Walking around the altar, I squeezed the man’s feet. The knots of hemp around his knees and ankles were tight, and he was lying on his back. The stiffness hadn’t set in that far, yet, but the feet were suspiciously still pink. I checked his hands. The cord was cutting into his wrist, too, and tied-like the others-in a British knot. The fingers were clenched, and when I tried to unbend them they fought back. He was cool, almost cold to the touch. I moved up to look at his eyes. The flat, deep brown was shiny, but a milky film was starting to form. The pupils were dilated. I knew Avitus was getting impatient for some answers, so I bent back up and spoke. “I think he’s been dead for about four or five hours.”
He nodded. “That would mean somewhere between the first and third hours of night. Anything else?”
“I need a bit more time. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
The beneficarius grunted, and slouched down, crouching, on the earth floor. It had been a longer night than usual for him.
I turned toward the corpse, and tried to picture the once-living man. He was fat, probably about forty to fifty, and swarthy. The brown of his skin was due to sunshine. The color covered his fleshy arm, stiff and extended from under his saffron tunic, in an uneven, mottled pattern.
A long mink mantle lay open and exposed beneath him. A few large, gold rings were nearly swallowed by the fat of his fingers, and an ivory and gold earring, in the shape of a woman, dangled from his right ear. I leaned over his tunic and sniffed. I knew better than to think any smell would linger in what was left of his throat. But a faint odor of something sweet-not beer, not wine, something else-wafted by me and disappeared. I glanced over at Avitus. He was nodding off, probably catching his only sleep for the day.
I moved around, back toward the man’s feet. They were shoeless and swollen, and the color still troubled me. And they were fairly clean. That bothered me, too. I shoved my hands under his thick, hammy calves, and touched something damp and earthy. I grasped and pulled, and came out with a muddy slipper-the kind fat, rich, lazy men like to lounge in. Laying it beside him, I searched for another. No luck. I turned to his feet, and pushed hard on a spot below his big toe. The pink color remained.
Turning him over would make me certain, but I was worried about waking Avitus. If I found something-and I thought I might-I didn’t want him to see it. The altar was wide, and I was able to shove the corpse on its side without too much effort. The body squeaked a little, as they sometimes do, and I wasn’t breathing lightly. I looked up, worried, but the beneficarius was still sleeping.
I pushed up the man’s tunic, and as I did a leather pouch peeped out from his right hip. He’d been lying on it, and whoever had done this to him hadn’t bothered to take it. I braced his body with my left hand, and with my right, carefully disentangled the pouch from a belt which had been all but obscured by a roll of fat. It was heavy. Keeping my eyes focused on Avitus, I slipped it into the fold of my cloak, and hoped the beneficarius wouldn’t notice the bulge on my left side.
Now I turned my attention to his back. The shoulders were rounded, looking as though they’d stooped in a perpetual cringe. If he’d been killed in this position, the blood should have settled here, in his back and buttocks. From the gore where his neck had been, all the way down to the crack of his ass, the color was the same as the rest of the body-a waxy, ashy grey.
I grunted as I lowered the corpse back down on the altar, and Avitus woke up. He snapped his head back and forth, like a ferret in a chicken house, eyes wide and large and alert. After a couple of seconds, he realized where he was. He pulled himself to his feet slowly, stretching his long arms and legs. He yawned. “What else?”
“He’s just arrived in Britannia, and he’s probably from the East-Egypt, maybe, or Cyrenaica. And he’s got money-lots of it.”
The beneficarius grunted. “I could have told you that. Any papers? What he did, who he was?”
I was smooth. “No idea. But I can tell you that he wasn’t murdered here, if that makes you feel better. Someone dispatched him somewhere else, and then that same someone-or maybe a whole new set of someones-brought him here, tied him up, and poured animal blood over the altar of your god. There would have to be at least two, to carry him.”
Poor Avitus stared at the body like he hadn’t seen it before. He’d wanted me to spoon feed him a tidy little robbery and murder, with the discovery of his temple an unfortunate and somehow accidental side-effect. But the fat corpse on the slab was no accident.
“Are you sure?”
I shrugged. “As sure as I can be.”
“Goddamn it. We’re all senior men. Who’d betray the temple? Who’d betray the pater, the governor himself?”
He choked on the sacred information and leaned against the wall and brooded. I was tired. With a look at that pouch and a talk with Bilicho still ahead. I decided to throw him a bone.
“Who said it was personal? Maybe some local saw the earth glowing. Maybe he thinks sticking a corpse in here will shut you down and hurt the legions. Maybe it was a joke. Who knows?”
The beneficarius stopped pacing. The bone was there for the chewing. He sniffed it, gnawed it a little, but decided not to wag his tail over it. Then he looked at me, and remembered I was fresh meat.
“Let’s go see what your freedman has to say.”
If I was worried, I didn’t act like it.
“Let me straighten out the victim first.”
I had noticed what looked like a fragment of papyrus clutched in the fat man’s fist. I unscrewed the stiffening fingers of his right hand, the side hidden from Avitus’ view, little by little. As I bent down to tuck the robe around the sagging flesh, I made one last effort to dislodge the paper. It was clammy to the touch, and I palmed it easily. I placed my other hand over the man’s eyes.
“May the earth rest lightly upon you,” I said piously.
Avitus had already turned toward the larger, better-lit room where Bilicho was waiting. I glanced down at the scrap in my hand, and caught a few words in the flickering light. The ones that stuck in my throat, the ones I was almost expecting, hit me hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs. Whatever document the piece had been torn from had been about a certain “C. Vibius Maecenas.”
I shoved the paper in my tunic fold, next to the leather pouch. Bilicho was up ahead, still standing, his eyes covered, next to two soldiers. But I was the blind man-all I could see was a tense and lovely blonde, murmuring words in a low, cold voice, words I wished I’d never heard: “I want him to die. I’d kill him myself, before he touched me.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Even in the dark cold, sweat trickled down my neck. I shivered. One thing I knew: whatever Gwyna’s role, it wasn’t the theatrical butchery of Maecenas’ throat-slitting. She wasn’t strong enough. And the rest I didn’t have time to think about.
Avitus was watching me. Bilicho couldn’t see me at all. The soldiers were angry and frightened and stiffer than Maecenas. This was supposed to be a nice mithraeum.
The beneficarius had his courtroom face on. It was time for opening arguments, and we’d better come up with a good defense-one that kept Avitus in the dark, where he was so obviously comfortable.
“These two men discovered-what is his name?”
I wanted to tell him his pretense was about as convincing as the Emperor’s hairpiece. Instead I said: “You know him, Avitus. His name is Bilicho. My medical assistant. Recently manumitted.”