Fortune's Fool

by Albert A. Bell

  Since I couldn’t sleep, I lit a second and third lamp and sat down to study the two skulls which had come into my possession. They were resting, side by side, on my writing table. I had the lower jaw of the one from the wall. Even lacking that piece, the one we had met with on the road this afternoon was still larger. That could mean that person was older. Perhaps I was looking at a man’s skull and a boy’s. On the other hand, men are generally larger than women, so this could be a man’s skull and a woman’s from the wall.

  I tried to imagine the eyes which had once peered out from those sockets. What color were they? Pressing around my own eyes, I could feel the same bone structure. I had the demoralizing sensation that I was looking at my future. Inevitably, we all come to that end. It’s odd to think that our eyes, noses, and ears—which are such important parts of our appearance—are just holes filled with something that disappears when we die. Noses and ears can even be cut off as punishment without taking the life of a person. Aurora could have the tip of one of her ears cut off and still survive. What defines the shape of our heads is something no one sees until we’re dead. Then one person’s skull is indistinguishable from another’s.

  The rain was pelting when I heard a knock on my door. I opened it to find Felix standing there, with Aurora just behind him.

  “Forgive us for disturbing you, my lord,” Felix said. Then he stood aside, put his hand on Aurora’s back, and pushed her, stumbling, into my room. “Good night, my lord.”

  As he closed the door behind her, Aurora, looking more awkward and uncertain than I’d ever seen her, said, “Felix thought it would be more decorous if we were both at your door…in case anyone saw us.”

  “What…what are you doing here?”

  She sighed and looked straight into my eyes. “My husband told me to stop being a silly goose and go back to you. You were only doing what you had to, he said, what you thought was best, even if you were a bit clumsy in the way you did it.”

  “Felix said that?” The man was certainly taking liberties. Advice to a fellow slave was one thing, criticism of his master quite another.

  “I added the clumsy part.” She held out her hands to me. “You were clumsy, Gaius. You should have trusted me all along the way. I would have understood.”

  I took her hands in mine. “I know. And I’m sorry, so sorry.”

  We clung to each other and did not say anything else for a long time.

  * * *

  I awoke at some time during the night to find Aurora sitting on the edge of the bed. I ran my hand up and down her beautiful bare back. She sighed but made no other response. Instead, she kept her gaze fixed on the two skulls on my writing table. When she had removed her gown earlier, she had tossed it over the skulls so the macabre sight wouldn’t disturb us. Now she clutched her gown to her, with her arms crossed over her chest.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “That we need more light in here so we can get a better look at these things.”

  We had left one lamp burning because neither of us enjoys making love in total darkness. Now we slipped into our clothes and I lit two more lamps. Picking up one skull in each hand, Aurora turned them at different angles, keeping them facing the same way.

  “I thought I had figured out who it was,” I said and told her about Delius and the missing gold. “But he’s alive and well. Now the second skull and the note seem to reopen the whole question. Why would someone want to warn us off if this is just a robbery victim from twenty years ago? And is this second skull someone we should try to identify?”

  “Let’s focus on the skull from the wall,” Aurora said. “The main thing I notice about it, other than the smaller size, is the spot where some of the teeth are broken.” She put the larger skull back on the table and held a lamp up close to the smaller one.

  “I suspect whoever killed him,” I said, “hit him in the mouth first, then on the head.”

  Aurora scrunched up her mouth, as though she’d tasted something disagreeable. “But he was hit on the right side of his face. Or her face. We do have to remember that it could be a woman, especially given the size of the skull.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you were hit on that side, wouldn’t you turn your head to the left?” She moved the skull.

  “Yes.”

  “But the hole where this person was struck on the top of the skull is on his left side.” She put the skull down and put her finger on the spot of the lethal blow. “Most people are right-handed. A blow to the right side of the face would come from someone’s left hand. A blow to the left side of the head, like this one, would come from someone’s right hand. Let me show you.”

  She faced me and brought her left hand up to the side of my mouth, turning my head. I kissed her hand.

  “I doubt that happened,” she said with a smile. Then she brought her right hand down on the top of my head to demonstrate how that blow could have been struck. If she had actually hit me, I wouldn’t have cared. I deserved it. “You see, I could not have delivered that fatal blow to the head in that spot with my left hand, or the blow to the mouth with my right hand.”

  “Well, that’s most likely,” I admitted, “but not the only possibility. Maybe the blow to his face was hard enough to spin him around. It was hard enough to break some teeth. When he turned, a left-handed person could have hit him on the head from behind.”

  She took my hand. “But, if you put a couple of your fingers in the hole—about the size of the rock that must have been used—they slope toward the front.” She sucked on two of my fingers and used them to demonstrate. “You see, he was struck on the head from the front, with a pointed object, by someone who was right-handed.”

  “But you’re not taking the cracked ribs into account. If he was hit there first, he would have doubled over or fallen.”

  “Stand up,” Aurora said. “Let’s see if we can figure out what happened.”

  I did as she told me, appreciating the irony of the servant giving the master an order. I don’t think she noticed.

