by Marilyn Todd
Marcus Cornelius Orbilio was not a gambling man.
Scrambling down the ladder, she gagged at the mangled mess beneath the giant stone lid. She had seen him around the place many times. One of the volunteers who patrolled the men's palisade, but without the bandana, of course, which would have drawn attention to himself. It was why he'd been able to kill Sarra so easily. An opportunist thug, who thought himself clever. The name still made her spit.
'You need tighter security checks in the future,' she began, but Beth was removing the silver ring from his finger and tears flowed down her face. 'Save your sympathy,' she snapped. 'The bastard didn't deserve it.'
The ring was a phoenix, she saw in the lamplight. The bird that rose triumphant from the ashes. Ptian had taken this as his emblem. How ironic that it was ashes that finally killed him.
'That's not the point,' Beth sobbed, closing the lids on his sightless eyes. 'Whatever his faults, you see—'
She broke up and looked up at her.
'Ptian is still my son.'
In the centre of the world, between earth, sky and sea, at the point where the realms of the universe meet, Rumour greeted old friends. The news they brought to the halls of echoing brass was sad. One of their most frequent tellers-of-tales would visit no more. The man who whispered into the ears of the Druids was dead.
Together, they mourned his passing in murmurs.
Countless doors and numerous windows carried the murmurs away.
Where they faded and died on the wind.
Flying down the path to meet Manion, Claudia thought it was not death spirits that hovered like bees, it was tragedy that danced in the air.
The Hundred-Handed are slaves to their system every bit as much as we are, Swarbric had said.
For three centuries, the Hundred-Handed have provided spiritual guidance for small, isolated communities who rely on this forest for their very survival This time the words were Orbilio's. In leading by example, the priestesses set high moral standards—
Poor Beth.
I am not against love, how could I be? Love is the pivot upon which the world turns.
Claudia had been thinking in terms of marriage, of couples, of men kicked out at forty to start afresh, when Beth had been referring to an altogether different kind of love. That of a mother for her own child.
The Hundred-Handed do care, she realized. But they were born into a society that valued others higher than themselves, and Swarbric was wrong. They weren't in thrall to their own
system. They selflessly dedicated themselves to those who looked to them for spiritual guidance.
Our system is far from ideal, Beth had said, adding that she would lay down her life to preserve it, flaws and all, in order to retain the respect of the people they served. We cannot teach them that nature is constant if the very College that serves it keeps changing.
Except Beth had had to sacrifice more than her life. She'd had to sell her own son and endure the worst pain any woman could suffer. Every day, she would wake, fearing for his welfare. Was he eating enough? Was he sick? Did his new family love him like she would have done? Did they beat him? Every single day, she'd have lived with this ache in her heart.
Only to have her worst fears realized.
Bitter at being abandoned, Ptian grew up hating women and she was responsible for making him the monster he was, at least that's the guilt that she carried. And at last Claudia understood why Beth allowed Gurdo to keep Pod. Pod symbolized the son she'd been forced to sell and by letting the Guardian of the Spring keep his mysterious foundling, she might, in some small way, make reparation. It was the same reason that she'd kept Clytie's death secret—
'Right on time,' a voice said from the darkness, and Claudia smelled nutmeg even through the torrential rain, and twin points of lightning flashed in eyes that were neither blue nor green.
'For what?' she retorted. 'Rebellion?'
'No,' he corrected, with a broad grin. 'Victory.'
He stepped out from the shelter of an overhang of rock. 'How well do you know your own history, Claudia?'
So calm, she thought. So bloody confident. And that was the thing. The Scorpion trusted his own confidence and success. Big mistake.
'Me,' he said, 'I've read a lot about Rome and its conquests lately. There was so much to learn, too.' His smile widened. 'How three generations of civil war ripped it apart, yet through all that scheming and backbiting, Julius Caesar still managed to conquer most of Gaul.'
She said nothing.
'Then, after his assassination when the rifts ran even deeper, I read how Rome went on to conquer Egypt.'
