Man Eater

XXXIV

Where do you begin to describe terror? Is it this sudden inability to breathe? The gasping for breath? The shallow snatches of air? Is it the blast of freezing air that hits you? The sensation of falling? Reeling? Of spiralling into unconsciousness?

At the brink of oblivion, Claudia pulled herself back. You can’t give in, a voice inside her screamed. While you’re conscious, you have at least a chance.

Corbulo stood on the edge and placed his hands on his hips.

Claudia pressed her fingers to her temples and battled with hysteria.

Marble Falls, the locals called it. She remembered now. Officially they were named after the engineer who, two centuries previously, diverted the forces of two rushing torrents and a lake in order to drain the marshy uplands and put paid once and for all to the flooding which blighted this ancient landscape. But Marble Falls was more appropriate, the Umbrian people felt, because viewed from the bottom, a wall of white marble fell from the hillside.

Viewed from the top, it was awesome.

Droplets of water, breaking free of the liquid marble, rose in their thousands to cloud the valley and now, with the sun heating them in earnest, manufactured humid, claustrophobic air. Lush vegetation-birch and poplar and willow-hung over the cascade to breathe in the excitement of the raging forces, their leaves turned to silver by the swirling steam.

Even on her knees, Claudia felt herself swaying. It was wide enough to launch a ship, this torrent, one of the mighty ocean-going merchantmen, a ten-thousander as they were called. What chance a tiny crate?

Tentatively she craned her neck. Rocks, boulders, more trees, more bushes, smaller cascades where the exuberant waters split and rejoined, split and rejoined as they abandoned themselves to the forces of gravity. Her vision blurred, and not from the spray. At the bottom, although obscured by the hot, dense clouds, this mighty mass of water plunged into the river Plennia, renamed after the same engineer who built the falls and widened the stream to cope with the torrent.

Claudia hoped his ghost walked and his grave was turned over by jackals.

‘I didn’t-’ She stopped, took another breath and forced herself to hang on to it. ‘I didn’t know Etruscans were famed for leaping to their deaths over waterfalls,’ she said in a voice with only the slightest tremble in it.

Corbulo turned. ‘You never know when to stop, do you? You and that tongue of yours?’

Claudia forced the jellified twigs that were her legs into a sitting position and hugged her knees in a nonchalant fashion. From that angle, only she could see that her fingers were white from the fear and that her hands shook like a baby bird’s wings unless she clasped them tight.

‘Why? Will begging save my life? You’ve convinced yourself you own my lands, that by killing me you’ll get them back. So go ahead. Push the damned cage. Then see where it gets you.’

‘Bitch!’ Corbulo ran to the crate and the bars rattled in his hands. Janus, for a moment there she thought he was going to. ‘You conceited, insolent, know-it-all bitch! How dare you-you of all people-accuse me of making this up? It’s my ancestors who lie buried there, my blood which was spilled there, my sweat that manured the soil, so don’t you lecture me on ownership, you empty-headed golddigger, you!’

It was a dangerous line, but Claudia persisted.

‘Your sweat,’ she scoffed. ‘How far does it travel, this precious Etruscan perspiration? How is it so different from the rest of us that it can reach from Carrera on the coast to my vineyards in the east?’

It was working, sweet Jupiter, yes, it was working. The mind that had planned and honed each meticulous detail could yet be defeated by rage.

‘Carrera? Who ever lived in Carrera? We’re farmers, my people, and bloody good farmers at that.’ He snorted derisively. ‘Your husband. Called himself a farmer, did he? I was a lad when he bought that land, eight years old, and I still remember the outrage among my people when he turned prime agricultural soil into vineyards. Vineyards!’

Claudia’s mind made quick computations. Her husband set himself up, must be twenty-four, twenty-five years ago. That’s right, Corbulo’s in his early thirties. ‘We’ve had this conversation, I believe. And I told you then, wine pays handsomely.’ The Empire virtually runs on it.

The trainer wasn’t listening. ‘Ten years ago he added a parcel to the south. That land belonged to my father-’

‘Ten years ago, I was fourteen,’ she pointed out, quite reasonably.

‘But you know the story, don’t you?’

Of course I do. Her husband trotted it out at every dinner party. ‘What story?’

‘It was that bloody Compulsory Purchase Scheme. Our lands for just half-a-dozen gold pieces plus some stinking slum in Rome. I ask you, Claudia, who could survive in two filthy rooms hemmed in by foul-mouthed drunks, babies crying day and night and dogs pissing up your front door? Nothing but stale sweat and rancid fats in your nostrils, and all the time, wherever you walk, that godsawful dust from the stonemasons drying the air!’

