'I must ask you to be careful. That's a very fragile piece.'
'Really?' She slipped off a sandal and was about to bring it crashing down on the cheetah's ear when, to her astonishment, Qeb dived across the room and threw his arm round its encrusted neck.
'Don't!'
It wasn't his ability to move so fast that astonished her. Not even the way he protected the terracotta cat with his body, in much the same way Tarbel threw himself over his mistress. It was the tears that were coursing down his cheeks.
'Don't hurt my baby,' he sobbed. 'Please don't hurt my baby.'
Gooseflesh rippled down Claudia's arms. Sweet heaven, what had she done? Watching this big Egyptian blubbing his heart out, she suddenly realized she had totally misread this poor wretch. The incense should have alerted her, but now it made sense that the younger brother was looking after the elder one. Why Qeb shaved his head. Why Stella had forbidden the children to enter his room. And it was not because she was afraid for her brood…
The slouch, the refusal to meet other people's eyes, his inability to interact — for heaven's sake, these were the classic symptoms of grief! Add in the Egyptian custom of shaving heads during mourning, the burning of incense, the great dung beetle that rolled the sun across the heavens and everything fell into place. The cheetah was a terracotta sarcophagus.
Replacing her shoe, Claudia had never felt such a bitch — or been so glad she hadn't brought her sandal crashing down. How on earth could she have suspected this poor man of molesting a child?
'Your daughter?' she asked softly.
'She was only three.' He sniffed, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. 'Three years old, can you imagine?'
Little by little the story unfolded, no doubt exactly as he'd confided to Stella, who would have homed in on his pain with the instincts of a magnet to metal. It was to protect Qeb that she'd banned her kids from his room, not the other way round. She'd felt the best way to let his heart heal would be without reminders of healthy, happy children constantly tearing at the open wound — and his story was tragic. Until the birth of their second baby, Qeb and his wife had no problems. They had a daughter, they adored her, she was three years old, her daddy was the keeper of a nobleman's menagerie and her mother was beautiful. But after the second baby arrived, something went horribly wrong. His wife couldn't stop crying. She'd stay in bed all day, wouldn't wash, wouldn't let anybody near her; she wouldn't touch or even feed the new baby. Qeb had been forced to hire a wet nurse.
'I knew she was ill,' Qeb stammered. 'Physicians examined her, but they said she'd get over it…'
How can you ever come to terms with walking in and finding your three-year-old daughter in bed with a pillow over her head? There was no sign of his wife or new baby, he said. It was a neighbour who eventually broke the news that she'd hurled herself under a chariot, the infant clutched to her breast…
'It's easy to talk to animals,' he said dully. 'If I'd only talked to my wife, got her to talk to me, she might have told me what demons were troubling her. Instead, the torment built up until it finally burst, and I did nothing to stop it.'
Angry and betrayed, feeling useless, impotent and raw, Qeb decided to bury his grief on the other side of the world. Feeding his animals in strict sequence, at set times and to a predetermined schedule — in other words, dominating time itself — was his way of coping, and, for once, Claudia thought, Stella was wrong. Happy healthy children around him was just the tonic this lonely, heartbroken man needed.
Orbilio was dreaming. In his dream, he seemed to be in a clearing in the forest. He saw acorns littered on the ground and, across the way, clusters of bright red berries of the mountain ash were being devoured by blackbirds. A sultry breeze ruffled the browning leaves, making them rustle. He appeared to be standing up, but since this was a dream it was just one more anomaly that his limbs weren't supporting him, something else was, and it was strange that a small fire should make such a disproportionate amount of smoke. Through the choking swirls, he heard voices talking in a dream language he couldn't understand, and the smoke smelled of catmint and clover, ivy and marsh tea — and wasn't that coriander seed and hemp as well?
Strangely, for a dream, there was a pounding in his temples that felt all too real, and a throbbing behind his eyes that meant he could hardly focus, while from somewhere strange music was made on unfamiliar instruments. Haunting, yet strangely rousing.
Orbilio didn't like this particular dream. He wanted to wake up and shake himself out of it. But it was not in his power to change things, only endure.
Above the trees the sun started to set.
Esus the Blood God tossed his horns and pawed at the ground with his hoofs.
His name had been called. His powers had been invoked. The oath that bound him to honour the old woman's plea for vengeance had been sealed by the final breath that passed from her body.
He paced the ground. She had called for retribution on the soul of her granddaughter's killer, and this could only come through hanging then skewering, that the victim's organs and blood might be drained from his body and his corpse left for the ravens to scavenge.
But who was to be hanged? Who was to be skewered, that his soul could never rest?
In frustration and rage, Esus the Blood God bellowed and roared.
High in the hills, in the cave from which the Spring of Prophecy bubbled from the rocks, the Arch Druid Vincentrix sat crosslegged on the floor and watched as four tired celestial horses pulled the chariot of the Shining One towards the dusky horizon.
Seated beside him, the Horned One smiled.
Twenty-Six
Claudia, too, was watching the sun set. Every time Marcia instigated a manhunt, the Scarecrow outwitted the trackers, who quickly attributed his ability to send dogs round in circles to supernatural powers. Possibly. But unless Claudia missed her guess, the answer was much more prosaic. If he could outsmart the hounds, it was because he was lacing his trail with a substance that confused them, in which case a certain herb sprang to mind, whose properties regarding canine attraction would be unfamiliar to Gaulish huntsmen. Anise, bless its little white feathery flowers, was a very recent Roman import! However, on the latest manhunt the huntsmen had nearly caught him. It was only beside the banks of the Carent, when the dogs went spectacularly wild, that the Scarecrow's spoor was lost.
The trackers put this down to the gods no longer favouring him. To Claudia, it smacked of a last-ditch attempt of a man in the throes of panic to throw them off the scent, and she pictured him racing down to the river, the crashing of his pursuers growing ever closer, the baying of the hounds ringing louder in his ears. She saw him tossing the last of his precious aniseed water over the river bank, then diving in and swimming like an otter for his life. In fact, she almost felt sorry for him, as he hauled himself on to an overhanging branch and clambered high into a tree. But only almost.
With the soft scents of sage and parsley billowing on the breeze, she shifted position and wondered where Orbilio had got to.
'Rome's famous for its spectaculars and the "Scarecrow Special" is one I wouldn't miss for all the ghosts in Hades.' He had laughed, insisting that he be back at the villa by the fourth hour after noon, no later. Yet still he hadn't shown.
'Just make sure you're camouflaged,' she'd snapped back.
A pair of sandalled feet appeared at the end of a row of smallage. The skin was tanned deep olive, and it glistened with fragrant oils.
'The Greeks used thiss herb to crown the winners of the Nemean Games,' Semir said, and if he thought noblewomen dressed in green lying in the herb beds was unusual it didn't register on his expression. 'I grow eet because mixed with cheese and pine kernels it makes tasty stuffing. This batch iss not ripe for harvest, though,' he added, with a sad shake of his braids. 'Germination slow has been this year.'