Dark Horse (12 page)

While Saunio lectured her on drama and fusion, movement and light, Claudia observed the grey hue of his face, his hollow, red-rimmed eyes, the waxy, stippled texture his skin had taken on during the course of the day. Unmistakably, the physical manifestations of grief. But Saunio was a professional through to the marrow. One of his beautiful young apprentices had met an agonizing end, but Bulis's death would not alter the agenda.

'Schedules cannot mourn,' he'd pronounced, refusing his crew so much as one hour off. 'Timetables cannot grieve and neither can we until the contract is finished.'

Grief and shock, he added, tolerated no margins of error, it was business as usual on the frescoes. So, with Saunio standing over them, the labourers laboured to ensure the plaster was

mixed to the exact level of dampness required to take a brush. The apprentices ground pigments to the exact mix of colour. An exact amount of outline was drawn for the artists to fill in.

'. . . the future,' he was saying, 'lies in illusionistic art, my lovely. Art is truth and truth is art, but therein the question lies. What constitutes
truth?'

'What indeed.'

'Take the meander in the banqueting hall. At first glance, it looks like a maze, but follow any of the lines with your eye - any one of them, Claudia - and you realize it is nothing but illusion. Misinformation. Created by shadows and spaces and geometrical trickery.'

His hollow gaze fixed itself on the pool, where he stared through the sparkling water to the green veined marble which lined it. So deep was his gaze, that he might have been staring straight into Hades itself.

'If the eye can be led, so can the mind,' he said slowly. 'For we can all be made to believe things which are not there.'

It was probably the light from the oil lamps flickering on the water, but Saunio's reflection made him appear even more squat and reptilian than usual tonight. Almost an allegory of depravity to fit the rumours.

'Illusion,' he said. 'That is the path for the artist to follow.'

'Wrong.' With a jerk of her thumb, Claudia indicated the exit. 'That is the path for the artist to follow. Goodbye.'

Shamshi was waiting, hands folded, outside the entrance to the dining hall. He was no longer wearing his baggy green trousers, but an ankle-length kaftan with a deep and richly embroidered hem. The brilliant artificial lights glinted off the thick hoops in his ears.

'Claudia.'

'Well, if it isn't Uncle Happy, the kiddies' pet.'

His mouth stretched a fraction sideways, the closest it came to a smile. 'Dear child, I need to speak with you,' he began, but at that point, Nikias turned the corner.

'Imparting your latest prediction?' he asked, and Claudia wondered whether she'd caught a flash of mischief in his eyes, or whether it was a trick of the flickering lamplight.

'I
tried
to tell her, Nik,' Shamshi said, his sibilant voice treacly with smugness. 'Earlier this afternoon, I tried to tell Claudia what I'd read in the entrails of my goat.'

The portrait painter grimaced. 'Stick to books, old man. Not so messy.' To Claudia, he said, 'Coming?'

'We
will join you in a minute,' Shamshi said, indicating in no uncertain terms that the conversation was private. Nikias responded with an as-you-wish nod, but Claudia had a different idea on how to spend her evening. It did not include Persian gut-gazers. But as she swept past, a bony hand clamped over her shoulder and stopped her dead in her tracks.

'Listen,' he whispered, and his mouth was so close that his breath wafted her hair and the scent of it was as sweet as an overripe melon. 'I bring you a warning.'

Even though she shook his grip free, the memory of his fingers lingered on her skin like a burn. And he
still
didn't smell of cinnamon, dammit.

'This morning at dawn,' he said, 'I cast the bones, inspected the entrails, searched the skies for the signs until finally the gods spoke.'

'Until finally the goats spoke, you mean.'

'Do not mock what you do not understand,' he snapped. 'Heed my warning. Before the sun stands thrice more over our heads, a woman shall die.'

Did her heart miss a beat there? 'I thought your omens couldn't foretell death? Only "disaster"?' Funny how the rules change to suit the occasion.

