Widow's Pique

One

'Alms! Alms for a poor blinded cripple!'

'Help an old leper, sir, won't you?'

The beggars' pleas carried like midwinter winds — some high-pitched and keening, reminiscent of blizzards, others deeper and low, like the northerlies that keep the earth frozen — and every last one echoed with the bleakness of their existence. Pushing through the huddle of begging bowls and gruel-stained rags, Claudia shielded herself from the April drizzle with her veil. At night, these lined, empty faces would huddle in doorways or seek shelter in the lee of the towering warehouses lining the wharves, but the minute day broke, they swarmed to the approach roads, seeking alms from the multitude who flocked into Rome every day. Merchants, poets, philosophers and sightseers; foreigners, furriers and farmers. The Ostia Gate on the Ides was no exception.

'Can you spare us a copper?'

'Ease an old soldier's war wound!'

Many of the injuries were fake. That amputated leg, for example, would be a lot more convincing if the beggar had put blood on the inside of the bandage and tied his ankle higher up the thigh so you didn't see his foot when he hopped. But ribs poking through flesh testified to the authenticity of most of the claims. As did the stench of festering ulcers. 'Clear off, you scabrous scum, you!'

The crack of a bull whip cleared a path for a rich man's litter to pass through.

'Out of the way, you old crone!'

A young blade on horseback was equally unimpressed with poverty and destitution.

Claudia stared down at the child sitting cross-legged in front of the gates. When darkness fell, these huge wooden doors would be cranked wide to admit the wheeled traffic that was prohibited during the daytime, the city streets being congested enough. But right now they remained barred and the girl sat in silence, with a resignation far beyond her eight years, her battered bronze bowl held out in front of her, her empty eye sockets fixed patiently upwards.

Claudia pushed on through the crush. Stopped. Then turned back. Girls, she thought. It was always the girls…

Vaguely, she was aware of a patrol unit marching beneath the arch in military precision, their breastplates and greaves jangling, the plumes on their helmets bobbing as they splashed left-right-left through the puddles. Of a black stallion pulling up sharply, its booted rider dismounting. Of water-bearers, beasts of burden, a priest in his chariot, of mourners taking flowers to a grave out of town, a flock of geese being herded to market. But these things were a blur. Claudia saw only this little mite's parents deliberately blinding their daughter, that she might keep them for the rest of their lives You shouldn't have given the child so much silver, a voice chided. It only encourages other bastards to mutilate their babies.

I can't help it, Claudia told the voice inside her head. The kid shouldn't suffer for the brutality of her own parents, the load was heavy enough.

They'll only drink it away, the voice argued. Then beat her, because she's not bringing home enough money.

I know, I know. The bruises showing through the rips in her rain-sodden tunic were as angry as they were fresh. But 'You'd have been better off giving her a good meal.'

Claudia spun round. Since when did the voice of reason start interrupting?

'Here you go.' A warm pie was pressed into the child's tiny hand and was met with a smile as wide as the Tiber.

'Veal and ham, with a honey cake and a couple of figs for afters.'

Dammit, she should have recognized the boots, if not the black stallion.

'Now what, pray, brings the Security Police out on a morning like this?' she asked sweetly. 'Pneumonia?'

Marcus Cornelius Orbilio kept his expression solemn. 'No, I'm saving that for a special occasion.'

His dark, wavy mop nodded in the general direction of the coast.

'I've been sorting out a communications problem with one of our senators.'

The drizzle had eased off and, through a gap in the clouds, the watery sun glinted on the flecks in his hair and she caught a whiff of his sandalwood unguent even above the stench of poverty and destitution, and the acid sweat of his mount. No amount of expensive cologne could disguise the smell of the predator, though.

'It's the Emperor's fault,' he continued. 'He shouldn't have said how he championed large families, citizen numbers being in sharp decline and all that. Sooner or later someone was bound to misunderstand.'

Orbilio grinned wickedly as he held up four fingers.

'And take it to mean wives, instead of children.'

'That situation didn't require intervention on the part of the authorities,' Claudia retorted. 'With four mothers-in-law, your senator would quickly have realized his mistake.'

'Maybe so, but what worried us was that he's got To Whom It May Concern inscribed on his marriage contract.'

Good looks, charm, intelligence and wit. Standard issue among the aristocracy, and with Orbilio the only patrician in the Security Police, the combination was exceptionally deadly. But did he really think she was stupid? A serial bigamist stalking the Senate, indeed. Young, dedicated and bitterly ambitious, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio had only one thought in his oh-so-handsome head. Promotion. And how better to grease the rungs of his professional ladder than by a clampdown on smuggling, forgery, tax evasion and — what was that other thing she was involved in? Oh yes, fraud.

