Dark Horse

by Marilyn Todd

  It was probably the light from the oil lamps flickering on the water, but Saunio's reflection made him appear even more squat and reptilian than usual tonight. Almost an allegory of depravity to fit the rumours.

  'Illusion,' he said. 'That is the path for the artist to follow.'

  'Wrong.' With a jerk of her thumb, Claudia indicated the exit. 'That is the path for the artist to follow. Goodbye.'

  Shamshi was waiting, hands folded, outside the entrance to the dining hall. He was no longer wearing his baggy green trousers, but an ankle-length kaftan with a deep and richly embroidered hem. The brilliant artificial lights glinted off the thick hoops in his ears.

  'Claudia.'

  'Well, if it isn't Uncle Happy, the kiddies' pet.'

  His mouth stretched a fraction sideways, the closest it came to a smile. 'Dear child, I need to speak with you,' he began, but at that point, Nikias turned the corner.

  'Imparting your latest prediction?' he asked, and Claudia wondered whether she'd caught a flash of mischief in his eyes, or whether it was a trick of the flickering lamplight.

  'I tried to tell her, Nik,' Shamshi said, his sibilant voice treacly with smugness. 'Earlier this afternoon, I tried to tell Claudia what I'd read in the entrails of my goat.'

  The portrait painter grimaced. 'Stick to books, old man. Not so messy.' To Claudia, he said, 'Coming?'

  'We will join you in a minute,' Shamshi said, indicating in no uncertain terms that the conversation was private. Nikias responded with an as-you-wish nod, but Claudia had a different idea on how to spend her evening. It did not include Persian gut-gazers. But as she swept past, a bony hand clamped over her shoulder and stopped her dead in her tracks.

  'Listen,' he whispered, and his mouth was so close that his breath wafted her hair and the scent of it was as sweet as an overripe melon. 'I bring you a warning.'

  Even though she shook his grip free, the memory of his fingers lingered on her skin like a burn. And he still didn't smell of cinnamon, dammit.

  'This morning at dawn,' he said, 'I cast the bones, inspected the entrails, searched the skies for the signs until finally the gods spoke.'

  'Until finally the goats spoke, you mean.'

  'Do not mock what you do not understand,' he snapped. 'Heed my warning. Before the sun stands thrice more over our heads, a woman shall die.'

  Did her heart miss a beat there? 'I thought your omens couldn't foretell death? Only "disaster"?' Funny how the rules change to suit the occasion.

  'Vivid portents can never be ignored,' Shamshi said. 'The signs are as clear as though they were written in stone. Before the sun stands thrice more over our heads, it is decreed that a woman shall die.' He leaned towards her, his dark eyes searching her face. 'Take care, Claudia. Take very good care. Danger lurks among us tonight.'

  Seventeen

  Tall as a Dacian, lean as an athlete, bronzed as Apollo himself, Jason stood on the deck of his warship the Soskia, gazing up at the stars. Overhead was Draco, the Dragon, snaking its way between the Great Bear and the Little Bear in the way dragons do, its fiery mouth snarling at Vega, brilliantly defiant in the zenith above. Draco was the hundred-headed serpent who had guarded the golden apples in the Gardens of the Hesperides. It was said that each mouth of the dragon spoke a different tongue.

  Jason turned his gaze past the black brailed sails towards the eastern horizon, but the heat haze prevented even a glimpse of Pegasus galloping through the night sky. There would be no rumble of celestial hooves tonight, Jason thought. No thunder, no lightning, the weather was settled. No rain would fall in these parts for some weeks.

  The fires which flared along the Liburnian waterfront would have to be doused with seawater.

  The Soskia, Greek for 'moth', was anchored too far out to discern any of the frantic activity or hear the shouts and the screams.

  Moths do well to keep clear of flames.

  'Ale?' rumbled a gruff voice in his ear.

  Jason turned to see Geta, his stocky, red-headed helmsman, holding out a horn beaker of foaming black beer. Until the first swig hit his tongue, he hadn't realized he'd been thirsty. Raucous laughter bellowed up from the closed deck below, the clink of mugs, the tang of fermented grain. Guards patrolled the upper deck and sentries kept watch from the wales.

