Black Salamander

by Marilyn Todd

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Critical Acclaim for Marilyn Todd

  Black Salamander

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  About the Author

  I, Claudia

  Black Salamander

  By Marilyn Todd

  Copyright 2014 by Marilyn Todd

  Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 2000.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Marilyn Todd and Untreed Reads Publishing

  I, Claudia

  Virgin Territory

  Man Eater

  Wolf Whistle

  Jail Bait

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Critical Acclaim for Marilyn Todd

  ‘Claudia—a super-bitch who keeps us all on the edge where she loves to live… The Roman detail is deft, the pace as fast as a champion gladiator.’ Sunday Express

  ‘A timeless heroine for today—you’ll be hooked.’ Company

  ‘An endearing adventuress who regards mortal danger as just another bawdy challenge.’ She

  ‘Terrific read…thoroughly entertaining.’ The Bookseller

  ‘Marilyn Todd’s wonderful fictional creation—a bawdy superbitch with a talent for sleuthing—[is] an-enormous triumph.’ Ms London

  ‘Todd’s gorgeous rich bitch, Claudia, plotting and spying to survive adverse fortune in ancient Rome in the delectably enjoyable Wolf Whistle.’ Frances Fyfield, Daily Mail

  ‘A daring debut from a promising writer.’ Oxford Times

  ‘Feisty and fun.’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘I, Claudia was one of the best and most amusing historical detective narratives of the last year, and Virgin Territory is a fine follow-up.’ Crime Time

  ‘Claudia lives life at the cutting edge, and has a way with the sword to prove it.’ Newcastle Upon Tyne Evening Chronicle

  ‘If you’re looking for a romp through the streets of Rome in 13BC then this is the book to buy!’ Books Magazine

  ‘As juiciest as the ripest grape, this is a vintage romp to savour.’ Northern Echo

  ‘Anyone who has yet to read a Marilyn Todd Roman mystery is in for a treat when they pick up her latest adventure, Wolf Whistle.’ Ms London

  ‘Claudia and Marcus make a volatile, clever and strong couple…an excellent escapist fantasy.’ Historical Novel Review

  Black Salamander

  Marilyn Todd

  For the Irrepressible Scamps

  I

  Don’t you just hate it when that happens? Claudia pulled her wrap tight to her shoulders, gritting her teeth as the trap bounced over yet another rut in the road. She’d been given this once-in-a-lifetime chance to join a prestigious trade delegation to Gaul (expenses paid, of course) at a time of year when Alpine meadows were at their very lushest. Yet here you are, twelve days into the trip and they hadn’t seen a single Alp. Not one, thanks to weather which was turning out more January than June. She grimaced. It was cold, it was wet, it was windy, and that isn’t the half of it.

  She poked her head through the flap of the canvas. ‘Are we clear of the danger zone yet?’ The question was directed at the driver.

  ‘Dunno, miss.’ The driver shrugged. ‘Hope so.’

  Not exactly reassuring. Claudia glanced round. Protected by the pines this mountainous terrain was perfect for a guerrilla attack, the delegation a sitting target as they skirted this deep-sided gorge. She shuddered. Wooded slopes fell two hundred feet to white waters swirling over jagged, black rocks. High above their granite-topped tips were obscured by the low, heavy clouds. Would a hostile clan attack an escorted convoy in broad daylight? One could never tell with the Helvetii.

  For a hundred years, they’d been a thorn in Rome’s side and it was only last year, remember, that Augustus had finally persuaded them that resisting the might of the Roman Empire may not be entirely to their advantage—and even then his charm hadn’t been universally appreciated. A burned village here, a town sold into slavery there, his tactics hadn’t won all the Helvetians over and certainly Libo, the tile-maker travelling with the delegation, had paid a heavy enough price for their dissension.

  A taciturn (some might say secretive) individual, Libo had done nothing more than wander off the path to relieve himself in the bushes.

  The tile-maker had been found where he’d squatted. A stab wound straight to the heart…

  A fat raindrop trickled cold down the back of her neck and Claudia withdrew to the shelter of the rig as rain began to hammer against the stretched canvas. Dammit, everything had started out so well, too.

  She pictured the Forum. Banners and garlands draped over every temple, arch and statue. The smell of holy incense floating away on the breeze. With the sun glinting off the gold and bronze and marble and making a shimmering haze over red-tiled roofs, and with pavements lined with cheering, whooping, whistling crowds, the whole city had seemed to float upon air. To a fanfare of trumpets, the delegation set off across the Forum. Augurs in flowing white robes held up their hands to show that the auspices had been favourable, and dogs stood on their hind legs, barking at the commotion. Pickpockets sliced through purses and toddlers were hefted on to shoulders to watch the cavalcade pass by. Goldsmiths, sculptors, brick-makers, oculists, bookbinders, perfumers and wine merchants—

  Ah, yes. Wine merchants! Claudia huddled down onto the seat and chewed at her nail. You’d think widowhood would come with a set of guidelines, wouldn’t you? A few decent instructions on how a girl’s supposed to manage when her fat, old buzzard of a husband pops off and she, at the tender age of twenty-four, discovers he’s nowhere near as rich as she imagined him to be. Actually. Claudia crossed one long leg over the other. To be fair, Gaius had died a very wealthy man—on paper. Unfortunately, you can’t buy gowns with the deed to a tenement or pay for your pleasures with a confectioner’s shop on the Via Latina.

