The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits (25 page)

“Pedilla. The younger ones may be expected to live well past dawn. Three days is the record, I believe.”

“Aaah,” whispered Volusia.

“Such blue eyes on this one,” Nero said idly. “She lives.”

“I curse you,” Volusia whispered. “Beast, you’ll burn for ever in the fires of Hell.”

“Silence!” Stigmus added apologetically, “Your Grace, none of them have recanted, or cursed Christ, despite my best efforts to persuade them.”

Nero smiled. “I shall return tomorrow night and see how she fares.”

Stigmus asked diffidently, “Shall the one known as Peter the Fisherman be crucified, your Grace?”

“No. He may be useful. So may his chief lieutenant, the one called Linus.” Bored, Nero returned to the palanquin, then paused. “Stigmus, could it be true? Did the Christian deity murder Matrusus? Did their God really try to save them?”

“I cannot believe so, your Grace.”

Nero nodded, relieved. “A God who allowed His own Son to be murdered . . . even I am not that ruthless, Stigmus. That would be a God to be feared, indeed.” Whatever else was said between them the old woman did not hear; the palanquin was lifted and borne away, the Guard marching on each side, and the square fell silent once more.

“Here, birdie birdie.”

“You stupid old woman!” shouted the second of the two soldiers. “It’s night, there aren’t any stupid birds! Get away from us!”

“Birdie birdie birdie.”

The two soldiers exchanged looks and drew their swords. There was a loud bang as their helmets were knocked together from behind. Black hands gleaming with gold rings and bangles gripped their throats, dropping them where they stood.

“Well done, Omba.” The old woman threw off her scarf and stood straight, kicked away the swords. “Don’t kill them, let them sleep. There’s enough death.”

“Master,” Omba grumbled, returning the dagger to her gold wrist-guard.

Quistus ran to Volusia. While Omba lifted the girl’s weight he took pincers from the bag of crumbs, gripped the nail-heads, pulled. Omba carried Volusia to the sedan chair waiting in the shadows. “I’m not doing this for pennies,” the blind man said.

Omba sat Volusia on the bench and stepped back. “I’ll be by the Transtiberium wharf as you ordered, Master, with the captain in my pocket.”

“Good. Well done, Omba. Run.”

Quistus climbed into the sedan. It bumped, lifting, then set off immediately through the dark streets. He closed the curtains and lit the candle.

Volusia watched him, the flame making her eyes very blue. She murmured, “Omba has no pockets.”

“Oh, she has all sorts of places to keep stuff.” Quistus bandaged Volusia’s feet. “Is the pain very bad?”

“No. I suppose.” She stared at her hands. “The marks of Christ. I was ready to live, Septimus.”

“You know better than to call me that.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Because I believe you should live fully in this world before being in too much of a hurry to live in the next.”

She gazed at him steadily.

“Because I am wearing your wife’s clothes,” she said. “Do I look like her?”

He shook his head.

She asked, “Do I make her alive again for you, a little?”

He said, “The Transtiberium boat is small. You’ll transfer to a bigger vessel at Ostia.”

“And where will that bigger vessel take me, Quistus?”

“Britannia. Londinium. Learn how to live, Volusia, not die.”

“Did you read that little book?”

He shrugged.

“So,” she said. “I live, and I take Christianity to Britannia.”

The sedan-chair weaved through alleys, was hurried across a broad thoroughfare, then came swaying downhill. They smelt the river.

“But you are not coming with me,” she said.

“No.”

The sedan-chair bumped as it was set down. He blew out the candle and they sat in the dark.

Then he got out. He paid the runners with gold.

Volusia stood up. “Nothing like her at all?”

He shook his head.

She kissed his lips. “Goodbye. And thank you.”

Omba helped her down to the boat. He watched with tears in his eyes. Volusia looked back from the deck, moonlight glowing on her pale robes.

Omba returned as the sail was hoisted. “What’s wrong, Master?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Omba. You could not have known.” He watched the moonlit sail shrinking on the moonlit waters. “They are the clothes Marcia wore on her wedding day.”

