'She's not here,' Snowdrop announced unnecessarily. 'Sit down.' With a wave of her arm, she indicated the on high-backed chair in the place. 'I'll go and fetch her.'
Laying her bunch of marigolds beside a stack of wooden plates in the manner of a matronly housewife, Snowdrop gave the cauldron a quick stir with the paddle, checked the bread oven and inspected the level of the water butt before setting off to find Nanai’.
It was just as well, Claudia decided, that she hadn't sat down. The bundle of rags on the chair turned out to be a sleeping infant.
Adjusting her eyes to the gloom, she wandered around. Heaps of mattresses had been piled higgledy-piggledy against the back wall. Stools criss-crossed this way and that. A mass of small, patched clothes burst out of a wooden chest in the corner, cooking implements littered the table and toys littered the floor. A tornado would have left far less mess. The infant stirred, gurgled a bit, blew a few bubbles, then sucked its thumb back to sleep. It would not have seen more than one birthday, and it was anyone's guess what sex it was. Claudia picked up the little straw doll which had fallen to the floor and replaced it on the tiny chest.
Herbs hung from the overhead beam in thick bunches. Thyme, lavender, rosemary, oregano which could be used as rinses, disinfectants, in cooking, for strewing, for medicine, added to wax to make sweet-scented polish. Horsetails lay beside pots on the table, ready to scour them spotless. The large round loaf in the charcoal oven sent out tantalizing aromas to combat the herbs, along with the smell of cloves, porridge, and clean wool piled high next to a loom. More wool steeped in buckets of plant dye. Bright yellow juniper; soft pink sorrel; creamy parsley.
At the far end, a moth-eaten tapestry curtained off part of the building. Claudia nudged it aside. Among the tangle of unmade bedclothes lay one black cat with half a tail and one mustard-coloured cat with exceptional whiskers. Wedged between the cats, infant twin boys lay entwined in each other's arms deep in sleep. Their faces hadn't seen water for weeks.
With no sign of Snowdrop returning, Claudia followed the path behind the back of the forge. As she did so, a three-year-old with grey eyes came barrelling round the corner. 'Ya!' he shouted, whipping an imaginary horse from his imaginary chariot. 'Ya, ya!' With no regard to pedestrians, the boy veered his chariot in a tight about-turn, knocking Claudia flying and trampling her foot in the process. 'Yeeha!'
The melee in the yard drowned her cursing, but in any case the woman swinging languidly back and forth in the hammock would have missed a meteor falling. She was crooning to a tiny bundle wrapped in her arms.
'My dear, I'm so sorry,' Nanai’ said, turning a radiant smile upon Claudia. 'Snowdrop said we had a visitor, but as you can see, the baby's asleep and I really did not want to wake her.'
You take Leo's handouts, live here rent free, the children are in rags, the house is a shack and you steal his grapes to sell on, so where's the money been going?
'What do you think I should call my little sweetheart?' Nanai asked.
'How about Adoor?'
'What kind of a name is that?'
'The kind that's short for Another Drain On Overstretched Resources.'
Nanai's laugh was fresh, like a mountain stream over rocks. 'The boys I've named after birds,' she said. 'There's Raven, Jay, Merlin. Young Sparrowhawk up the tree there.'
'Don't forget the Little Bustard,' Claudia muttered, rubbing her bruises. Across the yard, the grey-eyed monster whipped his chariot into the chickens.
Nanai' brushed back wisps of white baby hair with her little finger. 'Mostly they're girls who are abandoned, and to them I bestow flower names. Tulip. Angelica. Lupin. Camomile There's usually a trait I can home in on.'
'What was the inspiration for Snowdrop?' Claudia asked settling herself on a fallen log.
'As her namesake blossoms through the snow, so my little Snowdrop blooms.' Nanai smiled. 'To look at her, scrawny little mite, you'd think she'd keel over in a strong wind wouldn't you? But don't be fooled. She's a survivor, my Snowdrop. I found her on my doorstep, three years old and almost dead of pneumonia, covered in ulcers, poor love. To be truthful, I didn't think she'd survive that first night.'
A fat tear of remembrance dribbled down Nanai's cheek and splashed unnoticed on to the baby in her arms.
'I don't know why the gods chose me to care for her,' she said, 'but I do know I nursed that child for six weeks and that if her natural mother had come back to claim her after the journey we'd made together, Snowdrop and I, I truly don't know what I would have done.'
Claudia felt a cold hand pass over her skin. There it was again. Bubbling under the surface, the raw passion which drove Nanai to protect children who weren't even hers like a tigress would protect her cubs. To the death.
'But praise Cunina, who watches over babes in the cradle, the occasion didn't arise,' Nanai said cheerfully. 'Once news spread that I'd taken on a child no one else wanted, other women started to sneak up in the dead of night to leave their babes on my doorstep.'
Just like the burbling little bundle in her arms now, Claudia thought, moved by the tenderness with which Nanai wiped her fallen tears from the baby's cheek with her thumb. (The same thumb on which her own ring of Gaulish silver now glistened!)
A stone marten scampered home across the clearing as the baby suckled on Nanai's finger. Was its colouring the reason her mother gave it away? Better to pretend the child was stillborn and give it to someone who would love and take care of her, than let her olive-skinned islander husband discover the fair-haired creature was not his? Claudia put herself in the distraught mother's shoes and knew that, in her place, the husband would have to go before the child.
'With hair that blonde, it's unlikely the baby's eyes will change colour,' she said. 'How about calling her Flax?'
'Flax!' Nanai's green eyes closed in rapture. 'Yes, of course. Flax-' She began to croon softly to the bundle, a lullaby about sweet dreams and candied cherries, no doubt the same song she sang when she sat at her loom inside the tumbledown cottage.
'What will happen to you all now Leo's dead?' Claudia asked.
Even if the eviction order still stood, she didn't see Qus thundering up here with his band of henchmen, razing the old forge to the ground and ploughing up the soil while the children remained in residence. This had been another bone of contention between him and his master, but why? Because Qus found the prospect of making children homeless distasteful? Or because one of those ebony-skinned children was his?
Nanai's malt-brown hair shone with red and copper streaks in the sunset. 'Don't worry about our future, my dear. The gods have blessed us and I know we shall be provided for. Already they have punished Leo for his wickedness, as I told him they would.'
The earth quaked, but no buildings fell. The temperature plummeted, but no icebergs appeared. Claudia swallowed the lump in her throat. 'Aren't you the tiniest bit sorry your benefactor is dead?'
'Nemesis is the goddess of retribution, dear. Once her powers have been invoked, they cannot be stopped.'
Claudia stood up. The sun had disappeared behind the hills to the west. But that was not why she had to leave. Whether Nanai believed that crap about Nemesis she neither knew nor cared. All she knew was that Leo had indulged this woman for seven years — yet the minute she can't get her own way, she turns and woe betide anyone who stands in her way. 'I make a dangerous enemy,' she had said.
Now Claudia understood Nanai had meant every word. As she felt her way along the track in the dark, stubbing her toes on the boulders, snagging her robe on the prickles, she wished she could find something to like about the woman who cared for her orphans so deeply. Thank Jupiter for rowing boats No royal barge was ever more sumptuous, no imperial chariot ever more splendid!