Shit.
'This stays strictly between you and me, Hannibal.'
'It pains me that you might think otherwise, but,' he glanced to where Junius stood scowling under the awning of a bookbinder's workshop, 'if you need the reassurance so badly, madam, then you have my word. Returning to the matter of our informant, I will pursue this line if you insist, but I do not trust the fellow. He asked for too much money too quickly.'
'I wasn't aware we had too many choices.'
'Right now options are limited, I grant you. But patience, madam, patience. These are early days. You will recall that I only commenced my enquiries yesterday.'
Claudia's wished the same could be said of Marcus Cornelius. 'Time is not on my side, Hannibal.' Nor on that little snake Burto's, once she got her hands on him! 'Haggle if you can, but whatever your informant asks tell him I'll pay.'
'Madam, I really don't think-'
'Then keep it that way.'
He was taking this cloak-and-dagger stuff far too seriously, she decided, turning down the side of the bath house. You only had to look down any street and prosperity oozed from each marble pore. Why wouldn't one of the locals get greedy? The blood of the legate and his men still stained the soil on which they fell and the hills remained scattered with the bones of brave Santon warriors. But nothing brings the dead to life or turns back the pointer on the sundial, and in the time between Rome's conquest of these wild forests and the founding of Santonum, peace had prevailed. Whatever had happened here fifteen years before had been outside any political arena, and thus if there were no records of any incident it could hardly be serious. Besides, cold hard cash breaks any conspiracy of silence and what, after all, was thirty gold pieces compared to the cost of this visit? Especially since it was thirty gold pieces that Claudia would be fiddling from her taxes, anyway.
Across from the bath house, a surveyor was hunched, hands on knees, mapping out yet another warehouse. As he lined up his plumb bobs, so his assistants adjusted their rods accordingly until the satisfied surveyor finally nodded and the post was hammered in the ground to define the warehouse's limits. Because of this surveying work, traffic had been funnelled into a narrow and often bad-tempered stream, as wheels locked in the restricted accessway or some slow-moving ox cart held up everyone and caused a trailing backlog. Luckily for pedestrians, they could skip up the steps of the adjacent Temple of Hercules and cut across.
This temple was yet another example of the Emperor's cunning. Whether Roman or Gaul, there was no denying Hercules as the ultimate model of courage and integrity, and, also, as patron of commerce (the lifeblood of Santonum), trade deals were traditionally sealed at his altar. This was the first link in the imperial trust chain. The second being that, since Hercules was also leader of the Muses, it proved that men did not have to be bullies to be heroes. The Emperor was well aware that such values struck at the very heart of Gaulish society, just as he knew that by the time it came to military processions culminating at Hercules's intrepid feet few Santons saw further than the Great Feast that followed.
Rather than Rome cocking its leg and marking its territory…
Claudia was halfway across the precinct when she spotted a familiar blond head scrutinizing one of the statues with an intense expression.
'Admiring the competition?' she asked.
Paris turned slowly. 'Show me just one where there is life, a living soul inside rather than marble, and I will give it my admiration, but these?' The contempt in his voice was colder than hoar frost. 'Never.'
Claudia thought of the subtle swing of the knife-edge pleats of his marble nymphs. The carelessly tied girdle on one, a ringlet escaping from its stone hairpin on another, the amused arch of an eyebrow on yet another. Taken in isolation, they were nothing, but together they pulsed out character and individuality. Just as Hor had breathed life into the inside of the tomb, Paris had giving the tomb a personality all of its own.
'Marcia said you were a purist.'
'I am from Mycenae,' he said, as though that explained everything, and, hell, maybe it did. Despite most of its original splendour having been devastated by earthquakes, the palaces, villas and tombs of Mycenae stood testament to the skill of its craftsmen so that, even four and a half centuries on, their civilization remained a byword for excellence.
'Mycenaen sculptors are the best in the world,' he added with the confidence of a young man who was bloody good at his job and knew it.
'According to half the women at last night's banquet, they also make the best lovers.'
One nostril flared dismissively. 'Those fat old trouts imagine I would dissipate my energies on pleasuring them?'
Interestingly, his blue eyes were on Marcia's litter as it swayed back and forth above the heads of the crowd in a shimmer of green and gold drapes. He turned back to Claudia, and the expression in his eyes softened.
'You have no idea what it's like to start with a piece of stone — a virgin, if you like — and, as you slowly caress the marble with your chisels, feel the passion within her awaken.'
Gives a new dimension to the phrase 'married to the job', she supposed.
'Why aren't you at the tomb at the moment, arousing your marble nymphs?'
'I'm looking for Herakles.'
'Your dog?'
The softness vanished. 'The son of Zeus,' he snapped, 'who completed twelve impossible labours and was carried by the gods to Olympus.'
Ah. Hercules. Just like he meant Jupiter and not Zeus.
'Marcia wants the Governor to see how important she is every time he comes to dine, so she's decreed work on her tomb be deferred in favour of a statue of Herakles at the entrance of her estate. I am in Santonum for inspiration.'
'You could just copy the one inside the temple.'
'That monster?' Paris sneered. 'Its neck is too thick, its head is too small, its hands far too big and the expression on its face resembles that of a constipated griffin.'
Jupiter, Juno and Mars. How often had Claudia heard philosophers on the steps of the Rostra debating what stimulating conversation would be inspired, could the cream of intellect and ability be gathered in the same room for just one night? Now she knew. Marcia had collected the finest professionals from around the world — and they bored the spots off a leopard. Talent they might possess by the bucketload, but conversation? Personality? She'd had more fun talking to glow worms.
Santonum's Forum was packed with stalls that had spilled out of the market square and which offered everything from fruit presses to jars of honey, shaggy woollen tablecloths to salt meat. The air was heavy with the smell of ripe fruit and barley beer, of smoked hams that hung from hooks strung over makeshift rails, and the babble of trade and laughter drowned out the sound of cobblers bent over their lasts. At the top end of the Forum, prisoners in leg irons were being paraded on a platform under the watchful eye of an armed guard, while at the southern end of the Forum something similar was happening, except these were not criminals.
Dark-skinned Iberians, big brawny Germans and hooknosed Phoenicians stood, heads bowed, with cards around their neck that displayed everything from their age to their health to their various skills, but failed to mention their name or their family history. To people like Marcia, prodding the muscles of a redhead with frizzy braids, such matters were unimportant. These were not people. They were chattels. Objects, to be bought and sold at auction, like the kitchen boy scared out of his wits, whose fear of the Scarecrow provoked not protection or concern from his mistress, but anger that he'd left a few paltry mushrooms behind, and who cared that he would be torn from his friends and his family? As Marcia moved along the platform to peer inside the mouth of a Greek girl to examine her teeth, Claudia felt something slither under her ribcage. Reeling away, she slammed straight into a wall of leather. The wall smelled of dense, dark, cedary forests, his hair was cropped in a neat Caesar cut and the eyes above it, she decided, were, yes, definitely the colour of chestnuts.