Dark Horse

Thirty-Four

The heat was moulding the pale-blue cotton of Claudia's gown to her flesh like a second skin as she stormed up the vertiginous hillside. Bristly coats clipped short for the summer, goats nibbled noisily among the sea of small blue thistles as the young goatherd, no more than twelve, played a haunting tune on the pan pipes.

Earthquakes and tidal waves, volcanoes and hurricanes couldn't stop Claudia Seferius leaving this wretched island. She sent a stone winging into oblivion down the slope. Dammit, Mercury riding Pegasus wouldn't be fast enough for her tonight. Crunching on the strewing balm, yellowed and crisped from months without rain, Claudia's sandals released waves of lemon scent into the air as from time to time she stumbled over a boulder on the dusty path until, at last, a sun which had seemed particularly pig-headed about dipping today, began to fulfil its obligations. Two hours, she calculated, before the moon rose, then it was Junius down in the cove, the Istrian mainland by midnight. Even so! Good as that sounded, any technique which produces more, sells for less and still makes a bloody good profit has to be worth checking out. And now here they were. Leo's famous vineyards, where established practice had been thrown out of the window and trampled into the ground. Jupiter, Juno and Mars! If the climb hadn't already done it, the sight of his leafy green soldiers standing in rigid phalanxes would have taken Claudia's breath right away. Slowly, she walked down the aisles.

Carefully, she inspected the ranks.

Noting the way roots were kept moist with piles of manure, fertilizing the plants at the same time. Memorizing the angle of lean to maximize exposure of the grapes to the sun. Imagine the look on her bailiff's face when she ordered him to rip up the existing overhead trellises, pull out the elms which gave the old poles their anchorage, then plant new vines like espaliered apples! Imagine the look on the faces of those bastard merchants who'd driven her to the brink of ruin! They'd be laughing on the other sides of their faces, once they realized her profits were soaring. Let's see who's driving who then!

'Only mad people laugh to themselves,' a world-weary voice said.

Claudia found herself looking down at the olive-grove nymph, who had now miraculously transformed herself into a dryad of the vineyards. (Although the dryad was still no closer to having a wet towel rubbed over her face.)

'Who's laughing?' she said. 'The dust up here makes me sneeze.'

'It's not dusty,' the girl pointed out, a fat bunch of marigolds in her fist.

'Oh dear, it looks like my secret's out.' Claudia unclipped her brooch, the one shaped like a monkey and inlaid with carnelians and Baltic amber. 'But if you keep my secret, this is yours.'

'Wow!' A grimy finger traced the monkey's outline. 'Really, really mine?'

'Really, really yours,' she assured the rabbit-eyed scrap.

'Have you ever seen a real monkey? I haven't. I don't suppose this is real amber, do you? Someone said monkeys have tails like a cat, but I think they'd be more like a squirrel's, and anyway they're as big as bears, although I've never seen a squirrel that size. Can you help me pin this to my tunic?'

As Claudia knelt to attach the brooch to the filthy rag the child called a tunic, it occurred to her that she'd done a 'Leo' herself, charging headfirst without stopping to think. Because of its value, Nanai’ was more likely to confiscate the brooch to buy food for her massive brood.

'What's your name?' she asked.

'Snowdrop.'

'Because you keep your clothes so white?'

The grubby little face scowled. 'Snowdrop isn't a nickname.'

'Well, Snowdrop.' Claudia slipped off a ring of Gaulish silver and pressed it into the girl's free hand. 'You can give this to your mother.'

'You mean Nanai?' Rabbit eyes rolled in exasperation. 'Good heavens! Nanai's not our mother! We're orphans. Didn't you know?'

Er. No. Actually, I didn't — and that put an entirely different slant on Leo and Nanai's conversation. No tradesmen's dispute. No continuous gestation. These were strays she'd picked up. Strays which Leo had been subsidizing over the years.

'Come with me,' Snowdrop ordered. 'There's something I want to show you.'

She led the way along a winding goat track through the scrub, all the time cautioning Claudia to mind her arms on the brambles, watch out for rabbit holes, this bit was slippery, careful she didn't snag her gown on the roses, mind this fallen tree branch.

'Thinking about it,' she said, 'I'm not so sure you are mad. You were laughing at Leo's vines, weren't you, but you shouldn't.'

