Dark Horse

by Marilyn Todd

  All of it eclipsed by the Villa Arcadia.

  Shaded by figs and pomegranates and ancient gnarled olives, and affording breathtaking views over the Liburnian Gulf, luxury oozed from every pore. Over the past few months (as Leo had explained at numbing length during the journey), a veritable army of builders, sculptors, painters and mosaic-makers had been brought in, no expense spared, to turn the house into a palace. Extensions had been added, gardens landscaped, every surface covered with marble or gold, and the work was not finished yet. A squad of Rome's finest artists were still beavering away, covering the walls with frescoes and such like, in preparation for Leo's forthcoming marriage.

  'I know you're eager to see my vines,' he said, as the ship docked in the only deep harbour on the island.

  Claudia flashed him her eager-to-see-vines smile as she checked out the beaches.

  'And I know you'll be equally keen to get back to supervise your own estate.'

  Claudia flashed him her keen-to-supervise-estates smile as she checked out the delightful rocky coves.

  'But I'm rather hoping I can persuade you to stay on until after my marriage festivities.'

  'We-ell. I suppose I could stretch a week or two more.' Even then you'd need a chisel to winkle me out. 'After all,' she added happily. 'Rome is rather hot at the moment.'

  So there you have it. While Rome sweltered under a vile and viscous heat, and Greeks chased shadows and the Security Police chased their own tails, Claudia Seferius would be sunning herself amid a harmonious unity of rocks, sea and

  fragrant pinewoods enrobed by sapphire seas in a sumptuous villa at the courtesy of a tall, dark, handsome aristocrat for the summer.

  A dirty job, but hey - someone has to do it.

  And besides. What's the point of having double standards, if you don't live up to both?

  Three

  The demon stirred. Its sleep had been long, but in its sleep it had grown restless. The pull of the island was strong. The island of Cressia was part of Illyria, a great land stretching from the Alps in the north across the mountains to the east, as far as the border with Thrace. A thousand years ago, the Greeks believed Istria, the heart-shaped peninsula which separated Italy from the arid shores of Dalmatia, to be the edge of the world. It was there, they thought, that the Daughters of the Evening Star dwelt in the walled Gardens of the Hesperides, protected by the hundred-headed serpent who guarded a tree of golden apples.

  A gentle legend, for a gentle country teeming with lush valleys and forests bursting with game. But the living on Istria was easy. On Cressia, as with the twelve hundred other islands in the Adriatic, life was a constant struggle for survival and there was no room for myth. Only fact.

  Cressia's history ran heavy with blood. Every inch of her soil was steeped in treachery and drenched in betrayal, chronicling stories of murder, trickery and revenge . . .

  The demon stirred and licked its lips. The pull of the island was strong. Too strong to resist any longer. It had smelled the blood of her past in its dreams. Now it wanted to taste it.

  Four

  Paradise is all very well, with its forests of laurel, cypress and beech, its wild ginger, sandy beaches and bottomless freshwater lakes, but paradise is also prone to serpents.

  'Touch me up once more, you odious little pusboil,' Claudia said, 'and I don't care how old you are, you'll be chewing your own chitterlings for supper.'

  Beside her on the dining couch, Volcar's rheumy eyes shone like twin beacons. 'Now, now, gel. Surely you wouldn't begrudge an old man one final walk down mammary lane?' 'Remind me again how you spell "yes".'

  'Trouble with you, young lady,' he chortled, 'is that you have no sense of indecency.'

  'Trouble with you, old man, is that now you've discovered where the grass is greener, you're too old to climb the bloody fence. This lawn's private property.'

  Volcar had heard about the notion of a man's four score years and ten - and had promptly spat in its eye. Shrivelled, bent and with a face like a pickled walnut, his appetite for life was undiminished. Rumour had it, the furthest he had ever been from a drink in his life was twenty paces.

  'Can't blame a fellow for trying,' he said, smacking gums as hard as mussel shells as liveried slaves filed in with the first course of baked eggs, cheeses, asparagus and truffles. 'They say a man's only as old as the woman he feels, and at my age so long as I can feel something, I know I'm still alive.'

  'You'd feel something, if you try to scale my fence again.' 'Y'know, I like you,' Volcar said. 'You've fire in your belly, gel, and I've always had a hankering for women with spunk. Not like that frosty faced fossil over there.'

