“When did you last see him?” I asked.
“At evening parade before guard mount,” Burrus told me. “He was on the reviewing stand with the legatus, like most evenings.”
“Caesar wasn’t there?”
“The Proconsul usually appears only at formal parades,” said a veteran. “Often as not, morning and evening parades are reviewed by a tribune.”
“You didn’t see him on the wall that night?”
“We rarely do,” Quadratus said. “Why work your way up to senior centurion if you’re just going to tramp around the wall all night like a common boot?”
“Spoken like a true career soldier,” I told him. “He was found dressed in a coarse, dark-colored tunic, like a slave’s. Did any of you ever see him dressed like that?”
They looked at one another with embarrassed expressions, an odd sight on such hard-bitten countenances.
“Well, sir,” a veteran began, “we all knew that Vinius and that German woman got up to some pretty strange games, but they kept it behind the tent flap. He never let anyone see him looking like anything but a centurion.”
“Dressed like that, in public,” Quadratus elaborated, “well, he’d’ve been a laughingstock, worse than when you showed up in that full-dress rig.” They all had a good chuckle at my expense. “He would’ve lost respect, and a centurion can’t afford that. A First Spear least of all.”
“He was killed a few hundred yards from where you were standing guard,” I said. “Did you hear anything?”
“Just the barbarians raising their usual racket,” Burrus said. “Just like that night you were guard officer. They could’ve slaughtered a dozen Romans out there and we probably wouldn’t have noticed. On top of that, we were all half dead from lack of sleep.”
“That’s one thing being shut up here is good for,” Quadratus commented. “Mud and all, last night was the first decent sleep we’ve had in weeks.”
I looked up. There was nothing above the tent except the cloud-scattered blue sky. “I’ll see if I can persuade Labienus to put an awning over this hole.”
“It’s not too bad as it is,” said one of the veterans. “Not like it was Libya.”
I left them with further assurances that I would extricate them from what looked like certain doom. The younger men seemed eager to believe me. The rest had long ago learned the folly of expecting anything except the worst.
Walking back toward the praetorium I saw that a sizable crowd had gathered in the camp forum. I sauntered over to see what was going on, passing as I did the scorched patch of ground occupied the previous day by the funeral pyre of Titus Vinius. In the middle of the crowd I saw Labienus seated in a curule chair on a low platform with a half-dozen lictors before him, leaning on their fasces. Spotting Carbo among the onlookers, I went to see what was going on.
“The legatus is holding court,” he informed me. “A bunch of Provincial dignitaries and lawyers came in this morning and they need judgments on some long-standing cases.”
“In a military camp in a war zone?” I said.
“Life goes on,” Carbo told me, “even in wartime.”
It is one of the many anomalies of our governmental system that, when we sent a propraetor or proconsul to the territories, we expect one man to be both magistrate and military commander. That is why he takes a legatus; so that he can concentrate on the more crucial function, leaving the other to his assistant. But sometimes, as now, the same man had to fill both roles. I was surprised to see well-dressed Gauls among the dignitaries, including some Druids who looked like the same ones I had seen earlier.
If nothing else, this seemed an opportunity to have the praetorium to myself. I took a shortcut over the wall by the speaking platform and found the big tent deserted. First I walked a complete circuit of the tent to make sure that there were no possible onlookers, then I went inside.
I lifted the heavy chest onto the table and opened it with my shiny new key. I took out all the deeds and made a list of them, with full particulars including purchase price. Then, with all the papers and tablets heaped to one side, I picked up the box. It was still far too heavy, even taking the thick wood and iron strapping into account. I carried it to the door opening and set it down with sunlight flooding into the bottom. It was perfectly smooth and without any projections. I tried shifting the heavy rivets that held the strapping, but none of them moved.
I turned it over and examined the bottom. The chest rested on four stubby legs about an inch high, with leather pads glued to their feet. These I twisted one by one. The third one gave slightly. I took the chest back to the table and grasped the leg. Lifting that corner slightly, I turned the leg again. There was a click before it had completed one quarter of a revolution. The bottom of the chest sprang up a bit. I managed to get my dagger point between the bottom and the side and levered it up. The wooden slab came up easily. I was looking at what seemed to be a second chest bottom, this one made of solid gold.