Dark Horse

by Marilyn Todd

'About the treasure stashed over this hill?'

  'You want the full list? Or would you prefer to get going before they catch up with us? Here.' When the strap of his battle axe landed on her shoulder, her knees nearly buckled with the weight. 'Oh, and you'll have to carry this, too.'

  'I am not touching that sack.'

  'Yes, you are.'

  Scalp hunter or no scalp hunter, there are times when a girl simply has to make a stand. 'Excuse me, but I'm standing here like Diana of the Forests, bow in one hand, quiver on my back and bent double with a bloody battleaxe while you ponce about carrying diddly squat. Why don't you carry the damned sack?'

  'Because,' he said patiently, 'I shall be carrying Geta. In case you hadn't noticed, he died while I was sitting with him.'

  'What?' The great flat-faced, slant-eyed ox was dead? 'How?'

  Claudia felt herself swaying. Had he slit Geta's throat back there when she wasn't looking? One more double-cross in a lifetime of double-crosses would hardly notice.

  'From the bolt he took saving your life,' Jason said, sheathing his dagger. 'So kindly pick up the sack and get your arse up that hill before I lose my bloody temper.'

  Forty

  The demon hugged its secret pleasure to its breast. To have a person at one's mercy, to manipulate their fears and terrors and stretch and play with their emotions, was the most powerful feeling on earth.

  And now the demon had made another startling discovery. Contrary to all its expectations, men were nowhere near as satisfying as women when it came to the indulgence of torment. Not even close! Too solid and one-dimensional in their thoughts. No imagination to play on. Masculine suggestibility did not have one tenth of the fertile soil that the female mind enjoyed.

  The demon turned farmer.

  Sowing seeds of terror, watching them sprout and take root in the soul it had chosen. And, like any good landsman, it nurtured its crop, feeding its victim's destruction a bit at a time, just enough to make the crop grow, but not so much that it would bolt.

  Because the best time to reap is when the crop is young and at its most tender . . .

  The demon was content to wait.

  Time was on its side.

  Always had been. Always will.

  Forty-One

  Sitting beside the fresh-water pond, Clio should have felt elated. She'd beaten off the lynch mob. She was alive, free, the islanders wouldn't touch her now. So why did her legs feel as though they'd been filleted? Why could she not stop shaking? Why did she not feel triumphant?

  Dragonflies darted back and forth, iridescent rainbows of blue, green and silver in the torrid midday heat. A desultory songbird warbled in the scrub, a goat bleated and the shepherd boy's flute carried from way over the hill on the still island air. But the reflection in the mirror of the pool quaked.

  Her ordeal had been abominable, that was true. No human being should be put through that, but she had won, hadn't she? And it wasn't as though she didn't empathize with native superstition. She was Liburnian herself. She understood the minds of the people who made up Illyria - Istrians, Dalmatians, Liburnians, as well as all the islanders - and who so lacked the sense of adventure prevalent among the Greeks and the Romans. To the peaceful and by and large placid Illyrians, travel was anathema, but what they lacked in derring-do they compensated for in other ways. Clio's own people, for instance, had developed into superlative shipbuilders, creating light fast galleys especially suited to these waters, the same type Jason used and which were even called liburnians. The Istrians had honed their hunting skills to procure game from deep in the forests, the Dalmatians had evolved into skilled engravers, exporting their crafts round the Adriatic as far as the Bosphorus, and the islanders rejoiced in their musical skills. But because they rarely travelled beyond their own narrow, self-imposed confines, superstition had become magnified and on Cressia, thanks to the island's

  dark history, it had a tendency to spiral out of recognition when times were hard, as they were now.

  Which was not to excuse lynch-mob mentality. Merely to try and understand where the bastards were coming from. And use their own superstitions against them.

  With her flawless complexion, proud carriage, magnificent bosom and cape of gleaming black hair, the islanders had mistrusted her from the beginning. For a woman whose childbearing years were almost past to isolate herself from the community seemed unnatural, allowing fertile imaginations to run riot.

