Dream Boat

Chapter Thirty

For Orbilio to imply that he was on the staff had been a slight embellishment on the actuality. In fact, it had been a downright bloody lie.

He pushed aside the heavy door which opened in to the bakery. Outside, the quern was still, the horse collar dangling forlornly from the pole which traversed the rotary grinding cone and Marcus rejoiced for the absent donkey, who must get pretty dizzy going round and round, even in short shifts. Indoors, the dry air tickled at his nose and made him sneeze. Baskets of grain lined up for milling queued patiently against the back wall. Sacks of flour hunkered beneath scrubbed trestle tables, over which tomorrow scores of bare-backed workers would sweat buckets kneading dough. Orbilio placed his hand flat against the chimney wall, not surprised that the great oven in the wall had been kept going. Fires like that took too much time to build up once they'd died, it was best to keep them ticking over. There was still plenty of charcoal in the leather bucket.

He fondled the wooden handle of the mighty iron paddle on which the loaves were pushed into the oven, and thought it wasn't all a lie. That bit about reporting to Geb, for instance — that was true. One of the security guards had told him. He'd also told him that sentries weren't allowed down here, not unless they'd captured someone, otherwise they were not permitted past the inner fence, which, like the outer barrier, ringed the far side of the hills. No, the guard had admitted, neither he nor his fellow mercenaries knew much about what went on here, it meant certain death to even gossip or conjecture, and since they were paid such bloody good wages, he for one wasn't prepared to piss into his own honey pot. Their job, he added firmly, was to patrol the perimeters — to keep outsiders out and to keep insiders in and yes, that included women, although to his certain knowledge no girl had escaped, much less half a dozen.

Nevertheless, under pressure, he did admit that, despite the restrictions placed upon his movements and his lips, he'd picked up enough about this mongrel organisation to know that the Brothers were packaging Egypt more as untutored Romans imagined it, than a true reflection of real life in the province. Orbilio tended to agree. From regular dinner parties with a man who had served under the Governor of Egypt he'd learned that the genuine culture, with its religious beliefs and laws, daily practices, had little in common with this bastardised society. This valley here was way off key. A distinct duff note in the music of the Nile.

Checking that the coast was clear, he closed the bakery door quietly behind him and, keeping to the shadows, crossed over to the brew house. Hm. The door was locked. He rattled the handle twice, put his shoulder to the woodwork and, when it wouldn't budge, moved on, the sour smell of barley beer clinging like a leech.

It had bothered him, at first, that people were prepared to follow Mentu blindly like they did. Then he realised that the trick was to make them believe something which, on the surface, was so utterly unbelievable that then they'd' swallow anything, no matter how incredible it seemed. Two years experience in the Security Police suggested that Mentu would need to pull a pretty fancy stunt to have them swallow the bullshit that he fed them, and the guard had pretty much confirmed this. Something to do with a padded vest, an archer and a pig's heart, he had said.

Next on the right stood the granary. In the doorway, Marcus paused. Not a whisper. He slipped inside. The threshing floor had been swept so thoroughly there was not a single ear of wheat or barley to be seen, not even wedged down in the gaps between the paving slabs. Winnowing fans hung from hooks and an upper gallery ran along one wall overhead. He sniffed and recognised the aromatic scent of tansy. Useful herb, he thought. Its jagged leaves add a bit of pep to stews and sausages, its yellow button flowerheads brighten wreaths and garlands, and — according to the mystics — tansy wine can make a man immortal. (Or so Jupiter told Ganymede, and look what happened there!) Tansy, however, is also effective at keeping mice at bay and that's why he smelled it here, inside the threshing house.

Soft of tread, he climbed the wooden steps. A field mouse, had it not been deterred by the liberal sprinkling of herbs, could not have moved more quietly. A pulley mechanism operated up here, cranking up baskets of wheat and barley fresh from the threshing floor which were then swung through this hatch here (he squeezed his own body through the narrow doorway) and emptied into the corn bins for storing until the following harvest. Gazing down on to the soft golden hills below, Orbilio felt the chill contrast between the gentle art of reaping grain and his own chosen occupation.

