Dream Boat

Chapter Seventeen

For the second day running, the sticky breeze throbbed and pulsed like some invisible vampire, sucking energy from whoever it touched, and the breeze was unforgiving. It made sweat run in torrents down the necks of the fully armoured legionaries guarding Marcus. It trickled down their legs, their arms, their foreheads, their bronze plating, causing it to boil beneath their vests and sizzle against their cheekpieces and greaves. The scarves around their throats to prevent the armour chafing were dark with perspiration, their skins darker still from the heroic effort of standing guard in this crushing killer heat. The triumphal breeze blew gently in their faces, breathing lethargy, marsh sickness and mocking human fallibility.

Despite the eight unhappy men stationed round his house and the platoon of slaves cleaning up the house, Marcus was alone. Isolated in an emotional, rather than a physical sense.

There was no Claudia breaking her nails as she pulled at the plaster to remove the bones of the murder victim, whose ribs, even when they'd pulled the body out, still bore the instrument of the crime. No Claudia, weeping silently at the tiny skeleton lodged within the larger frame. No Claudia, white with cement dust and wearing a tiara of brick chippings in her hair.

No Claudia, being bodily evicted from his house, yet still managing to re-shackle Flea, down a libation for the family gods, curse Orbilio's boss to Hades and scoop up a squirming Doodlebug all at once!

Orbilio looked out upon the building site that was his garden and missed them all.

He missed Doodlebug, gnawing on the chair legs, ploughing up the dust and — may the gods forgive the little sod! — running off with the skeleton's kneecap. He even missed that outrageous street thief, Flea, with her wide green eyes and tawny hair and language which would make any self-respecting sailor blush. And he missed Claudia.

Especially Claudia. Propounding theories as she spat out chunks of plaster. Sprawling backwards over the rubble when her claw hammer jammed. Accusing him of showing off because he'd ripped away more of the wall than she had. It was, he thought, as the morning sun beat mercilessly upon his back, the closest thing he'd had to a family. The warmth, the banter, the pulling together, like oarsmen on a trireme. It had felt right, somehow. Natural.

So different from his own family, who were cold and clever and distantly proficient in everything they put their mind to. Laughter did not figure in an Orbilio family childhood. Just the brisk snap of efficiency, extending even to play, which took the form of music, poetry and painting. He'd never known a father who wrestled with him on the atrium floor, played a game of hide-and-seek, or the family banding together to play 'sardines'.

And yet, he reflected wryly, one member of that callous crew had sufficient passion to drive a knife deep into another's ribcage.

The heat was unbearable and, with no desire to retire to the office adjacent to the cause of his grief, Marcus crossed the courtyard to the atrium, whose honeycomb screen neutralised the sun's scorching rays. One day. Twenty-four hours since he'd first been confined to house arrest and already he was bridling like an incarcerated felon. The baths were out of bounds, and that was a bugger, too, particularly in this stinking heat, because it wasn't the same, splashing around in a tub. He needed a good soak, a massage in the steam room, a deep-cleansing scrape with the strigil. Dammit, he'd get spots on his back at this rate!

Up and down he paced, scratching at the stubble on his jaw, the tangles in his hair. Who? he thought. Whose was the body bricked in the wall? Who put her there?

His steward, Tingi, was doing his best to track down the slaves Orbilio's wife had sold the day she ran away, in the hope that they might shed light on who had been living here when the… let's call it, building work was carried out. Marcus slammed his fist into the palm of his hand. The bitch! He didn't mind her leaving him — good riddance. It was tearing apart the lives of forty-seven slaves which was so bloody unforgivable! How could she? Croesus, she'd known where his money boxes were kept, she could have taken any amount she pleased. Instead, the cruel bitch had waited until he was halfway to Macedonia on campaign before she set about splitting up families and friends with not a thought for their feelings. Just in order to feign some kind of independence and claim it was 'her' money she was leaving with!

Now, as then, Orbilio felt nothing but sympathy for the Lusitanian sea captain with whom she had eloped.

'Ah, Tingi! Any luck?'

The mournful Libyan, arriving home, spread his hands. 'No more than I had yesterday, sir.'

