Man Eater

IV

Marcus Cornelius Orbilio was woken by the sound of hammering. In Rome, the city that never sleeps and refuses to let anyone else sleep either, hammering was not unusual, night being the only time goods traffic was permitted through the streets. In consequence, much of the Emperor’s massive restoration programme had to be undertaken by torchlight, and if you add on the constant throb of axles being whacked, wheels bumped, sacks thumped, you’re in for a fun-packed show.

This hammering, however, was altogether different. It seemed to come from within the walls of his own house. Struggling to sit up, Orbilio realized the pounding was closer than he thought. Mighty Mars! It was inside his skull.

He flopped back on the bed and groaned. His mouth was furred his eyeballs tender, and the same instinct that told him it was a long haul to daybreak scoffed at his chances of getting back to sleep. Every joint and every bone ached to the marrow, his skin was dry and his gut felt like someone had plaited his intestines. Putting tentative fingertips to pounding temples, Orbilio was forced to face facts. There was no remedy known to medical science for the condition that racked his youthful body and he cursed silently. Surely, in this golden age of peace and prosperity, a cure for hangover could not be that difficult?

A chill breath of wind brushed his cheeks and he noticed he hadn’t closed the shutters. His blurred vision could just about determine a reddish tinge to the sky and his mouth turned down. Another oaf, clumsy with his tallow and, whoosh, up goes another tenement, killing as many occupants when the building collapses as are killed in the fire itself, the poor sods trapped by the same heavy safety chains they needed for their doors in the first place. Did the landlords care? Did they hell! A few new timbers, a bit of plaster and, hey presto, here’s a brand new tenement-we can charge double the rent.

Regardless of what he professes, Augustus doesn’t give a shit. He makes the odd sop, like limiting storeys to six, but what good’s that when tenants sleep four to a bed, there’s just one toilet on the ground floor and water has to be hauled from the street? What would it take to form a fire corps, eh? Remus, a million people are crammed in this city. Fires break out four, five, six times a day. If the Emperor truly cared about his people, he’d forget lavishing the spoils of war on stone and marble and organize cohorts to man pumps and form chains Orbilio stopped short. Jupiter in heaven, this is treason!

Worse, he suddenly became aware of a figure buried under the covers beside him. He felt a trickle of sweat run down his forehead. Suppose-oh, Janus. Suppose he’d been thinking aloud? Soft snores reassured him she was sleeping deeply, before a second question formed on his lips. Who the hell was she?

He would not, he swore, touch another drop. Not one more drop. He pinched the bridge of his nose. Croesus, he thought he had his drinking under control, but there were times lately when chunks of his life disappeared without trace. Small chunks, but they were missing none the less. Like tonight…

The intensity of the blaze changed the oblong of light in the wall from red to yellow, then a splintering crash told him the army had been called in and were doing what they normally did. They grabbed long poles and tore the building down. Far quicker. Far easier. And it wasn’t their fault, was it, if families were trapped inside?

He sighed with envy. In an ideal world, it would be nice to close one’s mind to life’s less appealing aspects, but Orbilio had discovered long ago that his conscience was a shrew, nagging him like a fishwife, prodding him with her bony finger whenever he wanted to be idle. He could feel her now-prod, prod, prod-and she wouldn’t stop until she got what she wanted.

The most cursory glance assured him his bedmate wasn’t the little redhead. Even bombed, he wouldn’t be that stupid. Without doubt he’d enjoyed their brief dalliance, teaching her things she’d never dreamed of even though she was married herself, until it slipped out who her husband was.

Gisco. The charioteer. Gisco, whose jealous nature and volatile temperament were legendary. In fact, the last man who’d forced Gisco to wear the cuckold’s horns had been found in a back alley, bound and gagged, with his balls tied round his neck…

When he’d learned that, he’d bundled the redhead into her clothes and out the side door in one single motion, but for Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, twenty-five years old and so healthy he was verging on immortality, the flame of Venus burned strong.

Thus-lying beside a total stranger, as the tenement fire snuffed out a dozen lives and wrecked scores more-he was able to run his hands abstractedly through his hair and tell his conscience to piss off. He was young and single and had no dependants, why shouldn’t he sow his wild oats? Then he felt it again. Prod, prod, prod. The fishwife had picked up the word ‘single’ and was throwing it back at him.

‘You’re an aristocrat, Marcus, whose ambition burns as fiercely as that inferno in the valley below. To pass through those ivory-inlaid doors of the Senate, my boy, you need a wife to your name.’

