Oracle of the Dead(13)

“Personally, I don’t believe any of that,” Stabinilla said.

“Oh,” I asked. “Why is that?” I wondered if she shared my own doubts.

“The Aborigines were nothing but savages, like Gauls or Germans. There are none of those giant stone monuments here in Campania, or anywhere else in Italy that I ever heard. Whoever cut that tunnel had skill and good tools. I don’t think it could be older than the earliest Greek settlers. They had the skills and tools necessary. They knew how to survey and how to mine. No pack of primitives drove that tunnel straight down to an underground river.”

“I don’t care what you say,” Porcia put in. “Even a mathematician from Alexandria couldn’t find that river so far down. It was sorcery.” Then she went on in a lower voice, “But there’s some even stranger tales about that place.”

“Such as?” Julia asked.

“Well, there are some old tales that say the tunnel wasn’t driven down from the surface. Some think it was carved upward, from below.” There were gasps and mutters from around the table. People made gestures to avert evil. Talk of the underworld always makes people uneasy.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose it is relatively easy to find the surface from the river, compared to going the other way.”

“And the precise alignment on the solstice?” Julia asked.

“Well, underworld demons would know how to do something like that, wouldn’t they?” Porcia said. I couldn’t argue with that.

“What do you think, Gitiadas?” Julia asked.

“Here we only speculate,” the philosopher said. “We are presented with certain remarkable facts: a tunnel carved with great precision in alignment with a celestial event, an underground river with no known source or effluent, and the appearance of a corpse therein. From these things we can spin theories both natural and supernatural, but our speculations have little value, because we are not in possession of enough facts from which to draw informed conclusions.”

“You make uncommonly good sense, for a philosopher,” I commended, while Julia rolled her eyes, as she often did when I spoke with learned persons. “What we need is more basic facts. We need to know where that river comes from. We need to know who had it in for the priest and perhaps all the priests.”

“We also must dismiss those things that are facts but are nonetheless irrelevant to the case at hand. Too many facts can be as inimical to clear thought as too few.”

“Exactly!” I said. “Personally, I don’t care if that tunnel lines up with moonrise on the anniversary of Cannae. Nor does it matter if it was carved out by the Aborigines, the Greeks, or our host’s grandfather. The circumstances of this murder are both immediate and local, and we need to concentrate on these matters, not upon ancient tales.”

“Most astute,” Gitiadas commended. “And, one must ponder certain other matters concerning this killing.”

“Such as?” I queried.

“Well, there must be a motive for the slaying.”

“Mmmm. Here we are confronted with an embarrassment of riches. People are killed for a great many reasons. Speeding up an inheritance is a classic motive. Revenge is another and forms a whole subcategory in itself. An insult may be a call for vengeance, or a tit-for-tat killing as is common in blood feuds. I’ve known many killings to result from jealousy and more from political rivalry. Killing during a robbery is common, and manslaughter can be the result of an accident, as when a blow meant merely to chastise results in a broken neck or crushed skull. I could go on all evening on the subject of motive alone.”

“Then,” said Gitiadas, “you must eliminate all save those that may apply in this case. Another factor must be the means of murder, be it a weapon or an opportune circumstance.”

“People are killed with everything from swords to chamberpots,” I observed. “Daggers, garottes, spears, bricks, clubs—I even knew a woman who strangled her victims with her own hair. This is, I believe, the only case where the weapon was a sacred river.”

“If he was drowned,” Julia said. “That hasn’t been proven yet, nor whether it was murder at all, rather than an accident.”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I would be inclined to believe the death the result of an accident, if a rather bizarre one, save for one fact: the disappearance of the other priests. That makes it smell of foul play.”

“Has it occurred to anyone,” said the playwright, “to wonder why, of all times to carry out a murder, the perpetrator or perpetrators chose a day upon which the shrine was visited by a Roman praetor?”