'Perhaps I could escort you to wherever you're going?' he asked with deceptive mildness.

'That's terribly sweet of you, but my litter's right behind. I just wanted to stretch my legs for a while.'

'Litter?' he murmured.

'Tch, have they got left behind in the crush? I shall have to sack that head bearer. The man's hopeless.'

'Stretch your legs?'

He wasn't giving up.

'Cramp, you know. Terrible thing. Unfortunately, it runs in the family.'

'Don't you mean limps?'

'I-'

'Ahhh.' A well-upholstered Arab with eyes as cold as marble appeared at her elbow. 'Meestress Seferius.'

Damn.

'Punctual, as usual, I notice.'

He performed a sequence of obsequious gestures with automatic correctness, but his hard gaze never left hers.

'You hef my money?'

She'd left it too late and now the long arm of the law was draped nonchalantly over its saddle, with a sly smile on its face.

'Me?' she flashed, twirling her cloak to conceal the stuffing of a fat purse into an even fatter outstretched hand.

With a muffled chink, both disappeared into the folds of his long, flowing robes faster than a bubble could pop.

'I think you have the wrong woman.'

Claudia had nothing against naked ambition. Provided it wasn't at her expense.

'Of course, of course, so sorry to hef troubled you.'

The Arab shot a sharp glance at her companion before backing away with practised unctuousness.

'Wasn't that Anpu the moneylender?' Orbilio murmured, stroking his stallion's muzzle.

'No idea. The fellow was a complete stranger to me.'

'I could have sworn that was the same Anpu who takes on gambling debts, but maybe I'm wrong. After all, everyone knows that gambling's illegal and, in any case, you told me you weren't doing that any more.'

Ah, but I didn't say I'd be doing it any less.

'Yes, well, you needn't worry your pretty head about me,' she told him. 'I'll be leaving Rome for a while.'

'Business or pleasure?' he asked, keeping a close watch on Anpu's oiled curls as they snaked their way through the crowd.

Claudia ignored the implication that Rome had suddenly become too hot to handle.

'Hardly pleasure,' she sniffed.

Instead of settling down to a long, hot, lazy summer stuffed with five lots of games, a dozen festivals and more feasts and processions than you could shake a stick at 'I'll be stuck in some dire little outpost at the edge of the Empire.'

'Really?'

Yes, she thought. Really. And now maybe he'd find some real criminals to chase, instead of hounding innocent widows.

'The King of the Histri wants me to supply him with wine-'

'Wait.'

Orbilio squeezed his eyes shut and massaged the bridge of his nose.

'Wait. You're telling me that the King of Histria… wants to buy your wine?'

'I'll have you know, my late husband worked long and hard to make Seferius wine synonymous with quality!'

And since no king, not even one ruling over a backward bunch of tribesmen on the furthest confines of the Empire, serves cheap plonk at his banquets, the Histri could do a whole lot worse than import their vintages from what were now her Etruscan vineyards.

'Yes. Absolutely. Why wouldn't royalty…?'

He let his voice trail off as he reached into his saddlebag and brought out an apple for his horse. The apple was a bit wrinkly on one side, but the stallion wasn't bothered about that. Its crunching deafened her ears.

'Still,' he murmured, 'I'm wondering whether you mightn't be mistaken in thinking Histria is some dreary little backwater.'

Claudia shot him a condescending smile.

'I might have my faults, Orbilio, but being wrong isn't one of them.'

And she ought to know whether Histria was dire or not! For a start, she'd had trouble finding the bloody place. In fact, it had taken much poring over of a rather smelly leather map from her late husband's account box, not to mention some help from her steward, before she eventually located the horrid little territory, but there it was. That tiny peninsula sticking out into the Adriatic like an insolent tongue.

'You tell me that isn't going to be barren and boring, covered in scrub, and with rocks bleached white by a blistering sun!'

'Very well. It isn't barren and boring and covered-'

'Sarcasm is beneath you, Orbilio.'

'Then we're making progress. Previously, you've given the impression that not even the lowliest worm was inferior to me.'

'I believe I said slug slime, but that isn't the point. Histria was dragged kicking and screaming into the Empire, and the pages of their history books are still dripping with blood.'

'Strange, but I was under the impression they were our friends.'

'Which only goes to show what kind of company you keep, Marcus Cornelius.'

