Black Salamander

IV

Had the crow sufficient stamina, it would discover that by flapping its black shiny wings from Rome to Vesontio it would cover the best part of five hundred miles. Which possibly explained why it preferred to stay at home, preening itself on the rooftop of a modest, white-fronted townhouse on the Esquiline Hill instead.

Its perch overlooked a bedroom whose double doorway faced on to a courtyard, where the scent of white roses mingled with the pinks growing beneath them, where sparrows took mudbaths in the shade of clipped laurels and a gleaming bronze fountain splattered and chattered to a long line of white marble ancestors, their noses turned snootily upwards.

‘We can try again later, if you like.’ The girl swung her long, naked leg over the coverlet and propped herself up on one elbow.

Marcus Cornelius Orbilio smiled wanly.

‘Don’t feel bad about it,’ she breathed, tracing a finger over the solid musculature of his chest. ‘Most men suffer the droops eventually.’

Eventually? For gods’ sake, he was twenty-five!

‘Pressures of work,’ he mumbled, closing his eyes and imagining she was that skinny blonde from the cookshop.

From outside he heard the mocking caw of a carrion crow, and imagination deserted him.

‘Perhaps if I-’ The girl’s fingernails slid down his armour-hard stomach.

‘No.’ It was kinder she attributed his lack of ardour to stress, but even as he forced his cheeks to bunch into a smile at the voluptuous creature lying beside him, dark hair cascading over her shoulders, pink nipples taut and erect, he felt a distinct ripple of guilt as he pushed her hand away. ‘Why don’t you-er, pour us some wine?’

There was no way he could tell her the truth. That he’d chosen her because she was the spitting image of another, with her dark tumbling curls and the flounce in her walk, for the way she threw back her head when she laughed. But the resemblance was purely superficial and in the harsh afternoon sun, Orbilio found he had no physical desire whatsoever for this mediocre substitute. There was none of the electrical surge he felt when Claudia Seferius entered the scene. No white lightning crackled around this girl the way it did around the beautiful widow. Her rosewater perfume lacked the spiciness of Claudia’s heady, Judaen scent and no matter how hard he searched, he could find no hint of molten-metal tints in those tumbling tresses, no dying sunsets, no flaming autumn hillsides.

It had been a mistake to bring this pale imitation to his bed, for the agony had been compounded, rather than eased, and a talon inside ripped at his liver as he thought about the wildcat who, if the schedule was on target, was ensconced in Vesontio right at this moment. He wondered vaguely which poor bugger was on the receiving end of Claudia’s tongue now.

Quite how she’d wangled a place on that prestigious trade delegation, Orbilio wasn’t sure, but he smiled at the bittersweet memory of the release of a thousand white doves as a signal for the delegation to set off to Gaul. Her flaming orange gown had stood out like a beacon among the rigs and traps assembled in the Forum, and once he’d watched her out of sight, Orbilio had raced up to the Capitol and remained there until the procession was just so many specks of grey dust. Twelve aching days had passed since then, and without her the city lacked vitality and life. Twelve whole days. Twelve long nights. How long before she’d be home? How long before he would see her again? Inhale the balsam from her hair? Watch that little pulse dance at her throat? Feel the heat of her firebrand temper?

He groaned, and when his bedmate tutted sympathetically, Marcus did not bother to correct her. He gulped down a goblet of chilled Thracian wine, shuddering at the shards of ice washed down with it, which slammed into his stomach like a punch. How come thoughts of Claudia half the world away could light his loins, while this girl who so closely resembled her could not? Why could he not imagine these were Claudia’s shoulders he nuzzled? Her breasts he cupped ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir.’ Orbilio’s steward tapped at the door. ‘There’s a messenger outside, says it’s urgent-’

‘No problem.’ Marcus was out of bed and reaching for his loincloth long before the steward’s knuckles had fallen away. ‘Tell him I’m coming.’

‘That’s a joke,’ snapped the girl on the bed, but Orbilio, pulling on his long, patrician tunic, didn’t hear and by the time he’d laced up his high boots, he’d forgotten all about her, including her name.

In the city centre, public notices were being hammered up, speeches delivered from tribunals, from platforms, from the steps of the Rostra. Marcus was forced to weave his way through the hoarse-throated beggars and skirt porters wiping sweat from their brow as they pushed heavy, wheeled barrows. Around Vulcan’s sacred lotus tree, chickens clucked inside barred wooden crates, baby goats bleated and urchins snatched a spilled melon here, a dropped sea perch there. This being market day, none of the charioteers whose wheels clattered so noisily over the travertine slabs gave a thought as to what might lie beneath them, and the astrologers looked to the stars to draw up their charts, not the bowels of the earth. Yet it was here, right under the Forum, that Marcus Cornelius made his descent.