  A boy runs away from home, as boys do, but they see only the stranger restoring her youth by feasting off his living flesh. The conclusion was hasty, they realized that. Perhaps the boy came home, wrote a letter, who knows? For whatever reason, the Lamiae theory quickly died down, but the seeds of sorcery had been sown. Instead of examining their own consciences at how the debilitating illness which claimed the fisherman's wife and the carpenter's son had slipped past their notice, they demanded a scapegoat.

  Vampire was the word bruited, but the islanders hadn't actually believed it. Sure, they'd tossed down the odd branch of whitethorn, left piglet intestines, chanted obscenities - but at heart they believed Clio to be human. A witch, who conjured up wickedness.

  But suppose Clio really was one of the Striges, one of those bloodthirsty birds of the night?

  Once she had seen the flip side of the coin, power was hers. She'd spat on a red gown and rubbed the dye round her mouth, trailing lines down her chin as though blood had been dripping. She clawed at her hair, making it wild, covered her face with flour to make it white, stripped herself naked apart from a bright yellow cloak. She had no idea whether the Striges were supposed to be winged or otherwise, much less what colour those wings might be, but she'd bet her bottom denarius those murderous bastards outside wouldn't know either!

  With her ear to the door, she had waited until footsteps shuffled towards her cottage. Silently lifted the latch. Then, to their total surprise, flung herself into the night.

  'Aieeee!'

  Screaming at the top of her lungs, she'd lunged headlong into the clearing, yellow wings billowing, the colour of the sulphur of Hades.

  'Come to me, my family of gnomes, vampires and witches!'

  Thopc, lugats and shtrigas. She enunciated the words clearly. It was vital the islanders heard this woman, who they'd believed Roman, speaking their own language fluently.

  'Come, wolfman! Come, ye children of the night! Let us dine.'

  She began to dance around the rotting intestines, screeching and howling at the top of her voice, calling upon other shapeshifters in her native Liburnian tongue. It was now or never, she calculated. Either they'd rush her, because she was mad or else they'd run screaming down the hillside like the cowards they truly were. Clio was taking no chances. She fell upon one of the stinking piles and pretended to devour it.

  'Look, ye harpies and trolls. Someone has spread us a banquet. We will not need to search for food elsewhere tonight!'

  She stood up and began to dance again.

  'Come to me, my dark friends. Feast upon the blood of the sacrifice, more succulent than a child's I assure you, and let us gain strength.' She made loud smacking noises with her mouth. 'Gather, all you flesh-eating thropc. Join me in my banquet, my immortal sisters the shtrigas—'

  Now, in the pulsing midday heat, Clio's reflection smiled in the fresh-water pool. Of all of them, that runt of a priest was the first to leg it down the hill, and by Croesus, could Llagos's skinny pins shift!

  'Couple with me, priest,' she'd called after him. 'Lie with me and my sisters. For I know that in your soul you are one of us.'

  A bloody landslide after that! Oh, yes, there'd be no more trouble from the islanders now. The stuff of their nightmares had been proved a reality. Vampires (gasp!) actually exist. Worse. Trolls, werewolves, all the shapeshifting creatures they had feared weren't just real. They walked among them on Cressia! From today, the islanders would take pains to

  appease the vampire's bloodlust with sacrificial offerings and the upsurge in piglet breeding would
know no bounds. Yes well. The sows might be exhausted, but whatever calamity might befall this beleaguered island in the future, one thing was certain. The blame would not be laid on this isolated doorstep!

  In that respect, Clio had achieved her objective. Total privacy. But now, thanks to Leo, that's all she could expect. Privacy! None of the wealth, the triumphal homecoming, the new life she was expecting. Clio, goddammit, was stuck here on Cressia.

  No wonder her reflection still trembled.

  Not from fear, or reaction after last night's pantomime.

  Her reflection trembled from rage.

  Forty-Two

  They had been climbing only a few minutes when the last of the scrub petered out. Now it was just bare white karst, slippery and hard to get hold of. Azan's archers might be crap, Claudia thought, as the strap from the quiver grated away at the flesh on her shoulder, but a blindfolded elephant couldn't fail to score a bull's-eye on such a slow-moving target. The only conclusion she could draw was that, in retaliation for disabling his artillery, Azan wanted to take them alive.