Sometimes, he thought, his hand automatically closing round the scimitar which hung around his waist, sometimes his work was bloody hard.

Take that guard, for instance. The one who'd told him so much about the commune and its security arrangements. The bastard had actually boasted about how he'd impaled 'some stupid little jerk' to make his death appear accidental, even to stuffing a gag in his mouth, and laughed when he said it took the kid fourteen hours to die. Marcus pinched the bridge of his nose to quell the nausea. No matter how many times he re-lived that episode where the mercenary bragged about his killing skills, the edge was never blunted. Each time it made his skin go clammy, hurt his head and made his stomach churn.

Almost as much as it had when he brought the rock down hard upon the braggart's head.

Orbilio shuddered. He was not sorry the man was dead, the bastard had been a sadist and a thug who had enjoyed killing for its own sake, but he himself felt only sadness and revulsion when he was forced to take a life — and make no mistake, he'd had no option with the guard. To leave the man unconscious was too risky. Apart from his own life, there was Claudia's to consider, also Flea's and Flavia's, plus — although he had to admit he didn't give a toss here either way — Junius as well. Therefore, it was with a clear conscience, if not exactly a light one, that Orbilio had slipped into the dead man's clothes, buckled on his weapons and concealed his body in the undergrowth.

And it was precisely because the taking of a human life, however necessary, did not lie easy with him, that Orbilio did not hear at first the footsteps on the gallery outside. He turned. Saw a lump of wood swinging violently towards him.

Smelled something which was neither corn nor tansy.

Then his world turned black.

Claudia found it easier than she'd envisaged to give her female minder the slip.

She waited until after Mentu 'swallowed' the deadly poison but, while biding her time, found nothing but admiration for the theatrical skills of the Holy Council. The way Isis gasped and Thoth dropped his scrolls of wisdom, you'd think the High Priest had slipped up and given Mentu the stuff he'd fed the goat! That was the clever bit, she decided. The High Priest, with his bare arms and shaven chest, could not possibly conceal a second potion on his person, therefore the crowd would readily accept that Mentu drank the same draught as the goat. They would not suspect that, concealed inside the goblet, might be a tiny phial of foxglove, henbane, celandine or belladonna, which would have been rammed down the poor animal's gullet.

However, if the Holy Council were born thespians, Mentu took the laurel crown. Claudia almost applauded as the fat Pharaoh's twitches mirrored that of the dying goat. The cramps, the rigidity, the ghastly noises in the back of the throat. Well done, Shabak! Her eyes had flickered across to old Bluejaw over there, a walking testimony of apothecary skills! He daren't dose the goat with cowbane, spurge or fool's parsley which induced a messy death by vomiting (and worse!). He'd picked a 'clean' quick poison which attacked the heart.

Ah, yes, the heart! That same dripping lump which the black jackal, Anubis, placed upon the Sacred Scales of Truth and which — surprise, surprise — balanced perfectly with the ostrich feather on the other side. What is it, Mentu? A block of gold, fashioned as a feather? Or won't you waste your precious metal, are we looking at a lump of painted lead?

Reverently, the cow and the falcon bent over the corpse, their floating robes conveniently blocking the view as Anubis replaced the heart into the Pharaoh's bloody, lifeless body. Not too fast, now. Don't let the punters think it's easy. A few more rites and rituals, let's string it out a bit — that's the stuff! A spot of handwashing, some mumbled prayers, a splash or two of holy water on the 'corpse'. Well done. Keep the audience on tenterhooks! Taking advantage of Mercy's absorption with the resurrection drama, Claudia slipped away.

'Behold your son, O Lord of the West.' The voice of Anubis rang out smooth and harmonious, as the voice of every conman should. 'Behold Osiris, whose heart has been found to be without evil, and whose virtue Thoth has recorded, Thoth from whom no secret can be hid.'

