Furies (13 page)

One of the doorways was partly open, dimly lit with torchlight. Sekhet walked towards it and threw open the door. A body draped in a linen shroud had been laid out on a stone funerary table. The table was carved in the form of two lions facing forward with the corpse’s head fitting into a basin between the lions’ tails, a drainage channel running down the centre and feeding into the basin. Sekhet set her torch in a wall sconce and pulled back the shroud.

And there lay Iovinus. His face was grey in pallor and slightly bloated now. The scent of rot and the noisy buzz of flies filled the airless little room.

“Bring the torch closer.” The flickering torchlight highlighted the gauntness of Iovinus’ face, the sharp edges of his cheekbones. The purplish tip of his tongue protruded partially from his mouth. As Aculeo took a queasy closer look, he noticed the right cheek was indeed shadowed with bruising, while the left side of his jaw was quite swollen. “See now?” she said. “His jaw was fractured. His left cheekbone as well I think.”

“That could have happened when we cut him down. He fell on the floor. And one of my associates may have kicked him once or twice.”

“Then his injuries wouldn’t be so apparent. As it is, he had barely enough time to swell and bruise before his death. It doesn’t happen afterwards. Do you know who might have done this to him?”

“Yes. I’d have beaten him myself if I’d had the chance.” Still, Aculeo was puzzled by this news.

“Hm,” Sekhet said. She took a sharp knife from her satchel and cut open Iovinus’ tunic. His ribs were edged in shadows, his belly distended, tinted greenish yellow. She probed her fingers around his abdomen, eyes closed, humming to herself. “He was ill. Wasting disease.”

“Oh?”

His groin was bound with strips of cloth dark with congealed blood. Sekhet cut them off and delicately peeled them off the man’s skin. “Ah,” she said when she was done. “He was castrated recently.”

“Castrated?” Aculeo asked, feeling ill.

Sekhet said nothing as she reached her gnarled fingers beneath the back of Iovinus’ long, skinny neck, probing, then turned his lifeless head side to side with her other hand. “His neck’s not broken, so death by hanging would have been from strangulation.” She said it quite easily, as though she were discussing the weather. “Were his hands bound?”

“No,” Aculeo said, turning away – he felt like he’d be sick any moment. Like most civilized men, he’d never understood the fellahins’ obsession with death. Sekhet eased Iovinus’ eyelids open with her thumbs and made another tsk tsk sound.

“What?” Aculeo asked.

“Tell me what you see.”

He glanced reluctantly into Iovinus’ eyes. “What should I be looking for?”

“When someone is strangled, the tiny vessels in their eyes will burst like flooded dams and they will appear shot with blood. That’s not the case with you, though, is it Roman?” Iovinus’ lifeless eyes remained open, unseeing, like the painted eyes of a statue. “This tells us he was already dead before the rope was slung around his neck. Which means that hanging himself would have been quite an impressive feat.”

“You’re saying that someone castrated him, then beat him to death and finally hanged him?” Aculeo asked dubiously. Sekhet nodded. “But why hang a man who’s already dead?”

“I know not. From what you told me, the man had his enemies.”

“More of them than friends these days.”

“Hm. Was anything stolen from him?”

“Some tablets. I don’t know what else. Oh, we found this on him.” Aculeo dug around in his satchel for the little silver box and handed it to her. “Incense.”

Sekhet opened the box, carefully sniffed the contents, then pinched off a bit and touched it to her tongue. She made a bitter face. “It’s not incense, it’s opium.”

“What?”

“Opium. It’s made from the sap of Persian poppies. It’s used to bring pleasure and sleep, and relieve pain. It’s also extraordinarily expensive.”

“Why leave it on him then? Even if the murderer didn’t know the value of the contents, the box alone would have fetched a few sesterces.”

“Robbery of that sort may not have been the goal,” the healer said with a shrug. “I should also be curious where your friend may have gotten the opium from in the first place. It’s not an easy thing to acquire.” She pulled the shroud back up to Iovinus’ chin. “So, I think he’s told us all he can. More questions than answers I’m afraid, but that can’t be helped. Would you care to say your last farewells?”

Aculeo gazed into the dead man’s eyes one last time, open wide as though in wonder, then shook his head. “I’ve nothing to say that might give him rest. The truth of what happened died with him.” He hesitated before placing an as for Charon in Iovinus’ mouth.

As they made their way back into the main chamber, Aculeo paused outside the open door of a room where a number of other bodies had been laid out on wooden tables, covered in canvas shrouds. “It’s a common chamber,” the healer said. “It contains the bodies brought here for ordinary funerals over the past few days.”

“A woman was found murdered in the Sarapeion yesterday.”

“Oh? You seem better acquainted with our newest residents than I am. Shall we examine her as well?”

“She was just some nameless porne. Let’s go.”

But Sekhet had already headed into the carved stone chamber. Aculeo reluctantly followed. As anxious as he was to leave this wretched place, he wasn’t about to head back through the dark passageways on his own.

Sekhet used her torch to light the oil lamps set about the room then approached the nearest table and flipped back the canvas shroud. It was an old man, his skin sallow, ripe with the stench of death. The next body was a fellahin youth with bluish-tinged lips. “Drowning,” she muttered. Then a woman, her face contorted in pain. “Breech birth.”