  'Progress would be a lot faster if I ditched the axe.'

  'I'll be needing that,' Jason replied. Geta was strapped across his broad shoulders, and the effects of the additional cargo showed in the lines on his face. Perspiration dripped off him in rivers. Claudia tried not to think about why he might want to lug a corpse around, instead of leaving him back there in the pines.

  'Then suppose I dump the sack?' she suggested. Just carrying it made her feel sick. 'Bumping around between the axe and the quiver, it unbalances me.'

  He flashed her a dark grin. 'I doubt anything unbalances you,' he said. 'And ask yourself the question, do you really think I've gone to all this trouble to bring along stuff I'm not going to need?'

  Which was enough to silence her. If Jason needed an axe plus a sackful of heads plus Claudia Seferius as well as a corpse with a thick thatch of red hair which would look particularly pretty dangling off a war spear, it didn't need Archimedes to work out what he was planning.

  Grappling with the slippery handholds, she wondered just how she was going to get out of this. Behind her, the shouts of the posse grew louder by the second. Not for them progress

  hindered by volleys of shrapnel, impeded by onerous burdens. They were scrambling up the hillside like millipedes. But assuming she escaped her pursuers, what then? Doubling back was out of the question - forget hailing a boat when the coast's in the hands of three pirate warships! While up here, the mountains were a desert. Without food. Without water. Without shelter. Without people. Just vast expanse of bare white rock after vast expanse of bare white rock. Like it or not, Jason was her only chance of survival, but the irony of her situation didn't escape her.

  The very man who was keeping her alive was also the man intent on killing her.

  Claudia climbed.

  The track made in the mountainside by centuries of chamois and mountain goats was a narrow, boulder-strewn death trap, but for Claudia, loaded down by half her own body weight, walking along it was like being fitted with wings. Suddenly the peak was much closer, the pass between the mountains a realistic goal.

  'That's far enough for the moment.'

  Glancing back, she realized that Jason had eased Geta into a fissure in the rock and was letting the cliff absorb his own weight until his breathing returned to something approaching normal.

  'Pass the quiver and bow,' he wheezed. 'High time we shortened some odds.'

  Unlike Roman archers, who pulled their bowstrings back to the chest, Jason lifted his bow so his arm was parallel with his shoulder and pulled the string level with his ear. As the first of Azan's men took an arrowhead in the chest, Claudia understood why no Roman archer had beaten a Scythian. Jason's shot was on a par with Parthian bowmen. Accurate. Deadly. Every shot counts. Two more rebels tumbled down the hillside, then, just when things were going well, Jason replaced the lid on his quiver.

  'Why don't you finish them off?' she asked, as he heaved Geta's body out of the crevice.

  'I got in sufficient shots before they dived for cover. Any

  more would have been a waste of ammunition, and before you say why don't we stay here and pick them off as they come up the hill, that's simply locking ourselves in a trap.'

  Darkness, he explained, would allow Azan's group the opportunity to separate, spread out - and comprehensively seal off the goat track.

  'My totem's the bull, not the sitting duck,' he added.

  'Strange,' she murmured, 'I could have sworn it was the chameleon.'

  If Illyria was one scenic surprise after another, then none was probably more so than the track on the other side of the mountain. Instead of a sea of sparkling turquoise spread out below her, Claudia was plunged into an ocean of dense forest and the first thing that struck her was the birdsong.

  'Inverse vegetation,' Jason explained. 'Unlike conventional mountains, where the upper slopes are covered with spruce leading down to rich fir and beechwoods at the bottom, on the karst, in Dalmatia, this is reversed.'

  As though to illustrate his point, a squirrel scampered across the track in front of her to shin up an oak tree in a red chattering blur. They paused in the shade to catch their breath, Jason laying Geta reverently against a beech.

  'How far to the cave?' she asked. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, hiding out here for a couple of days, and she pictured Jason's slingshot deer roasting slowly on a spit while Azan's frustrated gorillas gave up their search.

  'What cave?'

