Sour Grapes

by Marilyn Todd

  ‘Suggestible?’

  ‘Susceptible,’ he corrected with a dry chuckle ‘If I may speak bluntly, Claudia, Candace is the main reason I’m pushing Ren to fix a date for the wedding. More and more, your mother-in-law is becoming dependent on that woman’s visions and spells, and I’m not convinced that’s a healthy development.’

  ‘I doubt there’s a woman yet who hasn’t consulted some kind of fortune-teller, astrologer, soothsayer or quack when she’s about to get married.’

  ‘Are we men such ogres?’ he asked, sidestepping a crate of grey hazel hens. ‘Seriously, though.’ He shook his head. ‘Try as I might, I can’t find out one damn thing about Candace. Other than the fact that she’s Kushite by birth, our lovely sorceress remains a mystery, and mysteries, my dear Claudia, trouble me greatly.’

  Claudia wondered what his opinion was when it came to pots calling kettles black.

  ‘Where did Larentia find her?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah, well, that’ll teach me to go back home on business.’ He gave a rueful cluck of the tongue. ‘It was even my treat, you know, packing Ren off to the hot springs for a few days of luxurious pampering, because what happens? I check on my horses, I tie up a few deals and when I come back, she’s addicted to spells, spirits and magic, and the quicker she’s away from Candace’s influence, the better. Without our lovely sorceress, Ren’s a strong, funny woman—in fact, you and she have a lot in common.’

  ‘I do not take that as a compliment.’

  ‘I wish you would, because you’re more alike than either of you think, and you like each other more than you care to admit. And I’ll bet that’s another bitter pill for you to swallow.’

  ‘I don’t take medicines, Darius. The cure is invariably worse than the problem, and if it’s true that men marry women who remind them of their mothers, shoot me now.’

  ‘See what I mean? Funny.’ He broke off as another dry spasm wracked his chest.

  ‘And while we’re on the subject of medicines, are you taking anything for that cough?’

  ‘Everything,’ he sighed, dodging a porter balancing three sacks of grain. ‘Horehound, coltsfoot, mullein. I’m a walking herbalist’s half the time, which is another reason I’m pushing for an early wedding. Since I arrived in Mercurium, my throat and chest haven’t let up and, Claudia, I care for your mother-in-law deeply, but you have no idea how my lungs yearn for their homeland.’

  ‘Campania?’

  His face brightened. ‘Do you know it?’

  Never been. ‘Intimately. Particularly Naples, Capua and the peninsula out by Capri.’

  ‘Stunning, isn’t it? My farm’s further south, on the plains of Salernum, but Naples is handy for shipping the beasts in and out. Do you know anything about horses?’

  ‘Only that my last one is still running.’

  ‘Then it’s not one of mine. I only breed winners, and you have no idea how satisfying it is, watching wobbly foals turn into sleek racers, although sadly the credit is not mine to claim. As you employ specialists to oversee your vines, I employ trainers who do all the hard work.’

  ‘Could you spare one for Flavia?’

  ‘Only if you want her lapping the posts of the Circus Maximus,’ he retorted. ‘But if you’re worried about the girl, seriously, why don’t you sign her up for the Dance of the Brides of Fufluns?’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ he rumbled. ‘But come.’

  Instead of following the flow of the market, Darius turned into a side street and followed the steep path to the summit of Mount Mercury. Like the seven hills of Rome, the air up here was cleaner and fresher, trees lined the squares—laurels, plane trees and cypress—and from their branches birds serenaded the white limestone fronts and blood-red roof tiles of the villas of the well heeled. Facing west, these sumptuous villas overlooked the soft rolling landscape and sat in perfect alignment for catching the refreshing sea breezes during the baking hot Etruscan summers. Claudia followed the point of Darius’s index finger to a hill to the south that was fronted by a forest of salmon-pink columns.

  ‘That’s the Temple of Fufluns down there,’ he said. ‘Have a word with Talchis the priest. See if he can’t help Flavia to grow up.’

  If he could, Claudia thought, it would be the only miracle to take place around here.