  Claudia’s fist punched a dent in her swan-feather cushion. The easy option would be to sell up, but goddammit, Gaius had worked all his life
to put Seferius wine on the map—that reputation was part of her legacy. And besides. Claudia might baulk to admit it, but in truth she was attached to the company. The heady challenge of staying afloat. The cut and the thrust of negotiation and contract. The shipments, the payments, the management, and not simply on the trading side, there was also her Etruscan villa and the vineyard to oversee—and if a girl can’t live life on the edge, what’s the point? However, hanging on to her inheritance had been tough. Every hustler in town had been after a cheap deal and she’d been bombarded with offers to sell up, offers she’d knocked flat every time until suddenly the commercial flow had turned like a rip-tide.

  Bastards! The cushion cut a swathe through the air, narrowly missing the crate in which her blue-eyed, cross-eyed, dark Egyptian cat was curled, trying to sleep. ‘Hrrrrow.’

  ‘Sorry, poppet.’ Claudia slipped her hand between the bars and stroked the hump which Drusilla would otherwise get. ‘But it just makes me so damned angry.’

  Month after month, avaricious merchants had vied and fought with one another to get their hands on the young widow’s business, wheedling, coercing, bullying her to sell, but the instant they realized she was serious, what happened? The lowlife weasels banded together, the lot of them, to drive Claudia out of the trade—and it was so easy, that’s what made her blood boil. So goddamned easy, and she hadn’t even seen it coming.

  With Greek being the language of commerce, they simply stopped communicating with her in Latin. No more concessions, they said, and while Claudia was picking up Greek from a tutor, she was nowhere near fluent enough to hold her own in wheelings and dealings on that scale, even through an interpreter—who in any case the merchants refused to accept on the grounds it meant dealing with minions.

  Like it or not, Claudia had been forced to acknowledge that Seferius wine was commencing its death throes.

  ‘Hello, gorgeous.’ A shiny wet face poked its head under the awning. ‘Hard to credit yesterday was the midsummer solstice.’ He shook himself like a dog. ‘Thought you might be feeling the jitters, what with the road barely wide enough for a wagon. Ha!’ His eyes rolled upwards. ‘Did I say road? Not like Rome, eh? Anyway, I’ve brought a skin of wine to take your mind off the lumps and the bumps and the bruises.’

  Without waiting for encouragement (which was probably as well, because the wait would have been lengthy indeed), Nestor leaped into the moving rig, securing the canvas behind him. ‘According to Clemens,’ he said, referring to the stumpy little priest who seemed to know everything, ‘this is the border between Helvetia and the land of the Sequani.’

  Thank heavens! A Gaulish tribe, friends of the Empire! It was to their capital, Vesontio, the delegation was headed. So they’d arrive in what? Three days from now?

  ‘That river down there marks the boundary.’ Nestor edged a fraction closer as he unstoppered the wineskin and Claudia reminded herself of the promise she’d made yesterday. Namely that if this stocky little architect touched her up just one more time, she’d rip out his gizzard and feed it to the wolves she’d heard howling in the night.

  Not that Nestor was poor company. Far from it. Relentlessly chirpy and a fount of tall tales garnered from travels that had taken him the length and breadth of the Empire, hours which would have otherwise dragged on this wet, miserable journey had spun past. When it came to spooky legends, Nestor had no match. He talked of Helvetian bear cults, of deep, sacred caves guarded by the skulls of seven bears arranged in a ring, and chilled the blood with tales of Druids, making human sacrifice by burning their victims alive in effigies made of wicker…

  Nevertheless, it was quite astonishing the number of times he’d ‘accidentally’ brushed against her breasts, how often his hand had come to rest against her thigh, the regularity with which she’d felt his breath on the back of her neck. Take him to task, of course, and Nestor was quick to blame circumstances. The jolt of the wheels. A judicious pothole. But Claudia had given him clear warning yesterday. Keep your distance, or there’ll be a wolf out there licking its chops.

  ‘You’ve never been to Vesontio, have you?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You’ll love it. Prettiest city in the whole of Gaul in my humble estimation. And commanding as it does a broad loop of the river and with a mountain rising behind, it’s not only beautiful and a natural citadel, it is quite impregnable. And you know how impregnable translates to an architect, don’t you?’ He chuckled knowingly. ‘Prosperous. That’s why I love Vesontio so much!’

  Funny how his hand needed to clasp her wrist every time he made a point.

  ‘That city’s crying out for a delegation like ours,’ Nestor continued. ‘Oh yes.’ As a self-made man, he’d never quite lost his barrow-boy accent. ‘This’ll make us all rich, mark my words.’ He squinted out through the gap in the canvas, using the bump of the rig to annex Claudia’s elbow.

