She was out of breath, and her tunic was crooked. She’d worn a mantle over her head against the rain, and her face was flushed from the exercise. All of it. She said abruptly: “What do you want?”
“To find out who killed Faro. Don’t you?”
She was a stupid girl. She tried to give me a withering look but only succeeded in making herself look cross-eyed. “Mama says-”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what your mama says. Your mama feeds off hate and throws it back up on everyone she meets. And I suspect-I suspect very much, Secunda-you know it.”
Her eyes took on a kind of animal gleam. “She wouldn’t like you poking around.”
“She wouldn’t like you getting poked.”
One of the slaves stifled a guffaw. Some straw from the loft fell through a crack and rocked in the air until it landed. Secunda swallowed a couple of times. She was pretty, if you liked them dumb. “You-you-”
“Don’t worry. I won’t write about it on the temple wall. All I want to know is if you have a black horse that came home riderless the other night.”
She stared at me, her face red. Then she decided to pretend I didn’t exist and turned around and marched out the other end. The slaves trickled back to the main room. The big one cleared his throat.
“I-I think you might like the third stall on the right. Nice stall, isn’t it, Hamus?”
“Yeah. Damn nice stall.”
They all looked at me expectantly. I walked to the third stall.
Inside was a small black horse with a fine-boned, intelligent head. I climbed in with him, calming him down because he didn’t recognize me.
“ ’S’all right, boy. Easy.”
I stroked his neck while his nose took in my equine history. He decided I was all right. I rubbed him under the heavy part of the jaw and scratched a spot on his right front flank. He extended his neck for me. Now he knew I knew the secret spots of horses, so he let me pick up his hooves.
They’d been cleaned, but he was the one. I explored his haunches, found a minor scrape. Probably went through a bramble on his way home. I scratched between his ears, while he rubbed his head on my chest. I murmured: “I wish you could tell me what you saw.”
A sharp whistle from one of the slaves brought me out of the stall in a hurry. Hustling down the barn to meet me was Mumius, still hiking his belt into place. His face looked dipped in beet juice.
“Arcturus. You should know-Secundus left for Londinium. Yesterday. I wouldn’t-Secunda said-”
“I don’t care who you fuck, Mumius. I’m just here to do a job.”
He drew himself up, which was difficult considering his belt was still falling down. “I-I just want you to know-I didn’t talk. You know-about Faro. I didn’t.”
“You want a prize for valor?”
He kicked at a clump of horse manure and didn’t say anything. I studied him for a few minutes. He was still staring at the floor when he muttered: “I’m going back to camp.” His voice held disgust. “I’m through with that family.”
“Well, at least you got something out of it.”
He shrugged and grinned. “Any port in a storm.”
Then he laughed and held out his hand. Considering where it had been, I didn’t want to grasp it, but I figured the rain would clean me off again.
He turned around and disappeared back inside the house. I gave the black gelding one more pat over the stall door. The slaves were nowhere to be seen. I stared up at the loft. More straw was falling like snow. Time to get home.
* * *
The rain didn’t touch me. All I could see was Faro, and somebody nailing that mask on his face. Not sure why it bothered me so much. Maybe because I wanted to hurt him, and finding his dead body on my doorstep made me feel guilty. Because despite what he did to my wife, I felt-pity. Pity for him, and this whole goddamn town.
That old bastard haruspex at dinner, the first night. He was right. The place was rotten. Maybe not once, when it was younger and not so famous, but now it was as soft and swollen and stinking as a dead man in the summer sun. I wondered if the mine poisoned Aquae Sulis or whether the venom was old and always there, waiting to be dug up like silver.
Grattius was just a stooge, a nobody who could be pushed and pulled and led around. Someone else in town was doing the leading. I wondered who.
A lot of people seemed to know about Bibax. Vitellius. Grattius. Sestius and Sulpicia. Whoever told Grattius to arrange Aufidio’s death. Calpurnius knew, and knew enough to die for it. And wherever you turned in Aquae Sulis, whatever mean, crooked street you walked down, you always came back to the temple. The temple where the goddess collected her blackmail payments to the tune of bubbling water. Where the head priest drank Caecuban wine.
And there were the baths, of course. Notes left in cubicles, notes directing murder, and payoffs, and other business not clean enough to be done in the water. Octavio was always ready to bow and scrape at the important ones, patching a pipe here and picking up a note or two there, running errands like a rat in a sewer. I wondered about Octavio.
I wondered, too, about Bibax. Was he, after all, a murderer for hire, the netherworld’s assassin? Or was he a tool, like Grattius, who was paid to curse certain people, and maybe started to believe in his own powers-until the belief got in the way? Bibax. He was the root of what was growing in Aquae Sulis.
The rain stopped, and the world was at that silent point between storms, when the wind isn’t blowing anymore but the birds are still afraid to sing. I took the mantle off my head and smelled the air. The earth was cleaner-the town still filthy.
Faro was paid off. By Materna or Secundus. Who was now on a suddenly convenient trip to Londinium, out of reach from suddenly inconvenient questions.
I scratched my chin. The night he was killed, Faro was given a horse-a good horse, from their precious stable. It was as if-as if someone knew they’d be getting it back.
I swallowed the bile that crept up my throat when I thought about her. There was no one in this place, no one I had ever seen, who was more eaten away by hatred than Materna. It was her lover, her bed partner, her constant companion.
And she sat in her house, and brooded, and squatted in the bath, and brooded, and threw her parties, and played the social scene, and all the time she plotted and planned and desired, her thoughts and wants stretching to Faro, to other men and women she could trap and snare and jerk like pet birds on a string.
My doorway was solid and warm, and it comforted me when I shivered. I’d been looking for cobwebs. Maybe it was time to look for the spider.
* * *
I dreamed of horses. Manes danced in the wind, the ripples on their flanks shimmering with the pulse and throb of their hooves. Black and chestnut brown, dark gray and cream, they outran the sun, and their shadows fell on the wheat field like the passing clouds.
They were running too fast. The leader, a strong black horse with fine bones, was galloping toward a cliff that stretched to the sea. Nimbus was beside him, and all the horses were mad and joyful, even the donkey, twitching her ears and cantering at the back of the herd.
The wheat gave way to gorse and shrub. Dust rose like smoke, and still they wouldn’t stop. I was running, too, trying to get in front, trying to keep them from falling, but they were too fast, and too glad, and they didn’t see me. I was shouting, but my mouth was full of dirt, and still the horses kept on running.
I woke up to a hand on my forehead. My chest hurt.
“Ardur-are you-are you all right? You were turning back and forth in bed and breathing hard and-and whimpering. My poor darling-I wish I could keep the bad dreams away-”
I took her hand off my forehead and kissed the fingers while I caught my breath. “What time is it?”
“Almost the tenth hour. We should be getting ready.”
“When did you get home?”
“Not too much later after you arrived. I bought you another tunic for tonight.”