The Mammoth Book of Classical Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  Their hymn was slow and stately, yet at its words Octavio, who stood cloaked in red as far from the altar as he could stand without raising suspicion, shuddered. Only white-cloaked Crato, standing next to him, noticed. Bending closer, Crato murmured, ‘I find nothing vile in any of this. Silly and unphilosophical, but hardly heinous.’

  ‘ “His body and his blood,” ’ Octavio muttered back. ‘Did you not hear those words? There! Again! “We will share his body and his blood.” ’

  ‘I can cite you eight or nine Creation allegories making Earth herself and her fruits some god’s body, with water or wine for blood. Moreover, they sang, “his.” Not “her.” ’

  ‘To them, it makes no difference. Whoever their victim, he – or she – is thought to become their Christ Jesus of the ass’s head.’

  ‘And you have seen their sacrifice with your own eyes?’ Crato inquired skeptically.

  Octavio either misheard or chose to skirt his companion’s question, for he answered, ‘No, you will not see it. They send their catechumens away while all is still innocent enough. Only the initiates feast and, after feasting, tease their hound into upsetting the lampstand, when they use darkness to couple promiscuously.’

  ‘So say many who have never actually witnessed such things,’ Crato argued.

  ‘Shhh!’ Octavio told him. ‘The catechumens’ ritual is ending.’ As if he had simply been answering such questions as the Christians might expect any true catechumen of theirs to ask, the decurion turned from Crato and joined in a chant they would clearly expect him to know:

  ‘Holy, holy, holy, God one and only!

  Thou alone art holy, Thou alone art Lord.

  Heaven and earth quake at Thy glory.

  All glory forever to God, the sole Lord!’

  ‘Somewhat presumptuous,’ Crato nodded to himself, ‘yet not, I think, beyond divine forgiveness.’

  ‘The most sacred mysteries are about to commence,’ droned the dwarfish flamen, and the red-haired giant added in his foreign accent, ‘Let all catechumens depart.’

  As Crato turned to obey, his companion caught his sleeve and muttered one thing further in his ear: ‘If anything happens, tell Flavian–that visiting “apostle” is Rufus Sinistris, who may remember me from Gaul.’

  Crato and the other two in white filed from the cavern. Once they had disappeared, Rufus Sinistris turned to face the altar, stood several moments with face and arms uplifted in silent prayer, and then, reaching forth his left hand, flicked the white cloth from the arm-high mound.

  Revealing an ass’s head, smeared with blood and impaled on a T-shaped cross cut to its size.

  Hiding his reluctance, Octavio joined everyone present in prostrating himself before this grisly idol.

  The two presiding flamens rose first, passing together behind the altar. Rufus Sinistris returned bearing a silver chalice and a long, thin-bladed dagger. Dossemus brought a brazier filled with glowing coals and a small grill, which he arranged beside the altar, at the end opposite the lamp.

  Again Dossemus went behind the altar, and this time returned carrying a large platter on which rested what at first appeared in the weak light to be one huge lump of kneaded dough.

  It was the child Marcellina, curled up and heavily dusted with white flour.

  She appeared almost too heavy for small, hunchbacked Dossemus, and Rufus Sinistris soon relieved him, lifting the tray with its dormant burden and placing it on the altar before the crucified parody of a god. Octavio raised his head high enough to watch them closely. In her obviously drugged slumber – how little it would take to drug one so young! a single cup of unwatered wine would more than suffice – Marcellina’s tiny chest moved shallowly up and down.

  But for how long? Already Dossemus was turning her upon her back, stretching her small limbs out in miniature cruciform.

  Rufus Sinistris lifted his dagger and held it with both hands, high above Marcellina, its blade pointing downward. He chanted, ‘This is the most sacred body of Christ Jesus Our Lord, which will send up fragrant incense to God as it roasts. This is the vessel of Christ Jesus’ most sacred blood, soon to fill our chalice and cement our spiritual fellowship one with another. Let us eat and drink and be glad!’

  Octavio could wait no longer. Springing up with all his military training, he lunged across the cave and caught the giant from behind, catching his dagger even as it began its descent, jerking it to one side and immediately striking it across the floor. The hound pricked its ears up and barked once.

