Under Vesuvius

by John Maddox Roberts

  I spun around, looking for more men to fight. The only action was from a half-dozen horsemen who were pounding away into the mist, having had enough. The dead and wounded lay all over, bleeding, gurgling, cursing. The surviving Numidians were ruthlessly impaling anything that twitched.

  “Stop them!” I shouted. “I need some who can talk!” But it was no use. The tribesmen were beyond control, furious to avenge their slain comrades.

  “Casualties?” I demanded in disgust.

  “Four of our party wounded,” Hermes said, wiping blood from his sword. “Two Numidians killed.”

  Marcus walked up, having lost his horse somewhere. He was wrapping a cloth around his bloodied upper arm, but he was grinning. “For such a dignified magistrate,” he said, “you seemed to be enjoying yourself, Praetor. Wait until I tell Julia.”

  “Wait until tonight, when that wound begins to hurt,” I told him. “I want to see your face then.”

  “But the ladies will be fussing over me,” he said. “I’m a hero, bloodied in defense of my patron. I’ll—”

  “Hermes!” I said, cutting him off. “Take the lictors and go into Baiae. Get all those officials out here and tell them the last to arrive gets a flogging.” Of course I had no authority to do this to Roman citizens, but anger was getting the best of me. Besides, one of my uncles had once had a Roman senator flogged in public, and everybody knew it.

  While we waited I examined the dead attackers. The rain stopped and the mist began to clear, making the task easier. They looked like army deserters, runaway slaves, ruined peasants—the sort of bandits who are never quite eradicated from Italy. Their filth and rags proclaimed that they had been living in the hills for a long time.

  Two of the Numidians rode out to round up our scattered horses. By the time they returned with the wandering beasts, the good burghers of Baiae had begun to show up, looking none too pleased with my peremptory summons. Well, I was none too pleased with them. Uninvited gawkers also appeared. Violence and bloodshed attract them like flies.

  To my surprise, Cicero was with them. “What’s going on here, Decius?” he asked. “This district hasn’t seen such a pile of bodies since the funeral games for Pompeius Strabo.”

  “Listen to me!” I said to the assembled officials. “The situation here is getting entirely out of hand. At first it was just a murder here, a murder there—nothing to get upset about. But today I was attacked by a whole crowd of bandits. They tried to assassinate me, possibly to kill this man in my custody.” I pointed at Gelon with a sword and realized that I still held a weapon in each hand. Also, I was liberally bespattered with blood from head to foot. No wonder they were looking at me with such strange expressions. Quite a change from my snowy, purple-bordered toga.

  “You people have let the situation here deteriorate into a shocking state,” I said. “I am minded to call in the troops to restore order. Pompeius has a training camp at Capua and I’m sure he’ll be happy to lend me a cohort or two to establish martial law here.”

  “Praetor, Praetor, you are making too much of this,” said Norbanus. “This is simple banditry. What sort of people usually travel on this road? Wealthy citizens, the caravans of merchants—all ripe pickings for bandits. The day was dark and rainy; there was ground fog. These wretches did not see that this was a well-armed band of military men and warriors until it was too late.”

  “Yes, Praetor,” said Manius Silva. “We always have increased bandit activity whenever the volcano gets frisky.”

  “The volcano?” I said, not certain I had heard him correctly.

  “Oh, yes,” Norbanus chimed in. “You see, bandits fort up in the crater of Vesuvius. They’ve done it for centuries. The local farmers bring them food and wine rather than endure their raids. Most of the time they are content with this. There are only a couple of very narrow passes into the crater, so they are relatively safe there. But when there is a venting, the smoke and ash drive them out and they raid in the lowlands until it clears up.” Everyone nodded and agreed that this was so.

  “You lot,” I said, “have to be the most useless pack of soft-assed degenerates on the whole Italian peninsula! You mean to tell me that you allow a whole colony of bandits to camp on your doorstep! Why don’t you go up there and exterminate them?”

