Man Eater (12 page)

‘Oh really? So why aren’t I in chains?’

I might have no jurisdiction out here, Claudia, but I do have influence. High overhead, clouds began to roll in. ‘That’s the good news,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re under house arrest instead.’

*

With the spring equinox almost upon them and thus as many hours of daylight as dark, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, despite his ride, was far from sleepy…and since Sergius ran his estate along the same lines as any other working farm, what better time to get a feel for the place, now Macer had trooped off to Tarsulae with the corpse? The Prefect had not taken kindly to outside intervention, reminding Orbilio bluntly that his boundaries lay within the walls of Rome and not poring over the remains of the deceased.

‘Unless’, he stressed nastily, ‘I ask for assistance.’

During the long pause that followed, neither man willing to drop his gaze, Orbilio began to sense that Macer was finding his sudden appearance somewhat suspicious, but only when he was forced to confess his was a private investigation, did he begin to grasp the full picture.

As far as the Prefect was concerned, Security Police or not, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio was a suspect. Possibly even an accomplice.

He might not have got far with his examination of Fronto’s corpse, but since Macer daren’t openly accuse him, Orbilio was free to make other investigations. Having already spoken to the Pictors, each the very essence of co-operation, what he wanted now was a good poke around.

The layout was standard—four blocks round a rectangular courtyard with the south wing for guests and the east being the family’s preserve, bedrooms, office, and so on. The west wing had been converted from store rooms into Tulola’s private quarters, with only the kitchens remaining, while terraced barracks walked up the hillside from the north wing to house the displaced servants and stores. Fanning out beyond were the more traditional farm buildings and workshops—all of which would be deserted this time of night. Apart from the security guards, the only person on the loose was young Salvian, and that solely because Macer had taken the rest of his entourage with him to Tarsulae, seconding his nephew to watch the prisoner.

Which was on a par with leaving a newborn infant in charge of a troop of baboons, thought Orbilio. Without even knowing it, she’d given him the slip, heaven help the boy when she put her mind to it.

It was always the same, he reflected cheerfully as he made his way round the crocodile enclosure, a myriad of torches lighting his path. Every encounter with Claudia Seferius spelled trouble with a capital T and sent the blood thundering through his veins like spring torrents. What would life be like without her? His limbs acquired an unaccustomed weightlessness as he pondered whether Vulcan’s own forge could produce as many sparks as that woman!

From the other side of the palisade, a black shape, as long as a man, slid silently into the water.

Orbilio had not expected an effusive wringing of his hand at the announcement of her house arrest, and could thus hardly claim disappointment. Reward came in the tearing of her hair, the release of a thousand trembling curls, and the flashing of her eyes.

There was a second bonus, too. ‘Men like you,’ she had hissed. Initially her words had sent his temper spinning out of control—until a flash of understanding got the better of him.

Spitting, snarling, snapping? This was part and parcel of Claudia’s defence mechanism.

Deep inside she was scared shitless…

To that inner sanctum, unassailable and unapproachable, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio had made a small but significant dent. Winning her trust, however, was going to be a tougher, longer and more complicated business than he reckoned, but I’ll get there, he thought. I’ll get there.

‘Glutton for punishment, aren’t you?’ he said conversationally to the figure coming towards him on the path.

The Etruscan dropped the bale of hay he was carrying and looked up. ‘It’s that time of year,’ he replied, wiping his brow with his sleeve. ‘Another week, maybe two, and a new batch of animals docks from Africa. We need to make room for them.’

For a moment Orbilio forgot the problems that lay ahead with that spitfire Claudia. He had, in the course of his cursory surveillance, seen the wide range of animals in Sergius’ menagerie, had heard about the tricks they could turn. The elephant who stands nonchalantly cross-legged. Seals that balance inflated pigs’ bladders on their noses. Ponies that curtsy. Monkeys strutting round in miniature army uniforms, even with their own monkey standard bearer. What he wouldn’t give to see a show like that! Striped horses, someone said, and leopards that lick hares. Mighty Mars, Pictor was teetering on the brink of a fortune—and so, although you wouldn’t guess from his face, it always looked serious, was the trainer.

