Jail Bait (7 page)

Success. Whichever way it swung now, Orbilio would be a hero.

First, though, a hero needs his beauty sleep. Three or four hours should suffice, and the kudos of scaling his criminal pyramid buoyed his aching feet. In three or four hours, he’d be turning his back on these dark alleyways, the towering tenements, on mournful, plague-ridden wails. He’d be heading for the country, to a place with views of hills across a lake. Where birds sang in untrammelled bliss. Where fish leapt out of the water at sunset. A place, he mused, which offered health-giving springs and baths of hot, energizing mud.

A place, in short, which contained Claudia Seferius.

A python coiled round his innards and undertook serious constriction work.
Claudia.
The appearance of a goddess, the temperament of a tigress, there were strands of molten metal in her hair.
Claudia.
Eyes which flashed like sparks off an anvil, she lived life with the wind in her hair. Like lightning in a tempest, the electricity between the two of them was as terrifying as it was rousing. Wild. Unpredictable. He would follow her, he knew, Orpheus-fashion to Hades if she so much as crooked her finger…

Except Marcus was no gentle musician—and Claudia, certainly, no sweet Eurydice!

But such was her pull on him, stronger even than the moon on the tides, that wherever she left her footprints, he’d be there.

Not in front. Not behind.

Alongside.

As equals. The thought of her made his gut lurch. Janus, he really needed that drink.

For all that the sun was beginning to rise, the hour was still early and Orbilio’s house was in darkness as he let himself in. A whiff of proving bread escaped from the kitchens, but his stomach recoiled at the prospect of food. Sleep! He needed sleep. Urgent, replenishing sleep. And then…

Love or lust, who gives a damn? Like a drug, he was addicted to the woman. Try as he might, he could not live without her.

Marcus staggered across the atrium like a drunkard. The bedroom, too, was in darkness. He unbuckled his belt and it clattered as it fell to the floor. Sleep, yes, but surely a drink? To settle the flutters Claudia invariably brought on. By touch he fumbled for the jug beside his bed and without reaching for a goblet drank straight from the jar. The wine hit his stomach like a punch and too late he realized he should have sipped rather than gulped, but the damage was done and in this stifling heat, what difference did one more hangover make?

He was wiping a damp cloth over his face when the crack of a whip made him jump. What the hell…?

Again, the snap of rawhide rang out in his room, accompanied by rich, female laughter. Croesus, what was in that bloody jug?

‘I thought you were never coming home.’ She laughed, and he realized this was no hallucination. This was whatsername. Thingy.
Barbia.
That’s right. And Barbia, he remembered, had a penchant for whips. And for manacles. And chains…

‘I—’

The wine made his brain fuzzy, he couldn’t think straight. How did she end up here? In his bed? He’d flirted with her in the Palatine Gardens. She’d been a real laugh, earthy and vibrant, and they’d passed two jubilant hours rustling the laurels. But here?

‘I…
can’t stop,’ he muttered. ‘Just called in to change my tunic—
youch!
’
The whip stung his flesh. Mother of Tarquin, she thought he was larking about.

‘Not playing hard to get, are we?’ Her breathing was heavy and scented with wine. ‘Or else Barbie will have to get rough.’

‘No!’ It came out more terrified yelp than manly denial, but in any case it came out too late. Metal clamped round his right ankle and a second click fastened it firm to the bed. Orbilio let out a shaky laugh. ‘Barbia, look—’

Before he could clarify the misunderstanding that he’d given his address as a joke, a loud rip cut through the air and, whoosh, his tunic was gone. Thanks to glimmers of sunlight beginning to penetrate the cracks in the shutters, he could make out Barbia’s figure. It seemed to be encased in some form of harness…

In the blackness, he heard the jangle of handcuffs and lunged at where he thought they would be. But Barbia had been teasing. A diversion for the chainlink which snapped round his wrist and, shit. He was spreadeagled on his own couch, right ankle, left wrist, and there was not a damned thing he could do.

