Widow's Pique (19 page)

The sudden switch in conversation caught her completely off her guard, and she wiped an invisible dribble of sauce from her mouth to buy time.

'Much depends on what happens when I meet him, I suppose.'

'Really?' The old man glanced at Salome and frowned. 'I thought it was all cut and dried—'

'More wine, Silas?' Salome asked, silencing him with a smile.

Claudia pretended not to notice. Instead, she rested her elbows on the table and leaned forward.

'What do you make of the King, Silas?'

'Don't have an opinion either way, love.' But the old man refused to meet her gaze. 'I'm too old to concern myself with politics. My job's pruning apple trees and fanning out the peaches, making sure the apricots don't catch the blight.'

'Now, I find that surprising,' she said, spearing a prawn floating in rich garlic sauce. 'Because if the King gets his way and does stamp out Salome's reforms, your job, as indeed everyone else's on this farm, will go. Doesn't that bother you, Silas?' She beamed a sunny smile round the entire group. 'Doesn't it bother any of you?'

'It bothers
me
.'

'Lora, please don't start on that again,' Salome said firmly. 'How many times do I have to tell you, your father-in-law has no jurisdiction over me or my land. My husband was given this farm by the Emperor. I'm a Roman citizen, I inherited it legally, I retain legal title, I pay my taxes, I worship Roman gods, and, dear me, it's no one else's business what I get up to on my own property. Am I correct, Claudia?'

And you have a bust of the Emperor on display,' she said sweetly.

Salome must be slipping: she'd missed Augustus off the list - or rather, script. Well prepared and well rehearsed, the widow's mistake was to quote it verbatim, which draws more attention,

not less. However, the most interesting point was that, last time, she used the same script about Rome!

What I do with my land and who I employ is my business, not some busybody's in a city, who has never set foot on this peninsula.

Now she'd turned it on its head to use it against the Histrian King, and suddenly Claudia realized there was another death to add to her list. Stephanus, Salome's soldier husband, who would have been - what? - just forty-four when he died.

'Excuse me.'

She'd just noticed a creature little more than a child fingering the edge of one of her richly embroidered flounces. The overlap for the girdle would look ridiculous when worn in high society, the girl being at least a handspan shorter than Claudia, but her hair was thick, dark and wavy, and once tied up Roman-style with a few silver brooches to reflect the torchlight, who among the escorts, eating and drinking away happily at the gate, would notice the difference? The girl proved not only a willing accomplice, she was the envy of her young Spanish peers and, seated at the margin of the May Feast, no one at Salome's table had the least interest in what happened to a bit of washing draped over a drying frame, not even frecklefaced Mo. Thus, invisible in her working tunic, Claudia worked her way back to the table.

'Don't you think you're imagining this, me darling?' Naim was saying.

'No, I bloody don't,' she heard Tobias growl. 'That bitch is a spy.'

Spy? Claudia stepped two paces back into the shadows.
Bitch . . . ?

'Surely she's far too high-status to be a spy?' Bonni countered.

'And that's the beauty of it,' Tobias snapped. 'They think we couldn't possibly suspect the King's would-be bride.'

'Like the Divine Julius's wife, she'd be above reproach, you mean?'

'Exactly, Bonni.'

'Sounds a bit far-fetched, lad.' Silas added his voice of reason to the argument. 'If they wanted to send a spy, they'd have put a girl in undercover.'

'They've already tried that once, me lovely.' Naim rested a plump hand on the old man's arm and patted gently. 'Remember that little Cretan girl, the one with the squint?'

Silas buried his head in his hands and groaned. 'We shouldn't have let our guard down there,' he said. 'We should have sent her back.'

The hairs on Claudia's neck started to prickle. There was a cold chill down her spine.

'Well, we didn't and that's one spy they won't be seeing again,' Tobias said with disturbing finality.

'What is you suggesting for Claudia, Tobi?' The little laundress was close to tears.

