Man Eater (39 page)

‘Well, if you’re so damned patriotic,’ she snapped, ‘why don’t you kill yourself on Etruscan soil?’

There was a sharp pull on the reins. ‘You arrogant bitch,’ he snarled, jumping down to the ground. ‘To think I lowered myself to begging, as well.’

Lowered himself? It’s virtually impossible to rationalize the thoughts of a madman, but when you’re trapped inside a cage with a painted warrior brandishing a dagger on the other side of the bars, it wouldn’t hurt to try.

‘Begging?’

‘At Tulola’s banquet. Remus, you don’t think I was drunk, do you?’ He rattled the blade along the sides of the bars and Claudia cowered at the back of the crate. ‘I had to pretend, or you’d never have swallowed the rest of the play—but!’ A hand lashed in and grabbed the neck of Claudia’s rough, woollen tunic. ‘I asked you for a job, I asked you to go into partnership with me.’

He jerked her towards him so hard, her cheek bruised against the wood.

‘And you laughed at me. You patronized me, and then you fucking laughed at me!’

He had misunderstood her, even then. He had not recognized in her the affection she had felt, the gratitude that here was a man offering his life savings to bale her out. But how could he? As a Nubian cannot comprehend snow, how could Corbulo recognize what he did not have within him in the first place?

‘What was the next phase, Corbulo? Was I supposed to marry you, only for the poor bride to suffer an accident like little Coronis?’

As he let go the tunic, his hand lashed upwards, sending her reeling into the side of the cage. ‘You think I’d marry a tramp like you?’

Claudia could feel slivers of wood in her hair, and a large bump forming on the back of her head.

‘Think I don’t know what’s going on?’ he sneered. ‘First it was your bodyguard, then the policeman. What was it like, fucking the schoolboy? Did you learn much?’

Junius? Orbilio? Salvian? Mother of Hades, this man’s from a different galaxy! ‘More than I would from fucking a murderer,’ she said evenly.

Quick as a bolt of white lightning, Corbulo’s fist closed round her throat, whamming Claudia’s face into the bars. ‘I wouldn’t waste my seed.’

As he sprang back to take the reins, Claudia pitched forward on to the floor. Blood drizzled from her nose, she could hear it, drip, drip, drip, on to the boards as the
crate rumbled
on down the hillside.
It
clattered across the valley and she could hear the mules straining with the steepness of the next hill. There was a roaring sound in her ear, from where he’d banged her head. Croesus, where was he taking her?

‘Where does Fronto fit in?’ she asked, wiping her face with the hem of the ploughman’s tunic.

If she could only piece together the reason behind Corbulo’s madness (and there had to be a reason, however tenuous), she had ammunition. At the moment she was not only physically helpless, she was spitting into a wind which was rapidly becoming gale force.

‘Him!’ The derision in his voice was harsh, even through the boom inside her skull. ‘Now there was a sap! Do you know, he actually believed I’d take him into partnership with me? My own land, and he thought I’d give him half. I mean,’ Corbulo began to laugh, ‘can you seriously believe that?’

Claudia called on the spirits of the Umbrian woodlands to trip the mares, derail the crate, make her arms grow another cubit so she could undo the bolt. In stories and the epics, Corbulo would be unseated by an overhanging branch…

‘What land?’ she shouted back. She could hear the mules puffing, and she’d never heard animals pant like that. It was almost continuous.

‘
My
land, I’m talking
my
land.’ His voice was ragged from working the reins. ‘It was easy to persuade Fronto that it was to his own advantage, setting fire to the olive groves. I told him, if the land was burned—the olives, the vines—we could buy it cheap, him and me, and go into business together.’

‘You mean, you set up me
and
Quintilian?’ Whether you liked this man or not, it was a clever sting. ‘Why?’

The mares had not stopped to give Corbulo a rest—this was the end of the line. The air seemed steamy, damp. Claudia half expected to hear Cinna’s Cappadocian anecdotes cutting through the heavy atmosphere.
Let me help you with them buskins, duck.
Claudia felt delirium rising, the rapid welling of panic.

