Chapter Twenty-three
There were many things Claudia did not understand. She did not understand how he'd escaped the inescapable. She did not understand how he'd discovered this beautiful valley of Ra. She did not understand how he'd been able to distinguish his mistress among the mass of identikit kits.
Most of all, though, she did not understand why Junius had never troubled to buy himself his freedom! Heaven knows, it was not from lack of funds or opportunity and while some foreigners might envisage Roman slaves as downtrodden drudges, reliant on meagre kitchen scraps and a blanket to wrap themselves in at night, the myth could not be further from reality. Many slaves were downright rich. Saving their salaries, they bought businesses such as hairdressers, wigmakers, tailoring, which they ran out of hours, while others, for instance, hired out their talents as artists, musicians, wrestlers. Indeed, more than one barbarian had learned his lesson the hard way, when he came face to face with the Emperor's administration and discovered a vast army of slaves beavering away inside the Imperial Palace, issuing mandates and supervising appointments, enforcing laws and implementing Senate initiatives on Augustus's behalf on everything from the judiciary to public roads to tax. Few governors and magistrates, provincial prefects and aediles dared look down their noses at the Emperor's vassal bureaucrats! However, Junius was no imperial civil servant in a cushy sinecure, he ran no business out of hours, which meant his wealth was simply clocking up. Why would he not wish to buy his independence?
'I'm sorry, Junius.' Claudia's mind had been wandering, as minds tend to do with relief. 'What did you say?' Her knees were knocking like castanets. She could not believe it. He was alive! Junius was alive! Reprieved and well and in no danger of being fed to the bears!
'I was merely thanking you for bribing the jailers.'
Me? 'Oh, Junius!' She patted his arm reassuringly. 'Good heavens, it was the least I could do!'
'When I returned home, Leonides brought me up to date with events,' the young Gaul said. 'How Flavia staged her own kidnap to join the Brothers of Horus and that, with us lot languishing in the cells, you'd hired yourself another bodyguard, but he was worried, he said, because he had no idea where you were.'
That's because I didn't know myself the location of Mentu's funny farm.
'Security.' She winked, tapping the side of her nose.
Strange. He'd made no mention of Flavia shopping him, suggesting that either Leonides had drawn a veil over the issue or… or Junius was here on a mission of personal revenge! Indeed, what else would lure him so far from Rome, where no one would blame him for staying home and nursing his rather nasty-looking wounds? His mistress was perfectly safe. He'd said himself, he knew about the hired henchmen, so what plan, she wondered, fermented inside that bruised and swollen head? What form would his retaliation take?
And how the hell had he walked free from Death Row?
'How the hell did you find me?' she asked.
'Leonides told me you'd gone to see the patrician.' Around them, the dancing continued to a haunting mix of sistrum and drum, harp and pipes which carried on the breeze down the valley. 'I paid a visit to his house.'
'Orbilio told you I was here?'
'Him!' Junius executed a uniquely Gallic gesture then unceremoniously spat on the damp earth. 'He was in no position to speak, that one, much less give directions!'
'You do know he's under house arrest?'
'He was under a pile of half-naked, slobbering Amazons!'
Junius somehow managed to convey that Junoesque wasn't the word to describe these slappers, while also leaving Claudia in no doubt as to his feelings on finding the one person she had looked to for assistance helplessly drunk. 'The guards said he'd been partying since-'
'So how did you find me?' Claudia had no desire to hear about Orbilio's indulgences. He was single, free, could do what he liked. And the pain round her heart was indigestion, because she'd eaten no breakfast this morning and very little dinner last night.
'His steward put me on to the Brothers of Horus, where some bald bloke in a squalid apartment told me where I could join. I spun him some yarn about being the son of a Gaulish horse trader who'd been to university in Alexandria and had "found" Ra while I was there, and since the patrician's steward lent me this expensive tunic, a jewelled dagger and a few of the patrician's baubles, the priest accepted my story.'
'He'll accept any story,' Claudia replied tartly, 'so long as you have a suitable donation.' A jewelled dagger wouldn't buy him beyond a job in the fields, although he might be promoted to the back-breaking threshing floor, depending on the quality of Orbilio's 'baubles'.
'I'm down to help out in the brewery,' Junius said, with a suspiciously innocent air, and Claudia grinned.
Junius had availed himself of a few extras while Tingi's back happened to be turned… 'Your education with me isn't entirely wasted, then!' Hadn't she always said the boy had shown promise?
'These people.' He frowned. 'They're not what I envisaged.'
Me neither. Claudia followed his eyes to a couple in their sixties who had apparently lived such dull and blameless lives that they felt more than eligible for resurrection in the Afterlife, especially since, for one or the other of them, that gentle tap on the shoulder might not be far away.
'Only the young ones make the headlines,' she explained.
In her few short hours here, Claudia had assimilated pretty much all there was to know about the Pyramidiot way of life.
'And because there's no direct contact with the outside world — ' scribes pen any letters to families on Central Store papyrus and arrange their despatch — 'no one hears about couples who simply calf off from society, or the likes of middle-aged women' (e.g. Mercy) 'who walk out on violent husbands. What's particularly worrying, though, is that seemingly rational adults' (e.g. Mercy) 'swallow so many dubious tales.'
'Such as?' Junius prompted.
'How about not one, but three men coming a cropper when they try to leave? One gored by a rutting boar, another mistaken by the guards for an assassin creeping in, and an unlucky third tripped backwards and impaled himself on the protective stakes.'
'Wouldn't the assassin have been creeping the wrong way?'
'And how can one impale oneself on an outward, downward facing spike? But that's not the half of it,' she said, licking her finger and wiping away the thick runnels of kohl from her cheek. 'Where three burly fellows failed, no less than six of the weaker sex have succeeded in sneaking through unseen and unchallenged, yet nobody questions the official explanation. I find that extremely odd.'
What tactic do you employ, Mentu? How do you control their very reasoning?
'That bald priest in Rome,' Junius said, 'fed me some crap about Rome wanting to wipe out the Brothers of Horus, but that was tosh, surely. I mean, who'd buy that rubbish?'
'Look around,' Claudia said dryly.
Apart from those involved in running the scam, the only two members who weren't taken in were Claudia and the Gaul! Yet surely, at some stage, others must have smelled fish in the air. What became of them? And what had happened to the young man who'd found himself surrounded by the animal deities on the platform last night, and had then been spirited away? The only place they could have taken him was into the body of the temple.
'Luck of the gods, boy!' A coarse grey bun thrust itself between Claudia and her bodyguard, its own wig stuffed into an accommodating dress strap so that Mercy appeared as though some black, hairy succubus was hitching a lift on her shoulder. 'What in blazes happened to you?'
Claudia performed the introductions, adding that it was a long story, but it seemed the new recruit's family were none too enamoured with him joining the Brothers and had sent four of his cousins to dissuade him.