'And Spain, and Galatia, and Raetia.'
'My point exactly,' he said evenly. 'Which is why I want what is best for my people.'
'Oh, you'll feel victory, Manion. You'll feel it slice through your belly in the form of cold steel, slow, agonizing, it'll take you three days to die.'
He moved closer, and his seascape eyes danced. 'Surely, after all the confidences we've shared,' he whispered, 'you wouldn't allow that to happen?'
'No.' Claudia's smile was as cold as the Arctic. 'I have herbs that'll stretch it to four.'
Without hesitation, her knife plunged into his heart.
Twenty-Nine
The track to the pit was slippery from mud and hazardous with stones loosened by rain. Claudia noticed none of these things. All she could think was, He'll be all right. Manion was dead, his battle cry died with him, and with neither leader nor deputy, rebellion stood no chance. The monster was nothing without its head.
'I'm here,' she shouted over the storm. 'Orbilio, can you hear me, it's over!'
Now she'd seen the true picture, Beth could raise no objection to him leaving the Pit. Nothing stood in his way.
'It's just a question of finding a rope long enough, and it may be tomorrow, it may be the next day, but I'll send down some food and ... Marcus?'
'C-Claudia?'
The voice was faint. She could hardly hear it. More a rasp, a rattle—
Oh, god.
'Marcus, are you all right?'
A low groan was all that came back. Sweet Janus, no. No. Not after all this ...
'Marcus, hold on.' She tried not to let panic affect her voice. 'I'm going to fetch help.'
'Too ... late,' he wheezed.
'No, no, Gurdo has herbs, he'll be able to treat you, we'll have you out of there in a jiffy.'
'Can't,' he rasped. 'Compli - ah - cations.'
She wanted to scream.
She wanted to die.
She would follow him even to Hades.
And around the abyss, the storm crackled and howled, and trees bent in the wind.
'Marcus! Marcus, you can't leave me now, do you hear? I won't let you go, I love you too much.'
'Say ... say again. Let me hear it before I ... before I ...'
No, you can't bloody die. I won't let you.
'I said I love you, you fool, I've always loved you.' Rain mixed with the tears. 'Manion was right, I wouldn't let you in, because everyone close to me left and the hurt of rejection was too much to go through again. But I understand now. Clytie's death showed me that. Oh, darling, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but hold on! You must! I'll go and fetch help—'
'Don't go! P-please." The pause was agonizing. 'What... what did Clytie's death tell you?' he wheezed.
'Everything,' she cried, and suddenly it all came tumbling out. A twelve-year-old girl dies on the spring equinox from wrists that had been slashed on the very rock where she played with her friends ...
'You were right about motive being the key,' she sobbed.
First, one had to get inside the skin of the victim. A selfrighteous little prig, Gurdo had called her, adding that she was a pain in the arse. Even Sarra, as gentle and sweet as she was, felt that Clytie put her in a difficult position.
Because she didn't share her friends 'desire to climb rocks, swing from ropes or go poking around in caves and things, she yd come to me ostensibly to get
thread to sew up a tear in Aridella's robe or a new ribbon because Lin had lost hers, but basically Clytie was lonely and wanted someone to talk to, she said.
The clue lay in the word ostensibly.
At some point in the conversation it would slip out why she wanted these things - and once that happened, I was duty bound to put the girls on report.
Clytie was lonely, indeed she was ...
At the Disciplinary, she would rush forward and speak up for her friends, apologizing for landing them in it, but the trouble was, the damage was already done and Beth was left with no choice. She had to punish the girls.
Clytie was the neatest, the tidiest, the cleanest, the cleverest of the four novices, but none of this seemed to matter. It was
the flaxen-haired tomboys who were the priestesses' darlings. They would happily turn a blind eye to their scrapes and beside them, Clytie was invisible.
'It wasn't accidental that she "let drop" their escapades.'