‘I thought Sergius was shipping this lot to Rome for the Games?’ he said.

Corbulo grinned ruefully. ‘I don’t know whether he thought leopards would be like horses to train, but the message is starting to filter through.’ He heaved the bundle back on to his shoulder. ‘He’s resigned to missing April, but I’ve told him till I’m simple. You can’t hurry a project like this.’ He set off down the steps whistling under his breath. ‘Nature takes its own course.’

It certainly does around here. Orbilio was skirting the outhouses when strange grunts emanated from the ox stalls and he moved stealthily round to investigate. Was, he wondered, shaking his head in amusement, Tulola double-jointed or did that foot belong to the chap she was with, whose hair looked as though it had been cut with a ploughshare?

As he turned to leave them to it, he thought that in the faint, flickering light of a lantern at the far end of the barn, he detected movement. There it was again. Darting. Furtive. Twice more the shadow quivered and he edged silently round the haybales. He was barely halfway along before loud cries told him Tulola and her lover had climaxed. He heard a shuffle amongst the straw. Picking up the lantern, he raised it slowly. An ass blinked mournfully back.

‘Hey! Who’s down there?’

The Celtish accent was less than welcoming, and Orbilio turned the lamp to his own face. ‘Marcus,’ he shouted back. ‘I thought I heard noises.’

He heard Tulola’s deep chuckle in the darkness and felt, rather than saw, her pick up her tunic and walk naked back to the house.

‘Ach. Is nothing,’ Taranis yelled back, tucking his shirt into his pantaloons. ‘I just checking the stables.’ He slammed the door behind him and Orbilio heard footsteps running to catch up with Tulola.

With the barn to himself, he lifted the bar of the donkey’s stall. Someone had been here—the straw had been trampled where the watcher had waited. Why? Trapped and too embarrassed to excuse themselves? Orbilio crouched to search for clues. Or was there a more sinister purpose? Had the straw been crushed in an effort to crane a head over the barrier?

His mind busy on the peeping Tom, Orbilio stepped back and felt his boot slide on the slippery, shiny straw. Windmilling wildly, one arm knocked the pole as his other cannoned through the stall divider, knocking the lantern from its niche. The dry fodder caught instantly. Scratched and bleeding, Orbilio smothered the flames with his cloak, but it was not fast enough. Eyes rolling, the donkey bucked against the woodwork, terrified by the splintering and the smoke and the blood.

As he lunged to restrain the animal, his foot slipped sideways in something soft and he fell forwards just as the ass bolted out of its stall.

Prostrate on the barn floor, Orbilio stared at its galloping rear end, looked round at the demolition, looked at the sole of his boot and thought, ‘Shit.’

IX

Sulphur pools. The very thought conjures up visions of burning yellow treacle and the smell of eggs that have not fared well in the sunshine, of vulnerable invalids being purged by rich and zealous doctors. From parasites to paralysis, dropsy to dysentery, sufferers have been led like white bulls to the sacrificial altar to stew in the sweat baths and guzzle down jug after jug of crystalline emulsion, coming away relieved not of their symptoms but of several sesterces, but swearing until copper quadrans covered their eyes that they’d never felt fitter in their lives.

Claudia couldn’t wait.

Today, being a public holiday, humankind of every shape and variety had been drawn to this phenomenon of nature, whinging, laughing, splashing, grousing, and every damned one of them putting his heart and soul into it. You could almost sniff the roistering from the top of the hill, and it was as close to heaven as you could get away from Rome. Far from noxious, the air smelled fresh, like the sea, and even the rushing waters were blue, except where they swirled in the channels and over the rocks and thrashed white like the waves in the ocean.

An ox cart had set off at first light taking the women, the food and the servants while the men, apart from Pallas, enjoyed a hearty breakfast of pancakes before saddling up and racing each other like schoolboys. Claudia, who believed the only thing you should put on a horse was a bet, also declined Tulola’s offer to accompany her in her chariot, and opted for a good couple of hours’ gossip with Pallas and his considerable picnic breakfast in a fast, two-wheeled car.

