John Roberts - Oracle of the Dead

“Do you always travel with so many swords?” I asked him. “I would think agricultural implements would be your stock in trade in this area.”

“You think that’s a lot of swords, Praetor?” he said, inclining his shiny head toward the display. “That’s just the fancy pieces for officers and the rich men’s sons who’ll be joining the cavalry. In my wagon I have six chests of plain legionary’s swords and now Pompey’s here I imagine I won’t have a single one in ten days. I wish now I’d brought more.”

“Men of your trade have been preparing for trouble, eh?” I said.

“If you deal in arms, you keep your ear to the ground. War’s been in the air this last year and every cutler and arms maker in Italy’s been laying in swords, daggers, spearpoints, and arrowheads for a long time. Go to a port and you’ll see pig lead coming in from everywhere it’s mined. Do you think it’s all for plumbing pipes and roofs?”

“Slingstones?” I said.

“There you are. Men who make it their business to know such things say war is coming and a wise man had better be ready to meet the demand for arms.”

“Civil war, you mean,” I said.

“Well, that means you can sell to both sides, doesn’t it? Most wars, you only get to sell to one.” This simple commercial philosophy was fairly typical of the times. Deplorable as the situation might be, it presented wonderful possibilities to a man of enterprise.

Of course, it presented noncommercial possibilities as well, especially for men of my own class. My family had been prominent in Roman political life for centuries, but we had become the greatest of the plebeian families when we backed Sulla against Marius. There is much to be said for picking the right side. Now my family had thrown in their lot with Pompey, which I thought an unwise move. Yet, should I choose to join Caesar, the great men of the family would not object. Why? Because it is always a good idea to have a family member or two on the other side, just in case. That way, should the majority have chosen wrongly, at least the family would survive and would not lose all its lands. Such were the realities of politics and family in those days.

At other vendors’ booths I saw a similar enterprise at work: soldiers’ tunics and belts, hobnailed boots, canteens, oil flasks suitable for hard campaigning, all the gear a man needed for war. The legion would have stores from which to draw such gear, but it was often ill-fitting and overpriced, so a wise soldier showed up at muster with all his own equipment.

Not all the itinerant business people were so sanguinary in their wares. There were the usual souvenirs of the site, statuettes of Apollo and Hecate, lamps decorated with those deities or their symbols. One such vendor had no stall but sat on the ground with her wares displayed on a cloth before her. Among them were a number of the little arrows I had seen near the mundus on Porcia’s estate. Alongside them were bundles of fresh and dried herbs and small amulets made of bone, intended to ward off the evil eye or protect health. The woman was some sort of saga : a low-level witch.

“How is business here?” I asked her. “People seem to be on edge, so I suspect it has been brisk.”

“Oh yes, sir,” she agreed, smiling to show a small number of yellow teeth. “Just since you’ve been here I’ve had to go home three times to replenish my stock. Between the murders here at the temple and all this talk of war, people can’t have enough protection.”

I nudged the arrows with my toe. “And these?”

“Why, they’re offerings to Apollo, Praetor. He’s Apollo the Archer at this temple.”

“Doesn’t this offering have a specific meaning?” I asked her.

She lowered her eyes. “None I know of, sir. Just an offering, like. To ask the favor of the god.”

I didn’t blame her for prevaricating. Selling baleful charms might get her charged as an accomplice in murder, for which the penalties were severe. They were not as bad as those for selling poison, but bad enough. People fear supernatural evil more than a dagger in the back. Important persons fear poison most of all. Poisoners are regarded as witches of the worst sort.

So somebody wanted revenge. People always want revenge, for some reason, good or bad, but usually bad and not only bad but petty and unworthy. It told me nothing. Fortune-tellers were doing a thriving business as well. Fortune-tellers were the poor man’s oracle. Oracles are not paid, of course. That would be sacrilegious. They do, however, accept gifts, and if you aren’t able to offer a generous gift, you might as well not even ask the priests for access to the Oracle. Fortune-tellers, on the other hand, will oblige you for a few copper coins. There were diviners who threw bones, those who gazed into bowls of clear water, even some who used the behavior of small animals or snakes to foretell the future.

Fortune-tellers were frequently banned and driven from Rome by the aediles for fomenting popular discontent and influencing politics. After all, if the fortune-tellers get the populace to believing that some calamitous event will happen, it just might. Naturally, they always came back. Somehow, when there is a demand for services, the services always appear.

It was as if all Italy was sick with anticipation.

That afternoon I called Hermes to my side. “We’re missing something,” I said.

“You’ve been saying that for some time,” he said. “What do we do about it now?”

“You know what I’ve taught you. We can’t expect new evidence to come to us. The woman Floria was a stroke of luck unless she was something more sinister. We have to find it ourselves. So how do we do that?”

He thought a bit. “We go back and reexamine what we’ve already seen and look for what we missed.”

“Right. We’ll start where this all started, in the tunnel of the Oracle. This time with no mumbo-jumbo to distract us. No drinks, we bring our own torches and make our own smoke, and it had better be clean smoke with no funny colors in it. Come to think of it, get new torches with linen-wrapped heads and soaked in the best olive oil. I don’t care about the expense, I want as little smoke as possible. Same oil for the lamps. No chanting, no prayers, no uncanny voices. It will be just like when I was an aedile and we went down to inspect the sewers or the basements of buildings.”

He grinned. “I always loved sewer-crawling.”

“Bring three or four of our best men to carry torches and lamps; I want plenty of light. All armed. We know that there are people who don’t want us finding out things. They’ve committed a number of murders already and won’t scruple at a few more.”

An hour later we were in the valley of funerary growth and standing before the tunnel. Our purposeful little band, clinking with swords and daggers on bronze-studded military belts, had attracted some attention and a number of idlers, bored with the ongoing festival, had followed in hopes of seeing some action.

Iola rushed up to us with some of her acolytes or whatever they were, robes disheveled and dignity lost in their haste. “Praetor! What is going on?”

“Iola, I am going down into your tunnel to find out whatever is to be learned there. Everyone here has been lying to me or at least withholding the truth. I intend to get to the bottom of this and I propose to begin at the literal bottom, in the chamber of the Oracle.”

“You cannot do this!” she shouted, eyes and hair wild. “It is sacrilege!”

“Iola, Roman law recognizes sacrilege only as an offense against the gods of the state. Hecate is not a god of the state, but a foreign deity. My good friend Appius Claudius is censor this year and he is purging Rome and Italy of evil influences. He is a very upright and energetic man and he hates foreign cults. If you don’t want to be driven from Italy and your tunnel filled with rubble, you had better not hinder my investigation in any way. Do I make myself clear?”