'So sorry, milady.' Claudia pulled a solemn face. 'Very remiss of me to speak ill of the dead.'

'Is it? Then you'd better tell Nanai, because she's been saying all sorts of horrible things about Leo this morning, but that's not what I meant. Nanai says that when someone tries really, really hard to do something, you should never laugh at them, because it's always better to have tried and failed, than not have tried at all. Anyway, there's nothing to laugh at. Leo's method might be odd, but it does ever so well. He got much bigger grapes than when the vines ran the other way, dangling down, only — promise you won't tell?'

Claudia sucked in her cheeks. 'Vestal virgins' honour.'

'Well, the thing is, we've been taking a quarter of the crop. For Nanai, of course. We wouldn't dream of taking them otherwise. That would be stealing.'

'But it's all right to do it for Nanai?'

'Yes, because it's not as if we were eating them, is it? They still go to make wine.'

Claudia's mind suddenly found itself making rapid calculations. If Leo believed his yield to be twenty per cent down and was still content with the margin, whereas in reality they were twenty-five per cent up.

Oh, mamma, I'm home!

'Nanai’ sells the grapes to someone in the town, and he ships them to Istria, and that's where they're made into wine.'

'Well, that's all right, then. As long as it isn't stealing.'

Snowdrop flashed her an old-fashioned look. 'Are you making fun of me?'

'Perish the thought.'

After a sharp descent through yet more gorse and more prickly juniper, the girl suddenly stopped. 'There,' she said, pointing. 'That's what I wanted to show you. That's where we live.'

Swarming over the yard (it had long since ceased to be a garden) was a storm of small children, every one of them younger than Snowdrop. In their brilliantly coloured rags, it was like watching a prism fracturing then remoulding, then splintering again in the twilight. At a rough count, Claudia made it thirteen — give or take a toddler or two — although, like Snowdrop's estimation, it was hard to be specific given that the whole gang were either tumbling over an assortment of dogs, goats and poultry or else skipping, hopscotching or swinging from a rope looped over a branch. One, she noticed, was simply asleep where he had fallen.

Grime was the only common denominator. Some of the children were chunky, others like twigs, some had flat noses, others snub. At least two of the tots had black skin with wild frizzy mops, while others had fine hair like dark silken caps, wild matted curls just like Snowdrop's, or heads of brilliant red spikes. The closer she approached, the more ear-splitting the racket.

'Nanai! Nanai, look who's come to visit!' Snowdrop shrieked over the noise. To Claudia she said, 'Go on in.'

Fat chance. There were far too many folds in Claudia's gown for fleas to disappear without trace. Until small, dry, filthy fingers closed over her own, popping Claudia's resolve like a bubble.

Once, in the time before Leo moved all the workshop] on the estate close to the Villa Arcadia, this had been forge. Long, low and narrow, daylight penetrated the sing room at its peril, but there was little trace of the blacksmith today. A giant cauldron hung suspended from chains above the hearth, wafting out the smell of a stew which rarely saw mea Stinking tallows provided the light, but today, and despite the sinking sun, only one small, solitary flame flickered in a distant corner.

'She's not here,' Snowdrop announced unnecessarily. 'Sit down.' With a wave of her arm, she indicated the on high-backed chair in the place. 'I'll go and fetch her.'

Laying her bunch of marigolds beside a stack of wooden plates in the manner of a matronly housewife, Snowdrop gave the cauldron a quick stir with the paddle, checked the bread oven and inspected the level of the water butt before setting off to find Nanai’.

It was just as well, Claudia decided, that she hadn't sat down. The bundle of rags on the chair turned out to be a sleeping infant.

Adjusting her eyes to the gloom, she wandered around. Heaps of mattresses had been piled higgledy-piggledy against the back wall. Stools criss-crossed this way and that. A mass of small, patched clothes burst out of a wooden chest in the corner, cooking implements littered the table and toys littered the floor. A tornado would have left far less mess. The infant stirred, gurgled a bit, blew a few bubbles, then sucked its thumb back to sleep. It would not have seen more than one birthday, and it was anyone's guess what sex it was. Claudia picked up the little straw doll which had fallen to the floor and replaced it on the tiny chest.