He stared until he could no longer see Volusia’s sail, only moonlight.

“
Redivivus
,” he said.

S
oon after sunrise the morning hate began. The heavy thud of catapult arms striking home against their packed leather buffers was accompanied by the sharper thwack of the bolt throwers. Overhead the sky was laced with the smudged black arcs of incendiary pots and punctuated with the dots of stones and the dashes of the heavy iron tipped spears flashing in much lower trajectories towards the old city.

Jerusalem would fall before the month was out. That was
certain. Both sides knew it. The four legions of General Titus Flavius had battered their way into the city, taken the fortress of Antonia and had, at last, forced their way into the temple complex. But every stage had cost far too many lives, and now the exhausted legionaries were bracing themselves for the final assault on the old city; the rebels’ last line of defence. Once that was breached, as it would be, then – Titus had promised his men – they could do as they wished when they burst in upon the starving remnants of Jerusalem’s population. According to the intelligence gathered from those Jews who had managed to escape from the old city, conditions inside were appalling. Faction had turned on faction, and all had turned on anyone who even mentioned negotiating a surrender. The huge grain stores that had been gathered to see the defenders through the siege had gone up in smoke; deliberately fired by the leader of one sect to deprive his rivals of rations. Now, it was said, the long suffering bystanders were reduced to eating the bodies of their own children. The Romans sat outside this horror, biding their time, waiting for the day when they would enter and lay waste a city of walking skeletons.

Even this chance to slake their bloodlust and taste for booty had failed to rally the legions. They knew that they would pay a high price before this siege was over. The surviving factions of the Judaean rebels were a game lot, and knew that they could expect no mercy from the Romans. They would fight with the grim desperation of the already dead, each one determined to take as many legionaries as possible with them to whatever afterlife the Jews believed in.

No wonder the men were quiet, chief centurion Figulus reflected, as he gazed towards the thin pall of smoke hanging over the old city. His legion, the Tenth, was quartered amid the ruined streets surrounding the Antonia, most of which had been razed to form the artillery platform. The task of
guarding the temple complex had been trusted to the First Cohort of the legion, Figulus’s cohort. Each watch eighty men trailed up through the breach in the temple wall to replace their tired comrades who struggled down the rubble slope and collapsed in exhaustion in their goatskin tents. Under normal conditions those on night watch suffered from the most strained nerves as they struggled to hear what their eyes could not detect. But conditions were not normal. Far from it.

For three nights now something had been killing those men posted on the blackened walls of the inner court of the temple, which sheltered the sanctum of the most holy of holies. It was a large chamber, perhaps thirty feet square, which no man had entered since its construction. Until the legions arrived. Many had passed through the space with the usual soldierly indifference. In truth it was bare and smelled musty and the only thing inside it was a plain dark wooden chest sealed from the outside world. Despite the intense heat of the fire that had consumed much of the temple complex, the chamber in which the chest rested had been spared. One of his centurions, Quintus Marius, had forced the top but had only discovered a few dusty scrolls inside after he had hacked through the glassy sheen of the centuries’ old wood. Marius had found an old priest guarding the chamber, and once the man had been disarmed, with contemptuous ease, the centurion had tried to force him to reveal what was in the chest.

“Bunch of sacred scripts, my arse!” Marius had snorted as he looked around the temple complex. “Place like this has to be worth a few denarii.”

He looked at his interpreter, a weasily prisoner who had quickly volunteered his services to the Romans. “Josephus! Tell the old man to cough it up, now, or he’s dog meat.”

The Judaeans exchanged a few words in their gutteral
tongue before the interpreter turned back. “He says there’s nothing in there but scrolls. And no treasure. There’s no treasure anywhere.”

“We’ll see about that!”

Marius had seized the old man and dragged him inside the chamber. For a while Figulus only heard the odd cry of pain, and then there was a short thin scream and it was all over. Marius came out, wiping the blood from his dagger on the old priest’s head cloth.

“Any luck?”

“No, sir. Stubborn bastard just kept shaking his head, like, and uttering his gibberish. Got tired of it and knocked him on the head.”