But the Histri weren't just bloodthirsty, they were stupid as well. After one raid too many on their imperially protected neighbours (and the fact that they would insist on sinking Roman cargo ships), the Senate was left with no option but to declare war. For once, though, superior weaponry and battlefield tactics proved no match for guerilla tactics. The legionaries were trounced in the very first skirmish. Yet instead of giving chase and finishing them off, the tribesmen fell on the wine which had been left behind in the rout. Come the second wave, they were too drunk to lift so much as a fly swat against the invaders. The frontier was pushed out overnight.

What troubled Claudia was that Histrian brutality was ingrained. They could argue until they went hoarse that their motives had been noble, because they had no way of telling what savagery the Roman army might be capable of — but, by Croesus, Claudia would never call throwing innocent women and children over the city walls to their deaths a favour. Not in a million lifetimes.

'Five generations under the eagle,' she said. 'Butchers under the skin.'

'I'll concede their track record in public relations leaves a lot to be desired,' Orbilio said, exchanging three copper quad-rans for a bag of raisin-and-cinnamon buns, 'and you can take it from me the Histri are cunning, they're sneaky and they're all double-dealers — but surely, Mistress Seferius, by your standards, those are their plus points?'

Claudia shot him a glare that would have frozen the Sahara, but unfortunately he was bending forward to adjust something on his stallion's harness, with the result that a root cutter from the country took the full force of her scorn. Rhizomes and bulbs bounced over the highway like hailstones, but the cutter was scuttling away far too fast to concern himself with his loss.

Biting into one of the warm, spicy buns, Claudia thought what the hell. Who cares that, until only recently, Histria and piracy were like husband and wife, with little solid evidence that a divorce had gone through? A few weeks of misery was nothing compared to what she'd gain at the end — and let's face it, she'd been on worse trade expeditions!

As sultanas and cinnamon exploded in a fusion of hot, honeyed sweetness, she let her thoughts drift back to last Monday, when a letter bearing the royal seal of a woodpecker encircled by a rainbow was delivered by messenger to her house. The letter was a surprise in itself, but — even more of a shock — it was accompanied by a pair of ivory figurines, three pure white calcite bowls, a bronze mirror whose handle was shaped like a cat, two silver platters engraved with dragons and snakes, half a dozen brightly coloured woven rugs and a counterpane of arguably the finest damask Claudia had ever clapped eyes on. Oh yes. And enough sweetmeats to feed a family of fifty until Saturnalia! Spearing one of the exquisite white truffles preserved in extra virgin olive oil that His Majesty had sent her, she'd broken the seal of the scroll.

To the Lady Claudia, warmest greetings from his Imperial Highness, Ruler of the Forty Capes, Master of the Hundred Islands, King of all the Lands from the Mountains of the…

Blah, blah, blah.

… son of Dol the Just, grandson of Lijac the Invincible, great-grandson of..

Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.

… begat by Svarog the Sun God, Master of the Heavens, who rides the sky in his chariot of diamonds…

She skipped through never-ending sheafs of parchment.

… deep regret that, due to personal illness, his Omnipotence is unable to travel to Rome to call upon the Lady Claudia in person..

Don't worry about that, chum, the gifts more than compensate.

… especially in this most fecund of seasons, when the corn is in full growth and the vines are sprouting…

What a windbag. Aha! Here we go! Right at the end.

… kindly requests that the Lady honour him with a visit to his Kingdom, in order that a certain contract might be drawn up between His Royal Highness and Herself, binding their two parties in mutual agreement.

Certain — she'd rolled the words around on her tongue with another white truffle — contract. Certain contract. Contract certain. That was when she'd reached for that old ox-hide map and found Histria (eventually!) at the junction of Alps, Adriatic and Pannonian plains.

'It's where mountains meet sea, east meets west, civilization meets barbarism,' she told Marcus, through a mouthful of bun. 'Can you seriously think of a better place for a young widow to set out on the road to rebuilding her fortunes?'

'None whatsoever,' he said cheerfully, lifting himself into the saddle and tossing the bag of pastries down to her.

'The challenge of a crossroads is always exciting.'

Her eyes narrowed in deep suspicion. 'You mean that?'

He gave his stallion's neck a firm and reassuring pat.

'I'd have thought you knew me well enough by now to know that Marcus Cornelius always means what he says.'

'Hm.'

'So when he says that whenever Claudia Seferius comes to a crossroads, one road will unquestionably lead to trouble, another to mayhem and the third to chaos and ruin, you can be absolutely sure that he means it.'

He clicked his heels and the horse set off at a trot.

'I just hope you choose the right road this time,' he called over his shoulder.

She threw the buns. Naturally. But he'd timed it so he'd be out of range.