When the ibis's beak wagged up and down as his human hands held aloft the Sacred Scroll of Truth to show the people where judgement had been recorded, Claudia all but laughed. To think they'd paid good money to be part of this, as well! She could just imagine the sales pitch in the Forum.

'Roll up, roll up. Bring us your gold and silver, and in return we'll dress you in itchy, shapeless clothes, feed you meagre meals and work you harder than a mule.'

It's a wonder the barkers weren't crushed in the rush!

She was still grinning when she slipped through the temple forecourt gates. Oh, little terracotta ears cemented to the wall. What secrets have you heard?

'You've heard, then?'

Claudia sucked in her breath. Who-? What-? Then she realised that Penno, old Rabbitface himself, was striding towards her, his thin face pinched and drawn, and that he could not possibly have read her thoughts. The tips of his gravity-defying ears were pink.

Heard what, she wondered? 'Yes, of course I have.'

'Don't know how she did it,' he muttered, twisting his twig-like fingers in his hands. 'Locked her in myself, can't imagine how the thieving bitch escaped.'

'Flea escaped?'

Penno didn't seem to notice the obvious contradiction — that Claudia had patently not heard the news.

She smiled. Being so scrawny, it would have been relatively easy, she realised, for Flea to squeeze through the bars. Thieves sneak through small gaps all the time. Their size and flexibility is their stock-in-trade.

'I think I know where she might be,' Claudia told the temple warden, who stopped shaking his rabbit head and muttering about poor security to twist his face into an unclassifiable expression.

'Really?'

'I'll go and check, if you like.'

Penno's eyes narrowed. 'You will?' Thin, suspicious, he didn't trust her.

'Well, there are two places Flea could be hiding.' She chose two in opposite directions. 'So you take the bakehouse, and I'll check out the ladies bath house.'

He had no choice. But casting a glance over her shoulder, Claudia felt a prickle of unease when she realised was Penno following her with his eyes.

His face was ugly. His ears were a curiosity.

But his eyes were just plain creepy.

'Hey!' The voice startled her. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'

Damn. Outside the doctor-dentist-apothecary hut, Claudia turned a radiant smile upon her blue-jawed accuser. 'Where

I come from,' she said sweetly, 'it's customary to venerate the gods with flowers. I plan to do the same for Thoth, by weaving him a garland.'

'There are plenty of wild plants,' Shabak growled, 'without you buggering up my medicine garden.' His attention focussed on the bouquet in her hand. 'Why those two in particular?'

Ah. 'Because… where I come from, purple means honour and, er, yellow symbolises devotion.'

'Just where do you come from?'

Glad you asked me that. Claudia took a leap into the dark. 'Originally,' she breezed, 'Iberia, but of course I've lived in Rome since I was a child.'

'Iberia?'

Juno, sweet Queen of Heaven, if you're listening to this, I beg you not to give him Spanish ancestry. Claudia had attributed his swarthy skin and blue-black hair as hailing from the East, possibly as far afield as the Indus Valley…

'Baetica, to be precise,' she said. 'It's in the south.'

'Arid country, then?'

'I'm afraid I remember very little — apart,' she added with a girlish smile, 'from the customs which my family preserved.'

Shabak grunted and that, dammit, meant nothing. 'Those flowers,' he began.

'Pretty, aren't they?'

A frown knitted his dark brows. 'You do know what they're used for?'

'Me?' Time for a light, silvery laugh. 'Good heavens, botany's a black art to me, I barely know their names. This is a buttercup, I know that much, while the other one — don't tell me, it's ajuga, right?'

'Globe flower,' he said dryly, 'and purple columbine.'

He chewed his lower lip for several seconds, and again Claudia was struck by the thinness of his wiry frame. She recalled seeing him with Geb, and the contrast between the two men. One large and forbidding, the other small and unsmiling. If one was the Barbary ape on two legs, she remembered thinking, then Shabak was the agile monkey.

