Black Salamander

I

Don’t you just hate it when that happens? Claudia pulled her wrap tight to her shoulders, gritting her teeth as the trap bounced over yet another rut in the road. She’d been given this once-in-a-lifetime chance to join a prestigious trade delegation to Gaul (expenses paid, of course) at a time of year when Alpine meadows were at their very lushest. Yet here you are, twelve days into the trip and they hadn’t seen a single Alp. Not one, thanks to weather which was turning out more January than June. She grimaced. It was cold, it was wet, it was windy, and that isn’t the half of it.

She poked her head through the flap of the canvas. ‘Are we clear of the danger zone yet?’ The question was directed at the driver.

‘Dunno, miss.’ The driver shrugged. ‘Hope so.’

Not exactly reassuring. Claudia glanced round. Protected by the pines this mountainous terrain was perfect for a guerrilla attack, the delegation a sitting target as they skirted this deep-sided gorge. She shuddered. Wooded slopes fell two hundred feet to white waters swirling over jagged, black rocks. High above their granite-topped tips were obscured by the low, heavy clouds. Would a hostile clan attack an escorted convoy in broad daylight? One could never tell with the Helvetii.

For a hundred years, they’d been a thorn in Rome’s side and it was only last year, remember, that Augustus had finally persuaded them that resisting the might of the Roman Empire may not be entirely to their advantage-and even then his charm hadn’t been universally appreciated. A burned village here, a town sold into slavery there, his tactics hadn’t won all the Helvetians over and certainly Libo, the tile-maker travelling with the delegation, had paid a heavy enough price for their dissension.

A taciturn (some might say secretive) individual, Libo had done nothing more than wander off the path to relieve himself in the bushes.

The tile-maker had been found where he’d squatted. A stab wound straight to the heart…

A fat raindrop trickled cold down the back of her neck and Claudia withdrew to the shelter of the rig as rain began to hammer against the stretched canvas. Dammit, everything had started out so well, too.

She pictured the Forum. Banners and garlands draped over every temple, arch and statue. The smell of holy incense floating away on the breeze. With the sun glinting off the gold and bronze and marble and making a shimmering haze over red-tiled roofs, and with pavements lined with cheering, whooping, whistling crowds, the whole city had seemed to float upon air. To a fanfare of trumpets, the delegation set off across the Forum. Augurs in flowing white robes held up their hands to show that the auspices had been favourable, and dogs stood on their hind legs, barking at the commotion. Pickpockets sliced through purses and toddlers were hefted on to shoulders to watch the cavalcade pass by. Goldsmiths, sculptors, brick-makers, oculists, bookbinders, perfumers and wine merchants Ah, yes. Wine merchants! Claudia huddled down onto the seat and chewed at her nail. You’d think widowhood would come with a set of guidelines, wouldn’t you? A few decent instructions on how a girl’s supposed to manage when her fat, old buzzard of a husband pops off and she, at the tender age of twenty-four, discovers he’s nowhere near as rich as she imagined him to be. Actually. Claudia crossed one long leg over the other. To be fair, Gaius had died a very wealthy man- on paper. Unfortunately, you can’t buy gowns with the deed to a tenement or pay for your pleasures with a confectioner’s shop on the Via Latina.

Claudia’s fist punched a dent in her swan-feather cushion. The easy option would be to sell up, but goddammit, Gaius had worked all his life to put Seferius wine on the map-that reputation was part of her legacy. And besides. Claudia might baulk to admit it, but in truth she was attached to the company. The heady challenge of staying afloat. The cut and the thrust of negotiation and contract. The shipments, the payments, the management, and not simply on the trading side, there was also her Etruscan villa and the vineyard to oversee-and if a girl can’t live life on the edge, what’s the point? However, hanging on to her inheritance had been tough. Every hustler in town had been after a cheap deal and she’d been bombarded with offers to sell up, offers she’d knocked flat every time until suddenly the commercial flow had turned like a rip-tide.

Bastards! The cushion cut a swathe through the air, narrowly missing the crate in which her blue-eyed, cross-eyed, dark Egyptian cat was curled, trying to sleep. ‘Hrrrrow.’

‘Sorry, poppet.’ Claudia slipped her hand between the bars and stroked the hump which Drusilla would otherwise get. ‘But it just makes me so damned angry.’

Month after month, avaricious merchants had vied and fought with one another to get their hands on the young widow’s business, wheedling, coercing, bullying her to sell, but the instant they realized she was serious, what happened? The lowlife weasels banded together, the lot of them, to drive Claudia out of the trade-and it was so easy, that’s what made her blood boil. So goddamned easy, and she hadn’t even seen it coming.

With Greek being the language of commerce, they simply stopped communicating with her in Latin. No more concessions, they said, and while Claudia was picking up Greek from a tutor, she was nowhere near fluent enough to hold her own in wheelings and dealings on that scale, even through an interpreter-who in any case the merchants refused to accept on the grounds it meant dealing with minions.

Like it or not, Claudia had been forced to acknowledge that Seferius wine was commencing its death throes.