  Dossemus caught Octavio in turn from behind. Still grappling with Rufus Sinistris, the soldier dislodged Dossemus with one kick. The hound barked again, and this time went on barking.

  Rufus Sinistris gave Octavio far more trouble than did Dossemus, nor was it any longer merely two against one. By now the other cultists were on their feet, thronging in upon Octavio, whose only advantage was that his opponents kept getting in one another’s way.

  ‘You!’ shouted Rufus Sinistris, twisting round to see his attacker’s face in full lamplight. ‘Brothers! Sisters! This is the apostate who betrayed our people in Gaul, that time I escaped only with Our Lord’s help, who wanted me to labor yet awhile in His fields! Behold the betrayer! Let us drink his blood before the child’s!’

  Sinistris’ words brought still louder howls of rage from his fellow Christians – but now the old hound was on his feet, too, mingling his barks and howls with theirs, dashing back and forth on his short chain. The lampstand jerked, trembled, wavered, and went crashing over, plunging the cavern into deep darkness.

  For several moments, all was black confusion of blows, grunts, shouts, and curses, the hound’s barking, and – suddenly – a child’s high-pitched cry wailing over all. The din of combat had broken even Marcellina’s drugged sleep.

  Another sound rose above the turmoil – the sound of soldiers arriving. Soon their torchlight began to penetrate the cavern, casting upon its far wall the shadows of the twin trees which lent it its name.

  One by one, the Christians took notice and left off fighting. Some cowered in awe, some tried in vain to crawl away and escape or hide, some seemed to ponder their chances of changing sides. As the army came ever closer, two women bent over Octavio and dabbed at his bloody injuries with their garments, as if preparing to pretend that they had wanted to help him. The hound gradually subsided, but Marcellina continued to wail. Dossemus huddled behind the altar. Rufus Sinistris stood proud, clutched the ass’s head with both hands as if intent on saving a sacred thing from desecration, and began to chant a hymn. First one and then another Christian joined him. No more than those two.

  Flavian, Kynon, and Bodicca burst into the cavern, heading their combined force of Roman legionaries and British tribesmen. After one glance around, the warrior woman strode to the altar, stepping lightly over Octavio on her way, and gathered floury little Marcellina into the safety of her arms.

  ‘Does he live?’ Flavian asked, indicating Octavio.

  ‘He does,’ the wounded decurion answered for himself, struggling weakly into a sitting position.

  ‘As does your granddaughter,’ Bodicca added, turning toward Flavian. ‘And she, I think you will find, is whole and uninjured.’

  ‘Thank God!’ cried Marcella, pushing forward through the ranks of warriors to accept her child from the smiling British woman’s arms. ‘Oh, thank Juno and Vesta and all our Lares! All praise to the Great God of all!’

  ‘Well, daughter,’ said Flavian, ‘if it proves that Octavio has served us this night as nobly as he appears, by what I see here, to have done, I think I may judge his way clear to your hand.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ Kynon growled, adding to his tribesmen, ‘Seize these rascals. Let none of them escape!’

  ‘Bind them over to Roman jailers,’ Flavian amended, motioning for his own men to join Kynon’s in arresting the cultists. ‘They must have Roman justice.’

  ‘As you will, Roman. They are, after all, your own criminals.’ Smiling grimly, Kynon
half knelt and fondled the hound between its ears. ‘But not this fine fellow, whom I claim for my only prisoner and prize. He, I think, is guilty of no more than bad companions, and they not, perhaps, of his own choosing. It should prove easy enough to redeem him, at least, to live out the rest of his nights at my feet.’

  The hound craned his neck and licked Kynon’s hand.

  ‘Perhaps it is as well,’ Crato sighed on learning about Myrtilia and Bucco, the first dead and the second secured with his fellow criminals. ‘Had Flavian depended on my old feet, his legionaries could never have come in time.’ The philosopher sighed again. ‘Ah, Xanthippe, Xanthippe, I sought to believe good of all men. It seems that God has shown me my error.’

