Jail Bait

XXXVI

She was dead. Lais’ doped wine had killed her. Claudia had crossed the Styx and here were the caves of the Underworld, the ghosts of her long-dead ancestors writhing in some grisly welcome ritual. Drums were throbbing. Claudia prised open her second eyelid and winced from the swelling which surrounded it, a sweet memento from Pul. Once more, she was lying face down, although here was no fancy mosaic, no opulent marble. It was dust, she could smell it. Taste it. Sour at the back of her throat. Great. Charon the Ferryman had dumped her without so much as a guide or a hint to direction.

Lifting her head was like lifting a hippo. All around, the ghosts-red ghosts, if you please-danced to the pulsating drumbeats with rigid, flickering movements. Wooden puppets jerking on strings. Oddly repellent. Far from comforting. Someone groaned when she tried to sit up. Claudia had a feeling it was her. No one put out a hand to assist.

The dancers reeled towards her, then receded. Forward and back, jerk and jolt. Forward and back, jerk… Slowly her vision cleared, and Claudia saw they were not phantoms-hell, they were not even real people. These were painted figures, lit by a flickering flame. Red? Yes, they were red. Etruscan red. Their bodies, their faces, their hands. And they danced round a wall to a drum which pounded inside her head.

Using a stone tabletop for support, Claudia hauled herself to her knees as a wisp of fear tugged at her gut. Why should these painted Etruscans dance around a stone slab? She brushed the wisp away and rose groggily to her feet. A cheetah came into view, its painted spots brilliantly preserved. Preserved where?

Rats with razor-sharp teeth began to gnaw at her insides. She was cold. Icy cold.

There was a dark patch on the floor. And something glinting in the flickering, stinking tallow light. An emerald. Don’t look. Block it out, block it out, for as long as you can…

‘The dark patch on the floor there, that’s blood,’ she tried to tell the yawning cheetah, except there was a pebble bunging up her voice box. Human blood, stale and dry, and the emerald clinched any doubt. It was set in an earring. The one which was absent from the body fished out of the lake… ‘I suppose you got to know Lais’ double quite well, while she was kept prisoner here.’ But the cheetah was bored, it kept yawning.

While a giant’s hand crushed her heart in his fist, Claudia forced herself to pick up the candle and hold it up to walls covered with these Etruscan paintings. Tomb paintings. The stone tabletops were sarcophagi. The giant squeezed tighter. All Etruscan burial sites were the same. Gouged underground out of the rock. Leading off from this central chamber would be other, narrower resting places. But one thing was certain.

There was only one entrance.

Sealed with a huge block of granite.

‘It’s all right,’ she added, trying for a smile. Not that the Etruscans cared whether she was grinning or not, ‘Tarraco said the graves had been robbed generations ago, probably during the time of the Great Battle up on the lakeshore.’

Hysteria rose in her breast.

One woman had been imprisoned in this ancient tomb of the kings, then killed on this spot. Was it Lais’ intention to make it a double? Would Pul heave back that granite door any minute, and place his large hands round her own neck? As though in a dream, two words barrelled through this ancient tomb. Natural causes. Lais had it all planned! She’d been humouring Claudia from the start, knowing how long the drug would take to work in the wine. With an aching wrench of self-pity, Claudia realized too late that to keep up the pretence of being a spy was the last thing she should have done. She should have tried to run, go down fighting. Instead she set herself up as a swooning, love-sick girl coming in search of the man she’d set free from the cells who seeks refuge from the storm, and where better than the old Etruscan tombs? But, oops, there’s an accident, look. Lightning fells a tree, traps her inside… In a couple of months, when Lais makes her miraculous reappearance, she discovers this fallen tree trunk. How tragic!

Natural bloody causes, all right.

Claudia was destined to die of thirst and starvation.