‘Talk about a different world,’ he muttered, raising his torch above his head for a better view of this subterranean warren.

The air was noticeably stale, for one thing. Certainly none of the tempting aromas from the bakery-the pastries, the buns and the sweetmeats-found their way underground, there was not even a hint of stale wine from the taverns. Just the acid stench of pitch, spluttering and hissing as it burned from the torches, sending out clouds of dark, swirling mist and-he sniffed-something else. Something indefinable in the air. He sniffed again, but still couldn’t identify it. Unless, maybe, it was the smell of utter despair…

He paused and glanced back. Four, five, yes, six galleries behind him. That’s right. Two to go. He counted again to make sure-it was a veritable honeycomb down here.

Lights in sconces flickered and sizzled in the narrow stone corridor, casting sinister shadows over the arches and confusing spatial perception. In the distance he heard the well-drilled clomp of military boots. Long before they reached him, they had turned off into another part of the maze to become nothing more than an echo. Orbilio swerved off to his right, passed two enclosed chambers, then took the first gallery left. A man was waiting.

‘You found it all right, then?’ He grinned, looping his thumbs into the waistband below the great overhang of his belly. A monster of a buckle glinted in the flickering light.

Orbilio grunted. Finding the wretched place was one thing, getting out again might be another. These cramped corridors, from which other galleries led off, and then others, each with their own series of subterranean chambers, resembled more the minotaur’s labyrinth than Rome.

‘Augustus is converting this site into a holding place for wild animals, in order to put on beast shows up in the Forum,’ said Big Buckle. ‘Windlasses are being installed, winches, the lot.’ In the smoky gloom, Orbilio saw him wink. ‘But the Security Police will still keep a section, don’t worry.’

Orbilio didn’t. ‘What have you got that’s so urgent?’ he asked, hitching his torch into the bracket which hung on the wall in the hope it would hide the low expectations etched on his face.

‘Would you believe’-Big Buckle lowered his voice to an excited whisper-‘a plot to bring down the Empire?’

Orbilio swallowed his disappointment. It was as he had feared. Every third informant these days seemed to have wind of a plot to assassinate Augustus, the majority using the shield of these troubled times to settle a few unresolved grudges and scores of their own. He sighed. In virtually every street, it seemed, there was nothing quite like a spot of vilification to make a chap feel better, whether it was retaliation against an overlooked promotion, a whispered slur about an uppity neighbour or a slave’s hit-back against his master’s brutality.

‘The last time you dragged me down here,’ Marcus pointed out, ‘it turned out to be nothing more than a man slandering the fellow his wife had run off with.’

Big Buckle spread his wide, ugly hands. ‘What can I do?’ He shrugged. ‘We have to follow up every suggestion of treason. Can I help it, if that’s the fashion?’

Dislike him he might, but Marcus felt obliged to acknowledge the point. Few things were as satisfying, it would appear, as tarnishing one’s enemies with a thin coat of treachery, and the political field lay wide open to embrace any number of wild allegations.

Barely ten weeks ago, the Emperor’s right-hand man, Agrippa, had died suddenly-suspiciously even-leaving Rome bereft of her regent. Considering the sole remaining heir-Agrippa’s son, who was also the Emperor’s grandson – happened to be just eight years of age, you can begin to imagine the problem! Banners. Who’d fill the vacuum left by Agrippa? In the end, Augustus had appointed his stepson Tiberius as regent, but the nomination hadn’t pleased everyone. The Senate alone was in uproar. Tiberius is no blood relation, they cried. Neither to Augustus, nor to Augustus’s grandson. It’s a scandal.

Some even called ‘Bring back the Republic!’

It was like setting a torch to dry kindling.

Worse, it was on account of this damned political unrest that Marcus Cornelius had been unable to leave Rome to accompany the trade delegation to Gaul.

Deep in this hollow, subterranean maze, a hammer echoed in the distance and closer to hand unseen footsteps rang with ghostly reverberation across the stone flags, clip-clopping into the smoky, Stygian gloom.

‘This one has an altogether different slant,’ said Big Buckle, briskly rubbing his hands. ‘If you read the confession, you’ll see this is right up your street.’ Clearly the word ‘sir’ was not in his vocabulary. ‘North Gallic tribes getting restless-that’s what you’re working on, isn’t it?’

Hmm. By the flickering lamplight of the dingy office chamber, Orbilio’s eyes skimmed the text, confirming nothing he didn’t know already. Dissent among the Treveri in Trier. Helvetii chieftains meeting up frequently, and in secret. Both tribes holding clandestine summits. Could any significance be attached to these rumblings? His boss didn’t think so, and Orbilio’s mind drifted back to their recent conversation.

