“Dead? I understood he was being held under guard here in Lauretum.”
“He was. We were visiting him when Renatus came in with consecrated bread and wine.”
Theokritos fingered his Abraxas medal. “Go on, Surgeon. What happened?”
“We weren’t in the room, but Sigisvult died after drinking the Sacramental wine. The archdeacon called it the judgment of God.”
“Superstitious fool.”
“Yes. I believe Sigisvult was poisoned.”
“Murdered?” Theokritos dropped the medal as his complexion blanched to the same colorlessness as his hair. “Now it seems we have one witness less to the discovery.”
“A witness? I hadn’t thought of Sigisvult’s death in that light,” Getorius admitted, “yet it makes sense…in a frightening way.”
“Senator Maximin knows we were in the mausoleum,” Arcadia said.
“He told you that?”
“After Mass. It seemed like a casual question about our dinner with Galla Placidia.”
“Thanks to the man’s wealth, he knows this entire palace as I do its library. His gold buys information.” Theokritos snorted and probed at the papyrus scrap in the vitriol.
“Sir,” Arcadia asked, indicating the rolled documents at the top of the desk, “are those the manuscripts we found at Behan’s?”
“They are.”
“Do you know any more about them?”
“Young woman”—Theokritos waved an impatient hand toward his experiments—“my concern is what I have in front of me now.”
“May I look at the Latin text? My husband thinks your…your Secundus Papyrus is linked to Behan’s prophecy.”
Theokritos gave a shrug of permission. Arcadia unrolled the manuscript, then pulled Getorius aside. “The rooster drawing on this looks like the one on the broken tile.”
“Broken tile?” Theokritos asked, looking up. “Rooster?”
“Sir”—Arcadia took the fragment from her purse—“we found this in the mausoleum, part of the Book of John mosaic your assistant pointed out.”
“I thought it might be an artisan’s mark,” Getorius added, “but someone is using a cockerel as an identifying symbol.” When Theokritos did not comment further, Getorius asked, “Will you let me know if you discover anything?”
“That, Surgeon, will be for the Regina’s ears only.”
Getorius took Arcadia’s arm. “Let’s go home. There’s nothing more to learn here.”
Two days later, on November seventeenth, Childibert told Getorius that a body had been hauled out of the harbor near its silted south end, and identified as that of Miniscius. A magistrate ruled that Sigisvult’s workmaster had probably slipped and fallen off an icy dock early in the morning, while inspecting a cargo of building materials.
No further inquiry was conducted.
Lugdunum
Chapter ten
Brenos of Slana left the Abbey of Culdees at Autessiodurum on the seventeenth day of the Celtic month of Samon. The abbot rode on horseback, along with his secretary Fiachra, the guide Warinar, and only one packhorse to haul minimal supplies for the journey to Ravenna.
Four days travel beyond his monastery, in the gloom of a late afternoon, Brenos sat huddled in the prow of a Roman patrol galley that slid downstream along the current of the Arar River. The bearskin coat he wore glistened white, coated with sleet granules that drove in from the northeast. After the tribune in charge of the crew, Liscus, had said that Lugdunum would soon appear in the distance, Brenos wanted to be first to sight the old capital of the Three Gauls.
He glanced back at Fiachra, hunched with Warinar over a charcoal fire glowing in a brazier under the galley’s sternpost. Blowing on his hands to warm them, his secretary still looked sullen over having to make the winter voyage. Warinar, too, had sulked on the road. The guide wanted to stay at Autessiodurum, and had warned about the dangers of a winter journey, but the offer of a silver siliqua for each day of travel had proven irresistible. Brenos had made sure the man did not take advantage of the generous terms to extend the time of the journey by promising him the bonus of a gold solidus if they arrived at the Western capital within three weeks.
The abbot pulled the bearskin collar higher around the hood of his cloak. Although the clear weather had turned nasty abruptly, things had gone well since departing from the abbey. The Via Cabellono along the left bank of the Icauna River was paved and the countryside relatively flat. Brenos had counted on his church rank of abbot to receive food and shelter along the way. The monastic discipline practiced at Culdees had served him well; the horses had made almost thirty miles the first day, before early darkness came on.
That first night the abbot had found them shelter in a walled farmhouse. At dawn he had shaken his companions awake. Shortly after a breakfast of bread, cheese, and raisins, the trio was once more on the road.
The second day’s halt had been in the fortified hill town of Flavia Aeduorum. Brenos had gawked at the magnificent four-portal gate, at the stone bridge leading across a river to the citadel, and at the walls Augustus Caesar had built for the Aedui, who were long-time Gallic allies of Rome. Cavarillus, the bishop, had found housing for the travelers with a wealthy merchant. Both men had donated a gold piece to help the abbot defray his expenses. The nervous city prefect had scrawled a hasty petition for the abbot to give to Emperor Valentinian at Ravenna, pleading for a hundred field army legionaries to supplement what Frankish mercenaries he had been able to hire.
By the afternoon of November twentieth the three men had reached Cabillonum on the Arar River, in a mounting snowstorm. As a market center for shipping goods into northern and western Gaul, the river port housed a naval garrison that patrolled that stretch of the Arar. Brenos had shown his abbot’s ring to Tribune Liscus, the base commander, who was about to board a patrol galley that would tow a barge of lumber and wine casks downstream to Lugdunum.
Brenos bribed the officer to be taken along with the cargo. The four horses were led onto the transport barge and
