Black Salamander

XXXIV

The fluting trill of a nightingale brought Claudia back to consciousness, and fluttering hands felt the touch of the fine linen which encased her nakedness. As her eyelids flickered open, she smelled sandalwood.

‘You’ll catch your death,’ she told him, then realized that she was warm, that sunshine was washing over her, flooding the bowl in the hills with its liquid, golden heat.

‘Me?’ His laugh made something jump under her ribs. ‘It’s you who insists on dicing with death, Mistress Seferius. Will you never learn?’

She struggled into a sitting position, and saw that most of the others had melted away, presumably off to hunt spiders. Only Junius remained, hard-faced and sulking, and she wondered why his expression should be so unutterably sour. After all, if the Spider’s plan had gone according to schedule, he’d be dead.

Claudia turned her face to the sun, and flinched at the swollen tender lump that used to be her mouth. ‘How did you find me?’ she asked.

Inside her crate, a hard-boiled glare blazing in opposite directions, Drusilla yowled out her objections, at being used as a weapon and that if it ever happened again, she didn’t want Claudia to think she’d lap her cream any more, and as for sleeping on her counterpane at night, think again.

‘For a man of my calibre, it was nothing.’ Orbilio grinned. ‘Despite being left for dead, Junius somehow raised the alarm but was mystified why your possessions should have been taken from outside the Neptune Gate. I made enquiries of the sentry, who reported that a chap with grey hair took them. The reason was obvious, the next question was where.’

‘You didn’t think of the roundhouse?’

‘It was a possibility, but-’ shamefaced he glanced away, mumbling something under his breath.

‘You what? Didn’t know where to find it?’ Actually, neither did she, but that wasn’t the point. This was the man who was supposed to be a hero, remember? Heroes don’t mislay roundhouses all over the place.

‘Luckily,’ manfully he ploughed on, ‘our Silver Fox was well known in Vesontio, someone mentioned the ice cave where he holes up in winter, someone else guided us here. So you see, a few logical steps, one lucky hunch-’

‘Hunch?’ Claudia’s voice rose in outrage. ‘I could have died back there.’

‘Ah, but you didn’t,’ Orbilio said, passing her a goblet of fresh mountain water. ‘Hades is not up to the challenge. Ice?’

‘Very funny.’ She snatched the goblet from his hand. ‘Anyway, who needs the cavalry?’ she snapped. ‘I saved the Empire single-handed.’

One lazy eyebrow rose in query.

‘I’ll have you know, the Spider had every piece of the map, except mine,’ she said haughtily. ‘Without me, he’d have his grubby paws on the entire State Treasury.’

‘Oh.’ Orbilio rubbed his hand back and forth over his jaw. ‘Did I give you the impression the map pinpointed the Treasury?’

If Claudia had had claws, they’d be out. ‘Why?’ It was no mean feat, talking through both a fat lip and gritted teeth, but she managed.

‘No, it’s just that… Well, I apologize if you believed…’ He decided that staring at ferns was a better course of action than being speared by her lacerating scowl. ‘It was Galba’s supreme double-cross, you see. The whole point… Ah, how can I put this? There…never was any great cache of treasure.’

‘Orbilio, I’m warning you, I do not find this amusing.’

‘Neither, I’m sure, would the Treveri. Let alone the Helvetii.’ He tried for a smile. And failed. ‘I-I did tell you that the Security Police would know about any large sums on the move. I mean-’ He tried for a laugh. This was worse. ‘Surely-ha, ha-you didn’t imagine Galba could spirit away the entire Treasury of Rome-gold, silver, paintings, gems-and nobody notice?’

Claudia said nothing. She was too busy deciding whether flaying him alive was too good for him, or whether she should simply settle for throttling him with her bare hands.

Finally she asked, ‘Do they know yet, the tribes?’

‘They do.’ He quickly befriended a different fern. ‘My…boss doesn’t, though.’

Claudia blinked. She blinked again. In the end, her lids could hardly stand the pace. ‘Marcus Cornelius, I do declare! You haven’t sent a report back to Rome at all, have you?’ Still intent on the fern, he merely gave a tight-lipped shrug.

‘You scuppered Galba’s chance of setting up a new Republic through the back door.’

She pushed a hank of hair out of her eyes and ticked the sequence off on her fingers.

‘Once you realized what was happening, you sent word to the Treveri and Helvetii that there was, in fact, no treasure trove. They’d immediately check with their spies in Rome, where one quick visit to the Temple of Saturn would put them right, because they’d see it snoring contentedly in the temple basement. At this point, the chieftains would want a quiet word in the senator’s ear’-after which they’d probably chop it, and many other bits, off-‘and doubtless tell him what he could do with his seditious ideas before they roasted him slowly over an open fire then boiled his gizzards for tea.’

You don’t double-cross the Gauls and not pay the price! Galba and his co-conspirators would be dead already. By their own hand, if they had any sense, because the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.

What Claudia didn’t understand, however, was why Orbilio should choose this method. Augustus would continue at the helm without being any the wiser, it wouldn’t advance his career one single step…

Of course! She snapped her fingers and in the hollow of the hills the sound was like a twig cracking.

‘The Emperor never gets to hear about it…but neither does your boss!’ She laughed.

Who’d never know, poor little creep, how close he came to having his career shot into orbit by his patrician employee. Because it would not have been Orbilio who came out with the credit, but his boss. She watched the flecks in his hair dance in the sunlight.

‘Marcus Cornelius, that is devious, sneaky and extremely underhanded.’

‘I knew you’d approve.’

‘The Spider?’ she asked. ‘Will you catch him?’

He exhaled loudly. ‘I don’t honestly know,’ he replied. ‘Whatever happens, it’s a farm of maggots we’re opening up. Alive, he’s a thorn in Rome’s side. Kill him, he becomes a martyr. Take him as a prisoner of war, you can never turn your back.’

‘There is one solution,’ Claudia said. ‘If you ever catch him.’ She told him about the wicker man. ‘Leave him alone with the burning man’s widow…’ The hatred on that woman’s face would haunt Claudia for the rest of her days. That, and the screams of her husband.

‘Too many innocent people have died for my liking,’ Marcus said, twisting the figure-of-eight ring as his mind’s eye pictured two small flame-haired children running in the garden of their new foster home. ‘I’m glad it’s over. But one thing bothers me still. Where did you hide that map?’

Claudia smiled to herself. Her very first action, on arriving in Vesontio, had been to hire a carpenter to make a new cage for Drusilla. A good, solid piece of Roman craftsmanship. With the usual false bottom. Doesn’t every girl carry their secrets that way?

‘Map?’ she asked, fluttering her eyelashes. ‘What map might that be?’

Laughing loudly, Marcus rose to his feet and offered her his arm. ‘Going my way, milady?’

Claudia glanced up the precipitous sides of the bowl, then back to the tall patrician standing at her side.

‘Definitely,’ she quipped back. ‘After all, the only way is up, am I right?’

Because, when all’s said and done, there’s a lot to be said for a hero.