Black Salamander

by Marilyn Todd

  The silver censor crashed to the ground as Claudia employed both hands to dig out the pouch she’d uncovered. You devious little bastard, Clemens. She jerked out the deerskin pouch and peered at the seal, her blood alternating hot and cold as she imagined what she’d do to the fat little worm when she laid her hands on him. Steal my bloody gemstones, would you? She rattled the pouch, then checked the seal, but the black salamander, praise be to Juno, had not been tampered with. Nimble fingers undid the buckles on the satchel round her neck. Strangling’s too good for you, you putrid lump of slugslime, I’ve half a mind to—

  Uh-oh.

  Claudia blinked, and blinked again. She was wrong. Clemens hadn’t sneaked her pouch out of the satchel when her head was turned to dose Orbilio with syrup of figs. The pouch was still there, where she’d left it…

  This meant Clemens was carrying a deerskin pouch of his own.

  Which happened to be absolutely identical.

  XII

  ‘I don’t think Theo likes me.’

  Orbilio had taken advantage of the lull to steer Claudia away from the main gathering, and they were sitting with their knees drawn up, facing each other on boulders under the overlap of a willow. Wispy clouds had moved in to cover the sky, settling an early twilight over the canyon. The fire, fierce to start with, had pretty well fizzled out now that the upper layer had burned through to damper branches which had not yet been dried by the sun, and if anything, the barricade looked worse than before. Not because it was higher, quite the opposite. But the combination of blackened rocks and charred, sticking-up branches produced a dark and sinister effect, sending out a sombre sense of foreboding.

  When, from time to time, the pines spat and sparked, nerves jarred visibly.

  Resting her chin on her knees, Claudia wondered whether others among the party shared her suspicions that the bodies of at least the two soldiers, and probably half of the mules, were unlikely to have been touched by the flames. That the fire, short-lived as it had been, had been no more than a gesture. A symbol. An observance of duty.

  That Orbilio, in his assessment of the situation regarding the stranded group, intended it as nothing more than a discharge of communal liability. Let’s draw a line and move on, he was saying.

  For move on they would, come the morning, because on one point Orbilio was adamant. The army were not coming this way to look for them. It was precisely as Titus had reasoned. Informed that the convoy had taken a short cut which had been subsequently blocked by a rock fall, the military had sent appropriate messages to Vesontio, telling them they should expect the delegation from the local road in from the south. A smug air hung over the spice merchant.

  Claudia plucked a water forget-me-not, consigned two petals to the swirling, bright stream and forced her mind back to the issue at hand. ‘Might Theo’s dislike stem, do you think, from the point where you called him a fathead?’ Orbilio had bathed away the mud and grime, razored off the stubble and was wearing a spotless white tunic. She could detect the faint smell of its final rosemary rinse.

  ‘What did he expect?’ Marcus retorted. ‘Only an imbecile would leave Nestor’s body mouldering on the far side of the bridge.’

  ‘Theo felt it fitting that all four casualties be cremated together,’ came the case for the defence, ‘that they might enter the Underworld in solidarity.’

  She heard him mutter something under his breath which might have been ‘Bowls’ or ‘Bulls’ or possibly even ‘Halls’.

  ‘The man’s plainly incompetent.’ Marcus snorted, and Claudia decided he’d get along well with Maria. ‘I mean, fancy letting a group of lightly armed civilians sit it out in this isolated ravine!’

  Claudia intended to point out that the group had actually taken a vote. Instead she heard herself asking, ‘Why? Is it dangerous?’

  ‘What? No. No, of course not.’

  But it was too late. She’d been watching too closely to miss the flash of alarm skip across his face. She sent another couple of flowerheads upstream, watching them bob out of sight almost at once. Overhead, five disappointed buzzards circled in disbelief that their supper could be so cruelly denied them and close at hand came the bell-like croak of a toad.

  ‘So, then.’ She crossed one leg over the other and watched a snow-white moth settle to drink from a scabious. ‘In return for helping you establish your credentials as a—oh, yes, designer of mosaic floors—perhaps you’d care to enlighten me as to why you’re really here?’