‘A million of us manage quite successfully.’ Some of us even love it.

Corbulo kicked the cage and she felt it lurch closer towards the waterfall. Janus! With an iron grip, Claudia hugged her knees as though conversations like this were commonplace in her calendar.

‘Well, I couldn’t. And neither could my father, or my mother, or my two little sisters. The girls, they were only ten and thirteen, but they died of the flux within a month. It broke my parents, watching their babies die, knowing that had we had space and fresh air and clean, running water they’d be alive today, with babies of their own, and did your husband give a damn?’

Her husband had his faults, she thought, but a sense of injustice wasn’t one of them. This story did the rounds at dinner parties not out of venom, but as a warning to others. For a start, no peasant was forced off his own land, they went voluntarily and in the case of Corbulo’s father, very rapidly. Augustus was keen to stabilize the economy and men like him were not only exceptionally well paid, they were given good apartments and a weekly dole. But with Corbulo’s father, it went deeper. He’d neglected his acres, working the soil as little as possible and drinking his money away and (this was the point of her husband’s after-dinner speech) when he was remunerated for his lands, he lost the whole lot on one single cockfight. A chicken, godsdammit. Corbulo’s father sold his birthright for a chicken.

‘So did he, Claudia?’ The trainer’s roar was louder than the falls. ‘Did your husband give a fuck about us?’

Rumour also had it that his father sold his eldest daughter into prostitution. Small wonder the mother threw herself into the Tiber.

Claudia felt her anger boil at this appalling waste of human life, and if Corbulo truly cared about his family, he left it pretty damned late.

‘For gods’ sake, man, yours is not the only family who moved out under the scheme. I can name you a dozen who uprooted to Rome, and not only did they survive, they put their sons in the Senate. So spare me the hard-luck stories.’ She leaned forward and gripped the bars, her face barely inches from his. ‘You could have gone back any time you wanted, and if land’s so cheap’-it wasn’t-‘why didn’t you godsdamned buy some?’

Grey eyes blazed back at her. ‘You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said, have you? How many more times do I have to tell you? I only want to work that which is mine.’ He threw up his hands in a gesture of futility. ‘Croesus, Claudia, I begged you, I actually fucking begged you, to let me work with you. You could have done that for me.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ she said with a jauntiness that stuck in her throat. ‘Now you’ve explained everything, now I understand what’s behind all this, let’s put it behind us and start from scratch, shall we?’

‘How?’ There was a glimmer of reason in the angry, grey eyes.

‘Well,’ ‘she forced a laugh, ‘why don’t we go into partnership? Now. Etruria’s not very far away.’

‘You patronizing bitch. If I wrote to you once, I wrote to you a hundred times.’

I get letters from cranks all the time, how…? Oh, shit. The spray from the falls had soaked her tunic, water dripped from her hair. But Claudia was oblivious.

‘Corbulo’s not your real name, is it?’ Of course not. That would have given the game away right from the start.

A long, slow, ice-cold smile spread across the Etruscan’s red-painted face. ‘Try Crito.’

Crito! Her husband had been bombarded with letters from this man, and he’d laughed at the insolence of a fool who not asked, but demanded his lands back and at a price no sane person would consider. Each time her told the little oik to get lost, although when Claudia received similar demands after her husband’s death, she had not been so polite. Almost immediately, Crito’s letters stopped. And she thought she’d been clever…

‘What’s the matter Claudia? Cat got your tongue? Wishing you’d been nicer to me?’ His boot gave another menacing kick to the crate. ‘Or wondering how you can talk your way out of it?’

No, I’m not. Not any more.

The cage wobbled precariously.

‘Whether I’m alive or dead,’ she said, praying the tremor in her voice was drowned by the crash of the torrent, ‘you’ll still be a craven coward.’

‘Coward? Coward?’ Corbulo shook the cage so violently they both nearly toppled over. Claudia stifled a scream. ‘I’m a farmer, I’m a trainer. I am Etruscan! I am not a fucking coward.’

‘What would you call a man who gets someone else to do his killing?’ She didn’t give him a chance to reply. ‘Yes, you can set me up for Fronto’s murder, you can set leopards on me, you can even-big deal-push a defenceless woman over a waterfall in a crate. Well, to me that’s cowardice, Corbulo.’ She remembered Gisco’s diatribe. ‘You’re a lily-livered, yellow-bellied, chicken-shitted coward.’

