David Wishart - Last Rites

Niobe was staring at her. ‘Pythia …’ she said.

Pythia didn’t look at her. ‘I swear to the Lady Diana, sir -’

‘Pythia, this is important.’ The old woman was obviously terrified, but I couldn’t let up now. ‘I need the truth, okay?’

‘The back door was open?’ That was Niobe. She was still staring at Pythia.

The other slave’s eyes flicked between us. Her mouth opened and closed.

‘I didn’t mean any harm, sir,’ she whispered finally. ‘I swear I didn’t. Sir, if you tell the master he’ll -’

‘I won’t tell anyone.’ Shit! If the back door had been open all the time then this was a whole new ball game! ‘All I want is the truth. Was the door open or not?’

‘It was bolted at the start of the evening, sir, I swear!’ The old woman was mumbling so hard it was difficult to pick out the words. ‘I made sure myself.’

‘But not later?’

‘After the lady was found I saw the bolts had been slipped. I put them back, sir, just that, and I cleaned up like you said. The door was closed, there wasn’t much water. By the sweet Mother, sir, I swear I didn’t mean any harm!’

I turned away. Dear holy Jupiter, it’d been murder after all! Or at least it could have been murder.

We were getting somewhere at last. Now I needed time to think.

I walked back to the Caelian despite the rain. It felt funny not turning up Victory Incline to the old house on the Palatine, but we were settling in nicely to the new place on Fabricius Street. It must’ve been the fastest sale on record. Three months back we’d been twiddling our thumbs in Brindisi waiting for a favourable wind to take the ship we’d booked passage on back to Athens when a messenger had arrived hotfoot from my stepfather Priscus to say that one of his antiquities-nut cronies had fallen off his perch unexpectedly (the guy was ninety) and his house was being put on to the market. Perilla had talked me round and that was that. Half our stuff was still the other side of the Adriatic, mind, and it would stay there until the sea lanes opened again in two months’ time, but, hell, we could rough it. The only slug in the salad was that the new place was within shouting distance of Mother’s. Staving off dinner invitations without starting a major family feud was going to be much trickier in future. Not just dinner invitations, either: our compost heap was already the richer for a couple of Phormio’s more outré efforts that Mother had sent round to make sure we were eating properly. If properly’s the word. I’m not too sure about eating, either.

Bathyllus was waiting as usual with the obligatory jug when I pushed past the door-slave and got rid of my sopping cloak and mantle. The wine was steaming hot with a touch of cinnamon, just the thing after a wet, chilly walk all the way from Market Square; freshly hot, too, not a reheat. I’ve given up wondering how the little guy knows I’m coming home. Maybe he keeps a tame augur in the cupboard.

‘The mistress around, Bathyllus?’ I sipped the wine carefully as the cup thawed my hands out.

‘Yes, sir. And the new water clock’s arrived.’

‘Oh. Oh, yeah.’ I’d forgotten they were delivering the brute this morning. Perilla had seen it on one of her forays to the chichi shops in the Saepta, and she’d been immediately captivated. Me, I had my doubts. Machinery of any kind isn’t my bag, and some of those Greek gizmos are too clever for their own good. Or anyone else’s. Well, we’d just have to hope for the best. I picked up the jug from the tray and carried it with the cup through to the atrium.

‘Ah, you’re back, Marcus.’ The lady was supervising four beefy slaves who’d obviously just finished setting the thing up against the wall in the corner. They were looking pretty chewed; when Perilla supervises, she supervises. ‘How did it go?’

‘Tell you later.’ I set the jug down on a side table and laid the customary smacker between her chin and nose. ‘Gods! That’s a clock ?’

The thing was at least five foot high by three broad, with a reservoir at the top and a maze of bronze piping beneath. Halfway up, a winged Victory with a simpering grin and a tutu held a pointer against a vertical scale with the numbers one to twelve marked on it, on the other side of which stood a titan with his hammer raised above an anvil. At the bottom two chubby-cheeked-and-buttocked cherubs were poised over a basin.

‘Right, Zosimus, fill her up!’ snapped one of the deliverymen; obviously the foreman, because he was standing well back with his hands through the belt of his tunic.

I watched fascinated as another guy shinned up a ladder with a bucket and emptied it into the reservoir.

The foreman stepped forward and cleared his throat. ‘These are the calibration valves, madam.’ He touched two egg-bound ducks in bronze part the way down two central pipes. ‘They’re in the off position at present. The one on the left is for day, the one on the right for night. If one is open, the other must be closed. You understand?’

Jupiter! Complications already! I didn’t like the sound of this, but Perilla was nodding.

‘The calibration is simple. As the days lengthen during the first half of the year the left-hand duck’s beak is advanced at the rate of one notch on the kalends and ides of each month, while the right-hand duck – the night-duck, that is – is rotated in the opposite direction by a similar amount, thus matching the water flow for each pipe to the corresponding lengthening and shortening of the daylight and night-time hours. At the equinox the procedure is of course reversed for each duck. No messing around with wax to be added and removed to control the flow, you see.’ He smiled a superior smile. ‘This is a very sophisticated model.’

The lady was beaming. ‘But that’s absolutely marvellous! Most ingenious! Isn’t it, Marcus?’

I grinned at her weakly. Yeah, well, I’d take her word for it. One thing was sure: I wasn’t going to touch this bastard machine with a bargepole. Sophisticated was right; it sounded smarter than I was, for a start.

‘The Victory figure, of course, indicates the hour, and at its commencement the titan will strike his anvil bell. The water in the lower part of the system empties automatically at the close of the twelfth daytime and night-time hours respectively’ – the guy indicated the basin with the cherubs – ‘bringing the indicator back to its starting point. Your slaves then return the voided water to the reservoir by draining the basin into a bucket via the spigot which you will see at its base, and reset the valves for the appropriate upcoming time period, whereupon the cycle is repeated.’ He smiled. ‘Is all that clear, madam? Or do you have any questions?’

Gods! My brain had gone numb. What was wrong with an old-fashioned sundial? Sure, this superintelligent bugger told you every hour out of the twenty-four but personally I had better things to do with my sleeping hours than pad downstairs to a freezing atrium and check what the time was. And Bathyllus and the lads were going to just love it to bits.

Besides, I had a bad feeling about this. A very bad feeling.

‘Perfectly clear, thank you.’ Perilla was looking like the cat that got the sturgeon. ‘And, as I said, most ingenious. Would you set it going for us, please?’

‘Of course, madam.’ He turned to the guy with the bucket. ‘What’s the time, Zosimus?’

There was a terrible silence while the bucket-slave shuffled his feet and looked uncomfortable.

‘Uh…’ he said finally, and blushed to his ears.

I grinned; so much for the cutting edge of engineering science. ‘The garden’s out that way, pal,’ I said. ‘Only it’s overcast at present, so I wouldn’t bother. Why don’t you just set the thing for the sixth hour and we’ll make allowances?’