Departures (7 page)

Eprius’ face froze. He refilled the purse and threw it at Lucius’ feet. “You insult me, sir. I must bid you a good evening.” He held out his hand for the play.

Reluctantly, Lucius began to give it back to him, but Marcus
reached out and held him back. His smile and his heavily accented voice were deliberately offensive. “I think we keep this,” he said.

“What? Get out, you rogues, you lashworthy rascals!” Despite graying hair and growing paunch, Eprius was still fairly quick on his feet. His walking stick thudded down on Marcus’ shoulder. The
Aleadai
fell to the floor. “Get out, robbers, get out!” Eprius shouted.

“Bastard!” Marcus snarled. He ducked the next swing of the stick. Stars exploded inside Eprius’ head as a solid right sent him spinning back over his couch to the floor. Somehow he held on to his stick. Too angry to fear facing two younger men, he surged forward, crying “Thieves! Thieves!” at the top of his lungs.

Marcus’ hand snaked under his tunic. Eprius saw it emerge with a curiously shaped metal object. One of Marcus’ fingers twitched on it, and Eprius heard the beginning of a barking roar. Something sledged him in the forehead, and he never saw or heard anything again.

Lou Muller, who in Vesunna called himself Lucius the book dealer, stared in horror at the crumpled corpse that had been Clodius Eprius. The gun shot still seemed to echo in the room. “Jesus H. Christ, Mark!” he said, and he was not speaking Latin at all. “The patrol—”

“Lou, you can take the patrol and stuff it right on up—” Mark Alvarez tucked away the pistol and rubbed his shoulder. “The old son of a bitch damn near broke my collarbone. What was I supposed to do, let him yell until all the neighbors came? Speaking of which—” He scooped up the
Aleadai
and trotted into the street. His partner followed, still expostulating.

“Oh, shut up and listen to me, will you, please?” Alvarez growled. “Why do we make a good team, anyway? It’s not just because you’re the fellow who knows his way around the second-century empire and I’m the one with the pull to get a timer. I’ve got the brains to get you out of trouble when you screw up, which you did. For one thing, even I know—you’ve told me often enough—Stobaeus isn’t going to be born for a couple of hundred years yet. For another, and worse, that geezer was never going to sell us the play after you got his back up.”

“But I offered him seventy-five aurei!”

“That didn’t impress him, now did it? And it doesn’t impress me, either. What’re seventy-five aurei to us? Thirty credits for
the gold (always thanking God for fusion-powered transmutation), the same for some authentic molds, and voilà! Aurei! Whereas we can—and we will—get easily fifty thousand credits for a lost play of Euripides.’ ”

“Sophokles,” Muller corrected absently.

“Whatever. And as for the Time Patrol, why are we here in the boondocks instead of at the library of Alexandria? Why do we insist on so much privacy when we make our deals? Just so they won’t run across us. And they won’t. Erasing this fellow won’t leave any clues downtime. We don’t change anyone’s ancestry, because his wife’s been dead for years. We
did
check him out, you know.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Did anyone see us leave?”

“I don’t think so. But my God, Mark, a bullet—”

“What about it? Nobody here will ever figure out how he died. The local yokels’ll call it the wrath of the gods or something, and then they’ll forget it. All we have to do is sit tight for three weeks until the timer recharges, and then it’s back to 2059 and lots of lovely money.”

“I suppose so,” Muller agreed slowly. “I kind of liked old Eprius, though.”

“Liked him? Lou, he was just a stupid savage, like all the other stupid savages here and now. Look around. Is there anything here but filth and disease and superstition? You couldn’t pay me to time if it weren’t for xanthomycin. Come on, let’s get back to the inn. Like the fellow said, my man, the play’s the thing, and we’ve got it.”

“What about the gold?”

“You want to go back and get it? Relax; it’ll confuse the issue, anyway.” They walked on in silence until they came to the inn. “What a dump,” Alvarez sighed. “Oh, well, at least it has a bed, and I need sleep right now. We’ve had a busy night.”

