I crossed the porch extension and glanced into the tent. The air temperature rose sharply. The hot, humid atmosphere took me straight back to the army. There was the familiar suffocating smell of warm, trodden grass. A few oil lamps were lit. A portable throne stood opposite the entrance. Before it, fine cloths covered a low table where only crumbs remained. Cushions were piled against the back wall of the tent, behind the throne. Attracted in by the light, moths and long-legged insects knocked against the roof. Nobody else was there.
I pulled out one of the torches. Dew dampened our bootstraps as we made our way behind the tent. Aelianus was starting to look apprehensive. Whatever he had seen earlier, he wanted never to see again.
As it happened, somebody had obliged him. When we turned around the corner to where he told me the corpse had been lying, it was no longer there.
I left him at the pavilion entrance while I tried to find attendants. Eventually I learned that there was nobody with any authority left at the Grove. All the Arval Brothers had returned to Rome. Oddly, nobody seemed to know anything about any man who had been terribly knifed under the guy ropes. There should be a commotion over the sudden death of one of the twelve Brothers. I saw no signs of consternation. The murder must have been hushed up.
I made Aelianus return with me to where the body had been. I had no doubts about his story, though I was beginning to fear that other people might be skeptical. I put one hand on the grass; it was very wet, far wetter than dew alone would cause. By torchlight, no traces of blood were now visible. On the skirts of the pavilion, however, I found a distinct spray of blood splashes. Whoever sluiced the ground had overlooked them.
The knife that had been with the body was gone too. There seemed to be no other evidence. Aelianus pushed his hand under the bottom edge of the tent; its side wall had once been pegged to the ground with wooden stays, but they were pulled out. It may have been an oversight; the side walls were probably looped up earlier that day to air the interior.
With some difficulty we dragged up the wall of the tent, finding that the cushions I had seen were piled just here. We shoved some of them aside. Moving the torch closer, I discovered that the grass inside the pavilion, under the cushions, was stained with the rusty red of blood.
“Believe me now?” Aelianus demanded defensively.
“Oh, I always believed you.”
“Whoever cleaned up outside failed to realize there was more work to be done inside the tent.”
“Yes. If it’s a coverup, they will have been in a rush. I am seeing what happened now. Looks like the fight started inside the pavilion. A good place to ambush somebody-it would have given the killer privacy. At the first assault, the victim may have fallen against the tent wall. Since it isn’t pegged, it gave way under his weight. He would have half fallen outside, then probably struggled right under the tent, trying to flee.”
I ducked under the flap myself going in. On the inner surface of the tenting there were more smears of blood, long marks like dragging, which had not soaked through to the outside. They could have been made by a man falling.
“The trouble started inside. The desperate victim somehow made it outside, probably got caught up in the guy ropes in his panic, and was finished off. Ceremonially, with the sacrificial knife-” We both winced. “The killer then pulled the tent wall down straight, piling the cushions up to cover the blood inside.”
“Why bother?”
“To delay discovery. You heard people, you said?”
“It sounded like attendants, clearing the interior.”
“Maybe the killer had also heard them coming. There was time for a few swift adjustments to make the scene look normal.” I wondered if the killer then walked out, passing the attendants, or ducked back under the tent wall again. Either way, an encounter with Aelianus must have been only narrowly avoided. “The corpse, behind the tent, could safely have been left.”
“Right, Falco. It might not have been discovered until the pavilion was taken down. That’s not going to happen until at least tomorrow-or even the day afterwards, when the festival formally ends.”
Thinking about this, Aelianus was staring at the area next to the throne where the assault must have begun. He gave a start. He had seen something glint under the cushions. Flinging the tasseled soft furnishings further aside, he retrieved a decorative holder of some sort. It was a flat tube, with one open end, the other closed in a curved shape. As a scabbard, it would be too short for a sword and too big for a dagger. It formed a distinctive, short, broad-bladed shape. We both knew what it was: a priest’s fancy holder for a sacrificial knife.
“Well, somebody committed sacrilege,” Aelianus exclaimed dryly. “ It is forbidden to bring any kind of blade into the Sacred Grove!”
DAWN OVER THE Arx.
