Black Salamander (9 page)

‘I know we’re short of horses,’ Theo said, washing the dust off his face, ‘but Hanno, you’ll have to sort out which one we can best afford to lose.’

However, the old muleteer didn’t hear. Wracked with sobs, his old bony body hugged itself, keening quietly in grief and despair, as he pictured his grandson’s corpse mouldering in this humid valley, being pecked by buzzards, gnawed by rats…

Theo did not press the point. No one had an appetite, anyway, and when one of the mares whinnied softly, she didn’t realize how lucky an escape she had had.

A camp fire was lit, for comfort more than for light.

And so a second night passed.

IX

‘I’m sorry, but this isn’t good enough!’

Maria’s voice punctured Claudia’s sleep, the first few decent hours she’d been able to snatch. She resisted the urge to reach out and strangle the old bat. We each cope with pressure in different ways, she reminded herself. For once, let’s be charitable, eh?

‘What’s your problem this time, ma’am?’ Theo sighed, scraping his razor over his stubble.

‘Less of your sauce, young man.’ Maria snatched the mirror out of his hand. ‘The problem, as you well know, Theodorus, is food. Goddammit, the horses are eating better than we are. Why can’t you organize a hunting party, bring us back a stag or something?’

Give me strength. Claudia flung off the cloak which doubled as a blanket and staggered down to the riverbed. Fancy being woken up for that! Maria knew the score, same as everybody else. With the rain on the run and the sun breaking through, the valley was turning into a cauldron. Already Nestor had been wrapped in canvas and lugged well clear of the camp, the stench was appalling, and they daren’t risk leaving the other bodies too long. Hunting was low priority in comparison and Theo was explaining this for probably the fortieth time.

‘That’s another thing,’ Maria said. ‘It’s starting to look like a gypsy encampment round here. There are women, Theodorus, who have hung out their washing on bushes to dry, the place is turning into a slum. Kindly have a word with them, will you.’

Peace, unfortunately, didn’t last long. The scrum of men working out today’s rescue strategy had decided that, since the rushing river could not be forded, being both too wide and too dangerous, their best chance would be to climb over the rubble which had so disastrously trapped them down in this valley. Every available hand was conscripted.

‘Dexter? Certainly not!’ Maria had heard the news through some other wives and blanched. ‘Let the drivers go, Theodorus, and that sour-faced Gaul, but my husband will not be part of a
labouring
gang.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ snapped a tall redhead. ‘They’re not working the salt mines. My husband’s proud to be part of the detail.’

‘That’s as may be,’ Maria sniffed, ‘but your husband is an artisan.’

‘And what do you think bookbinders are?’ The glass-blower’s wife laughed, leaving Maria puce in the face.

‘I can’t go,’ Dexter whined, when Theo appraised him of the rule. ‘I’m experiencing palpitations since my liver pills ran out,’ but nobody listened and off they trooped, every man jack of them, and the sun was still low in the sky.

‘Volso seems much better today,’ Claudia remarked to Iliona as the two of them decided they’d set about catching some fish. Neither had tried this lark before, and they were working on the principle that if they made a large enough bag of light linen, sooner or later something would be stupid enough to swim inside and investigate.

‘Nothing wrong with him yesterday.’ The Cretan girl laughed. ‘Except fear. Scared of heights is our Volso, you should have seen him crossing the pass in the Alps. Green as a grasshopper he was, if not greener, when we worked our way down the mountain.’

Hmm. Would a man with vertigo engineer a landslide on the very part of the trip which terrified him the most? It was possible—perfect cover for any strange behaviour on his part—but what worried Claudia was that she had almost accepted that the sabotage came from within.

Which could only mean the killings and this trap were linked.

Why?

‘Look.’ Iliona pointed to where an eel was investigating the neck of their weighted linen hood. ‘Oh, no.’

It swam away again, and after an hour of lying on their stomachs, the two girls decided to bait their trap, and after another hour, they wondered if maybe they ought to change tactics. Then, suddenly, there was a flash of silver underwater, and as one they jerked on the cord to close the neck of the hood, groaning in unison when they discovered, on pulling up the dripping sack, that somewhere along the line their slippery cargo had wriggled free.