Orbilio considered the one thin sheet of inadequate linen which concealed his sad lack of enthusiasm and knew that if his boss walked in right now, he’d strangle the oily bastard with this bloody chain, purely for exposing him to the siren from hell!.As Barbia whisked a knife through his loincloth, Orbilio prayed to Priapus to help him in this, his hour of need—

Somehow the misty shores of Lake Plasimene belonged to a different incarnation, and instead of the quacking of ducks and the croaking of frogs in the bulrushes, he was stuck with Barbia’s fruity laughter and the acid smell of her leather gear. In fact, as the bullwhip stung his thigh, Orbilio’s final thought, as Barbia pressed her ample breasts into his face, was that, sleep or no sleep, by Croesus, he’d be on the first horse out of town the instant this harpy untied him.

Assuming, of course, he survived.

IX

Tradition demanded Cal’s body lie in state, his feet facing the door, for several days.

The heat, alas, decreed otherwise.

With oak leaves wreathed around his shattered skull and less than eighteen hours after he had met his violent end, Cal set off from Atlantis on this, his ultimate journey. In deference to his youth, flute players rather than trumpeters led the procession as eight bearers shouldered the funeral bed on poles of sacred oak. With his face washed clean and his hair combed low, Calvus resembled more a dashing blade knocked out cold in a drunken brawl and it seemed to Claudia quite impossible that he wouldn’t bounce up any second, yelling, ‘Which of you bastards wants more?’

But he wouldn’t.

Those beech-leaf eyes would never sparkle in fun. Battered lips could never again beg kisses in exchange for a secret.

This was not a practical joke.

Swinging censers of smoking cinnamon accompanied the bier, barely masking the sulphurous stench of the torches which purified its four corners. Cal had no relatives in Atlantis, no close friends, so the mourners were hired, wailing women, beating ash-covered breasts and howling with such conviction, few would suspect it was not their own son or brother they were burning today.

Slowly, the cortege made its way down the slope of the promontory, the black-clad undertakers setting the pace as the sun beat down on a landscape which, until Pylades arrived, had remained untouched for eight generations. Usually two centuries is time enough to regroup and rebuild after battle, but the fighting left behind a sinister legacy. ‘The Place of Blood’. ‘The Place of Bones’. Graphic names which not only immortalized the twenty thousand men killed in that fateful Battle of the Lake, but which had served to deter settlers, wary of the restless ghosts of the warriors. Only fishermen doggedly continued to ply their trade, their base a small village unsullied by the ferocious spilling of blood on the eastern rim of the lake.

Then a visitor from Greece discovered a mineral spring on the cliff-like projectory, and the augurs said, ‘This is a miracle’

And it was. Not only Atlantis, with its shining opulence and hedonistic splendour, rose from obscurity. Attracted by the influx of visitors, a whole host of shops, houses and businesses sprang up, and in the five years since Pylades arrived, a whole town had evolved, with its central Forum and its main street and its taverns and brickworks and lawcourts. There were blacksmiths, dentists, barbers, potters, barrelmakers, herbalists—you name it, they were here in their droves—and they called their town Spesium, ‘Place of Hope’.

To the sounds of trumpets, horns and cymbals loud enough to scare
every spirit, not just the bad ones, the funeral procession rumbled past leadbeaters and coppersmiths, bakers and glassblowers, apprentices and matrons. For a moment, Claudia thought she glimpsed a familiar face in the crowd, someone from Rome, but maybe she was wrong, because when she lifted her mourning veil for a better view, there was no one she recognized after all. Bugger.

Finally, on the far side of the newly constructed triple-arch gateway, the parade ground to a halt, silver censers blinding in the sunlight. With professional ease, Cal’s final wooden bed was hefted on to the pyre and Claudia noticed that the immense Oriental she’d seen yesterday on her arrival had also latched on to the party. His posture was identical—feet squarely apart, arms crossed—and he still wore that tight leather vest and strange kilt. Today, though, the long tuft of hair was tied in a thong like a mare’s tail on parade day. Somehow it looked like a weapon, as deadly as the curved blade at his hip. Despite the heat, Claudia shivered.

