Read Online Funeral Music by Morag Joss - Free Book Online Page A

its adoption into a Roman family. Had the young slave mother died? Or had the child simply been taken from her, becoming the property of the childless couple who owned the mother? Perhaps she, poor thing, had given up her baby in order to secure its freedom. Perhaps the child had been fathered by the Roman master. There was no way of knowing from the coffin lids which had so long ago closed over these people, and how little it mattered anyway. The baby had died before its second birthday. The suffering of these dead was over and now two thousand years had passed to quiet the bereaved. In all that time the sacred spring, never ceasing, had poured forth how many gallons?
    She looked round mildly, hearing as if for the first time the background rush of water. She allowed herself to be drawn away from the coffins towards the source of the noise. It was coming from the Sacred Spring overflow which gushed straight out of the wall about twelve feet away, at the end of a wide tunnel-like corridor. Sara stopped and looked down its darkness to the light at the end. The corridor led to a railing just in front of the overflow, which formed the only barrier between the spectator and the thousands of gallons of hot water that daily poured out of the wall. Under the spell of the sound, she walked towards the railing as the rush of water tumbled out at eye level and fell vertically for five feet before hitting rock below. She could see how the water slid in a deep, rusty sheet towards her and disappeared through a rough grille at a point directly below her feet. From the railing’s edge she could almost, by leaning over the railing, have placed her hand in the hot powerful flow of water, if she were stupid in that kind of way; it would be easy to overbalance and tumble onto the rocks. This overflow arrangement, an arched brick hole in the wall, fed the water into the drain which carried it beneath the floor back to the main drain and eventually out to the river. The Romans could surely not have imagined that it would still be working, and people still marvelling at its brilliance, two thousand years after they built it.
    The gauzy steam rising all around had basted every contour of the surrounding wall with mineral-heavy droplets, laying down particle by particle a bronzy, gingery crust round the brick mouth from which the water exploded, apparently stained with gold, as if from a bottomless reservoir of riches. Hidden spotlights played on the tumbling flood as it burst forth and bathed it with the luminosity of a miracle. Sara approached it cautiously, as she would an altar. Arresting as the sight was, the crash of water upon her ears was yet more stupefying. Breathing and tasting became the same thing in the roaring, tin-edged air. Sara felt the grip of dampness underfoot as she went on, silent and staring. She reached the rail. Then. Looking down. And the rush of the water almost drowned the scream, but in the orange light her head jerked up suddenly and she turned away. The water flowed on. But she had to turn back. Her eyes travelled down again into the wet glistening pool below, where the body lay. It was so large and so dark in that small, bright space, in all that flowing, tumbling water. Those legs and arms, they were going all the wrong way; spider limbs: it was a huge, drenched, dead spider. She tried not to look again at the face. The water flowed on. She looked again at the poor, stiff, dead face with its mouth open and soundless, while the water ran over it and over it like clear, flowing glass. It was all wrong, that face, which yesterday she had thought was Matteo’s. Matteo’s poor, dead, empty face. Move him. We must get him out of there. We must stop that face looking like that. Sara staggered away from the railing, and as her hands went up to cover her eyes, a hurrying, dark shape loomed at her out of the dark and enveloped her, as she stumbled, in its arms.
    NUMBNESS DESCENDED over the next few hours. Sara could recall