  He used an asparagus spear to point to Leo's sister-in-law,

  the exquisite, immaculate, glacial Silvia, whose age was the same as Claudia's - twenty-five - whose plucked eyebrows arched in perfect symmetry. And whose honey-coloured ringlets wouldn't dare to droop, no matter what the circumstances.

  'Wouldn't think, would you, seeing them tiny tits, that Silvia was a mother of three? Here's another thing I'll bet you didn't know.' Volcar lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. 'For all her airs and graces, madam there daren't show her pretty face in Rome.'

  Didn't show it much round here, either. In the week that Claudia had been on the island, she'd barely exchanged a dozen words with the only other female in the villa. 'Because ... ?' she asked.

  'Don't know, and to tell the honest truth, gel, don't care to know more about the prissy bitch. To listen to her, though, you'd think she owned the bloody place. Huh. Gets right up my nozzholes, does Silvia.' He chewed on a succulent white truffle. 'Mind, if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say, wouldn't you, that abandoning her children might have a bearing on the scandal.'

  'You, Volcar, are a wicked old man.'

  'One who's too old for flattery, gel. Why don't you just let me feel your bum instead?'

  The small man sitting next to Silvia leaned over to his host's couch, tapped him lightly on his forearm and mumbled something Claudia couldn't hear.

  'Oh, not again!' Leo muttered. He turned to Volcar. 'Llagos tells me you're up to your old tricks again, Uncle.'

  'Me, lad? Never laid a finger on the lassie.'

  Scepticism expressed itself in a twist of the lips. 'Sorry I've left you to the randy old sod's mercy,' Leo told Claudia, as the dishes for the first course were cleared away. 'Only as the wedding draws ever closer, conversation tends to be more progress report than witty repartee.'

  Looking round the couches, Claudia tried to imagine any of the assembled party being remotely amusing. Silvia? Too selfabsorbed to waste her energies on exploring the philosophies of the meaning of life. Saunio? The fat, pretentious but brilliant artist reserved his animation for his work, while Nikias, the

  famous Corinthian portrait painter, would never use one word when none would do. Llagos the priest might be capable of levity, but his accent was invariably too heavy to follow and in any case, when he laughed, his protruding front teeth had a tendency to spit. Which just left Shamshi, Leo's personal astrologer-cum-augur. And the less that man said the better!

  Persian by birth, Shamshi retained the traditional garb of knee-length baggy trousers and shoes which tied in a bow. Like most of his people, he wore thick bands of gold in each ear, though Shamshi went one stage further and drew attention to his earrings by shaving the whole of his head apart from a small cap of black hair right on the top. What really made the hairs of Claudia's neck stand on end, though, was the way his soft, sibilant, girlie voice seemed to caress every inch of her skin. With Volcar, you knew where you were: he was forthright, outrageous and funny. Whereas Leo's human channel to the future was as slimy as you can get without leaving a trail.

  'So if I'm neglecting you, I apologize,' Leo told Claudia as the main courses were ferried in on steaming silver salvers. 'But I'm concerned the building work won't be completed in time for the wedding. Any idea when the atrium will be finished, Saunio?'

  'Tomorrow,' Rome's most
illustrious artist announced pompously. 'Tomorrow you may go in and have a look at the finished artistry, if you wish.'

  'Very kind, I'm sure.' Leo chuckled, darting an amused glance at Claudia. 'My own atrium,' he mouthed, 'and I'm not allowed to see it!'

  'It's why you commissioned the great Saunio,' the artist replied, running a podgy finger over the little curled beard that encircled his chin. 'To create magic'

  'Modest with it,' Leo murmured.

  'Modesty is for the mediocre.' The great man sniffed. 'Saunio is anything but mediocre. Note, ladies and gentlemen, how in this dining hall I have designed the painted shadows to fall away from the light entering through the double doors behind. This is because when the sun . . .'

  Volcar nudged Claudia in the ribs and nodded at Saunio.

  'I'll wager the old sod's got goat's legs and cloven hoofs under his tunic,' he muttered, slithering an oyster down his stringy throat. 'You've heard the gossip, I suppose?'

