Dark Horse

Sixteen

Claudia must have fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes, dusk was casting its soft cloak over the Villa Arcadia.

As much as a spot of light relief would have gone down rather well after the trauma and tragedy earlier, she had decided against accompanying the olive-grove nymph back to her over-populated home. If her theory was wrong — and Jason's intention was indeed to kill Leo out on the water — then the villa would be wide open to attack and Claudia had no intention of straying far from her escape route.

Thanks to plunging cliffs, much of Cressia's indented coastline was inaccessible. But not all. A great sweeping bay to the east sheltered the island's principal town and only deep harbour, though rocky coves and pretty sandy beaches proliferated. Plenty of places for a determined warship to put in. Plenty of places for a small rowing boat to be secreted, ready for a strapping bodyguard to row his mistress across to the mainland.

The pearl in a necklace of interconnected islands, Cressia was a long, narrow tongue of land forty miles long but rarely more than three miles wide. Craggy limestone mountains rose almost vertically out of the sea to the north, attracting squalls in winter and a pall of grey cloud even in summer. It was a place for only the brave, the foolish and the vultures, and much of the central hills were equally intractable, an untamed wilderness of oak, sweet chestnut and scrub. But where the landscape softened, so the climate changed, also. Here, rich pasturelands, olive groves and vineyards flourished. Warm in winter, but without the searing summer heat that bleached the Dalmatian coast to the west, deer and rabbits were hunted for game, trees coppiced for firewood, hives set up for the yellow bees which feasted off the nectar of wild herbs and produced such incomparable honey.

Heading homewards along the ridge of a hill, Claudia understood what attracted Leo to this extraordinary Island of the Dawn. The soil might be too thin, too dry, too starved of nutrients to make a fortune out of the estate, but who could blame anyone for settling here? What a bloody shame Lydia had not been able to give him the heir he so desperately wanted.

She had seen, from a distance, the small house of white island stone way out on the flat land of the point that Leo had built for his jettisoned wife. Odd. His behaviour didn't square with the man Claudia knew. Divorcing Lydia after eighteen years was one thing. He was blinkered about sustaining the bloodline and, whilst it was far from noble, he wouldn't be the first chap to set a wife aside. But to do it without notice was callous. Worse, for Lydia to find out by chance that the dowry to which she was legally entitled to have returned had been squandered on his costly renovations — well, that was simply unconscionable. How could he?

Back at the villa, Claudia had paused in the forecourt, absorbing the clang from the metalwork shop, the sparks from the blacksmith's, the dull thuds from the carpenter's shed overlaid with that distinctive sawdusty smell. Volcar's acerbic description of 'Leoville' wasn't so very wide of the mark. Legions of slaves fetched and carried, sweat making damp ropes of their hair and sticking their cheap cotton tunics to their bodies. Sacks on backs went past. Barrels. Baskets. Jars, rumbling over the flagstones. From the kitchens came the clamour of pans being scraped, skillets washed, skivvies being clipped round the ear. The pitchy tang of charcoals tingled in her nostrils, along with the smell of the goose which had been roasted for lunch. Fish hung like washing on a line as they were cured in the sun, and water was ferried in buckets to the spanking new bath house.

Leoville.

Complete with the eagle, that ultimate emblem of Roman supremacy, emblazoned upon the entablature over the stone gateway. Leo, Leo, what a mess you've created in your stupid obsession for heirs!

Shamshi had just been leaving the bath house, his baggy trousers flapping like fish gills round his stick-like legs. 'I say, Claudia.' His wet hair clung to his skull like a black cap. Oh. It was a black cap, worn to protect his head against the fierce rays of the sun. Creepier and creepier. This guy wears a cap over the only part of his head that isn't shaved!

'Yes, yes, I know. Before the new light was born in the sky, bad news came over the water.'

The Persian nodded. 'Truly, the prediction was accurate. But, dear child, this morning I cast the bones and looked into the fresh entrails of a goat-'

'My, my, some chaps have all the fun.' And before he could draw a second breath, Claudia's long legs had put as much distance between her and the gut-gazer as they could possibly manage.

Who can trust a man who claims to do everything? Inspect entrails, interpret dreams, observe birds, watch for portents, my armpit! With sixteen colleges in Rome devoted to an individual discipline, each requiring years and years of training, how does one lone Persian pretend to cover the lot? Creepy bastard. His boasts during the fire of how he would have handled her welfare, had he been in Leo's place, still made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Just let it be you who left this lump on my head. Oh, please, let it be you. But no matter how many times she'd encountered him in Arcadia, not once had Shamshi smelled of cinnamon. Bugger.

