A loud knocking echoed upstairs.
John leapt awake, blade in hand before his eyes were fully open. How long had he been asleep? Probably only a short time.
“I will attend to that,” he said, striding out of the room before Peter could reply.
The heavy knock reverberated again, underlined by Darius’ hoarse shouts for admittance. Isis called anxiously from her room, as if she too had been startled awake by the commotion.
John yanked the door open. Darius lumbered past him, a limp form over his shoulder. Dumping his burden unceremoniously on the tiles, Darius rushed out into the garden, retching.
For an instant John feared that Philo had been harmed before Darius reached him but the bloodied body on the tiles groaned and muttered something unintelligible. The voice belonged not to Philo but to Anatolius.
Peter would be extremely unhappy about all the blood and mud that was being tracked into the house he kept so spotless, John thought as he helped Anatolius to his feet.
Isis was back in the kitchen and with Peter, John and now Anatolius there as well, even before an ashen- faced Darius staggered in, the cramped, hot room seemed very crowded.
“I couldn’t find Philo, Lord Chamberlain,” Darius confessed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “But I did see a woman. Or what had been a woman. A beautiful young…” He rushed into the lavatory that opened off the kitchen and vomited again.
John’s mouth tightened. He looked around the kitchen, as yet untouched physically by the riots yet full of human flotsam fleeing them. “I will have to seek Philo then,” he muttered. “And I pray to Mithra this will be the last time I’ll have to warn him about heedlessly courting danger.”
Chapter Twenty
Lord Mithra answered John’s prayer, although not in a manner he would have desired.
Philo lay on the table in Gaius’ surgery so recently occupied by the plasterer with the broken arm, but unlike that particular patient he was beyond feeling pain.
If only he had found his old mentor before his murderer had struck, thought John. But then, he reminded himself, Philo might have been lying dead in the alley where the Prefect’s men found him even while John vainly searched the area near the Chalke.
John forced himself to walk over to the table and look down at the old man, who was decently covered by a linen sheet pulled up to his waist. Philo’s lined face looked serene, his white hair and beard neat. The bruising on his neck and the narrow wound in his ribs told the manner in which his shade had been set free to fly to eternity, there to discover the answers to those vexing questions that bedevil all who live, farmers and philosophers alike.
But he could not offer an answer as to why or by whom he had been murdered.
A ripe oath and the crash of breaking pottery emerged from the next room, followed by Gaius. “I fear that Bacchus is again interfering with my ability to carry out my calling,” he muttered. “I cannot seem to get my thoughts to flow correctly this morning.”
“If I may trouble you for such information as has been revealed by your examination?”
“Yes, you’ll want to know about Philo, naturally.” Gaius rubbed his temples. “Very well, then. Since it was apparent how he died, I did not carry out any internal investigation of the body.”
John was grateful to hear that. Philo had always been at pains to maintain his dignity and would have been horrified at the thought of his remains being violated by the physician’s sharp and disrespectful knives.
So far as his death was concerned, it had been clean enough as such things went. He had been spared the sort of obscene wounds John had seen in his time as a mercenary, wounds suffered by men who left their homes and loved ones whole but oft times came back maimed and occasionally half insane. Nor, his treacherous memory reminded him, was it only in times of war that this could happen…but he turned his attention firmly away from that dark river as the physician continued speaking, still massaging his forehead.
“In this particular instance,” Gaius was saying, “you would have been able to ascertain as much as I and that with a quick glance. By the bruising on Philo’s throat, I suspect that the assassin crept up from behind and choked him to render him helpless and muffle his cries. Then a quick stab, a shove to the ground, and a hasty departure to avoid discovery.”
“That is the coward’s way, to creep up on an old man.”
“No more cowardly than poison, John.”
“But still I would like to think that it was not as easy as killing a chicken for the evening meal. And then too, I would have wished him a more dignified death.”
“You mean, you hope he had the opportunity to die fighting? That is the former mercenary speaking! One thing, however. Although I rather suspect Philo wielded the blade he carried only at table, his dagger was under his body. We’d probably both like to think he marked his assailant, but even so it must have been over very quickly and mercifully so.”
“So it’s possible he at least had a chance to defend himself?”
Gaius picked up Philo’s cold hand. “Briefly, perhaps. You see these wounds?” He pointed to gashes on the dead man’s palm.
John bent down to examine the deep cuts. “Isn’t it strange, Gaius, that they appear so regular?”
Gaius shrugged. “Those who are attacked commonly put their hands up to defend themselves against the stabbing and slashing.”
“And yet…”
“Our minds seek meaning in the meaningless, John. Do we not see strange and wonderful shapes in summer clouds?” Gaius pointed out.
“Perhaps you’re right,” John admitted. What was obvious enough was that someone had taken advantage of the violence to slaughter an old man in cold blood.
“It’s just too commonplace a death for Philo,” he went on. “I wonder what other adventures he had in his wanderings and why Atropos wielded her inexorable shears and cut the thread of his life here instead of somewhere else.”
“If it’s any comfort, I would say that a blade wielded as expertly as in this instance provides an easier death than one by poison or fire.”
John agreed, adding that apart from the other six recent deaths of which he was personally aware, there must have been many more who had died in the inferno at the docks.
“Yes, indeed. But you mean five deaths, don’t you, John? Aurelius, the three stylites we examined, and that girl belonging to Isis?”
“There was also the burnt body Philo stumbled over,” John reminded him.
“Yes, well, that’s true. But there’ll be more than a few like that once the weather gets really cold and they doze off too close to their fires.”
“Gaius, I have a strong suspicion there is a connection between all of these deaths.”
The physician looked down at Philo. “Well, I didn’t see the man Philo found, but as for the stylites, as I said, they all burnt from the outside, notwithstanding people raving about fires from within, hands from heaven, and the like.”
John thoughtfully traced the gashes on Philo’s palm.
“But what about the matter of Philo’s funeral?” Gaius asked after a short pause. “It seems you’re going to be responsible, John, since obviously he has no family here to carry out his rites.”
John nodded, adding “Although at the moment the dead will be fortunate to be buried with only a hurried prayer at their graveside. And Philo would not want that.”
Gaius gently smoothed Philo’s white hair but remained silent.
The sun was setting as John lit a lamp and carried it into what had been Philo’s bedroom. It was spartanly furnished, hardly fit for an Athenian, as Philo had remarked on more than one occasion with what John had taken to be an attempt at humor.
The room held few reminders of its former occupant. One or two letters Philo had been writing lay on a desk
