Whether or not he had yet called for silence, it was not too late for Claudia to join in, because here, on the Argiletum, a solemn-faced Orbilio was busy wiping dark stains from his hands. He had not seen her. Sorry, Marcus. Another time, huh?
One eyebrow twitched slightly as Claudia threw back her hood and stepped forward. ‘Is this the place where you found Jovi?’ There was nothing in his voice to suggest he’d ever doubted she would not honour the bargain. ‘The boy doesn’t remember.’
The investigator’s voice did not carry as far as the gawpers and they shuffled their feet in noticeable disappointment.
Claudia cleared her throat. ‘Yes.’ Even in daylight you could barely make out the narrow cul-de-sac between the bookseller’s and the satchel shop, much less by night. ‘Is that where…?’
As her voice trailed off, she considered the worshippers and the temple attendants, duly hushed, heads bowed low. With street sounds drowned by the sacred flutes, the Priest of Luna would sprinkle holy salt on the pig’s head to purify the sacrifice. There would be no smells of turnip stalks and piss up there, no buzzing flies or scuttlebugs. From the hurly-burly of the street, Claudia’s ears picked out only Cypassis relating the bitter-sweet story of Echo and Narcissus and how poor, pining Echo was reduced to hiding in caves. And darkened alleyways, Claudia added silently. With heavy feet and a heavier heart, she approached the pitch-black tunnel. From a million miles away, a man’s voice was urging her for gods’ sake, don’t go down there, but Claudia heard only her maidservant’s crooning, growing fainter as it became muffled by the high walls of the passageway.
The priest would be finishing his solemn intonation. One of his attendants would purify the sacred hammer and he would ask, is this the right moment to strike, my lord?
Someone had snatched a torch from its bracket on the bookshop wall and was running after her. He was calling out her name and shouting, come back, but Claudia was mesmerized by the figure in the alley. White? Dark? No, it was parti-coloured. Part light. Part dark. That was the effect of the blood.
The pig would now be stunned with the sacred hammer. A second attendant would then turn to the priest, who would gravely nod his assent.
The figure was seated. Back to the wall. Facing forward.
The second attendant would turn the dazed animal’s head to the heavens and the Priest of Luna would speak words of reverence.
The figure was naked. Her hair had been hacked off and laid in her lap. Dark, limp, it resembled a cheap and shaggy blanket.
Luna’s second attendant would turn the pig’s head towards the hallowed earth and the Priest would utter prayers.
The figure’s wrists had been bound behind her back. Her legs had been bound at the ankles.
Lest the sacrificial beast recover from the blow which had stunned it, the Priest of Luna would draw the consecrated blade clean across its throat.
At least it was quick.
Which was more than you could say for this poor cow in the alleyway.
VII
Rome isn’t Babylon. No swaying date palms, no native willow, no light Euphrates poplar. No great wide streets to face the winds and blow the smells away, no glistening whitewashed houses. No scorching sun, no private bathtubs, no jugs fetched home on heads. No ale. No lard. No harems.
Here, on his lands below the Sabine Hills, Arbil was surrounded by all manner of dismal trees, home to all manner of verminous creatures, and he mourned the vast unbroken flatness that was Babylonia. Except Babylon was dying. The great metropolis sat back while other cities sniped at its trade, and found the price for complacency was slow obliteration. Soon it would be nothing but a ghost town, a shadow of its mighty past, and a man with sons must change or shrivel with it. Arbil was not a surrenderer. That gutless peacock, the self-styled Augustus, now there’s a defeatist, he thought, and he might fool Romans with his tales of his glory, but by Marduk he did not fool Arbil. He called it an empire, yet would not fight wars. What a prick. He fobbed his people off with temples paid for by other mens’ campaigns and sold it back to them as a ‘Golden Age of Peace’. He was nothing but a conman.
Which was all to Arbil’s good. As a result of those pacifist policies, the first thing to dry up was the hitherto steady stream of prisoners of war, the traditional source of slave labour upon which the Roman economy depended. When Arbil heard about the practice of leaving babies on midden heaps, he knew at once he had a goldmine on his hands, a perpetual source of income, and he’d hardly have to work at it. He’d chosen a site not too close to Rome, yet private enough, from which to operate, and naturally this was subject to Babylonian law and none of that namby-pamby stuff the Romans professed to enforce. If a wife kills her husband, she is impaled. If a son strikes his father, his hand is cut off. If a couple commit adultery, they are tied up and thrown in the river. Simple, but effective. There was never any trouble on Arbil’s property.
Even from a distance, a stranger approaching would see that this was not the standard design of four wings round a central courtyard. A short-toed eagle for instance, cruising for snakes and frogs and lizards, would have a better view, and he would see a shape not dissimilar to his own silhouette. A stubby head, the remains of the original building, with a garden as its eye, and beyond, a broad stocky body, the earliest of the many extensions. Splayed from the middle, he would see eight long blocks, huge ‘wings’ of wings either side and, finally, a splayed tail block at the end. However, there would be too many people milling around, quite literally hundreds, for the short-toed eagle’s comfort and he would move on, skimming the ridge of the hill in his search for juicy reptiles.
Arbil would not have been among the buzz of humanity caught in the scan of the eagle. The weather was invariably foul and he spent all of the winter and much of the spring closeted indoors, swaddled in a long woollen mantle over numerous ankle-length robes. There were times when he would have swapped half his fortune for a Babylonian drought, even the odd swarm of locusts would have been more comforting than this bloody damp. Why go out in it? He had men for that. Overseers. Physicians. Managers for the various wings. Eunuchs to look after the girls once they reached puberty. Arbil had enough to do without supervising the supervisors. In fact, his whole organization was structured round routine, and that included his personal life.
First he would summon his wife and make love to her (twice, if he could manage it). Next he would bow to the rising sun. Then he would pray to Marduk. So powerful was this patron god of Babylonia that Arbil’s bedroom was devoted entirely to his holy symbol, the dragon, and it was from the dragon Arbil drew his strength. He patted his ample girth and smiled. His stamina, now! That came from the goddess Ishtar, whose eight-pointed star he’d had inlaid with ivory over his bedhead and it was to Ishtar that he turned every morning. (Twice, if he could manage it.)
After breakfast, he would bathe, for without his body perfumed and massaged, without his rebellious straight hair crimped in the traditional style and his beard snipped and curled as he liked it, he was in no fit state to reel in one of the many tentacles of his organization and absorb the latest news from the city. After all these years away from the motherland, he still baulked at mingling with men who wallowed like hippos in communal bathwaters and who worshipped gutless pagan gods.
He must have been daydreaming, maybe he’d even fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew was his wife saying ‘Arbil, Arbil! Are you all right?’
‘What?’ His vision was fuzzy, his mouth was dry. ‘Of course, I’m all right.’ He looked round. How did he come to be in his office? Wasn’t he in his bedroom just now? He never came into this, his favourite room, painted blue like the night sky to show up the gold in the lamplight, before his ablutions were complete.