Man Eater (20 page)

‘Them weals round your ankles looks worse than they are, but old Cinna’s camomile compress’ll fix ’em in a jiffy. By tomorrow they won’t even show.’

Between the harmonious scrape of the strigil, the lilt of the woman’s voice and the impenetrable swirling steam, aches eased and bruises were banished. Bastard, she thought. She didn’t even know the man, why should he pick on her? Still, he was dead now—and it was a death Claudia wouldn’t have wished on her worst enemy. Except, hang on, he
was
her worst enemy! He was the one who’d deliberately planned to feed her to the crocodiles. Hell, yes—and I tried to save the bugger, too.

‘My word, you have been in the wars. Rub my balsam salve on them bumps and cuts, luvvie, and they’ll be gone before you look in the mirror. Oh, hello, duck. Which do you want, the hot room or the steam?’

Tulola ungirdled her gown. Like all her tunics, this was also designed to slide away in one piece and she wore neither breast band nor thong underneath.

‘Steam’s fine,’ she purred, her eyes raking Claudia’s naked back. ‘Is that your famous rose oil I can smell?’

‘That you can, my luv, and I expect you’ll be wanting a rub over with it, too. Let me give you a hand with them buskins—’

‘No rub today, Cinna. Why don’t you go and check the plunge pool?’

‘I’m not half finished with my first darling, yet.’

‘I told you, Cinna, you check the plunge pool.’ She laid one stiffened finger on Claudia’s bare shoulder and began to trace a pattern. ‘I’ll finish the massage.’

Claudia slithered off the bench. ‘Don’t trouble yourself, I’m off to soak in the hot room.’

She knew Tulola would follow, but at least you could see where you were and pre-empt the strike. ‘How’s your brother?’ she asked, easing herself into the water. ‘Fully recovered from last night’s little episode?’

‘Funny you should ask,’ Tulola replied, a frown furrowing her usually unlined forehead. ‘I’m rather worried about him, as a matter of fact.’

The change in Tulola startled her. ‘Why?’

‘He’s such a ghastly yellow, and he feels bilious all the time.’

Claudia, who knew nothing about nursing, suggested that if he was too ill to ride into Tarsulae, why not let the horse doctor take a look at him?

‘I suggested that,’ Tulola said earnestly, ‘but he wouldn’t have it. Insists there’s nothing wrong, apart from a spot of food poisoning.’

‘He could be right, you know.’

‘Nonsense, sweetie. He’d have been as sick as a dog if it was something he ate.’

‘What does Alis think?’

Tulola snorted. ‘Alis! If my brother told her blue was yellow and she was a grasshopper, she’d believe him. “Anything my husband says goes” is all you get from that pompous little cow.’ She kicked violently at the water.

‘Sergius is a grown man, I dare say he knows what he’s doing.’ Claudia bobbed right under to wash the caked mud out of her hair.

‘That’s what that sulky bitch Euphemia said.’ Tulola began to chew her nail. ‘No one seems bothered about him except me. Even Scrap Iron thinks it’ll pass, and he’s well used to death and injury.’

‘But not illness, remember. Look, it was a long day yesterday, one way and another, perhaps the others are right. Maybe you’re worrying unduly? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m finished here.’

There was an argument raging in the atrium, she could hear it from outside. Timoleon, who had taken to fighting with words in lieu of net and trident, had this time picked on the Celt. Claudia positioned herself behind a pillar.

‘Who you call coward, you dirty motherfucker? I leave because there are too many dead men.’

‘Frightened of ghosts, Taranis?’

‘Who knows who is next to have knife in his back, heh?’

‘The killer’s dead, you saw him—or at least what was left of him.’ Timoleon’s taunts were having little effect, so he moved up a gear. ‘Unless you set him up and you’re the murderer?’

‘You crazy, you know that? Killer need motive, I have no motive.’

Timoleon picked up the Celt’s ragged pack, upended the contents over the tiles and sneered. ‘Psychopaths kill for pleasure.’

‘Like you, yes? Like you kill in the arena? Well, maybe you kill this Fronto? Maybe you kill me when my back is turned?’

