by Marilyn Todd
Cooled by white marble and shaded by honeycomb screens, the great soaring atrium oozed peace and tranquillity. Fresh flowers scented the Senator's hall - roses, lilies and pinks. A fountain splashed prettily, birds with bright plumage trilled from their cage in the corner and servants glided silently in and out, while the strumming of a lyre filtered through from a room at the back.
Working for the Security Police, Orbilio had almost forgotten, until recently, what it was like, the indolent lifestyle into which he had been born. A lifestyle of seaside villas like this, where families could just up sticks and retreat for the summer, while his own time was passed scouring crime scenes and meeting informers in strange, secret places or trawling drinking dens and whorehouses in search of those creatures of the night who could help him unravel his latest investigation and bring the perpetrator to book.
'Marcus? Marcus, can it really be you?'
He spun round, his eyes widening in surprise and delight. 'Margarita!' He had forgotten the Senator had remarried.
'There was a time,' she said, linking her arm through his and drawing him towards the back of the house, 'when you were less formal. Called me Darling, Lover, Cherub—'
'That was a long time ago,' he reminded her as sternly as he could muster. 'You're a respectable wife and mother now, Margarita.'
'I was a wife and mother then, too,' she flipped back, 'and I'll kindly thank you not to call me respectable. Give me a kiss.'
He leaned down to plant a chaste kiss on her cheek, but Margarita clasped his face in her bejewelled hands and drew
him down hard on her lips. He wondered how long it would be before he'd be allowed up for air.
'I'm investigating a series of burglaries which has been targeting wealthy establishments since Saturnalia,' he explained, once she'd finally released him. 'I gather your own house was a recent victim?'
Robbery was hardly his usual line of enquiry, but after eight months of getting nowhere and with the upper classes growing restless, Orbilio's boss had begun to feel the wind of change blowing underneath his high-backed office chair. Sort it out fast, the breeze was telling him, or there'll be someone else's butt on this cushioned upholstery. Orbilio didn't resent the routine enquiry. It made a change from rapes and murder, allowed him to investigate the horse doping business himself instead of delegating to others, and also, thanks to the intricacies of aristocratic lineage, many of the families involved happened to be his own relatives. Which gave him a perfect opportunity to catch up.
'The bastards took all my lovely jewels, darling. Come in here, and I'll tell you all about it over a jug of chilled wine. It's vintage Ligean, of course. You'll adore it.'
Margarita led him into a small chamber overlooking the sea, where shutters offered shade, coolness, silence - and total privacy. Lavender oil burned in a brazier, heroic scenes plastered the walls and a large, white cat snoozed in a basket. Orbilio noted that the wine and glasses were already in place on the table. Not for him. For anyone, he realized sadly.
In the three, maybe four years since he had last seen her, Margarita had lost weight. Gone was the voluptuous bosom, the dimpled cheeks, the unforced laugh which had attracted him so deeply when he was at a low ebb after his wife had walked out. Now, seeing the lines scoring her eyes, the dyed hair, the increased reliance on cosmetic aids, Marcus felt a pang of something he couldn't identify.
'Absolutely scrummy,' she said, pouring the wine. 'Colour of honeydew with just a hint of freshly mown hay and greengages in the bouquet.' She linked her arm through his and chinked glasses.
'When you say "all" your jewellery . . . ?' Orbilio said, smiling, as his gaze took in the rich array of gold pendants, emerald earrings, silver tiara and bracelets, as well as pearl-studded hair combs.
'These little gewgaws are what I was wearing at the banquet the night we were robbed. They're all I'm left with, unless -' with one deft movement, she undipped her left shoulder brooch - 'you want to search the premises more thoroughly?'
'Margarita, please.' His voice was hoarse. 'Cover yourself up, before someone comes in.'
'No one will come in,' she assured him, but his eyes told her that fear of disturbance wasn't the reason for the rebuff.
Marcus drained his wine in one swallow. Some things never change, he reflected, although he had forgotten, until now, how Margarita had favoured quick-release clothing. How she'd never bothered with underwear.
'Sex should always be spelt with three Fs,' was her motto. 'Frequent, fast and frivolous, darling.'
