A yoke of oxen under the foreman and two subordinates drew the barge along the fifteen-mile towpath, while a helmsman guided it from the stern. Night had already fallen, but the process of feeding the city could not be interrupted by the cycles of the sun. One of the teamsters walked ahead with a rushlight—another firefly in the continuous chain of barges plodding toward Rome to be unloaded and then to drift back to Portus on sweeps and the current.
“They were singing,” the foreman said. “The sailors were. There’d been some wine in the manifest too, you know.” He glanced from Lycon to Vonones as they walked down the ramp to either side of him. The beastcatcher’s face was impassive, the merchant’s screwed up in an expression between distaste and nausea. Neither offered much sympathy for what the teamster thought of as his personal ordeal.
“Well, that stopped, the singing did, after a while, but that didn’t mean much,” the foreman continued. They were approaching the barge itself, and he had to keep talking to remind himself that it was daylight and he was alive.
“It looks easy enough,” the foreman babbled on, “but it’s a damned long trip, as you’d know if you ever followed a team of oxen. Usually some of the folks we give a lift to, they’ll walk along part of the way and talk to us. Well, this lot didn’t, but we had the escaped tiger and that African lizard-ape to talk about, me and the boys.”
“Where did you hear about that?” snapped Vonones, who now understood how the authorities had known whose door to come knocking on.
“Why, wasn’t it all over the towpath?” the teamster foreman replied in injured amazement. “There was a caravan of beasts pulled up not a quarter mile from the river, and the drivers with nothing else to do but come talk to us on the path. And don’t you know how slow an ox walks, especially when one of the yoke’s got a sore on his shoulder for that lazy bastard Nearchos in the stables not doing his job?”
Vonones swore. So much for loyalty—and the sanctity of a bribe. When he found out who had talked. . . . But first Vonones knew he would have to survive this day. He didn’t like to think about the odds.
Lycon jumped onto the barge, balancing for a moment on the thick gunwale that acted as a fender while the vessel was being towed.
The foreman turned away. “We’d been talking, me and the boys,” he went on, in a voice an octave higher than that of a moment before, “about what might have happened if they hadn’t killed that tiger, and if it had gone for our team, you know? And what the Master’d do to us, no matter it wasn’t any fault of ours, dear gods.”
“You say there were a dozen sailors aboard when you left Portus?” Lycon interrupted.
“Something like that,” the foreman agreed. He faced around again slowly, but he kept his eyes on Lycon’s face rather than on the interior of the barge. “Can’t really swear to it, you know. And there was Ursus on the steering oar.”
“Can’t really swear to it now,” said Lycon grimly, as he walked along the gunwale.
There was no question in his mind as to what had caused the carnage. Nothing else could possibly have been quick enough. There were approximately six bodies in the bow, forward of the upright ranks of jars. Lycon was not sure that he could have duplicated their wounds with two hours and an axe, but these men had been killed before any of them could shout and alert the teamsters on the towpath. One man’s chest had been hollowed out like a milkweed pod at summer’s end. Another torso was untouched except for splashes of blood, but the head and all four limbs had been excised from it. The skin of the chest was smooth and an even tan—that of a healthy boy, perhaps no older than Alexandros.
For an instant, the thought of his son drove immediate concerns from Lycon’s mind. Then the hunter glanced up toward the levee and the closed palanquin and the glowering guards. No, this couldn’t wait.