  ‘It was blessed error, born from nobility of mind, like Pallas from the brainpan of Zeus.’ Chloe kissed her husband’s bald head. ‘But, husband, once again I remind you, you are not Socrates, and I am not Xanthippe!’

  [Translator’s Afterword: In the original, Crato has a fifty-line Epilogue pointing the moral that there are indeed evil creeds abroad in the world (not merely isolated individuals misinterpreting basically innocent creeds), and that it is a grave mistake to seek excuses for such creeds. From my own vantage point, safe in twentieth-century America and post-Vatican II Catholicism, I draw another moral entirely from Atramentacio’s work: Before we modern Christians succumb to the temptation of portraying any unpopular minority as a criminal cult – whether we are inspired by misinformed zeal or by the seductive charm of a ready-to-hand Evil Conspiracy – it might be wholesome to remember there was a time when we were the tiny, misunderstood, and dreaded minority; when the word ‘Christian’ must have fallen upon ordinary, honest, God-fearing ears very much as the word ‘Satanist’ falls upon ours; when real people suffered real hate crimes thanks to the promotion of such misunderstanding; when everyone who killed us truly and sincerely thought he or she was offering homage to God.

  Notice how carefully Atramentacio dissociates the Hebrew characters from any suggestion of guilt. The playwright appears to have been a liberal and fair-minded worshiper of the one high God conceived to be over all nations and people (and Whom Christian apologists were to identify with the Father preached by Jesus), as well as of more localized Roman deities; and to have worked from accounts as speciously reliable as much of the anti-Wiccan, anti-New Age religion, etc., material currently used in our own Sunday schools and law enforcement agencies.

  Among the most sobering reflections of all is provided by the evidence, found in the writings of Church Fathers, that the Christians themselves of those first few centuries were perfectly willing to believe such outrages as found in The Ass’s Head – always about other, ‘heretical’ Christian groups, of course. Never about their own.

  It will have become obvious why Atramentacio’s work was lost for so long. The wonder is that any copy of The Ass’s Head survived at all for rediscovery in our own day.

  One change I made in the action. It is, I hope, a change that might have been made by even the most conscientious director of a staged production. In the original, Myrtilia’s death is accompanied by a rather fearsome divine (or, if you prefer, diabolical) apparition, which all the other characters see with her. This is certainly in keeping with the dramatic conventions of the classical stage, but it strikes me as inconsistent with Octavio’s personal history, with the action in the cave, and with the general tone of the play. It could also make the cave action seem anticlimactic, and I despaired of trying to convey, in a few words, the mindset that would have allowed the ancient Romans to witness such an apparition and continue to call the Christian belief ‘superstitious’ – in their sense of the word, which differed somewhat from our sense of it. For all these reasons, I limited the vision to Myrtilia’s eyes alone, thus moving her death more into line with such examples, drawn from early Christian literature, as the deaths of Ananias, Sapphira, and Nichomachus, and trying at the same time to render it susceptible to medical explanation. I have made no other essential changes in the play.]

  * This suggests some ‘in’ joke, perhaps concerning an obscure philosophical school, a character in a now-lost play, or even an actor associated with such a character. In any event, after being mentioned in the Prologue, Pytho vanishes completely from The Ass’s Head.

  THE NEST OF EVIL

  Wallace Nichols

  It would be difficult to imagine this anthology without one of the Slave Detective stories by Wallace Nichols. Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s Nichols produced a regular stream of stories about Sollius, the slave of senator Titius Sabinus, whose detective skills are known throughout Rome. The stories appeared exclusively in the London Mystery Magazine and have not been collected in book form. In The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits and The Mammoth Book of Historical Detectives, I reprinted the earliest Sollius stories, which take place in the final years of reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The following is one of the later stories from the series, set in the reign of Septimius Severus, but the years have not dulled the detective powers of Sollius one jot.

  One morning in the late Roman spring Sollius the slave, returning from an errand for his master, Titius Sabinus the Senator, heard hurrying footsteps behind him. Continuing on his way, the Slave Detective – for so ran his fame in Rome – slightly slackened his pace to let the other overtake him. But he kept taut and wary: many among the dregs of the City wished him ill.