‘With all hunts, patience is the key,’ said Iliona, smoothing the lines of her long, divided skirt. ‘It’s just the same with the bull games, you have to match the beast, your wits against his.’

‘Do they still do that in Crete?’

The last of the low clouds had finally drifted away, leaving blue skies dotted with white cottonball puffs, with sunshine which made diamonds and pearls of the river. Rainbows danced as the water rushed over the rapids, and suddenly the hissing water sounded happy and alive, rather than a threat to whoever approached it. Warblers sang in the alders and the willows, and damselflies danced in formation, their wings iridescent in the sun.

‘Bull worship? Heavens, yes.’ Every bead and bangle jingled when Iliona laughed. ‘The leaping’s died out—in fact, no one these days can imagine how the bull dancers survived—but as to revering our taurine spirits, darling, that’s very much alive.’

Claudia thought about the festivities in Rome, the bull fights which would have been held yesterday and the day before, when spry, feisty little critters were pitted in the arena against cocky youths armed with one small knife and fast legs, whose sole aim it was to cut the ribbons from those vicious gilded horns before the bull chased them over the barrier, thus knocking them out of the contest.

‘Funny how it’s the bulls, not the boys, who come out with their dignity intact,’ she mused.

Old Firebreath, as he was affectionately known, held the current record. In five seasons, not one youth had managed to clip a single ribbon from his cunning horns and irrespective of what happened this year, there were plans to erect a statue of that gallant little bull outside the Circus Maximus.

‘Pff,’ Iliona waved a disparaging hand. ‘Call those bull fights? We Cretans have more in common with the Gauls than you might think. Wait till you see what happens in Vesontio.
That's
a bull fight.’

‘Vesontio?’ Claudia was confused. Surely bull worship was confined to the south? The hot sea ports? Iberia?

‘It’s a trait the Sequani share with their Helvetian neighbours,’ Iliona said. ‘Attaching virility to the spilling of blood and—so I hear—drinking it, too. Warm is best, apparently. Bulls’ blood for the Sequani, bears’ blood for the Helvetii.’

Claudia’s comfy bubble burst and the canyon closed in once again. A malignant place haunted by bear cults on one side, bull worship on the other. Vulture Valley. Stalked by killers and saboteurs, hostile tribes, ferocious wild animals and here they were, ambushed, helpless and trapped. Nausea washed over her, and to counteract its effects, Claudia sluiced icy water over her face.

They were never going to catch fish in this snood, were they? Staring into the river, she remembered the lyre-maker who’d been swept to his death in boiling waters similar to this…

‘Do you believe they’re head hunters?’ Iliona asked slowly, a frown spoiling her exquisite unlined features. ‘Titus says it’s nonsense, about the Gauls keeping embalmed heads as trophies, but Nestor was adamant, because he’d seen for himself, he said. The larger the collection, the greater the power…’

Her voice trailed off and suddenly the encampment, without a single fighting man on hand, seemed terribly vulnerable. The mew of a kite made goosepimples rise on their skin. Vulture Valley, thought Claudia again. Where only our bones would be found. Minus their skulls—

It was late when the bedraggled band returned, scratched, bruised, weary and depressingly empty-handed, and their spirits didn’t lift far when they learned that all their womenfolk had managed to conjure up for supper was a watery soup of burdock root and wild asparagus, flavoured with nothing meatier than horseradish and wild sorrel with a bit of caraway, pepper and water mint thrown in. Second helpings bubbled wearily in the cauldron.

‘You haven’t said how pretty our trap looks.’ Iliona nudged her husband gently in the ribs.

By slanting position slightly, Claudia could see that she’d woven wild flowers into a garland to hang round the rig, vibrant purples and yellows and white.

‘I told you the army wouldn’t come for us this way,’ Titus growled, not even bothering to look at her handiwork. ‘We’re wasting our bloody time here, and it’s not as though we’re ever going to retrieve those bodies, either. The soldiers are probably at the bottom, or at least sandwiched part-way in between, and by now Hanno’s grandson’s body will be…’ He pushed his trencher away in a gesture of distaste and dejection, but the same unease and concerns felt by the spice merchant were beginning to be shared by others.

