John Roberts - Oracle of the Dead

“Why,” I said, “if it isn’t Eugaeon, priest of Apollo!”

“How can this be?” Iola wailed. “How did the priest enter the sacred river?”

“I’m rather more concerned whether he did it willingly or unwillingly,” I said.

Sextus Plotius crowded forward and stared at the corpse, his face pale. “Praetor, I do not understand this. There is no access to this river except by way of this tunnel.”

“Surely it must surface somewhere near the temple,” I said. “And it would have to be upstream from here.”

He shook his head. “No, there is no flowing surface water in the vicinity. There are hot springs in abundance in Campania, but none nearer than ten miles from this spot. Even if one of them flows into this chamber, there is no way that he could have gone there, jumped in, and surfaced here in the time since we last saw him, no more than an hour ago.”

“Maybe he sneaked down here while we were undergoing the rites above,” Hermes suggested.

“Don’t speak foolishly!” Iola said. “The sacred black bitches of Hecate would never let a priest of Apollo approach the holy precincts. The very scent drives them wild.”

“Be that as it may,” I said, “the man is dead and may have been murdered. As praetor, I will investigate this.”

“Ah, noble Praetor Metellus,” Plotius said diffidently, “you are praetor peregrinus, in charge of cases involving foreigners. There seem to be none but natives here.”

“Nonsense,” I said, gesturing toward the black-clad devotees of Hecate, “these creatures are as foreign as a pack of Britons. I will take charge.”

“As you wish,” Plotius sighed.

“I want this body carried above into daylight,” I ordered. “Now, everyone, back up that tunnel, and I’d better not smell any smoke that doesn’t come from a torch or lamp.”

“But, Praetor,” Iola said, all but wringing her hands, “there are ceremonies we must perform. This holy place has been contaminated by death. There are lustrations and sacrifices. .”

“Do them later,” I told her. “I want none of your people to leave before I have questioned them, either.”

She bowed in an almost Oriental fashion. “As you wish, Praetor.”

So we made the long trudge back up the strange tunnel, but this time I had no leisure to ponder its oddity. What could this possibly portend? In spite of my matter-of-fact pose, I was almost as unsettled as the rest. First, the whole alien ritual and the descent into the uncanny tunnel, the weird river with its putative goddess, and now a man we had met so recently, dead in an unfathomable fashion. It was enough to unsettle a philosopher.

Then I cheered up. I had been getting bored, and now there was something interesting to do.

Clean air and sunshine quickly restored everyone’s spirits, except for Iola’s.

The slaves laid the body of the late Eugaeon upon the ground and I took a closer look at him. “Remove his clothing,” I instructed the slaves.

“Decius!” my wife cried, shocked. “That is terribly undignified!”

“Oh, he shouldn’t mind being naked. He’s Greek, isn’t he? Was Greek, I should say.” She whirled and stalked off, taking the other women of the party with her. Except for Antonia, of course, who came closer to get a better look.

With his clothes off, the man looked shrunken. He was not fat, as so many priests are. His face and body were typical for a man of about forty years, rather spare, but not underfed. The only thing strange about him was that he was completely depilated.

“Not a hair on him,” I remarked. “Is this required of priests of Apollo?”

“I wish more Roman men would do that,” Antonia said. “I think it’s attractive. I have all my slaves depilated.” Something else I really didn’t need to know about Antonia.

“Has someone gone to fetch the other priests? Maybe they can tell me if they’re supposed to be hairless.” One of my assistants ran off to fetch them. I could see no mark of violence on the front of the body. “Turn him over,” I told the slaves. No mark on the back, either.

“He must have drowned,” Hermes said.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “There are plenty of ways to kill a man that leave no mark on the body: poison and asphyxiation come immediately to mind.”

“Maybe he was frightened to death,” somebody suggested.

“He doesn’t have a frightened expression on his face,” somebody else pointed out.

“I never saw a corpse that wore any sort of expression at all,” I told them, “and many of the deceased were plenty frightened immediately prior to expiring.”

A moment later the boy sent to fetch the priests came running back. His name was Sextus Lucretius Vespillo, the son of a friend. He was about fourteen, had recently shaved his first beard for his manhood ceremony, and was rather easily excited. “They’re all gone!” he shouted. “Not a sign of them.”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose that tells us who killed the bugger.”

“But we don’t know he was murdered,” Plotius cautioned.

“Then why did they run off like Persians at the sight of a Roman?” I asked. “That looks like guilty behavior to me. I want a thorough search made for those priests. And I want all of you men mounted and out looking for those priests. Also for some way that Eugaeon got into that water. There has to be an access to the underground river somewhere nearby. It’s probably hidden, but don’t let that stop you.”

Julia returned when she saw that the body had been decently covered. “Ah, my dear, you can be of great assistance to me in this matter.”

“How so?” she said, suspiciously.

“You seem to be conversant with this Hecate cult.”

“I’ve studied the ancient religions. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on them.”

“Still, you know more than I do. And it seems that women play a leading role in this cult. I want you to question Iola and the other priests and priestesses or acolytes or whatever they are. Women seem to be more comfortable talking to women than to male officials.”

“For good reason,” Julia said.

“Exactly. I, in the meantime, will set up a temporary headquarters for investigation here at the temple.”

“Do you think the matter is all that important? You are a Roman praetor with imperium. You could assign one of your men to conduct the investigation. You have more important matters demanding your attention.”

I looked about at our strange surroundings; the funereal glade with the beautiful temple rising above it. “I am not so sure about that. This is a very odd business and we know how upset people can get when someone of local prestige gets murdered. People are on edge right now anyway. All this tension between Caesar and Pompey and the Senate has people expecting the days of Marius and Sulla to return.”

“That is preposterous,” she protested.

“Nevertheless, the fear is there. I want a quick end to this business before the whole countryside is up in arms over a common murder.”

But I was soon to find that there was nothing at all common about this particular murder.

The trouble was not long in starting. The first evening ended without either the fleeing priests or the mysterious access to the underground river found. The temple and its compound afforded fairly comfortable lodgings for me and the members of my entourage I chose to assist me. The rest I packed off to the villa where I was staying. It was an exceedingly luxurious establishment, built by Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, and one which he had hinted he might leave to me in his will. He lay even then on his deathbed so I knew the will would be read soon.

The next morning, people began calling upon me. I sat on the temple portico in my curule chair, which was draped with the customary leopard pelts, my lictors ranged before me with their fasces. First to arrive were a gaggle of white-robed priests of Apollo from several nearby temples. They were all Greek, of course. Apollo is a god respected by Rome, but he is not native to Italy and was imported from Greece. Thus his principal sacerdotes are Greek and his rituals are performed in the Greek fashion. Personally, I found him quite respectable, unlike some of the truly lunatic deities that had wormed their way into Italy in recent years. For some reason, despite having a perfectly good set of gods to see to their needs, Romans and other Italians were unreasonably enthusiastic about adopting new gods from all over the world, principally from Asia, where they breed gods like livestock. Many of these alien deities were so scabrous and their rites so scandalous that the censors expelled them from Rome with some frequency.