‘That’s another thing,’ Sargon said, stepping aside to let a wagon piled with bales and fleeces lumber past. Silverstreak, grumpy at leaving the fire, bared his fangs at the mules. ‘When I’m in charge, we’ll send some other bugger to go searching the middens. It’s no job for you and me.’
‘We’re the only ones your father trusts to do it properly, you know that, but we’re slipping from the point, are we not? Granted your father’s had a bad run of late, but he’s hardly dying, Sargon. There’s nothing wrong with his…his physical health.’
‘Ah, Dino, we grew up together, remember? Shannu might be my baby brother, but,’ Sargon grimaced, ‘no amount of dancing round the subject can alter the fact.’ His voice took on a harsh note. ‘Shannu is insane.’
The Greek sighed. No beating about the bush, then. ‘You fear Arbil’s treading the same path?’
Calling for a torch bearer, Sargon shrugged. ‘He’s deteriorating fast, you’ve seen it yourself.’
‘Are you not worried for him?’
‘I’m more worried for me,’ he said sharply. ‘That it’s hereditary, and who knows when it might strike. That’s why I live life for today, Dino. You never know what lurks around the next corner.’ They ducked to avoid a cartload of cedars. ‘So what do you say? You and me, running the business side by side? Your expertise on the sales side combined with my-’
‘Expertise on backing chickens?’
‘Ability to increase our income,’ he corrected. ‘Oh, that makes your eyes light up. Well, Arbil thinks he knows the slave trade, my friend, but I’ve discovered a way of doubling our turnover. No extra work. No risks. Just this.’ He tapped his head. ‘Brainwork.’
The Collina Gate loomed out of the swirling mist. The cries of the alms-seekers grew closer, the shouts from the toll booth, the stink of the hovels beyond. Over to the west, the sky danced orange from a tenement which had caught fire, but the screams did not carry this far, there was no indication of the devastation and bereavement it would leave in its wake. Instead, the smell of salt fish mingled with freshly sawn timber, and with dung and hot pies and hemp.
‘Are you in, Dino?’ Sargon persisted. ‘We’ve grown up like brothers, trust each other, know one another inside out-’
‘Apart from the fact you sneak off now and again,’ Dino said amiably. ‘Are we talking a fifty-fifty split?’
‘Sixty-forty, you greedy bastard. But I need to know. Are you with me on this?’
By “this” Dino assumed Sargon meant the silent takeover of Arbil’s empire. Evidently he was planning to have his father restrained as insane sooner rather than later, and now he was being asked to join the connivance. Dionocrates thought of Rome, and what impelled him to come with such regularity, and that thought stirred his loins as well as his young blood. Rescued from Chios, all he’d known was the slave farm up in the hills.
Until recently.
What he’d found here went beyond his wildest fantasies, and the funny thing was, for all the wealth that had been showered upon him, the pleasure he’d discovered in the city came for free…
He weighed up the risks of plotting against the powerful Babylonian versus what he’d discovered in Rome. Risk he enjoyed, though. He ran his hand over the stubble which was forming on his chin. No doubt there was a flaw in Sargon’s arguments, one which could ultimately prove fatal, but for the life of him, Dino couldn’t think of what that flaw might be.
‘You know bloody well I am, Sargon.’ He wagged a playful finger. ‘Provided you let me pick the cockerels in future.’
*
As nightwatchmen patrolled the warehouses and wharves and scavengers cruised the riverbanks for carrion, the light in Magic’s head grew stronger. Like a bright, white ball of lightning, it hurtled relentlessly towards his brain. He could see it, he could feel it, he could even fucking hear it. It was a loud light, screaming, flashing, bursting his skull open.
He tried hiding. Under the table. Under the bedcover. Inside the cupboard. But the light followed, screeching inside his head.
This time it would not go away.
This time there was no voice to comfort him.
Tears coursed down his cheeks, he tasted their salt on his tongue and, far beyond the boundaries of the light, he heard keening.
Time passed.
Manure carts and the shovellers who followed clattered on the cobbles far below. Downstairs, an old man snored loud enough to shake the lichens from the rooftiles, but Magic couldn’t hear for the serrated ball of flame inside his skull. He could feel it attacking his flesh from within. White hot. Burning. And this time there were no gentle whispers, no soft, sweet songs to stop the light from pressing on his eyeballs.
‘Bitch,’ he screamed. ‘Filthy, treacherous bitch!’
His fingers fumbled for the woollen doll. He’d stolen it this morning, from a child in the Cattle Market, and she’d cried when he snatched it from her hands.
‘Bitch!’
With a sharp peeling knife, he hacked and hacked at the doll.
‘Take that! And that! And that!’
As the first tinge of dawn reddened the sky above the Esquiline Hill, the baying inside Magic’s head began to subside and the hideous light slithered away. He watched a piece of his paper patchwork peel from the wall, touched the globs of fat where his tallow had guttered. Crawling out from under his bed, he stared at the doll in his hands.
At Claudia.
Her shredded tunic hung by a thread on one shoulder. Magic ripped it off and began to keen again, rocking back and forth upon his heels as he pressed the frock over his eyes.
‘No one could care for you the way I could,’ he wailed. ‘No one.’
He picked up the doll and examined the deep gouges on its back and its thighs and its breasts. Not its. Hers. Her back, and her thighs, and her breasts. Claudia’s breasts. Shaking fingers probed the rip marks in the wool. Claudia’s proud, generous breasts which she offered him every night, here in his room, when she came to him alone and in secret. Magic’s breathing became ragged. Last night, though, she hadn’t come. She had sent the light instead, and the light was evil. She had tricked him. The treacherous bitch had betrayed him.
He shook the doll. ‘I’ll teach you.’ His voice rose. ‘This is Magic you’re dealing with. Magic, you hear?’
Lighting the wick of another stinking tallow, he picked up his reed, sharpened the point and dipped it in ink.
‘don’t think you can deceive me you bitch’, Magic paused and looked up at the welter of copies round his bedroom walls, ‘ your mine understand you are mine and the next time we meet it shall be for eternity ’.
XXI
The sun was heartily sick of captivity. For a week he’d been bullied by a gang of grey clouds, but now, on the first day of the Megalesian Games, it was time to fight back. What he didn’t know, however, because he was behind with the news, was that the bald aedile responsible for organizing the Games had succumbed to the same fever which had laid low his five charioteers, so the sun’s first sight of Rome was hardly encouraging. Without expert guidance, the inaugural procession was late setting off, the lictors and statue-bearers hoping to catch up as they quick-marched double-time past the crowds lining the slopes of the Capitol without so much as a thought to the poor aedile wallowing in sweat and delirium. Less would they care about Severina, curled into a ball and howling like an animal for the girl whose throat had been cut in the Wolf Cave…