‘What’s your view, Clemens?’ the glass-blower asked.

‘To leave our dead without proper service or burial?’ The little priest looked haggard. ‘Their bodies not purified, their ghosts roaming this earth for ever?’ Sadly he shook his head. ‘I never thought I’d live to see such a terrible day.’

‘We’ve done everything humanly possible,’ Theo said, and everyone knew it was really Hanno he was addressing and a weighty silence descended on the group.

Overhead, four buzzards wheeled and everybody knew why.

The rest of the plates were put down.

Finally it was Titus who voiced what had been hanging over the convoy for some time. ‘We have to decide,’ he said, staring directly at the young soldier, ‘whether we wait for the army or try and find a way over this mountain.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Theo stood up and cleared his throat. ‘Very well, then.’ After a day in the sun, his freckles stood out, making him appear more adolescent than ever. ‘We’ll take a straight vote on it. You’ve all had long enough to form an opinion, so first of all, who’s for staying?’

Nineteen hands shot in the air, one of them Claudia’s, and taking her lead, Junius’s hand going up made it twenty.

‘Right then. For pushing on?’

This time thirteen hands shot in the air, still one of them Claudia’s, and taking her lead with a quizzical grin, the young Gaul’s hand made it fourteen.

That he had a count of two over didn’t seem to occur to the soldier. ‘Straightforward majority,’ he reported. ‘We wait here for the army.’

And so, while wolves howled and vixens screamed at the moon, a third night was passed in the valley.

X

Inside the Aemihan basilica in Rome, the bustling commercial centre on the north side of the Forum which looked straight up at the Palatine Hill, three men dressed, despite the intolerable heat, in full senatorial regalia, paced the upper gallery conversing in Greek. Anyone seeing these politicians—one fat, one cross-eyed, the third man thin from an ulcer—would have assumed they were simply digesting their lunch in admiration of the sumptuous restoration work after a fire two years before. They paused at the columns, as though praising the fine African marbles. Another gentle amble, then a stop to venerate (or so it would appear) the statue of the Emperor Augustus on its podium.

‘So far, so good,’ muttered the fat man. ‘With a combination of silver, cunning and luck, our agent in the delegation has succeeded in separating a sizeable group from the main body of the convoy and the schedule, gentlemen, is on target.’

‘With all due respect,’ cut in Squint, ‘no one doubted the plan. It’s the tribes I’m concerned about. Are they trustworthy?’

‘Trustworthy?’ shrilled the thin man. ‘They’re not in it for the love of Rome, these barbarians, it’s every chieftain for
himself.’

‘That’s the whole point of cutting off the delegation,’ Squint explained. ‘We need to stall our so-called allies.’

‘They’re not stupid,’ protested the invalid, gulping a pastille of liquorice. ‘It’ll be a fucking bloodbath if they ever find out.’

‘It’ll be their blood in the soil, not ours,’ the fat man reassured him under his breath. ‘The Empire might have fallen’—he patted Augustus’s marble shin with affection—‘but the legions will still fight for Rome, they’ll crush the barbarians, have them begging on their knees for our mercy, mark my words.’

‘I don’t like it,’ the invalid said doubtfully.

‘My dear fellow,’ Fatso said, wrapping his arm round the other’s bony shoulders. ‘Do you think I’m happy, dancing with the devil? But if we’re going to make a new order for Rome—a better order, I might add, taking Arabia, the Orient, annexing Dacia’s goldmines—for that, my friend, sacrifices have to be made, and if that means sucking up to the likes of the Helvetii, then so be it. Jupiter’s bollocks, it’s only temporary.’

He paused, as a brawl broke out downstairs where the moneylenders set out their stalls, and the thin man sucked voraciously on another pastille. Liquorice was supposed to be helping his ulcer, or so the physician insisted. So far all it had done was give him chronic diarrhoea.

‘Surely,’ said Squint, gazing up at the clerestory window, ‘the point here is to celebrate that our plan is on target. Note I say,
our
plan,’ he added. ‘I assume you’re still with us on this?’