I got slowly to my feet, and held my find out for everyone to see.
There was a little pause. Then Meritus took the ring from me. ‘I think, Excellence, with your permission, the high priest should see this.’
Marcus nodded. ‘I will take it to him. And we can make arrangements for the message to be sent to Fabius, from both of us.’
‘I should be grateful,’ Meritus returned. ‘I should attend to purifying the shrine. Finding a dead man here was bad enough, but then to touch his blood and then his ring! The omens for the shrine are terrible. We must cleanse ourselves, and it, at once. The four elements, you think, Scribonius?’
The thin priest nodded. ‘The four elements at least, sevir.’
‘Very well. Salt, Hirsus, and herbs — at once. And purify yourself again before you go. You, Scribonius, fetch a temple slave, since this floor must be scrubbed and cleansed by fire. Then you can purify the place with incense smoke. And you, Excellence, will you join us for the sacrifice?’
To my relief my patron shook his head. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the high priest should hear of this at once. He should have finished the noonday sacrifice by now. We will leave you to your ablutions. Trinunculus here will show me where to go.’
The sevir nodded. ‘As you please, Excellence. Though, I think, a little more ash upon your forehead as you leave?’ He led the way to the outer altar, and supervised Trinunculus as he scooped up a handful of the still-warm dust and rubbed it reverently on our hair and faces. ‘I would anoint you myself, only I have touched the ring, you know, and Scribonius would declare my hands unclean.’ As we left him he was plunging the offending hand into the water jar.
Trinunculus led the way, back across the courtyard to the central temple. ‘I still don’t understand,’ he said, as we approached the podium and climbed the steps towards the inner cell, ‘what can have happened to the body.’
I nodded. I had been thinking much the same thing. ‘Always supposing,’ I said suddenly, ‘that it was a corpse at all.’
The others were looking at me in astonishment.
I was thinking aloud. ‘Because a man is lying in blood, it does not follow that the blood is his — especially in a place like this, where sacrificial animals are offered every day. And I noticed myself how extraordinarily chill the water was. If a man wanted to make himself seem cold. .’
‘Is there,’ Marcus said, ‘anywhere in there a man could hide?’
Trinunculus looked baffled for a moment. Then he smiled. ‘That statue of the Emperor, perhaps. I believe it’s hollow. Meritus would know — he gave it to the temple when he was appointed. But even if it were, how could a man possibly get into it? It would have to come apart somehow.’
‘Perhaps it does,’ Marcus said. ‘Libertus, go and have a look.’
I gulped. Walking into the priests’ section of the temple was one thing. Manhandling a statue of a god — even a god I did not personally believe in — was quite another. Especially when someone was already dead. I considered begging to be spared the honour, but then I looked at my patron’s face. I swallowed hard and took a reluctant step towards the grove.
And as I did so there emerged — it seemed from the very columns around us — a high, unearthly, throbbing wail. A terrible inhuman sound that made my blood run cold.
I thought of men in torment, and was suddenly reminded — for no reason that I could explain — of the legend of that defiant old Icenian in the arena, screaming his last among the ravening dogs, and of his curse on all things sent from Rome. All things sent from Rome. .
The sound faded, quivered, rose to a climax and died again.
Marcus or no Marcus, I turned tail and fled back towards the entrance gates. Even then, when I arrived at the safety of the veranda, my patron was there before me, with Trinunculus hard at his heels. The poor little slave boy, whom we had left there waiting our return, had thrown himself to his knees with my towel over his head, and was gibbering with fright.
And so, I must admit, was I.
Chapter Five
Trinunculus was the first to recover his composure. He took a long slow breath, settled his novice’s wreath more firmly on his head (it had fallen sideways in his hurry), and said with as much priestly dignity as he could muster, ‘That was the peculiar sound we told you about, Excellence. I wonder what trouble it foretells this time.’
‘Whatever was it, in the name of Mars?’ Marcus was looking decidedly shaken. His words confirmed how very shocked he was. It is not like Marcus to make meaningless enquiries. If the young priest had been able to tell us anything, he would surely have done so instead of bolting for the veranda with us like a startled rat.
He said as much, with patient courtesy. ‘I regret, Excellence, that I don’t know the answer to that question. Everyone in the temple has been asking themselves the same thing ever since this morning. There have been some wild rumours — animals, demons, spirits of the dead — but no one seems to have the slightest real idea. It is impossible even to say exactly where the sound is coming from.’
I nodded. I had thought myself that it had seemed to echo from the very walls. But though supernatural voices are the very stuff of every religion, they are uncomfortable things to come across in person. I was as anxious as anyone to find some earthly explanation.
‘Could it have been some kind of instrument?’ I suggested. ‘Some peculiar trumpet, possibly?’ As soon as the words were uttered I regretted them. Of course it hadn’t been a trumpet. It didn’t sound remotely like any trumpet I’d ever heard, but I had felt the need to make some kind of down-to-earth suggestion — if only for the benefit of Marcus’s slave, who was still visibly trembling.
Trinunculus extended his long-suffering courtesy to me. ‘Certainly not one of the temple instruments, citizen. We have long-horns, certainly, and pipes and drums, but none of them could possibly make a noise like that. And it didn’t seem to be a human sound. But here comes the person you should ask. If this is a portent, he’s the one who’d know.’
He nodded across the courtyard. An aged priest in a toga and white robes was making doggedly towards us, supported down the temple steps by a pair of temple slaves.
‘Ah!’ Marcus said, without enthusiasm. ‘The Chief Priest of Jupiter!’
I knew the man — and so, I imagine, did everyone in town. The pontifex, he liked to be called — the title they used to give to high-ranking priests in Rome. I am not sure that he was strictly entitled to the rank, though of course the label is now much more loosely used. But even that distinction did not please the man. He had hoped, at one time, to be appointed to the highest priestly rank of all, the ‘Flamen Dialis’ — the Flamen of Jupiter. There is only one flamen for each deity — originally there were only three in all of Rome — but his failure to achieve the post had come to dominate his life. He was the next thing to a Flamen Dialis in the province, he insisted, and he voluntarily imposed upon himself many of the tiresome restrictions which attended that office.
There is some justification for his view, I suppose, since the Chief Priest of Jupiter in any city is the guardian of the sacred temple ‘flame’, and as such has the exclusive privilege of using it to light the altar-fire for public offerings. Certainly he was a most important dignitary and often the honoured celebrant at any civic festival. But this tall, cadaverous old man had held the post in Glevum for a decade, and his insistence on the flamanic rituals was the source of many jokes at his expense, especially since — like many priests — he had a much younger wife. His personal fire had dwindled with the years, the town wags said, until now there was very little ‘flame’ about him. Embers at best, they whispered, if not actually ashes.