Dark Horse

Forty-One

Sitting beside the fresh-water pond, Clio should have felt elated. She'd beaten off the lynch mob. She was alive, free, the islanders wouldn't touch her now. So why did her legs feel as though they'd been filleted? Why could she not stop shaking? Why did she not feel triumphant?

Dragonflies darted back and forth, iridescent rainbows of blue, green and silver in the torrid midday heat. A desultory songbird warbled in the scrub, a goat bleated and the shepherd boy's flute carried from way over the hill on the still island air. But the reflection in the mirror of the pool quaked.

Her ordeal had been abominable, that was true. No human being should be put through that, but she had won, hadn't she? And it wasn't as though she didn't empathize with native superstition. She was Liburnian herself. She understood the minds of the people who made up Illyria — Istrians, Dalmatians, Liburnians, as well as all the islanders — and who so lacked the sense of adventure prevalent among the Greeks and the Romans. To the peaceful and by and large placid Illyrians, travel was anathema, but what they lacked in derring-do they compensated for in other ways. Clio's own people, for instance, had developed into superlative shipbuilders, creating light fast galleys especially suited to these waters, the same type Jason used and which were even called liburnians. The Istrians had honed their hunting skills to procure game from deep in the forests, the Dalmatians had evolved into skilled engravers, exporting their crafts round the Adriatic as far as the Bosphorus, and the islanders rejoiced in their musical skills. But because they rarely travelled beyond their own narrow, self-imposed confines, superstition had become magnified and on Cressia, thanks to the island's dark history, it had a tendency to spiral out of recognition when times were hard, as they were now.

Which was not to excuse lynch-mob mentality. Merely to try and understand where the bastards were coming from. And use their own superstitions against them.

With her flawless complexion, proud carriage, magnificent bosom and cape of gleaming black hair, the islanders had mistrusted her from the beginning. For a woman whose childbearing years were almost past to isolate herself from the community seemed unnatural, allowing fertile imaginations to run riot.

A boy runs away from home, as boys do, but they see only the stranger restoring her youth by feasting off his living flesh. The conclusion was hasty, they realized that. Perhaps the boy came home, wrote a letter, who knows? For whatever reason, the Lamiae theory quickly died down, but the seeds of sorcery had been sown. Instead of examining their own consciences at how the debilitating illness which claimed the fisherman's wife and the carpenter's son had slipped past their notice, they demanded a scapegoat.

Vampire was the word bruited, but the islanders hadn't actually believed it. Sure, they'd tossed down the odd branch of whitethorn, left piglet intestines, chanted obscenities — but at heart they believed Clio to be human. A witch, who conjured up wickedness.

But suppose Clio really was one of the Striges, one of those bloodthirsty birds of the night?

Once she had seen the flip side of the coin, power was hers. She'd spat on a red gown and rubbed the dye round her mouth, trailing lines down her chin as though blood had been dripping. She clawed at her hair, making it wild, covered her face with flour to make it white, stripped herself naked apart from a bright yellow cloak. She had no idea whether the Striges were supposed to be winged or otherwise, much less what colour those wings might be, but she'd bet her bottom denarius those murderous bastards outside wouldn't know either!

With her ear to the door, she had waited until footsteps shuffled towards her cottage. Silently lifted the latch. Then, to their total surprise, flung herself into the night.

'Aieeee!'

Screaming at the top of her lungs, she'd lunged headlong into the clearing, yellow wings billowing, the colour of the sulphur of Hades.

'Come to me, my family of gnomes, vampires and witches!'

Thopc, lugats and shtrigas. She enunciated the words clearly. It was vital the islanders heard this woman, who they'd believed Roman, speaking their own language fluently.

'Come, wolfman! Come, ye children of the night! Let us dine.'

She began to dance around the rotting intestines, screeching and howling at the top of her voice, calling upon other shapeshifters in her native Liburnian tongue. It was now or never, she calculated. Either they'd rush her, because she was mad or else they'd run screaming down the hillside like the cowards they truly were. Clio was taking no chances. She fell upon one of the stinking piles and pretended to devour it.

'Look, ye harpies and trolls. Someone has spread us a banquet. We will not need to search for food elsewhere tonight!'

She stood up and began to dance again.

'Come to me, my dark friends. Feast upon the blood of the sacrifice, more succulent than a child's I assure you, and let us gain strength.' She made loud smacking noises with her mouth. 'Gather, all you flesh-eating thropc. Join me in my banquet, my immortal sisters the shtrigas — '

Now, in the pulsing midday heat, Clio's reflection smiled in the fresh-water pool. Of all of them, that runt of a priest was the first to leg it down the hill, and by Croesus, could Llagos's skinny pins shift!

'Couple with me, priest,' she'd called after him. 'Lie with me and my sisters. For I know that in your soul you are one of us.'

A bloody landslide after that! Oh, yes, there'd be no more trouble from the islanders now. The stuff of their nightmares had been proved a reality. Vampires (gasp!) actually exist. Worse. Trolls, werewolves, all the shapeshifting creatures they had feared weren't just real. They walked among them on Cressia! From today, the islanders would take pains to appease the vampire's bloodlust with sacrificial offerings and the upsurge in piglet breeding would know no bounds. Yes well. The sows might be exhausted, but whatever calamity might befall this beleaguered island in the future, one thing was certain. The blame would not be laid on this isolated doorstep!

In that respect, Clio had achieved her objective. Total privacy. But now, thanks to Leo, that's all she could expect. Privacy! None of the wealth, the triumphal homecoming, the new life she was expecting. Clio, goddammit, was stuck here on Cressia.

No wonder her reflection still trembled.

Not from fear, or reaction after last night's pantomime.

Her reflection trembled from rage.