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“Something’s dead,” Hermes persisted. “Maybe it’s a dead snake.”
“We can always hope.” My eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom. I moved my feet very carefully. Even a torpid and inoffensive snake will whip around and bite if something touches it unexpectedly. The shrine was little more than a long, narrow room. At its far end was a statue of a benevolentlooking woman, her shoulders draped with snakes, more snakes wound about her feet. The statue was slightly smaller than life size. Smaller than life size for a mortal woman, anyway. You never know about goddesses.
“The smell is coming from there,” Hermes said, pointing toward a gaping square opening in the floor before the statue. With great trepidation, I made my way to the edge of this ominous aperture. It was perhaps ten feet on a side, its rim slightly raised. The gloom made its bottom all but totally obscure. I could make out some sort of shapeless mass on its floor, five or six feet down.
“Hermes,” I said, “go fetch torches. Be careful. That snake could be anywhere.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Hermes said with great sincerity. He edged his way back to the doorway, shuffling his feet as if he could shoo the swamp adder away. Once he was at the door, I heard the patter of his sandals as he ran to find us some sort of illumination.
“What’s down there?” Julia said.
“We’re about to find out. I didn’t want you to come in. That snake could be anywhere.”
“The priest said there was a ramp leading down to the sacred serpent’s crypt,” she pointed out. “I don’t see any such ramp here. The sides look quite sheer.”
“What has that to do with anything?” I said, exasperated. “I didn’t want you to come in! Is that too much to ask?”
“Yes, it is,” she said. Well, she was a Caesar.
Hermes returned with commendable alacrity, accompanied by a pair of linkboys. These juvenile torchbearers usually slept through the day in order to spend their nights illuminating the way of citizens through Rome’s benighted streets. Hermes didn’t caution them to watch out for the snake. Any snake biting a linkboy wasn’t biting him, I suppose.
“This is better,” Julia said. With a bit of light, the little shrine was much more cheerful. The walls were covered with old, smoke-smudged frescoes of scenes from, I presumed, the myths of Angitia and her fellow Marsian deities. Needless to say, snakes featured prominently.
I gestured to the boys. “Come over here. Hold your torches over this pit and be very, very careful.”
Mystified, they did as I ordered. When their light flooded the pit one of the boys gasped and would have dropped his torch had I not grasped his hand. “Steady. It’s just a dead man. You’ve seen plenty of those.”
“Not like that one!” said the other boy, a bit older. Roman street boys were a hard lot to shock, but I was forced to acknowledge that this was a bit more than the usual alley corpse.
Julia turned away and gagged, and she was as unflappable as the rest of her family. When she had her composure back, she asked, “Is that the priest who came to you about the snake?”
“The yellow toga and headband are the same,” I said. “Otherwise it’s hard to tell.”
“I think of saffron as more of an orange than a yellow,” she replied, now fully in control of herself.
The dead man who lay on the carpet of cedar bark and shavings was bloated and almost purple. His skin was covered with giant blisters like fistsized, semitransparent bubbles. Yet the unmistakable sce
nt of death was rather faint.
“Hasn’t been dead long, though he’s looking rather poorly,” I remarked.
“Should I fetch Asklepiodes?” Hermes asked, understandably eager to be away.
“I think not,” I said. “His specialty is wounds and death caused by weapons. Poisons and venoms are not in his realm of expertise.”
“Poplicola, then?” he said, hopefully.
“He’d just try to sell Julia another snake. Let’s review what we have here. A priest of Angitia came from the Marsian country to ask me to find his snake. Today, in the shrine of Angitia, we find a priest of Angitia, possibly the same man, dead from what looks like the bite of a serpent that fully lives up to its reputation.” I pondered a moment. “Correct that: We have a corpse in the clothing of a priest of Angitia. It could be almost anybody.”
“You’re very tiresome when you get this way, dear,” Julia reminded me.
“We are in a holy shrine,” I said, “dealing with a goddess and sacred snakes. This is a religious matter. Hermes, go find Caesar and ask him if he would be so good as to come here on a matter of some urgency. Tell him I require his expertise as pontifex maximus. He is probably in the Domus Publica.”
“Do you think Caesar will be able to help?” Julia said when Hermes had dashed off.
“Probably not, but I want him to see this. It’s not every day we see a murder as unique as this one in Rome.”
“Murder? Surely this was an accident.”
