Scorpion Rising

Just because we deliver a baby, it doesn't follow that we bond differently with that child than we do from any other.

Unless, of course, you are that child 'Unloved, unwanted, Clytie must have been consumed by grief,' Claudia sobbed.

The last straw would have been the letter. The draft Claudia had found in the urn. The scribbled evidence that would finally convict Ailm.

Clever enough to tell tales, but not clever enough to qualify, are we?

It was too much.

'On the night her mother took centre stage on the dais, Clytie went down to the river and slashed her wrists.'

Right from the start, Claudia was reminded of her own mother's death, was haunted by her suicide. And though she'd come to Gaul to lay the ghosts of her past, she still couldn't see beyond the pain of betrayal.

Clytie wasn't murdered. Not in that sense. But a young girl on the brink of womanhood had received one disappointment too many, and though Beth hadn't told her that she would not qualify for the Hundred-Handed, Ailm couldn't resist 'telling the truth'.

'She chose that particular rock because she wanted her friends to find her.'

Like her mother, Claudia realized too late, she wanted to be found by someone she loved. Someone who would understand…

'But the girls didn't know this.' How could they? It had taken her a lifetime herself. 'They panicked.'

They're children, not adults, and because Clytie had killed herself on their own special rock, they thought she'd done it to get them into trouble. Instead of running for help, they remembered hearing about women who were killed in Santonum and who had had their faces painted.

'They tried to disguise Clytie's suicide.'

Having applied the cosmetics, they pulled her off the rock and left her beside the river, her hair fanned out, her arms outstretched, knowing that either Pod or Gurdo would find her.

'I should have seen it,' Claudia sobbed. 'It was so bloody obvious,'

The peaceful death, just like her mother's…

'It's because I didn't think clearly that you're in this mess, and I'm sorry, but please don't die on me, Marcus.'

'I love you, too,' he croaked back. 'Oh, god, Claudia, I love you so much and if I… if I…'

'Will you stop bloody iffing!' she screamed. 'I've already killed two men tonight, so if you think I'm going to let you sit on that ferry to Hades alongside Ptian-'

'You killed Ptian?'

The voice came from behind, a deep baritone, and it smelled of sandalwood unguent.

'ORBILIO?'

She stared at him. Stared at the abyss. Stared at him once again. Not a ghost. Not a hallucination. The bastard was there in the flesh.

'You said you were dying!'

'I said it was too late.' His face twisted. 'I just omitted the part about getting me out of the Pit, I was already out.'

But 'You said there were complications. You said-'

He took a step forward. The rain had plastered his hair to his face, but his eyes were as dark as the storm. 'And you said you loved me,' he rasped.

'You bastard.'

'Claudia, I'm sorry.' A pulse beat at the side of his neck. 'But it was the only way I could get you to say it.'

'Say what? The first thing that came into my head, so a dying man wouldn't feel he was alone?'

He tricked her and so help her, she'd never forgive him.

'Do you really think I give this for you?' she hissed, snapping her fingers.

'Do not be too hard on him, Merchant Seferius.' A second figure stepped forward and rain or not, you could still kohl your eyes in the shine in his hair. 'Your policeman was only trying to bring my daughter's killer to book.'

'Gabali?'

Janus, Croesus, how many more people had heard her make a fool of herself? Had he hired a team of bloody claqueurs and sold tickets? Then she looked at the Spaniard's face, sunken with grief, at the stipples that stood out on his cheeks.

'Clytie was your daughter!'

Penetrating brown eyes bored through his thin pointed features. 'How could you doubt it?' he asked, and his voice was hoarse with emotion. 'And now you tell me that she killed herself because nobody loved her.'

'No.' Claudia could barely speak the words. 'She killed herself because she had nothing to live for and, believe me, Gabali, there is a difference.'

She would never know what made her mother slit her wrists that afternoon. Was suicide a notion she'd contemplated once, twice, a hundred times before? Was it a spur-of-the-moment decision? An impulse driven by wine? Maybe, like Claudia, it was the not-knowing that finally eroded her strength. Of seeing the man she had married and with whom she'd raised a child march off to war and never come home. Being nothing more than a lowly orderly, his absence, even death, was not worth recording. For four years her mother would have lived with the uncertainty of not knowing if it was her drunkenness that drove him away.

'Suicide occurs when the burdens of life are too heavy to bear and death seems the only way out,' she told Gabali. 'It's not rational, but that's the point. And it certainly isn't because no one loves them.'

It's just that that person's love isn't enough.

A shame Claudia had carried too long 'I hope you are right, Merchant Seferius. I hope to the gods you are right, but with all my heart I thank you for getting to the truth, and I thank you, Marcus, for suggesting I go to her for help.'

'WHAT?'

'If I lied to you, I apologize,' he said. 'But the HundredHanded-'

'Lied to me?'

'- refused to even meet with me when I turned to them for justice-'

'Gabali, you threatened me with-'

'- and if they would not help, nor the local judiciary, Manion said my only recourse then was the Security Police.'

Claudia's anger found a new outlet. 'Manion said?'

'I did not lie when I said I worked for the Scorpion,' he said in his soft Andalus accent, and did nobody care about the storm crashing around them? 'I merely omitted that, from time to time, I also undertake certain contracts for your friend here, contracts that might be too sensitive, leastways politically, for Rome.'

'You work for Orbilio?'

It must have been the wind screaming through the branches, because he didn't seem to hear her.

'Through my contacts with the College, I wangled Ptian a job as a guard, then engineered Manion a place in the slave auction, even though he was expecting an attempt on his life. That was why he joined the queue at the last minute, switching places with your friend here-'

'He is not a friend, and he certainly isn't mine,' Claudia hissed.

'- to throw the sniper off guard, but the attempt was more subtle than that.'

'The raven.' She refused to even look at Orbilio. 'But if it wasn't Manion who shot that bird, who on earth wanted the Scorpion dead?'

'Ptian, of course.' Ptian had no intention of sharing power, he explained. 'He wanted to be known as the man who led Aquitania to freedom, so he killed a raven with an arrow flying Manion's colours in a plan that should have been foolproof.'

Foolproof? Then Claudia remembered the way Ptian had blown on his ring, buffing it up on his pants like Manion. The ring was silver — like Manion's. Engraved — like Manion's. Doubtless one of many characteristics that Ptian had copied to mould himself into what he assumed was the embodiment of a rebel leader. Were we only able to see ourselves as other people see us, she reflected wryly. Because then he'd see that he was nothing but a shallow imitation, a thug and a bully, without character of his own. But bloated on self-importance mixed with smugness and a certain native cunning, Ptian would have considered himself the intelligent one, not Manion. He was the hero, the man to lead Gaul, and no wonder the emblem on his ring was the phoenix. It symbolized a new leader rising from the ashes of subjugation. But Ptian was also a coward. If he was to kill Manion, he had to be sure to succeed.