Oracle of the Dead(59)
He thought about that for a while, taking an occasional sip of his own excellent wine. “Well, you know, a temple can fall on hard times, just like a business or a family. They don’t live on the largesse of the god. They need patronage or they can go under. It wouldn’t be the first time a temple got a bit underhanded to keep afloat. I’m told there’s temples in the east that run whores and call them priestesses, just charge for their services right out front like any brothel.”
“That’s true,” I said, pondering. The mention of patronage stirred up some thoughts. “What do you know about a family named Pedarius?”
“They live north of here. Don’t see much of them, but they’re patricians and they go all the way back to Aeneas, if you can believe them. Poor as hedgehogs, from what I hear, ashamed to show themselves around much, since they can’t flaunt the style a patrician’s supposed to have.”
“Then why,” I wondered aloud, “are they the patrons of the Temple of Apollo?”
“Couldn’t say,” said Belasus. “But if that family were my patrons, I’d steal, too.”
Dinner was a fine, convivial affair. The caterer knew his business and laid on fresh fish from the bay, roast kid, suckling pig, and something rather rare in those days—beefsteaks. We tend to think of cattle as work animals too tough to eat except for the youngest veal, but some local farmer had a pampered herd of cattle that he never set to work but instead let them laze about eating grass and a special preparation of grain soaked in wine so that they put on flesh at an astounding rate. The very idea of tender beef may seem to be a contradiction in terms, but this was as tender as the finest lamb and had a subtle flavor such as I had never encountered. The Gauls and Britons eat a lot of beef, of course, but they boil the tough joints until they are nearly tasteless and only the broth is worth anything.
Anyway, the evening was a resounding success. We all ate and drank far too much, which men must do once in a while, or else the world gets out of balance. We kept the world well on an even keel that night.
As I went to bed in one of those vacant rooms that night, I knew that something was not quite right. Then it occurred to me. It was something that I had mentioned to Julia. Nobody had tried to kill me. That seemed wrong. In my career it always seemed that, when you looked into the wrongdoing of evil people, sooner or later some of them tried to kill you. It was only reasonable.
Despite this anomaly, I went to sleep easily. Nevertheless, the next day, when someone really did try to kill me, it came almost as a relief.
9
THE NEXT MORNING, HEADS RINGING and hands a bit shaky, we rode from Pompeii. The weather was no longer as fine as it had been, a drizzle had set in, but a little rain in the face was just what we needed. By noon, we were almost recovered. Every five miles along the road there was a pleasant alcove where travelers could rest. Each one had stone tables, a fountain of clear water, and plane trees for shade.
When we judged that the sun was at zenith (it was not visible, but the rain had stopped), we paused at one of these. We dismounted, put the horses to graze, and unpacked the luncheon Belasus had thoughtfully provided from the leftovers of the previous night’s banquet. My men spread a cloth on one of the stone tables while I sat on the ground at the base of one of the trees. The morning’s drizzle had not been heavy enough to penetrate the plane tree’s dense foliage, and the ground was dry.
“Ready to join us, Praetor?” one of the men asked when all was ready.
“No, I like it here. Just bring me—” and at that moment I was struck by an arrow.
I’ve been wounded many times in my long and belligerent life. I’ve been speared, clobbered by slingstones, stabbed, cut, clubbed, bashed with fists, hit with stones and roof tiles, and even run over by a chariot, but this was the first time I had been struck by an arrow. I had never worried much about arrows. For one thing, Italians are, by and large, wretched archers. We specialize in close-in work with cold steel. The legions usually hire archers from places like Crete or the East where people favor the bow.
So here I was, in southern Campania, sitting beneath a plane tree, and out of nowhere an arrow flew through the remains of a morning mist and skewered me through the upper chest, just below my left collarbone. One second I was peacefully awaiting my lunch, mildly hungover but at peace with the world, the next I was looking down in amazement at the end of a feathered shaft protruding from my own all-too-mortal flesh. Sometimes life is just like that.
“Praetor!” shouted some of my men. They rushed over to me. All but Hermes, of course. He wasted no time in such foolishness. He had his sword out and was running toward the brush on the other side of the road, where the arrow had come from.