A Pattern of Blood

Chapter Twenty-four

The medicus was waiting at the gate, wrapped in an impressive coloured cape which put my own to shame. He was accompanied by a pair of household slaves, equipped with torch-sticks, ready dipped in pitch, while a third slave carried burning coals in a metal pot, so he could light them when necessary. Flavius was also there, looking resentful, and flanked by two burly servants with staves.

‘This is intolerable,’ he grumbled, as soon as he saw me. ‘I have business, clients to attend to. Every moment I am kept here is costing me contracts. I am not a peasant to be kept here at your whim.’

‘Not my whim, citizen,’ I assured him cheerfully. ‘You are here at the express command of Marcus Aurelius Septimus, acting in the name of the governor.’ That was rather craven of me, since I had encouraged Marcus to send him, and I added, ‘Marcus is going to come with us himself. He has already sent us an escort — look, here they come now with Maximilian.’

Maximilian was not under arrest, but he was clearly an unwilling conscript, and the two guards that Marcus had sent me did not look pleased to be there either. It was comic, I thought. The people I had asked to accompany me were reluctant to come, while others, like Marcus and Sollers, had volunteered their presence on the outing.

We went out into the streets. The town was quieter now, although most stalls were still open, and the hot food stalls were already doing a roaring trade among those town dwellers who had no kitchens in their homes. The better ones served up spiced beef for the affluent, while from the less salubrious establishments women draggled by with buckets of hot ‘stew’. I didn’t envy them their meal. I had tasted that stew before. It is made of remnants from the market and I would have to be very hungry before I had an appetite for half-rotten turnips and floating eyeballs again. Though there were townsfolk, I was aware, who would have sold their souls to Pluto for less.

We turned left at the forum and out towards the Verulamium Gate.

It was as well we were carrying an escort. The watch at the gate were surly and suspicious — a group of Roman citizens, on foot, leaving the town gates just before dusk is calculated to arouse suspicion, even if one of them is a narrow-striper. We were not even going in the direction of the cemetery or the amphitheatre. The sight of the two soldiers, however, allayed their fears and we passed under one of the portals and crossed the fine stone bridge without further hindrance.

Only Maximilian, it seemed, had any clear idea of where exactly we were going. Flavius, as he protested constantly, had only consulted the woman within the gates, and as we left the town behind he was increasingly jumpy. One could not blame him. There was the usual straggle of buildings beyond the bridge, but after that, signs of habitation soon died out and we found ourselves in open countryside.

Not that there was any real danger here. The land around was cultivated, in parts, and there were open spaces where sheep and goats grazed dismally on the winter grass. And there was traffic on the road — men with carts and boys with sledges, peasants dragging home hoes and handcarts, stout women with donkeys, thin ones with firewood, bright-eyed girls carrying water from the stream — and all of them dashing for the verges when a scarlet-cloaked horseman came galloping by, carrying messages for some imperial post.

But we were not on the road for long. Our way led along a marshy track into a valley, hemmed in by bushes on either side. Sollers was looking definitely uneasy, and even Flavius, who had kept up an incessant grumble all the way, ceased his complaining and drew a little closer to his armed companions. I was glad we had brought our escort.

Maximilian, though, was leading the way as if an evening stroll through the wilderness was an everyday event. I waited until the path had widened a little, then went up to walk at his side.

‘Marcus told you, I presume, that we know you planned the robbery?’

He scowled at me. ‘Why else do you suppose I agreed to come on this miserable errand? If we find the woman, at least she can testify that I didn’t intend the stabbing.’

‘Marcus may search your apartments while you’re out.’

‘Let him,’ Maximilian said sullenly. ‘I don’t know what he hopes to find. Anything of any value has been sold long ago, to pay that wretched bath attendant. Not that I ever had much in the first place. If I had, I wouldn’t have needed to rob Quintus. I wanted money, that was all, and he refused to give me any.’