  Including last night’s shenanigans.

  Eleven

  When Augustus triumphed over Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, he united the Empire and promised his people an end to the carnage of war. But his peace came with a price tag. In return for safe highways, better living standards and grain in your granaries, he told the vanquished nations, you pay tax to Rome and abide by Roman law. It’s all right, you can keep your customs, your clothes, your obscure religions, we don’t mind. In fact, your culture enriches ours. But cross me, he warned, and your soil will be stained red with blood for a decade. Which path do you choose?

  Too many lives had already been sacrificed, too much lost, for the tribes to challenge the might of the Romans. He knew full well that they’d bow to the inevitable, then try to squeeze as much as they could out of the deal—which was all very fine, but left Augustus with something of a dilemma. Given the peace that had settled over the Empire, what was he going to do with seventy legions, now that most of them had nothing to do?

  Augustus was nothing if not shrewd. Rumours had abounded for years about how he’d offered himself as Julius Caesar’s catamite to advance his own cause, and whether those rumours were founded or not, it was the nineteen-year-old Augustus who inherited the Divine Julius’s crown. No one else. So the administering of territories stretching from the eastern shores of the Black Sea to the Oceans of Atlantis was nothing short of child’s play for the Emperor. By replacing amateur conscripted farmers with a force of hardcore professional volunteers, the army’s efficiency multiplied. Within two years he’d reduced seventy legions to fewer than thirty, allotting the redundant veterans generous pensions as well as parcels of fertile land in the conquered territories to those that wanted them, while opportunities naturally flourished within his elite and restructured army.

  The father of Publius Peregrinus Macedo might well have bought his son’s original commission, but there was no disguising the lad’s military genius. Nicknamed Rex on account of his imposing stature, he was the youngest legate to march into Gaul and the first to fully appreciate the importance of civilian support on campaign, the so-called ‘Second Army’ of carpenters, engineers, musicians and blacksmiths, orderlies, veterinarians and scribes.

  Waiting in the general’s office, Orbilio scanned the gleaming collection of weapons, armour and other trophies of war that obliterated most of Rex’s walls and was flooded with memories of his own tribuneship. Hardly the happiest time of his life. The marriage he’d been contracted into prior to his first posting hadn’t got off to the finest of starts, and being absent from home for the best part of two years did nothing to bolster the relationship. Add on his refusal to follow the proud ancestral tradition and take up law once his stint was up, opting for what his family considered to be some grubby, poorly paid post in a demeaning little backwater of the Administration, and it was no great surprise that his wife ran off with a sea captain from Lusitania, causing a scandal that still clung to him like a wet shirt. He peered at the battle-scarred helmets, the rows of pierced shields, an Egyptian corselet still stained with blood. No matter how hard or how often he tried to explain, not so much as one distant third cousin had grasped the fact that enforcing the law was infinitely more important that practising it, especially since the object of defence was to get the accused off and never mind that the bastard was guilty!

  Testing the point of a Scythian arrowhead, Marcus prided himself on his work within the Security Police. The satisfaction of knowing that this assassination attempt had been foiled, that conspiracy had been thwarted, those rapists and murderers thrown to the lions. He might only be a small cog in the wheel, but that was the wheel that kep
t Rome safe and the Empire thriving, and no one could take that sense of fulfilment away. He saw, in time, taking a seat in the Senate, like his father before him, and voting on issues that would change not just the law, but the whole structure of society. Make it better and stronger for generations to come. There was a sense of achievement in that, too.

  But… He ran his finger over the red horsehair crest of an antique Spartan helmet. But at the same time there was something missing in his life, and that something was a woman. A wife. And that something also had a name.

  Watching the tumble of curls bursting out of their ivory hairpins this morning, Marcus felt the same wrench in his gut that he always felt when he was with her. It wasn’t love, of course, because love wouldn’t keep a chap tossing and turning all through the night, then leave him aching and empty in the morning. Love was about holding hands in the moonlight and whispering sweet nothings in one another’s ears, not chasing round the countryside risking your career on a girl who took life’s corners on two wheels. Nevertheless… He examined his teeth in the shine of an ancient Mycenean breastplate. The Governor of Aquitania was pressuring him to set an example of Roman propriety by remarrying, while Claudia’s estate was under threat if Darius married Larentia.