  The hairs on the back of her neck were the first to react. He seemed genuinely confused. Just as he might genuinely not remember how slowly and how painfully he had despatched Bulis and Leo. And suddenly Claudia saw herself roasting over that open fire . . .

  'The one where you've stashed your booty,' she said nonchalantly.

  'Oh, that one.' He chuckled as he wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. 'Well, there are caves in these mountains. Hundreds of them, in fact, as Geta knew full well. But as for the gold . . .'He ruffled the mop of red hair affectionately. 'It was the only story I could think of which

  would make a plunder-hungry pirate drive his ship at full speed on to the rocks. That, and cutting the rest of the crew out of the deal.'

  'What fairy tale were you planning to spin him once he was up here?'

  'Hadn't actually thought that far ahead,' he admitted, hefting the helmsman back on to his shoulders. 'But I'd have thought of something.'

  And Claudia thought, I'll bet you would. You must have had Bulis and Leo mesmerized, the poor misguided bastards. She caressed the stiletto still strapped to her calf and followed the Scythian deeper into the woods.

  Orbilio wasn't sure how he'd get through the day. Time had never stood heavier. What he had wanted to do was jump in the saddle and scour the island for signs that could shed light on Claudia's disappearance, but there it was again. That old patrician millstone . . .

  'You can't go charging off,' Silvia reminded him, tweaking her curls in the mirror. 'You're chief mourner at Leo and Bulis's funeral, and besides, you're Rome's representative on Cressia now. You have an example to set.'

  'Bollocks to examples, bollocks to Bulis and bollocks to Cressia, frankly. These people didn't give a toss about Leo when he was alive, the hypocrites can't very well complain when—'

  'You'll have to speak up, darling. Your voice is still terribly hungover from last night's binge.'

  'That's not the drink,' he said. 'That's the swelling.'

  'Good grief!' Big blue eyes jumped out on stalks as they noticed the bruising. 'What happened?'

  A Gaul was what happened. Once Orbilio realized Claudia was missing, he'd released Junius and explained the position - only to take the full force of her bodyguard's fist. It was only because he knew how to roll with the punches that his bloody jaw hadn't been broken.

  'I tripped down the steps.'

  'Then I hope that will teach you a lesson about over imbibing,' she said tartly. 'B
ut back to this morning, there

  is no question of escaping your obligations, Marcus. Whether you like it or not, the needs of the many must be balanced against the need of the individual.'

  'You're a fine one to dish out lectures on duty,' he snapped. 'Or have you forgotten those three boys of yours?'

  'Marcus!'

  'Think that's uncalled for, do you? That I shouldn't mention the subject. That you don't deserve it, because it was only the night before last that some bastard left you for dead on the dark shores of Hades and you're frightened, bewildered and pitifully vulnerable? Well, I'm sorry for you, Silvia, truly I am, but that doesn't give you the right to lecture me about marital obligations and denying my children their birthright.'

  Silvia laid the mirror down, walked across the room and began to massage the stiffness out of his shoulders. 'You raised those points, darling, not me.'

  Shit. 'I'm sorry.' He wiped his hands over his face. 'My nerves are shot to threads, I'm not thinking straight.'

  'Understandable, darling. It's your cousin's funeral and that's a lot of responsibility, but you can't cry off simply because some little wine merchant's widow has taken it upon herself to have an adventure.'

  Orbilio resisted the urge to finish the job on Silvia's throat. 'It's a little more serious than that,' he said levelly.

  He was wasting his breath.

  'It's not just the family who will expect you to fulfil your obligations.' Silvia hesitated. Smoothed the wayward curls at the back of his head. 'The thing is, darling, it wouldn't sit at all well with the Senate should word filter back that you'd turned your back on duty.'

  'Hardly turning my back,' he retorted, shrugging her off. 'All I'm suggesting is postponing the ceremony.'

  'Iss too late, I fear,' Llagos said from the doorway. His dainty hands were spread in a gesture of helplessness. 'Things hef not been so good for the islanders lately. Much temptation to return to the old ways. So! Thiss morning I gather the people together and tell them -' he coughed apologetically '- I tell them that the death of your cousin iss sacrifice to almighty Neptune.'