“Julian! I’m off now.”

Julian Lockhart glanced up to see the figure of his colleague silhouetted against the bright sky. He rose, stretching his back and his long limbs, a trowel dangling from one hand.

“Alex?” he shouted back. “Come and have a look at this before you go.”

Alex Cothill walked down the slope into the excavation and picked his way between the younger members of the team, who were busily scraping the layers of soil down to the next level.

While he was waiting Julian took off his battered felt hat and used each rolled-up sleeve of his shirt in turn to wipe his forehead, leaving a dark patch on the khaki. At this time of the morning the air was cool on these mountain slopes but the sun was rising in the sky and its heat was already building.

He replaced the hat and pointed to the ground with the trowel. “I wanted you to see this before we photograph it and bag it up.”

Alex looked down on a jumble of blackened, broken bones interspersed with rusty objects.

“No wonder it showed up on geophysics,” he said. “What is it, armour?”

“Yes. The individual leaves would have been backed with leather, but that’s all rotted away now. So are the crossed belts. But the buckles and scabbards are intact.”

“No helmet.”

“No, not so far. Still, there’s no question about it. We have a soldier.”

“A soldier and what else? That’s not just one skeleton, is it?”

“Quite right, it’s two: one male, one female. The male was tall, strongly built – you only have to look at the long bones.”

Again he pointed with the trowel, more closely this time, tracing the outlines. “The female’s an adult but she was small, even for those days. It’s fair to assume the armour and the weapons were being carried by the male. And that, my friend, is where we are presented with a small mystery.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. See, here’s the pugio – the dagger – still in its sheath. Both of them pretty badly corroded – we certainly won’t be able to separate them here. And here’s the longer scabbard for the gladius. Nice piece of work. Bronze, intricately pierced. This wasn’t standard issue.”

“High ranking soldier?”

“Almost certainly.”

“So?”

“So where’s the gladius?”

Alex hesitated, then pointed back towards the sloping end of the dig. “Didn’t Pippo uncover a gladius up there?” he said. “Bone handle, some decoration – just the sort of thing that would go with that scabbard. We haven’t found any other weapons so that’s probably it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it most probably is. So why is the gladius over there and the body over here?”

“See what you mean.”

Nearby, a strongly built young woman had been listening to their conversation, her lively grey eyes moving from one to the other. She was kneeling where she’d been helping Julian to clear soil from the skeletons. Now she got up and dusted off her hands.

“The party was attacked by robbers, maybe,” she said. “He is fighting them, and he is wounded and comes back here to die.”

Julian shook his head. “It’s a good try, Claudia, but I don’t buy it,” he said. “If he was fighting, why was the pugio still in its sheath? He should have been holding it in the other hand.”

“Maybe it was a surprise attack,” offered Alex. “He didn’t have time to draw both weapons. The attackers killed him up there and the woman down here, and threw the two bodies together.”

Julian shook his head again. “I don’t think so. We haven’t seen any cuts on the ribs or skulls or neck vertebrae, or defence wounds on the arms. And they weren’t just thrown together. The legs are folded and they’ve both fallen on their right sides. He’s on top, but we haven’t got his right hand yet because it’s partly under her scapula and upper arm.”

“Has Professor Montalcini seen this yet?” asked Alex.

“Yes, he had a quick look earlier,” Julian replied. “He’s sitting on the fence, as usual. He agrees there isn’t any obvious sign of violence but he won’t venture an opinion until he’s had a chance to put all the bones under his microscope. You know Montalcini.”

“What do you think, then? You reckon they died in the eruption?”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure of it. I still can’t work out which stage, though. It’s the way they’re lying. If I didn’t know better I’d say he had his arm around her shoulders when they died. But that just doesn’t seem to fit with people choking their life away on noxious gases. You’re the geophysicist; what do you say?”

Alex shrugged. “It all depends on the particular combination of mephitic vapours sent ahead of the surge. An unreactive gas – carbon dioxide, for example – would cause death by anoxia; they wouldn’t know what hit them. There are others that induce a kind of delirium. They didn’t have to die in agony.”

“Mmm. In that case it could have been the sixth surge.”

They both gazed at the horizon, where a wisp of cloud obscured a ragged conical peak. Vesuvius was just eight kilometres away to the north, and it dominated the landscape. At its feet lay Pompeii , Herculaneum , Oplontis, Boscoreale and Terzigno. Unlike the present site, all had been the subjects of excavation and study for many years.

Claudia got back on her knees and resumed work on the skeletons.

Julian rested a hand on Alex’s shoulder and took him to one side. “When is it you’re actually flying home?” he asked.

“Tuesday. But I’ve got people to see in Naples before then, so I won’t be around much for the next few days. I’ll look in before I go. I take it you’ll be staying to the end, to tie everything up.”

“I don’t know about ‘tie everything up’. Each time I think I’ve got a handle on what happened here, something new crops up. If only there was time, I'd make the trench larger."

“It’s already pretty big, Julian.”

“Not big enough. I’d make it twice this wide and ten times as long.”

“The farmer would go mad.”

“I know.”

“Professor!”

Claudia was pointing down at something. Julian reached her in a couple of long strides and dropped into a crouch. He saw that she’d lifted the scapula of the female skeleton and uncovered the right hand of the soldier. On the fourth digit of the hand was a gold ring.

Claudia held back the scapula while Julian scratched away at the soil and then carefully slid the ring off the bony digit. He and Claudia stood up together and Julian held it out in his palm for all three of them to look at. He poked it around with one finger.

“It’s an intaglio,” said Julian. “I think the stone’s carnelian. Fantastic workmanship, isn’t it, to engrave it with a detailed little head like that? All done without a magnifying glass, too.”

“Is it a portrait of the man?” Claudia asked breathlessly.

Julian took the ring and passed his thumb lightly over it to remove some soil.

“Could be. They often used these things for seals. But it could be a God or an Emperor – it looks a bit like Vespasian, actually. We’ll be able to tell when we’ve cleaned it up properly. Well done, Claudia! Listen, when the team bags this lot up make sure the bones and the scabbards and the ring are recorded separately. I want to take a look at this later.”

“Okay.”

“Hang on, there’s an inscription on the inside.”

The other members of the team had wandered over, crowding around to see the new find. They looked on as he wiped some more soil away and rotated it carefully. “IMP. C. FRATELLUS”, he read.

“He was an emperor!” cried Claudia.

“No. ‘IMP.’ is short for Imperatur. It’s Latin for General.”

He looked thoughtfully at the group, but his gaze seemed to go beyond them. “So, our high-ranking soldier was a General,” he said. “What the hell was he doing up here?”

“Julian,” Alex said slowly. “The name – Fratellus – it’s not that common. Does it ring any bells with you?”

“Fratellus, Fratellus… of course – Salernum! The villa with the great library and scrolls and tablets. We visited it together.”

“It was quite a dynasty, as I remember: advocates, praetors, generals… Later than this, though.”

“Not by much. Beginning of the second century, wasn’t it? That was only twenty or thirty years after all this. But the historians told us there wasn’t any sign of the family in Salernum before that.”

“Maybe this is why. Maybe the family came out of Pompeii .”

Julian looked at Alex and blinked rapidly. “You’re right. The team’s probably still excavating there. We should tell them.”

He turned back to the skeletons, and the broken skull of the soldier.

“You didn’t make it, old boy,” he said softly, “but somebody did, didn’t they? Who was it?”

Copyright © ukapress.com All Rights Reserved.