‘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.