'What do you bloody think?' Lora snapped back. 'We keep on being nice to her, show her anything and everything the nosy bitch wants to see, and let the blushing bride think we're stupid. And then . . .'

When she snapped her fingers, Claudia's knees turned to aspic. If only she'd had a phial of the sedative she'd slipped the little woodpecker the other night, she'd use it now to drug the guards and make good her escape. Her head began to pound. Croesus, why hadn't she done that in the first place? Why complicate the issue by playing bluff and doublebluff? But this was no time for recriminations. Right now she needed to—

'My dear, I haven't thanked you for the good work you've done helping Broda to recover from the trauma of seeing Nosferatu.'

How long had Salome been standing there, she wondered. And why hadn't she realized before that the Syrian girl was missing from the group around the table?

'It's only jacks and hopscotch,' she said, delighted there was not a hint of quiver in her reply.

'Yes, I know, but her mother tells me that Broda's so exhausted these days, she falls asleep almost at once.' Salome's

smile was as ingenuous as they come. 'I can see I'll have to give up dispensing medicines and open a gymnasium instead.'

'You'd still need your remedies,' Claudia retorted. 'Probably more so, after all those wrenched joints and torn muscles.'

'Then we'll have to go into business together. You mix 'em, I'll fix 'em - great Marduk, what's that?'

Her smile had frozen into a death rictus. Claudia followed her horrified gaze, just as screams filled the courtyard.

'It's burning,' someone cried.

'The whole farm's on fire!'

'The bastards!' Salome hissed. 'The absolute bastards. This time they're out to destroy me!'

But even as she spoke, she was racing off to organize chains of leather buckets to douse the flames, issuing orders for the release of the livestock from pens, telling her Amazons to forget the crops in the fields, look to drenching the hives, to protecting the grain store, to making sure they covered their hands to avoid burns, to putting damp cloths over their noses and mouths.

Now was the time. While the Histrian chauvinists told Salome what they thought of her practices once and for all by destroying everything on the farm in one sweep, this was the time to sneak out.

Claudia had already established her hideaway.

The earliest inhabitants of the Histrian peninsula were hunter-gatherers, who'd braved the preponderance of bears, lynx and wolves to make their homes in the hundreds of caverns that pitted the richly forested limestone hills. These caves afforded more than adequate protection from predators and the elements, penetrating the rock by anything from a hundred feet to as much as a mile, where dripping stalactites made strange shapes and the cavernous halls still echoed with the moans of their ghosts.

But as the hunter-gatherers became farmers, so the caves were abandoned as dwellings and used as animal pens or for storage. Over time, the magnificent paintings on the walls

faded, pelts over the entrances shredded and fell, bones crumbled to dust, to be blown away on the wind.

But the farmers did not entirely forsake the past. The new homes they built for themselves in the valleys retained many of the hallmarks of their previous existence. They still used stone to protect themselves from the weather and carnivorous marauders. Great flat slabs of stone, laid in small, defensive circles which gradually narrowed as the walls grew until they ended up with a sturdy grey cone with a hole in the roof to let the light in and to let out the smoke from their hearth.

It was in one of these ancient, long-abandoned beehives that Claudia had desposited a basket of food, a couple of thick blankets and one very grumpy cat in a cage. This had necessitated a series of furtive manoeuvres because she'd needed to completely hoodwink her escort, but praise be to Juno, the fires wouldn't touch Drusilla out there.

Amazonia was in chaos. The whole farm had turned into a choking mass of swirling smoke, the flames leaping and dancing in joyful abandon as they crackled and spat and hitchhiked on the breeze, spreading new fires to new fields, new incendiaries to new buildings. Screams rang into the night, but worse still were the laughter and taunts in the Histrian tongue. Dark figures flitted about with torches, setting fire to whatever they could - goose grass, fodder stores, farm implements. Everything burned.