‘You’d call me a backstabber? You little turd, I’ll—’ Pity. Just when it gets interesting, Macer makes his entrance.

‘What’s going on?’ He held out an imperious foot for a slave to clean his boot. ‘More trouble?’

For all his faults, he had a perfect sense of balance, did the heavily armoured Prefect. Not so much as a wobble as the servant scraped off the mud.

‘No trouble, Macer,’ Timoleon replied, deliberately crushing one of Taranis’ cloakpins underfoot. ‘One big, happy family, us.’

And I’m a Vestal Virgin, thought Claudia from behind the column.

Glimpsing his buckled brooch, the barbarian turned puce. ‘You bastard!’

‘Did you hear that, Salvian? One big, happy family.’ Macer held out his other foot. ‘Yet I don’t recall your father and I throttling each other as boys. Separate them, will you, lad?’

That was another thing. Normally you had to be eighteen to qualify as a junior tribune, and the days of favoured sons being given soft commissions went out with Augustus’ shake-up. Interesting.

Salvian, however, wasn’t as daft as he looked. Rank might hold in the forces, you could see him thinking, but it wouldn’t separate two strong civilians. Whereas a bucket of water from the atrium pool would.

‘Now we have that sorted out,’ Macer unstrapped his helmet and brushed the red plumes into shape, ‘perhaps someone can brief me on the events of last—and just where might you be going, sir?’

Taranis, his grimy face streaked with the water, hefted his pack on his shoulders. ‘I…I go to homeland, to Atrebates. Is not safe here.’

‘I think you’ll be perfectly safe here, sir, while my officers and I are stationed on the premises. So until I get to the root of this nasty business, no one leaves, and I mean no one. Is that clear?’

A low grumble emanated from the Celt’s throat, which could have been construed either way.

‘In fact, until I say to the contrary—’ not only a good sense of balance, Macer, he had a nice way with words, too—‘you don’t even fart without my permission. Pass the word round.’

Hidden behind the pillar, Claudia waited until the atrium emptied. She watched Macer clap his arm round his nephew’s shoulder as the two of them disappeared into the courtyard. She watched the legionaries file out of the main entrance and head towards the slaves’ barracks. She watched Timoleon wring the water out of his yellow hair as he chuckled his way to his room.

And she watched Taranis throw a murderous glance at what she first thought was the gladiator’s retreating back, and then was not so sure that Timoleon was the intended target.

Unfortunately the marble column prevented her seeing who was.

XVI

The last place you’d expect to find an oasis of peace and tranquillity in this madhouse was at its centre, but that’s life for you. One surprise after the other. In consequence, while the Prefect and his entourage jangled off to inspect mutilated corpses and snack-happy crocodiles, and while an army of slaves waged war on cobwebs and dirt with an arsenal of sponges on poles and ostrich-feather dusters, Claudia twiddled the rings on her fingers and examined the marble statuary dotted between the topiaries.

The impending trial aside, to say she was at a crossroads in her life was to elevate understatement to an art form. Augustus’ sweeping reforms were not confined to the army or the land, public buildings or public works, far from it. Since poor health had effectively grounded him twelve years previously, he sought greater and nobler causes to advance, with morals topping his agenda. Other people’s morals, that is. He meant well, she’d give him that. On the whole he was a decent, honest and well-meaning chap whose infidelities were no more than light relief at a time when the weight of the Empire was enormous, and for so elevated a position he lived humbly and he lived frugally, the days when he prostituted himself to a consul for financial advancement or became Julius Caesar’s catamite as the price for adoption almost forgotten.

But only almost. It was his past that shaped her present—that and the fact that the number of actual citizens, as opposed to prisoners-of-war who had become slaves, was dwindling fast. In an effort to stabilize marriage and encourage larger families, Augustus’ moral reforms discouraged birth control, made divorce difficult and adultery a criminal offence (at least as far as women were concerned). More pertinently, widows had two years in which either to mourn or to rejoice before remarriage became mandatory.