  ‘Practising the latest philosophy, are we?’ She wrenched her arm away and wedged the wineskin firmly between his hip and hers. ‘That a man’s only as old as the woman he feels?’

  ‘Pity you never got a chance to see the Alps as we passed through,’ Nestor said, oblivious to the rebuff.

  Tell me about it. She’d been up them, she’d been down them, she’d been joggled to her very core on their steep slopes and on bends made perilous by landslides, but not once had Claudia so much as glimpsed one of the majestic peaks which remained snow-covered all the year round and which, Nestor assured her, were quite undeserving of the gloomy, doom-laden names bestowed on them by the Helvetii. Peak of Gloom. Peak of Evil. The Pass of Bones… Somewhere in the distance came a low rumble, like thunder.

  ‘Better luck on the return trip, eh?’ he said, patting her knee.

  ‘Nestor, which part of the word no are you having trouble with?’ she asked, but so engrossed was Claudia in recalling the real objective behind making this journey that there was no sting in her rebuke.

  Sure, the delegation would cover her expenses, raise her commercial wine-growing profile and provide her with numerous contacts for trade—unfortunately those were long-range proposals. When you’ve been blackballed and cash flow is tight, to hell with pretty views and a travelogue. The immediate objective is cash. Cold, gold, glittery coins which Claudia could trickle through her fingers and replenish gasping coffers with. Her eyes darted to a satchel swinging from a hook above Drusilla’s cage. She pictured the soft yellow deerskin pouch tucked inside. The one sealed with a golden blob of wax imprinted with the sign of the black salamander.

  ‘Nestor!’ Somehow he’d managed to combine the task of unstoppering the wineskin with a fingertip alighting on Claudia’s nipple. ‘I told you yesterday, no more funny business, but you didn’t take a blind bit of notice!. She had to raise her voice to drown the rumbling sound from outside. ‘The fact that you have no respect for me, that hurts. But you know what hurts most?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This.’ Claudia squeezed his testicles as hard as she could and his eyes streamed with water. ‘Touch me again, you odious wart, and I’ll geld you.’

  ‘LANDSLIDE.’ The powerful voice of a legionary boomed the length of the line. ‘Move! Fast as you can—run for it. NOW!’

  Claudia’s stomach flipped somersaults. After all this, the danger after all came not from hostile Helvetii.

  The danger came from a rock fall.

  II

  Imagine thunder. Imagine a stampede of wild Camargue stallions. Imagine earthquakes and a volcanic eruption. Now put them together. The very ground shook beneath the wheels as the driver cracked his whip. The mares bolted forward, and as her nails dug deep into the grain of her maplewood seat Claudia thanked Jupiter for the skill of her driver.

  With the stone trackway potholed and scarred and treacherously steep, coated with an ooze of wet mud that had turned it into an oil slick, only the driver’s expertise kept this light trap on its course. Twice the wheels skidded. Drusilla’s cage slid to the left, it slid to the right. The axle caught on a rut. Rocks
crashed behind them, clattering, splintering, bouncing down the ravine. Horses screamed on the perilous bend and Claudia clung to the rig as the wheels bounced high off the ground and crashed down again. We’ll turn over, she thought. A wheel will spin off. How far now down the gorge? A hundred feet to the bottom?

  Boulders the size of a stable block thundered past, ripping up sixty-foot pines, oak trees and beech. Fragments broke off, thumping, thudding, wrecking their way to the riverbed.

  ‘Gee up! Gee up there!’

  The mares needed no encouragement. Their eyes wild with terror, foam flecking their cheeks, they galloped ever closer to the wagon in front. Claudia’s clenched knuckles were white, she daren’t breathe. One slip from a rig up ahead and the whole column would go down like gates in a gale, plummeting into the void…

  Sweet Juno, could they truly outrun it?

  Nestor had gone. At the first yell of the soldier, he was off, faster than a bullet from an Iberian sling, his eyes still watering, his face as red as a turkey-cock’s wattle. Idly she wondered whether things like this had happened before on his travels, whether rock falls were a regular occurrence?

  ‘Madam.’ The canvas was jerked open, rain began driving into the cart. ‘You have to get out.’

  ‘About bloody time, I must say.’ Claudia stared at the bleached face of her bodyguard, hurling himself into the jostling rig. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Backtracking up the road like you told me,’ Junius puffed, grabbing the handle of Claudia’s trunk. ‘Come on. Quick!’

  ‘Brilliant. When that creep Nestor started pawing me, where were you? Sightseeing!’ At her feet, Drusilla howled like a banshee. ‘What’s the point of having a bodyguard, if he’s not around to protect your body?’

  ‘Sightseeing?’ His left hand closed over the strap round the cat’s cage. ‘You gave me specific orders to— Oh, the hell with it, just jump, will you?’

  Claudia stared at the young Gaul. ‘Has your mind been possessed by a lunatic’s?’ With mares at full pelt, wagons racing behind and boulders bouncing down the hillside like inflated pigs’ bladders, Junius tells her to jump? ‘I’ll be pulped like an olive for oil.’