'This garden is reserved for me and my trained assistants only,' he said at length, although his mind seemed to be preoccupied with something else, she wondered what. Why wasn't he at the temple service? 'I must ask you to respect our Hippocratic laws.'

You did say hypocritic?

With a few tinkling apologies along the lines of being new here, she had no idea, so sorry and all that, Claudia left the doctor standing in the middle of his path, stroking his long blue shiny jaw in thought. There was something on that man's mind, and no mistake. She prayed it wasn't her! And that it had no connection with the flowers in her hand, because Shabak would know damned well what effect these two would have. Nothing serious, of course, and the symptoms would be temporary. But by the time Claudia had finished, Min the Grand Vizier would be in real discomfort! Cramps. Cold sweats. Nausea. He'd have difficulty breathing (that'll worry him!) and, best of all, the problems he'd encounter passing water would make the strongest bull's eyes water!

Surprisingly, Shabak's gaze was still riveted upon her, so she pretended to have trouble with her shoe while she collected up a few more wild flowers and stuck them in the bunch. Her plan was coming along nicely. The juice of this little wayside blossom rubbed into his pillows, sheets and mattress and Min can look forward to a few lovely raised blisters here, a delicious skin rash there.

Claudia made a mental note to focus on his loin cloths. Shabak finally lost interest, by which time it was quite some bouquet she had accumulated. Ah, well. No reason not to spread her generosity to others.

The black tomcat in Mentu's chamber hadn't moved, and even when Claudia had finished doctoring the leader's wine and clothes and bedlinens, the lazy creature only yawned and tucked its paw in. Cats, thankfully, were immune to the effects of her pot-pourri, although in this one's case, she acknowledged that it probably would not have noticed.

She breezed around the deserted wing. A little bit for Bast, a little bit for Horus, a nice big squeeze ofjuices in the bath. (That'll heat the water up!) She treated their towels, paid particular attention to the feathers in their bolsters. Things were going well. The theatricals outside the temple would continue for a while longer — Mentu would milk his happy resurrection for all it was worth — Claudia had time to poke around here at her leisure.

Because it seemed to her, that under cover of Mentu's carefully constructed con, a sick killer could mingle freely in the crowd.

He would be cold, compassionless, selfish to a 'I — and would be at pains to put on a front to disguise his brutish ways. The mantle of a caring physician, for instance. Or might he prefer to dramatise his role, such as the thug-like Keeper of the Central Store? Then again, clipped speech disguises many moods Stop this, it's nonsense! The cloying atmosphere is getting to you, don't fall into its trap! If six girls (seven if you count the little laundress) have gone missing from this commune, the most likely explanation is that they've been sold on as slaves, probably to brothels in the Orient. The trade was not unknown. Claudia felt her spirits lift. In which case, my girl, there'll be documented evidence here somewhere.

Her search began with Min, taking care, of course, to doctor every surface thoroughly along the way. Shabak might put two and two together and mix up a fast antidote, but with luck (and whatever had occupied his thoughts back there) the meeting in the medicine patch would have slipped the physician's mind. Nimble fingers riffled in Min's trunks and chests.

Everyone has secrets. Most people write them down. Not necessarily directly, although some do like to keep a diary, but they retain mementoes which, in isolation, mean precious little, but which — when put together — carry a great deal of significance. Like Min's collection of pornographic sketches, for instance, in which women were uniformly humiliated and abused. She skimmed through the illustrations and concluded that, in Min's eyes, women were born for man's use and his pleasure. No doubt he also kicked his brother's tomcat, should it ever venture into this room!

The only other papers hidden in his strongbox were accounts and, judging from his ticks and comments in the margins, Min worshipped money even over Ra. Women might not be respected. Gold was. He was salting stashes of it away in secret — and, according to these records, in places Mentu didn't know about. Oh dear, oh dear. You naughty boy. You're out to double-cross your younger brother.