She deliberately told tales on her friends, knowing they'd be reported to Beth, but hey presto, this was her chance to shine. She would vouch for her friends! Throw herself at their mercy! Clytie the Heroine would ride to the rescue!
Except there was no rescue. Nothing changed. The flaxenhaired trio did not alter their ways, they were too full of life to cow down. Instead, they resented her tittle-tattling. Perhaps they argued? Perhaps they pretended to shun her, to teach her a lesson? Whatever happened between them, it came to a head on the spring equinox.
Just because we deliver a baby, it doesn't follow that we bond differently with that child than we do from any other.
Unless, of course, you are that child—
'Unloved, unwanted, Clytie must have been consumed by grief,' Claudia sobbed.
The last straw would have been the letter. The draft Claudia had found in the urn. The scribbled evidence that would finally convict Ailm.
Clever enough to tell tales, but not clever enough to qualify, are we?
It was too much.
'On the night her mother took centre stage on the dais, Clytie went down to the river and slashed her wrists.'
Right from the start, Claudia was reminded of her own mother's death, was haunted by her suicide. And though she'd come to Gaul to lay the ghosts of her past, she still couldn't see beyond the pain of betrayal.
Clytie wasn't murdered. Not in that sense. But a young girl on the brink of womanhood had received one disappointment too many, and though Beth hadn't told her that she would not qualify for the Hundred-Handed, Ailm couldn't resist 'telling the truth'.
'She chose that particular rock because she wanted her friends to find her.'
Like her mother, Claudia realized too late, she wanted
to be found by someone she loved. Someone who would understand ...
'But the girls didn't know this.' How could they? It had taken her a lifetime herself. 'They panicked.'
They're children, not adults, and because Clytie had killed herself on their own special rock, they thought she'd done it to get them into trouble. Instead of running for help, they remembered hearing about women who were killed in Santonum and who had had their faces painted.
'They tried to disguise Clytie's suicide.'
Having applied the cosmetics, they pulled her off the rock and left her beside the river, her hair fanned out, her arms outstretched, knowing that either Pod or Gurdo would find her.
'I should have seen it,' Claudia sobbed. 'It was so bloody
obvious,'
The peaceful death, just like her mother's ...
'It's because I didn't think clearly that you're in this mess, and I'm sorry, but please don't die on me, Marcus.'
'I love you, too,' he croaked back. 'Oh, god, Claudia, I love you so much and if I ... if I ...'
'Will you stop bloody iffing!' she screamed. 'I've already killed two men tonight, so if you think I'm going to let you sit on that ferry to Hades alongside Ptian—'
'You killed Ptian?'
The voice came from behind, a deep baritone, and it smelled of sandalwood unguent.
'ORBILIO?'
She stared at him. Stared at the abyss. Stared at him once again. Not a ghost. Not a hallucination. The bastard was there in the flesh.
'You said you were dying!'
'I said it was too late.' His face twisted. 'I just omitted the part about getting me out of the Pit, I was already out.'
But—
'You said there were complications. You said—'
He took a step forward. The rain had plastered his hair to his face, but his eyes were as dark as the storm. 'And you said you loved me,' he rasped.
'You bastard.'
'Claudia, I'm sorry.' A pulse beat at the side of his neck. 'But it was the only way I could get you to say it.'
'Say what? The first thing that came into my head, so a dying man wouldn't feel he was alone?'
He tricked her and so help her, she'd never forgive him.
'Do you really think I give this for you?' she hissed, snapping her fingers.
'Do not be too hard on him, Merchant Seferius.' A second figure stepped forward and rain or not, you could still kohl your eyes in the shine in his hair. 'Your policeman was only trying to bring my daughter's killer to book.'
'Gabali?'
Janus, Croesus, how many more people had heard her make a fool of herself? Had he hired a team of bloody claqueurs and sold tickets? Then she looked at the Spaniard's face, sunken with grief, at the stipples that stood out on his cheeks.
'Clytie was your daughter!'