‘Corbulo.’ There was an urgency in her voice now. ‘What is it that’s so special about those particular plots of land?’

‘Those?’ he asked casually, unharnessing the crate. ‘Nothing. Arson was just a means of getting you away from your precious cronies in Rome. Why do you think I paid that masseuse in the bath house to suggest the damned shortcut?’

There was a jolt as the cage settled. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

Corbulo was staring at her as though she was a rather backward camel he was training. ‘How else could I get my lands back?’ he asked patiently. ‘Now tell me, Claudia.’ He lifted one end of the cage and began to turn it sideways. ‘Isn’t that a lovely view?’

The mules hadn’t been puffing. The boom hadn’t been inside her head. The dampness wasn’t panic.

This was panic!

Claudia Seferius stared wide-eyed through the bars of her cage. Adjacent on the precipice, before it fell 500 feet to the valley below, churned a massive, roaring, crashing waterfall.

XXXIV

Where do you begin to describe terror? Is it this sudden inability to breathe? The gasping for breath? The shallow snatches of air? Is it the blast of freezing air that hits you? The sensation of falling? Reeling? Of spiralling into unconsciousness?

At the brink of oblivion, Claudia pulled herself back. You can’t give in, a voice inside her screamed. While you’re conscious, you have at least a chance.

Corbulo stood on the edge and placed his hands on his hips.

Claudia pressed her fingers to her temples and battled with hysteria.

Marble Falls, the locals called it. She remembered now. Officially they were named after the engineer who, two centuries previously, diverted the forces of two rushing torrents and a lake in order to drain the marshy uplands and put paid once and for all to the flooding which blighted this ancient landscape. But Marble Falls was more appropriate, the Umbrian people felt, because viewed from the bottom, a wall of white marble fell from the hillside.

Viewed from the top, it was awesome.

Droplets of water, breaking free of the liquid marble, rose in their thousands to cloud the valley and now, with the sun heating them in earnest, manufactured humid, claustrophobic air. Lush vegetation—birch and poplar and willow—hung over the cascade to breathe in the excitement of the raging forces, their leaves turned to silver by the swirling steam.

Even on her knees, Claudia felt herself swaying. It was wide enough to launch a ship, this torrent, one of the mighty ocean-going merchantmen, a ten-thousander as they were called. What chance a tiny crate?

Tentatively she craned her neck. Rocks, boulders, more trees, more bushes, smaller cascades where the exuberant waters split and rejoined, split and rejoined as they abandoned themselves to the forces of gravity. Her vision blurred, and not from the spray. At the bottom, although obscured by the hot, dense clouds, this mighty mass of water plunged into the river Plennia, renamed after the same engineer who built the falls and widened the stream to cope with the torrent.

Claudia hoped his ghost walked and his grave was turned over by jackals.

‘I didn’t—’ She stopped, took another breath and forced herself to hang on to it. ‘I didn’t know Etruscans were famed for leaping to their deaths over waterfalls,’ she said in a voice with only the slightest tremble in it.

Corbulo turned. ‘You never know when to stop, do you? You and that tongue of yours?’

Claudia forced the jellified twigs that were her legs into a sitting position and hugged her knees in a nonchalant fashion. From that angle, only she could see that her fingers were white from the fear and that her hands
shook like a baby bird’s wings unless she clasped them
tight.

‘Why? Will begging save my life? You’ve convinced yourself you own my lands, that by killing me you’ll get them back. So go ahead. Push the damned cage. Then see where it gets you.’

‘Bitch!’ Corbulo ran to the crate and the bars rattled in his hands. Janus, for a moment there she thought he was going to. ‘You conceited, insolent, know-it-all bitch! How dare you—you of all people—accuse me of making this up? It’s my ancestors who lie buried there,
my
blood which was spilled there,
my
sweat that manured the soil, so don’t you lecture me on ownership, you empty-headed golddigger, you!’

It was a dangerous line, but Claudia persisted.

