Once across the Forum, Marcus kept to the diminishing shade of the Via Sacra. The beads of sweat which had linked hands round his belt told him today would be another stinking inferno and already, even at this early hour, fumigatory fires burned the length and breadth of the city. Orbilio did not think that, in this heat, they helped.
How long, he wondered, before the contagion ran its course and the Forum could reflect a different mood? Lately, in place of strings of roped ostriches kicking up mayhem, scrawny pigeons pecked in the dust, with no children to chase them away. Gone were the dancers, the acrobats, the fire-eaters in their gaily coloured costumes. Silent were the taunts of the bare-knuckle fighters, the strident cries of the hucksters, the hup-hup-hup of the litter bearers. For the past week, heads wagged low in sombre consultations with fortune-tellers while augurs studied the stars, the entrails of sheep, even the flight patterns of owls in search of encouraging auspices. The sun might shine, thought Orbilio, but the light had gone out in the city. Swerving past a man up a ladder fixing his gutterspout, he glanced down a sidestreet and saw yet another handcart wheeling away a tiny body concealed by a sheet and heard that most heartrending of sounds-the muted sobs of a father bereaved.
‘Shit.’
As Orbilio pressed on up the Velian slope, the lump in his throat refused to subside. Death he was used to. He was twenty-eight, for gods’ sake, he’d seen men die-good men, bullies, bigots and cowards, he’d watched them expire on the battlefield and from public executionbut a child? Its soul stolen away in the night? That can’t be right. And whilst his objective in visiting Jupiter’s temple had been to gain ammunition to fight his boss rather than to offer up prayers, Marcus couldn’t help wondering when the King of Olympus intended to tear himself away from his drinking and his whoring and send a thunderbolt to put paid to this murderous heat.
People were dying, and Jupiter did not care. Orbilio snorted. Who did that remind him of! Three painstaking weeks he’d spent gathering evidence on that damned murder and, snap, just like that, his boss suspends further enquiries. Well, the case was too important to walk away from, both from the victim’s point of view, as well as Orbilio’s. He needed a weapon to fight back with and this morning he had found it.
A personal application from his boss for his brother to fill the role of Jupiter’s priest. Brilliant!. Just what Orbilio needed.
For the last seventy-five years the job had not so much been vacant, more covered by the collegiate as a group, but lately, to emphasize the importance the king of the gods played in Augustus’ golden age of peace, the Emperor decided to entrust the task once more to a single individual. Heaven knows, the list of applicants would be tremendous (what a feather in their cap, whoever got the job) but the post would not be as easy to fill as some might imagine. Few people in living memory had ever seen the original functions performed, but only a foreigner could not be aware of hundreds of taboos by which Jupiter’s special priest was bound and the job would only go to a man who could recite the rules and regulations.
Well, Orbilio knew. The whole list lay in his family vault.
And with this information, he could trade with his superior officer, for the man’s ambitions knew no bounds. His brother, as weak and clumsy as he was strong and shrewd, would not care a jot. But for the Head of the Security Police to boast a sibling in this prestigious role… Oh, yes. Orbilio was in an excellent position to bargain.
He paused in the street to stroke the ginger tomcat which came rubbing round his ankles, and vowed he would not bargain with his boss unless pushed to the limit. Scrubbing the cat’s ears, Marcus was keenly aware that, if he could solve this outstanding murder case-correction, this Giant Pyramid of a case-there’d be no need for horsetrading at all. His skills would see him through. Hadn’t those selfsame skills put him on to it? Long, weary legs began the long, slow haul up the Esquiline Hill.
It had all started with a bit of gossip. One man in the steamy atmosphere of the public bath house bragging to another how he planned to spend the fortune he’d inherited from his wife. The voice was not that of an old man, and Marcus’ investigative ears twitched, albeit idly.
‘Didn’t she keep cats or something, your late wife?’ the friend asked.
‘Twelve of the fuckers,’ the husband spat. ‘Got rid of them straight away!’
That was all. A snippet of overheard conversation, but somehow it stuck in his mind. Twelve cats, the man said. Twelve’s a lot, an awful lot, but perhaps Orbilio would have thought no more of it, had the husband not sounded so bitter when he snarled out the number. Plus, he didn’t like the way the man laughed when he said ‘straight away’. In fact, the whole tone of it stuck in Orbilio’s craw, and it was more to put his own mind at rest that he checked out the fellow’s history. Which was shabby, to say the least. A wastrel, a womanizer, a professional sponger, but he could not have killed his wife. He had an alibi, his wife was a hundred miles away, and she died of natural causes Except healthy women do not die of natural causes. Uneasy now, Marcus delved deeper, and what he found made his blood turn to ice.
At which point, his boss got the hump.
‘The woman’s been dead three fucking months,’ he had snapped. ‘What difference does another month make? Just get your arse up to the Palace and keep the fucking plague out!’
Well, sorry, but Orbilio had no intention of dropping this case. Not this one! Solving it would propel him through the Senate House doors faster than a tornado and since there’s more than one way to snare a song thrush, even when his brain felt like porridge and every muscle screamed, Marcus Cornelius trekked all the way across town at the end of his shift to verify his boss’s application regarding the role of Jupiter’s priest.
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.