  “This is Campania, Praetor,” Norbanus said stiffly. “It’s always been the practice here.”

  His wife, Rutilia, spoke up. “When some malcontent decides to be an enemy of society, Vesuvius gives him a place to go. We’d rather they do that than hang around here and murder us in our sleep.”

  I turned to Cicero. “Do you think Cato could be right? Is this what too much good food and soft living does to people?”

  “Your troubles this day are not yet over, Decius,” said the ex-consul.

  I closed my eyes and sighed. “What now?”

  “Ah,” Silva began hesitantly, “Praetor, you see—well, there’s been another killing in town. Discovered just this morning, in fact.”

  “No one important,” Norbanus added hastily. “Just a slave.”

  “What sort of slave?” I asked bleakly.

  “A runaway,” he answered. “Someone identified her as a girl from the Temple of Apollo.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while and they, quite wisely, didn’t intrude upon my ruminations. Finally, I came to a decision.

  “I am coming into town. Make a house available for my use. No craft are to leave the harbor, no one is to pass through the gates without my permission. I am sending for troops to enforce my authority and you may consider yourselves under siege until I find out what is going on here and have taken steps to correct it.”

  “You can’t do that!” Silva cried. “You need a decree of the Senate for such a thing. Besides, it will ruin business.”

  “He can do it,” Cicero informed him. “He has the authority to declare martial law under his own imperium until the Senate has reached a decision. General Pompey will back him up. Pompey wants no disturbances in Campania right now.”

  Everybody knew what he meant. The Senate was disturbed by Caesar’s defiance and was turning to Pompey as a savior. Pompey’s greatest strength was in southern Campania and points south on the peninsula, all the way to Messina. Here he would raise his legions if need be. He wanted things orderly here.

  The white-robed chief priest of the city came forward. “Praetor, before you can enter the walls, you must be purified of this blood and so must your men.”

  “Delicate lot, aren’t you?” I sneered. “In Rome, we bathe in the stuff.”

  “Decius,” Cicero said in a low, warning voice.

  “Very well,” I said. “I will not offend your guardian gods.”

  “I will see to the arrangements,” the priest said.

  “Then go, all of you,” I ordered. The crowd, stunned by the turn of events, began to straggle back to Baiae.

  Rutilia, again in her golden wig, did not get back into her litter. Instead, she approached me. “Decius Caecilius,” she said when she stood before me, “allow me to tell you that you look very good dressed in blood.” Then she turned and went back to her litter.

  “Cicero,” I said, “do you think Roman women will ever be like that?”

  “Decius,” he said, “haven’t you noticed? They already are.”

  10

  By the time we reached the city gate the priest had made his preparations and we went through the ceremony of being washed in purified water, fumigated with incense, passed between two flames, and dressed in new clothing. Thus cleansed of blood, we entered the city. A spacious town house owned by a friend of Cicero’s was being prepared for us, and while we waited I demanded to be taken to view the body.

  The duumviri conducted us to a long, low building behind the Temple of Venus Libitina. As at Rome, the goddess in this aspect was the patroness of the funeral trade and a conductor of the shades of the dead to the underworld. Chambers for receiving the dead opened off a portico that ran the length of the b
uilding. We were taken to the last chamber. Inside were three or four bodies.

  “This is where we take the bodies of slaves, paupers, and foreigners who have no patrons or hospites,” explained the chief undertaker. “Those usually are sailors who happen to die while in port. If no one claims the body by the second day, they are taken to the burial pits outside town.”

  Rome had such a facility, though of course much larger. It was something of a scandal that elderly slaves were often cast out of the house to die in the streets and go unclaimed, so their masters could be spared the trouble and expense of decent burial. At least Baiae had few paupers and, it seemed, few skinflint slave owners.

