John Roberts - Oracle of the Dead

“Curio continues to be controversial,” Marcus went on. “He’s gone over to Caesar wholeheartedly now, after months of vacillating.” Scribonius Curio was the most remarkable Tribune of the People in a long time. His rise to power had been phenomenal, and he was uncommonly effective, proposing and ramming through the Assemblies a program of legislation unprecedented in its scope and volume. Rumor had it that Caesar had suborned him with a bribe of unprecedented extravagance and now it appeared that the bribe had been successful. If so, Curio was a man of character, for in the years to come he hewed faithfully to Caesar, right until his death in Africa. I had always liked him, even when we ran afoul of one another.

“Oh, enough of this dreary political blather!” Antonia cried. “Let’s have the real gossip! What’s Fulvia been up to?” This Fulvia was one of those scandalous women who livened Roman discourse of the day. She had been briefly involved with some ill-fated political rogues and had been a center of attention ever since.

“Well,” Marcus began, “she has been linked with the aedile Caelius Rufus, who has been prosecuting those who illegally divert water from the aqueducts. And, since her own family are notorious for just that crime-” and so on. I was eager for the political news, but petty gossip about who was sleeping with whom, who was bribing whom for financial gain, who had murdered whom for banal motives, left me utterly unconcerned.

Still, I was grateful for the way Marcus had turned the conversation to lighter subjects. It was well that we ended the evening on a cheerful note, because the next morning brought us yet another murder at the temple.

"What?” I shouted. “Who’s left to kill? The whole staff of priests are gamboling happily amid the Elysian Fields already!”

“Calm down, dear,” Julia admonished. “With all you ate and drank last night you’re liable to bring on a seizure.”

It was early morning, never the best hour for me. Hermes had come in to wake me more than an hour before my accustomed time. It was still dark enough to need lamps. I threw on a toga, ignoring Julia’s demands to wait for her. I knew she would take far too long to get dressed and made up. Preceded by torchbearers, we made our way up to the temple. In what had become the market area, I could see the embers of some campfires still burning, though most of the visitors were fast asleep. A steward met us at the entrance to the temple grounds. He looked distressed, and understandably so. Temples of Apollo were supposed to be serene places and this one was anything but.

He led us to the stable area, where horses and asses shifted quietly in the cool morning. There on the straw lay the body, and the torchbearers lowered their flames so that we could see, but it was scarcely necessary in the growing dawn light.

It was the slave girl, Hypatia. I closed my eyes for a moment. Such a beautiful child.

“Well,” Hermes said, “at least this time there’s no mystery about how she died.”

Indeed, she had been stabbed just beneath the sternum. It was an expert’s blow, sure to kill quickly with one thrust slanting upward into the heart. Hermes parted her gown to view the wound.

“It was done with a broad-bladed dagger or a short sword, maybe a soldier’s pugio .”

“I wish Asklepiodes were here,” I said, not for the first time.

“He probably couldn’t tell you much. This looks pretty straightforward.”

I spoke to the steward. “When was she found?”

“Less than an hour ago, Praetor. The boy who cares for the animals is always here before first light. I am afraid he tripped over her. He came running to me and I sent word to you at once.”

“Commendable. Besides the boy, how many people have been trampling around here since she was found?”

“Just ourselves, sir.”

“Hermes, go get my lictors and have them guard this area. We’ll make a thorough search at full light.”

He was back in a few minutes, and Julia arrived as well, looking grim when she saw the body. “That poor girl,” she said. “She was afraid to speak out and she had reason to be, it seems.”

“I blame myself for this,” I told her. “I should have taken her into custody. I said right in front of everybody that I might be questioning her further. Clearly somebody did not want her to talk.”

“Do you think she saw more than she told you?”

“Probably not, but sometimes it is best not to take chances. Whoever is behind this decided to eliminate a possible problem. They didn’t see fit to employ arcane murder methods this time.”

“Why at the stables?” Julia mused. “What was she doing out here in the middle of the night?”

“I’ve been pondering that myself. Perhaps she was frightened enough to try to escape and she came down here to steal a mount. But it can be no coincidence that the murderer was here waiting for her.”

“She must have been summoned here by someone she thought she had reason to trust.”

“If so, she was mistaken in that belief. In fact, it causes me to wonder about her depth of involvement in this matter.”

“You think she might have been an accomplice?” Julia said.

“It wouldn’t be the first time someone suborned a slave to spy on a master. Nor would it be the first time an accomplice was eliminated in just this fashion.”

With full light we went over the scene. As is common with stables, the ground in front, where the body lay, was a mash of trampled mud and straw. Footprints, both human and animal, were so plentiful that they told us nothing. I examined the ground closely for any foreign matter, but there was nothing. Just the beautiful girl, whose eyes stared up at nothing, expressing nothing, not even the reproach I deserved.

“Well, my dear,” I said, “I don’t think we’re going to learn anything here.”

“Don’t be so sure, my love,” Julia said. To my horror, she further opened the unfortunate girl’s gown and felt her breasts, then her belly. Apparently satisfied, she straightened. “This girl is-was, I should say, pregnant. About three months along.”

Her words did not shock me at all, but her actions did. Romans do not at all mind turning live bodies into dead ones. We do it all the time. However, we have a ritual revulsion for touching dead bodies before the proper rites have been performed. Death contaminates, and the purificatory lustrum must be performed before the body can be handled. And here was Julia, the very personification of patrician rectitude, touching the body of a murdered slave.

Mind you, I did not doubt for a second that her judgment was correct. Few women knew more about pregnancy than Julia, since the subject was her passion. She suffered from the Julians’ famous infertility and she had been to every midwife, medium, and quack physician in Rome to find a cure. Still, as many years as we tried, she had achieved pregnancy rarely, carried a child to term only twice, and these infants had not survived their first four months. I accepted this as the gods’ will where it came to the Julians, as opposed to my own family, whose fertility was little less than pestilential. In our circles, where you cannot produce heirs, you adopt. But Julia resisted this expedient, still hoping to produce an heir of good Julian-Caecilian stock.

“What of it?” I asked, when I got over my shock. “Girl slaves get pregnant all the time, and a beauty like this one must have had more opportunity than most. Julia, you’ve contaminated yourself! We’ll have to summon a priest and perform a lustrum.”

“Don’t be an idiot!” she snapped. “Touching the dead can’t contaminate anyone. The gods aren’t that petty.”

I was astonished. This was the first time I had ever heard Julia speak against ritual law. Of course, I never truly credited all that primitive mumbo-jumbo myself, but I had never seen any point in taking chances. Moreover, I had always thought that old, patrician families like the Julians were even more tradition-bound than mine. But Julia had become something of a freethinker. She had been consulting with Alexandrian philosophers.