Claudia took a plate of food to her room, and that's when her exertions must have caught up with her. Because now Hesperus was settling down to join his daughters in the Garden on the mainland. The type of sunset that the islanders interpreted as the blood of Medea's murdered brother turning the sea red. She yawned, stretched, swung her legs over the bed. Four doors along, Silvia's glacial tones lashed one slave girl after another.

'For pity's sake, you stupid lump, are you colour blind? We are wearing the green robe tonight. Gre-e-e-en, do you hear? And you! Careful with that hairpin, you clumsy girl, you've drawn blood!'

Juno save us from royal we's.

'Not that necklace, you fool. How many times do you have to be told, we want to make this a victory feast for the master. Nothing but our best emeralds will suffice for tonight.'

Whoa. Leo was back? And victorious?

Hurriedly, Claudia pulled on a gown of the finest Egyptian linen, midnight blue and trimmed with gold, and ran an ivory comb through the tangles of her hair. There might be issues to sort out with Leo tonight, but no way was she going to let that little cat Silvia outdo her in the looks department. With a quick drizzle of Judaean perfume in the hollows of her collarbone, she set off round the path outside her bedroom, adjusting her golden girdle as she went.

Looking even smaller in the red glare of the sunset, sure enough, the Medea was safely moored against the jetty. No holes in her side from where she'd been rammed. No mast missing. No keening of widows and orphans.

'Everything comes to those who wait, whether they want it or not,' a cracked voice said.

Volcar? 'What are you doing hiding behind trees?'

'Thinking,' the old man said.

'Drinking more like.' She could smell it from here.

'Thinking, drinking, same thing at my age. A man drinks to think and thinks to drink, sod all else to do in this dreary backwater.'

We have murder, vendettas, eviction orders on children and execution orders on dolphins. We have sisters at war, a bitter ex-wife, scandal, financial betrayal, the clash of artistic egos and the dark influence of a Persian astrologer. What kind of a life had Volcar led that he considers this dreary?

'Why don't you go back to Rome?'

The old boy spat in the dust. 'Ask Leo. See what answer you get from him.' He pointed his stick at the Medea. 'What d'you make of that business, then, gel?'

What indeed. She ought to have been relieved; everyone home safe and well. Instead, anger flared in Claudia's breast. Damn you, Leo. Damn you to hell. You are reckless, feckless and utterly irresponsible. You callously risked the lives of dozens of men in the name of your own naked pride. Then she remembered the body of a young apprentice chained to the pillar. And maybe, just maybe, Leo's impetuosity didn't seem quite so misdirected after all.

'What happened?' she asked.

'You tell me.' Rheumy eyes flashed a surprisingly shrewd sideways glance. 'First I know of it is Leo, standing with his hands on his hips, and smug wasn't the half of it. "Take my word, uncle, the murdering bastard will think twice about tangling with Rome from now on".'

Claudia's eyes stood on stalks. 'He actually sank the pirate ship?'

'Sink the Soskia?' Volcar's wheezy chuckle drowned the rasping of the cicadas. 'That'll be the day, when someone scuppers Jason! But to hear Leo go on, gel, you'd think he'd won the Battle of Actium.

'"Did that headless chicken run!" he laughed. "First, he ducked round the point and when he saw I was still on his tail, he put out across the Gulf to outrun me, but he was no match for my Medea. Realizing his tactics weren't working, he tried to lose me round the islands, but that warship hasn't a fraction of the manoeuvring power you might think, Uncle, and in the end I sent him scurrying away across the open water, tail between his legs."' Volcar smacked his gums loudly and with relish. 'You're an intelligent woman. What's your verdict on that little episode?'

Trust no one, the little voice whispered again. Trust no one.

Age had not diminished the old man's senses, they were every bit as sharp as a man half his age. He'd been able to recount Leo's triumph word for word, and in doing so had revealed how Jason had indeed mocked Leo with a humiliating chase round the Gulf, just as Claudia had anticipated. But Volcar had not stopped there. The old man had deliberately gone on to expose Leo's arrogance in believing he'd won the encounter. The smell of rodent tickled her nostrils. Why would Volcar confide his kin's shortcomings to a virtual stranger?

'What's my verdict?' Claudia tucked a wayward curl back under its ivory hairpin. 'What I say, Volcar, is that if a man can smile when things have gone arse over tip, then he's found someone to blame it on. Tell me what you know about Jason.'