‘This has only come about since Augustus moved troops up and over the Rhine,’ his boss had said, dismissing the notion with a wave of his small, pudgy hand. ‘And anyway, the Treveri getting it together with the Helvetii? Jupiter would swear an oath of chastity before that day dawns.’

‘I can’t agree, sir,’ Orbilio had countered. ‘Both tribes are persistent troublemakers with a reputation for war, and that argument about them being bitter enemies doesn’t stand up. History shows they change allegiances the way you and I change our tunics, I’m sure the tribes are taking advantage of our Germanic campaign. ’ There was definitely something afoot in that part of Gaul. With troops committed to the push into Germany, it had been necessary to despatch one legion from Aquitania and another from the south coast to shore up the line, but Orbilio felt it went deeper than merely a few diehards shaking their fists in the air. Suppose it was Rome they had in their sights? Maybe the Emperor himself…?

‘Bollocks!’ His boss had sneered when Marcus voiced his anxiety aloud. ‘For any serious assault, you’d need the Germans banding together with the Helvetii, and even then they’d need the help of the Sequani who stand in between them, and the Sequani are our staunchest allies in the whole of Western Gaul. Or are you the only man on the earth not to have heard about that delegation to Vesontio to celebrate fifty years of harmony between our two nations?’

‘Of course, sir-’

‘Fifty years, Orbilio. Fifty years, in which they’ve grown fat on the land, working their vast tracts of forest in peace, churning out fruit presses and canoes instead of spears and javelins, and look at the quality of the stock they breed nowadays. Men will part with a small fortune to get their hands on a good Gaulish mule-’

‘Yes, sir, I’m aware of that-’

‘Are you?’ his boss snapped. ‘Their king, Oxi- Axi- oh shit, I can never get my tongue round those bloody Sequani names, but the point is, their king’s been afforded the title ‘Brother of the People’ by the Senate. The Senate, Orbilio. This is not a title either party takes lightly, and the Sequani are grateful-bloody grateful, I might add-that their cemeteries are filling up with the sick and the old, not young men butchered in inter-tribal skirmishes.’

‘I’m not suggesting King Axo- Ixo-’ (Orbilio couldn’t pronounce the names either) ‘is mounting an insurrection, but you know yourself, sir, what these petty chieftains are like. Ruthless and ambitious, keen to prove themselves. Suppose-’

‘Suppose, my arse, Orbilio! The whole idea of the tribes banding together and marching on Rome is preposterous, they’d be torn to pieces by our legions before they’d crossed into Italy, and in any case the Sequani are our buffer against such a contingency. One whiff of an uprising and King Ixi- Izi- Sodhisbloodyname will be selling them out as fast as he can. Trust me, the Emperor’s as safe as a Vestal Virgin’s virtue. Now get out of here and stop wasting my time.’

With that, Orbilio had been bawled out of the room, his misgivings stronger than ever. Looking at it objectively, he could see why his boss, even as head of the Security Police, had imagined him right off his rocker. A few power-hungry princes from a few branches of a few northern tribes marching on Rome? Put like that, it did sound preposterous. However, whenever he’d received wind of these secret alliances, will-o’-the-wisps as they were, the core of each rumour was identical-that any time soon, Augustus would be just a name in the history books.

There was only one logical conclusion, which turned Orbilio’s blood into ice.

The uprising was being masterminded from inside Rome. Someone here-someone high-ranking and influential-was plotting to kill the Emperor, quietly whipping up the northern tribes to act as the military muscle he’d need for his coup to succeed. Because not only would Augustus need to be eliminated, loyal generals, senators and magistrates would have to be taken out as well…

This someone had to be close to Augustus, a trusted friend, a senator, a general…the head of the Security Police? Orbilio knew he could not confide in anyone. Not if he wanted to live.

Meanwhile, in this subterranean rabbit warren, Big Buckle had almost nodded off. ‘This confession,’ Orbilio said, jerking him awake, ‘reads more like an official report.’

‘Well, you know what they’re like, these interrogations.’ Big Buckle yawned and rubbed his great belly. ‘Half lies, half gibberish, I simply tidy it up.’

‘In other words, this is nothing more than your interpretation of what was said?’

‘Exactly.’ The sarcasm scuttled right past him, and his chest puffed up like a cockerel’s at dawn. ‘Typical example in your hand there.’ He even crowed like the damned cockerel. ‘Here we are, trying to extract information about sedition and assassination, and all we get are ramblings about some sodding treasure map.’

The scroll tumbled out of Orbilio’s hand. ‘Treasure map?’ It was a credit to his upbringing, he thought, that he managed to keep the excitement out of his voice.

‘See what I mean?’ Big Buckle laughed. ‘They do it every damned time. Think they’re clever, they do, feeding us lines, setting us off on false trails in order to buy themselves time, but I’m wise to these scum. Trust me, we get to the truth in the end.’