Herbs hung from the overhead beam in thick bunches. Thyme, lavender, rosemary, oregano which could be used as rinses, disinfectants, in cooking, for strewing, for medicine, added to wax to make sweet-scented polish. Horsetails lay beside pots on the table, ready to scour them spotless. The large round loaf in the charcoal oven sent out tantalizing aromas to combat the herbs, along with the smell of cloves, porridge, and clean wool piled high next to a loom. More wool steeped in buckets of plant dye. Bright yellow juniper; soft pink sorrel; creamy parsley.

At the far end, a moth-eaten tapestry curtained off part of the building. Claudia nudged it aside. Among the tangle of unmade bedclothes lay one black cat with half a tail and one mustard-coloured cat with exceptional whiskers. Wedged between the cats, infant twin boys lay entwined in each other's arms deep in sleep. Their faces hadn't seen water for weeks.

With no sign of Snowdrop returning, Claudia followed the path behind the back of the forge. As she did so, a three-year-old with grey eyes came barrelling round the corner. 'Ya!' he shouted, whipping an imaginary horse from his imaginary chariot. 'Ya, ya!' With no regard to pedestrians, the boy veered his chariot in a tight about-turn, knocking Claudia flying and trampling her foot in the process. 'Yeeha!'

The melee in the yard drowned her cursing, but in any case the woman swinging languidly back and forth in the hammock would have missed a meteor falling. She was crooning to a tiny bundle wrapped in her arms.

'My dear, I'm so sorry,' Nanai’ said, turning a radiant smile upon Claudia. 'Snowdrop said we had a visitor, but as you can see, the baby's asleep and I really did not want to wake her.'

You take Leo's handouts, live here rent free, the children are in rags, the house is a shack and you steal his grapes to sell on, so where's the money been going?

'What do you think I should call my little sweetheart?' Nanai asked.

'How about Adoor?'

'What kind of a name is that?'

'The kind that's short for Another Drain On Overstretched Resources.'

Nanai's laugh was fresh, like a mountain stream over rocks. 'The boys I've named after birds,' she said. 'There's Raven, Jay, Merlin. Young Sparrowhawk up the tree there.'

'Don't forget the Little Bustard,' Claudia muttered, rubbing her bruises. Across the yard, the grey-eyed monster whipped his chariot into the chickens.

Nanai' brushed back wisps of white baby hair with her little finger. 'Mostly they're girls who are abandoned, and to them I bestow flower names. Tulip. Angelica. Lupin. Camomile There's usually a trait I can home in on.'

'What was the inspiration for Snowdrop?' Claudia asked settling herself on a fallen log.

'As her namesake blossoms through the snow, so my little Snowdrop blooms.' Nanai smiled. 'To look at her, scrawny little mite, you'd think she'd keel over in a strong wind wouldn't you? But don't be fooled. She's a survivor, my Snowdrop. I found her on my doorstep, three years old and almost dead of pneumonia, covered in ulcers, poor love. To be truthful, I didn't think she'd survive that first night.'

A fat tear of remembrance dribbled down Nanai's cheek and splashed unnoticed on to the baby in her arms.

'I don't know why the gods chose me to care for her,' she said, 'but I do know I nursed that child for six weeks and that if her natural mother had come back to claim her after the journey we'd made together, Snowdrop and I, I truly don't know what I would have done.'

Claudia felt a cold hand pass over her skin. There it was again. Bubbling under the surface, the raw passion which drove Nanai to protect children who weren't even hers like a tigress would protect her cubs. To the death.

'But praise Cunina, who watches over babes in the cradle, the occasion didn't arise,' Nanai said cheerfully. 'Once news spread that I'd taken on a child no one else wanted, other women started to sneak up in the dead of night to leave their babes on my doorstep.'

Just like the burbling little bundle in her arms now, Claudia thought, moved by the tenderness with which Nanai wiped her fallen tears from the baby's cheek with her thumb. (The same thumb on which her own ring of Gaulish silver now glistened!)

A stone marten scampered home across the clearing as the baby suckled on Nanai's finger. Was its colouring the reason her mother gave it away? Better to pretend the child was stillborn and give it to someone who would love and take care of her, than let her olive-skinned islander husband discover the fair-haired creature was not his? Claudia put herself in the distraught mother's shoes and knew that, in her place, the husband would have to go before the child.

'With hair that blonde, it's unlikely the baby's eyes will change colour,' she said. 'How about calling her Flax?'