Amazonia has stirred up a lot of trouble round here,
Mazares had said, the night he bumped into Salome.
If she doesn't change her ways soon, something terrible is going to happen. I know it.

Claudia remembered the anguish behind his velvety eyes, and knew that the anguish was genuine. Bile rose in her throat. Suspicious of Salome and her farm, someone (the King? Pavan?) had sent a young slave girl undercover to learn what went on here. That girl had never returned. The anguish in Mazares's eyes had been genuine, sure - but only for his fellow conspirators. Claudia felt nothing but contempt for them all. Long may Amazonia burn.

She was halfway across the meadow when she noticed the pigsty. No longer fat, calm and contentedly pregnant, the spotted sow was squealing in terror as the thatch on her roof crackled and spat. The pig was new. The Amazons had dealt with situations like this before, although never on such a vicious and co-ordinated scale, and they were attacking the blazes the best that they could. But the pig was a recent arrival. No one, goddammit, had given a thought to the new sty . . . 'Shit!'

Changing tack, Claudia raced across to the smouldering building, the screams of the trapped sow tearing talons into her heart. She could hear her crashing into the walls to escape flames that licked higher and higher, and knew that each collision meant a dead piglet. Terrified of not reaching her in time, Claudia's skin fused with the searing hot metal bolt that fastened the gate. She recoiled in pain and anger, and the pig charged past, shrieking in panic, her snout bloody and raw.

'Ey!'

From nowhere, a hand clamped round Claudia's waist. It smelled of cheap wine and stale sweat, tinged with arousal and smoke.

'Ja bim mir un Amazoni!'

'Get off me, you fat bastard!'

Too late she remembered Mazares's other complaint. That they were sick of burning rapists round here . . .

'Let go of me, you oaf!'

She thought she could shake him off. She honestly thought that, between her slum heritage and her dancer's training, she could shake her attacker off. Maybe she could. But he was calling out in his thick, guttural tongue words that she remembered from the crew on the galley. Some were what one might call basic. Another was the crew's term for Drusilla.
Vildkatz.
Wildcat. A second figure emerged from the swirling smoke. His laughter was deep as his arms lashed around her, forcing her to her knees.

'Dal Dom het un vildkatz heer, alfid!'

His erection pressed into her spine when the first monster

ripped her tunic away with both hands. Squirming, kicking, writhing, twisting, the more Claudia struggled, the more the bulge on her spine jolted in arousal, but she was not giving up. They were not going to take her like this. Never!

'Ayiee!'

A head butt in the first monster's groin sent him retching on his knees into the ditch, but her spunk only fired the second man's hunger.

'Dom vetta spiel, vildkatzi?'

You want to play, little wildcat?

Gripping her neck in his elbow, he squeezed.

Hetta spiel!'

Then let's play.

He knew exactly how hard to press. Not hard enough that his victim passed out, there was no pleasure in that. He pressed on her windpipe with exactly the right amount of pressure, while he roared with laughter at her helpless flailing. Around her, screams and shouts filled the bitter night air, and the roof of the pigsty collapsed with a crash. With tears of frustration spurting down her cheeks, she felt him unbuckling his pantaloons. Gagged as his naked erection pressed against her. Smelled the stench of his sweat.

'You'll pay for this, you bastard,' she gurgled.

His reply was to hitch up her skirt.

'I'll find you. I'll hunt you down if it's the last thing I do, and you'll die screaming for mercy.'

'Da! Spiel, spiel, mir pritti vildkatz!'

Mighty Mars, Sacker of Cities, hear me! Make him writhe in the Pit of Eternal Fire for this. Make sure he never sails to the Lands of the Blessed to walk with his ancestors in the Elysian Fields. Let the Waters of Forgetfulness never be his to drink.

'Merr, merr, mir pritti vildkatz!'

His breath was hot in her ear as his hand yanked at her loin-cloth. Then . . .

'Dom vetta spiel, huh?'