Jail Bait

by Marilyn Todd

  Observing the nimbleness of Lalo’s olive-picking fingers and the raw, damaged knuckles, Claudia decided that it wouldn’t hurt to enquire how long he’d been in the old woman’s employ, either. What exactly was his role within her smallholding? For a field hand, he was exceptionally familiar with his mistress, even to sleeping in her bed. Did he bully her? That seemed unlikely, but why should he be here today? Had Lavinia sent him to watch and report back? Or was he paying his own last respects?

  As Pylades wound up his oration, the pre-paid sobbing took over and branches of cypress were solemnly laid over Cal’s body, covering for ever that mop of corn-coloured hair. With a lump in her throat, Claudia inched through the crowd. Lecher or not, the Greek ought to know his efforts in ensuring Cal didn’t journey alone on this tragic morning were appreciated. When she saw him turn to Kamar and mutter, ‘I can’t take much more of this,’ under his breath, Claudia froze.

  ‘Be patient,’ the physician replied. ‘It’ll be over soon enough.’

  Pylades snorted. ‘That’s fine for you to say,’ he flashed back, ‘you’re a doctor, but me! I have a business to run!’

  The hiss of the flames sweeping over the pyre drowned the rest of the interchange, but in any case Claudia could stomach no more. Sickened by the callousness, she reeled away from the congregation, to be swallowed up amongst the basketweavers and the moneychangers, the fishmongers and the wheelwrights.

  Did no one care? A boy dies, and nobody here gives a damn?

  Forget Kamar. He’d pronounced death by falling and nothing would sway him from that conclusion, and in any case who’s to call him a liar? The evidence was literally going up in smoke, and as to a few bloodstains on the rock, why, you’re overwrought, my dear, those could be anything—fishguts, a cracked shin, in fact are you sure that it’s blood? It looks very like paint, you know…Turtleface’s stock would probably soar as a result of the calm and professional way he dealt with another neurotic attention seeker!

  By the basilica, she pulled close to the wall to let past a bloodied carcass of beef. Bluebottles swarmed over the meat and a mongrel trotted behind, pausing to lick the odd drip of blood.

  If the priest with the shiny black eyes won’t let even his own acolyte near the spring, he’d not wish to become embroiled in a scandal which might cast a cloud over his nymph.

  Leon was too clumsy, too obsessed with galloping hormones to care, which only left Pylades—and far from being the high-minded deliverer of Lake Plasimene, bringer of trade and prosperity and cures for the sick, Pylades turned out to be just another shallow, self-seeking money-grubber, concerned more with his daily schedule than the boy who had died!

  When it came to matters of conscience, it was clearly a case of the bland leading the bland.

  ‘You wish to steal my boat again, yes?’

  The voice in her ear made her jump, causing Claudia to stub her toe on the kerbstone. What else could account for the colour flooding her face? ‘Ah.’ The grey rowboat. ‘Um—’

  He was leaning against the side of a barber’s shop, the sole of one foot flat against the stonework as he carved a small piece of wood with a knife. Today his long hair was tied back at the nape, though there was no change in the depth of the accent. ‘Is “ah-um” Latin for yes or for no?’ the Spaniard enquired and despite his dark, dark eyes being hidden in the shadows, Claudia knew they were laughing.

  ‘I assumed the boat was the property of Atlantis,’ she said stiffly. Dammit, he had no right to creep up on her like that! ‘However, I wish to thank you for saving my life yesterday.’

  ‘No need,’ he replied, flashing a sharp glance. ‘The bear, also, was trespassing.’

  Also?

  ‘You know, this man Tuder—’ he shrugged expressively ‘—for a banker, he have very good taste. Maybe I show you around? The villa, the grounds. You wish to see, yes?’

  Above the hum of conversation from the barber’s came the sound of iron scissors snipping at hair, bronze knives being stropped, the sizzle of curling tongs heated in charcoals and whetstones being lubricated by spitting.

  ‘I wish to see, no.’

  The Spaniard grunted, and the grunt could have meant anything.