  “He must have been hit in the ribs,” she began, “on his left side, by some weapon. The person who attacked him would have swung like this.” She drew her arms back and pretended to strike. “The blow came from a right-handed person.”

  I bent over as though I had been hit. “Now what?”

  “My instinct is to swing again and hit you on the head.” Aurora raised her arms high and brought them down on my head. Like a good actor, I fell to the floor.

  “This would be where you take my clothes off,” I said. When she looked puzzled, I went on. “And this would be where you smile seductively as you think about taking my clothes off.”

  Instead she looked at her hands, as though she were holding something. “Gaius, I think we were wrong.”

  I got up, brushing myself off. “About what?”

  “About the weapon. We said it was a rock, but I don’t think someone would have hit him in the side with a stick or a club and then picked up a rock to hit him in the head.”

  “You’re right. That means he used a tool of some sort, with a long handle and something sharp and heavy on the end.”

  “Something like that would be easy enough to find on an estate like this.”

  “If he was in fact killed here,” I reminded her. “We aren’t at all sure about that.”

  “Lie down again,” Aurora said.

  “Why?” I complied as I asked the question.

  She glanced at the skulls again and then down at me. “When was he hit in the mouth? And why at that particular spot?”

  I got up and stood beside her. “That’s as big a puzzle as why he was killed.”

  Aurora placed the two skulls side by side, both turned to the left. “Two of the teeth in the skull from the wall are broken, but there are still pieces of them in place.”

  “There’s a gap right here, behind the tooth that’s shaped like a dog’s.” I pointed to the spot.

  She picked up the skull and t
urned it so we could see the teeth from the bottom. “You’re right. That tooth is completely gone. It must have been missing before this person was killed. I wonder if somebody was trying to cover up something that might have made this person recognizable.”

  “I don’t think the killer was worried about him being found and identified, not once he was sealed up in that wall.”

  “His—or her—clothes and jewelry were removed.”

  “We don’t know that he was wearing any jewelry,” I reminded her.

  “Well, he certainly was wearing clothes.”

  “I can’t dispute that. This tooth is far enough back in the mouth that it wouldn’t be the first thing you’d notice about this person.”

  We fell silent as one of the lamps flickered out. I reached under the writing table for the flask that contained more oil but the stopper wouldn’t come out. The last servant who filled the lamps had jammed it in tightly.

  “Tap it against the table,” Aurora said. “That’ll loosen it.”

  After a couple of sharp taps I got the flask open, filled the lamp, and relit it from one of the burning lamps. As I was putting the flask back under the table, I said, “By the gods! What if…No, it couldn’t be.”

  “What couldn’t be?” Aurora said.

  Before I could reply, we heard a knock on the door.

  “It’s Felix, my lord,” a man’s voice said.

  I gave Aurora a quick kiss on the cheek. “Never mind. It’s just a crazy idea.”

  I opened the door to see that it wasn’t light yet. “What do you want?”

  “With your permission, my lord, I think it’s time for my wife to return to our room, for the sake of appearances.”

  The man displayed eminent good sense. I had chosen the right husband for the woman I love. “I suppose it is.”

  As Aurora came to the door she said, “Wait, husband.” She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me, with Felix smiling behind her like a doting father.

  * * *

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Tacitus asked as we watched a crew of workmen resume their demolition of the wall not long after dawn, while two other men dug the trench where the foundation of the new walls would be laid. “We had a warning that couldn’t be missed.”

  “That’s precisely why I’m continuing. I don’t want them to think they’ve frightened us.”

  “Speak for yourself. They’ve frightened me. What sort of people keep human skulls lying around to use as warnings? And parchment? Why write on parchment? That’s what people use for magical books or if they can’t get hold of papyrus.”

  “We keep saying ‘they.’ What makes us think it’s more than one person?”

  We moved back as more of the rubble fill in the wall tumbled out, raising a cloud of dust but, to my great relief, revealing nothing else.

  “There’s no reason it has to be more than one, I guess,” Tacitus said. “But that skull on the tree and the message makes me think we’ve stumbled into something big, and I think that kind of secret would involve more than one person.”

  I shifted to Greek. “You think Romatius knows something, don’t you?”

  Tacitus shrugged and changed languages as well. “He’s a friend of yours, I know—”

  “But there were several other people at the taberna who could have overheard our conversation. Your blabbermouth servant told the kitchen girl all about it. And who knows how many people heard us at the bath? I couldn’t get you to keep your voice down.”

  Tacitus bowed his head. “For my shortcomings and for those of my servant, I apologize. But something made Romatius nervous. You saw how he reacted as soon as we started talking about missing people. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

  “No faster than you, my friend, if you had a willing partner waiting. Doesn’t Julia suspect—”

  “It’s none of your concern, Gaius Pliny, but I love Julia and will always be faithful to her, after my own fashion. You’re hardly one to criticize any man’s relationship with his wife, you know.” He drew his shoulders back.

  “I don’t understand the change in your attitude, Cornelius Tacitus.” I shook my head slowly. “When I first met you, you had little good to say about Julia. You once quoted Semonides’ line that a man can’t enjoy a day if he has to spend all of it with his wife.”

