The River God's Vengeance(7)

Now Hermes leaned close, frowning with concentration. Finally he straightened. “I can’t hear much, and he’s got an accent. Sounded to me like he was saying, ‘Accursed, accursed,’ over and over again.”

A moment later the man’s eyelids sprang open, staring with round-eyed terror; then, the eyeballs rolled up to show whites alone.

“Is he dead?” Hermes asked.

“Unconscious again,” I told him. Then, to the slaves who stood by, “You heard what I want. Take him away.”

“Now,” I said to Hermes, “let’s have a look at this place.”

We went to one of the cellar walls where the support timbers were plainly visible, only a thin layer of plaster covering the wooden wall between them. I set my elbow against one and laid my forearm horizontally. The next beam was three or four inches past my fingertips.

“That’s a bit wider than an Egyptian cubit,” I remarked, “but not all that much. Somebody was stretching the code without violating it fiagrantly.”

Hermes took out his knife again and made a long scratch in one of the timbers. Immediately, sap began to fiow. “Green wood again,” he said. “But it’s strong enough. It hasn’t had time to rot or warp.”

“What’s underfoot?” I asked. Hermes stooped and came up with a handful of gravel. “I don’t know good gravel from bad,” I said, “but that is undisputably gravel. As soon as this wreckage has been cleared away, I want workmen to dig here and find out how deep the gravel extends. What’s all this stuff?”

The falling water level had revealed a litter of tools of all sorts: hammers, mallets, chisels, saws, boxes of nails, masons’ squares, and things the function of which I could not even guess.

“A lot of builders in this quarter,” Hermes said. “They often take their tools home with them after work.”

“Maybe this was Vulcan’s punishment,” I said, “for being such sloppy workmen.”

“I’ll bet it was these,” Hermes said, walking to one of the big horizontal beams that had once supported the ground fioor. “There must be rotten timber here someplace, some squirrel or woodpecker den that made a weak place.”

“I see your little time in the forests of Gaul made you an expert on arboreal matters.”

“Do you have a better idea?” He stooped once again and came up with a couple of pale cylinders about the length and thickness of a man’s thumb.

“What are those?”

He held them out to me on his palm. “Candle stubs. They must be from the ground-?oor apartment. Poor people don’t use them much.”

I took one and examined it. Its base was dark from whatever it had been stuck to when it was in use. “Rich people don’t use them much either,” I commented. Most people prefer lamps because, not only are candles expensive, but they drip. They do burn more brightly than lamps, though. For some reason candles are a traditional Saturnalia gift, so most people use them for only a week or two after that holiday.

“It’s getting dark.” I looked up and yelled, “Marcus Caninus!”

Moments later the man looked down into the cellar. “Aedile?”

“I want these big support timbers, these joists or whatever you call them, taken to the Temple of Ceres and placed in the courtyard as evidence. I want to examine them tomorrow in daylight.”

He made a sour face. “Whatever you say, Aedile.”

Hermes was poking at one of the timbers with his knife. “Look at this.” He scratched an X with his knife so I could see where to look in the fading light. Where the lines crossed was a hole in the wood big enough to stick my middle finger in without fear of splinters. “I’ll bet this timber is full of boreholes like this.”

“Somebody,” I said, “allowed all these citizens to die just to save a few wretched sesterces. Our laws have become entirely too lenient of late. I am going to search the law codes and find absolutely the most savage, primitive, vicious punishment ever laid down for such a man, and then I am going to see it applied to whoever is responsible for this atrocity.”





2


WHEN I ENTERED MY HOUSE, Julia began to make a comment on my dirty, disheveled appearance, caught the expression on my face, and thought better of it. She clapped her hands and sent a couple of slaves scurrying for my dinner. We had agreed that, for the year of my aedileship, we would give up any thought of regular meal hours.

“A bad day, I see,” she said, taking my hand and leading me to the triclinium. “Was there fighting?”

“No fighting this time,” I told her as I collapsed onto a couch. “An insula fell. Two hundred thirty-three dead at the final count. A lot of injured, and some of them won’t live.”