Stone Cold

Thirteen

Orbilio opened one eye, felt a stab of white pain bounce off the back of his skull and quickly closed it again. So, then. Not dead. As far as he knew there was no sunshine in Hades — and he didn't imagine it was filled with pretty girls with apple cheeks and liquid black eyes pressing their young, firm breasts against his arm as they mopped his brow, either!

'Where am I?'

The first time he awoke, he truly believed himself to be in the Halls of the Dead. Through misty vision and great waves of nausea, monsters and giants closed in on him. Dwarves and serpents gurned in the flickering torchlight. The second time he awoke, he realized they were painted plaques. Grotesque, but harmless, in fact the very opposite of harmless, but it hadn't been the most auspicious moment to be introduced to the Gaulish custom of sticking gargoyles on the wall to scare off any evil spirits who tried to enter the house.

'Sssh,' his ministering angel cooed. 'Lie still and rest, my lord. You're all right now.'

She could have fooled him. His head pounded, his brain was on fire and every tooth in his jawbone was screaming. 'Someone hit me,' he said.

'Yes, me.'

She laid a cold compress over his forehead, drenched with healing comfrey and witch hazel, and at the same time contrived to press another warm breast against his shoulder. The feeling was not altogether unpleasant, even allowing for the pain in his head.

'Would it be too much of an imposition to ask why?' Vaguely he remembered the stakeout in the boatyard. Witnessing the senseless murder of the nightwatchman and a child being smuggled ashore. After that, though, things started to get a bit hazy.

'Well, if I hadn't clobbered you with that lump of wood, my lord,' she said matter-of-factly, 'they'd have killed you like they did Rintox.'

'Rintox being the nightwatchman?'

Even the simplest deduction sent daggers into his brain, slicing it into a thousand pieces.

'He was a lazy git and no mistake,' the girl said, wringing out the cloth for another compress that she placed behind his ear. 'That's why my stepfather hired him, and it's why he wouldn't have no dog in the yard, neither. Said if you had the right guard dog, you could never turn your back on the bugger, and if you had one you could turn your back on, then it weren't worth the trouble of keeping. But no one deserves to die like Rintox did, do they? Can you try to sit up, my lord? I've got a potion here what'll put paid to the queasiness.'

As she plumped the cushions behind his back, he smelled the same scent he'd smelled last night in the boatyard, and now he remembered where he'd inhaled it before.

'You're the boatbuilder's daughter.'

Like everyone else in the yard, he'd been too distracted by bouncing breasts, swaying hips and the flash of her shapely calves to notice the girl's face, and he felt his cheeks burn with the shame.

'Stepdaughter, my lord.' She held the mug to his lips. 'You won't get me calling that bastard Dad — now look, this stuff ain't nice, but do drink it all if you can.'

The shattered mush that was his brain slowly reassembled itself. 'The anonymous note in my room? That was you?'

'Certainly was. Come on, you can do better than that, my lord. That's the ticket.'

'Mother of Tarquin!' His eyes were streaming from the vile brew. 'What is this stuff?'

'Told you it weren't very nice, and frankly you don't wanna know what it is. Now then,' She sat on the bed and leaned earnestly towards him, 'what are we going to do about them child-peddling bastards, my lord?'

'We,' he groaned, 'aren't going to do anything.'

He stared at the grimacing monsters covering the walls, felt the bitter aftertaste of her concoction strip the taste buds from his tongue and gingerly explored the swelling behind his left ear. Right now, he wasn't sure Rintox hadn't got off rather lightly and was immediately ashamed of his thoughts. Rintox's death was no joking matter. He might have been lazy, as Black Eyes here said, but sloth is no motive for murder. Rintox didn't deserve to die in terror and pain, any more than his family deserved to have their lives ruined, either.

'You are going stay here and carry on as usual,' he told her firmly. 7 am going to take this up with the authorities.'

'Oh, no.'

Black Eyes folded militant arms over her breasts.

