Rosemary Rowe: A Coin for the Ferryman

‘M-m-master,’ Kurso stammered, before he had even properly climbed down. ‘I am g-g-glad to see you. Your p-p-patron’s wife sent us. You must come at once.’ He flung himself before me. ‘They have f-f-found something in the g-g-ground that they were clearing for J-Junio and Cilla’s house.’

I went in the land cart with him and Junio, leaving the women and the red-haired boys to follow in the hired coach. We took the short way — not the military road, but a twisting and sometimes vertiginous route down narrow rutted lanes — plunging through mud and overhanging branches at a pace which threatened to shake the axles off the cart and forced us to grip on with all our might.

‘So what exactly is it that the land slaves found?’ I managed, although it was hard to say anything at all when one’s teeth were being jarred together hard at every bounce.

Kurso shook his head. If it was difficult for me, it was almost impossible for him. ‘B-b-bad,’ was all I could make out.

‘What is it, Kurso? Money?’ That was possible. There had been a lot of trouble with Silurian rebels recently, setting on travellers and robbing them. They operated chiefly over to the west, but they were rumoured to have secret hideouts in the woods where they concealed their loot. This might be one of those. If so, it would certainly be ‘bad’. At the very least it would infallibly interrupt our plans and mean that Junio’s house could not be built.

Marcus was a magistrate and honest to a fault. He would demand that the place was closely searched and watched, and that would require a dozen burly guards trampling about our roundhouse day and night. Almost certainly there would be a court case too before he handed the find over to the imperial purse, and since the site was on my doorstep, so to speak, I could expect to be questioned repeatedly myself. In fact I should be grateful that — if there was a cache — it had come to light before Marcus and his family went abroad: it might have been difficult to persuade an unknown magistrate that I had no connection with the stolen goods. I did not want to think about what might have happened then. ‘A hoard of stolen coins?’ I said again.

But Kurso was shaking a determined head. ‘B-b-body,’ he finally got out.

A body. That was different. Curious, of course, but more explicable. There were often corpses in the forest, when the snows withdrew. Wolves, perhaps. Or bears, though they were not so common as they used to be. Perhaps some aged forest dweller had simply starved to death, or a benighted traveller met a frozen end in one of the winter’s more ferocious storms. There were a hundred possibilities. It was unlikely to be anything very sinister, since there had been no news of any local disappearances, but it was still a problem and I could understand why Julia had sent for me at once.

It was appalling luck to come across a corpse in a place where you intend to build a dwelling house. Of course an unknown person of no particular account found dead in the forest in the normal way would not cause much concern. It might either be left exactly where it was, or be taken to the common pit and flung in with the beggars and the criminals. But a body discovered on a house site was quite a different thing. The spirit of the unquiet dead would haunt your doors for ever, if the body was not somehow laid decently to rest.

A different explanation had occurred to Junio. ‘I hope they haven’t disturbed a grave of any sort?’ he said. ‘That would be dreadful at this time of year.’

I understood his fears. We were approaching the second Roman Festival of the Dead, the Lemuria, when kinless, hungry, homeless ghosts of those who had not received a proper funeral were said to prowl. These Lemures are known to be malevolent spirits anyway, ravenous and dangerous if the proper ceremonies are not observed — so much so that the temples close, and marriage is forbidden during the festival. But their worst spite is said to be reserved for those who unearth their buried bones.

It was such a bad portent that even I could feel a shiver of alarm, and I was not raised in a Roman household, as Junio had been. To him the threat was very real. I could see that he was looking shaken and alarmed.

‘Was it a grave?’ I echoed.

Kurso shook his head. We had slowed to let a donkey squeeze past us on the road — narrowly, since it was laden with wicker panniers full of quacking ducks — so he managed to answer more coherently. ‘N-n-not a proper one. J-just a shallow ditch. J-Julia says we’ll have to f-f-find out who it is, and get the f-f-family to bury it. Otherwise it will c-c-curse the h-h-house for ever afterwards.’ Then we went lurching on again, and we abandoned speech in favour of clinging to the wagon-sides and praying that the bone-juddering torment would soon be over.

After what seemed like a lifetime, but was probably closer to an hour, we joined up with a proper highway once again — a paved spur from the military road which led towards the villa. My roundhouse was near the junction and I expected we would stop, but the cart-driver did not draw up outside my gate. Through the palisade of woven stakes which formed my outer fence, I could see the new area which the villa slaves had cleared: one or two land-slaves were still working with an adze, grubbing out some bushes which were growing near the road. Clearly, however, the project had been largely abandoned, for the moment anyhow.

I was about to call to the cart-driver to stop, but Kurso saw what I intended and said hastily, ‘They’ll have t-t-taken the body to the v-v-villa now. If no one c-c-claims it in a day or two, the s-s-slaves will make it ready for the f-f-funeral pyre. J-Julia said you w-w-wouldn’t w-w-want it in your house.’

I nodded. I was sincerely grateful. The presence of a dead body in my roundhouse, just when I was bringing home my son, would have been an omen that even I could not ignore, though I am not very superstitious about these things as a rule. At Marcus’s spacious villa, on the other hand, there were a dozen places where it might decently be put, without impinging on the family’s living space and bringing evil luck. There was even a special room out in the stable block where dead slaves could be taken and laid out, and a cremation site out on the villa farm. Most of the servants were members of the Guild of Slaves, of course, which would arrange to give them a decent funeral — Marcus, like all good masters, paid their dues himself — but there were always one or two who had not yet enrolled, or poor freemen labourers who died on villa land, and Marcus always saw that they got at least the basic rites.

Clearly Julia intended to deal with this corpse in the same way, if we couldn’t find its family to perform the rituals. That would do a great deal to appease the vengeful Lemures, I told myself, hoping that the body had not been hidden for so long that we were already past the half-moon after death which — tradition said — was the maximum permitted before a funeral, if one wished to keep the ghost from haunting afterwards.

I was still thinking about this when we reached the villa gates and the cart did stop at last: I scrambled down, with Junio and my slave, and was immediately accosted by the gatekeeper. I knew the man, a swarthy rogue called Aulus, who always carried a faint scent of onions and bad breath.

He greeted me as though I were a friend. ‘Well, pavement-maker, here you are at last. We’ve been expecting you. The mistress will see you in the atrium — I’m to find a slave to take you to her straight away, she says.’

I was about to protest that I knew my way around the villa very well and did not need a slave, but a young pageboy was already hurrying out to us. Obviously they had been watching for my arrival from the house.