I walked beside him for a moment, and then murmured, ‘It was you, of course, who wrote “Remember Pertinax” on that tablet?’

His scowl deepened, and he quickened his pace without answering.

‘It had to be you,’ I said, matching my stride to his. ‘You wanted to divert suspicion from yourself, and suggest a different motive for the stabbing. No one else had anything to gain from it. But how did you know about Pertinax? Did Rollo tell you? I know he attended Quintus to the baths, when the council members met. I’m sure he listened to the political gossip, and he was something of a friend of yours.’

‘If you know so much, citizen, you hardly need to ask,’ Maximilian muttered sourly.

I took that for assent, and we walked for a little way in silence. ‘You have consulted this soothsayer often?’ I said, at last.

He glared at me truculently. He was showing us the way, his manner said, but he did not have to make conversation as well.

‘I am interested to know what she said to you,’ I ventured cheerfully. ‘She doesn’t seem to have been very reliable. Her prophecies for Flavius have proved untrue.’ An invitation to complain will often persuade a man to talk when cruder methods fail.

It worked now. Maximilian snorted. ‘Untrue! Untrue is an understatement. Everything she told me was a pack of lies. She promised me reconciliation with my father. The shape of some stupid storm clouds predicted it, she said. Well, it didn’t happen. Instead, he was threatening to disinherit me.’

I nodded. ‘If he had not so conveniently died.’

Maximilian threw me a venomous glance and quickened his pace still further.

‘You must have known that she could not be trusted,’ I said, picking my way carefully over a muddy patch, and hurrying to catch him up again. ‘You bribed her to tell Sollers what you wanted him to hear.’

He tried to walk away from me again, but I trotted after him, and at last he said, reluctantly, ‘I only asked her to repeat to him what she had said to me. I thought it would persuade him to go away.’

‘What she said to you? She spoke to you about Sollers?’

‘About Sollers and Julia. I paid her extra to read the signs for them. They were turning my father against me. I wanted to know what the future held. And when I heard, I was delighted. She was happy to repeat the prophecy to him.’

‘Giving you the opportunity to have your father robbed?’

He did not answer that.

‘And what did she say? What was this prophecy?’

‘That Sollers would meet another woman and that she would be his destiny. He would only be happy if he left my father’s house and Julia would only bring him doom. It could not have been more direct.’

‘It couldn’t,’ I agreed. It was unusual for diviners to be so unambiguous. Usually they gave the kind of veiled message which Junio had suggested. ‘She is no ordinary soothsayer?’

He shook his head. ‘No, she isn’t. I think she had education once, but life has been hard to her. I wondered sometimes if she told me, not what she saw, but what she wanted me to hear.’

‘But you came to her often?’

‘Several times. She encouraged me to do so. I do not know why I came. She was ugly, pock-marked, and she smelled. But I suppose I wanted to believe.’

‘I see.’ I turned to see if we were overheard, but Maximilian’s little spurts of speed had left the others far behind. Only Junio was in sight, and he was several yards back down the track. Maximilian, however, was still striding onwards.

I panted after him. ‘We have lost the others,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘It is not important. The kiln is straight ahead along this track. If they follow us, they will come to it.’ He turned to me, and there was a strange look in his eyes. ‘I thought you wished to be alone with me. Is that not why you dragged me from my father’s house, an hour before his funeral?’

He was more perceptive than I thought. ‘Perhaps,’ I said. I looked at him. ‘When did you last consult the soothsayer?’

He thought for a moment. ‘It was days ago. The last time I lost heavily at dice. I wanted her assurance for the future, but she had nothing to say. She was unwell, she said; she had a headache and she could not read the signs. I had to come away.’

‘You lost at dice?’ I said. ‘Or was it that you had to pay your comrade at the baths?’

He scowled. ‘Oh, so you know about that too? A little of both. That is why I had staked so high. With a little luck I could have paid all my debts.’