Well, that was their affair, perhaps they'd come to blows when it came to light and kill each other in the process. But certainly any receipt for the sale of young girls to brothels would be lodged among these papers. And, dammit, there were none She backtracked to the office, where the papers were in neat order, and could tell from the registry that Neco was obviously right at home overseeing a large number of clerks and scribes, secretaries and accountants. As she had suspected, records were kept of every confessional heard at the terracotta ears — time, date, confidante's name, all listed alongside — but there was nothing suggestive of sales to Oriental brothels.

Penno's room was decorated with hieroglyphics depicting the Day of Judgement — Anubis, weighing out some poor sod's heart, with Osiris set to lead him to the Underworld should the feather in the jackal's hand balance on the scales. Below the scales, there squatted a hideously misshapen monster licking its chops. Seth, of course. The Devourer of Souls. She peered closer at the long, curved snout and stiffly tufted tail. No wonder the dead man was looking worried!

Laid out on Penno's long low table was a hand-sized replica of Ra's famous barque, a bowl of holy water, a set of ten carved priestesses, two ivory musicians and two carved horn dancers. Puzzled, Claudia considered the arrangement as she dripped the irritant juices on his bed and rubbed petals, leaves and sap into the temple warden's mattress. Then she saw! Old Loppylugs here conducted his own religious ceremonies in the privacy of his room, inevitably acting out the role of High

Priest himself, and no doubt Penno made several changes — improvements! — in his little dramas. What other fantasies did he harbour? Men who are addicted to rites and rituals make ruthless killers. Like Min, they have a need to control.

Each of the superintendents here thrives on control — terrorising, intimidating, bullying, even prescribing drugs to keep the commune pliable. That's their job. It's why they were given these commands.

Claudia gazed round the bedroom of the Keeper of the Store. Give him one thing, she thought. He's a stickler for his own rules, the room was barren. No paintings on the walls. No tasselled drapes. A couple of spare tunics, nothing fancy. No jewels. Not even a razor for Geb! It therefore did not take her long to find his secret cache of letters, and there were only two.

You bastard. You killed her, and you didn't even bother coming to her funeral. You are no father of mine.

The second one was clearly a response to Geb's reply.

You are more evil than I thought. You killed my mother and now you lay the blame on her, you say she drove you to it. I hope you rot in hell, you vicious bastard.

The raw emotion was too much for Claudia. She felt the child's pain (instinctively she knew it was a son's), sensed the anguish in his heart. Mercy's feminine intuition had not been wrong. Geb was the type to beat his wife and he'd beaten her once too often, so it seemed. No, wait! Claudia was jumping to conclusions here. She only had Mercy's gut feeling that Geb had used his fists. There are many other ways to die…

But the son's suffering embedded itself like a fish hook as Claudia continued to doctor the clothes and bedlinens of the remaining members of the Holy Council and she could not dislodge the barb. Was it possible, she wondered, that Geb had joined the Brothers of Horus to clear his conscience through their rigid, self-imposed regime of abstinence and penance? It might explain his violent temper and the punishment he inflicted cold. Through suffering, was he saying, you too can achieve blessedness? The notion did not sit well with his loutish behaviour.

Blast! Zigzagging back and forth, she realised she'd missed a room. Neco's! Bugger, she'd used up all her irritants, as well! She imagined the Chief Scribe's superior air when it became obvious he'd escaped the mass contagion. By heaven, he was a smug bastard now, he'd be bloody unbearable then! Stupid cow, how could you have overlooked him? Neco, of all people, would keep his documentation neat and tidy. Any sales slips would not be hard to find — Claudia's hand was on the door when she realised someone was already in the room. She put her ear to the woodwork and heard a thwack, followed by a whistle, followed by a groan. Thwack, whistle, groan. Thwack, whistle, groan.

Her immediate thoughts were of Min, and the girl whose rape she had not prevented. She'd not fail another girl, whatever the consequences. Without hesitating, Claudia burst in.

She had indeed interrupted something nasty. The whistle was caused by the breath being expelled through the scribe's crossed teeth. The groan was pain. But the cause of the groan was a three-tailed knotted rawhide lash with which a kneeling, naked Neco thrashed himself.