Widow's Pique (22 page)

'The girl is a sickly little thing, prone to bouts of illness that confine her to her bed, but this only binds the relationship between mother and daughter. They become closer than ever.'

She swallowed.

'One day, the family set off from Gora to propitiate the

spirits of the lake. I don't have all the details, but it's something to do with creatures like the Sirens—'

'Ruskali,'
Marcus said. 'Beautiful maidens who inhabit lakes and rivers, but whose loveliness disguises their real purpose, which is to lure victims into the water, where they hold them under until they drown and then feast off their flesh.'

Wherever you turn on this wretched peninsula, there are ghouls, vampires and demons.

'Well, that's what happened to Delmi's daughter,' she said. 'Her body was washed up many weeks later and, superstitious to the end, the Histri still believe the
Ros—?'

'Ruskali!

'—Ruskali
got them. As far as Delmi was concerned, it was irrelevant, of course. Her beloved daughter was dead and by all accounts, the mother's spirit died alongside.'

A hand covered her own and squeezed gently.

'Weak lungs are inherited, Claudia.'

She snatched her hand away and wondered why the horizon had blurred.

'Anyway,' she said briskly. 'A couple of years pass and Delmi's son marries an elfin creature called Lora, a beautiful child with waves of walnut hair that cascade down to her waist, and whether Lora reminds Delmi of her dead child I have no idea, but Delmi perks up and the feeling, apparently, is mutual. Lora adores her mother-in-law in return.'

As the sun moved round, lifting the shade from the rocky cove, Claudia turned her face towards it.

'Then, surprise surprise, her only surviving child is out hunting when he's disembowelled by one of his own mastiffs and, racked with grief, Delmi takes her own life by swallowing hemlock. Or so the story goes.'

Orbilio sat up and turned her round to face him.

'Claudia, I'm well aware of all this—'

'Oh, and then the King gets bouts of sickness, as well.'

'Listen to me. Just because one family experiences one tragedy after another doesn't mean it isn't just that. Tragedy.'

He swiped his hands through his unruly mop.

'It happens. It happens all the time, and it happens more often than most people can cope with. Claudia, Delmi isn't alone in ending her own life that way. Hundreds of people beaten down by disaster do the same thing every day, because, like it or not, the gods don't dole out life fairly, and they certainly don't distribute joy and catastrophe evenly. Sometimes one just has to accept the obvious: that an accident is an accident is an accident.'

'It makes me sick to my stomach to agree with you, but for once, my dear Marcus, I do. There are times when one has to accept the inevitable . . .'

She stood up and paddled out to her knees, careless of the salt water saturating her robe.

'. . . but this is not one of those times. Orbilio, I saw a man die. I saw a funny little man who couldn't stop sneezing have a noose thrown round his neck and I watched helplessly while someone throttled the life out of him.'

Every time she closed her eyes at night, she saw his heels drumming impotently against the rocks. Every time she opened her eyes in the morning, she felt the cold thud of failure, that she had not saved his life.

'Raspor would not have been killed if those accidents were just that. He was silenced to prevent the King hearing his evidence, and even though I suspect that evidence was flimsy in the extreme, his killer wasn't prepared to take that chance.'

'Do you seriously think the King can't put two and two together by himself?'

'Maybe he's too close. Maybe it needs someone from outside, someone with objectivity, as a certain little priest lost his life to point out, to see the absurdity of what's happened. Correction, of what's
still
happening. The illness that prevented him from coming to Rome. Has anyone questioned that to his face? Or asked how well he knows Salome, and whether there's a connection between the lovely widow's visits and these inherited weak lungs?'

She waded back to the shore, anger blazing from every pore now.

'Ask yourself, Marcus, who might make that connection -and if the answer is, well, maybe a
doctor
might make that connection, you might find that your next question is, where
is
the royal physician? Followed by, do I actually believe that ridiculous story about him bunking off for a bit of rumpy pumpy with a burly boat builder? The same boat builder, incidentally, who disappeared the night a small girl called Broda was traumatized by the sight of Nosferatu strangling his victim. Oh, and don't forget while you're asking yourself all these questions, Orbilio, that Broda was woken in the first place by the sounds of whispering in her own house. And if you happen to conclude that one of those whisperers was her uncle, the very same boat builder, who lived with them, then you might also conclude that he, too, was silenced to prevent him speaking out.'

'By Mazares?'

Claudia wrung the drips out of her skirt.

'It was a full moon the night Broda caught Nosferatu in action. Admittedly she only saw a play of shadows on the wall - a fluke of fate which I know damn well saved that child's life - but allowing for the distortions from the moon, there's one aspect that Broda's adamant about. The head. Nosferatu's oversized, lolling head.'

In other words, an aureole of thick and glossy curls that fell down to his shoulders, the kind that would mislead the eye in the dark.

'Actually,' he said, his eyes still closed and his hands making what looked like a very comfortable pillow on the rock, 'there are two things Broda was adamant about. The head was one, but the other was the hands. She insists Nosferatu's hands were giant claws, and I'm afraid you can't pass one off as fact and dismiss the other as the product of an overactive imagination.'

Maybe. Maybe not. That wasn't the point.

'You obviously know that Mazares is a widower,' she said, slipping on a pair of pale grey leather sandals. 'Now, whether you believe he's a cold-blooded murdering bastard or not, my advice is not to stand too close to him, Orbilio.'

She marched off up the springy path towards the town. 'People around him have a habit of dying, and that's not an overactive imagination, my investigative friend. That is fact.'