Juno be praised, he flung open the bolt!

‘Out! Out, you bitch!’ He grabbed her wrist and jerked her roughly on to the stones. As she fell, the cage teetered-backwards, forwards, backwards…then it toppled into the torrent. For a moment it wavered, buoyed by the force, then, with astonishing speed, crashed against an overhanging tree, swirled round, and headed straight into a boulder. As Claudia watched, she felt her bones turn to chalkdust. One strong gust and they’d blow clean away. Up it rose, the cage, to stand on its end. With only an imperceptible change in the roaring in her ears, she heard it dash against the rock, saw it break into five, then ten. By the time it reached the rim of the waterfall, there was nothing left but firewood.

She could hear a demented magpie chattering, then realized it was her own teeth.

Deflected by that brush with death, Claudia failed to realize what Corbulo was up to. He’d unbound the loops of his hair and was using the dark blue ribbon to tie Claudia’s wrists. Perhaps the reason she hadn’t noticed was that he’d left a good cubit of space between them. Could she-wild thought-get behind him and throttle him with it?

‘I’ve given six months of my life to get you,’ he hissed, his fingers digging deep into her arms as he shook her. ‘Six months, and every day with my life on the line, but did Crito flinch from the most dangerous animals on Jove’s earth? Did he hesitate to put poison into the wine of those mercenaries?’

Claudia gulped the steamy air in the hope it would steady her legs. ‘Poison’s a woman’s tool,’ she rasped, but she never finished the sentence. The blow from the trainer sent her reeling to the ground, twisting her leg beneath her.

‘Don’t you dare suggest that,’ he snarled. ‘Who knifed Fronto? Who snapped that Greek doxy’s neck in full view of a hundred revellers? Tell me that doesn’t take balls.’

Claudia grimaced at the pain in her knee. It wasn’t me Coronis was shooting nervous glances at, she realized now, it was Corbulo. Both at the elephant show and during Macer’s questioning, he’d deliberately stationed himself beside me, knowing any jittery looks from the girl would be deflected by yours truly here. Callous bastard.

He snatched a handful of her hair. ‘And what about the planning? Don’t you think that took guts?’ Claudia screamed as he twisted her curls. ‘Well, answer me, my fine and fancy lady.’

‘Yes! Yes,’ she screamed. ‘I’m sorry.’

Corbulo glanced over his shoulder to the valley shrouded by swirling steam. ‘Oh, you will be,’ he said. ‘You will be.’ Using her hair like a leash, he hauled her, whimpering, to her feet. ‘You wouldn’t believe what I’ve gone through, you and that charmed life of yours.’

‘Please-’

‘Doping the beasts to set the schedule back. Sucking up to Sergius and his whore of a sister. Fawning over that slimeball Fronto.’

‘Corbulo, please! You’re hurting me!’

‘Crito. The name’s Crito.’ He began to drag her towards the edge. ‘You may as well get used to it, because we’ll be together through all eternity, Claudia. One way or another…I’ll take my lands with me.’

‘What-?’ She didn’t need to ask the question, suddenly it was clear. Now she understood why he had left so much slack between her wrists. He intended to slip it over his head, so her arms would be round his body when he leapt from the precipice.

‘This way I can watch the terror on your face all the way to the bottom.’

Frantically Claudia scrabbled on the rocks. ‘Why didn’t you just kill me at the beginning?’

The grip on her hair didn’t waver and the cliff came ever closer. ‘Revenge, you bitch. Revenge. I wanted to watch you suffer, the way my family and I had to suffer. I wanted to see you rot in a gaolhouse. See you exiled. Penniless. Disgraced.’

He jerked her to her feet, and Claudia tasted blood from the blow that sent her flying.

‘Well,’ he fought to loop her arms over his, ‘you denied me that pleasure, but at least I’ll die happy.’

‘No you bloody won’t!’ she yelled.

Claudia’s kneecap smashed into his groin. His face, the red paint streaked by the watery air, contorted into a gargoyle as he let go of her arms. Gagging, gasping, he reached for his dagger, but for once Corbulo the trainer was too slow.

With all her strength Claudia pushed.

Like the leopard’s cage, Corbulo seesawed back and forth, wobbling, wavering, teetering on the brink. But with each tremulous sway, the momentum was gaining, until slowly the balance shifted. Claudia held her breath. It could go either way…

Sweet Jupiter, it could still go either way!

Then, with a strangled yelp, Corbulo pitched forward into the boiling waters.

But not before he’d grabbed hold of Claudia.

Together they tumbled into oblivion.