  On the bridge, Clemens was on his knees, leaning over to wash Nestor’s cremated bones in the river before placing them in a trunk which had been cleared and lined with linen for the purpose. Had he been killed in a genuine accident, Claudia knew Nestor would have found the current situation a sublime tribute to his travels. A final adventure, the last of his tallest tall stories. Heavens, he’d have loved to have folk recounting tales of landslides and derring-do as they admired the sculpted frieze on his tomb. It would proclaim in marble and for ever the moment this group was trapped in Vulture Valley, between headhunting Gauls and a bloodthirsty Helvetian bear cult, as Nestor’s own corpse straddled the border. Indeed, had he been given the chance to write his own eulogy, Nestor’s arm would have wrenched itself from its socket in the bid to grab pen and parchment—but. Claudia swallowed. He’d been murdered in the most brutal, cowardly and cunning fashion, and were Nestor able to write anything today, it would surely be the name of his killer.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fly in my eye.’ Claudia sniffed. ‘Anyway.’ She cleared her throat and turned back to Marcus. ‘You were telling me the purpose behind your deceit.’

  ‘Why do you sense an ulterior motive?’ He grinned. ‘Lies come naturally to us men.’

  Don’t they just. However, if lies were illegal, few of us would ever get out of the courthouse, Claudia reflected. She consigned the last of the forget-me-nots into the greedy white waters and listened to the gurgles, fizz and splashes.

  ‘The truth is,’ he said, keeping his eye on the circling birds, ‘my boss sent me undercover to keep an eye on one of this group.’

  The notion was so preposterous, Claudia nearly fell off her boulder. ‘Clemens?’ she asked innocently. ‘Who’s after the post of Jupiter’s priest?’

  ‘That’s him,’ Orbilio said, perhaps a little too quickly. ‘My boss’s twin brother has applied for the job and—’

  ‘Your task is to suss out the opposition?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  When he shifted position, the smell of sandalwood drifted downwind. Claudia stuffed a ransom under her nose and breathed in its garlicky pong, ignoring completely the flecks of light which danced in his curls and the strong, narrow fingers which spiked through them as a makeshift comb.

  ‘And you?’ he asked airily. ‘You just fancied a trip across to Gaul, I suppose?’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘Naturally.’ His smile was sickly in its insincerity. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t want to be in Rome for the midsummer festivities, would you? The flute-players carnival? The feasts, the horse races, those dreary mock bullfights? So crowded.’

  ‘So noisy.’

  ‘So tell me.’ He leaned forward and slipped the ransom from her hand. ‘Have you noticed anything,’ he inhaled the pungent fragrance, ‘unusual about this delegation?’ Claudia snatched the flower back. ‘No, no. We’re often trapped in isolated valleys. Par for the course.’

  ‘Accidents,’ he said, tossing a meaningful glance at the smouldering blockage, ‘can happen and unfortunately people do die in them. Nestor, for instance, and’—he rubbed his jaw as he pretended to think—‘Libo. You, er, know anything about that?’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘He was a tile-maker,’ Orbilio said. ‘Found stabbed in the bushes.’

  ‘Must have been travelling at the front of the convoy, otherwise I’d have heard.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Marcus chewed his lower lip in thought. ‘I suppose you know nothing about any map, e
ither?’

  ‘Map?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ He stood up and stretched. ‘You know, Claudia. That’s what I like most about us. We’re both so open and honest with one another.’

  And with his thumbs looped inside his belt, he sauntered back up the path, whistling softly under his breath.

  Behind Claudia, well hidden in the bushes, a pair of intense blue eyes watched Orbilio depart.

  *

  Any misgivings Theo may have felt about his command being undermined were quadrupled the moment that upstart patrician began giving orders the following morning. It had been bad enough, Theo told anyone prepared to listen, Orbilio killing one of the horses last night so everyone had a bloody good supper inside them. This morning, he’s insisting we do it again, to put a big breakfast under our belts.

  ‘This expedition’s going to be tough,’ Marcus was telling the sombre gathering. ‘With no map, no guide, no idea what terrain lies ahead, we need to pack water in any container you can adapt to the purpose and, ladies, there’s no room for fripperies. We can only take the basic fundamentals.’

