We had all seen dead men. Dead women too. We had seen flesh battered and bones treated disrespectfully. Even Justinus, the youngest here, must already know the swift sag of the stomach that comes in the presence of unnatural death. That smell. The mocking way skulls grin. The shock at the way human skeletons can hang together even when entirely stripped of meat and organs. The worse shock, when long-dead bones suddenly fall apart.

What lay here was in one sense no longer human; yet these bodies were still part of the wider tribe we belonged to. Most had died years ago. Many would never be identified. But they called on us as family. They imposed responsibilities. I cannot have been the only one who silently promised them justice.

The newest corpse was a woman.

‘How long?’

‘Two days, at most.’

Her killer must have been fleeing from the forest almost as the first troops approached. Perhaps the noise of them stomping down thickets had disturbed him. Perhaps he even glimpsed them through the trees.

She lay on her own, not with the others. Those who found her had felt she was different—still close enough to living to count as a person, not simply anonymous ‘remains’. Indeed, it would have been possible to recognise her face—had her killer not battered her badly. She had suffered; large areas of her skin were discoloured by bruising. Someone suggested much of the beating was inflicted after death; we preferred to think so. Either her trunk was swollen because of what had happened internally during the violence, or she had been pregnant. Unlike the other bodies, which were deposited face down in scraped graves, this one had been left unburied and looking at the sky. She had not been ripped open. He had not finished with her corpse.

Around her neck still lay a gold chain that must have been the means by which Nobilis managed to get close to her again. The expensive granulation looked like the hanging loop on the Dioscurides cameo. I could see the fastening. I forced myself to bend down over the body, unhook it, and remove the chain. It had dug into the flesh, but I pulled on it as gently as I could.

‘I know who this is.’

I recognised her dress. I remembered that sad rag from when she was brought to see Helena and me in the inn at Satricum. It was Demetria, daft daughter of the morose baker Vexus, obedient lover of the foolish grain seller Costus—and one-time wife of Claudius Nobilis, the pernicious freedman who so relentlessly refused to release her from his possession, that he finally came after her and slaughtered her.

56