Penetrating brown eyes bored through his thin pointed features. 'How could you doubt it?' he asked, and his voice was hoarse with emotion. 'And now you tell me that she killed herself because nobody loved her.'
'No.' Claudia could barely speak the words. 'She killed herself because she had nothing to live for and, believe me, Gabali, there is a difference.'
She would never know what made her mother slit her wrists that afternoon. Was suicide a notion she'd contemplated once, twice, a hundred times before? Was it a spur-of-the-moment decision? An impulse driven by wine? Maybe, like Claudia, it was the not-knowing that finally eroded her strength. Of seeing the man she had married and with whom she'd raised a child march off to war and never come home. Being nothing more than a lowly orderly, his absence, even death, was not worth recording. For four years her mother would have lived with the uncertainty of not knowing if it was her drunkenness that drove him away.
'Suicide occurs when the burdens of life are too heavy to bear and death seems the only way out,' she told Gabali. 'It's not rational, but that's the point. And it certainly isn't because no one loves them.'
It's just that that person's love isn't enough.
A shame Claudia had carried too long—
'I hope you are right, Merchant Seferius. I hope to the gods you are right, but with all my heart I thank you for getting to the truth, and I thank you, Marcus, for suggesting I go to her for help.'
'WHAT?'
'If I lied to you, I apologize,' he said. 'But the HundredHanded—'
'Lied to me?'
'- refused to even meet with me when I turned to them for justice—'
'Gabali, you threatened me with—'
'- and if they would not help, nor the local judiciary, Manion said my only recourse then was the Security Police.'
Claudia's anger found a new outlet. 'Manion said?'
'I did not lie when I said I worked for the Scorpion,' he said in his soft Andalus accent, and did nobody care about the storm crashing around them? 'I merely omitted that, from time to time, I also undertake certain contracts for your friend here, contracts that might be too sensitive, leastways politically, for Rome.'
'You work for Orbilio?'
It must have been the wind screaming through the branches, because he didn't seem to hear her.
'Through my contacts with the College, I wangled Ptian a job as a guard, then engineered Manion a place in the slave auction, even
though he was expecting an attempt on his life. That was why he joined the queue at the last minute, switching places with your friend here—'
'He is not a friend, and he certainly isn't mine,' Claudia hissed.
'- to throw the sniper off guard, but the attempt was more subtle than that.'
'The raven.' She refused to even look at Orbilio. 'But if it wasn't Manion who shot that bird, who on earth wanted the Scorpion dead?'
'Ptian, of course.' Ptian had no intention of sharing power, he explained. 'He wanted to be known as the man who led Aquitania to freedom, so he killed a raven with an arrow
flying Manion's colours in a plan that should have been foolproof.'
Foolproof? Then Claudia remembered the way Ptian had blown on his ring, buffing it up on his pants like Manion. The ring was silver - like Manion's. Engraved - like Manion's. Doubtless one of many characteristics that Ptian had copied to mould himself into what he assumed was the embodiment of a rebel leader. Were we only able to see ourselves as other people see us, she reflected wryly. Because then he'd see that he was nothing but a shallow imitation, a thug and a bully, without character of his own. But bloated on self-importance mixed with smugness and a certain native cunning, Ptian would have considered himself the intelligent one, not Manion. He was the hero, the man to lead Gaul, and no wonder the emblem on his ring was the phoenix. It symbolized a new leader rising from the ashes of subjugation. But Ptian was also a coward. If he was to kill Manion, he had to be sure to succeed.
No one crosses the Scorpion and lives.
No indeed. Just as no one thrown into this pit ever comes out, not even their bones.
'You anticipated the attempt on Manion's life to be through trickery not direct action,' she told Gabali. 'That's why you brought a long rope.'
And who better to smuggle one in than the man who used to throw victims into the Pit?
'Si.' Gabali's smile lacked warmth. 'To think like an assassin, it is best to be an assassin. To shoot the Scorpion in public would draw too much attention and risked killing the wrong man.'
'Yet Manion believed Ptian would still take the gamble?'