Claudia couldn’t wait.
Today, being a public holiday, humankind of every shape and variety had been drawn to this phenomenon of nature, whinging, laughing, splashing, grousing, and every damned one of them putting his heart and soul into it. You could almost sniff the roistering from the top of the hill, and it was as close to heaven as you could get away from Rome. Far from noxious, the air smelled fresh, like the sea, and even the rushing waters were blue, except where they swirled in the channels and over the rocks and thrashed white like the waves in the ocean.
An ox cart had set off at first light taking the women, the food and the servants while the men, apart from Pallas, enjoyed a hearty breakfast of pancakes before saddling up and racing each other like schoolboys. Claudia, who believed the only thing you should put on a horse was a bet, also declined Tulola’s offer to accompany her in her chariot, and opted for a good couple of hours’ gossip with Pallas and his considerable picnic breakfast in a fast, two-wheeled car.
‘Did you hear that Timoleon?’ He fanned away the dust kicked up by the hoofs. ‘“We Corinthians are born riders”? Croesus, that man must have a brass neck as well as brass balls.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, look at him! He’s no more Greek than the Emperor.’ Pallas peered at his reflection in a silver serving dish propped against the buckboard.
‘You don’t like him, do you?’
‘Darling girl, I don’t like any of them,’ he replied cheerfully, smoothing his eyebrows into shape.
‘Excellent.’ Claudia snuggled up beside him. ‘Because if you can’t find a good word to say about these people, you’d better pass me a honeycake and tell me all about it.’
As a result, the journey whizzed along. Timoleon, he hold her, was a local boy, born near Tarsulae to farming stock. When the Emperor had diverted the road, his family had merely broadened their horizons and taken up banditry. It was only due to his age that the youngest brigand escaped execution and served five years in gladiator school instead, where he obviously worked hard to suppress his Umbrian accent and where he adopted the name Timoleon. After his sentence was up, he opted for a further three years in which he earned himself the name Scrap Iron as well as the immeasurable riches that went with the crowns.
Interesting, she thought, because not all his opponents would have been skilled fighters. The vast majority were common criminals sentenced to die in the arena. Like his own family, for instance.
Salvian, fearing conspiracy among the giggles, rode his horse closer to the car, the tuneless clanking of his ill-fitting armour drowning the boundary calls of the flycatchers, the courting coos of the turtle doves.
‘You never fancied joining up, then?’ He couldn’t always have been fat, and in his youth Pallas would have stood head and shoulders above the average legionary.
‘Me?’ He took a bite of black pudding and patted his ample girth. ‘You’ll not catch me with steel in my belly, better the surfeit than the sword.’
She thought long and hard about the next question. ‘And you never married?’
‘Oh, I married, I married. In fact, come to think of it,’ he grimaced theatrically, ‘I’m still married.’
Claudia’s affection for the fat man was growing stronger by the minute. ‘What went wrong?’
Pallas laughed, his chins shaking, and he wagged his pudgy finger. ‘You don’t want to know, you really, really don’t.’
With a whoop and a cheer, they overtook the plodding ox cart, resisting the urge to pull faces at Alis and Euphemia, and it was there, on the brow of the hill, that Claudia got her first glimpse of the sulphur pools. You could tell the channel that fed them by a straight line of wild cane stretching back to infinity but which terminated in a crashing, splashing waterfall the height of a cottage. Below these falls, a series of smaller cascades had been carved by the blue torrent to leave a score of shallow saucer-shaped pools, some no wider than a wine press, others the width of a bedroom, before the warm waters became lost in the river they tumbled into.
The same river where, stripped to his loincloth and plastered with grey-black mud, stood the man she most wanted to avoid. Silly cow, she told herself. Still can’t tell the difference between passion and compassion, can you? His eyes weren’t dark with lust last night, he was apologizing because he hadn’t cleared your name.
‘You made good progress.’ He rinsed the health-giving slime off his skin and bounded on to the bank.
‘I have just two words to say to you, Orbilio. One rhymes with pod, the other with toff.’
The gracious bow and twinkling eyes implied he hadn’t heard, but Claudia knew better. To her left, a small cave had been hollowed into the rock, its mouth covered by deerskins and guarded by a dragon, where freeborn women could rent bathing shifts. Claudia tipped the crone and marched inside.
‘Oi! Where d’you think you’re going?’ An aged claw snapped over Salvian’s wrist.
‘I’m ac-c-companying my prisoner.’
‘Not in ’ere, you ain’t. Not unless you’re a girlie.’ To the delight of the crowd, her hand whipped up his tunic and a raucous cackle confirmed her suspicions. ‘Nope.’ As women shrieked and men hooted, Claudia took advantage to duck round the drapes and up the steps of a tiny stone building with just two columns and a weathered old portico. Mingling with the throng, she became as anonymous as the next woman-unlike certain young men in full military uniform who stuck out like sore thumbs. Very, very sore thumbs.
The shrine, it seemed, served both Metaneira, the nymph who lived in the river, and Thoas, the sulphur god who plunged into her, and was suitably revered by men and women seeking improvements in their own love lives. And not all of them married to one another, to judge from the inscriptions on the lead sheets which had been so tenderly consigned to the sacred pool.
A pinched-nosed priestess dripping with gold filigree stood on call to aid the lovers, selling simple cyclamen at five times its value. Powder the root and he’s yours for ever, madam. Roving eye, dearie? My magic potion will cure that. Claudia sniffed the proffered flagon and detected only vervain. No wonder the old bag stooped with the weight of the gold!
Predictably the friezes were also of a suggestive nature, and you could hardly move for children sniggering and whispering as their grubby fingers traced the rudest of the paintings. Claudia kissed a coin and tossed it in the fountain for Metaneira, who, even if she possessed Tulola’s incredible stamina, must be heartily sick of Thoas’ attentions by now.
Outside, in what was now a Salvian-free zone, the place was buzzing. Theoretically, on public holidays you weren’t supposed to engage in trade or commercial activities, but try telling that to the people. Fortune-tellers predicted cures beyond the expectations of even the most optimistic of quacks and a group of lepers, fenced off from the healthy, clamoured to buy holy water for their wretched mutilations. Brown grasshoppers, as long as your little finger, bounded and chirruped and got crushed underfoot. From the pools there came squeals of delight, groans of relief, cries of encouragement as tetchy babies were coaxed into the shallows. Grown men squabbled over places in the pools, small boys held weeing contests under the waterfall.
Claudia clambered up steps hewn from the rock with the aid of a rope handrail, and inhaled. The smell of oceans and open spaces, of travel and adventure all rolled into one. Without warning the age-old feeling of restlessness welled up inside her. It was her craving for adventure that had got her into this mess and that self-same drive would probably bring about an early demise-but heaven knows it would be worth it. The thrill of the unknown! The excitement of each new, unfolding challenge!