“I was wondering about that,” Hermes said. “There’s enough air coming up from the hole there to keep us breathing here. Why did the priests suffocate so easily?”
“I can’t say I know much about the properties of air,” I admitted, “any more than I do about those of water. But it seems to me that the air rises from the water tunnel and is sucked up the passageway. Maybe when the trap is shut, the flow of air stops.” Something struck me.
“That’s how Eugaeon ended up in the water! He was leaning down into the hole to get what air was left, lost consciousness, and fell in to resurface so fortuitously in front of us!”
“Why not the others?” Hermes asked.
“He was the ranking man and the others let him have the water hole. Or maybe they were all up the shaft, pounding their fists against the stone. They probably suffocated even faster up there.”
I had the men lower torches into the well and stuck my head down there, like the late Eugaeon. What I could see looked like natural tunnel. I was tempted to have the men lower me into it, but somehow I had had enough adventuring in water for that day. I came back up.
“I wonder how we can measure the distance to the other chamber?” I mused. I sat down and tried to think like an engineer.
“We could tie something that floats to a piece of rope,” Hermes suggested. “Tie a knot every cubit. Toss it in, and when it comes out the other side, count the cubits.”
I nodded. “That makes sense. How would you know when it came out the other side?”
He thought a while longer, as did I. “Have a man in the other chamber. As soon as it comes out, he grabs it and gives a tug. Then you know not to pay out any more line.”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll make an engineer yet. Tomorrow I want you to do exactly that.”
“What will you be doing?” he asked.
“Sleeping, I hope.”
8
JULIA WAS NOT HAPPY WITH MY FORAY into the underworld, but she was not as angry as I had feared.
“It was not wise to flout the customs of the Oracle and treat an ancient holy site like some Subura tenement. Iola is right to be furious and she will definitely have you charged with sacrilege when you step down from office.” Of course I was immune from prosecution while I held office, but I was everybody’s fair game as soon as I should step down.
“Now, Julia, don’t we already know that this shrine is fraudulent? It looks like they’ve been using it for years to fleece the public, murdering some of them.”
“We don’t know anything. We have strong reason to suspect that at least some of the staff of the temple, at some time or other, have been using the Oracle for profit, and that murder may be involved. That doesn’t make the site itself any less holy.”
“Well, Hecate’s a pretty poor goddess if she allows such goingson in her own precincts. She’s supposed to be fearsome. Why doesn’t she sic her black bitches on the miscreants? They’re the ones committing sacrilege, not I.”
Despite my clearly sarcastic tone, Julia seemed to give this some serious thought. “The gods are not always swift to punish. They are immortal, time means little to them. They are content to bide their time and devise a fitting punishment. You recall a few years ago when Crassus took advantage of his position as one of the quinqidecemviri and falsified a prophecy in the Sibylline Books? Nothing happened to him at the time, but after he went to Syria, he met a catastrophe such as has befallen few Romans.”
“That’s pretty rough on the part of the gods,” I said, “killing tens of thousands of Roman legionaries, plus thousands more foreign auxilia, just to punish one foolish old man.”
“Immortality gives the gods a strange sense of proportion. Nevertheless, they won’t be mocked or taken advantage of.”
“Hecate is from Thrace. Do you think she even knows what is going on in Italy?”
“Honestly, Decius, you have the strangest ideas of what the gods are like, as if they were just oversized mortals with long lives and somewhat augmented powers. It’s a concept suitable for primitives and ignorant peasants, not for an educated Roman of the ruling class.”
“We can’t all be philosophers,” I said. My mind was not really on our conversation. I had a great many thoughts spinning around, looking for something to give direction to all I had learned. Murders and tunnels and ventilation slots in the ceiling and miniature arrows and rivalries going back centuries and a great general preparing for civil war and a subterranean river with a vicious current and a score of other things that made no sense but I was sure would, if I could just fit them together in the proper order, perhaps together with a few other missing pieces.