Pausing to drink from a fountain, Claudia decided that Lais would be living dangerously were that the case-the Emperor’s reforms were exacting in the extreme! Nowadays, not only a cuckolded husband had the right to instigate a divorce against an adulterous wife. Recent legislation gave others an incentive to shop her, because if the husband, for whatever motive, decided against prosecution, the informant himself could indict-with the added inducement that, should the erring wife be proved guilty, said accuser could claim half her dowry.
Bound by the stifling, almost incestuous, isolation of an island, petty jealousies would escalate, imaginary scores would need settling. Lais and her lover would need to watch out.
Assuming, of course, the supposition was correct. Claudia trickled lukewarm water from the fountain over her face. There might be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this. Lais, for instance, could turn out to be a nagging shrew, a middle-aged cripple or some kissy socialite. Who knows, she might be all three, with not a thought to romancing some drop-dead sexy slave which, if the affair came to light, could result in her being cast out and sold into slavery, and for him would mean certain death.
Was he worth it? Claudia wondered. Was the Spaniard worth risking the auction block for?
She was heartily relieved that the triple arch loomed before the question required an answer.
Cal’s pyre had burned through and, to the piping of flautists, attendants swept the smouldering debris into a pile, sprinkling it with a purifying mix of wine and water before sifting it into the urn. Flapping the ostrich feathers brought on a tight constriction inside Claudia’s ribs. Was it really only yesterday Cal had grabbed that parchment fan from her hand in the sizzling heat of the walnut grove and whipped up, not just a breeze, but a whole storm of passion? As the lid closed for ever on the pottery urn, her vision clouded at the memory of chiselled features which would never again break into a self-mocking grin, of hands stilled for ever from turning somersaults.
‘I’ll be waiting.’
The words echoed in her head and Claudia bit deep into her lower lip. From now on, whenever she inhaled the astringency of alecost she would think of Cal, and more than ever she was glad she hadn’t succumbed to her desires in the clandestine anonymity of the cave. “Who would know? Claudia would know. Now, at least, his shade could walk the Elysian Fields with one less stain on its soul.
Claudia blew into her handkerchief. It was so bloody unfair. Cal was too young to die, to be murdered. He’d been in the prime of his life, guzzling every opportunity which presented itself before maturity took a hold of his character and twisted it out of all recognition. Beside one of the tombs, a freckle-faced girl of maybe seven or eight rolled a hoop with a bone. For her, the world was a blank stucco wall upon which she could paint out her destiny, and whether the child turned out a thin-lipped virago, a brow-beaten doormat or a drink-raddled jade, only time or a clairvoyant could tell. But at least the future was hers to chart out.
Cal had been denied that opportunity.
A fat tear trickled down Claudia’s cheek and angrily she brushed it away. Our characters are the product of the decisions we make, and Cal ought at least to have been given a fighting chance. To die nobly in battle, perhaps, or face down disease with some dignity. Even hand-to-hand combat with his killer would have been preferable to having his neck wrung like a chicken’s.
It was too soon, the emotions still too raw, for Claudia to set her mind to considering who might have murdered Cal, or even why.
Yet, if only she had turned around, Claudia Seferius would have seen his killer standing behind her, deep in the shadows of the triple-arch gateway.
Watching intently.
X
Under the circumstances-heat which sweat-stained their clothes and attracted ravenous insects, the funeral going on all around them-you’d expect the citizens of Spesium to ease up a bit, but no. If anything, people seemed more careworn, more anxious. Farmers had fetched their cheeses, eggs and cattle in for market day, they were damned well going to sell them, and the Corn Measurer doled out the grain, flanked by two solid henchmen who put paid to all thoughts of pilfering. Rich men and poor, artists and administrators frantically thrust and jostled through the crush, shouting and squeezing and gripping their purses amid the clatter of wheelwrights and the grinding of shovels mixing cement as more and more apartment blocks were thrown up. So much brick dust, thought Claudia, so much construction, I could almost be back in Rome.
Then she saw him, standing head and shoulders above the crowd, a whopping great bear of a man with a black bushy beard and hair spiking out in a thousand directions, shaded by a scarlet awning over his stall. He was, at that moment, offering half-price enemas to a portly magistrate.
‘Dorcan, you old fraud!’ Claudia waited until the lardball waddled off before approaching the giant. ‘I thought I caught a glimpse of your ugly mug earlier.’ She examined the array of potions laid out on the counter. ‘What brings you so far north?’
Dorcan, whose ancestry could only be guessed at, exhibited a row of perfect white teeth and it was only when he tipped his head back and roared, like he did now, that you could see they were someone else’s, held together by strands of gold wire. ‘Remember my instant cure for hangover?’
‘Not personally.’ Claudia ran her finger over a thin plait billed as the original thread from the Minotaur’s labyrinth. ‘Although if I recall, it was a gruesome mix of goat dung and rennet, was it not?’
‘That’s the one. Got me into a real spot of bother, I tell you.’ His was not so much a laugh, more the bellow of a bull. ‘See, I never expected the silly sods to eat the ruddy stuff, they was supposed to rub it on their foreheads.’
Claudia picked up a dried snake purporting to be a clipping of Medusa the Gorgon’s hair. ‘Is that why you had to grow the beard?’
‘That come about after a misunderstanding over my fertility ointment when it appears I was somewhat heavy-handed with the mustard.’ Dorcan leaned over the counter and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Made their dicks glow like embers, it did.’
Claudia’s eyes were beginning to stream. ‘How many times have you been run out of town?’
The giant counted them off on his fingers. ‘Well, there was that incident over the toothache cure, which I sold as black chameleon and they caught me grinding chicken bones. My ointment for nappy rash went down none too well, owing to the fact it made their little bums go green-’
‘Stop,’ she wailed, fearing she might stay permanently doubled up, when a child ran over, making such a screech on a whistle made of wood that she was forced to stick her fingers in her ears.
‘Put it away, lad, until you’ve learned how to play it,’ Dorcan chided, but the child’s mother did not see the jest.
‘I say,’ she asked stiffly, ‘do you have a cure for moths?’
Claudia, who had no idea moths got sick, stuffed her fist into her mouth when Dorcan smoothly knocked over the sign which read ‘Reduces Fever’ and handed over the small clay pot it rested against. The woman counted out three bronze coins and she and her unmusical offspring moved on.
‘So then, my lovely,’ the burly bear pocketed the money and propped the sign against a thin blue phial, ‘I presume you haven’t travelled one hundred miles of metalled road just to sample my world-famous remedies. What brings you to Atlantis?’
Claudia ignored the question. ‘You’re a chap who hears things, Dorcan. I’m looking for a man.’
Another day aren’t-we-all would have tripped off his tongue, but suddenly he scowled and dragged her underneath his scarlet awning. ‘Don’t have no truck with them,’ he growled, and for a second she was bewildered.