  Expediency, that’s all it was. She knew him enough to trust his word that she could continue to manage her own affairs without his interference. He’d have the appendage of respectability that the State required. Expediency. Yes, that’s what it was. Expediency, pure and simple.

  ‘Ah, Marcus.’ Rex strode into the room with his customary briskness, and for all that he was clad in civilian clothes, he might just as well have been wearing his red legate’s tunic, with his red woollen cloak swinging jauntily over his shoulder. ‘Been admiring my collection, have you? That—’ he jabbed a stubby finger at a leather belt hanging empty in pride of place behind his desk ‘—was Agamemnon’s own baldric. By your right shoulder hangs the girdle of Hippolyte the Amazon queen, and this,’ he said proudly. ‘This is the very sword with which Achilles despatched Hector beneath the walls of Troy!’

  Orbilio was reminded of charlatans in Rome selling dead snakes cut from Medusa’s head or feathers shed from Pegasus’s wings.

  ‘Hoping to add Hercules’s olive-wood club very soon. Depends on whether my source can negotiate a fair price—’

  ‘About Hadrian, sir.’

  ‘Hadrian?’ The old war horse filled two goblets to the brim with wine. ‘Waste of time, m’boy. Appreciate you coming up here and all that, and happy to put you and your scribe up for as long as you want, but no need, no need. Local army chappies are quite capable of handling the investigation.’

  ‘There are rumbles of a cover-up.’

  ‘That’ll be the sister’s doing. Take no notice.’ Rex indicated for Orbilio to take a seat on a high-backed upholstered chair with carved lion armrests. ‘Keeps stirring the wrong pot, that’s Rosenna’s trouble. Won’t face the truth.’

  Orbilio placed his glass on the desk untouched. ‘And what is the truth?’

  ‘The truth, m’boy, is that Lichas was a nasty little shit, who deserved everything he got.’

  The general downed his wine in one swallow, while Marcus wondered idly whether anyone ever deserved to be stabbed and thrown into the river alive.

  ‘Which makes it doubly unfortunate for Hadrian that he was the last person to see Lichas alive and has admitted quarrelling with him under the yew,’ he said evenly.

  ‘That admission was made in this room, dammit, when there were only the three of us present, and if you take that outside, both my son and I will deny it, and never mind I sat next to your father on a bench in the Senate, I’ll have you denounced as a liar, understood?’

  ‘No, sir, I don’t understand.’ Orbilio laced his fingers. ‘Your son is this close to being arrested for Lichas’s murder, and right now the only thing that’s preventing him from being marched off in chains is the fact that you’ve leaned on the local judiciary. Rosenna knows it, the townspeople know it, and if I’ve any hope of clearing Hadrian’s name, you have to let me interview him again—’

  ‘Categorically not!’ Rex pounded the desk with his fist. ‘The boy’s said too much as it is.’

  ‘Are you worried he’ll say more?’

  Colour suffused the general’s face, turning it a deep shade of purple. ‘If I was still a legate, I’d have had you flogged for that remark.’

  ‘If you’d still been a legate, I’d have been a tribune, and you could not have had a tribune flogged for any reason. Sir. Now let’s not forget we’re on the same side here—’

  ‘What we shouldn’t forget, sonny, is that I didn’t invite you here and I didn’t ask you to meddle in affairs that don’t bloody concern you.’ The old soldier regrouped. ‘See here, m’boy. You came to Tuscany for all the right reasons, I realize that, and I appreciate the sacrifice you’ve made, too. Building a reputation for yourself in Aquitania and all that. But best get back while you’ve still got a job, eh?’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  Rex’s lips tightened and for several minutes the only sound in the office was that of him tapping his finger on his satinwood desk. Orbilio let his gaze range across the various antiquaries. What was Rex hiding, he wondered?

  ‘Sorry if I appear to be breaking your balls, but you see how it is, don’t you?’ The general harrumphed around in his chair. ‘Just…just not right, this sort of thing.’