'Vivid portents can
never
be ignored,' Shamshi said. 'The signs are as clear as though they were written in stone. Before the sun stands thrice more over our heads, it is decreed that a woman shall die.' He leaned towards her, his dark eyes searching her face. 'Take care, Claudia. Take very good care. Danger lurks among us tonight.'

Tall as a Dacian, lean as an athlete, bronzed as Apollo himself, Jason stood on the deck of his warship the 
Soskia,
gazing up at the stars. Overhead was Draco, the Dragon, snaking its way between the Great Bear and the Little Bear in the way dragons do, its fiery mouth snarling at Vega, brilliantly defiant in the zenith above. Draco was the hundred-headed serpent who had guarded the golden apples in the Gardens of the Hesperides. It was said that each mouth of the dragon spoke a different tongue.

Jason turned his gaze past the black brailed sails towards the eastern horizon, but the heat haze prevented even a glimpse of Pegasus galloping through the night sky. There would be no rumble of celestial hooves tonight, Jason thought. No thunder, no lightning, the weather was settled. No rain would fall in these parts for some weeks.

The fires which flared along the Liburnian waterfront would have to be doused with seawater.

The
Soskia,
Greek for
'moth',
was anchored too far out to discern any of the frantic activity or hear the shouts and the screams.

Moths do well to keep clear of flames.

'Ale?' rumbled a gruff voice in his ear.

Jason turned to see Geta, his stocky, red-headed helmsman, holding out a horn beaker of foaming black beer. Until the first swig hit his tongue, he hadn't realized he'd been thirsty. Raucous laughter bellowed up from the closed deck below, the clink of mugs, the tang of fermented grain. Guards patrolled the upper deck and sentries kept watch from the wales.

As Jason gulped down his ale, the helmsman studied his captain.

Unlike other Scythians, Geta included, there was no Asiatic slant to Jason's eye. Aye, but then Jason were warrior caste, Geta thought, an expert swordsman, at home with scimitar, lance and battleaxe. Depending on who you listened to, he were either the by-blow of a prince or the bastard of a Trebizond merchant. Jason never let on, but then he wouldn't. Men from the Caucasus don't talk much.

But Jason's history were common knowledge on account of his ma being a priestess, like. One of fifty who served the moon goddess Acca. Foreigners called 'em Amazons, since Acca's priestesses bore arms for certain rituals, and that were how Jason came to be a warrior. Through the temple.

Like Geta's, the captain's body was also covered top to toe in tattoos. They were Scythians. Weren't given no choice. But every man's brands were unique. Up Jason's arms flew Tahiti's sacred crane and Acca's sacred wryneck bird. On his thighs galloped the horse sacred to Targitaos the sun god, while his totem clan, the bull, shielded Jason's chest from evil. Dzoulemes, the sharp-sighted lynx, kept watch on his back.

Geta were from the Danube delta, so it were natural that his totem were the water serpent. His father were a boatman, aye, and his father before him, and Geta had absorbed the complexities of the Danube's watery labyrinth with his mother's milk. Before he were ten, he could navigate its tortuous channels. At fifteen he'd progressed to working the trade ships round the Black, Aegean and Ionian seas. By eighteen, he could read clouds and the behaviour of seabirds, were able to predict when storms would whip up, and where, and knew the best refuges to run to.

Piracy were the obvious step. Blindfold, he could circumnavigate them blue ice floes cast adrift from Russian rivers - what some called the clashing rocks. Likewise, that strange cluster of islands in the Sea of Marmora, round whose cliffs the winds turned without warning. Geta had had many a rich picking off the wrecks around them! Only then that bloody Roman Emperor started interfering, didn't he? Aye, and buggered up a smashing little earner. Armed bloody escorts to protect the merchant fleet. What kind of life's that, when a

man's not even given chance to plunder the wrecks? When Geta heard the
Soskia
was recruiting, he jumped. Plunder, he reckoned, might not be so hard to come by under a fellow Scythian!

Precisely
what
a fellow Scythian were doing here, Geta neither knew nor cared, but he knew a shrewd move when he saw one. For all their highfalutin ideas, the Romans understood bugger all about the nations they'd conquered. Just cos an eagle flies in the sky, it don't follow that every creature on the ground is a mouse! They might pay lip service to this Roman legislature, but beneath the surface, the people round the Adriatic resented subjugation. Bitterly. Which, Geta reflected, tipping back the last of his ale, added up to an awful lot of bitter people.