  ‘But the mules,’ Maria cut in. ‘Surely they can carry our trunks? My husband needs all his bookbinder’s tools, his—’

  ‘Medicines,’ Dexter said sadly.

  ‘We’ll need changes of clothes, our finery for when we arrive—’

  ‘If we arrive,’ Marcus said grimly. ‘Unless we carry the absolute minimum, we risk losing everything. With just one muleteer and two injured men, we shan’t be able to manage all the horses.’

  With his freckles camouflaged by purple outrage, Theo stepped forward. He was, Claudia noticed, fully armoured, even down to his helmet. ‘As leader of this party,’ he said, ‘I insist we take a vote. No, no, listen!’ He held a hand up to silence the boos and let’s-get-on-with-its. ‘We still have the option to return the way Orbilio here came in—’

  But that was as far as he got. Shouted down by virtually everyone (with Volso’s voice the loudest.), the group had had enough of this place and was itching to move on. The precipitous gorge and its boiling, dangerous waters were getting to them, and without the reassuring cushion of a rescue party on the Helvetian side, they looked to Vesontio for their goal—and they looked for it with no time to be lost.

  While Hanno determined which of the horses were fit to make the journey over the vertiginous hills, the party set about discarding all but the barest essentials.

  Unfortunately, that also meant leaving behind Nestor’s bones.

  ‘We’ll bury them by the bridge and mark the spot with a cairn,’ Orbilio said. ‘Then when the road has been repaired, our soldiers can disinter them and return them to his family for proper burial in Rome.’

  ‘I’ve already dug a pit,’ Theo lied. ‘So you can leave that with me.’

  Alas, no one cared whether Theo had dug a temporary grave or not. Marcus Cornelius Orbilio was the convoy’s hero and saviour. It was his every word they hung on, not Theo’s, and to them, the young soldier had been relegated to less than a servant. Even old Hanno commanded more reverence, if only because he’d suffered personal tragedy in this terrible accident, and as the sun struggled to break through the clouds, in a valley alive with birdsong and the buzzing of bees, resentment turned to simmering hatred.

  XIII

  The gorge might have formed a perfect natural boundary, with its dizzy drops and racing torrent, but nature doesn’t build in angular shapes, she leaves that to surveyors, stonemasons and brickies. Thus the isolated stragglers were able to exploit a fold in the schist, close to where Theo calculated the road to Vesontio had parted company with the river, but by the gods, it was bloody tough going.

  Five dry days could only begin to redress the effects of prolonged torrential rainfall, and on this north-facing slope the ground remained treacherous. Hands were bandaged from the outset to protect the skin from nettles, brambles, bark and roots, which would otherwise have torn them to shreds, but the climb, even zigzagging upwards in lazy, slow loops, was precipitous. Half the time they were crouched over like hunchbacks, slithering and sliding on thick layers of mulch.

  The astrologer had taken plenty of stick for not forecasting the convoy’s disaster, but for the moment, he didn’t care. Every time he looked down, Volso was drawn towards the void which beckoned and he had to force himself to concentrate on his progress one step at a time, lurching from fern to root to sapling for support. By the time he reached the peak, his sweat-beaded face resembled a mouldering lettuce in both line and shape as well as colour, and his whole cadaverous body was trembling.

  Claudia tried to picture him on the edge of that precipice clobbering Nestor with a rock, and failed. But then again, she thought, pressing a cooling sorrel compress to the nape of her neck, the key to getting away with murder is precisely that your actions appear so out of character, no one possibly suspects you. It was in Volso’s rig, remember, that she had discovered the corpse. A set-up? An unlucky break for the real killer, that the trap had sustained very little damage in the rock fall? Or a calculated risk taken by the astrologer himself?

  ‘Drusilla’s adapted like the proverbial duck to water,’ Junius puffed. ‘No need for the leash, she’s having a ball.’

  Naturally. The cat was well used to adventures like this. In the eight years they’d been' together, Drusilla and Claudia, this was hardly their first overland safari and such was the nature of these dark, Egyptian cats that in any case her behaviour was more like a dog’s than a cat’s. (Except how many hulking great statues of dogs do you see, venerated by pharaohs?)

