第7章 The Fall from the Wharf

The porter was found at dawn, under the western walk of the Ash Wharf, where the boards ran out over the water and there was nothing below but the brown river. His name was Onesimus, and he had been one of the men who worked the steelyard, one of the two who lifted the sacks onto the hook and read the arm. He had been a strong man and a quiet one, and the story that went round the wharf by the second hour was that he had been drinking and had lost his footing on the wet boards, which was the story that went round every wharf in the city whenever a porter died, and which was true often enough that no one had to work hard to believe it. Menophilus came to the house before the fourth hour, which he was not supposed to do, and stood in the doorway of the little room with his face the color of wet ash. "Onesimus is dead," he said. "I heard. The watch came by the market." "He did not fall." Her brother's voice was low and it shook. "I saw him yesterday, and he had not been drinking, and he told me—" He stopped and looked behind him, down the corridor, at the shadows of the house. "Come in and close the door," Faustilla said. He came in and closed the door, and stood with his back against it. "He told me he would not do it anymore," Menophilus said. "He was the one who read the arm. He was the one who had to say the weight aloud, and he had been saying the weight that the beam gave him, and the beam gave him a false weight, and he knew it, and he could not stand it. He told me he was going to go to the granary keeper and ask to be moved off the beam. He told me that yesterday." "Did he go?" "I do not know. He is dead, so he does not say." Menophilus put his hand over his mouth for a moment and then took it away. "They will call it the river. Faustilla, I have seen the boards. The boards under the western walk are nailed fast, and they were not wet, and the rail is waist-high. A man does not fall over a waist-high rail onto his back without a hand to help him." Faustilla was already reaching for her cloak. They walked down to the wharf together, and by the time they reached it the body had been carried to the porters' yard and laid on a bier of planks under a lean-to, because the watch did not take a dead slave or freedman anywhere; there was nowhere to take them to. The yard had filled with the men who had worked with him, standing in a loose ring with their hands at their sides, and among them, kneeling by the bier, was a woman with a leather satchel and a plain tunic and the unhurried hands of one who has touched many dead people and does not flinch. Faustilla knew her at once. Albia was a medica, a woman of no great fame and considerable practice, who kept a room on the Aventine and was called out for the poor because the poor could pay her in the only coin that was always good among them, which was need. She had set Faustilla's brother's broken finger once, and had refused payment, and had left with the single remark that a man who works with his hands should learn to keep them. Albia looked up as Faustilla came near. "You are the steward of the Otacilian house," she said. "The one who counts." "I am." "Then count this." Albia turned the dead man's head slightly, with two fingers, and showed the back of the skull above the collar, where the hair was clotted with blood, and beneath the hair a small, straight wound, no bigger than a coin, with clean edges. "He fell on the water and the water does not make a wound like that. The water makes no wounds at all. A rail makes no wounds. A nail makes a ragged wound. This was made by a thing that was flat and heavy, and it was made from behind, and he did not turn to meet it, because a man who is facing the blow has his hands up, and his hands are down." The ring of porters had gone very quiet. "Say nothing of this," one of them said, an older man with a rope-scarred neck. "Say nothing, medica. If they hear you say it, we will all be in the river. We are not citizens. We are the men who carry, and when a man who carries dies, the river takes him, and that is the whole of the law." "I say nothing to the watch," Albia said. "I say it to the woman who counts." Faustilla knelt by the bier. She looked at the wound, and at the dead man's hands, which were the hands of a porter, thick and split and calloused, and she thought of what he had been about to say, which was the plain truth, that the beam was false. Whoever had killed him had killed the only honest part of a dishonest machine, which is the part that has to speak. She stood and took Menophilus by the arm and drew him out of the yard. "You will not go back on the boards," she said. "I have to work. If I do not work, they will look at me." "Then work, but do not be near the beam, and do not be alone, and do not go down to the western walk at any hour for any reason, and if a man asks you to carry a sack anywhere but in the open, say no." She held his arm hard. "Say no, and take the beating, and live. Do you hear me?" "I hear you." He pulled free, but he did not go; he stood there with his head down, and then he said the thing that was really in him. "Onesimus was going to tell someone in the office. There is a man in the grain office. That is what he said. He was going to tell him, and yesterday he did not come to the yard, and today he is dead, so either he told him and the man is part of it, or he never told him and the man is not." "Which man?" Faustilla said. Menophilus named him, and the name was one she had seen on the tallies, in the neat hand of a clerk, beside the word that meant received. The name was Granius. ---