Illyria was a bloody big place. Hundreds of tribes, stretching from Liburnia in the north to Dalmatia in the south, as well as twelve hundred sodding islands in between. And when you start totting 'em up, that's an awful lot of people paying taxes to an Emperor they've never seen, sending sons to wars they'd never heard of. The problem had always been how to shake off the yoke. How could these disgruntled souls, too widely scattered to muster a co-ordinated attack, ever rid themselves of their oppressors?

All the while they passed sesterces in place of their old coins and bent their knee to Neptune instead of Bindus, resentment seethed. It seethed and simmered, simmered and seethed, the pressure building up, up, up like a volcano. Who did these foreigners think they were, storming in and dividing up the land among themselves? What right had bloody Romans to strip it from the people who owned it? How come the very people who'd worked this land for generations suddenly become enslaved to strangers overnight?

Aye, Geta weren't half glad he were Scythian, not part of the Empire. Them what resisted were executed, else they became chattels to the very men who'd seized their own farms from them in the first place. Slaves! Geta spat over the side of the rail. Bought and sold like bloody sheep, without rights, without respect, without a say in their own fucking destiny! Troublemakers were castrated or put to work on the treadmill

cranes, six at a time, so what could the ordinary man do? Not one damn thing.

Until one man - Azan - began to move among his people.

Always wary of the dark ways of the informer, Azan listened to their grievances, reassured the dissatisfied that they were not alone, that others baulked at the same injustice. Above all, he gave the buggers hope. They did not have to suffer, he told them, freedom
was
within their grasp. The same freedom their Dacian neighbours enjoyed to the east, and the Scythians beyond, and the Cappadocians and Armenians beyond that.

Hearts began to stir. Could freedom truly be more than a dream?

Oh yes, my brothers, Azan assured them. What's more, he would be the one to deliver it. He would drive the settlers from every inch of Illyrian soil, make it a kingdom once more. And he would start with the coast and the islands! Once those territories were liberated, the inland colonies would be isolated. Helpless and unprotected, they could choose: fight, surrender, or flee. Soon, Azan promised, the land would belong to the Illyrian people once more.

Quite how the rebel leader had joined forces with a Scythian warrior, Geta didn't know. The warship was Jason's, but the crew were Azan's men, whose drunken laughter echoed louder into the night with every pitcher of beer. Geta wasn't Azan's man, of course. He was no man's bar his own.

Out along the coast, he watched the fires burn, yellow, red and orange. Flickering tongues that spat and hissed in the black void in supplication to the fire god, Agni.

'Reckon it'll take two days to put out that shipyard.' He chuckled. 'Aye, and two more before it stops smoking.' He planted his callused hands on his hips. 'For an easterner, you're pretty handy with a burning arrow, lad.'

A corner of Jason's mouth twitched. 'You're no slouch yourself,' he said, 'for a navigator.'

Geta aimed a mock punch at his captain, their cross-cultural jokes hiding a Scythian truth: in order to remain outside the Empire, every Scythian must be able to defend himself with cutting-edge skill. Regardless of their different backgrounds, even as small boys both would have had to practise with dagger

and short sword until their little arms ached, and afterwards they'd have been sent straight to the butts for more. Warriors in particular were required to be expert in every conceivable weapon, including the scimitar, the battleaxe, the spear and the double-handed sword that sliced through metal helmets like a fist through parchment. It was a known fact that you weren't granted warrior status unless you could take an eye out at three hundred paces with the slingshot.

'Where to tomorrow?' Geta asked, his eyes fixed on their crackling handiwork. Darting here, flitting there, no hit was ever predictable and he wondered how soon they could start to plunder.

Jason ran his finger slowly round the chain from which hung the purple amulet which all sailors wore as protection against shipwreck. 'You know, Geta, I rather fancy paying the Villa Arcadia another visit.'