Now he understood the lines round her mouth, the hollows under what had, not so long ago, been bright eyes. He had hoped that remarriage to the Senator would have made her happy, let her find whatever she'd been seeking from life, and he watched impassively as she drew the fine embroidered linen over her naked breast and pinned back the brooch without a flicker of embarrassment in her hazel brown eyes.
'You don't know what you're missing,' she said, but he knew exactly. Casual sex, as Margarita was finding to her cost, is not the answer. It leaves a person aching and incomplete, wanting more from life than a succession of bleak hydraulic manoeuvres.
'I'm sorry,' he said, and he meant it. 'My philandering days are behind me.'
Dalliances where the soul plays no part were no longer the answer. As time passed, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio found he needed more. Much, much more.
'You're in love, darling.'
'I most certainly am not,' he protested.
'Who is she? Do tell. Do I know her?'
'Margarita, I'm here to talk about last month's robbery.'
'If you say so, darling.'
As she settled herself provocatively on a couch richly upholstered in a deep shade of scarlet, Orbilio let the wall take his weight. In the basket, the white cat began to snore softly. 'Tell me about the banquet.'
Her cherry-red mouth turned down at the corners. 'One party's much the same as another, darling. Nothing stands out.'
That was the problem, of course. In the twenty-eight robberies since Saturnalia, the overlap between guests and jugglers, dancers and musicians, caterers and slaves was enormous. No one and nothing stood out.
'These are sophisticated thefts,' he explained. 'Each job netted a tidy haul, but no one's tried to fence any of it. Where's the stuff going?'
'Perhaps you're chasing a thrill-seeker, who steals for the sheer hell of it?' Margarita ran her fingertip round the top of the glass until it let out a soft hum.
'A thrill-seeker with a warehouse to store the stuff in.' Marcus laughed, topping up both their glasses with the chilled wine. 'No, this has to be for pure profit.'
'I don't see how the scam could work without an outlet,' she said, letting her fingers brush his as he handed the glass back.
'Sooner or later I'd expect things to resurface,' he said, pretending not to notice. 'Then someone somewhere would recognize their own necklace in a shop in the Forum or see their rings on someone else's fair hand. Yet in eight months, nothing. Not one single lead.'
'Marcus, dear, this is all very interesting, and it's a real shame I won't see my lovely baubles again - there was a cameo I was particularly fond of, the one you bought me, remember? - but darling, at twenty-six don't you think you should consider adopting a more appropriate career?'
'Margarita,' he said, laughing, 'you are impossible.'
She stuck out her pretty pink tongue and he watched the light dance on the emeralds round her neck as she stood up and walked towards him.
'I'm serious, darling,' she whispered, coiling one arm round
his waist. 'Your father was a highly respected advocate, both your brothers are in the law and, if you really want that seat in the Senate, that's where you should be, too. In court.'
'I often am,' he insisted softly, uncoiling the arm. 'Giving evidence for the prosecution.'
Hazel eyes rolled in mock exasperation. 'You know damn well what I mean,' she said, and somehow the arm was back. 'You want to swap your lowlifes for the high life again, settle down, r
aise a family.'
'I was married.'
'I know you were, darling, I helped you get over the bitch. But the Senate won't take you unless you're married, and funnily enough, I know just the girl. Sweet little thing, she'll give you boatloads of babies and I promise she won't run off with a sea captain from Lusitania and leave you broken-hearted like that other cow.'
'Since our hearts were never joined, there was nothing to break,' he said carefully. 'Humiliated is the word, I believe. Not broken-hearted.'
'Whatever,' Margarita murmured, entwining her other arm round his neck. 'But I know this girl, she's my niece—'
'Hold it right there.' He laughed. 'You, of all people, know I'll be buggered if I'll kow-tow to family convention with a second bloody marriage of convenience. Not when the first one caused such grief.' Past tense? Orbilio could tell Margarita as many lies as he liked, but the bottom line was, that marriage was causing grief still. 'When - if- I remarry,' he said, 'social class won't come into it. Love's all that matters. Without it, there are no foundations to build on.'
