Dark Omens by Rosemary Rowe - Libertus Mystery of Roman Britain 14 - Dark Omens

Author:Rosemary Rowe - Libertus Mystery of Roman Britain 14 - Dark Omens [Rowe, Rosemary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Historical
ISBN: 9780727896889
Google: r6-QngEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 17859402
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

For a moment I stood there, staring after him.

Of it course it was possible that his shocking information was only partly true: some half-heard story that had spread around the town, getting more and more distorted as it went. Or it might be a confusion of different incidents – after all there had been a body at the pond some day before. Everybody knows how rumours alter as they spread.

And then it struck me. Why was I supposing the same pool was involved? The money-lender hadn’t mentioned where the corpse was found. I was beginning to conflate the two events myself. This was probably not even on the southern side of the town. Though, come to think of it, if the body was the priest’s, I thought I knew a reason why he might have gone that way.

I shook my head. I could not really credit that the corpse was his. A priest does not go missing from the temple unobserved – he would always have an acolyte or slave attending him. Besides, he’d been alive and active only yesterday, talking to Cantalarius in the afternoon – no doubt there would be witnesses to that – so even if he had died overnight, how he could be half-eaten in so short a time? Unless there really was a curse, of course.

But I didn’t honestly believe there was a curse at all. Call me cynical, but when there’s a violent death that’s unexplained, I usually suspect a human cause. This began to look like murder, and a nasty one at that. But who would want to murder a harmless, rather doddering, ancient priest – let alone divide his corpse up afterwards? And – more important – who would ever dare? The earthly penalties for such an act were terrible enough, but nothing compared to the almost certain retribution by the gods. Even rebel Druids would baulk at such a thought.

In fact if half a body had been found today, I thought, perhaps it was really Genialis after all. I could invent a plausible story to account for that. Suppose, for instance, that he’d fallen off his horse, been found by the wayside by a pack of starving wolves, dragged into a snow-drift while they were eating him and then abandoned when they were frightened off? That would make more sense of the timetable at least. And it was just possible. A pair of fancy sandals were no proof of anything, whatever the members of the temple said. Genialis, I remembered, had fancy sandals too.

There was one obvious flaw in this convenient theory, though. If this was Genialis, what had happened to the priest? Presumably he wasn’t at the temple now, or no one would ever have supposed that the legs and feet were his. But how could he have got out unobserved? Surely he would never have set off alone for Cantalarius’s farm, and in the dark – since he was missed before the morning sacrifice at dawn? Or had he,

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