‘Your sweat,’ she scoffed. ‘How far does it travel, this precious Etruscan perspiration? How is it so different from the rest of us that it can reach from Carrera on the coast to my vineyards in the east?’

It was working, sweet Jupiter, yes, it was working. The mind that had planned and honed each meticulous detail could yet be defeated by rage.

‘Carrera? Who ever lived in Carrera? We’re farmers, my people, and bloody good farmers at that.’ He snorted derisively. ‘Your husband. Called himself a farmer, did he? I was a lad when he bought that land, eight years old, and I still remember the outrage among my people when he turned prime agricultural soil into vineyards. Vineyards!’

Claudia’s mind made quick computations. Her husband set himself up, must be twenty-four, twenty-five years ago. That’s right, Corbulo’s in his early thirties. ‘We’ve had this conversation, I believe. And I told you then, wine pays handsomely.’ The Empire virtually runs on it.

The trainer wasn’t listening. ‘Ten years ago he added a parcel to the south. That land belonged to my father—’

‘Ten years ago, I was fourteen,’ she pointed out, quite reasonably.

‘But you know the story, don’t you?’

Of course I do. Her husband trotted it out at every dinner party. ‘What story?’

‘It was that bloody Compulsory Purchase Scheme. Our lands for just half-a-dozen gold pieces plus some stinking slum in Rome. I ask you, Claudia, who could survive in two filthy rooms hemmed in by foul-mouthed drunks, babies crying day and night and dogs pissing up your front door? Nothing but stale sweat and rancid fats in your nostrils, and all the time, wherever you walk, that godsawful dust from the stonemasons drying the air!’

‘A million of us manage quite successfully.’ Some of us even love it.

Corbulo kicked the cage and she felt it lurch closer towards the waterfall. Janus! With an iron grip, Claudia hugged her knees as though conversations like this were commonplace in her calendar.

‘Well, I couldn’t. And neither could my father, or my mother, or my two little sisters. The girls, they were only ten and thirteen, but they died of the flux within a month. It broke my parents, watching their babies die, knowing that had we had space and fresh air and clean, running water they’d be alive today, with babies of their own, and did your husband give a damn?’

Her husband had his faults, she thought, but a sense of
injustice wasn’t one of them. This story did the rounds at dinner parties not out of venom, but as a warning to others. For a start, no peasant was forced off his own land, they went voluntarily and in the case of Corbulo’s father, very rapidly. Augustus was keen to stabilize the economy and men like him were not only exceptionally well paid, they were given good apartments and a weekly dole. But with Corbulo’s father, it went deeper. He’d neglected his acres, working the soil as little as possible and drinking his money away and (this was the point of her husband’s after-dinner speech) when he was remunerated for his lands, he lost the whole lot on one single cockfight. A chicken, godsdammit. Corbulo’s father sold his birthright for a chicken.

‘So did he, Claudia?’ The trainer’s roar was louder than the falls. ‘Did your husband give a fuck about us?’

Rumour also had it that his father sold his eldest daughter into prostitution. Small wonder the mother threw herself into the Tiber.

Claudia felt her anger boil at this appalling waste of human life, and if Corbulo truly cared about his family, he left it pretty damned late.

‘For gods’ sake, man, yours is not the only family who moved out under the scheme. I can name you a dozen who uprooted to Rome, and not only did they survive, they put their sons in the Senate. So spare me the hard-luck stories.’ She leaned forward and gripped the bars, her face barely inches from his. ‘You could have gone back any time you wanted, and if land’s so cheap’—it wasn’t—‘why didn’t you godsdamned buy some?’

Grey eyes blazed back at her. ‘You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said, have you? How many more times do I have to tell you? I only want to work that which is mine.’ He threw up his hands in a gesture of futility. ‘Croesus, Claudia, I begged you, I actually fucking begged you, to let me work with you. You could have done that for me.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ she said with a jauntiness that stuck in her throat. ‘Now you’ve explained everything, now I understand what’s behind all this, let’s put it behind us and start from scratch, shall we?’