  As Jason gulped down his ale, the helmsman studied his captain.

  Unlike other Scythians, Geta included, there was no Asiatic slant to Jason's eye. Aye, but then Jason were warrior caste, Geta thought, an expert swordsman, at home with scimitar, lance and battleaxe. Depending on who you listened to, he were either the by-blow of a prince or the bastard of a Trebizond merchant. Jason never let on, but then he wouldn't. Men from the Caucasus don't talk much.

  But Jason's history were common knowledge on account of his ma being a priestess, like. One of fifty who served the moon goddess Acca. Foreigners called 'em Amazons, since Acca's priestesses bore arms for certain rituals, and that were how Jason came to be a warrior. Through the temple.

  Like Geta's, the captain's body was also covered top to toe in tattoos. They were Scythians. Weren't given no choice. But every man's brands were unique. Up Jason's arms flew Tahiti's sacred crane and Acca's sacred wryneck bird. On his thighs galloped the horse sacred to Targitaos the sun god, while his totem clan, the bull, shielded Jason's chest from evil. Dzoulemes, the sharp-sighted lynx, kept watch on his back.

  Geta were from the Danube delta, so it were natural that his totem were the water serpent. His father were a boatman, aye, and his father before him, and Geta had absorbed the complexities of the Danube's watery labyrinth with his mother's milk. Before he were ten, he could navigate its tortuous channels. At fifteen he'd progressed to working the trade ships round the Black, Aegean and Ionian seas. By eighteen, he could read clouds and the behaviour of seabirds, were able to predict when storms would whip up, and where, and knew the best refuges to run to.

  Piracy were the obvious step. Blindfold, he could circumnavigate them blue ice floes cast adrift from Russian rivers - what some called the clashing rocks. Likewise, that strange cluster of islands in the Sea of Marmora, round whose cliffs the winds turned without warning. Geta had had many a rich picking off the wrecks around them! Only then that bloody Roman Emperor started interfering, didn't he? Aye, and buggered up a smashing little earner. Armed bloody escorts to protect the merchant fleet. What kind of life's that, when a

  man's not even given chance to plunder the wrecks? When Geta heard the Soskia was recruiting, he jumped. Plunder, he reckoned, might not be so hard to come by under a fellow Scythian!

  Precisely what a fellow Scythian were doing here, Geta neither knew nor cared, but he knew a shrewd move when he saw one. For all their highfalutin ideas, the Romans understood bugger all about the nations they'd conquered. Just cos an eagle flies in the sky, it don't follow that every creature on the ground is a mouse! They might pay lip service to this Roman legislature, but beneath the surface, the people round the Adriatic resented subjugation. Bitterly. Which, Geta reflected, tipping back the last of his ale, added up to an awful lot of bitter people.

  Illyria was a bloody big place. Hundreds of tribes, stretching from Liburnia in the north to Dalmatia in the south, as well as twelve hundred sodding islands in between. And when you start totting 'em up, that's an awful lot of people paying taxes to an Emperor they've never seen, sending sons to wars they'd never heard of. The problem had always been how to shake off the yoke. How could these disgruntled souls, too widely scattered to muster a co-ordinated attack, ever rid themselves of their oppressors?

  All the while they passed sesterces in place of their old coins and bent their knee to Neptune instead of Bindus, resentment seethed. It seethed and simmered, simmered and seethed, the pressure building up, up, up like a volcano. Who did these foreigners think they were, storming in and dividing up the land among themselves? What right had bloody Romans to strip it from the people who owned it? How come the very people who'd worked this land for generations sud
denly become enslaved to strangers overnight?

  Aye, Geta weren't half glad he were Scythian, not part of the Empire. Them what resisted were executed, else they became chattels to the very men who'd seized their own farms from them in the first place. Slaves! Geta spat over the side of the rail. Bought and sold like bloody sheep, without rights, without respect, without a say in their own fucking destiny! Troublemakers were castrated or put to work on the treadmill

  cranes, six at a time, so what could the ordinary man do? Not one damn thing.

  Until one man - Azan - began to move among his people.

