“You amaze me, John! I could never have thought of such a convoluted theory!”
“Nor would I,” John admitted, “if Minthe hadn’t directed the gravest suspicion at herself by vanishing at the same time as Sunilda. It was too much of a coincidence not to be connected with what has taken place here. In effect, she had accused herself and as soon as I realized that, all the fragmentary information fell into place and I saw the whole.”
“But we must be too late to save Sunilda now, she’s been gone so long!” Anatolius frantically burst out, all thought of discretion forgotten.
John shook his head. “You’ve forgotten that Sunilda wrote about her plan to join Gadaric. It will begin when the straw man is tossed off the headland and that won’t be for a while yet since it’s not yet dawn. Unfortunately, if Sunilda balks I’m absolutely certain Minthe will be only too happy to assist her to carry out her fantasy.”
Anatolius pointed out that Minthe must have known she could not fail to be hunted down and executed.
John shrugged. “I may be able to hazard a guess at what someone has done or may be planning to do, but as to how such a one would propose to escape from such a certain fate I confess myself puzzled. Perhaps this is one of those situations where once the desired object is accomplished, nothing else matters and so the perpetrator’s plans extend no further beyond that.”
“Eliminating the twins would certainly remove even the remotest possibility of any impediment to Castor assuming the throne.” Anatolius lowered his voice again, even though they were standing well away from the general flow of pedestrians. “Of course, given the enormous crushing power that Hero’s accursed artificial hand is capable of exerting, it would be easy for Minthe to employ it to kill Gadaric. To think of her using it on the boy’s throat….”
John remained silent.
“Why didn’t Poppaea die, John? Minthe is, after all, a very knowledgeable herbalist.”
“Since she was responsible for the poisoning attempt, she knew the antidote to administer when the wrong person ate it,” John replied, turning at the sound of Peter’s shuffling approach.
“You must be hungry, master. I’ve been hunting for you for some time.” The elderly servant ceremoniously offered John a hunk of bread and a piece of cheese from a small silver plate that reminded John of Nonna’s recent hospitality.
“I regret that this was all I could obtain for you,” Peter went on in an outraged tone. “Theodora’s entourage appear to have scoured the kitchen as cleanly as a plague of locusts.”
John quickly ate the frugal meal. When he had been requested to attend Zeno’s grand banquet in honor of the twins he had not expected the invitation to lead to the consumption of so much bread and cheese-for once, almost too much. As he finished and handed the plate back to Peter, Godomar loomed out of the darkness and, to John’s well-concealed annoyance, paused to converse with them.
“Lord Chamberlain,” he began with a slight bow. “I sincerely hope you do not intend to take part in this blasphemous festival. It would be unconscionable enough at any time, but when an innocent child is dead and another has vanished, to even contemplate holding it is unspeakable.”
“As a matter of fact, we are about to resume our search for Sunilda,” John replied.
“Then you won’t be in attendance at the service I have arranged for the villagers? Needless to say, I consider it my duty to offer an alternative to this hideous pagan rite, for it’s obviously no more than that.”
John noticed Peter directing a furtive, sorrowful glance him. “You are free to go if you wish, Peter,” he told his servant, knowing that it was his, John’s, pagan beliefs that worried Peter much more than his master’s absence at the service just announced.
“What of Calyce? Is she going?” Anatolius asked with over-elaborate casualness. “And Livia?” he added hastily.
“The empress has decreed that all of her attendants, including the ladies-in-waiting, will accompany her to the event. No doubt they’ll be much educated in the ways of wickedness after witnessing it!”
“That’s a lesson Theodora would be well qualified to teach, if it weren’t that her ladies have already been long enough at court to be well practiced,” muttered Anatolius as Godomar departed for the village with Peter trailing behind.
Watching his servant leave, it struck John, not for the first time, that the aging Christian-who was after all a freed man-might well decide to end his days contemplating the world from a monastery rather than cooking meals for a pagan master with the culinary tastes of an ascetic. Should that come about, what would his house be like when it no longer sounded with Peter’s tuneless singing of lugubrious hymns as he scrubbed the kitchen floor or his scolding when his master did not eat what he considered adequate nourishment?
He quickly drew his thoughts back to the immediate problem of Sunilda. There, at least, was a loss that it might be in his power to prevent. He had to find her before she had the chance to harm herself.
Unfortunately, children loved to play hide and seek. And they were experts at it. John had remained ignorant of her intentions for too long and now, if he were to save the girl, he had only until sunrise to discover her hiding place.
Chapter Thirty-one
John left Anatolius to stand watch with the guards at the villa and set off down the shore road toward the village.
The road was as crowded as the Mese at midday, with villagers either making their way to the headland where the celebration would culminate or claiming good places from which to observe the procession as it passed by. John saw no one he recognized except Paul, who was standing at the end of the path to his house. A quick exchange between them confirmed that the man had seen no sign of Minthe or the missing girl.
“I expected you to be attending Godomar’s service,” John observed.
Paul took a long time to respond. When he finally spoke, his words were hesitant. “If it were being held at any other time I’d certainly be there, faithful follower that I am. Godomar himself invited me as he went by a little while ago. Quite a flock he’d gathered already. But the straw man goes to the sea and the sea is ancient and all powerful. And though you may say I’m just a foolish old man, still….” His voice trailed away.
John did not press him further. It had struck him on more than one occasion that the Christians’ rigid insistence on their god’s exclusive sway, so at odds with human nature, would finally prove to be their undoing.
He continued on his way. The dark sky was strewn with a dusting of stars against which loomed the black masses of trees and bushes. An owl called from the towering shadows of a stand of pines as he passed.
Just before the road passed through the center of the village, John arrived at an open space illuminated by a huge bonfire. In its shifting light he saw Zeno supervising the drawing up of the procession. Flapping back and forth, long hair flying, the elderly man was directing groups of his servants, villagers, and Felix’s excubitors into their places with equal and enthusiastic impartiality.
Two of Zeno’s younger servants stood at the head of the line. They wore golden-colored tunics and were harnessed to a cart decorated with fragrant greenery and bundles of straw on which the well-stuffed sacrificial figure was laid out, surrounded by piles of vegetables and fruit. The cart was brightly illuminated by torches held by two men, dressed entirely in red, who flanked it. The sight of the duo immediately reminded John of Mithra’s torchbearers. The notion was strangely comforting.
Behind the straw man’s cart three or four young village women, dressed in long white garments with chaplets of olive leaves on their hair, were chattering. Their role, Zeno explained to John when he dashed up for a quick word, was to dance in celebration of the straw man’s fate.