A Coin for the Ferryman Read Online Free PDF Page A

had been no news of any local disappearances, but it was still a problem and I could understand why Julia had sent for me at once.
    It was appalling luck to come across a corpse in a place where you intend to build a dwelling house. Of course an unknown person of no particular account found dead in the forest in the normal way would not cause much concern. It might either be left exactly where it was, or be taken to the common pit and flung in with the beggars and the criminals. But a body discovered on a house site was quite a different thing. The spirit of the unquiet dead would haunt your doors for ever, if the body was not somehow laid decently to rest.
    A different explanation had occurred to Junio. ‘I hope they haven’t disturbed a grave of any sort?’ he said. ‘That would be dreadful at this time of year.’
    I understood his fears. We were approaching the second Roman Festival of the Dead, the Lemuria, when kinless, hungry, homeless ghosts of those who had not received a proper funeral were said to prowl. These Lemures are known to be malevolent spirits anyway, ravenous and dangerous if the proper ceremonies are not observed – so much so that the temples close, and marriage is forbidden during the festival. But their worst spite is said to be reserved for those who unearth their buried bones.
    It was such a bad portent that even I could feel a shiver of alarm, and I was not raised in a Roman household, as Junio had been. To him the threat was very real. I could see that he was looking shaken and alarmed.
    ‘Was it a grave?’ I echoed.
    Kurso shook his head. We had slowed to let a donkey squeeze past us on the road – narrowly, since it was laden with wicker panniers full of quacking ducks – so he managed to answer more coherently. ‘N-n-not a proper one. J-just a shallow ditch. J-Julia says we’ll have to f-f-find out who it is, and get the f-f-family to bury it. Otherwise it will c-c-curse the h-h-house for ever afterwards.’ Then we went lurching on again, and we abandoned speech in favour of clinging to the wagon-sides and praying that the bone-juddering torment would soon be over.
    After what seemed like a lifetime, but was probably closer to an hour, we joined up with a proper highway once again – a paved spur from the military road which led towards the villa. My roundhouse was near the junction and I expected we would stop, but the cart-driver did not draw up outside my gate. Through the palisade of woven stakes which formed my outer fence, I could see the new area which the villa slaves had cleared: one or two land-slaves were still working with an adze, grubbing out some bushes which were growing near the road. Clearly, however, the project had been largely abandoned, for the moment anyhow.
    I was about to call to the cart-driver to stop, but Kurso saw what I intended and said hastily, ‘They’ll have t-t-taken the body to the v-v-villa now. If no one c-c-claims it in a day or two, the s-s-slaves will make it ready for the f-f-funeral pyre. J-Julia said you w-w-wouldn’t w-w-want it in your house.’
    I nodded. I was sincerely grateful. The presence of a dead body in my roundhouse, just when I was bringing home my son, would have been an omen that even I could not ignore, though I am not very superstitious about these things as a rule. At Marcus’s spacious villa, on the other hand, there were a dozen places where it might decently be put, without impinging on the family’s living space and bringing evil luck. There was even a special room out in the stable block where dead slaves could be taken and laid out, and a cremation site out on the villa farm. Most of the servants were members of the Guild of Slaves, of course, which would arrange to give them a decent funeral – Marcus, like all good masters, paid their dues himself – but there were always one or two who had not yet enrolled, or poor freemen labourers who died on villa land, and Marcus always saw that they got at least the