  ‘It was only ever her physical being which was carted round inside that cage,’ Claudia wheezed back, ‘never her spirit.’ The two had simply been reunited.

  As for herself, having taken up Iliona’s offer to borrow a long, divided skirt and separate bodice, Claudia had no cause to regret her action. Watching Maria hanging on to the tail of a mule with both hands as it dragged her up the hillside put paid to that.

  Since the group comprised mostly the middle-merchant classes, accustomed to their own personal hairdressers, masseurs, valets and barbers (the novelty of washing out their smalls and cooking their own dinner had worn off fast enough), hysteria had quickly set in, although it was Gemma, the brick-maker’s seventeen-year-old daughter, who voiced what many feared—that they’d never reach Vesontio alive.

  They had clambered up hills, they had skidded down again, skirted ridges and forded endless foaming streams, they’d spent a night huddled round a camp fire while wolves howled and bears snuffled worryingly close in the undergrowth. Every bark of a deer made them jittery, each drum of the woodpecker, each squirrel’s harsh chatter. And now, as the plateau levelled out, the enormity of what the band was facing was rammed home to them.

  All around, hills—endless, endless hills—rippled outwards in every direction. Bobbled with minute and distant trees, their greenness was broken only by tongues of grey bare rock on which eagles, soaring proudly on the thermals, had built eyries.

  ‘We’re lost,’ Gemma sniffed. ‘We’re lost and we’re going to die!’

  Many of the women, and more than one of the men, were weeping openly now. Fatigue sets in fast on those who live soft, and it was easy to identify shoots which had sprung from hardy stock. Excluding the drivers, rugged types, used to hard physical exercise, and Theo, of course, accustomed to route marches and digging defence lines and ditches, one or two surprises manifested themselves among the party. Not quite in keeping with his cover as a designer of mosaic floors, Orbilio’s stint in the army was exposed when he lent his strong arm to assisting the ladies, leaving Claudia to ponder whether his stripping to the waist had been a necessity, or whether it was simply a ploy to take their minds off their ordeal? Mind you, who’d be fool enough to be distracted by that broad chest and those glistening, undulating muscles, or that little scar just to the left of…

  Where was I? Oh, yes. Claudia plucked another fistful of sorrel leaves. Musing on the revelati
ons thrown up by this ill-fated expedition. She squeezed the juice in her hands. Clemens, for instance. The rotundity on him was going-to-seed fat, rather than hereditary corpulence, and the priest, as he set up a makeshift altar in the clearing, showed few signs of emotional wilt. Iliona was clearly as robust as she was beautiful, contriving to look a million sesterces with her lilac bodice tucked inside dark purple pantaloons and, since she’d discarded not one hollow bangle, she jangled a different tune with each sultry swing of her hips. Small wonder Titus summoned up the energy to lead his wife away from the group, to return with a barely concealed grin on his face.

  ‘Our bodies will be torn apart by foxes and lynx,’ Gemma wailed, ‘our bones left to rot where they fall.’

  ‘I’m afraid she’s right about our being lost,’ Orbilio admitted, ‘and with no sun to guide us, under cloud cover we could be walking these forests in circles.’ He turned to Theo. ‘I thought you were taking bearings?’

  The insinuation was subtle, but the insinuation was still there.

  ‘Maybe it’s your fault,’ the legionary flung back. Not for him any grovelling explanations. Straight for the jugular. ‘Have you considered that, Mister-Know-It-All-Patrician? You insisted on coming up here, remember?’

  Wiping more of the cooling sorrel down the V of her bodice, Claudia noticed that Marcus didn’t dignify Theo’s accusation with a reply. His eyelids merely narrowed as he rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  ‘I don’t see that establishing blame brings us closer to Vesontio,’ Maria snapped, smack on target as usual. ‘We have no direction, no food, no shelter—oh, for heaven’s sake, child, stop that godawful blubbering!’

  ‘The girl’s terrified,’ Dexter said, putting one arm around Gemma and taking her hand with the other. ‘Now you’re not to worry,’ he told her. Her parents were no use. They were snivelling wrecks themselves. ‘We’re all going to be fine. Trust me. Once the clouds lift, we’ll be able to sort ourselves out, we just have to wait here a while.’