The River God's Vengeance(4)

“And you received your contract from?”

“The Censor Valerius, sir.” This was Marcus Valerius Messala Niger, the consul of some seven years previous and still censor the year before I took this burdensome office.

I looked around for Hermes, my personal slave, who carried all my writing materials and was supposed to be standing by to take notes. As usual, he was nowhere to be seen. I began to stalk around the site, plotting his punishment.

Eventually I found him standing by one of the rubble carts, this one piled with wooden beams. He was amusing himself with an ancient Roman pastime, carving his name on the timbers. Every wall, monument, and tree in Rome bear these blessings of widespread literacy. The graffito is the only art form we did not steal from the Greeks or the Etruscans.

“Improving your skills as a scribe, Hermes?” I asked.

He refolded his knife, stuck it beneath his tunic belt, and affected not to notice my ominous tone. “This is fresh wood,” he said, tapping the newly carved letters of his name. I had to admit he had carved the letters with some precision. Beads of sap oozed from the incised lines.

“Is that so? I was wondering how a building constructed of new materials could fall, but I was learning that there are many foul little secrets to the builders’ trade.”

“You aren’t supposed to build with wood this fresh,” he went on.

“Really?” In truth, the only experience I had with construction was the army sort: putting up bridges and siege works. For that you used whatever timber was readily available, usually cutting it on the spot.

“It’s supposed to age and dry out. Wood this new will warp and rot quickly, not to mention all that sap will make it burn hot as a potter’s kiln.”

“You don’t say. Someone is going to have all sorts of fun prosecuting these people.” I wasn’t really that dense, just preoccupied. My mind was still reeling from the implications of Metellus Scipio’s daughter marrying Pompey. If there should come a break between Caesar and Pompey, the family could demand that I divorce Julia. What would I do then? I noticed that Hermes had been carving his name all over the timbers heaped on the cart.

“I knew it was a mistake giving you that knife.” It had been a Saturnalia gift a couple of years before, a fine Gallic blade cunningly jointed to fold back into its handle. The blade was no longer than the width of a man’s palm, so I couldn’t be accused of arming a slave. “I suppose it gives you some satisfaction knowing that your name is destined to be immortalized at the bottom of a landfill.”

He smiled. “I have to practice somewhere. You never give me enough time.”

“You’ve never done an honest day’s work in your life, imp.” Hermes was a handsome, strapping young man at this time, in his early twenties, brown and fit from his time campaigning with me in Gaul and exercising in the ludus almost every day in Rome. Always an eager student of arms, this enthusiasm for writing was new. He had a lively, quick intelligence, which nicely complemented his many criminal proclivities. An uncle gave him to me as a present several years previously, when I set up my own household. He was Roman-born, despite his Greek slave-name.

“More bodies here!” shouted the slave.

“They’re getting down to the rich people’s quarters,” Hermes noted.

“Then let’s see who we have.” I walked with him over to the rubble, which was beginning to take on a pitlike appearance as the debris of the roof and upper stories were carried away. The ground fioor had collapsed into the basement. As in most such houses only the ground fioor had water piped in. This had been shut off soon after the building fell, but enough had fiowed in to leave a foot or two in the basement and already bits of rubble could be seen sloshing around in it.

The slaves were handing up bodies to workers above. Most, of course, would be slaves. A rich man’s household would contain far more slaves than family members. The corpses were mostly naked or nearly so, since the disaster had occurred when everyone was asleep. It can be difficult to distinguish between a slave and a poor freeman when both are naked, but there is seldom much problem in telling the servile and the wealthy apart, with or without clothes.

Hermes paused by a row of bodies that had the look of household slaves, lacking both the marks of hard labor and the jewelry of the wealthy.

“Whoever the master was, he wasn’t loved,” Hermes observed.

“I noticed.” Many of the slaves had the collars of runaways riveted around their necks. I paused by a dead girl of no more than sixteen. Covered by plaster dust though she was, it was plain she had been extraordinarily pretty. She wore one of the neck rings. On an impulse, I beckoned to a pair of the public slaves. “Turn this one over.”