Finding where his slaves had been taken after the auction had been a doddle — records were kept of all transactions — but even in this, his bitch of an ex-wife had been cunning. Aware of the bitter feud between Orbilio's father and one Lucius Afer, she'd contacted Afer prior to the auction, and he had promptly snaffled the slaves up then gloatingly refused point-blank to sell them back to Orbilio. Shortly afterwards, the bastard distributed the slaves around his vast and scattered estates, thereby transferring the feud to the next generation.

Tingi mopped the sweat from his forehead. 'I'll try again later,' he said, 'but it would help if we knew just how long the body's been there.'

'Don't I know it!' Orbilio retorted.

Fifty years in the wall and the crime would never be solved. Contagion would cloud his family name for eternity.

Five or six years bricked up in the plaster and Orbilio's chances of reinstatement to the Security Police, already perilously slim, would vanish into thin air, along with any prospect of the Senate. But, no! The crime could not be that recent, the body had to have been here before he inherited the house. He was sure he'd have noticed a wall creeping forward!

Then again. Marcus tasted acid in the back of his throat and, flipping back a mental calendar by a full nine years, saw a callow youth of seventeen exchanging marriage rings with his fifteen-year-old bride in what was not a love match, rather the political merging of two powerful clans. The mists swirled in his memory to reveal that same young man lifting weights and working out in the gymnasium to build up his muscles, and different swirls revealed different facets of the young Marcus Cornelius. The serious frown, as he pored over maps and considered his forthcoming stint in the army. The laughing youth, out on the town with his riotous friends. The experimental lures of his marital bed.

What the mists of time did not reveal, of course, was a boy interested in the walls of old storerooms!

The calendar flipped rapidly forward and, standing in the cool of his atrium, with his loyal steward at his side, Orbilio knew in his heart that if, say, an uncle had bricked up a wall six, five, even four years ago, he would not have known. Much less cared.

But the boy had matured into the man and the man experienced a tidal wave of guilt. Suppose he had unwittingly concealed a murder?

'Is everything all right, sir?'

Suddenly, Marcus knew he could not rest until he knew the truth. However bitter that might be.

'What? Oh, yes, Tingi. Everything's fine, thank you. I need a shave, that's all,' he told his concerned steward. 'Can you see to it? And, er — ' he lowered his voice — 'any joy with that other matter?'

The Libyan glanced round, checking the legionaries' positions at their post. 'The favours you called in, you mean? No, sir. I spoke with the Clerk of the Dungeons, he said there's nothing he can do, the Gaul's committed a capital offence, the papers have already been signed.'

'What about the Dungeon Master? He owes me big time.'

'So he said, sir, but the problem is, he can't just tear up the execution order, twenty-two other names are on the same sheet and duplicates have already been filed in the Record Office.'

Marcus felt a stab of pain behind his eyes. 'Tingi, you go back. You tell him that Orbilio doesn't give a toss about his bloody administrative procedures. You remind him that Orbilio saved his son's arse, and you point out exactly where Orbilio caught the little bastard and what he was doing at the time. I'm sure,' he added, 'that after a moment's gentle reflection, the Dungeon Master will see a way to excusing Junius the Gaul from Saturday's outing in the arena.'

In truth, he felt less than confident. One lesson Marcus had learnt during his appointment with the Security Police was that loyalty was an elastic commodity. People were effusively grateful on the occasion that their skins were saved, less so over the passage of time, and that they rarely repaid the favour without some kind of prompting. The Dungeon Master was very much the type who separated the past from the present as though they were the yolk and white of an egg, and to lean effectively on people like him required a physical presence. Not some diluted, second-hand message!

As in so many areas of Orbilio's young life, waiting was always the hard part.

The herald was calling the first hour before noon and the barber was stropping his knife on a sturdy Spanish whetstone when the letter arrived. Orbilio, buried beneath a mound of hot towels, suggested his secretary read it aloud.

'My dear Antonia — ' The secretary, a plump individual with wide set eyes which bestowed on him a false sense of innocence, cleared his throat. 'Oh, dear. There uh — appears to have been an error in the address.'

Orbilio grinned. 'I doubt that,' he said. This could only be one woman's doing. 'Carry on.' Now what was that scheming witch up to?

The barber stripped away the hot towels and pulled taught Orbilio's cheek as the secretary read on.