  ‘Sollius, Sollius . . .’ came in a panting voice.

  The Slave Detective glanced over his shoulder. An elderly man, a fellow slave, as could be seen from his base attire, gestured to him to stop.

  ‘What is it?’ Sollius asked as soon as the other came up.

  ‘Will you come in and speak with my mistress, Dacia, the wife of Marcus Albinus the architect?’

  Sollius recognized the name as that of an architect of repute in Rome.

  ‘There is great trouble in our house,’ went on the old slave beseechingly.

  ‘That house – where is it?’

  ‘You’ve just passed it,’ and he pointed to a small mansion on the Palatine, clearly the residence of a rich man.

  Sollius nodded, and followed the other into the atrium.

  Dacia, obviously agitated, was a still-handsome woman in latish middle age. She greeted him breathlessly.

  ‘Only you, Sollius, can help me. I saw you pass by – and so to see you was a grace of the Gods.’

  ‘What is your problem?’ he asked.

  ‘My son has been arrested by Licinius the Prefect.’

  ‘For what crime, lady?’

  ‘Murder,’ she answered, a sob behind her voice. ‘Get him released,’ she went on hysterically. ‘I will pay you anything you ask.’

  ‘I can only serve you, lady, with the permission of my master.’

  ‘I will get it – but at least hear me now.’

  ‘As you will,’ he answered, and humbly composed himself to listen.

  ‘We are a strange household,’ she began, wringing her hands. ‘Marcus Albinus is my second husband, and Agenor is my son by my first husband, a gentleman of Greek origin. I have a daughter, Nanno, by Albinus. Recently my husband adopted the daughter and only child of his greatest friend who died three years ago, leaving her destitute. She is a girl of the same age as Nanno, seventeen, and she is – O Gods, was! – named Melissa. She was found stabbed yesterday. The Prefect has arrested Agenor. But he is – he must be – innocent. Save him, Sollius!’

  ‘Ask permission from Titius Sabinus, lady, and I will look into the case. Meanwhile it will do no harm to ask the City Prefect what evidence he has against your son.’

  ‘I will see the noble Sabinus at once – and oh, Sollius, hasten to the Prefect!’

  The Slave Detective changed his steps to the barracks of the Urban Cohorts, and there broke in upon Licinius, whom he saw to be frowning.

  ‘The very man I most desired to see and for whom I was about to send!’ cried the Prefect, leaping up. ‘I can keep order in
the Emperor’s City, but I’m a poor hand at solving mysteries.’

  ‘You have one?’ innocently inquired Sollius.

  ‘A murder,’ replied Licinius grimly. ‘On what seems overwhelming evidence I have arrested a man – yet, against its showing, I half believe him not guilty. You must help me, Sollius.’

  ‘That means two I must help,’ smiled Sollius, ‘you and Agenor’s mother.’

  ‘You know about the case already?’ cried the Prefect, open-mouthed. ‘Is this magic?’

  ‘Neither magic nor knowledge. Only a mother’s anguish. So tell me.’

  ‘It seemed such a simple case,’ sighed Licinius. ‘There was bad blood between the young man Agenor and the girl Melissa. He had tried to seduce her – though his mother won’t believe it – and she had repulsed him, as a slave witnessed, with a biting mockery at his deformity, for he is slightly humpbacked, a scowling fellow, as you will see. I have little liking for him, but justice is justice, and I am unhappy: still, the evidence is against him.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘He was found standing over her, the knife that had killed her in his hand. He swears he had found her dead, and had taken the weapon – which was a hunting-knife of his own – out of her body from hatred to see it there. She was a very beautiful girl, with Greek looks from a Greek mother. Moreover, he had taken his repulse, which was only a day or so before the murder, and as the same slave has sworn, with evil looks, words and threats.’

  ‘Threats?’

  ‘That beauty, when scornful, deserved a brand, burnt in!’

  Unaccountably, Sollius shivered.

  ‘What was the stepfather’s part in this?’

  ‘He has never approved of his stepson, and kept him without money. I should have believed Agenor more surely guilty had it been Albinus who had been stabbed. However angered the young man may have been at the girl’s treatment, he loved her.’