  Funny, but despite the lane reeking with the wolf’s grease used to cure baldness, with steam and the dust from the scrape of their stools, Claudia could smell only a subtle blend of woodshavings and pine…

  ‘I come anyway,’ he insisted. ‘Three hours from now. I wait by the jetty and—’ he cut short her protest with a flash of white teeth ‘—I let you row, if you want.’

  Claudia willed her feet to start walking, because the Spaniard made no effort to prise himself away from the wall.

  ‘You know,’ he was addressing her retreating back—so she might have misheard, what with the babble of gossip from inside the barber’s and a chariot rattling past but it sounded for all the world as though he said, ‘you look just as good with your clothes on.’

  Accompanied, perhaps, by a chuckle.

  *

  Who was he? Her mind whirling like a mill-race, Claudia elbowed her way down the street, careless of a packmule loaded with grain. The owner cursed roundly as he bent to scoop up the trail of spilled corn, but Claudia didn’t hear. Who the hell was the stranger who, with the utmost calm and composure, circled a blood-crazed bear with a spear in its eye? The same man who issues veiled warnings against trespassers on the island, yet conversely offers to show her around? Who mocks her state of near nudity without enquiring as to her health after so narrow an escape?

  Who was the stranger who, let’s be honest, had strip-searched her soul yesterday?

  A picture flashed into her mind. Of him standing at the edge of the clearing, one shoulder bare as he leaned on his lance. Today he wore a tunic of watercress green and the gold had not been restricted to the hem, but was embroidered into oak leaves and acorns. What job, she wondered, swerving past a pedlar, what job on Tuder’s estate would befit a man of twenty-five, twenty-six with broad shoulders and strong, corded muscles? She exchanged five sesterces for an ostrich-feather fan from the pedlar. Tuder had a wife, had he not? Lais, someone said her name was. Closer to sixty than fifty they said. Would Lais have need of a slave with smouldering good looks? To explain the gold thread in his cloth?

  Pausing to drink from a fountain, Claudia decided that Lais would be living dangerously were that the case—the Emperor’s reforms were exacting in the extreme! Nowadays, not only a cuckolded husband had the right to instigate a divorce against an adulterous wife. Recent legislation gave others an incentive to shop her, because if the husband, for whatever motive, decided against prosecution, the informant himself could indict—with the added inducement that, should the erring wife be proved guilty, said accuser could claim half her dowry.

  Bound by the stifling, almost incestuous, isolation of an island, petty jealousies would escalate, imaginary scores would need settling. Lais and her lover would need to watch out.

  Assuming, of course, the supposition was correct. Claudia trickled lukewarm water from the fountain over her face. There might be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this. Lais, for instance, could turn out to be a nagging shrew, a middle-aged cripple or some kissy socialite. Who knows, she might be all three, with not a thought to romancing some drop-dead sexy slave which, if the affair came to light, could result in her being cast out and sold into slavery, and for him would mean certain death.

  Was he worth it? Claudia wondered. Was the Spaniard worth risking the auction block for?

  She was heartily relieved that the triple arch loomed before the question required an answer.

  Cal’s pyre had burned through and, to the piping of flautists, attendants swept the smouldering debris into a pile, sprinkling it with a purifying mix of wine and water before sifting it into the urn. Flapping the ostrich feathers brought on a tight constriction inside Claudia’s ribs. Was it really only yesterday Cal had grabbed that parchment fan from her hand in the sizzling heat of th
e walnut grove and whipped up, not just a breeze, but a whole storm of passion? As the lid closed for ever on the pottery urn, her vision clouded at the memory of chiselled features which would never again break into a self-mocking grin, of hands stilled for ever from turning somersaults.

  ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  The words echoed in her head and Claudia bit deep into her lower lip. From now on, whenever she inhaled the astringency of alecost she would think of Cal, and more than ever she was glad she hadn’t succumbed to her desires in the clandestine anonymity of the cave. “Who would know? Claudia would know. Now, at least, his shade could walk the Elysian Fields with one less stain on its soul.