Mother of Tarquin, he needed the reminder like he needed the hammering in his head, but one thing was certain. Never again would he make the mistake of letting his family contract a political alliance. Divorced, thankfully, from a profligate wife who ran off with a sea captain, he resolved that the next time he married, it would be for love.

Orbilio rolled over on to his stomach. In a bid to circumvent the rules, he had cultivated the acquaintance of a crusty ex-tribune, ex-prefect, ex-consul. Sucking up to people was not Orbilio’s strong point, but if it meant smoothing a primrose path to the Senate House, so be it, and only last night the ex-tribune, ex-prefect, ex-consul had confirmed to him personally that, in his eyes, merit was paramount and Orbilio need have no further qualms.

It was on the strength of those wheels being oiled that Orbilio had got so comprehensively oiled himself. No, sir. He would not be coerced into marriage again, not even by his own uncle, and especially not to the poor creature his uncle was pushing at him. The girl was fourteen years old, for gods’ sake! He rolled on to his back again. The appeal of pubescence was lost on Orbilio. He wanted a companion, a friend, a lover. A woman to laugh with, cry with, grow a wrinkled old rind with, not a mechanical producer of sons. With Gisco’s little redhead wife he’d enjoyed vigorous sex flavoured with the fun of conniving and the spice of forbidden fruit, but what he needed, what he desperately missed (and it sounded corny but there you are), what he needed was the love of a good woman.

Or, in Orbilio’s case, the love of a bad woman.

A woman, for instance, whose untamed locks had a shine you could shave in, whose spicy perfume sent shockwaves down a man’s spine, whose very image haunted him from sun-up to sun-down-after which, the pain increased tenfold.

When he took a woman like that into his arms, there would be none of the hurried thrusts and quick gratification he’d sought with Attica. He would light lamps, thousands of them, on every level and every ledge, every surface and every sill and, in the flickering heat, he would kiss her eyelashes and drown in the dip of her collarbone. He would explore every inch of her skin until his tongue tingled with the taste of her sweat, then let his nose wallow in the scent of her curls-long damp tendrils that clung to her breasts, short damp tendrils that led down to heaven.

The moon would rise and the moon would fall before he was through, and there would be no question of forgetting her name as he sometimes had with Attica.

He would whisper it, over and over again. Claudia Seferius. Claudia Seferius. He would run his tongue gently round her ear, feel the flutter of her breasts. Claudia Seferius. Claudia Seferius. The featherlight touch of his fingertips would part her thighs, pulsing, pulsing, the drumbeat of their hearts setting the tempo. Claudia Seferius. Claudia Seferius. Faster and faster their bodies would sway until finally in unison…

The knock made him jump. ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir. There is a messenger outside who says he cannot wait until morning.’

Shit! ‘No matter, Tingi, I wasn’t asleep.’ Now wasn’t that the truth?

Grateful to the darkness which hid the throbbing thickness between his legs, Orbilio opened the door to his Libyan steward.

‘The young man is also in rather a distressed state, sir.’

He recognized him the second he set eyes on him. Standing in the shadows, that muscular form was unmistakable, despite the bandage round his head, and Orbilio felt his heart lurch.

He was never sure of the relationship between them Claudia called him a boy, but here stood a man, barely younger than himself, the slave whose eyes never wavered from his mistress and who hung closer than her own shadow. Jealousy alone, though, had not rearranged Orbilio’s heartbeat. The injuries Junius had sustained might well be mirrored on Claudia.

Drawing himself up to his not inconsiderable height and throwing a towel round his waist, Orbilio listened to the words tumbling out of the exhausted Gaul. Pinch me, I am dreaming.

‘Mistress Seferius, you say, is accused of murder?’

Junius nodded sullenly.

‘Of a complete stranger?’

He nodded again, and Orbilio was no fool. The slave liked him as much as he, himself, liked the Gaul. How it must stick in his craw, this visit.

‘And she doesn’t know you’ve sent for me?’

‘No. Sir.’ The sir was either an afterthought, forgivable under the circumstances, or it was added as an insult.

Orbilio met the stare head on and gave no quarter in his own. ‘Give me the address again.’

It was with a satisfying sense of mischief that he despatched the weary bodyguard to saddle up, then nudged the sleeping beauty in his bed.

Nothing, not a moan, not a groan, not a twitch. Dammit, where did he get her from? Vaguely he remembered doing the rounds of several taverns, but surely he’d not lowered himself to picking up a common whore? Praise the gods, the quality of the garments on the floor set his mind at rest. At least he’d had the sense to pick up a courtesan. Catching his reflection in the glass, unshaven, sunken-eyed, with his head coming off at the hinges, it was a miracle he’d been any use to her, except those scattered clothes spoke volumes…

‘Up you get.’ He gave her bottom a gentle kick and realized he hadn’t paid her. Remus! He drew on a fresh woollen tunic. What was the going rate? Tavern whores charge eight asses, but a high-class hooker? Think, man, think!

