Free Vita Brevis by Ruth Downie Page B

screech came not from the nails, but from his wife.

12
    The only person who was not disturbed by the opening of the barrel was the man inside it, because he must have been dead since sometime yesterday. Even Ruso, who was as accustomed to dealing with the end of life as Tilla was with the beginning, was shaken. Not that the sight was gory: The man’s eyes were closed and the cropped blond head rested against the wooden staves as if he had crept in there for a sleep. But who curled up naked in a barrel and then nailed a lid on from the outside?
    Tilla was gripping Ruso’s arm as if she was afraid she might faint. He put his hand over hers and said, “It’s all right,” although if she had asked him exactly what was all right, he would not have been able to answer. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “Go and sit down.”
    Even as he said it, strangers drawn by her screams were gathering around the barrel and there were fresh cries of horror. He said, “Does anyone know who it is?” but nobody seemed to be listening. The crowd’s exclamations drew new onlookers from the street, and now it seemed most of the drinkers from the bar on the corner were pushing their way forward to get a look so that they too could recoil in shock.
    “Go and sit down,” he urged Tilla, but instead she released her grip on his arm and bent to retrieve the lid.
    “We must show respect!” She was trying to place the lid back in its original position, but the loosened nails snagged in the ends of the staves and other hands grabbed at it to hold it up.
    Voices were demanding, “Let me see!” and “Is it anyone we know?” and “Ugh, these flies!” and then he heard the woman from the bar with “Let me through!”
    He needed to take charge here before his new workplace became the center of a street show even more distasteful than the one he had witnessed this morning. “Stand back!” he ordered. “Back, everybody.”
    One or two people began to move but Sabella, who had forced her way to the front, placed both hands on the rim of the barrel and bent to peer at what could be seen of the man’s face. “It’s all right,” she announced, straightening up. “It’s nobody from ’round here.”
    “Stand back!” Ruso urged again, not for the first time frustrated by the inability of civilians to obey a simple order. To Sabella he added, “You shouldn’t touch anything or breathe the air. You don’t know what killed him.”
    Sabella let go of the barrel as if it were hot, and hid her hands behind her back. “You heard the doctor! Don’t all stand there gawping. It’s nobody we know anyway.”
    She would have made a promising centurion.
    As the crowd shuffled back, Ruso squatted to position the lid over the nail holes. Then he retrieved the fire iron that Tilla had dropped, and used the end to hammer everything back into position.
    “Nothing to see!” Sabella declared to the disappointed onlookers. “You can all go home!” To Ruso and Tilla, she said, “I’ll get my husband. He’ll have to see to it.”
    The crowd began to disperse, several of them pausing to point out the barrel to people who had arrived too late to see anything.
    Suddenly realizing what they might be thinking, Ruso announced loudly to nobody in particular, “It was here when we got here!” One or two people turned to look, and he knew that nothing he said would make much difference: The doctor’s emblem beside him on the wall, the stains on the leather apron, and the unlucky man in the barrel had combined to produce a very unfortunate first impression.

13
    The Vicus Cuprius was near the amphitheater, which was just as well. Ruso, as distracted as any man might be whose wife had just found a naked corpse inside a barrel, found it hard to concentrate on where he was going.
    The site was barely more than leveled rubble crammed between two soaring apartment blocks. Someone was busy adding to a complicated web of twine that was pegged out on the ground.