'There's others here better qualified to answer that question, gel.'

'Leo?'

One skinny shoulder shrugged slightly. 'Could be.'

Strange time to start acting coy. 'Where is he?'

'Search me, gel. And just think of the pleasure you'd give a lonely old man while you do it.'

Still laughing, Claudia swept along the portico towards Leo's private quarters. This was where the sculptor Magnus — correction, the sculptor Magnus — had depicted scenes from the Odyssey on a magnificent marble frieze and Claudia was following the hero's adventures as he faced everything from the wrath of the man-eating Cyclops to the twin sea monsters, Scylla and Charybdis, when she heard a soft whistling.

Leo's Ethiopian bailiff was striding across the courtyard with a bolt of bright-blue cloth slung across one naked shoulder, his dagger tucked into his belt. His skin had been oiled, and in the fiery sunset, it glistened red, like blood, and the tendons on his arms and neck stood out like ropes.

'You don't know where Leo is, do you, Qus?'

He paused in his stride. 'No, my lady.'

Hm. 'Qus.'

'My lady?'

'What made you think Jason didn't kill Bulis?'

Dark eyes stared unblinkingly down at her. 'Jason killed Bulis.'

'When you showed Leo the third spear this morning, you sounded distinctly surprised that Jason had turned his tactics to murder.'

'I was not thinking straight then, my lady,' Qus said politely, and suddenly his loping gait was eating up the flagstones once again and he was gone.

Fine-looking man. Broad of shoulder. Chest like a hammered bronze breastplate. Five parallel lines running horizontally across his forehead that did nothing to lessen his attraction. Claudia wondered how much it hurt, having tribal marks scored that deeply into the flesh. How old he had been at the time. And why the devil the bailiff had lied. On both counts.

Just below the part on the frieze where Odysseus stuffs candlewax in his ear to resist the song of the Sirens, she collided with a small, fat swarthy body.

'Ah, Claudia. What a delightful surprise,' Saunio said.

Might be for you, chum. 'Have you seen Leo?' she asked.

'Pfft.' The maestro waved a lazy hand. 'He promised to inspect the atrium at sunset, but where is he, that's anyone's guess. Come, my lovely. You can be the first to observe Saunio's finished artistry.' Hot fingers closed round her arm as he drew her into the room. 'There now, give Saunio your honest opinion.'

'Of your work?' she asked. 'Or the fact that you were waiting for me in ambush out there?'

'I fear you are mistaken,' he said with a small laugh, but the light which had hardened in his little beady eyes gave the game away. 'It was Leo I was waiting for, although it is perhaps ungallant of Saunio to admit it.'

No point in arguing. If he was the type to hang around in the shadows hefting pots of lilies, he'd regret it soon enough. Claudia saw herself tying the maestro to a chair while she shaved off his trademark curly beard and washed the dye out of his hair. See what the BYMs thought of their precious mentor then!

'Ta-da!' Saunio spread his fat arms wide. 'Looks twice the size, doesn't it?' The illusion was amazing. False rooms led off everywhere. 'Deceive the eye and art will triumph,' he said. 'Take that triptych, for instance.'

Quite. A visitor would be hard pushed to say it wasn't a real shrine opening off from the atrium, because such was Saunio's genius with perspective that, no matter where you stood, the impression didn't waver. The left- and right-hand panels depicted long marble tables adorned with four-handled vases narrowing inwards to the centre panel, a shrine to the goddess Minerva. This kind of thing had been done before, of course (although not quite with such skill). What made Saunio's work breathtakingly original was that he'd added to the illusion by incorporating a scaled-down marble altar on which equally scaled-down offerings could be made. A miniature torch also burned in Minerva's honour as though this was an actual shrine, not a one-dimensional painted image.

But one thing was missing in this glorious room. True, there was enough gold leaf round the capitals of the columns to make even Midas turn green with envy. Rare eastern woods. Ivory carvings. Fine marble busts. The place was awash with onyx boxes, silver mirrors, and gleaming copper waterspouts funnelled the rain from the roof into a central pool where a fountain splashed out a soft tune, and small birds the colours of Arabian jewels sang their hearts out from an aviary at the end of the hall. But something was missing in this sumptuous room.

And that something, unfortunately, was Bulis.

