Feline eyes narrowed. 'Don't talk to a Kushite about murder! I could tell you tales that would freeze your blood and turn your hair white, and what if Felix is tortured by memories? What if he is tormented by the fate that befell his wife and his family? This has only come about through the injustice of a conspiracy involving your own husband, and don't pretend to me Gaius Seferius was an angel.'
'If you must know, Candace, he was a bastard.'
Ruthless and brutal in his business dealings, while socializing meant touring the child brothels in search of small boys. Claudia hadn't shed tears for her husband. But in many ways Gaius was an honourable cove, and the idea of him raiding the Imperial treasury seemed anomalous to the point of incredulity. Also, if he and the other five had been co-conspirators, his mother would have made the connection… and so would they.
Darius, Claudia realized, wasn't as smart as he thought…
'But at least Gaius was an uncomplicated bastard,' she told Candace, 'while you, my little wind-walking fraud, have been used. Played like the harp you use in your charades — and I suppose he conned you into funding his exploits?'
Candace laughed. 'See? You know nothing! What I earn is mine. Mine!' She held out her arms to reveal the welter of gold, and yes, always gold. Maybe that's why she took balm of Gilead? To counter the pain of carrying so much weight. 'I told you on Market Day, no one can take this away from me, not Felix, not a thief, not even your State, so there will never be any question of my breaking the law.'
With a crash of cymbals the marriage ceremony was brought to an end, thousands of tiny candles were lit round the idol and the tempo changed again. With wild music and free-flowing wine, the Bridal Dance was about to begin. In the reflection of the sacred pool, the moon rippled silver and full.
'This is about more than money,' Claudia said. 'More than just control.' There was something Candace still wasn't telling.
'I have lived through things I should not have lived through, endured what no living person should have endured,' the sorceress hissed. 'Gold paves the road to freedom like no other. Never more shall I be enslaved!'
The passion exploded like a ripe melon, and suddenly Claudia saw the reason for Candace's mask. How do you preserve your own identity when you have none? You create it. By surrounding herself with mystery and magic, then portraying herself as an instrument of the supernatural, slave becomes master at last.
'Except somewhere along the line, morals become blurred, ethics fade and compassion dies like a thirteen-year-old girl with a rock tied round her waist.'
As the crowd surged forward, eager for a better view of the virgin moons, a child was sent flying and began to cry.
'How dare you!' Candace pressed her nose to Claudia's and the light in her eyes was pure fire. 'This gold is not for the pursuit of avarice. This gold assures our future
'Whose future? Lichas'? Tages'? Vorda's?' The child's crying was closer now, and more harrowing for its insistence. 'Whose freedom are you buying with the blood of their innocence?'
But the answer was not the one Claudia expected, nor did it come from Candace's mouth.
'Mummy, Mummy, Indigo's hurt! Someone trod on her and she's bleeding,' a tiny voice sobbed, stuffing a grazed elbow under Candace's nose. 'Kiss it better, Mummy! Kiss it better!'
Twenty-Six
Many things change but the land never does, and regardless of who conquers whom, the soil is enduring and the cycles of the moon never waver. She begins as a crescent, young, fresh and pure. The virgin who waits her turn. Then she matures into womanhood, ripe, round and fecund, adored by all who gaze up at her. Finally, though, her time comes. She grows old, shrinking away until she fades into nothingness, then a brand new moon is born and the sequence starts over again.
No moon is ever the same. What has passed once can never be repeated, not in the same manner, Aplu's weather staff will see to that. Each moon is revered for her own self, and there was a saying among the Etruscans: no moon, no man — meaning that any child born between the moons was cursed by the gods — and thus, of all the traditions dear to their heart, it was this the people held closest. Fufluns and his brides stood at the very soul of the fatherland. Life versus death; harvest versus crop failure; happiness versus sorrow. The cycle of three, like the cycle of the moon. Sacred. Respected. Sacrosanct.
Each moon had her role to play in the farming year, and no role was more valuable than her sister's. Without the planting moon there could be no harvest moon. The ploughing moon was as crucial to farmers as the hunter's moon, the lambing moon and the midsummer moon.
Claudia watched the first little bride take her place inside the candle-lit circle, but her mind was not on the dance. She saw only a small girl with fair hair and freckles whose face was creased up in pain, yet who still turned to her best friend first. The invisible Indigo.
'I found her in the mountains when she was a baby,'
Candace mouthed over Amanda's head as she ferociously cradled her daughter. 'She'd been abandoned, exposed and left to die, and believe me, I know how that feels. I gave her a home and I gave her love, and that's why I keep earning,' she added. 'That's why I need gold so badly.'
Claudia sighed. If only money was what children needed! It helps. God knows it helps. But what Amanda needed more was her mother's time, not her money — and the girl needed stability, too.
'Darius told Mummy that Indigo was bad for me and Mummy should stop moving round and that would get rid of her, but I told Indigo not to worry, no one's going to get rid of her, because why should Mummy listen to what Darius tells her? She 'll be moving on soon, we always do, but this time it won't matter, because Indigo and me are running away to live with my father in Rome, only you promise not to tell Mummy, won't you?'
Dammit, the bastard was right. It wasn't fair on the girl to keep uprooting and moving on. She needed real children to be friends with.
Taking a deep breath, Claudia had clenched her fists and broken her oath to Amanda.
But it was better Candace heard from an impartial source that her daughter was so unhappy that she planned to run away, and it shocked her rigid to learn that Amanda preferred to start a new life with an imaginary father and an imaginary friend, rather than continue with the life she already had. Feeling like an intruder, Claudia had left mother and daughter mingling their tears of pain, hugging each other tight. Will anyone ever understand love, she wondered? Has anyone ever actually got it right?
Absently, she watched the little moons dance in the flickering, fairy-lit circle. The first was dressed in diaphanous silver, another in a headdress of crescent horns, the third clad in a costume of clinging ivy. And now Claudia's attention was focussed.
For a split second, she swore she could smell the stale sweat of the sailors, hear their coarse jeers ringing once again in her ear. She was their age when she began, too. The difference was, it had been every night, not just once a year, but orphaned, penniless and alone in the slums, dancing was her only escape. Like a dam bursting its barricade, memories flooded back with every sensual sway. The rhythm. The pulse. The arched back and the come-on look in the eye. As the fifth moon swept into the ring, chin held high, skirts billowing, Claudia recalled her own half-parted lips, the pretence to each leering sailor that this dance was for him and that she couldn't get enough of his pawing as she stretched, coiled and gasped her way through her routine. Except the performance here tonight was authentic. As the fire moon stroked her budding breasts with teasing sensuality, arousing the earth god with the thrust of her hips, Claudia realized the girl wasn't acting. Of course, it wasn't the same for all the performers. Three had danced stiffly and had been acutely self-conscious. But when a virgin bride peels off her clothes and gyrates with erotic abandon…