The Legatus Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

felt a little shiver down my spine.
    No doubt it is designed to that effect. The entire complex is enclosed by walls, with a great colonnaded entranceway reached by two shallow steps from the street and protected from the idle public gaze by a verandaed ambulatory on either side. Once through the massive gate – and only then – one can see the central temple. It is a lofty building, made more impressive still by being set towards the back of the courtyard on a
podium
, up an imposing flight of marble steps, its entrance screened by a further arrangement of towering columns. The mixture of soaring architecture and shadowed secretness is intended to impress the superstitious.
    I have to say that it impresses me.
    To the right-hand side of this edifice, towards the rear, there is an unpretentious building housing stores and slaves where the priests themselves retire to robe and rest. Priests do not sleep at the temple on the whole: most of them have other occupations, too, and keep up houses elsewhere in the town. The store block seems especially insignificant, however, since to the left, set back with mock-discretion in a grove, is the second temple. The temple of the emperors, where our business lay: much smaller than the Capitoline shrine, but no less elaborate – even from where I stood the columns were aglint with gold.
    One of the problems of having a living emperor as a deity is the possibility that the god may one day choose to visit his shrine in person. In Glevum the city fathers had solved the difficulty by building a small Imperial shrine within the courtyard complex of the temple of Jupiter.
    There is an elegance in this solution which amuses me. Jove is generally worshipped together with Minerva and Juno – the so-called Capitoline Triad – so he is presumably accustomed to sharing temple space, while even Commodus can scarcely take offence at finding himself worshipped in such distinguished company. And, should the Divine Commodus ever deign to visit, an effective revelation of his godhead is ensured. There is apparently a private entrance at the back of the complex from the town house of the High Priest of Jupiter, so that any visiting deity could enter the precinct unseen and emerge dramatically onto the front steps of the great temple at a suitably theatrical moment – thereby dazzling the credulous. The chief priest does the same thing at every festival.
    Even the irony of all this, however, did not make me smile today. There was something eerily amiss.
    I looked around the courtyard. Gigantic statues of the gods stood in their accustomed places, gazing down from mighty plinths upon the open altars at their feet. The many-times-life-size faces of the immortals still looked thunderously down upon us from the pediment. But there was something missing. And suddenly I realised what it was.
    The temple courtyard was empty. There was nobody in sight.

Chapter Three
    Usually, of course, the place is thronged with people. But not today. Today there was not a priest, not a temple slave, not a worshipper – not even a money-changer or a seller of sacrificial birds. Only the stone gods and silent colonnades. I am not a superstitious man – I have more respect for the ancient gods of wood and stone than for the carved deities of Rome – but standing under the verandaed entranceway, alone with Marcus in that silent place, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. A hundred basalt eyes seemed to be upon me.
    Even Marcus seemed momentarily uncertain, and his slave (who had finished paying the litter-carriers and just now arrived) looked around the courtyard and shivered visibly.
    ‘Dear Mercury!’ he muttered, and when he thought Marcus wasn’t looking he shifted the towel and bath slippers he was carrying and fished in his tunic for a coin. I heard the splash as he dropped a propitiatory
as
into one of the great stone water bowls at the door. It must have represented his tip for the entire afternoon.
    As