Sluicing water over his face and wincing as the cold water dribbled down his arm to his elbow, Orbilio heard himself humming. Claudia Seferius! In trouble up to her beautiful, kissable lips and who’s the chap to pull her out of the mire? The humming turned into a whistle. Murder isn’t necessarily a job for the Security Police and the Security Police isn’t necessarily confined to murder cases, but it was what Orbilio did best. He towelled himself dry and decided the stubble on his chin could wait. With his widespread network of informants and spies, he’d solve it in no time-then let’s see how many of my letters she returns.

Lacing his boot, he recalled the last time he saw her, the wind whipping her curls about as she stood on the deck in Sicily. Wherever she walked, that woman, trouble walked beside her, and that day had been no exception. Barely one hour before she had escaped death by a cat’s whisker, yet to see her in the prow of that freighter, proud eyes flashing, her back as straight as any arrowshaft, it was almost impossible to believe the evidence. A man thought only of the liquid swish of her skirts, the molten folds of cotton over her breasts.

Scheduled to sail with her, Orbilio had instead been called away at the last moment on the Governor’s orders. What had happened during that voyage from Sicily? What had caused her to return his letters? Dammit, the air sizzled whenever they were in the same room together, what had ‘Dammit, you! Up!’ Harshly he pulled the bedclothes off the slumbering form. The chill night air would wake her more surely than his voice.

The woman in his bed began to groan like an ungreased axle, clawing at the bedclothes, but his grip was the stronger. ‘You’re out of here,’ he snapped, ‘and I mean now!’

He shook bronze into his hand. ‘Ten sesterces should see you right.’

The moaning stopped. ‘Did you say…ten sesterces?’

Orbilio rolled his eyes. There was no time to argue. ‘Twenty, then, you money-grabbing bitch.’

More coins showered the bed.

‘But get one thing straight. Don’t sniff round me again, because no one rips Marcus Cornelius off twice. Besides,’ he got hold of the bed frame and tilted, ‘you’re a bloody poor lay.’

The woman tumbled out with an ignominious bump as the bedframe clattered back down.

‘Any whore worth her salt leaves a man with a memory of his night gymnastics, but you-’

He stopped abruptly. Sitting bolt upright on the tessellated floor, outrage bulging her forty-year-old eyes, was the heavy-hipped wife of the ex-tribune, ex-prefect, ex-consul.

Orbilio produced his most disarming grin while his mind turned somersaults.

Quite how he’d ended up with his patron’s wife in his bed remained a total blank. Bu t it was fairly certain that by calling her a whore and a money-grabbing bitch, his prospects weren’t as hot as he’d hoped.

Especially when she seemed intent on spitting obscenities at him, interspersed with ‘don’t-you-think-you-can-treat-me-like-this-and-get-away-with-it’ and ‘you-haven’t-heard-the-last-of-me-not-by-a-long-chalk’.

Shit.

He thought he caught other threats, including one that seemed to imply that those ivory-inlaid doors would be slammed in his face assuming he was ever foolish enough to contemplate such a move, but on the whole her tirade was drowned by his feeble (but insistent) protestations.

‘Joke, you say?’

The vindictive bitch was deaf to his excuses as she snapped on her sandals.

‘Well, if you fancy a joke, Marcus Cornelius Gigolo, how about the one that goes: You’ll pay so dearly for what you called me, you scheming bastard, you won’t have those twenty sesterces left to rub together by the time I’ve finished with you!’

With that, she slammed the door and he could hear her clip-clopping over the tiles like some old billy goat, which-having seen her by lamplight, chins sagging and her make-up streaked-she more than closely resembled.

His hands were shaking as he gathered together the rest of his possessions, grateful more than words could express for the long ride ahead. Bacchus, old boy, you are out of my life. Forever. Henceforth it’s milk for Marcus. Goat’s milk, cow’s milk, camel’s milk, dandelion bloody milk, just keep me away from the wine. He adjusted his belt and pulled tight his cloak just as Tingi knocked at the door.

Yet it was not via the door that Marcus Cornelius Orbilio finally made his exit.

It was through the open window, with Tingi’s words still ringing in his ears as he legged it towards the stables.

‘There’s a Master Gisco in the atrium. Shall I show him in?’