'Oh, no, you bloody don't, my lord. For one thing, I ain't staying a minute longer under the same roof as that fleshpeddling creep, and while me Mam won't hear a word said against the dirty bugger she'll find out soon enough what he's like, so I won't lose no sleep over that. And for a second '

She paused only to plunge the cloth into a bowl of cold water redolent with hyssop and comfrey and wring it out as though it were a chicken's neck.

'For a second,' she said, slapping it on to his forehead, 'I'd be very careful who I told about this, if I was you. I mean, it ain't poor folk who can afford tender young flesh, if you gets my drift, and I'm pretty sure, from the odd bits I've overheard, that there's some powerful people involved here.'

'Like who?'

'Well, if I knew that, I'd have told you in me note, wouldn't I!'

Orbilio was plunged back to his childhood, to the times when he'd been stuck in bed with mumps or the itching pox. The family nurse hadn't had much use for meekness, either.

'I suppose the only thing in our favour,' she said, 'is that the bastards don't know we're on to them-'

'I do wish you'd stop saying "we".'

'Why?' Her liquid black eyes widened in incomprehension that it could possibly be any other way. 'We're a team, ain't we?'

'No,' he sighed wearily, 'we are not a team.'

Or at least that's what he would have said, had his face not been muffled by two soft, warm bosoms.

'Glad we got that settled, then,' Black Eyes announced cheerfully. 'Now upsy-dupsy, my lord. Let's get your old head bandaged up, cos we can't have you here when me Mam gets home, can we? That's the ticket.'

With a brisk flick of the wrist, she tipped the water from the bowl out of the window.

'Which is the quickest way to your place, d'you reckon?'

For the female pheasant strutting proudly across the woodland clearing with a string of chicks in tow, the appearance of yet another predator to deplete her brood was met with a series of almighty squawks followed by a good few indignant clucks as it became obvious that the predator in question was not stalking her. Further on, a robin fluttered from the forest floor into the safety of the branches overhead and the rapid whirr of wingbeats into a bramble thicket testified to the nervousness of a pair of dunnocks.

But the Scarecrow had grown used to this and didn't notice the slithering of an adder from the stone on which it had been basking, or the chatter of a squirrel as it dropped the acorn it had been nibbling between its paws to scamper up the oak tree in a blur of rusty red. The Scarecrow was watching out for other things.

By crouching down and pulling back an overhang of dog rose, one was afforded an excellent view up the gently rolling hill to the meadow where the horses pastured. Their sweat carried on the summer breeze, rich but not unpleasant, as did their snickering and snorts, the swishing of their tails and the crunch of grass being pulled up in clumps by soft, prehensile lips. They were fine horses, some of the best, but the Scarecrow had not risked everything in creeping this close to the villa in order to sit and watch a herd of grazing animals.

The overhang of dog rose gently fell back into place and the Scarecrow moved on, to a view through a patch of gorse to the adjacent meadow. Here, the grass was still long and lush, and this was where the horses would be moved to next, once the paddock they were feeding in had been cropped back. Right now, though, it was full of squealing children, five of them to be precise, twin boys aged eight, a girl perhaps one year older and another girl a few years younger, plus a tot as naked as the day that he was born and browner than a stack of berries. From the noise they were making, you could be forgiven for thinking there were twenty-five rolling down the bank, not just five, and the reason they were shrieking was the antics of a middle-aged man in a purple-striped tunic with a clump of feathers pinned to his breast.

The Scarecrow watched as the man, lean and tanned and fit and strong, played Wolf with them, his patience never straining at the constant repetition or the increasing number of grass stains that were accumulating on his tunic, or the fact that the littlest one found that the surest way to attract the man's attention was to pull his hair. It was a fine head of hair, the Scarecrow thought. White at the temples, admittedly, but no signs of thinning, and his energies didn't diminish as he strode round the meadow, growling and snarling and gobbling the children up, or jumping out from behind trees and scaring them witless. The Scarecrow noted how easily he incorporated the noises floating up from the menagerie into the game. The reverberating snarl of the cheetah; the mewing of peacocks; the gibbering of monkeys and parrots.

Then suddenly a small child with hair of gold and eyes as big and blue as a full summer moon came running into the meadow, her little Roman robe billowing out like a pink cloud as she hurtled down the hill.