  Claudia blew into her handkerchief. It was so bloody unfair. Cal was too young to die, to be murdered. He’d been in the prime of his life, guzzling every opportunity which presented itself before maturity took a hold of his character and twisted it out of all recognition. Beside one of the tombs, a freckle-faced girl of maybe seven or eight rolled a hoop with a bone. For her, the world was a blank stucco wall upon which she could paint out her destiny, and whether the child turned out a thin-lipped virago, a brow-beaten doormat or a drink-raddled jade, only time or a clairvoyant could tell. But at least the future was hers to chart out.

  Cal had been denied that opportunity.

  A fat tear trickled down Claudia’s cheek and angrily she brushed it away. Our characters are the product of the decisions we make, and Cal ought at least to have been given a fighting chance. To die nobly in battle, perhaps, or face down disease with some dignity. Even hand-to-hand combat with his killer would have been preferable to having his neck wrung like a chicken’s.

  It was too soon, the emotions still too raw, for Claudia to set her mind to considering who might have murdered Cal, or even why.

  Yet, if only she had turned around, Claudia Seferius would have seen his killer standing behind her, deep in the shadows of the triple-arch gateway.

  Watching intently.

  X

  Under the circumstances—heat which sweat-stained their clothes and attracted ravenous insects, the funeral going on all around them—you’d expect the citizens of Spesium to ease up a bit, but no. If anything, people seemed more careworn, more anxious. Farmers had fetched their cheeses, eggs and cattle in for market day, they were damned well going to sell them, and the Corn Measurer doled out the grain, flanked by two solid henchmen who put paid to all thoughts of pilfering. Rich men and poor, artists and administrators frantically thrust and jostled through the crush, shouting and squeezing and gripping their purses amid the clatter of wheelwrights and the grinding of shovels mixing cement as more and more apartment blocks were thrown up. So much brick dust, thought Claudia, so much construction, I could almost be back in Rome.

  Then she saw him, standing head and shoulders above the crowd, a whopping great bear of a man with a black bushy beard and hair spiking out in a thousand directions, shaded by a scarlet awning over his stall. He was, at that moment, offering half-price enemas to a portly magistrate.

  ‘Dorcan, you old fraud!’ Claudia waited until the lardball waddled off before approaching the giant. ‘I thought I caught a glimpse of your ugly mug earlier.’ She examined the array of potions laid out on the counter. ‘What brings you so far north?’

  Dorcan, whose ancestry could only be guessed at, exhibited a row of perfect white teeth and it was only when he tipped his head back and roared, like he did now, that you could see they were someone else’s, held together by strands of gold wire. ‘Remember my instant cure for hangover?’

  ‘Not personally.’ Claudia ran her finger over a thin plait billed as the original thread from the Minotaur’s labyrinth. ‘Although if I recall, it was a gruesome mix of goat dung and rennet, was it not?’

  ‘That’s the one. Got me into a real spot of bother, I tell you.’ His was not so much a laugh, more the bellow of a bull. ‘See, I never expected the silly sods to eat the ruddy stuff, they was supposed to rub it on their foreheads.’

  Claudia picked up a dried snake purporting to be a clipping of Medusa the Gorgon’s hair. ‘Is that why you had to grow the beard?’

  ‘That come about after a misunderstanding over my fertility ointment when it appears I was somewhat heavy-handed with the mustard.’ Dorcan leaned over the counter and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Made their dicks glow like embers, it did.’

  Claudia’s eyes were beginning to stream. ‘How many times have you been run out of town?’

  The giant counted them off on his fingers. ‘Well, there was that incident over the toothache cure, which I sold as black chameleon and they caught me grinding chicken bones. My ointment for nappy rash went down none too well, owing to the fact it made their little bums go green—’

  ‘Stop,’ she wailed, fearing she might stay permanently doubled up, when a child ran over, making such a screech on a whistle made of wood that she was forced to stick her fingers in her ears.

  ‘Put it away, lad, until you’ve learned how to play it,’ Dorcan chided, but the child’s mother did not see the jest.

  ‘I say,’ she asked stiffly, ‘do you have a cure for moths?’