'Love!' she scoffed gently. 'When your foolish plebeian infatuation wears off, what will you be left with? I can tell you in one short word, Marcus. Isolation. Your peers won't respect you, the lower orders will see it as weakness, you'll be despised and ostracized on all sides. Duty, darling. Duty is what counts, because at the end of the day, duty is all there is.'
'Bullshit. I joined the Security Police because that's one place where I can make a difference. By rooting out vermin who undermine our society, I help make Rome a safer city to sleep in, which in turn stabilizes the whole Empire.'
'And this business you're engaged in at the moment? How exactly does investigating common burglary buttress the Empire, darling?'
'You're incorrigible,' he said, disentangling his curls. 'I'd have thought you, of all people, would be pleased that I'm assigned to this case, considering many of the targets are your own relatives.'
'Our own relatives,' she corrected. 'And I am, darling. If anyone can catch the culprit, it will be you. The Senator and I are well aware of your record. One hundred per cent success rate, so I'm told.'
'Ninety-nine,' he corrected, thinking of a certain young widow with vineyards in Etruria and principles nowhere to be seen.
'Your trouble,' Margarita breathed, 'is that you need a woman, Marcus.'
Goddammit, she was right, he did need a woman, but it was not Margarita he longed for. Whenever his loins stirred, it was at the thought of a girl with thick, dark curls streaked with the colours of an autumnal sunset which tumbled over her shoulders. A wild, unpredictable creature, who raged like a forest fire out of control, scorching everything within range. He pictured her long legs scissoring up the Forum, her laugh filling the whole room, her eyes blazing with passion, her magnificent breasts heaving like the ocean in winter. And there was only one woman like that. Claudia Seferius.
But he needed a wife, too.
Not, as Margarita suggested, as a good career move. It was true that the Senate would not accept him without one, but his reasons for wanting a wife was more for a soft, warm embrace to come home to at night than for ambition. He longed for someone to laugh with, to share his triumphs and his tribulations, as well as his bed. He wanted a wife, a best friend, a lover, someone to grow old and wrinkly with. But, most of all, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio longed to hear his house ring with the laughter of children. His children. And therein lay the problem.
For all his passionate arguments, he was a patrician whose family traced their ancestors back to Apollo himself. Could
he really, when all was said and done, deny his children their birthright by marrying a woman from a lower social order?
Sadly, he knew the answer to his own question.
And the knowledge made him feel sick.
Outside, seagulls screamed as he ripped off the gold shoulder brooch. A tumble of embroidered linen cascaded on to the floor, and suddenly Orbilio was glad Margarita wore nothing but perfume under her gown.
Nine
Two people fight. Now one man is dead. Was Bulis one of the tussling pair? He couldn't have been, Claudia thought. No one could have entered that inferno to tie someone up without succumbing themselves.
Besides, Bulis wasn't just tied. He was chained.
Was that what the fight was about? One person trying to prevent another from entering? Was Bulis alive while they struggled? Sweet Juno, was he screaming? Begging for help as Claudia ran across the path in the early hours? She hadn't been able to hear anything over the crackle of timbers. But no one on the steps could have missed his cries of agony . . .
A grim-faced working party mounted the stone steps and disappeared inside. Knowing the grisly task they had to undertake, the sound of sawing put her teeth on edge, and her mouth was drier than the Sahara as they carried the body out on a stretcher. Impossible to believe those charred remains had once been a living, laughing human being. What terror filled your heart, Bulis, as the first of the flames began to take hold? Which gods did you pray to for mercy? Which gods closed their ears to your prayers?
In silence, the stretcher-bearers manoeuvred the body down the steps. A path cleaved through the horrified crowd. By the bakehouse, several of Bulis's beautiful colleagues were sobbing openly.
'How could this have happened?' one of them spluttered through his tears. 'How could this have happened to Bulis?'