'Uncle Hanni!'

When she threw her little arms round the man's neck and smacked her rosebud lips against his weathered cheek the Scarecrow felt something churn inside.

'Uncle Hanni, you're home!'

'Am I?' The man spun round, looking over this shoulder, then beyond that, until he finally spotted his own shadow. 'So I am, little Luci,' he declared. 'So I am!'

'I've seen Qeb's cheetah. It's really scary, but ever so, ever so pretty. It's got emeralds for eyes and it's all enamelled, and it's got a blue collar round its neck of shiny lapsed lizards.'

'I think you might mean lapis lazuli, and I think you might also have been poking this ' he gave the child's nose a gentle tweak — 'in places where it doesn't belong. Did Qeb say you could go sneaking around in his quarters?'

'You won't tell Mummy, will you, Uncle Hanni? Only last time I got caught playing in somebody's room she made me scrub the latrines, clean out the pig-pen and I had to shuck peas for a whole week.'

'I hope you washed your hands before shelling those peas.'

'Promise you won't tell?'

'Very well, young Luci,' the man said, laying a hand over the feathers pinned to his chest. 'I swear I won't breathe a word of your indiscretions to your mother.'

'Thank you, Uncle Hanni, oh, thank you, thank you!' A shower of wet kisses descended upon him. 'Now can we play pirates? Please can we?'

'We'll have to put it to the vote.' He turned to the other five, knowing their eager eyes had already lit up. 'What d'ye say, me hearties? Do we let this 'orrible wretch join our rebel gang, or shall we make 'er walk the plank?'

Filled with shame and an uncontrollable sense of selfloathing, the Scarecrow turned back into the woods.

Whilst fighting off a gang of slave traders with one hand and stamping out fires on the oar deck with the other, Hannibal noticed a flock of doves take off from the woods down in the valley. At the same time, half a dozen rooks rose from the tree-tops, then circled noisily.

'Break out the mainsail, men! Stay the foremast, set the sprit, put the cat out!'

The rooks settled. The pigeons were nowhere in sight. The horses in the next meadow grazed contentedly.

'Why, shiver me timbers, if that isn't the Minotaur!' he yelled, drawing an imaginary sword as one of the estate dogs wandered into the paddock and cocked his leg against a poplar. 'After him, men! Don't let the brute get away!'

With a series of bloodcurdling shrieks, Hannibal's pirate gang tumbled up the hillside behind him.

In her bed, the old woman clutched at her heart. The pain was horrendous, but the old woman didn't mind. However long she had to endure it, this was nothing compared to the agony of knowing that her granddaughter would never set foot inside this house again, or the terrible imaginings that tortured her when she thought about what her darling must have endured during her final moments on earth.

'I'm coming,' she cried. 'I am coming to join you, my angel.'

She wanted to curse the fiend that had snatched this beautiful child from a golden future and denied her the happiness she so richly deserved — a loving husband, a house filled with the laughter of children, the right to grow up and grow old with loved ones and friends — oh, how she wanted to curse this vile monster, but her ancient body was failing her. There was no breath left in her to call on the gods, but surely the Shining One, who saw everything, would take pity on her? Surely the Hammer God would strike out for vengeance?

'May your evil bones never be buried,' was all she could rasp, as the pain clawed ever deeper into her heart. 'May your black soul never rest!'

In the final throes of her spasm, the very last gift that her granddaughter had given her fell from the bed on to the floor. Typically thoughtful, it was a carving made from ivory of a wolfhound, just like the hound the old woman used to keep when she and her man were first married. The old woman had wanted to die clutching this gift as something she could show the God of the Underworld, that he might see how beautiful her angel was on the inside, as well as the outside. Now she would just have to tell him, but the Horned One was patient, as well as a good listener. Through pains that rent and twisted her frail, shrivelled body, the old woman was content that her angel would be reborn in goodness and light. Mustering one final breath, she called one name.

'Esus!'

Esus, the Blood God, because those who he slayed or were slain in his name were condemned to eternal torment.

In the corner, layers of dust faded the bright colours of the baskets woven by her granddaughter and made grey the pillow where she'd laid her lovely head.