Five
Craning her neck upwards from the bridge over the spring, Claudia was unable to glimpse any activity up on the plateau. For a secretive sect this was hardly surprising, but somehow she was disappointed not to be seeing dozens of women in white, floaty robes swanning about bearing lustral bowls here, pouring libations there and singing paeans to Mother Nature. Perhaps the birdsong was paean enough. 'Can I help you?'
Claudia turned, but once again there was nobody there. Just the river that danced through the flower filled meadows, the cliff, the caves and the woods. It was a trick of the wind, of course. Or the valley's acoustics 'Down here,' the voice said, with a tug on her robe. 'I'm Gurdo,' he added cheerfully. 'I have healing powers, you know.'
She looked at the dwarf, clad in green plaid pantaloons and matching shirt, and decided that wasn't so much a twinkle in his equally green eye as mischief.
'What? You don't think little people can cure you?' He tutted. 'This here's the Cave of Miracles, lady. Cross my palm with gold, tell me what ails you, and between me and the healing springs, we can fix it.'
He beckoned her into the cool of the cavern decked with roses and honeysuckle, where, rather than gushing out of the rock, water trickled through a fissure in the soft white limestone into a basin hewn out of stone before being channelled to a place where the oil lamps that twinkled in niches carved out of the rock didn't penetrate.
'How much gold?'
The cave smelled of comfrey, rosehips, yarrow and hore-hound. All of which had acclaimed healing properties.
'I might have small hands, but together they make a large cup. See? Fill that to the brim and in exchange I'll give you a grail of this water. Your ailment will be gone by the dawn.'
'Probably not as fast as my gold.'
'Oh, so you're a cynic as well as an invalid? Lucky me.' He crossed militant arms over his chest. 'Now do you want to be cured, or don't you?'
'Yes,' she said, 'I want to be cured.' According to Gabali, it was the only way into the College. 'But I thought physicians were supposed to exercise charm and have a good bedside manner.'
She'd seen lions in the arena less hostile than Gurdo.
'Listen, lady, I'm the guardian of these springs, not a physician, and frankly, what I do with my charisma's my business. Besides. I told you. Dwarves possess curative powers.'
'Since when?'
'Since you Romans started putting us to death for being malformed.'
Claudia laughed. 'You and I, Gurdo, are going to get along very nicely, but pull that extortion-and-menaces act one more time and I shall hold your money-grubbing head under the water for forty-five minutes and see whether you possess lung power as well.'
'I suppose you don't care that you've hurt my feelings?'
'Oh, so you're sensitive as well as a bully? Lucky me.' She crossed militant arms over her chest. 'Now are you going to cure me or not?'
Gurdo tipped his head back and roared. 'You know, Lofty Legs, you could be right. We might be friends yet.' He wiped the tears from his eyes with the hem of his sleeve. 'What's wrong with you, anyway?'
Claudia hadn't thought that far ahead, but whatever made people flock to this cave, it wasn't going to be cured by a mug of water, that was for sure. Still. Faith can move mountains, so the saying goes. In this case, faith drizzled out of the mountain like tears but the principle, she supposed, was no different.
'You don't look ill,' he added, peering at her unblemished skin, bright eyes and shiny hair.
She peered back at the little dandy, rocking on his heels and with his long hair tied back in a queue. 'I have a pain in the neck.'
'Now that I can believe.'
It was true. It came in the form of the Security Police, who didn't view her battle for financial survival in quite the same light as herself. Something to do with fraud and forgery not being all it was cracked up to be when it came to legal technicalities, she believed. And, unless she missed her guess, arrest warrants, handcuffs and trials figured in their equation as well.
'Joint problems comes under the category of laying on of hands — nah, don't look so worried. Not mine.' A stubby finger pointed directly upwards. 'Mavor's the woman for that. Now you wait here, Lofty Legs. Make yourself comfortable, help yourself from the fountain, do whatever you want — only don't go in there, right?'
He pointed to where the channel of water disappeared into darkness.
'Out of bounds,' he warned, 'and that's why this is the Cave of Miracles, lady. Not just this spring. This is the only cave in Aquitania with two mouths, one for us humans, one for the spirits. You keep away from that part.'
'I wouldn't dream of coming between you and your charisma,' she said sweetly, but he'd already stumped off.
'Don't mind him,' a youthful voice chuckled.
A spiky dark haircut popped itself round the cave mouth and Claudia thought, First dwarves, now elves.
'Dad works on the theory that if he was so wicked in his last incarnation to be reborn as a dwarf, he might as well enjoy being nasty.'
'It's one of the few pleasures that cost nothing,' she agreed.
That was another thing about these Gauls. Reincarnation. If life was so tough, why keep repeating it? But then theology was never Claudia's strong point.
'Tell you what else he says.' The youth laid down the pile of kindling in his arms and mimicked Gurdo's voice and stance. 'Pod, boy, don't you never go to bed angry, you hear me? You bloody well stay up and fight like the rest of us!'
'Pod?'
'Dad said I was always full of beans as a nipper.' The elf grinned so widely that his cheeks dimpled up. 'The name kind of stuck.'
'And your mother?'
'Me mother?' He brushed his hands down his woodsman's tunic as though trying to brush off a memory. 'No more than wind at the door, that's what I reckon.' He pointed to where the stream disappeared round the bend. 'Gurdo found me wandering beside the reed beds over yonder, seven summers old, I was, there or abouts, and what with me having no memories of me own and no one coming forward to claim me, he raised me himself
That would make it ten years since Pod was adopted, but why no memories? Was it an injury that wiped them clean? A trauma? Or was this artless imp simply a congenital liar?
'So you think you can burn charcoals with your chattering now?' Gurdo's voice carried along the path even though the dwarf himself was out of sight.
'What he lacks for height, he makes up for in cunning,' Pod confided in a theatrical whisper. 'That crafty bugger can see round corners!' Aloud he shouted, 'Pod off!' as he gathered up his kindling, and was still beaming from ear to ear as he sprinted off with a litheness that would make a polecat jealous.
Gurdo hove into sight, accompanied by a creature whose hair blazed red and wild, whose breasts were full and thrusting, and whose hips swayed to a rhythm that was anything but virginal. Had Claudia been a man, she imagined her jaw would have dropped to her collarbones and stayed down there for a week. Well, well. She knew the priestesses kept men enslaved for sex, but even so. This was not how she'd imagined the Hundred-Handed!
'I hear you have a pain in the neck?' Mavor asked kindly.
'You have no idea.'
It stood six feet tall, boasted dark wavy hair and came complete with a baritone voice. Not that Claudia thought about the Security Police in that way, of course. If she ever thought about Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, it was in the official sense and had nothing to do with the way his hair flopped over his forehead in times of emotion or the little pulse that beat at the side of his neck. In fact, she could hardly recall what he looked like, much less remember that musky sandalwood unguent of his. With just a hint of the rosemary in which his patrician tunics were rinsed.