Then she pulled back the shroud of the next table. “That’s her,” Aculeo said. Sekhet eased the shroud off the woman’s body. Her skin was the colour of tallow and her belly had already begun to bloat. Tiny black flies crawled around her eyes, mouth and nostrils. Aculeo shuddered, looking away.

Sekhet stroked the girl’s cheek. “Poor thing,” she said. “How did you come across her?”

“Iovinus had patronized a porne named Neaera. I’d hoped she could tell me his whereabouts through her but she disappeared a few days ago. When I heard a dead woman had been found in the Sarapeion I’d thought it might be her.”

“And?” Aculeo shook his head. The old woman pursed her lips, then took her knife and carefully cut away the girl’s soiled chiton, exposing her naked body, thin and malnourished, with lean, ropey muscles and breasts small as figs. She examined the cut that ran the length of her forearm. “Fairly shallow, just enough to break the skin,” she mused. “And done just prior to her death, barely enough time to scab.”

A thin braid of frayed yellow jute cord was knotted around one of the girl’s wrists. “Someone tied her up,” Aculeo said.

The old woman examined the girl’s wrists, both of which were marked with the dim red imprint of rope, then took the cord firmly in her hands and yanked – it snapped easily. “Yes. Not with this though.” She inspected the girl’s face, looked in her eyes, her ears, her nose. “The side of her face is bruised, she was struck recently.” She opened her mouth then, prying open the jaws. “Her teeth are worn flat along the surfaces. Common in the poorer classes – all the sand and mill-grist that gets into cheap bread. Bring that lamp closer.”

A gaping wound ran down the side of her abdomen beneath the ribs, caked with dark blood. The girl’s hips were narrow as an adolescent boy’s, her legs long and skinny. Her body was still locked in the pose it had been in when they’d found her, with one arm raised over her head as if to ward off a blow, the other crooked before her, her hand covering the dark triangle between her legs, giving the impression of modesty.

“Pour some water into that basin,” Sekhet said. Aculeo did so and watched as the healer dabbed a wet rag at the blood encrusted wound on the girl’s abdomen. “So deep!” she said, pressing along the edges of the gash with a long metal instrument. “The wound’s too short for a knife, too wide for a javelin. A sword perhaps.” Sekhet carefully rolled the body onto its stomach, waving away the little flies that rose in an angry, buzzing cloud.

Several raised, pinkish scars criss-crossed the girl’s back and shoulders. “Whip marks – not recent.” The healer rolled her onto her back again, examined her hands which were caked in pinkish-grey dirt and blood. She began to clean them. Her nails were broken to the quick, her fingertips covered in tiny cuts. As though she’d been clawing at something, Aculeo thought. Or someone. “Perhaps she was defending herself from her attacker,” he said.

“No,” Sekhet mused. “If she was that close to her attacker there would be cuts and bruises on her hands or arms as well. Yet only her fingertips are injured. She was digging at the earth with her bare hands.”

Aculeo looked away again as the healer examined the girl’s pelvis. “She was raped recently,” she said with a sigh. “She shows no signs of the diseases pornes tend to get.” She examined the girl’s legs, clicking her tongue. Her buttocks and the backs of her thighs were covered with purplish-yellow bruises, her calves and ankles streaked with dried pinkish-grey mud. “An unusual colour,” she mused. “Not from around here.” Sekhet washed the girl’s calves, running a fingertip along a pale ridge that ran half the length of one leg. “Guinea worm. It lives in the shallows of rivers and lays its eggs in small cuts in the feet and toes. It’s a common enough thing with river slaves.” The soles of the girl’s feet were like thick sandal leather, the toenails brown, cracked and broken, the tops of the toes cut and raw.

“You think she was a porne?”

“More likely a working slave. And yet she was murdered near the Sarapeion in the middle of the night, when the only other visitors are supplicants and pornes.”

“I found this in her hand,” Aculeo recalled, taking the tiny gold earring from his coin purse and handing it to the healer.

Sekhet turned it over in her hand, pensive. “Hardly the sort of thing to be worn by a river slave. She must have stolen it. You’ll know more about her if you learn who she stole it from. So, the more we know, the more questions we have. What shall we do with her body?”

“The slaves who brought her must have given you money for her burial.”

“If she’s in the common room then we got barely enough to cover her with a shovelful of bitumite and dropped in a pit,” Sekhet said with a weary sigh, stroking the girl’s small, pale face. “I suppose little more could be expected for a nameless slave. Murdered and tossed aside like garbage, her death unmarked, her soul unable to reach the afterlife. A shame, when for just one more sesterce we could take care of her properly.”

“You are a thieving old crone, aren’t you? Here,” Aculeo said, tossing her the coin. The girl’s shade won’t linger in the Harbour of Souls to haunt me at least, he thought irritably.

Sekhet nodded and placed a twisted hand over the girl’s eyes, then closed her own. “We will shed our sorrows and put away our mourning, O Isis, and by your foresight you will enclose our days with wholesome health and beneficial wealth. On this day, and whatever days shall be born from this night hence, we shall direct our troubled thoughts to your commands alone.”

Gellius answered the door, blinking in the dim morning light, eyes caked with sleep. “Aculeo,” he said in surprise. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes.”

“You took care of Iovinus?”

“Yes, I …”

“What the fuck does he want?” Trogus growled from the shadows, then began coughing, a wretched interminable sound. Gellius put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. It was painful to witness Trogus in this state, especially given he’d always been such a hale, cheerful man. To see him now so bitter and sickly was truly dreadful.