'Flax!' Nanai's green eyes closed in rapture. 'Yes, of course. Flax-' She began to croon softly to the bundle, a lullaby about sweet dreams and candied cherries, no doubt the same song she sang when she sat at her loom inside the tumbledown cottage.

'What will happen to you all now Leo's dead?' Claudia asked.

Even if the eviction order still stood, she didn't see Qus thundering up here with his band of henchmen, razing the old forge to the ground and ploughing up the soil while the children remained in residence. This had been another bone of contention between him and his master, but why? Because Qus found the prospect of making children homeless distasteful? Or because one of those ebony-skinned children was his?

Nanai's malt-brown hair shone with red and copper streaks in the sunset. 'Don't worry about our future, my dear. The gods have blessed us and I know we shall be provided for. Already they have punished Leo for his wickedness, as I told him they would.'

The earth quaked, but no buildings fell. The temperature plummeted, but no icebergs appeared. Claudia swallowed the lump in her throat. 'Aren't you the tiniest bit sorry your benefactor is dead?'

'Nemesis is the goddess of retribution, dear. Once her powers have been invoked, they cannot be stopped.'

Claudia stood up. The sun had disappeared behind the hills to the west. But that was not why she had to leave. Whether Nanai believed that crap about Nemesis she neither knew nor cared. All she knew was that Leo had indulged this woman for seven years — yet the minute she can't get her own way, she turns and woe betide anyone who stands in her way. 'I make a dangerous enemy,' she had said.

Now Claudia understood Nanai had meant every word. As she felt her way along the track in the dark, stubbing her toes on the boulders, snagging her robe on the prickles, she wished she could find something to like about the woman who cared for her orphans so deeply. Thank Jupiter for rowing boats No royal barge was ever more sumptuous, no imperial chariot ever more splendid!

Not that everyone would be keen to leave paradise. Drusilla for one, would be howling her head off down there in the cove' calling Junius all sorts of names that no cat of her aristocratic pedigree should know, much less use, and his arms would be scratched to ribbons. But then Drusilla had no qualms about reminding people that being crammed in a crate wasn't top of her list of pleasures. Tough. In the eight years they'd been together, Claudia and the cat, bitter pills had become part of their joint daily diet. This was simply one more in a long line that she'd have to swallow where the end results outweighed discomfort.

With a pang of affection, Claudia's mind cast back to the days when they were both skinny bags of bones starving in the gutter of a rough northern dockyard. Young and alone, robbed and raped, Claudia would not have cared if she died. Then a small mewing sound pricked at her awareness, and from then on, neither she nor the cat had looked back. Now look at her. From the days of dancing for sailors in boisterous taverns, she was mistress of a town house in Rome, a sprawl of Etruscan vineyards, had slaves at her beck and call, food in her belly. She was answerable to no one and nothing.

Squinting as she picked her way along the stony path in the dark, Claudia smiled. Of the three problems hanging over her head, one at least was secure. Thanks to Leo's revolutionary techniques, Seferius vineyards were set to make their first decent profit since her husband had died. (Listen, she never said she was good at the business. Only that she was not prepared to let it go cheap.)

Which only left Hylas the Greek to contend with, and the Security Police who had compiled such a persuasive case for the prosecution. Goddammit, if she couldn't kill these two birds with one stone, then her name wasn't Claudia Seferius! There had to be some way she could win Hylas over that didn't entail two broken legs, and once she'd found it — bribes, blackmail, she wasn't proud — Orbilio would have no case to present. Now then. Let's start with the bribes. What kind of present would appeal to a successful Greek horse breeder?

The hand that clamped round her waist came out of nowhere.

Before the sun stands thrice more over our heads, a woman shall die.

As she opened her mouth to scream for her bodyguard, a gag was stuffed into her mouth.

'Mmmf! Mm-mm-mmf.' (LET ME GO, YOU BASTARD.)

She kicked backwards, wriggled, squirmed in a bear hug that was terrifyingly familiar.

Before the sun stands thrice more over our heads, a woman shall die — and the sun had risen two times already.

'Mm-mmf! Mm-mm-mmf.' (LET ME GO, YOU FAT BASTARD.) 'Mm-mm-mmf!'

The bear hug relaxed. Strong arms released her. Claudia started to run. But her attacker hadn't intended to let his victim go free. Just long enough to throw a cloak over her head. A cloak which smelled of cinnamon.