  The body lay on a tablelike stone bier, about waist height to me, covered by a sheet to keep away the flies. At my nod a slave drew back the sheet. Charmian lay stiff and pale, bold-eyed no more. She looked thinner than when I had last seen her, as if she had been drained. There were bruises and weals and whip stripes all over her naked body. Her neck was bruised, but whether from the beating or strangulation I could not tell.

  “We wondered about this one,” said the undertaker. “As you can see, she had recently been severely beaten. That’s probably why she ran.”

  “I want to see her back,” I said. The gloved and masked attendants turned her on her side. In her death rigor she moved like a wooden statue. Her back was savaged worse than her front, but I saw no stab wounds. There had been no crushing blow to the back of the skull. I signaled them to let her rest.

  “Have you any idea when she died?” I asked the undertaker.

  “I think it must have been yesterday evening sometime. The rigor is consistent with that time. Also, if she’d been dead longer, there would be signs; the beginning of decomposition, bites from scavengers, and so forth.”

  “Had you any idea who she was?”

  “Someone said she looked like a slave from the Temple of Apollo, body servant to the girl who was murdered,” the undertaker went on. “I sent a messenger to the priest, but we’ve received no answer yet.”

  “I’ll be responsible for her,” I said. “I will pay for her funeral and burial.”

  “Funeral?” the man said.

  “You heard me. She will receive the rites and be decently cremated and interred.”

  “As you wish, Praetor.”

  The officials behind me remained stony faced, undoubtedly convinced that I was mad. But they recoiled in horror when I bent close to the poor girl and sniffed. I have the usual dislike of dead bodies, but some things must be done.

  “The praetor is gathering evidence,” Hermes told them in a voice that told them to keep quiet.

  She smelled very faintly of horse. Had she been hiding in a stable? Yet I saw no bits of straw or hayseed in her hair. There was another smell, even fainter but unmistakable: the fragrance called Zoroaster’s Rapture. I straightened.

  “Has the body been bathed?” I asked.

  “No, this is just how she was found,” the undertaker explained. “Since she is to have a funeral, we will of course prepare her properly.”

  “Do so.” I turned to the officials. “I want to know where she was found and the circumstances.”

  Silva gestured, and a man in gaudy military garb came to the front. I recognized him as the officer of the city guard.

  “Just after first light this morning,” he reported, “I was notified that a young woman’s body had been discovered at the municipal laundry. I—”

  “Take me there,” I said, cutting him off. I wanted to hear the rest of his tale on the site.

  In a mass, we walked from the precincts of the temple and through the city and out one of the side gates. This took no more than a few minutes, Baiae being the small town that it was.

  “I must say, Praetor,” Norbanus said, “that you are making a great fuss over a dead runaway.”

  “Is everyone here really as obtuse as they pretend,” I asked, “or is this some act put on for my benefit?” I glared around, but nobody said anything. “Gorgo, daughter of Diocles the priest, was murdered. Now her slave girl has likewise been murdered. The two are connected. Investigating this unfortunate slave girl’s death is as important as investigating Gorgo’s.”

  I might as well have been speaking to them in Parthian. When people are accustomed to thinking in terms of rank, status, hierarchy, and so forth, it is difficult if not impossible for them to think any other way. I had learned long since that my mental fluidity was a rare thing in a highborn Roman. In any sort of Roman, for that matter.

  The municipal laundry lay just outside the gate. Although it was just a place where wives and family servants could come to do the household laundry, like everything else in Baiae it was a thing of beauty. A low hillside had been terraced and a stream diverted to descend what appeared to be a great, marble stairway. Here a number of women were at work, beating the wet clothes and bedding with wooden paddles, laughing and gossiping the whole time. On a sunny slope just downhill, bronze drying racks awaited the clean cloth.

  There were many places to sit and rest amid the soothing sound of flowing water. Huge, mature plane trees provided abundant shade. Protective herms lined the watercourse, and at the top of the marble stair a benevolent, reclining water god watched over all. It was the sort of scene pastoral poets like to sing about: nature with all its dangerous aspects banished, nature tamed and made orderly.

