Her customers were mostly naked. Clothing not burned off by the fire had been stolen by looters or fallen off along the way. Anna attempted to restore dignity to the deceased by draping their midsections with whatever cloth was available.

She came to a man with the face of a boy. Which row to put him in? She peered down to look more closely. He had gray hair on his chest and scalp but had the cheeks of a baby – not even the peach fuzz of an adolescent. She took off a glove and cupped his chin with her palm. It was as smooth as plaster. The whole face slipped a bit sideways and Anna jumped back in shock.

It was a mask! She pulled it all the way off, solving the boy-man mystery. The dead person was an old man. But there was a new mystery. Why was he wearing a mask? Someone had gone to a lot of effort to fashion it. It was similar to a funeral mask, made of wax and tinted to match the skin color of the old guy, with the lips just a shade more pink. The eyes were closed, avoiding the challenge of making eyeholes look realistic. It even had life-like eyebrows and lashes. Anna turned the mask over. The craftsmanship was superb. The old man’s big nose was leaning a bit to the side like it had been broken years before, and the mask reflected the same nose.

Anna ran after the litter bearers and asked them where they had found the latest batch of bodies. One of them mentioned a particular district and remembered it was a bit odd. They’d found the dead man sitting down, propped against a column in the market. It was out in the open in an area that had been cleared of corpses the previous day.

Probably most slaves would have simply shrugged and returned to work, but Anna had been born a very curious child and was now a very curious 22-year-old woman. Her mistress, Camilia, would not get angry if she left her post to report this strange affair. She ran back to the bodies and pulled Masked Man out of the row and off to the side. Then she grabbed the mask and jogged to the nurses’ station.