“Good thing.” I drained my wine cup, feeling better now that food was inside me. “We don’t have room for all that here.”
“No.” Cassia glanced around our small apartment. “A cabinet to hold scrolls would be a wonderful thing to have. But very expensive.”
Any furniture beyond a simple stool or bench was a luxury. We’d been lucky the table had already been in the apartment when we arrived.
I abruptly wanted to rush to a carpenter and have him build her a roomful of cabinets like the one Livius had in his tablinum. And then find a grand villa to house them all in.
A nice dream. I was only an assistant on a building site, and I hadn’t even been paid for that yet. We currently existed on the coins earned from my last bodyguard job and what Aemil had paid me to find his missing gladiators. Villas and furniture were beyond us for now.
But I would not trade what I had. Lying quietly in the dawn’s light, rising when I chose, and doing the sort of work I liked, was more luxury to me than all the gilded furniture and intricate mosaics that filled the house of Sextus Livius.
The morning’s rain had ended, and a soft blue April sky arched over the afternoon. Crops would already be sprouting in warmer areas of Rome. In three days would be the festival of Cerealia—when Nero expected us to have the answers to all this. There would be a few gladiatorial games in honor of Ceres, though mostly we’d have horse races and chariot races in the Circus Maximus, along with plenty of feasting.
We passed the Circus, quiet this afternoon, on the way to the Aventine. When Cerealia began, this valley would team with people pressing to see the festivities, the vendors avidly selling food and trinkets along the way. A roar would fill the air whenever a favorite chariot team won or went down in a spectacular crash.
Water splashed quietly in the fountain near Marcianus’s home, spilling from the mouths of three stone fish. We turned here and made our way to his shop, its shutters open to admit passersby.
Marcia, in a plain ankle-length tunic, her hair tamed into a bun, stood just inside the doorway, wrapping a splint around a young boy’s finger. The lad regarded the splint with wonder, while his mother next to him watched in worry.
“If you keep this on for the next few weeks, Nonus Marcianus says it will heal straight,” Marcia told them.
Marcia’s slender hands worked the ties of the splint with dexterity. I hadn’t realized Marcianus had her tending to patients now, but her calm efficiency reassured the boy.
Once Marcia finished, the boy hopped up from the stool where he’d sat, still gazing at his finger. His mother took him by the arm and propelled him away, sidestepping me in some alarm.
“Is Marcianus in?” I asked Marcia as she rolled up the extra leather ties for the splint and laid them back into a wooden box.
She did not look up from her task. “He is in his workshop with his skeleton.” Marcia’s tone held a mixture of exasperation and amusement.
I moved past her into the front room of the shop. Shelves and a table took up most of the space, both holding a multitude of scrolls, bronze instruments that I didn’t want to know the purpose for, and bottles of oils and ointments.
Cassia, after greeting Marcia cordially, followed in my wake. I stepped through a door in the rear of the shop to a small corridor that led to a chamber tucked behind the main house.
It was here that Marcianus cut up any corpses he was brought and examined them for whatever he hoped to find. Today he had the bones of the young man we’d found laid out on a long wooden table.
Marcianus had put them together as they would be in life, the man’s arms at his sides and legs stretched out, as though he relaxed there in Marcianus’s chamber. The feet had fallen apart but had been laid out flat with all the bones in a neat order.
The skeleton had been washed, removing all traces of dirt, though the bones were yellow-brown from their burial. Here and there, dried skin or muscle clung to the joints. I noted that the young man’s teeth had been straight and whole, not yet worn down from millstone grit that never quite left the bread.
I, who’d watched men die and be dragged from the arena, sometimes having struck the fatal blow myself, couldn’t explain the strange coldness that crept over me as I regarded the corpse, bare of his flesh. Maybe because a dead man was still a man, just not breathing, while all appearance of life had been stripped from the one on the table.
“Good afternoon, Leonidas. Cassia.” Marcianus straightened from where he’d been peering at the man’s left hip. “Come to visit my friend?”
“To see if you’d discovered anything useful from him,” I said, trying to push my qualms aside.
Cassia approached the skeleton with interest. “Was he deliberately killed, as you suspected?” she asked Marcianus.
“Indeed, he was. See here?”
Marcianus turned the skull to one side, pointing out a ragged hole at the base. Cassia leaned eagerly to look.
“How can you tell it was not an accident?” she asked. “He might have fallen and struck his head.”
“He might have,” Marcianus admitted. “But whatever rock or piece of masonry he landed on would have had to have been very thin, round, and made of metal. See how the hole has curved inward, the fragments pushed in very regularly? Plus, I found flecks of bronze in the wound.”
“Murdered, then,” I said grimly.
“Presumably.” Marcianus, as always, spoke with a cheeriness out of place in a room of death. “Whether planned or in a fight gone out of control I could not say. Our young man was a slave or perhaps a freedman. A plebeian, in any case, whether free or not.”
