Stone Cold

Eighteen

Semir was bending earnestly over what appeared to be an empty flower bed as Claudia rounded the corner of the peristyle.

'If it's your modesty you're looking for, you left it in the atrium,' she said. 'And your mother should have warned you that wearing loincloths that tight plays hell with the circulation.'

'Thank you, Mistress Clodia.' The Babylonian grinned. 'I shall bear eet in mind.'

'As long as that's all you bare.' Those seams were stretched to breaking point.

'Eet iss my crocus I want people to gasp at,' he laughed, 'but I am hopeful.' He probed the soil with a gentle finger. 'They will flower next month, during first rains of autumn, very pretty, and over time will colonize thiss whole bed, eef eet is kept properly watered.'

'With wine?'

Semir wiped an errant braid out of his eye. 'And thees,' he said, pointing to the massed ranks of blue vervain, 'Hor say thees flowers spring from tears of his Egyptian Isis. I think maybe goddess was unhappy, yess?'

What about Hor? she wondered, sweeping on. Was he unhappy, yess, or did the artist famed throughout the whole of Alexandria find fulfilment working like a mole, with skivvies rather than trained artisans for his assistants? The closer she drew to the stream, the louder the chip-chip-chip of chisels as Paris supervised his equally unskilled labour force — but wait. It was unfair to write off Marcia's enslaved workforce as amateurs. Many were just labourers, true, but that tomb was more precious to her than anything else and she was never going to compromise immortality for the sake of workers lacking in qualifications and experience. Marcia might want the project finished quickly, but she was shrewd enough to grasp that there was nothing wrong with a well-supervised production, provided the end product was of sufficient quality. So what if Hor painted what he was told to paint and Paris shipped in mass-produced torsos and simply stuck a head on to personalize the statuary? This was what Greek sculptors had been doing from the dawn of time, and if the artwork on this tomb propelled them up the social ladder then good luck to both of them.

Near the pool, where flamingoes dabbled and sacred ibis stood in all their stately ugliness, a small girl with golden hair and big blue eyes was playing with a kitten.

'Qeb says I can keep her when she's old enough to leave her mother,' Luci said, as the kitten chased the ribbon that should have been tying the girl's hair back but was now torn to shreds. 'I shall have to smuggle her into my bedroom, though, cos Mummy says there are already too many mouths to feed as it is, and I heard her tell Uncle Hanni that half the time she's not sure she isn't raising a clutch of cuckoos, we're growing so fast.' She scooped the kitten into her arms and it started to rattle. 'I like Qeb,' she announced, 'don't you? He strokes my hair-'

'Oh, does he.'

'Yes, and it feels really nice, too, but can you keep a secret?' She put the kitten down and cupped her hand to Claudia's ear. 'He keeps a cheetah in his bedroom. I've seen it. It's lovely and smooth and has blue lizards round its neck, but Mummy says I'm not allowed in there, so you won't tell her, will you?'

Claudia tickled the kitten's little grey ears and thought about a grown man stroking a small child's hair and what exactly made Mummy ban her daughter from his quarters…

'No, I won't tell her,' she promised.

'And you're not to tell her that Qeb lets me feed live mice to his snakes, either,' Luci said. 'Shall I show you how it's done? It's ever so easy, you just hold them by the tail and drop them in the cage, then the snake eats them and you can see a big bulge where the mouse is in its tummy.'

In her arms, the kitten squirmed and Claudia didn't blame it at all.

'Maybe you can show me later,' she said. 'There's something really urgent I have to do and I'm afraid it can't wait any longer.'

A week had passed since the attempt on her life in the Temple of Augustus. A week in which her would-be executioner believed she thought she'd had a lucky escape from a freak accident, because, hey, that's building sites for you, these things happen. The hell they did. But revenge, as women everywhere will tell you, is a dish that's best served cold, and what better time to start dishing up than when the target is off guard? Waiting was the hard part. When someone tries to kill you and you not only know who, but also why, there's a great temptation to rush in and start tearing livers and lungs out with your bare hands. It had taken every ounce of Claudia's self-control to let the killer think they'd got away with it, but the time had finally come to turn the tables. However, before those tables could start moving, there were three things she had to lay her hands on first.

'What are they?' Luci asked.

Claudia told her.

Luci laughed.

Having finished work for the afternoon, half a dozen slave girls tumbled out of the back door of the villa and ran arm in arm towards the stream, giggling and gossiping as they did every day. Since one peeled vegetables in the kitchens, another cleaned the bath house, a third aired the Mistress's linens and so on, this was the first time today that they'd met up, and with so many people coming in and out, as well as the extra workers employed on the tomb, the girls were never short of who-did-whats, you'll-never-guesses and you-won't-belie ve-what-old-so-and-so-said-when-he-thought-my-back-was-turneds.

Down the hill they ran, exchanging tittle-tattle, embellishing rumours, until they reached the river bank. Throwing off their soft cotton tunics, they let out their customary squeals as they jumped into waters that had been heated by the sun. Soon, they were joined by other slave girls from the villa and, in no time, everyone was horsing about in the reeds.

They had no idea that sharp eyes followed every movement.

The swinging of wet hair. The way they tipped their heads back when they laughed. They way they shrieked when dainty toes collided with sharp rocks.

The Watcher sighed. Having scoured the local villages and picked out the very best, it was depressing to see how many young women were left whose bodies were already ravaged by poverty, childbirth and diet. At least these girls would still have their teeth by the time they were thirty. Nourishment was never an issue at the villa. In fact, looking at them splashing about in the river, many were already overweight. The Watcher's lips turned down as ripples of fat bounced about in the water. They were almost as bad as the skinny ones, whose hipbones stuck out through their skin. That one has a squint. That one has warts. The redhead has a nose you could launch ships from, and will you look at the breasts on the blonde one! The Watcher shuddered. It was grotesque, breasts that big, absolutely revolting. On a par with the one who keeps pulling her hair out, strand by irritating strand. Yes, we all know it's caused by anxiety, but a woman of twenty going bald? Disgusting.

But for all that, there were many bathers whose beauty was ripe, unblemished by physical disfigurement and not despoiled by the march of time. Unfortunately, it was just not possible to take girls this close to the villa. The Watcher frowned. With the villa out of bounds and the villages depleted, where else could be found the perfection that was so crucial to the cause?

Walking up the hill from the menagerie and leaving Luci with her kitten, Claudia listened to the squeals and splashes of a group of young women making the most of the late-afternoon sunshine.

Passing a stand of stately silver birches, she felt a cold chill ripple down her spine.

Someone's watching me.

She turned, but none of the undergrowth moved. Ridiculous! If it was the Scarecrow she'd have heard a churr from a magpie, a squawk from a pheasant, a grouse from a grouse. It was nothing. Just Claudia's imagination working overtime, because Marcia's huntsmen had returned empty-handed, the dogs having lost his spoor again. The Scarecrow was unlikely to strike again so quickly after such a narrow escape. He'd feel threatened by the hunt, not emboldened. She was simply overreacting.

The Watcher's eyes followed the familiar bounce of Claudia's ringlets as she resumed her march back up the hill, the luscious curve of her breasts, the unlined skin around her neck, the moist red lips and finely arching brows.

Now that — the Watcher's pulse quickened — now that, my friend, is perfection…