  ‘Murder?’

  Rex wasn’t listening. ‘Have fun, by all means. At his age, we all did. Sow your wild oats and if that includes hopping over the fence for a bit of a change, then so be it. But to make a vocation of it, dammit! Just ain’t natural, and I’ll cure that boy of his ridiculous notions if it’s the last thing I do. Think I’ll have a word with the Emperor, what. Ask for Hadrian to be put in charge of a cohort out on the Rhine. That’ll make a man of him right enough, because there’ll be none of this namby-pamby nancy-boy stuff, not on my watch, even if I have to beat it out of the lad myself.’

  ‘I’m sure that’ll do the trick.’

  ‘Are you being funny?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘That Lichas, he was one of ’em, y’know, and we all know how far they’ll go to protect one of their own.’

  ‘With all due respect, you can’t lump homosexuals in a box and—’

  ‘Not talking about bloody poofs! Commoners, Marcus. Riff-raff. You served abroad. You know what it’s like, living among vanquished tribes. Can’t trust ’em, can’t turn your back on ’em, and forget this talk about the Etruscans being conquered so far back in time that they’re fully integrated. Bollocks. It’s them and us, always was, always will be, and it don’t matter a damn what we’ve done for the ungrateful buggers, they still resent us.’

  ‘One can see their point, though.’

  The general pushed his jowly face towards his. ‘I’ll not have my son’s reputation smeared through these preposterous allegations. If Hadrian says he didn’t kill that snide little queer, that’s the end of it, so you leave it, Marcus. Leave it alone or so help me you’ll be pushing a quill for the rest of your sordid little career.’

  *

  Watching her brother’s pyre burn, Rosenna experienced an unexpected sense of release. At last, she thought, Lichas was free of the indignity of lying there with his corpse ravaged by murder, by water, by savage wee teeth. At last, Lichas was free.

  As the choir of four (it was all she could afford) sent him on his last journey with hymns, an acolyte sprinkled sacred water on the pyre as the priest raised his arms in supplication that the gates of the Fields of the Blessed would open and the newcomer find peace among his ancestors. There was no question of hiring wailing women or professional mourners for Lichas, but the modest funeral had not deterred the townspeople from paying their respects. The toy-maker had been a nice enough lad and his skills would be missed, but wasn’t it wicked the way that patrician boy cut him down in his prime and was gonna get away with the m
urder? Discontent rumbled through the crowds like distant thunder and Rosenna’s heart found comfort in the sound.

  ‘There’ll be no funeral meats,’ she explained.

  They understood. Lichas was young, he hadn’t had time to establish his business. Rosenna couldn’t afford a funeral as well as a feast.

  ‘You are bearing up well, child,’ the priest murmured. ‘Lichas would be proud of you.’

  She smiled thinly, knowing he interpreted her pursed lips and fists clenched white as grief. This was undoubtedly true. But they were pursed and clenched in vengeance, as well.

  Flames crackled and coils of incense spiralled upwards on the warm breeze. Rosenna hadn’t actually lied about her financial situation. All she’d said was there’d be no funeral meats and left people to draw their own conclusions, whereas Lichas’s toys had sold for a tidy profit. That was a lot of money she’d found in his chest. But not so much, unfortunately, that she could afford a funeral, a feast and bribing a slave in his killer’s household.

  The choir continued to carry Lichas on his final voyage, calming the River Styx with their voices and steadying the Ferryman’s oars.

  The spy’s news was bad. The worst possible, as it happened, as he’d listened in on the conversation between Rex and that high-flying crony of his from Rome. It was, as Rosenna had feared, a full-scale cover-up. Having admitted to quarrelling with Lichas at the spot where he was killed, Hadrian was one step away from confessing to the murder, something Rex had no intention of allowing him to do. According to the spy, the investigator from Rome was more than happy to drop the case, whilst Rex had personally spoken to the Emperor, who was arranging for Hadrian to be despatched to the Rhine, where the rumours about his precious boy wouldn’t have surfaced.