Chapter 15
“Don’t touch it,” I commanded.
Vibius stared at me. “Do you think any of us would? Gallus is right—this means all kinds of misfortune.”
The most misfortune had been suffered by whoever lay in the ground before us, but I did not state this. “I want to fetch Marcianus,” I said. “A medicus,” I added to their blank faces.
“He’s beyond the skills of a medicus,” the foreman tried to joke, but his face was wan, his mouth a shaky line.
“I agree,” Cassia said. “He must be sent for, at once. He lives nearby, on the Aventine.”
She looked directly at Vibius, who gaped at her then turned to me. “Where can I find him?”
I explained where he lived, and Vibius, with another nod, started off.
Gallus fanned his face with the scroll. “We’ll need a spell as well.” He took several long breaths, trying to calm himself. “To reverse the curse. Though I’ll have to pay someone to perform it.” An expense he’d not accounted for, his tone said.
Vibius, at the edge of the field, turned back at Gallus’s words. “My wife is good at curses. Lifting them, I mean. She has the touch.” He swung away once more and trotted off along the river, heading for the Aventine Hill.
The foreman paced away from the hole, clearly unnerved. His workers took the opportunity to rest, seating themselves on the ground. Cassia, I could see, wanted to linger and study the corpse, but she led Gallus back to the boulder and fetched his wine flask for him.
Vibius returned quickly, the long-legged figure of Marcianus behind him. Marcianus must have been home, and readily rushed to see what I’d found. He’d come alone, without his assistant, Marcia, of whom he’d grown very protective.
As they came across the field, I noted that Vibius and Marcianus resembled each other. Tall and thin with long limbs, they each looked as though they ate very little. Deceptive—I’d watched Marcianus down much in one sitting.
Marcianus put his hands on his lanky hips, his knee-length tunic splotched with his last patient’s blood. He gazed down into the hole in fascination. “Well, Leonidas, what have you got for me this time?”
Vibius, the foreman, and the workers eyed him in curiosity, still not understanding why I’d wanted a medicus.
Nonus Marcianus was not just any medicus. He was a genius. I wagered he could tell us everything about this body, possibly even where the man had grown up and what he’d done for a living.
If it was a man. The bones looked like bones to me. While being a gladiator had acquainted me with the newly dead, I’d no experience with one who’d lain a long time under the earth.
Marcianus took up a spade and started to widen the hole. I helped him, and together we cleared a space big enough for him to slide down beside the body.
“Poor fellow,” Marcianus said as he bent over the bones. “I can’t be certain at the moment, but he might’ve had his head bashed in. At the base of his skull.” He touched his neck in the same place.
“He?” I asked.
“Yes, this was a man, fairly young, but not a youth. I’d say in his twentieth year or so. Met his end here, and the perpetrator covered him up.”
Vibius listened in astonishment. “How do you know all that?”
“For age—length of the bones and lack of wear,” Marcianus answered, in his usual lighthearted fashion. “Shape of the entire body for the gender. As he’s crumpled in a heap, not laid out, he died where he dropped—wasn’t dragged here from somewhere else. I’d say he’s been here about ten years. Given he was under the stones, meaning they were piled on top of him and the building built, and given how much of him has decayed away, that is my guess.”
Vibius appeared to be impressed. Cassia, sitting next to the unhappy Gallus, had a tablet open, marking it rapidly with her stylus.
“No wonder this site was abandoned,” Gallus said, his voice weak as it drifted to us. “His ghost likely haunted the building, whatever it was.”
“This place?” Marcianus waved at the grounds. “Warehouse, if I remember aright. Not built well, fell down after a few years. Lay in a heap of rubble for a time before it was cleared and the land sold. I’ve walked up and down this path for years,” he said as the others stared at him. “For exercise.”
“The site passed from hand to hand,” Gallus said. “I understand why, now.”
I knew that this land had been purchased by a proconsul, which had been inherited by his widow, then bought from her by Sextus Livius, who often speculated in land and new buildings. How long the proconsul had owned it before that, I did not know.
“What do we do?” I asked Marcianus.
“Do?” the foreman snapped. “We don’t need to do anything. The Tiber is right there.” He gestured with his spade to the river flowing not fifty feet from this spot.
