the house one of the slaves told us that he’d seen Lithputh – Lucianius – secretly receiving money from a priest.’ For services rendered, presumably, I thought to myself, although I didn’t say the words aloud. In fact, I was careful not to say too much. Hirsus was already in danger from the law.

For a man to love another man is not unknown, and there is no legal barrier to having intercourse with a slave of either sex: many citizens keep pretty boys or youths precisely to gratify their procilivities. The danger for Hirsus – and a serious one – lay in the fact that this was not
his
slave. Using another man’s slave, for anything, without the permission of his owner is legally a form of theft, and there are nasty punishments for that – though only, of course, if an accuser can be found. I didn’t want to take that role – I was concerned with murder, not with lust.

The prisoner on the floor moaned softly and stirred, and I seized the interruption eagerly. ‘In any case,’ I said, ‘it seems the Phrygian is regaining consciousness. You’ll have an opportunity to ask him for yourself.’

‘That is the least of what he has to answer for!’ the high priest said, echoing my thoughts. ‘If he has desecrated the Imperial shrine – committed murder in the precinct of the gods – and killed a Priest of Jupiter no less . . .!’ He quavered into silence as if his voice had failed him.

Marcus nodded. ‘The punishment will be terrible indeed.’ He’d adopted his magisterial tone again. ‘My judgement is that this has endangered the safety of the town, and would call for the severest penalties. The hook, perhaps, even for a man with personal rights. For a slave like this . . .’

There was an uncomfortable silence. The hook is an appalling death – being whipped half dead, then dragged around the town behind a chariot by an iron hook thrust through the flesh. And when Marcus talked of ‘his judgement’ these were more than idle words: he was the highest magistrate in this part of the province. A freeman is entitled to a trial before the courts, and a citizen can even appeal to the Emperor, but for a mere slave Marcus’s word was law. If Marcus had uttered the same words in the
curia
, the sentence would have been instantly imposed.

Hirsus had beads of nervous perspiration on his brow. ‘How can you say so, with him lying there like that? He’s hurt. He has been beaten. He’s not even had an opportunity to defend himself – and you are already planning horrors for his death!’