  “Where was she found?” I asked.

  The guard captain strode to a spot next to the watercourse, beneath a plane tree. It was a grassy little nook, the sort of place where a family might come for a picnic. “She was laid out here,” he said.

  “‘Laid out’?”

  “Yes, Praetor. She was found exactly as you saw her in the libitinarium, arranged just as she would have been if she were on a funeral bier.”

  “But naked?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who found her?”

  “Some slave women from the house of Apronius Viba. His house is just against the city wall by the gate, and they were the first to come here this morning.”

  I went over the ground, but the springy turf and short-trimmed grass held no prints. I saw nothing that might have been lost or discarded by the killer. At the edge of the little clearing a stone stair led up the slope, away from the watercourse. Curious, I climbed it. Everyone else followed dutifully.

  The stair traced a curving path beneath low-hanging branches and ended at a broad pavement flooring on a notch cut into the hillside. A retaining wall perhaps ten feet high covered the vertical face of the cut, and it was pierced by at least thirty low, square doorways. I had never seen such a structure before.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Why, Praetor,” said Silva, “these are ice caves.”

  “Oh, yes. You told me about these a few days ago. Who owns them?”

  “The ice company leases them to various men of the city,” said the guard captain.

  “I want a list of all the lessees,” I said.

  “Why, Praetor?” Norbanus demanded. “One of them is mine, I freely admit. But why do you want to know this?”

  “Because they strike me as a good place for a runaway slave to hide,” I said, but that was only part of my reason.

  He shrugged. “Very well. I can get you the list. There are several of these facilities around the city.”

  “This is the one that interests me,” I said. “It will do.”

  I saw no more profit to be had in this place, so we returned to the city. By this time my new house was prepared. I sent the rest on about their business but I asked Cicero to tarry. He was clearly bored with life away from Rome and was following my progress out of curiosity.

  “Join me for lunch, Marcus Tullius,” I asked him. “I have no kitchen staff here yet but we can send out for some food.”

  “Gladly,” he said.

  “Thank you for backing me up with these plutocrats,” I said as we took chairs in the house’s excellent impluvium collonade. “In fa
ct, I was not at all sure about my constitutional powers in this matter. It’s not the sort of thing you get taught studying law.”

  “You’re on quite solid ground in a municipality like this,” he assured me. “Your imperium overrides all local authority, and your authority to use military force is unquestionable. Of course, that won’t stop these people from suing you as soon as you step down from office.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” I told him. “These men are so terrified at having their dealings investigated, they’ll never go to Rome to hale me into court.”

  He grinned. “Isn’t guilt a wonderful thing? Even when it has nothing to do with your investigation, it can get people to see things your way. By the way, it was very decent of you to arrange the rites for that poor girl.”

  “You mean very un-Roman of me?”

  He frowned. “Not at all. The humane treatment of slaves is a bedrock of Roman custom. It is one of the things that distinguishes us from barbarians.” He was dreaming, but I didn’t mention it. “But there could be complications. I hear you’ve confiscated two of the priest’s slave girls. He will construe your taking charge of this one’s body as further unauthorized appropriation of his property. He will have grounds for suit.”

  “I took them to keep him from killing them. And they are evidence. Besides, he’s as dirty as the rest of them—I can feel it. He’s hiding something and I mean to find out what it is.”

  A short while later, Hermes returned from the market, trailed by a boy carrying a large basket crammed with goodies. I’d sent Marcus and the rest back to the villa for rest, doctoring, and to tell Julia what was going on. Over a humble but delicious lunch of sausage, seed cakes, fruit, and wine we discussed the latest twists.

  “What sort of killer,” I said, “goes to the trouble of murdering a slave girl, then lays her out with all possible dignity, as if she were a beloved relative, in one of the most beautiful sites the town has to offer?”