The River God's Vengeance(31)

“There’s been quite a few, what with the usual death toll, plus that insula collapse yesterday.”

“He was a big, black-bearded fellow, brought here from the Temple of Aesculapius on the Island.”

“Probably still warm, too,” Hermes added helpfully, his voice sounding odd because he was pinching his nostrils shut.

The overseer scratched his shaven, malformed head. “Vulpus usually takes deliveries in that district. His wagon was here just a little while ago. Over here, I think—” We followed him around the rim of the excavation to its northern quadrant. Inside the pit was an unbelievably ghastly mess of putrescence: bodies and pieces of bodies in many stages of bloat and decay. Some were as dessicated as Egyptian mummies, some looked like infiated pig’s bladders, while yet others, more recently expired, looked as if they could get up and walk out of the pit. The legs of dead horses thrust upward like ship’s masts in a harbor.

What made it all the more horrible, if anything could, was that the weight of the relatively whole corpses on top pressed down on the semiliquid mass of decayed fiesh mixed with lime below, forcing a disgusting, bubbling stew of putrefaction to the surface. The resulting mixture of slimy fiuid, recognizable human fragments and patches of fur all mixed together looked like the primal soup from which all life had been created.

The air was full of fine, powdered lime. This kept us continually coughing, which made it all but impossible to breathe through our mouths. The hideous stench was unavoidable.

“Is it always as bad as this?” I asked, just to be saying something. My wits were addled with disgust.

“This is just the usual. You get so you don’t notice it after a while. You should’ve been here right after Pompey’s triumphal Games. We had dead elephants in the pits, then.”

Hermes and I jumped involuntarily when the relative quiet of the ugly scene was disturbed. First came a faint rumble that seemed to come from beneath our feet. Then there was a roar as of a powerful, subterranean wind as, a hundred paces away, a fissure appeared in the ground and a plume of dirt and lime dust shot into the air.

“Demons are escaping from the underworld!” I cried, my nerves already unsteadied by the infernal scene.

“Just gas venting from an old pit,” the overseer assured me, as the pall of stench from the fissure beggared all that we had smelled thus far. “They’ll keep farting like that for years. Pay no mind.”

He called to a little group of pit slaves, and they talked for a while in the shortened, simplified Latin spoken by the lowest of Rome’s poor. It sounded like something dogs would use to communicate among themselves and is a foreign language to most of us. Four of them descended into the pit, and the overseer came back to us.

“They think they can reach the ones from Vulpus’s last load. They’ll drag your man up here. Of course,” he grinned crookedly, showing scummy teeth, “they’ll expect a little reward.”

“Hermes, a sestertius for each man and a denarius for our friend here.” Hermes dug into my rapidly shrinking purse, clucking at this extravagance. I didn’t think it an opulent reward. I wouldn’t have gone into that pit for the loot of Tigranocerta.

Within a few minutes the men returned, carrying a limp body, too recently dead to stiffen. Even in the dimming light I could tell that they had found the right man. They laid the burly body at our feet, and I crouched beside him. He was lightly dusted with lime, so that he resembled a statue carved from rather inferior white marble. Just below his breastbone was a small blotch.

“Well, what have we here?” I mused. I grabbed up a handful of dry grass, absently amazed that anything could grow on this blighted ground. With it I scoured away at the mark, unafraid of contamination. The death rites would have been performed when he died at the temple. At least, I hoped so. With the clotted blood and lime scrubbed away, a neat little incision, less than an inch wide, was revealed.

“Expertly done,” I said. “A dagger thrust beneath the breastbone, angled upward into the heart. Instant death and all bleeding internal.” I straightened up. “I’ve seen enough. Thank you, overseer.”

He shrugged. “Always glad to be of service to Senate and People.” Then, to his men, “Toss this stiff back in.”

“Can’t you do anything about this place?” Hermes asked, as we hastened back toward the Esquiline Gate.

“Fortunately for me,” I told him, “an aedile has no powers or responsibility outside the walls of Rome. At least there is one awful mess that doesn’t come under the purview of my office.”