‘Hello, gorgeous.’ A shiny wet face poked its head under the awning. ‘Hard to credit yesterday was the midsummer solstice.’ He shook himself like a dog. ‘Thought you might be feeling the jitters, what with the road barely wide enough for a wagon. Ha!’ His eyes rolled upwards. ‘Did I say road? Not like Rome, eh? Anyway, I’ve brought a skin of wine to take your mind off the lumps and the bumps and the bruises.’

Without waiting for encouragement (which was probably as well, because the wait would have been lengthy indeed), Nestor leaped into the moving rig, securing the canvas behind him. ‘According to Clemens,’ he said, referring to the stumpy little priest who seemed to know everything, ‘this is the border between Helvetia and the land of the Sequani.’

Thank heavens! A Gaulish tribe, friends of the Empire! It was to their capital, Vesontio, the delegation was headed. So they’d arrive in what? Three days from now?

‘That river down there marks the boundary.’ Nestor edged a fraction closer as he unstoppered the wineskin and Claudia reminded herself of the promise she’d made yesterday. Namely that if this stocky little architect touched her up just one more time, she’d rip out his gizzard and feed it to the wolves she’d heard howling in the night.

Not that Nestor was poor company. Far from it. Relentlessly chirpy and a fount of tall tales garnered from travels that had taken him the length and breadth of the Empire, hours which would have otherwise dragged on this wet, miserable journey had spun past. When it came to spooky legends, Nestor had no match. He talked of Helvetian bear cults, of deep, sacred caves guarded by the skulls of seven bears arranged in a ring, and chilled the blood with tales of Druids, making human sacrifice by burning their victims alive in effigies made of wicker…

Nevertheless, it was quite astonishing the number of times he’d ‘accidentally’ brushed against her breasts, how often his hand had come to rest against her thigh, the regularity with which she’d felt his breath on the back of her neck. Take him to task, of course, and Nestor was quick to blame circumstances. The jolt of the wheels. A judicious pothole. But Claudia had given him clear warning yesterday. Keep your distance, or there’ll be a wolf out there licking its chops.

‘You’ve never been to Vesontio, have you?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You’ll love it. Prettiest city in the whole of Gaul in my humble estimation. And commanding as it does a broad loop of the river and with a mountain rising behind, it’s not only beautiful and a natural citadel, it is quite impregnable. And you know how impregnable translates to an architect, don’t you?’ He chuckled knowingly. ‘Prosperous. That’s why I love Vesontio so much!’

Funny how his hand needed to clasp her wrist every time he made a point.

‘That city’s crying out for a delegation like ours,’ Nestor continued. ‘Oh yes.’ As a self-made man, he’d never quite lost his barrow-boy accent. ‘This’ll make us all rich, mark my words.’ He squinted out through the gap in the canvas, using the bump of the rig to annex Claudia’s elbow.

‘Practising the latest philosophy, are we?’ She wrenched her arm away and wedged the wineskin firmly between his hip and hers. ‘That a man’s only as old as the woman he feels?’

‘Pity you never got a chance to see the Alps as we passed through,’ Nestor said, oblivious to the rebuff.

Tell me about it. She’d been up them, she’d been down them, she’d been joggled to her very core on their steep slopes and on bends made perilous by landslides, but not once had Claudia so much as glimpsed one of the majestic peaks which remained snow-covered all the year round and which, Nestor assured her, were quite undeserving of the gloomy, doom-laden names bestowed on them by the Helvetii. Peak of Gloom. Peak of Evil. The Pass of Bones… Somewhere in the distance came a low rumble, like thunder.

‘Better luck on the return trip, eh?’ he said, patting her knee.

‘Nestor, which part of the word no are you having trouble with?’ she asked, but so engrossed was Claudia in recalling the real objective behind making this journey that there was no sting in her rebuke.

Sure, the delegation would cover her expenses, raise her commercial wine-growing profile and provide her with numerous contacts for trade-unfortunately those were long-range proposals. When you’ve been blackballed and cash flow is tight, to hell with pretty views and a travelogue. The immediate objective is cash. Cold, gold, glittery coins which Claudia could trickle through her fingers and replenish gasping coffers with. Her eyes darted to a satchel swinging from a hook above Drusilla’s cage. She pictured the soft yellow deerskin pouch tucked inside. The one sealed with a golden blob of wax imprinted with the sign of the black salamander.

‘Nestor!’ Somehow he’d managed to combine the task of unstoppering the wineskin with a fingertip alighting on Claudia’s nipple. ‘I told you yesterday, no more funny business, but you didn’t take a blind bit of notice!. She had to raise her voice to drown the rumbling sound from outside. ‘The fact that you have no respect for me, that hurts. But you know what hurts most?’

‘What?’

‘This.’ Claudia squeezed his testicles as hard as she could and his eyes streamed with water. ‘Touch me again, you odious wart, and I’ll geld you.’

‘LANDSLIDE.’ The powerful voice of a legionary boomed the length of the line. ‘Move! Fast as you can-run for it. NOW!’

Claudia’s stomach flipped somersaults. After all this, the danger after all came not from hostile Helvetii.

The danger came from a rock fall.