  Always wary of the dark ways of the informer, Azan listened to their grievances, reassured the dissatisfied that they were not alone, that others baulked at the same injustice. Above all, he gave the buggers hope. They did not have to suffer, he told them, freedom was within their grasp. The same freedom their Dacian neighbours enjoyed to the east, and the Scythians beyond, and the Cappadocians and Armenians beyond that.

  Hearts began to stir. Could freedom truly be more than a dream?

  Oh yes, my brothers, Azan assured them. What's more, he would be the one to deliver it. He would drive the settlers from every inch of Illyrian soil, make it a kingdom once more. And he would start with the coast and the islands! Once those territories were liberated, the inland colonies would be isolated. Helpless and unprotected, they could choose: fight, surrender, or flee. Soon, Azan promised, the land would belong to the Illyrian people once more.

  Quite how the rebel leader had joined forces with a Scythian warrior, Geta didn't know. The warship was Jason's, but the crew were Azan's men, whose drunken laughter echoed louder into the night with every pitcher of beer. Geta wasn't Azan's man, of course. He was no man's bar his own.

  Out along the coast, he watched the fires burn, yellow, red and orange. Flickering tongues that spat and hissed in the black void in supplication to the fire god, Agni.

  'Reckon it'll take two days to put out that shipyard.' He chuckled. 'Aye, and two more before it stops smoking.' He planted his callused hands on his hips. 'For an easterner, you're pretty handy with a burning arrow, lad.'

  A corner of Jason's mouth twitched. 'You're no slouch yourself,' he said, 'for a navigator.'

  Geta aimed a mock punch at his captain, their cross-cultural jokes hiding a Scythian truth: in order to remain outside the Empire, every Scythian must be able to defend himself with cutting-edge skill. Regardless of their different backgrounds, even as small boys both would have had to practise with dagger

  and short sword until their little arms ached, and afterwards they'd have been sent straight to the butts for more. Warriors in particular were required to be expert in every conceivable weapon, including the scimitar, the battleaxe, the spear and the double-handed sword that sliced through metal helmets like a fist through parchment. It was a known fact that you weren't granted warrior status unless you could take an eye out at three hundred paces with the slingshot.

  'Where to tomorrow?' Geta asked, his eyes fixed on their crackling handiwork. Darting here, flitting there, no hit was ever predictable and he wondered how soon they could start to plunder.

  Jason ran his finger slowly round the chain from which hung the purple amulet which all sailors wore as protection against shipwreck. 'You know, Geta, I rather fancy paying the Villa Arcadia another visit.'

  'Ain't that a bit risky, son?'

  'Not a bit of it. Who would expect us to return to a strike scene the very next day?'

  'Crafty bugger, you are.' The redheaded helmsman tipped back his head and roared with laughter. 'Keeping them bastards on their manicured toes!'

  But Jason didn't hear. He was gazing into the water, talking to himself as much as to his valued helmsman.

  'The thing is, Geta, I don't think my message is getting through.'

  He drummed his fingers gently on the ship's painted wooden rail.

  'High time I sent another one, which will.'

  From her vantage point on the hill, the woman called Clio could not see the shipyard ablaze, nor the warehouse beside it, nor any of the other buildings which burned along the Liburnian coast. There was too much of a heat haze this evening, blurring the horizons and softening the contours of the island.

  But she knew there would be fires burning somewhere tonight. There always were. No matter how many the precautions, or how careful, Jason slipped through.

  Superstitious types believed that the darkness rendered

  his warship invisible. In practice, the Scythian was simply intelligent, inventive, resourceful. And Clio knew all about intelligent, inventive, resourceful . . .

  Below her, the lights of the little harbour town twinkled softly in the dusky night. She wondered what the dullards down there did for entertainment. Was there music and dancing in the taverns? Men fighting each other with feet and fists over a woman? Did they gamble, throw dice, bait bears or stage cock fights? Croesus, had they ever heard of those things?

  They didn't think she understood their language. Just because she spoke to them in Latin, they didn't stop to question that she might actually speak their tongue. But Clio had been bora in Liburnia. Understood everything those smelly sons of bitches were saying about her. Her rich ripple of laughter was mellowed by the sultry air. Didn't that latest rumour beat everything? Having abandoned the idea of a flesh-eating monster on their own doorstep, the silly sods had now labelled her one of the Striges. Vampires, who sucked the blood out of virgins. Virgins, indeed! Croesus, did any woman look less like a lesbian than Clio? She rolled her eyes, but accepted that the gossip was to her advantage.