The sound of a fist crashing against his door hauled Gaius Tero from the depths of slumber. Stifling a curse, he climbed out of bed and threw on a mantle. His wife stirred and muttered drowsily. “It sounds like business, Calvina,” he said. “Go back to sleep.” A forlorn hope indeed, with his door being battered down. “I’m coming, I’m coming!” he shouted, and the pounding stopped. As tesserarius of Vesunna’s seven-man detachment of vigiles, he wondered what had gone wrong now. Had someone knocked over Porcius’ wine shop again, or had Herennius
Fundanus’ firetrap of a stable finally decided to go up in smoke? Either way, the responsibility fell on him, for the vigiles were constabulary and fire brigade both.

He threw open the door. Just as he had expected, there stood the panting figure of Larcius Afer, who had the watch that night. “Well, what is it?” Tero demanded, adding hopefully, “I don’t smell smoke.” The siphon, which was the city’s chief fire-fighting implement, was a pain in the fundament to deploy and use.

“No, sir,” Afer agreed. He paused to wipe sweat from his face. The night was warm, and he had plainly run some distance. Tero, who was not the most patient of men, glared at him until he continued. “Clodius Eprius has been killed.”

“What do you mean, killed? Has he been murdered?”

“Killed, sir,” Afer repeated stolidly. “Kleandros is with the body now. He’ll be able to tell you more than I can, I’m sure.”

“Obviously,” Tero snapped. Still, he was glad the Greek doctor would be there. They were old friends, though they argued constantly.

The tesserarius ducked back into his house for sandals, then accompanied his fellow vigil to the dead man’s home. It was a couple of hours before dawn, and a waning crescent moon shed a wan light over the town. Nevertheless, it was dark enough to make Tero glad his companion carried a torch.

Eprius lived (or rather, had lived) at the opposite end of town from Tero’s home. He and Afer tramped through Vesunna’s central forum, silent save for the sound of their footsteps. At its very heart was the temple dedicated to the city’s tutelary gods. Its huge circular cella made it currently the biggest structure in Vesunna, but the amphitheater being built not far away promised to dwarf it and everything else in the town.

Tero wondered idly what the old Petrocorii, the Celtic tribe that had founded Vesunna, would have thought of such an incredibly huge edifice. Magic, without a doubt: Anything was magical to someone who did not know how to do it.

His thoughts turned back to Eprius. Why would anyone want to kill the old fool? Tero knew him fairly well, and also knew he had not a single enemy in town. Had some footpad done away with him? Tero tried to pump Larcius Afer, but Afer shook his head, saying, “You’ll have to see for yourself.” With a small shock, the tesserarius realized his subordinate was frightened. That was very strange. Before settling in Vesunna, the two of them had served together on the Rhine, and Tero knew full well
that the skirmishes there had thoroughly inured Afer to the sight of gore.

It seemed as if most of Eprius’ neighbors were gathered outside his front door. Well, Tero thought, that’s scarcely surprising. They all started talking at once when they saw him, raining questions down on his unprepared head. “I don’t know a damned thing yet,” he said, pushing his way through the crowd. “If you’ll let me by, maybe I’ll find out something.”

Kleandros met him at the entrance. Tero liked the sharp-tongued physician. They had worked together before, and once or twice a month they would meet for wine, a friendly game of draughts, and much good talk. Still, the doctor’s elegant slimness always made the squarely built Tero feel like a poorly trained dancing bear. Just by standing before him, Kleandros made him suddenly and acutely aware of his own uncombed hair, the patches and stains on his cloak, and the ragged bit of leather hanging from one sandal. As usual, he disguised his feelings with raillery. “Hello, quack,” he said. “What do you have for me today?”

An opening like that would normally make Kleandros sputter and fume, but today he did not rise to the bait. Under the curling black ringlets he combed low on his forehead, his face was grim as he answered, “Hello, Tero. I’m glad to see you. You’d best come look for yourself.” He was speaking Greek instead of Latin, something he did only when very upset. Tero began to worry in earnest.

The physician led him down the dark entry hall to the dining room. Someone had refilled and lit all the lamps there; the flames cast multiple dancing shadows. Three couches had been grouped together in one corner of the room. One was overturned, and the wall behind it bore a sinister stain. The vigil looked a question at Kleandros, who nodded. “Poor Eprius is behind the couch,” Kleandros said. “Tell me what you make of him.”

“Why me? You’re the doctor,” Tero said, but he walked around the couch.

Both on the Rhine and as a vigil in Vesunna, Gaius Tero had seen the results of more violent deaths than he liked to remember. Yet the corpse in this quiet room shook him in a way none of the others, however grisly, ever had. He was in the presence of the unknown, and little fingers of ice crawled up his back as he viewed its handiwork.