  Hadn't everyone? The maestro and his BYMs. Beautiful Young Men. Travelling around the Empire with a team of thirty junior artists, labourers and apprentices as he sold his services to anyone wealthy enough to afford his exorbitant charges, rumours were bound to spring up. Typically Saunio, the gossip could never be less than ostentatious: tales of orgies, unnatural practices, bloodthirsty rituals, the list was endless. Volcar wouldn't be the first person to liken the maestro to a satyr, not when Saunio got his barber to shave his upper and lower lips, leaving just that preposterous narrow band of dyed hair round his chin. But how much of the gossip was fiction? Claudia wondered. How much lies, put about by jealous rivals? While Saunio lectured the assembly on the principles of perspectives, his curls adhering themselves to his forehead with a mixture of perspiration and their own dye, Claudia thought, love him or loathe him, you had to hand it to the little chap, he'd built himself a monumental reputation as an artist, a reputation well deserved.

  'You don't believe those rumours?' she said.

  'Believing's got nowt to do with it, gel. What's the point of having gossip unless it's to pass on?'

  'You, old man, are incorrigible.'

  'At my time of life, I can't afford to wait for discretion to come calling.' He let out a wheezy chuckle. 'These days when I bend down to pat old Ajax here -' he ruffled the ears of the ancient hunting dog chomping on a chop bone - 'I try to find other things to do while I'm down there.'

  'Exactly how old are you?'

  'Put it this way, gel -' Volcar winkled a snail out of its shell with a loud plop - 'when I was a boy, the Dead Sea was only sick.'

  'Something funny over there?' Leo called across.

  'Do share it,' Silvia drawled, dabbling her long slender fingers in the scented water bowl. 'We could use a laugh.'

  Laugh? In six days, Claudia had not seen the Ice Queen so much as smile.

  'Silvia's right,' Leo said. 'We've had enough shop talk for tonight, let's change the subject. Any suggestions?'

  'Pirates,' Volcar said, spearing a prawn on his knife.

  Apart from Nikias, who didn't look up, the others all exchanged glances.

  'Oh, come on, Uncle,' Leo said. 'Surely we can think of a better topic to entertain our guest—'

  'Why?' the old man cut in. 'Seen 'em, haven't we? Prowling the waters out there. Heard 'em, too. That weird wailing's enough to send shivers down a dead man's spine. Like a banshee, it is, howling for blood.'

  Claudia ran her finger round the rim of her wine glass. 'Is piracy a threat?'

  'No,' Leo said, glowering at Volcar. 'We're as solidly defended as any place in the Empire. Take no notice.'

  "Course it is, gel,' Volcar said, pulling a crab claw out of its cracked shell. 'Sure, the mainland which encircles this archipelago is defended, but Rome can't do much to protect the coastline. Too deeply indented, see?'

  'You're scaring her, Uncle. Cressia's a large island and—'

  'Size don't mean diddly, lad, and you know it. In fact, I'm not sure it don't make matters worse, us being right at the head of the Adriatic as we are.' He eased another claw out of its casing. 'We're just one of twelve hundred islands, you see, gel. Them fast pirate ships can dart through the channels, in and out the inlets, and what can the Imperial Navy do? Bugger all.'

  'That's not true, Uncle, and you know it. The navy's on patrol—'

  'Sod all use that is to the poor sods who've had their crops raided, their livestock stolen, their women and children raped and carried off to be sold. Whole bloody settlements have been torched, the marauders long gone before the first imperial trireme hoves into sight.'

  The mainland. So near and yet so far . . .

  'Ignore the old buzzard,' Leo said firmly. 'Volcar, you should have been a cook, you're that good at stirring. And on the subject of cooking, Claudia, I insist you try our local

  mutton. The salty grass combined with a diet of wild herbs gives it a magnificent flavour and— What? Not leaving already, Llagos?'

  'Sorry, yess.' The little priest was shaking his robes as he slipped into his sandals. 'I hef to be up early,' he explained. 'Temple busyness.' He shot an apologetic smile at Claudia. 'Much complicated on Cressia. Because we are island, we worship the Sea God above all the others. Me, I say, Bindus, Neptune, Poseidon, what does it matter in what name we invoke his protection? For Bindus we had only humble stone altar. For Neptune we have magnificent temple now, with gold and marble and a splendiferous statue three times the height of a man. But some -' his small shoulders shrugged eloquently - 'some peoples here cannot forget the old ways. So tomorrow -' he made a salute of farewell - 'tomorrow iss one time when I must also serve the old ways, keep everyones happy. But!' He lowered his voice to a comical whisper. 'You must not tell the Romans, heh?'

