‘Hmmm,’ said the gut-gazer. Men with their hair garlanded and women with theirs streaming free shuffled forward. ‘Hmmm,’ he said again, nodding with practised ambiguity. ‘Hm, hm.’ Solemnly he picked up the dripping liver and weighed it in his hands from left to right. He peered, he prodded, he even smelled the wretched thing, then he harrumphed a little more, re-examined the heart and kidneys, and muttered dolefully, ‘This bodes well. Spes has favoured us.’
Heaven knows what the man was like when he encountered a bout of the miseries, but the proclamation was enough for the crowd. Roars broke out, cheering and clapping, and the music started up again, with a trumpet thrown in for good measure, and then the lambs were set loose, scores of bleating, silly, bright-eyed creatures skipping down the street, unaware their dad was being roasted on the fire. Ropes had been stretched across the upper storeys of buildings along the main thoroughfares from which sheets of every hue were hung to provide rainbows of shade ‘If you suffer from insomnia,’ Kamar whispered, chomping on a piece of sacrificial mutton, ‘I can prescribe a poppy draught.’
Claudia looked up at him, his turtle face as lugubrious as ever. Was it her imagination, or was there steel inside that silky offer? Beside him stood a mouse of a woman, his wife, whose badly disfigured face, rumour had it, resulted from falling into the fire as a child. One rather had the impression that the burns had been the first, rather than the last, of this woman’s burdens. ‘Insomnia?’ Claudia asked.
‘Chronic sleeplessness,’ he said. ‘The inability to fall asleep; waking and being unable to get back to sleep.’
I know what it means, you sour-faced oaf.
‘Only one couldn’t help noting you do not siesta and were abroad in the early hours of the morning,’ he explained.
Claudia pictured Kamar again whispering behind the statue with old Stonypuss. ‘Does it bother you I keep late hours? Has-’ she tilted her head towards Pylades, conferring with Mosul and the temple warden ‘-someone complained about my activities?’
‘Of course not,’ Turtleface said quickly. ‘Not at all. Certainly not. My concern is purely for the residents’ welfare.’
‘Then you must have had a busy night,’ she said silkily.
‘Busy?’ he growled. Beside him, the dormouse pulled nervously at the hem of her sleeve.
‘Yes, I-’ Claudia loaded sympathy into her voice ‘-thought I heard screaming.’
The big Etruscan’s mouth pinched even further inwards so that now no lips were showing. ‘It’s the midwife’s job to deliver babies,’ he snarled, ‘not mine. By the time they called me in, it was over bar the shouting, the woman had haemorrhaged too long.’
Claudia felt a punch in the pit of her stomach. Those screams were a young mother dying?
Kamar sniffed. ‘I daresay you’ll find she’d not taken sufficient care to preserve the seed during the early stages of gestation. In my professional opinion, haemorrhaging at birth occurs because some women are foolish enough and irresponsible enough to imagine they can live a normal life when they carry a child in their womb.’
Is that a fact? ‘Then how do you account for so many healthy births among women in the fields?’ Or don’t the poor count, in your fine professional opinion?
‘What’s that you say?’ Kamar stooped closer to hear. ‘I didn’t catch that.’
You couldn’t catch crabs in your loin cloth, you coldblooded rodent. ‘I was merely enquiring after the health of the infant,’ Claudia replied, accepting a sliver of roast from the sacrificial platter.
‘The child?’ Kamar jumped backwards as though burned. ‘My dear girl, the child was the least of my worries. When I saw the state of the mother, I simply hooked the foetus out and got on with the job I was paid for.’
The mutton in her mouth turned to lard. He what? Claudia fought against the rising nausea in her stomach. This callous son-of-a-bitch killed a child at the moment of its birth, simply because he’d been paid to attend the mother, not her baby? For a second, she feared she might throw up all over him, but Claudia was a past master at the concealment of feelings. She merely prayed to Jupiter, god of justice, that Kamar was the one who’d snapped Cal’s neck, she wanted to see this man trampled by elephants, torn apart by wild asses, flayed alive. Preferably all at once.
‘I’m wondering whether that cross-eyed little pedlar didn’t have a point, dear,’ piped up Kamar’s little peahen of a wife. ‘He,’ she gave a wan smile, ‘said he’d rather take his bonework back to Rome and take his chances with the plague. He…well, implied there was a jinx on this place.’
‘I’ve warned you before about mixing with the common rabble,’ Kamar snapped. ‘One day you’ll pick up something more than malicious gossip, which medicines might not be able to cure.’
Was that a threat?
‘Honestly,’ he tutted, rolling his eyes as, with reddened cheeks, his wife mumbled an apology. Then he pulled his lips back into what Claudia supposed was a smile as Pylades strolled up to join the party.
‘Enjoying the festival?’ he beamed, his gaze roaming over the curves of Claudia’s figure, and again it flashed through her mind. Three men. One objective. One dead. ‘This year’s Agonalia is the best to date,’ the stocky hillsman was saying, ‘but then the town grows stronger by the month. Down there.’ A richly embroidered sleeve pointed towards a group of merchants milling around their terracotta vats, though his gaze was fixed on the swell of Claudia’s breasts. ‘Down there you can buy olive oil of every quality and colour-local produce, Spanish, African, even,’ he bowed modestly, ‘Greek. Another year and Spesium, I’ll wager, will boast its own oil market like any other fine and prospering town.’
‘A commendable rate of expansion,’ murmured Claudia, her eyes alighting on his loins.
A rumble came from deep within the Greek’s throat and colour suffused his cheeks as he clasped his hands across his body.
‘I notice another hulking great warehouse is nearly complete,’ she continued, because this town, this strange town, had sharpened its interest for her. Look at it! There were few signs that the town was built on anything other than private investment and only the arena, still in its foundation stages, and the half-built theatre smacked of imperial backing.
‘Ah, well-’ Happy to be back on firm ground, Pylades launched into a great discourse on commerce and the value of attracting trade guilds, but it was those tortoise eyes which bothered Claudia. As the founding father of this town pontificated on the merits of private investment, Kamar’s gaze flickered back and forth in the direction of the sacrificial fire at the steps of the temple. Strange. Shifting her position for a better view, Claudia saw his scrutiny was directed at Pul, adopting the usual stance, and idly she wondered whether he ever peeled that leather vest off, and if not, what he and it must stink like.
‘Now if you’ll excuse me,’ Pylades said, ‘duty calls.’ A smug look descended on his swarthy face. ‘Atlantis, I’m pleased to say, has never been busier.’
‘So the plague isn’t all bad, then?’ Claudia said sweetly. Grunting, he offered a stiff arm to the doormat, who, at a nod from her husband, accepted with yet another watery smile.
Leaving just Kamar and Claudia under the cold, almond eyes of big Pul.
*
‘I thought I caught the smell of hokum in the air.’