  Claudia, who had no idea moths got sick, stuffed her fist into her mouth when Dorcan smoothly knocked over the sign which read ‘Reduces Fever’ and handed over the small clay pot it rested against. The woman counted out three bronze coins and she and her unmusical offspring moved on.

  ‘So then, my lovely,’ the burly bear pocketed the money and propped the sign against a thin blue phial, ‘I presume you haven’t travelled one hundred miles of metalled road just to sample my world-famous remedies. What brings you to Atlantis?’

  Claudia ignored the question. ‘You’re a chap who hears things, Dorcan. I’m looking for a man.’

  Another day aren’t-we-all would have tripped off his tongue, but suddenly he scowled and dragged her underneath his scarlet awning. ‘Don’t have no truck with them,’ he growled, and for a second she was bewildered.

  ‘No, Dorcan,’ she patted his arm, ‘I appreciate your concern, but it’s not an abortionist I’m after.’

  His face dropped back into its amiable position. ‘That’s a bloody relief,’ he said. ‘You won’t believe what them backstreet quacks gets up to. Now that, ma’am—’ he turned to address an elderly matron—“is a string from the lyre of Orpheus himself, the only one in existence and a snip at three gold pieces.’

  ‘Ooh, I don’t know—’

  ‘Strum on this, you’ll charm the feathers off a bird and have creditors eating out of your hand.’ He gave a wicked wink. ‘Works a treat on daughters-in-law, too. Why, thank you, ma’am, and may the gods smile upon you.’ Stashing the gold, he brought another lyre string out from under the counter and beamed at Claudia. ‘What man are you after, my lovely?’

  Claudia described the Spaniard and Dorcan said, yes, he knew the bloke, though not to speak to, mind. Tarraco his name was. Not what you’d call social, keeps himself very much to himself, steering clear of the drinking dens and that, and he never takes parts in the local athletics, the discus, foot races and the like, although whether he’ll attend the new theatre when it’s finished Dorcan couldn’t say. But Tarraco was a rum bird, in his opinion. A real dark horse.

  ‘What does he do out on Tuder’s island, do you know?’

  ‘Do?’ The big, black bushy eyebrows shot straight up. ‘Tarraco don’t do nothing, lovely. Tarraco owns the bloody place.’

  ‘But… What about Tuder? I thought—’

  ‘Tuder?’ Dorcan threw his head back and roared again. ‘If you’d kept them pretty eyes of yours open, you’d have seen the banker’s tomb right beside where they was burning Cal.’

  This time it was Claudia’s turn to be surprised. ‘You knew Cal?’

  Dorcan shrugged his massive shoulders and began straightening the jars and pots. ‘Not really, no.’

  Since he refused to meet her eye, Claudia fired off a different arrow. ‘Who’s that chap?’ she asked, indicating t
he kilted Oriental standing on the temple steps, fingering his walrus moustache.

  Dorcan puffed out his cheeks and rolled his eyes. ‘Now—that is a man you should avoid,’ he said soberly. ‘His name is Pul, and he’s not so much an Oriental as a half-caste. His father was a Bessian tribesman, his mother came from far beyond the Caucasus, that’s all anyone really knows of Pul. Except—’ he spoke from one side of his mouth ‘—he’s the law around here.’

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ Claudia scoffed. ‘What about the military?’

  ‘You see any hammered breastplates here? Any feathered helmets?’

  ‘There’s a barracks, I passed it on the way in yesterday.’

  ‘Sssh.’ The charlatan held up a cautionary finger as a goldsmith approached the booth, his apron sparkling with precious dust. ‘Colic, sir? I have the very remedy.’ He passed across a brew of myrtleberries crushed in white wine. ‘Drink this with every meal and in two days you’ll be fine.’

  Around them, the Forum buzzed like any other town on market day, with the squeal of fretful children, the protesting bleat of goats, the aromas of pepper, cumin and nutmeg in the air. Surveyors with their rods and lines pushed through the crowd, wagoners and carters spilled out of taverns, clapping one another on the back. How could it be possible, in a society run by an army which prized itself on discipline, that a civilian such as Pul could control a lively commercial centre?