The folk on the mainland had no truck with building houses out of stone. What was the point, with so much timber at their fingertips and the climate so benign? Instead, they built cosy homesteads out of wood, weaving sacred hazel between the structural supports and thatching their roofs with rain-repellent straw. In true Histrian tradition, pine was used for the flooring, from which one trunk was carved into a bear's head, though sometimes a boar or a wolf, from which rose the pedestal for the family table, usually protected by a shaggy, woollen cloth.

Bowl-shaped ovens covered by a terracotta lid sat on grids over the charcoals. Inside, rich stews of hare, boar or pheasant simmered away in metal pots, or maybe a lamb roasted, with little flour cakes baking alongside. Invariably, part of the family pig would end up hanging over the hearth as a smoked ham, rubbing shoulders with lovely, round, village-churned cheeses. Not much taken with fripperies, Histrian homes would still boast a variety of terracotta plaques nailed to their timbers, sometimes painted, sometimes embossed, sometimes both, and rows of fine red beakers, reflective of the Histrian soil, dangled from hooks on the walls.

It was one such longhouse, belonging to the senior village elder, as it happened, that had been converted into a courthouse for the day. Seated in one of the wicker chairs arranged around the yard, Nosferatu followed the proceedings with indifference.

In the olden days, soothsayers dispensed justice with bundles

of willow rods, interpreting the fall of their willows to determine a man's innocence or guilt. Nowadays, the three soothsayers had been replaced by three elders, who would each form an independent opinion then lay their bundles north to south (guilty) or east to west (not) on the ground. It worked on a majority verdict and, for extreme offences, either the King or his representative would preside. Although serious, these crimes were not considered extreme - the way treason, for example, would be, or indeed any other crimes that impacted upon the kingdom as a whole, such as smuggling, tax evasion and fraud - although the elders felt they'd got the best of both worlds today in inviting officialdom to observe proceedings from the sidelines. Especially since the crime had been perpetrated on Roman soil!

On the other hand, they were enormously relieved that the investigator attached to the Security Police had declined to attend. They'd fully expected this member of their distant, absent and arrogant ruling class to come poking his nose where it didn't belong, and the fact that he hadn't was, the elders felt, entirely of the King's making. Who else could have persuaded Rome to let them get on with it?

'Long live the King!' the senior elder shouted. Quickly remembering to add, And long live the Emperor Augustus!' as his gaze alighted on Salome's red locks.

Through the open door of the longhouse, Nosferatu could see beds covered with bright woollen blankets woven by the womenfolk during the long, dark days of winter, and a variety of baskets plaited with multi-coloured withies swung from the ceiling beams. One type was for collecting fruit and berries. Another for winnowing the grain. Yet another for transporting faggots on their backs.

The wicker chair creaked as Nosferatu fought cramp, but people were too engrossed in the trial to notice.

Caught red-handed, the prisoners could only hang their heads in shame as bundle after bundle went down north to south. Their opinions on Amazonia cut no ice with the spectators or the judges. For a farming community, the

destruction of another man's harvests and the killing of his livestock was an abomination where neither youth nor drunkenness was accepted as a legitimate excuse, and as their mothers sobbed and their fathers stood white-lipped in silence, sentence was passed upon the arsonists.

'It grieves me to pronounce this particular punishment,' the senior elder said solemnly. 'But the men who stand before us today have been castigated before by this court. They were fined and they were shamed, but clearly they did not learn their lesson, and therefore we, the judges, have no option.'

Silence descended on the yard.

'It is our conclusion that you, sir' - he pointed to the only prisoner who had sneered consistently at the proceedings -'you are the ringleader in this latest outrage. Your bigoted views have inflamed those with weak characters, influenced their judgement and incited them to commit acts they would previously have held back from. For this, and to set an example that we will not tolerate anarchy, we have no choice but to sentence you to beheading. The execution will take place at midnight. May you make your peace with Perun while you prepare.'

He turned his hard gaze on the others.

'This village does not condone corruption nor will it tolerate the corruptible. I sentence each of you to four years of shunning . . .'

Shunned? A collective gasp rang through the crowd. Thrown out of the village, their names never spoken, for four years it would be as though they'd ceased to exist!

'Four years of shunning,' the senior elder repeated, 'in the hope that you use this time wisely to reflect and repent.'

And how. With no recourse to justice if things went wrong, and banned from sacrifices that would purify their wretched souls, the perpetrators would also be forced to live with the knowledge that anyone caught speaking to them during this time would be cripplingly fined. That meant their wives, their children, their mothers, their brothers, and, with the loss of their breadwinner, at least two families faced penury, resulting

in the women being forced to divorce in favour of a husband who could provide and their children being passed to him for adoption.

Nosferatu blotted out the sobbing. Bastards should have bloody well considered the consequences before they started torching everything in sight, not snivelling afterwards, throwing themselves on the court's mercy and begging forgiveness like a bunch of craven cowards. Weren't giving a lot of thought to the word mercy last night, were they? Personally, Nosferatu would have upped the sentence to six years, not four, and beheaded a couple more prisoners, (a) to set an example and (b) to weed out spineless bullies from Histrian society.

When the time for the New Order came - and it was not that far away - there would be none of this are-we-Histri-are-we-Roman bollocks. The New Order would have a strictly no-vacillating policy, and yes, of course it was regrettable that innocent people died in the struggle, but they were sacrificed out of purpose, not mindless, wanton destruction, and let's face it, for most of the victims, the first they knew of what had happened was when they found themselves knocking on the Gates of the Blessed.

Raspor? Well, there was always an exception to every rule, but Raspor brought that on himself, the little blabbermouth, so in that respect his death was not quite so regrettable - and as for that pansy boat builder! All one can say on that subject is that blackmailers get what they deserve. The Nosferatu of legend might kill for pleasure, but not the person whose shadow little Broda had seen. Which was not to say there wasn't a sense of satisfaction in a job well done!