  Fear and superstition kept the nosy buggers away.

  Clio had come to Cressia for a purpose, and privacy was its key - and of all people, the priest was her best ally in this. Llagos walked a religious tightrope. Cressian by birth, he was astute enough to have adopted Roman practices and pocket Roman coins while at the same time pacifying the islanders who followed the old ways by pandering to their pagan superstitions. The best of both worlds, she thought sneeringly. Like the peep show she staged for the horrid little runt.

  Hooves crunched on the path below. The moon, two-thirds full, was rendered fuzzy from the heat and she could see no more than the rider was tall and well built. Pushing back her long, dark, heavy tresses, Clio watched the man dismount and tether his horse to a bush. The climb to her cottage was steep. She heard his breath, ragged from exertion. Behind her, the door to her cottage stood wide, sending out wafts of oregano oil burning in the single lamp which hung in the window. The horse snickered softly.

  'Clio?'

  He could not see her. Standing in the shadows, her black hair and dark-purple robe rendered her all but invisible. It was a quality she traded on, invisibility. The ability to move, yet not be seen.

  'Clio, it's me.'

  She counted to ten, then jangled the bracelets on her left wrist. When he jumped, she smiled to herself. He still had no idea she was only four feet away.

  Silhouetted in the pale moonlight, Leo moved towards the place where he imagined she was standing. 'I can't stop,' he said. 'They're waiting for me at dinner.'

  Clio let him approach. He was close now, his nose almost touching hers, and she smelled woodsmoke in his hair and wine on his breath, and could see that the torque he wore round his neck was of solid gold.

  This time she only counted as far as five. Then slapped his face so hard, her ring slashed his cheek.

  Eighteen

  Large or small, every event in life has a consequence which colours our future from that point on. We are who we are because of the choices we make. We endure or fail from those decisions. In the light of last night's revelations, it was a very different Claudia who made her way the following morning along the garden path which ran behind the villa.

  What had started out as sanctuary from Hylas the Greek was no longer that simple. Escape from the law was not that easy. A young man had died - fried in paradise - and Saunio's words drifted back. If the eye can
be led, so can the mind. It can be made to believe things which are not there.

  He had been talking about the use of illusion in art, but the same sentiments applied to Bulis. Providing Leo didn't have to confront the issue of the boy's death - which he undoubtedly would, were the garlanded corpse lying in state in his sumptuous hall - then Leo could pretend nothing had happened. Whatever motives had inspired him to go swanning off after Jason in that glorified fishing boat, endangering not only his ship and her crew but the hundreds of men, women and children left vulnerable on the estate, Claudia could have forgiven him had one of those motives included anger. Pride and humiliation make fools of us all and Leo wouldn't have been the first idiot to charge off, blinded by grief or by passion. Sure, he'd been provoked. But such was the measure of Leo's ego that he'd believed himself capable of seeing off a pack of vicious sea wolves. And still did.

  Try explaining that to Bulis's mother.

  Slipping into Leo's office through the open double doors from the garden, Claudia stopped to listen. Only a slave whistling as his heather broom swept the interior courtyard

  competed with the sound of birdsong. Deft fingers searched his scrolls, ledgers and tablets. First rule of combat, know your enemy. Come on! Something. Anything! Just a tiny hint as to why Orbilio should have got his cousin to invite her here—

  'You can't do this!' a female voice shrieked. 'You promised me, Leo, you swore an oath.'

  The woman was in the garden, heading this way down the path. Leo, approaching from the opposite direction, was on a head-on collision course, destination: office. Claudia ran to the other door to escape through the courtyard, but hell, the damn thing wouldn't budge.

  Leo's response to the shrieking female was indistinct. Nevertheless, as Claudia fumbled with the handle, she was hard pushed to find an apology in it.

  'You bastard,' the woman screeched. 'You dirty rotten bastard! You won't get away with it.'