This is goodbye, but please don't be sad for me. I am starting life anew, in a place where my stepfather can't get his hands on my olive groves or the vines in Frascati, and since I have no need for these estates any more,

I am dedicating them to Ra. Yes, Ra, Antonia! Isn't it wonderful? I am joining the Brothers of Horus, to walk — if my heart should prove worthy — the path to the Fields of the Blessed. I shall think of you always, dear friend, and pray that, one day, that brute Marcus will stop beating you senseless.

Your sister in harmony,

Claudia (soon to be known as Anuket)

The barber was quick to apologise as he mopped the bleeding cut, but Orbilio waved short his protest. 'It's not your fault,' he said, and it wasn't. '… that brute Marcus…' He'd been laughing so hard, the barber couldn't follow the contours, 'beating you senseless' indeed!

Clever letter, though. Obviously written in the presence of the — shall we say — membership committee, the message seemed on the surface nothing more than a fond farewell to a girlfriend. Underneath, however, its code revealed that Claudia had discovered Flavia's whereabouts. That in order to bring her back to save Junius, Claudia was pretending to join these mystical Brothers. That in order to enlist, one had to, sinisterly, change one's identity and finally — that to join involved the transference of large sums of money!

Orbilio's humour faded. He for one had never believed Mentu harmless, even though the enterprise had been the subject of official investigation. In the end, the Treasury line was that as long as Mentu paid his taxes and endowed a college or two, what was the problem? Mentu, whether he liked to call himself Pharaoh, Osiris, Ra or Slinky Sue was not committing any crime. No fraud, no forgery, no theft, no plots against the State. Oh, sure, one or two families complained about their (mostly) daughters running away, that they were allowed no physical contact and that the few short notes received didn't come across like the children they'd raised, but so what? These 'runaways' were, in legal terms, adult, and while theoretically their absconding might be against the law, inasmuch as children remain the property of their fathers until marriage (and, for women, their husbands thereafter), everyone felt that those who chose commune life were either unstable, unloved, unwanted, immature or simply inadequate.

Or, to put it another way, no one really wanted these people back.

And to some extent, Marcus sympathised with that view. If human beings are stupid enough to give up everything to follow some quasi-religious nut, then that's their choice. What worried him was that, of all the people who'd joined, none — not a single one — had ever returned! Twice he'd pressed for a closer investigation into the activities of the cult — indeed he'd even volunteered to go undercover himself — but the official line held firm. Don't rock the boat. Which had culminated in yet another clash with his superior.

'Even if Mentu is operating a swindle,' his boss had said, 'this is not a job for the Security Police, whose role, as you obviously need reminding, is to oversee the security of Rome by rooting out forgers, conspirators and the like. So get your arse out of my office and start bloody rooting!'

When the barber moved to rinse Orbillio's face with clean water, he pushed him away. Everything in Claudia's letter underlined his suspicions about the self-styled Pharaoh Mentu. Members had been targeted with cold-blooded precision, picked because no one would press too hard for their return while at the same time ensuring that not so much money changed hands that it warranted making a fuss. Sisters/brothers/friends might show concern, but what the hell? They have no clout in law.

The Brothers of Horus, as Claudia's letter told him only too clearly, were in the business of mind control. They brainwashed the 'faithful' with new names and new rituals as a means of keeping them focussed on Ra and off their money, although until now the cult had been nothing more than a vague and nagging worry niggling away at the back of Orbilio's mind and, like the buzz of a wasp trapped in a room, annoying, though hardly a major cause for concern.

Until now.

The words echoed round his empty bed chamber.

Until now.

Never had Marcus felt more paralysed than by this damned house arrest. Soldiers at every entrance. Vigilantes posted outside.

Until now. Until Claudia joined up with the cult…

Marcus dabbed at the nicks on his chin with a spider's web soaked in vinegar. He didn't imagine for one second that the headstrong widow would be swayed by the Brothers' mind games (in fact, he almost pitied them), but surely over the past year or two, one of the faithful would have wanted to leave?

Immediately, the wasp became a whole swarm.

Exactly what did happen when you tried to leave the cult? Why had no one ever come home? Suddenly, looking into the mirror, Marcus realised it was not Claudia's sanity he feared for.

Marcus feared for her life.