“Very well.”

That had been several days ago, and any euphoria the men might have had about finding something valuable in the temple had long since dried up, like everything else in this dusty arid husk of a province. And now, to add to the chief centurion’s problems, something was murdering his men. Figulus watched as the first legionaries from the night watch appeared in the breach, silhouetted against the dawn sky, as they began to pick their way down the slope towards the Cohort’s tent lines. One of the figures was hurriedly picking his way down the rubble slope, making towards the chief centurion. Figulus felt his heart sink like a rock; there could only be one explanation for the man’s hurry. He turned towards one of his orderlies.

“Send for Centurion Marius. Tell him to meet me up there. In the inner temple.”

The body of the sentry, like all the others killed that night, and the previous two days, was missing its head. The man was lying forwards in a pool of his own blood. Most of it had dried to a dark, dim purple but patches still glistened and had
drawn a noisy droning cloud of flies. Figulus knelt down by the man’s shoulders and cocked his head to look at the ugly mass of muscle, artery and bone where the neck had been cut through.

“What the hell did that?” Marius asked, squatting beside his superior, but slightly further away from the body.

“Looks like a sword blow. Maybe several sword blows. Look there.” Figulus pointed to a cut in the flesh that angled away from the edge of the skin. “Took our man a few attempts to get the head off.”

“Our man?” Marius looked at him with raised eyebrows. “What makes you think a man did this? And all the others?”

“What else would it be?”

Marius looked at him silently for a moment before speaking. “So how did he get past the sentries on the outer wall? How’d he get inside the inner walls, sir? It’s not possible.”

“Of course it’s possible. It’s a certainty. Some of those bloody sicarii must have found a way back into the temple,” Figulus said quietly. “They’re picking off our sentries.”

“Then why take the heads, sir? What’s the point of that?”

“Trophies,” Figulus suggested, remembering when he had served as a raw recruit in the Second legion during the early years of the invasion of Britain. The Celtic warriors built their reputations on the number of enemy heads they managed to accumulate. “Or maybe there’s some kind of bounty on offer.”

“Or maybe it’s just the work of some demon . . .” Marius muttered, casting a wary glance towards the chief centurion, a man who had little time for petty superstitions.

“Demon?”

“It’s just what the lads are saying, sir.”

“Is that right? A demon . . . What kind of bollocks is that?”

“What do you expect them to think, when we lose men night after night? And every one of them has lost his head?”

“Seems to be catching,” Figulus sniffed with contempt. “I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense, especially from you, Marius. I’ve never had you down as being gullible. This is the work of a man. A flesh and blood man. There are no spooks involved. Got that? Make sure that the rest of our lads get the message. There’ll be no more talk about demons.”

“Yes, sir.”

Despite his order, Figulus was well aware that the rumour of a demon preying on the sentries of the First Cohort was spreading through the rest of the legion like the plague. Everywhere he went the men fell silent and sullen at his approach and only continued talking in muted whispers after he had passed. Nor was the rumour any respecter of rank. As the sun dipped into the haze of smoke hanging over the city at the end of the day Figulus arrived at the legion’s headquarters for the evening briefing. The legate, Flavius Silva, had occupied a wealthy merchant’s house, abandoned long before the siege when its owner had been condemned to the galleys for an attempt on the life of a Roman official. Silva had made himself quite at home in the faded opulence and now conferred with his senior officers in a shuttered dining room overlooking the dead plants of the roof garden. Beyond the crumbling parapet of the garden, the house had a magnificent view towards the old town. In a more peaceful time the vista would have been fascinating and relaxing. But now Silva’s staff used the roof garden as an observation point to signal the fall of shot to the prefect of artillery on the huge earthworks close to the Antonia. As the briefing started the observers signalled the last fall of shot, and then tied the signalling arms down for the night and returned to the camp, leaving the roof garden to the legate and his officers. Once
the usual strength returns, supply levels and intelligence reports had been discussed the senior centurions and tribunes were dismissed. With a scraping of chairs, the officers eased themselves back from the trestle table and rose to leave.