The pitiful remains that had once been a laughing, living apprentice had been laid on a wooden bier and garlanded with laurel earlier in the day, but the steward hadn't been sure what to do with it. Place it in the atrium, as though the boy was a guest or a family member? Or leave him in the servants' quarters, as though he were a common slave? Until Leo returned, poor Bulis had been stuck in the woodshed in a spiritual no-man's-land. But Leo was home now, and clearly a decision had been made. Bulis might well have been caught up in Leo's vendetta and paid the ultimate sacrifice. But when it came to social status, the young apprentice didn't make the grade.

While Saunio lectured her on drama and fusion, movement and light, Claudia observed the grey hue of his face, his hollow, red-rimmed eyes, the waxy, stippled texture his skin had taken on during the course of the day. Unmistakably, the physical manifestations of grief. But Saunio was a professional through to the marrow. One of his beautiful young apprentices had met an agonizing end, but Bulis's death would not alter the agenda.

'Schedules cannot mourn,' he'd pronounced, refusing his crew so much as one hour off. 'Timetables cannot grieve and neither can we until the contract is finished.'

Grief and shock, he added, tolerated no margins of error, it was business as usual on the frescoes. So, with Saunio standing over them, the labourers laboured to ensure the plaster was mixed to the exact level of dampness required to take a brush. The apprentices ground pigments to the exact mix of colour. An exact amount of outline was drawn for the artists to fill in.

'… the future,' he was saying, 'lies in illusionistic art, my lovely. Art is truth and truth is art, but therein the question lies. What constitutes truth?'

'What indeed.'

'Take the meander in the banqueting hall. At first glance, it looks like a maze, but follow any of the lines with your eye — any one of them, Claudia — and you realize it is nothing but illusion. Misinformation. Created by shadows and spaces and geometrical trickery.'

His hollow gaze fixed itself on the pool, where he stared through the sparkling water to the green veined marble which lined it. So deep was his gaze, that he might have been staring straight into Hades itself.

'If the eye can be led, so can the mind,' he said slowly. 'For we can all be made to believe things which are not there.'

It was probably the light from the oil lamps flickering on the water, but Saunio's reflection made him appear even more squat and reptilian than usual tonight. Almost an allegory of depravity to fit the rumours.

'Illusion,' he said. 'That is the path for the artist to follow.'

'Wrong.' With a jerk of her thumb, Claudia indicated the exit. 'That is the path for the artist to follow. Goodbye.'

Shamshi was waiting, hands folded, outside the entrance to the dining hall. He was no longer wearing his baggy green trousers, but an ankle-length kaftan with a deep and richly embroidered hem. The brilliant artificial lights glinted off the thick hoops in his ears.

'Claudia.'

'Well, if it isn't Uncle Happy, the kiddies' pet.'

His mouth stretched a fraction sideways, the closest it came to a smile. 'Dear child, I need to speak with you,' he began, but at that point, Nikias turned the corner.

'Imparting your latest prediction?' he asked, and Claudia wondered whether she'd caught a flash of mischief in his eyes, or whether it was a trick of the flickering lamplight.

'I tried to tell her, Nik,' Shamshi said, his sibilant voice treacly with smugness. 'Earlier this afternoon, I tried to tell Claudia what I'd read in the entrails of my goat.'

The portrait painter grimaced. 'Stick to books, old man. Not so messy.' To Claudia, he said, 'Coming?'

'We will join you in a minute,' Shamshi said, indicating in no uncertain terms that the conversation was private. Nikias responded with an as-you-wish nod, but Claudia had a different idea on how to spend her evening. It did not include Persian gut-gazers. But as she swept past, a bony hand clamped over her shoulder and stopped her dead in her tracks.

'Listen,' he whispered, and his mouth was so close that his breath wafted her hair and the scent of it was as sweet as an overripe melon. 'I bring you a warning.'

Even though she shook his grip free, the memory of his fingers lingered on her skin like a burn. And he still didn't smell of cinnamon, dammit.

'This morning at dawn,' he said, 'I cast the bones, inspected the entrails, searched the skies for the signs until finally the gods spoke.'

'Until finally the goats spoke, you mean.'

'Do not mock what you do not understand,' he snapped. 'Heed my warning. Before the sun stands thrice more over our heads, a woman shall die.'

Did her heart miss a beat there? 'I thought your omens couldn't foretell death? Only "disaster"?' Funny how the rules change to suit the occasion.

'Vivid portents can never be ignored,' Shamshi said. 'The signs are as clear as though they were written in stone. Before the sun stands thrice more over our heads, it is decreed that a woman shall die.' He leaned towards her, his dark eyes searching her face. 'Take care, Claudia. Take very good care. Danger lurks among us tonight.'