Then the bruiser slid from her mind as Pylades stepped forward to deliver the oration, and to hear him list the achievements of a young man he probably never knew to a crowd of people who’d never heard of him, you had to admire the professionalism of this stocky hillsman, so glowing were the tributes, so touching the anecdotes. As a young acolyte swung a censer with clumsy abandon, a priest in long flowing robes sprinkled the bier with wine. These two, Claudia deduced, must be Leon and Mosul. Spluttering from incense overdose, the priest snapped for Leon to withdraw, and as his little black eyes met with Kamar’s, so he shrugged in a mixture of irritation and despair. This, then, was the perfectionist who tended the shrine of the water nymph all by himself? A tub of a man with the eyes of a mole.

As Pylades began to quote a few lines of Virgil, appropriate to the occasion, Claudia noticed the hint of fluff on Leon’s upper lip and sympathized with Mosul. Already the lad’s concentration had veered towards a shapely ankle protruding from the long, white tunic of a flautist, although from this angle, Claudia could not tell w nether the joint belonged to a youth or a girl.

Mosul completed his purification procedure and resumed his place next to Kamar. Pylades, keen to give Cal a good send-off, was now quoting Sappho and Claudia glanced round the crowd. Strange. Not a military uniform in sight. Not that she minded, of course! The greater the distance between the army and Mistress Seferius the better at the moment, but all the same, it struck her as odd, no official attendance at a funeral. The Oriental, she noticed, had melted away as invisibly as he had appeared, but right at the back, Lavinia’s tall field hand had appeared, his ebony skin shining in the sunlight. At his shoulder, the young Jewish girl appeared to be pleading with him, and Lalo spread his weathered outdoor hands in silent pacification, as though to say ‘not now’, and Claudia made a mental note to find out how long Ruth had been with Lavinia and where she had come from before. Her Latin was perfect, barely a hint of a Judaean accent, but it was strange she hadn’t adapted to Roman attire, and equally strange that Lavinia didn’t object. If only to spare her servant from Mosul’s cold and contemptuous stare.

Observing the nimbleness of Lalo’s olive-picking fingers
and the raw, damaged knuckles, Claudia decided that it wouldn’t hurt to enquire how long
he’d
been in the old woman’s employ, either. What exactly was his role within her smallholding? For a field hand, he was exceptionally familiar with his mistress, even to sleeping in her bed. Did he bully her? That seemed unlikely, but why should he be here today? Had Lavinia sent him to watch and report back? Or was he paying his own last respects?

As Pylades wound up his oration, the pre-paid sobbing took over and branches of cypress were solemnly laid over Cal’s body, covering for ever that mop of corn-coloured hair. With a lump in her throat, Claudia inched through the crowd. Lecher or not, the Greek ought to know his efforts in ensuring Cal didn’t journey alone on this tragic morning were appreciated. When she saw him turn to Kamar and mutter, ‘I can’t take much more of this,’ under his breath, Claudia froze.

‘Be patient,’ the physician replied. ‘It’ll be over soon enough.’

Pylades snorted. ‘That’s fine for you to say,’ he flashed back, ‘you’re a doctor, but me! I have a business to run!’

The hiss of the flames sweeping over the pyre drowned the rest of the interchange, but in any case Claudia could stomach no more. Sickened by the callousness, she reeled away from the congregation, to be swallowed up amongst the basketweavers and the moneychangers, the fishmongers and the wheelwrights.

Did no one care? A boy dies, and nobody here gives a damn?

Forget Kamar. He’d pronounced death by falling and nothing would sway him from that conclusion, and in any case who’s to call him a liar? The evidence was literally going up in smoke, and as to a few bloodstains on the rock, why, you’re overwrought, my dear, those could be anything—fishguts, a cracked shin, in fact are you sure that it’s blood? It looks very like paint, you
know…
Turtleface’s stock would probably soar as a result of the calm and professional way he dealt with another neurotic attention seeker!

By the basilica, she pulled close to the wall to let past a bloodied carcass of beef. Bluebottles swarmed over the meat and a mongrel trotted behind, pausing to lick the odd drip of blood.

If the priest with the shiny black eyes won’t let even his own acolyte near the spring, he’d not wish to become embroiled in a scandal which might cast a cloud over his nymph.

Leon was too clumsy, too obsessed with galloping hormones to care, which only left Pylades—and far from being the high-minded deliverer of Lake Plasimene, bringer of trade and prosperity and cures for the sick, Pylades turned out to be just another shallow, self-seeking money-grubber, concerned more with his daily schedule than the boy who had died!