  'Talking of mutton reminds me,' Leo said, barely troubling to wave the priest off. 'Tomorrow, Claudia, I must show you the vineyards. They'll knock your eyes out,' he insisted. 'I got the idea from apple trees, originally. I thought, hell, if you can espalier fruit trees along ropes for good cropping, why not vines?'

  'Excuse me?'

  'Told you it was a revolutionary technique.'

  'You don't seriously grow them sideways?' Even the slowest dunce knows grapes aren't grown laterally. Ask any vintner. They're trained horizontally on a trellis of overhead poles between elm trees.

  'Why not?' Leo laughed. 'The soil's pretty poor on Cressia, this way we can manure that more often, the goodness reaches the plants that much faster and it makes it easier to hoe round the roots to keep the soil open. I admit the grapes aren't yielding as well as I'd hoped, in fact they're twenty per cent down on what I was expecting, but still high. It's early days yet and in any case, my wine's pitched at the - well, let's say lower end of the market.'

  Produce more, sell for less, and still make a bloody good

  profit? Funny how the idea of growing them laterally didn't seem quite so stupid all of a sudden . . .

  Looking at Leo, tall, lean, with thick, dark, wavy hair and that attractive dimple in his chin, she wondered why he'd left it so long before finding a wife. Most patricians married in their early to mid-teens. Leo was thirty-six. Scooping up a juicy scallop in rich garlic sauce, she thought, you know catching him at certain angles - say, in profile, when the light is right - he looked a lot like someone else she knew. Someone she'd seen recently, in fact. Except Orbilio's hair was darker, with subtle highlights which glistened in the light. It was thicker and wavier, too, with a fringe that flopped over his face when he was angry. Also, now she thought about it, Orbilio had a funny way of spiking his hair with his fingers when he got annoyed—

  Not that she thought about it, and dammit, that bloody scallop had gone down the wrong way, too. Claudia took a long draught of chilled wine. From now on, she really must check the shellfish. It would not do to find she'd eaten a bad one.

  'Nikias,' Leo said, 'how's my painting of the Banquet of the Gods coming on?'

  Silvia let out a pointed sigh.

  'Fine,' Nikias replied, n
ot raising his eyes from his plate.

  Although theoretically a member of Saunio's team, since he was on sub-contract to the maestro on this job, Claudia disqualified the Corinthian from the BYM category on technical grounds. At thirty-eight, he was too old to be young. With an intensity of expression bordering on the hostile, he was far from pretty. Also, she did not think he was homosexual, either.

  'Still scheduled for completion next week?' Leo persisted.

  'Yep.'

  'And you don't foresee any problems with the deadline on the portrait of my bride and myself above the bed of the new marriage chamber?'

  'Nope.'

  Well, that settled that, then. As silence descended on the group, Claudia took to admiring the dining hall's splendid white marble columns garlanded with deep-blue delphiniums,

  white oleander and sulphur-yellow hibiscus. Aromatic resins crackled in wall-mounted braziers and fragrant oils burned in the dozens of lamps which hung on the walls and from tall silver stands. In this brilliant artificial light, the bronze dining couches gleamed like gold.

  Shamshi took advantage of the lull in conversation. 'Bees,' he announced, in his soft sibilant voice.

  'Bees?' everyone echoed in puzzled unison.

  'I noticed a swarm,' he said, 'travelling east. Coupled with the flight of three pigeons across the sun at midday and the fall of the bones, there is only one conclusion to be drawn.' His dark eyes fixed on Claudia. 'Before a new light is born in the sky, bad news will come over the water.'

  'Ah,' Leo said thoughtfully. 'Will it, indeed?'

  This time a longer silence descended on the diners, and Claudia wondered how much notice Leo paid to the Persian's prophecies. From what she'd seen of him, he seemed a level-headed enough chap. But then he had been resident on Cressia for several years, and on an island where dark deeds figured heavily in its past, superstition found a perfect breeding ground in a race of people isolated by the sea. How much of this hocus pocus had Leo absorbed? And how much of an influence did Shamshi exert on his patron? Leo did not strike Claudia as the imaginative type, so was it the Persian who had planted the idea of training vines in rows like soldiers? To espalier them sideways, instead of dangling them from overhead trellises? Ditto the Villa Arcadia. Architecturally, the mould had been broken here, too.