‘Perhaps,’ Orbilio said mildly, ‘it would be a good idea if I interviewed the prisoner myself?’

Mother of Tarquin, this was the break he was waiting for! The tribes might want a share in the new order-but for the Treveri, historical enemies of the Helvetii, to unite, both sides would have to be bought, and the sum would not be small. (What price this new Republic?)

‘As you wish.’ It was no skin off Big Buckle’s nose whether the written confession was sufficient or not. His job was purely to make it available. ‘This way.’

Following him down the smoky corridor, Orbilio was uncomfortably aware of what his father would have made of a high-born patrician mixing with what he’d undoubtedly call lowlife and scum. The old man had taken as fixed that his sons would follow law as their route to the Senate, and Marcus knew he’d have reacted none too kindly to the news that one of his boys had taken up with the Security Police instead of the judiciary. An emptiness washed over him, the same as it always did when he thought of his father and the broad gulf between them, a chasm which could never be bridged, thanks to his father’s premature death.

So many issues unresolved. To explain, for instance, that by weeding out fraudsters, killers, assassins and thieves, Marcus was making the world safer, more stable. His mouth twitched at one corner. Never. the old man would have boomed. Prestige is what counts, lad. Prestige! And instead of letting him unburden himself by talking through his cases, he’d have questioned him about…well, the dinner to which Orbilio had been invited to tonight, for instance.

Oh, his father would have approved of that! Dining with Senator Galba, the chap who’d organized that illustri ous delegation to Gaul? Word’s finally got out about your successes, he’d have said approvingly. Play your dice right, lad, and your career will be taking off big time! Galba’s a serious player in the political arena, keep him sweet, because with the senator in your corner…

Perhaps it was as well the old man had gone early. Another flaming argument would have erupted, Marcus pitting ethics against self-interest, and the galling thing was, both father and son had the same ultimate goal. They both wanted Marcus to take his seat in the Senate-which would only have led to another contentious issue, of course. Marriage. His father citing Orbilio’s failure as a husband by letting his wife abscond with an impecunious sea captain to bring the shame of divorce on the family…instantly forgiven, of course, providing he married so-and-so, and off he’d go, the old man, trying to force his son into a second miserable alliance and riding, as always, roughshod over human emotions.

The next time he took a wife, Orbilio resolved, it would be no business merger. And there was only one possible candidate.

Yet no matter how many times their paths crossed, no matter how many adventures they shared, Claudia, goddammit, always pushed him away.

He spiked his fingers through his hair. For all her abrasive temperament, her confident exterior, one thing that woman was scared of-maybe the only thing-was love. She avoided it like a whale avoids fresh water, and Marcus knew the reason.

She’d been burned. An army orderly of a father, who walked out one morning and never came home. Death? Desertion? Only the father knew the truth, but the consequence was that the child who’d adored him had been left to care for a reckless, feckless, selfish mother who in turn had deserted her daughter in an alcoholic haze. What transpired between Claudia leaving her southern slums and her arrival in Rome five years later, polished and svelte, Orbilio, through the course of his investigations, had caught only glimpses. What he’d seen though were horrors enough-and as a result of her experiences, Claudia had turned herself into an island.

But islands, by the gods, can be reached. By boat, by bridge, by swimming underwater, and while it would take time-years in all probability-Orbilio was resigned to waiting. Not necessarily happily, but resigned nevertheless.

He cracked his knuckles. One thing, though, waiting didn’t mean celibacy. Next time, he’d go for a blonde!

The tunnels seemed to grow darker as he followed Big Buckle through the tortuous maze, the resinous pitch sour in back of his mouth. Disembodied voices echoed down the hollow corridors and he closed his mind to what tales these catacombs might be able to tell…

‘Prisoner’s in here,’ Big Buckle said, throwing open a door to a narrow chamber lit by two oil lamps and a cresset light on the wall.

Orbilio shielded his eyes against the unexpected brightness, and saw a thickset man wiping his hands on a towel. The towel was a mass of reddish brown stains, and the man wore a leather apron to cover his tunic. Orbilio could see why.

He’d reached for his dagger and was cutting the prisoner’s bonds before the warder realized what was happening. ‘Oi!’

‘Was this really necessary?’ Orbilio growled. Red splashes stood out stark on the grey stone of the wall, and the floor was oily with blood.

‘It works,’ the warder snarled back. ‘And the rules is straightforward. If the prisoner ain’t a Roman citizen, we torture the barbarians to get at the truth. This sure ain’t one of us.’

Us. Orbilio shivered.

‘Get out,’ he ordered the warder.

With fingerbones broken, lash marks to the torso and a face mashed to pulp, the prisoner was not going anywhere.