And Claudia thought, how indeed? How did a young apprentice come to be chained up like a hay rake? Did the arsonist know the boy was inside? Or, god forbid, had burning Bulis alive been his objective? The nightwatchmen had been
drugged, the grain store flooded with oil and set alight, but who was fighting on the steps while the inferno raged, and who had clamped her tight in a bear hug then knocked her out? She could understand it if he'd left her where she had fallen, but instead he'd taken the trouble of carrying her back to bed. Later, she thought, she would go through a few rooms, see who scented their clothes with sweet cinnamon. Because someone—
A woman's scream cut through her conjecture.
So jarring was the sound, so utterly obscene in this moment of reverence as Bulis's remains were carried indoors, that at first no one understood what was happening. Then people saw where the woman was pointing.
And more screams filled the air.
Sails brailed, oars shipped, a galley lay at anchor in the calm, rose-red waters. Slim and symmetrical with her high carved posts fore and aft and her single bank of oars, there was no mistaking her for a merchantman. But the galley formed no part of the Imperial Navy. The colours she flew were of Mars, God of War. And the painted eyes were right at the front, on her bow. All the better to see her prey.
So much for the threat of piracy not being substantive.
'Jason!' Leo hissed through his teeth. 'Qus, arm the men! Everyone, man your stations! Prepare to defend to the death.'
Out on her prow, its bronze ram glinting in the rising sun, one man stood alone. His arms were folded over his chest. Like the Dacian tribes over the hills to the east, he was tall and wore black pantaloons tucked into red leather boots. He wasn't a Dacian, though. Dacian warriors wore a beard as their badge of identity. This man was clean shaven. And unlike the Dacians, his swordbelt tied under the crotch. Other tribes did that, of course, including Shamshi's fellow Persians. What gave him away were the blue tattoos on his forearms. Those tattoos pronounced the captain a Scythian. That savage race of warriors who sacrificed horses - and occasionally humans - to the sun god they worshipped.
Suddenly a lot of things fell into place.
'Bastards!' Leo ran to the cliff edge and waved his fists. 'Murdering bloody bastards,' he yelled.
The lone figure performed a long, insolent bow before resuming his original pose. Gold glittered in the sunlight when he leaned forward. At his neck and also at his belt.
'Qus!' Leo roared. 'Is the Medea ready?'
'Naturally,' the bailiff replied. 'You gave strict orders to keep
her primed to sail at a moment's notice.'
'Well, this is the moment, Qus! Muster the crew. I'm going after that murdering bastard.'
'But that's what he's waiting for,' the Ethiopian protested. 'He's trying to goad you into giving chase.'
'I'll give that sonofabitch chase all right, Qus. When I catch him, he'll wish he'd never been born!'
'You can't hope to outstrip him with the Medea.'
'Who bloody can't? Leo turned to his head slave and glowered. 'You just make sure that ship's ready to sail in ten minutes or you'll find yourself turned into cash come the next auction.'
Ten
In the field behind her simple cottage in the hills, the woman called Clio unhooked her robe and slipped naked into the freshwater pond. Sensuously, she splashed her face, her neck, her arms, paying particular attention to her magnificent breasts. She drizzled the soft, clear springwater over her thighs, her buttocks, the soft curve of her belly then lay back in the water, eyes closed against the sun, her dark hair streaming on the surface like a veil, her breasts bobbing.
There was no food in the cottage. She had eaten the last of the bread with her breakfast. The fish and the fruit had run out two days before. Even the cheese was gone now: it had comprised her meagre dinner last night. At least after her bath, she'd be able to go into town to stock up.
If you could call that hole a town!
Anywhere else in the Empire and the place would be awash with marble temples and airy basilicas, with triumphal arches and statues covered with gold. Day and night it would be thronging with spice sellers, money changers, perfumers, astrologers, the air ringing with the whine of self-blinded beggars, the crack of the wagoner's whip. All cities these days seemed to be a league of nations, with one group wearing gaudy turbans, others in fringed pantaloons and, everywhere, strange, exotic animals.
Clio sighed, and made circles with her wrists in the water, sending out a series of seductive ripples.
Alas, no giraffes here. No fast chariots. Nor pavements for them to rattle over, had there been any to start with! Cressian philosophy, like its inhabitants, was quite simple. Dump a few flagstones, call it a wharf. Erect a poky little building, call it a shrine. (Erect a bigger one and you get to call it a temple!)