Dark Horse (13 page)

'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.

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.'

Leo's growled reply suggested he already had, and that he wasn't losing his beauty sleep over it, either.

Key. Key. Where's the bloody key?

'You told me that cottage was mine.' So. Nanai’. 'You've no right to kick us out. Where will we go?'

The answering mumble suggested Leo didn't particularly care.

'But the children. Think of the children, Leo!'

The gist of his reply this time seemed to be along the lines that it was her fault, she should not have had so many.

Claudia had her hand on the door key when, with a distinct lack of tact considering the room was already occupied by one irritated female, Nanai reversed into the doorway. Bugger. Claudia dived beneath the maplewood desk and hugged herself tight into a ball. With luck, the two outside would pass like angry ships.

Luck wasn't listening.

Leo barged straight past Nanai into his office.

'Sorry, but it's settled. I told you time and again that place wasn't to be used permanently, yet you continued to bring brat after brat in, and now you try to tell me they're my responsibility. Well, Nanai, they're not.'

'Yes, they are, dammit. You represent Rome on this island—'

'And Rome didn't mind helping out with free accommodation, food, firewood, clothes, but it's sick of giving you continuous handouts while you make no effort to curb the numbers. You brought this situation upon yourself, Nanai’. I| gave you fair warning to quit, and now there's a new order coming which starts with my marriage. From now on, I have my own children to look to, and I'll not risk them picking up disease from your lazy brood.'

'You're a cruel man,' Nanai said, her voice dropping to freezing point.

In the light of the morning sun streaming through the windows, her eyes shone the green of the first leaves of spring and her hair was the colour of malt. But her borage-blue gown was faded and going to holes, and there were deep scuffs in her patched leather sandals.

'In place of a heart, you have only a dark empty space. But know this,' she said, wagging a finger of warning, 'I make a dangerous enemy.'

'Then, Nanai, you should know how I deal with my enemies.'

'Ach, so you threaten helpless women now, do you?'

Eyes blazing, Nanai stared at him for several seconds. She opened her mouth, changed her mind, and had there been skid marks on the flagstones outside, Claudia would not have been remotely surprised. What did surprise her was that you'd think, wouldn't you, that producing a litter year in, year out would leave Nanai with a figure like a sack of mouldy turnips, not straight of back and clear of skin. And that she'd be too exhausted to scream like a banshee.

Leo swore as he rattled a bunch of keys, and while he searched for the right key for the lock, Claudia wondered whether Nanai might also have been Leo's lover. She was also a good-looking woman - cultivated, intelligent and a Roman to boot, who had raised her children to speak Latin without the trace of a Cressian accent. But oaths given by men in the grip of passion might not seem quite so important to them once the novelty had worn off, whereas discarded

distresses tend not to see things in the same accommodating light . . .

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the issue, though, and however high-handed Leo's actions appeared on the surface, when all's said and done this was his land. No contract had been signed and whatever their relationship, Nanai’ ought not to make promises she couldn't keep. Children need trust every bit as much as they need security—

'Qus!' Leo's bellow made her jump. 'QUS!'

'Sir?'

'I don't care what tactics you have to resort to, but I want Nanai off my land and now. What are you waiting for, man?'

'I can't do it, sir, and to be blunt, neither should you. The children have nowhere to go -'

'Qus, you're my bailiff, not my bloody social conscience. Turf the rabble out, or I'll find myself a bailiff who will.'

There was a pause of perhaps five beats. 'Very good, sir.'

'With the mood she's in now, you might find her a mite stubborn and while I'd rather you didn't use force . . .'

'Sir?'

'Well, if you have to, I quite understand,' Leo finished in a rush.

'I will not use force on a woman!'

'You will if I bloody tell you to. And once they're out, get the men to demolish the building and plough up the ground, because I'm not having her sneak back only to go through this rigmarole twice. When my bride and her family arrive, there will be no trace of that place. Understood?'

This time the silence seemed to stretch for infinity. 'Whatever you say, sir, but I can't do it today. Every hand is working flat out on repairs to the
Medea
.'

'What are you blathering on about, man? There's not a scratch on her.' Leo's fist thumped the desk above Claudia's head, making the inkpots rattle. 'Janus, Croesus, Qus, do you think I'm bloody stupid? Everything I do lately you defy me and I won't tolerate insolence—'

'She's listing badly, sir.' Pause. 'Didn't you know?'

'Medea?
How the bloody hell did that come about?'

'It would appear that someone holed her below the water line during the night,' Qus said.

'Fuck!' Leo slumped into his chair, and Claudia wriggled tighter into a ball. 'Fuck, fuck, fuck, that's all I bloody need.' He wiped his hands over his face. 'Much damage?'

'The shipwright says three days, maybe four on the stocks. He's hauling her out of the water right now.'

'That bloody Nikias,' Leo muttered. 'He knew I was going after the dolphin this morning.'

He stood up and Claudia's internal organs rearranged themselves more comfortably.

'Well, while he's about it,' Leo said wearily, 'tell the shipwright to change the boat's name back again.
Medea
doesn't suit her, I don't know how I got talked into altering it, really.'

'It's bad luck to change a boat's name.'

'Croesus, man, don't you ever just obey a bloody order? Anyway, she's been changed once and we're still alive and kicking, so I see no harm in reverting to the original.
Medea's 
too . . . too . . .'

'Dark?'

'Precisely.' Leo scooped up some coins and briskly dropped them into a purse. 'Right then, I'll have a word with Llagos,' he said, chinking the purse. 'See if I can't get him to bless her the new name. And tomorrow you sort out that business with Nanai’, but no later, do you hear?'