Eprius’ body lay on its right side; its right hand still clutched a stick. Tero barely noticed, for his gaze was fixed in horrified
fascination at the ruin that had been its head. There was a neat hole about the width of Tero’s little finger over the left eye. A small stream of blood ran down over Eprius’ face to join the pool beneath his head. Already flies were beginning to buzz about it.

Bad as that was, it was far from the worst. Whatever had drilled through Eprius’ forehead had smashed out through the back of his head, tearing his skull open from the inside out. Much of the left rear quadrant of his head was a sickening soup of brain, pulverized bone, scalp, and hair. It was that which had stained the wall; blood cemented the gory fragments to the plaster.

The hobnails of Larcius Afer’s sandals clicked on mosaic tiles as he came up. Dread was on his face; his fingers writhed in a sign to avert evil. “It was Jupiter’s thunderbolt slew him,” Afer said. “Two or three of the neighbors heard him cry out, and then the terrible roar of the thunderbolt itself—and not a cloud in the sky. His man Titus had the evening free, and when he got home, he found this.”

Tero had never been one to fear the gods unduly, but he felt the little hairs on the back of his neck trying to rise as he listened to Afer. Surely nothing in his experience could have produced the ghastly wound he saw. To have Kleandros throw back his head and laugh was unbelievable. Tero wondered if the doctor had taken leave of his senses, and Afer stared at him indignantly.

“How many men has either of you known to be killed by the gods?” Kleandros demanded. “I’ve been a doctor for twenty years now, and I’ve never seen one yet.”

“There’s always a first time,” Afer said.

“I suppose so,” Kleandros conceded. “But Clodius Eprius? Good heavens, man, use your head for something more than a place to hang your hair. The worst thing Clodius Eprius ever did in his whole life was to drink so much wine that a couple of his friends had to carry him home. If the gods started killing everybody who did that, why, there wouldn’t be five men left alive in the empire by this time tomorrow. No, I’m afraid that if the gods left it to Nero to kill himself and soldiers to do away with Caligula, they wouldn’t have much interest in Clodius Eprius.”

Afer was still far from convinced. “What did kill him, then?” he demanded.

“I haven’t the slightest idea right now, but I intend to try to find out instead of moaning about Jupiter.”

The physician’s healthy skepticism gave Tero the heartening
he needed to shake off his superstitious fear and begin thinking like a vigil once more. He quizzed Eprius’ neighbors, but learned nothing Afer had not already told him. There had been shouts and then a crash, but nobody had seen anyone fleeing Eprius’ home. Titus proved even less informative than the neighbors. He was grief-stricken and more than a little hung over. When Eprius had given him the night off, he had not questioned his master, but headed straight for the wine and girls of Aspasia’s lupanar, where he had roistered the night away. When he came back and found Eprius’ body, he rushed out to get Kleandros, and that was all he knew. Tero left him sitting with his head in his hands and went back to the dining room.

“Learn anything?” Kleandros asked.

“Nothing. Maybe Jupiter did kill him.”

Kleandros’ one-word reply was rude in the extreme. Tero managed an answering grin, but it was strained. His eyes kept going back to the blood-spattered wall. In the middle of the spatters was a ragged hole. “What’s this?” he said.

“How should I know?” Kleandros said. “Maybe Eprius used to keep a tapestry nailed there and was clumsy taking it down.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve been here more than once, and I don’t remember any wall hangings.” Tero took a knife from his belt and chipped away at the plaster, enlarging the hole. At its bottom was a little button of metal. No, not a button, a flower, for as Tero dug it out he saw that little petals of lead had peeled back from a brass base. Never in all his years had he seen anything like it. He tossed it up and down, up and down, whistling tunelessly.

“Give me that!” Kleandros said, grabbing it out of the air. He examined it curiously. “What is it, anyway?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I couldn’t begin to, any more than I could begin to tell you what killed Eprius.”

Something almost clicked in Tero’s mind, but the thought would not come clear. “Say that again!” he demanded.

Kleandros repeated.

He had it. “Look,” he said, “where did we find this strange thing?”

“Is this your day to do Sokrates? Very well, best one, I’ll play along. We found this strange thing in a hole in the wall.”

“And what was all around the hole in the wall?”