  He cringed. “I said that?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “In my defense, she was hardly more than a child when I married her, and a rather immature one at that. In the last couple of years she has grown up in many ways. Maybe I have, too. Losing the baby made her a different person and made me appreciate her in ways I hadn’t before. I consider myself lucky to be with her, and I’m sorry you find yourself trapped in your marriage. I hope you can find some way to make it tolerable for both of you.”

  “Are you suggesting that I might come to love Livia?”

  “I’m not asking for a miracle, just for an easing of the tension. For your sake, Gaius. A rope that’s stretched too tightly for too long will snap.” He made the motion of pulling on something until it came apart.

  Like a contestant in the pankration, I raised a finger to signal my surrender. I pointed it back at the wall. “This work is going well. I think I’ll go see how Phineas is doing with organizing the library.”

  “And—with apologies to Semonides—I’m going to spend the rest of the day with my wife.”

  Before retreating to the library, I sent Felix back to the quarry. Pompeia caught me off-guard and suggested that Aurora ride with him, to learn something about the business of the estate and to have time to get acquainted with her new husband. I couldn’t object without raising my mother-in-law’s suspicions.

  My mother surprised me when she said, “But Aurora is…needed here.”

  “To do what?” Pompeia asked. “Any of the servant girls can pamper Gaius as well as she can. I’ve not noticed that she has any particular skills, but perhaps I’m not fully informed about her…talents.” With an eyebrow raised, she looked from one of us to the other.

  * * *

  “Aurora, I—”

  Felix started to say something to me, but I stopped him. “You speak Greek, don’t you?” I asked in that language.

  “Not as well as you, I suspect, but I can manage.”

  “Let’s use it. I’m always wary of talking around strangers. These men don’t speak Greek, do they?”

  “They’re barely more articulate than their oxen,” he said with the haughtiness which we servants who work in the house often display toward field hands and laborers.

  “You can never be sure. Let’s test them. Keep an eye on them over your shoulder.” I raised my voice. “On a beautiful day like this, husband, I wish I could take off my gown and ride naked for a while. Just let the sun and the breeze play over my body.” I touched my breasts lightly and shook my hair loose.

  Felix chuckled. “They didn’t even blink until you touched your breasts.”

  “I suppose it’s safe to talk then.”

  “I know you would rather have stayed at the house with Gaius Pliny, now that you’ve settled your differences.”

  He was right, of course, but if I had to be somewhere else, then riding a horse on such a lovely day wasn’t a bad place to be. Straddling a horse gave me almost as much pleasure as having my legs wrapped around Gaius. Besides, I really did enjoy Felix’s company, and the scenery beggared description. The peninsula on which Gaius’ villa sits divides Lake Comum into two long, thin branches. The main roads run on either side, near the lake. We were on a smaller road in the center of the peninsula. The forest around us was thick and green and beyond the trees rose the Alps, still snowcapped in July.

  For the rest of the trip Felix had questions about the house in Rome, where he would soon be working. He was uneasy about leaving a place where he had lived and worked for over thirty years to move into a position of authority in a larger house.

  “I don’t know how people will regard me, co
ming in as an outsider,” he said. “I’d resent me, in their place.”

  I told him as much as I could about the place and the people. As we talked I began to realize that I didn’t know as much about them as I should have. Some of his questions I couldn’t answer. Since I was the master’s favorite and my mother had been the elder Pliny’s mistress, perhaps others in the household were reluctant to confide in me.

  When we arrived at the quarry in midafternoon it seemed odd to hear myself, for the first time, introduced as Felix’s wife. Eustachius, the owner of the place, offered us something to eat and assured us that the stone would be loaded and ready to go in the morning. I tried not to stare at his left arm, or rather the stub of it protruding from the sleeve of his tunic, but he noticed me looking. I wished Felix had warned me.

  Eustachius, a swarthy man of about forty, sat with us on a bench outside his house and his diminutive wife, Nicera, set wine, bread, and cheese on a table in front of us. “To answer your question before you have to ask it, lovely lady,” he said, “I got it pinched between two big blocks of stone when they shifted on a wagon. It was completely crushed. We had no choice but to cut it off at the elbow like this.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “No matter. After ten years, I’m used to it. And my right arm is as strong as two arms for most men.” He held the limb in front of my face and flexed the enormous muscles. “So, Gaius Pliny is tearing out the wall my old dad and me built for his dad, eh?”

  “You worked on the wall?”

  “Sure did. It was a small job, so my father put me in charge of it.”

  “Could I ask you a few questions about it?”

  “By all means, but you’ll have to wait until dinner.” He got to his feet. “If I don’t crack the whip over these louts, they’ll not have your load of stone ready by tomorrow.”

  * * *

  As the sun comes up over the Alps there is a fleeting moment when it turns the snow on the peaks pink and orange. I had not gotten up this early just so I could enjoy that ephemeral sight, but the lovely dawn proved some small compensation for a sleepless night without Aurora. I was coming out of the latrina when one of the servant girls, hardly more than a child, ran up to me.