There was no answer to that, and I tried a different tack. ‘And do you know what she promised Flavius?’

He sneered. ‘I thought you had heard the tale. Rollo told everyone. Flavius was to make two tokens from a piece of bone and when the two parts were reunited, Julia would be his. It is not an unusual superstition.’

‘But it is a superstition,’ I said. ‘I wonder that you believed her at all.’

He turned away and strode on, and nothing that I said could provoke an answer. In any case, there was no room for speech. The path leading into the valley was narrower now, and wetter, and every step had to be made with care. If the light failed, I thought, we should need more than torches to get us back on the road dry shod. Then, just as I was beginning to despair, we turned a corner and Maximilian cried, ‘There it is. That is the place.’

It was indeed an abandoned kiln — more abandoned than I had imagined. It lay at the bottom of the valley, a rectangular chamber half set in the ground, its pierced roof crumbling and its entrance archway cracked. A trickle of water ran along the pathway to the door, flooding the tiled culvert which had been built to contain it. Through the hole in the roof it was possible to see the close-set walls of the over-chamber, where the tiles would have been made, and the arches which supported them over the central flue that ran the length of the kiln. Somebody had thatched over part of the roof, covering the smoke holes, and made a narrow chamber, scarcely the width of a man, between two of these inner walls, while stagnant water lapped under its base and rats scrabbled at the sides. It was the most unlovely dwelling I have ever seen.

I came a little closer and saw that it was even more unlovely than I thought. The woman was there, a pile of old shards and shattered phials beside her. She seemed to be asleep, lying alongside the lower aperture, beside the blackened remnants of a fire.

I looked at Maximilian, and he at me. Then together, we slithered down the slope towards the kiln. But one look at her face told me the dreadful facts. There would be no prophecies today. The soothsayer was dead.

Junio, behind us, had hesitated on the bank, and I called to him. ‘Fetch the others. Run!’

Junio set off like a stone from a ballista, and we heard him calling faintly down the path. ‘Come quickly, come quickly, the woman is dead.’

She had died of a fever, by the look of it, for she was wizened to the bone, her lank hair was plastered to her head, and beneath the warts the death-pale skin was still blotched and red in patches. Maximilian went to move her and I pulled him roughly away. ‘Don’t touch her. Do you want to be the next? Have you not heard what happened a few years ago in Rome? Thousands died of a fever much like this.’

He drew back, horrified, and I saw the expression on his face.

‘You cared for her?’

‘I hardly knew her,’ he said. ‘But there has been so much death. Although,’ he went on, his eyes widening in horror, ‘I spoke to her some days ago. I hope she did not have the fever then.’

I might have answered him, but there was the sound of feet on the path and Junio and Sollers came running up, with Flavius and the guards not far behind.

‘What is it?’ Sollers said, clambering swiftly down to join us. ‘Dear Hermes, the spotted fever. Do not touch her, either of you. We must get a litter for this body, and have it burned before the fever spreads.’ He took a corner of the ragged skirts and pulled it gingerly towards him. The corpse rolled over grotesquely. Junio, who had climbed down after Sollers, drew back in horror.

‘How long has she been dead?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I cannot tell. Not long. A day or two perhaps, no more. The body is cold, although it would not take long to chill it here. But see these reddened marks upon the back — I have seen this before on slaughtered soldiers. The blood seeps down a few hours after death, and where the body lies it makes these bruise-like marks. Yes, poor hag, she has not long been dead.’ He got to his feet as Flavius came up, red-faced and flustered, followed by the slaves and soldiers.

Flavius came to where the kiln pit was and peered down. There was a long pause when he saw the body huddled there. His face turned from fiery red to white, and back to red again and then he burst into nervous laughter. ‘Where are your spells and omens now, old hag?’ he cried. ‘Much good they did us, either of us!’ He was shaking with emotion.

‘I should. .’ Sollers said, and moved towards him, but I motioned to the soldiers.

‘Seize him,’ I said.