Man Eater

XXXV

I am dead, she thought. I have died, and Charon is taking me across the Styx in his little grey ferry boat. I can feel it bobbing, and I am weightless.

She could feel, too, the rage of the Underworld. It throbbed, vibrated, rumbled. The fury of a hundred million souls wrenched from their bodies. She could feel their pain. In her shoulders, in her arms, in her wrists…

Janus, Croesus and the girl next door, ghosts, be buggered-this pain is real. It was searing her joints and her ligaments and her tendons, and Claudia, with great trepidation, opened her eyes.

Shit!

The weightlessness, the bobbing, it made sense now. She was hanging. In mid-bloody-air, she was hanging, and the reason she was suspended, the cause of the pain shooting up her arms and biting into her wrists, was Corbulo’s stupid Etruscan fillet.

Below her, two rivers and a lake launched themselves into space, and she remembered doing the same with Corbulo. What happened? She kneed him in the goolies, it made him sick, and when he reeled, she gave him a shove. She remembered that. Claudia looked down into a sea of steam, felt her head swim and looked up again. By the gods, yes. That son-of-a-bitch lunged for her, and over they went, the two of them. Corbulo, the man with a chip on his shoulder the size of a pine tree. Corbulo, who could forgive his father for gambling away the family’s heritage and selling his sister for a few coppers a shot, but who could not forgive the person who bought that land fair and square in the first place. Corbulo, whose sense of duty had so warped over the years, it rotted his mind, his reason and his dignity. It had desensitized him to other people’s feelings, desecrated his own emotions. He could not even see that by lowering himself, as he put it, to training wild beasts, he had unleashed a prodigious talent that would have made him rich beyond words. Rich enough to buy lands equalling Claudia’s and beyond, but his rancid mind was set on one track only. Reclaiming a birthright that wasn’t his.

It was a wonder he hadn’t taken a pop at the Emperor. It was Augustus who instigated the Land Purchase Scheme. Augustus whose rapid expansionist policies stabilized the merchant classes. Augustus who, in the best possible motives, had consolidated this distinctly uneven distribution of wealth.

Not that she’d been thinking such cerebral thoughts as she toppled over the cliff. Her mind was purely on survival, and when she saw a branch-the same branch the cage crashed into-she hung on to it with both hands. She heard the woollen tunic rip, and as she clung to the tree, she saw a flash of gold as the sun caught Corbulo’s torque. Then he was under, she saw his arms stiff above the boiling waters, saw a swirl of white as Corbulo’s kilt was swept off in the torrent. Like a knitted doll, he was dashed from rock to rock. His tanned torso, red paint washed off long ago, was thrown up momentarily by the tumbling force, then it was pitched into the abyss. The angle of his head, the twisted limbs, told her that, if not already dead, Corbulo could not survive many more seconds.

There was a creak, a crack and she could feel the branch giving way. Desperately she swung herself to the right, into the body of the tree, but it was not strong enough to take her weight. She had crashed through the tree, a young birch, into the tree below, and then the one below that.

Where she hung now, like a pheasant on a hook, the only thing between her and certain death, paradoxically, a dark blue ribbon which belonged to the man who tried to kill her. Dammit, Corbulo, you were too lazy, too stubborn to work at the training, you never even tried to buy us out. Your contempt for me-or rather, my lands and my money-contaminated all logic. Claudia’s fists closed round the fillet to ease the strain on her bleeding wrists. You thought yourself superior-manipulating Fronto, bribing a homesick Greek girl, ingratiating yourself with Sergius Pictor, setting up Quintilian and me. Did you ever, even once, wake up in the morning and see yourself as you really were? Did the mirror never throw back the reflection of the shabby, shallow, self-obsessed individual who looked in it? Did you never cringe at yourself, Corbulo?

Her fingers could take the strain no longer. She let go of the fillet and winced as the ribbon dug into her wrists. Her shoulders were on fire, her head was swimming with the pain. The woollen tunic, the one that reeked of onions and sweat, had long since slipped away. Corbulo had torn it, the branches had torn it, there was little left by the time she was caught by the canopy. She wondered what the ploughman was like, the owner of the tunic. Would he be cross at losing it? Would he thrash around looking for it? Curse the fool who stole it? Grumble all the morning? Isn’t it funny, she thought, what goes through your mind at a time like this?

Everything here is white or it’s green. The world is condensed. I can see spray, it washes over my face, my feet, my legs. I can see water, thousands upon thousands of gallons, rushing below me. Or I can see green, varying shades of green, from the poplars, the birches, the willows. Oh yes, and blue. That one, small, fragile piece of blue…

Above her, although she couldn’t see it through the blur, the sky would also be blue. Not this dreary, twilight blue, it would be vibrant, fresh, the colour of speedwells. There might be a few clouds streaked across it. Mares’ tails. Light, white, dancing clouds. Skittish clouds. Happy, silly, carefree clouds.

Clouds filled her eyes and dribbled down her cheeks. Dammit, I can’t even see the bloody sky. Talk about irony. He gets the quick death, I just hang here until his stupid, stupid ribbon chafes through. She glanced down into the white froth and shuddered.

‘Claudia Seferius, what the hell are you doing there?’

Sweet Janus, the trees are talking back! Wildly she flung her head from side to side. This is not happening. It is not, not happening.

‘Couldn’t you see I was in trouble back there at the villa?’

Overhead, the wavy mop of Marcus Cornelius Orbilio was being saturated in the spray. He seemed to be securing one end of the mare’s reins over a branch, though the concentration couldn’t wipe the grin off his face.

‘I-’ She cleared her throat. ‘I knew you’d be fine without interference from me.’

The tears down her face turned into a watercourse. I should have known Corbulo couldn’t fell you with just one stick, she thought. For once, he’d underestimated his man. Patricians? Soft as sand, he’d have said, not stopping to consider whether any broke the mould. Whether any worked out at the gymnasium with weights. Whether any had muscles strong enough to repel the odd whack with a vaulting pole…

‘Now I suppose you expect me to come down there and rescue you?’

Claudia gulped back her tears. ‘On one condition, Orbilio.’

‘Oh?’

‘That after this, you leave me alone and I never have to set eyes on you again.’

Carefully he looped the rest of the reins round his shoulders. ‘You’ve got yourself a deal,’ he shouted, testing the knot.

Claudia pinched her lips together. That was the thing about Marcus, she thought, dangling in mid-air above a 500-foot drop while thousands of gallons of water thundered past.

He was such a godawful liar.