Sick at heart, I watched the killing. It was like Vulfard’s death all over again. The aurochs tossed the broken body repeatedly, picking it up on its horns after each time Protis’s corpse flopped to the sand then flinging it up in the air. When the beast tired of that murderous treatment, it let the body lie where it fell, waited for a moment or two, then slowly and deliberately folded its fore legs and knelt and crushed the bloody remains of the young Greek into the sand. Finally the beast rose to its feet, looked around the arena as if satisfied and, ignoring the dogs, trotted away in the direction of its stall.
The door stood wide open. Walo must have succeeded in returning the bears to their enclosure and prepared a way for the aurochs to leave the arena. The hulking beast passed through the open doorway and headed for its stall of its own accord, for I saw it no more.
Numbed, I looked around the great empty bowl of the Colosseum looming over the gruesome death scene. The commotion had awoken people living in the other houses. A torch flame flickered in a window. My gaze travelled round the circle of the seats opposite me and my stomach gave a sudden lurch. In the dark shadow of a tier of seats slightly higher up, was a darker patch. It was difficult to be certain. Tucked in against one of the columns was what looked like the shape of a man. Someone was sitting there, watching. My spine crawled as I wondered if a spectator had been there the whole time, relishing the spectacle of Protis’s death.
Osric and I went down into the arena. Protis’s lifeless body was so badly mangled that Osric had to go back to our lodgings to fetch a blanket in which to wrap the corpse, so we could carry it away. As I waited for Osric to return, I looked up again at the spot where I thought I had seen a spectator. This time the place was empty.
*
A Greek priest from the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin came for Protis’s funeral. He conducted the service in the little chapel inside the Colosseum itself, and afterwards we buried Protis in the makeshift cemetery in the abandoned section of the arena. We placed a broken piece of marble to mark his grave. On the Nomenculator’s advice we claimed that Protis had been killed in an accident while the aurochs was exercising. Paul said that it was the only way to avoid an official investigation by the city magistrates. If they got involved, we would not be allowed to leave the city for months. Osric and I had already agreed between ourselves that we would stay silent on the even more delicate question of how all the animals had been set free that fatal evening. Neither of us wanted Walo to be blamed.
The mystery of the watcher in the spectator seats preyed on my mind. I was unsure if my imagination had been playing tricks or not. So, on the morning after Protis’s death, I climbed to the upper tier where I had seen the lurking shadow. The stone benches were worn and chipped, streaked with a winter’s grime. It was hard to know if anyone had been there recently. I turned away, about to go back down to the arena, when I felt something crunch beneath my shoe. I had stepped and crushed the empty shell of what looked like a small nut. I went down on my hands and knees and saw three more half-shells, lying where they had fallen close beside the seat. They were greenish brown and wizened, more like the thin casings of large seeds. I picked one up and smelled it. There was a very faint whiff of some exotic flavour that I could not identify. Instantly, the unusual tastes of the meal with the Nomenculator came back to me. Paul loved exotic spices. He had also arranged for the animals to be housed in the Colosseum and had a vast knowledge of ancient Roman ways. I imagined him sitting on that seat, nibbling on dried seeds, and looking down into the arena when Protis died, enjoying the spectacle and indulging a perverted sense of history re-enacted. But that made no sense. It was Paul who had warned me that a clever enemy remains hidden. He would have been foolhardy or very arrogant to have taken the risk of coming to the Colosseum that night.
I sat back on my heels and thought about the Anglo-Saxons that Abram and I had met on our way back from St Peter’s Basilica. It was possible that one or more of them were King Offa’s hirelings, paid to get rid of me. But there, too, I saw a difficulty: releasing the aurochs and the two bears into the arena was not a sure way of getting me killed. Protis had died, not me.
Of course there was the simpler explanation: the spectator had been there by coincidence. Nevertheless, I was left with a disagreeable feeling that the shadowy watcher had known what would happen.
Carefully, I gathered up the half-shells and put them in my purse along with Offa’s coin.
Chapter Thirteen
‘the annual Nile flood – a great mystery,’ Abram remarked. The two of us watched a fisherman throwing his net in the mud-laden current. The graceful flare and splash of his net was endlessly fascinating. Standing in a tiny, unstable boat hollowed from a tree trunk, he gathered up the fine mesh hand over hand, swung it inboard, and shook out a silver shower of fingerlings.
‘Why a mystery?’ I asked.
‘The river rises when there is no rain in Egypt. So where does the water come from?’ he answered.
‘Doesn’t your itinerarium provide a clue?’ I asked.
‘The itinerarium only extends so far,’ he replied, pointing upriver with his chin. ‘The source of the river is unknown.’
He had produced the map when we went to the Nomenculator to report what had happened with the aurochs. Paul had pressed us to leave Rome as soon as possible, saying it was for our own safety. He knew of a large party of pilgrims leaving for the Holy Land and he could arrange for us and the animals to accompany them to the port of Brundisium. From there the pilgrims would sail for Jaffa and Jerusalem and we could continue overland to Baghdad. Diffidently, Abram had proposed a quicker route by ship from Brundisium to Alexandria in Egypt, then onward. He unrolled the scroll to show the Nomenculator what he was suggesting.
‘This is Alexandria on the Egyptian coast,’ he had said, pointing to a symbol of a castle. ‘Those lines, like a tangle of green worms, represent the delta of the Nile, each river finding its own way to the sea. And here’ – he had slid his finger to a straight black line that met the most easterly of the rivers – ‘is a canal that links the Nile to the Erythrean Sea. From there one can sail all the way to Baghdad itself.’
The Nomenculator had taken the opportunity to show off his erudition. ‘Herodotus wrote about the canal, if I’m not mistaken. Built by the pharaohs. Emperor Trajan had it dug and cleared when it silted up.’
‘Are you sure that the canal is still usable?’ Paul had given Abram a worried glance. ‘Shifting sand is difficult to keep at bay.’
‘The map has been a reliable guide so far,’ the dragoman had replied reasonably.
Paul had then turned to me. ‘Sigwulf, I think your dragoman is offering good advice.’
‘Then we go through Egypt and use the canal,’ I answered. Months earlier in Aachen, Alcuin had suggested this same route, and indeed our voyage from Italy across the Mediterranean had been uneventful. In Alexandria we had been met by customs officials and taken to an interview with the city governor. His overlord was the caliph and when he heard of the purpose of our journey, he immediately gave his permission for us to proceed. Abram had slipped the port captain a generous bribe for his dockworkers to shift our animals without delay onto two large riverboats that regularly plied the river.
Now, less than six weeks after departing Rome, we were gliding along the braided waterways of the delta heading deeper into Egypt. Watching the fisherman cast his net again, I was confident that I had made the correct choice.
‘That night in the Colosseum, did it involve those Saxons you were so worried about?’ Abram asked.
The abruptness of his question caught me off guard as I kept my suspicions to myself, and I could only answer feebly, ‘How do you reach that conclusion?