An hour passed, grains trickling through the glass. Maxian suddenly shuddered and stepped back from the first body. Sweat trickled down his face and he looked exhausted. The dead man stepped quickly to his side and helped him to a chair next to the wall. Gaius Julius squatted, peering at his young master. The lad’s eyes were flickering, unfocused. His right hand was clenched in a death grip. Gaius Julius stood and brought him back some wine. Maxian shied away from the cup, but the dead man gripped the Prince’s head in his free hand and forced him to drink. After the first taste, the young man took the cup in his own hands and drank deeply.
“How do you feel?” Gaius held Maxian’s head up in his hands, staring at his eyes.
“Exhausted. I may have to wait until tomorrow to examine the other body.”
“Can Abdmachus do it?”
The Prince shook his head, too weary for words. Gaius Julius lifted the Prince’s clenched hand up, so that the boy could see it. Maxian had trouble focusing, but when he did, he frowned. “Odd. Why is my hand doing that?”
Gaius Julius pried the fingers back and revealed a small, irregular clump of pale-gray metal in the Prince’s palm. He plucked it out and rolled it in his fingers. An eyebrow rose. “It looks and feels like a slinger’s bullet. Was it in the body? I saw no wound like this would have made-had he carried it for a long time?”
Maxian, still terribly weary, shook his head no. Then his head rolled back against the wall and he began snoring. Gaius Julius sighed and put the odd ball of metal on the e’nd of the table. This done, he carefully lifted up the Prince and, straining with the effort, carried the boy up the stairs to the main floor of the house.
Anastasia de’Orelio, Duchess of Parma, looked up in irritation at the sound of rapping on the door to her private study. Sighing at the latest interruption, she put down the letter she was reading and composed her hair.
“Enter,” she said, her voice tired and on the edge of open irritation. She sighed again inwardly when Krista entered the chamber and knelt by the side of the desk. Perhaps it had been a mistake to begin using the girl in the field. She was quick and usually circumspect, it was true, and rarely drew attention to herself-she was a slave, after all.
“Yes, my dear, what is it?”
“We kept watch on the Egyptian house in the hills, mistress, until the Prince and his servant returned. They came back very early this morning and they had two bodies, fresh ones, in a wagon. They took them inside the building and we came back to the city to warn you. The Prince is up to something dreadful up there! We should inform the aediles, or the prefect, and stop him.”
Krista was almost breathless. She and Sigurd had hastened back to the city as fast as they could.
Anastasia sighed and looked down at the girl, still kneeling at her side, panting. Youth! she thought to herself, rubbing the graininess from her eyes. Too many late nights, now that the Emperor was gone from the city, and too little sleep were wearing her down.
“My dear, the Prince may be a little odd, but this news is nothing untoward. Remember, he is a healer of the Temple of Asklepios. Though it is not particularly pleasant that he may traffic in the bodies of the dead, it is his profession to understand the workings of the human body. The other watchers in the city reported to me earlier today that two bodies were purchased from the burial temple on the road south of the city. The families, I suppose, would be upset, but they are dead, you know.
“You must learn to see the whole picture, Krista, if you are going to be of use to me. It is good, even, that the Prince has decided to undertake his medical investigations outside of the city. If it were discovered that he was carting bodies around in the wee hours, it would reflect badly on the Emperor.”
Krista gave her mistress a frowning look but quickly schooled her features into calm acceptance and polite at-tentiveness.
The Lady d’Orelio continued: “The Prince has a project that is consuming all of his attention-which is a welcome change from his previous lassitude. Though I surely appreciated his pursuit of the available women in the city, this is far better for him. His brother, I know, is worried about his apparent disappearance, but I’ll have a talk with him tomorrow. In the meantime, you need to return to your previous duties here. I will send Sigurd and Antonius to watch the Egyptian house.”
For a moment, Krista considered telling her mistress what she felt about that in a loud and angry voicey but the memory of previous, very short-lived arguments with the Duchess quelled that impulse. Instead she bowed her head to the tiles and retreated demurely from the room. In the hallway, after closing the door, she cursed-entirely silently-for fifteen minutes before, shaking with anger, she stalked off to her own cell in the servants’ quarters.
Pigheaded old woman, she snarled to herself in the safety of her thoughts. The pretty Prince may be a healer and all, but he and that old man are up to something evil.
But she could see no way to do anything about it if she wanted to continue living. Disobedient slaves were treated harshly in Rome.
“It’s lead.” Maxian spilled the remains of the metal shavings into a‘ cup on the long wooden table. The air in the basement was still fetid and stank of corruption. Two days of sweaty work in the darkness had not freshened the air any. Abdmachus was perched on a stool they had scavenged from one of the outbuildings of the house. Gaius Julius, fresh from dragging the body of the young black man out to the crematorium in the back garden, was sitting on the steps down from the main floor, drinking deep from a flagon of watered wine.
“Lead?” Abdmachus’ voice was filled with curiosity. “Did he eat it?”
“I don’t know… It permeated his whole body, in minute fragments, much smaller than can be seen with the naked eye. His liver held most of it, though his kidneys and stomach lining had some. When I started drawing it out, there was a great deal suspended in his blood as well.” Maxian’s voice was still weary, but he had begun to recover from his second examination.
“Gaius Julius.” The Prince turned to the old man. “This man was a longtime resident of the city, yes?”
The dead man nodded and wiped his mouth before saying: “By the report of the aediles in his district, he had lived there almost his whole life, fifty-two years. He was the oldest man in the area, or at least the oldest recently dead. It’s lucky he had no relatives to pay the burial tax, or they would have cremated him before I got there.”
“So, a Roman citizen of fifty years. He probably never left the city in his life, unless to visit the gardens outside of the city on a holiday. Somehow he ingested a large quantity of lead. Now, the other man, he was not long in the city?”
“No more than a month,” Gaius Julius said, “a Maure-tanian slave who angered his master. Clubbed on the head with a pewter mug and left to die in the alley behind the master’s house. The street sweepers picked him up. Just fresh the morning we brought him here.”
Maxian nodded, pensive. “He is reasonably healthy, foreign, and he has no lead to speak of in his body, though there were minute traces in his stomach.”
Abdmachus raised an eyebrow at this. “Then he was exposed as well to something common that carries the metal.”
Maxian picked up the fragment ball and crushed it between his fingers. The paniculate metal collapsed easily into a powder at the bottom of the cup. He rubbed his fingers clean on a cloth.
“I have lead in my body too,” the Prince said, his face calm and considering. “I checked after I examined the African boy. Far less than the old man but more than the slave. We were all three exposed to the metal, and I think that I know how.”
Abdmachus cocked his head, staring at the Prince.
Gaius Julius spoke into the moment of silence before Maxian, however. “The aqueducts again. I remember reading in the logbooks of the Imperial architects that the pipes that carry water from the stone channels to the public fountains and insulae are made of lead. Is it the taste in the water that you noticed before?”