‘Did you hear that Timoleon?’ He fanned away the dust kicked up by the hoofs. ‘“
We Corinthians are born riders
”? Croesus, that man must have a brass neck as well as brass balls.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, look at him! He’s no more Greek than the Emperor.’ Pallas peered at his reflection in a silver serving dish propped against the buckboard.

‘You don’t like him, do you?’

‘Darling girl, I don’t like any of them,’ he replied cheerfully, smoothing his eyebrows into shape.

‘Excellent.’ Claudia snuggled up beside him. ‘Because if you can’t find a good word to say about these people, you’d better pass me a honeycake and tell me all about it.’

As a result, the journey whizzed along. Timoleon, he hold her, was a local boy, born near Tarsulae to farming stock. When the Emperor had diverted the road, his family had merely broadened their horizons and taken up banditry. It was only due to his age that the youngest brigand escaped execution and served five years in gladiator school instead, where he obviously worked hard to suppress his Umbrian accent and where he adopted the name Timoleon. After his sentence was up, he opted for a further three years in which he earned himself the name Scrap Iron as well as the immeasurable riches that went with the crowns.

Interesting, she thought, because not all his opponents would have been skilled fighters. The vast majority were common criminals sentenced to die in the arena. Like his own family, for instance.

Salvian, fearing conspiracy among the giggles, rode his horse closer to the car, the tuneless clanking of his ill-fitting armour drowning the boundary calls of the flycatchers, the courting coos of the turtle doves.

‘You never fancied joining up, then?’ He couldn’t always have been fat, and in his youth Pallas would have stood head and shoulders above the average legionary.

‘Me?’ He took a bite of black pudding and patted his ample girth. ‘You’ll not catch me with steel in my belly, better the surfeit than the sword.’

She thought long and hard about the next question. ‘And you never married?’

‘Oh, I married, I married. In fact, come to think of it,’ he grimaced theatrically, ‘I’m still married.’

Claudia’s affection for the fat man was growing stronger by the minute. ‘What went wrong?’

Pallas laughed, his chins shaking, and he wagged his pudgy finger. ‘You don’t want to know, you really, really don’t.’

With a whoop and a cheer, they overtook the plodding ox cart, resisting the urge to pull faces at Alis and Euphemia, and it was there, on the brow of the hill, that Claudia got her first glimpse of the sulphur pools. You could tell the channel that fed them by a straight line of wild cane stretching back to infinity but which terminated in a crashing, splashing waterfall the height of a cottage. Below these falls, a series of smaller cascades had been carved by the blue torrent to leave a score of shallow saucer-shaped pools, some no wider than a wine press, others the width of a bedroom, before the warm waters became lost in the river they tumbled into.

The same river where, stripped to his loincloth and plastered with grey-black mud, stood the man she most wanted to avoid. Silly cow, she told herself. Still can’t tell the difference between passion and compassion, can you? His eyes weren’t dark with lust last night, he was apologizing because he hadn’t cleared your name.

‘You made good progress.’ He rinsed the health-giving slime off his skin and bounded on to the bank.

‘I have just two words to say to you, Orbilio. One rhymes with pod, the other with toff.’

The gracious bow and twinkling eyes implied he hadn’t heard, but Claudia knew better. To her left, a small cave had been hollowed into the rock, its mouth covered by deerskins and guarded by a dragon, where freeborn women could rent bathing shifts. Claudia tipped the crone and marched inside.

‘Oi! Where d’you think you’re going?’ An aged claw snapped over Salvian’s wrist.

‘I’m ac-c-companying my prisoner.’

‘Not in ’ere, you ain’t. Not unless you’re a girlie.’ To the delight of the crowd, her hand whipped up his tunic and a raucous cackle confirmed her suspicions. ‘Nope.’ As women shrieked and men hooted, Claudia took advantage to duck round the drapes and up the steps of a tiny stone building with just two columns and a weathered old portico. Mingling with the throng, she became as anonymous as the next woman—unlike certain young men in full military uniform who stuck out like sore thumbs. Very, very sore thumbs.