Already one-quarter of Claudia’s freedom had slipped past

She paused between the laurels and looked up. Jupiter’s storm clouds were gathering again, there would be another tempest tonight. Beside her, the winged dragon that had carried Medea to Corinth bared its sharp bronze teeth.

When she first heard that her husband had bequeathed her the lot—his house, his vineyards, his investment properties—her immediate thought had been ‘sell them’. All of them. Turn them into cash and be done with. It was why she’d married him, wasn’t it? And let’s face it, Claudia Seferius’ knowledge of wine was strictly limited…to the level of the contents of her glass. Later, though, when a reliable source suggested the business should net ten percent comfortably, it seemed sensible to hang on and live off the earnings.

So what went wrong? And why, after a winter spent poring over accounts that showed profits closer to seven percent and maybe as low as
six
percent, had she felt a physical revulsion about selling? Quintilian wasn’t the only patronizing son-of-a-bitch to put in an offer, whether for outright purchase or marriage in which, ha-ha, the Widow Seferius came as a bonus on top of their, ha-ha, shrewd investment.

She’d give them ha-bloody-ha.

Fortunately, she was, so far, the only person who knew that sales were…not as good as forecast (that was it, not as good as forecast), but word would get out soon enough. With a shiver, Claudia left the dragon and studied a marble satyr. Clearly drunk, his outstretched goblet begged for a refill. She patted him on his goatish knee. It’s true, isn’t it? All roads lead to wine. One way or another.

In her own case, and with little else to occupy her during the long winter evenings, she had set out to improve her knowledge of commerce. Since, by a strange quirk of fate which had nothing whatsoever to do with her, her gambling debts had spiralled up the wall and over the ceiling, it was a gushing flow of liquid cash she needed, not a few dribbling investments. Strangely enough, the raising of hard crunchy currency had not proved too arduous a task. For a senator, Quintilian showed a distinct lack of munificence in chucking out the poor and installing the educated classes and she had rapped his knuckles for that by retaliating in the Campanian deal, but that was only part of the pleasure.

To his new tenants he leased the apartment block for 20,000 sesterces. Claudia had simply applied for tenancy herself and was now subletting the block for 35,000. (Come on, where did he think she got the money from to buy that land in Campania?)

But that wasn’t the point. The point was, sales were tailing off and this was solely on account of her gender.

She looked up at the reeling satyr. The bias was unlikely to change once word got round that the Seferius’ widow was charged with murder. As it would. In Rome, rumours spread faster than floodwater, no matter how half-baked Macer’s reasoning might be.

Like a carcass being tornapart by jackals, her husband was being laid open to the bone, but, and here is the difference, she thought, the quarry isn’t dead, not by a long chalk. These arrogant merchants might have the smell of blood, but the hunt is a long way from over—and, as every huntsman knows, many a stag outwits the archer.

For, contrary to popular opinion, the archer is not as good as his arrow, he is only ever as good as his aim.

*

It was the sound of snoring, audible above the trumpeting of the elephants and the honking of the seals, that interrupted Claudia’s train of thought. Sprawled on his back on a marble seat beside the fishpond, his mouth wide open, Pallas dreamed of self-shelling lobsters and an eighteenth way to cook sucking-pig. Beneath the bench, a column of ants and a cluster of flies competed for the remnants of his lunch, but the wine seemed to have been spared and it seemed a pity to let it go to waste. She was on to her second glass before the inevitable fit of coughing woke him up.

‘Darling girl, what a pleasant surprise.’ Pallas gulped gratefully at the glass thrust in front of him.

‘Me or the wine?’

‘Both,’ he said chivalrously, heaving himself upright and straightening his tunic. ‘Although I feel slightly disadvantaged, caught in so undignified a posture. Are you recovered from last night’s shenanigans? That looks nasty.’ He pointed to the marks on her throat.

‘I’m still sore,’ she admitted, ‘but the lividity is misleading. Don’t tell Macer, though. I might need to trade on his sympathy.’

‘Now there, oh yes, there’s a man who’s sharper than he looks.’ Pallas shot her a cryptic look.