Man Eater (40 page)

‘How?’ There was a glimmer of reason in the angry, grey eyes.

‘Well,’ ‘she forced a laugh, ‘why don’t we go into partnership? Now. Etruria’s not very far away.’

‘You patronizing bitch. If I wrote to you once, I wrote to you a hundred times.’

I get letters from cranks all the time, how…? Oh, shit. The spray from the falls had soaked her tunic, water dripped from her hair. But Claudia was oblivious.

‘Corbulo’s not your real name, is it?’ Of course not. That would have given the game away right from the start.

A long, slow, ice-cold smile spread across the Etruscan’s red-painted face. ‘Try Crito.’

Crito! Her husband had been bombarded with letters from this man, and he’d laughed at the insolence of a fool who not asked, but demanded his lands back and at a price no sane person would consider. Each time her told the little oik to get lost, although when Claudia received similar demands after her husband’s death, she had not been so polite. Almost immediately, Crito’s letters stopped. And she thought she’d been clever…

‘What’s the matter Claudia? Cat got your tongue? Wishing you’d been nicer to me?’ His boot gave another menacing kick to the crate. ‘Or wondering how you can talk your way out of it?’

No, I’m not. Not any more.

The cage wobbled precariously.

‘Whether I’m alive or dead,’ she said, praying the tremor in her voice was drowned by the crash of the torrent, ‘you’ll still be a craven coward.’

‘Coward?
Coward
?’ Corbulo shook the cage so violently they both nearly toppled over. Claudia stifled a scream. ‘I’m a farmer, I’m a trainer. I am Etruscan! I am not a fucking coward.’

‘What would
you
call a man who gets someone else to do his killing?’ She didn’t give him a chance to reply. ‘Yes, you can set me up for Fronto’s murder, you can set leopards on me, you can even—big deal—push a defenceless woman over a waterfall in a crate. Well, to me that’s cowardice, Corbulo.’ She remembered Gisco’s diatribe. ‘You’re a lily-livered, yellow-bellied, chicken-shitted coward.’

Juno be praised, he flung open the bolt!

‘Out! Out, you bitch!’ He grabbed her wrist and jerked her roughly on to the stones. As she fell, the cage teetered—backwards, forwards, backwards…then it toppled into the torrent. For a moment it wavered, buoyed by the force, then, with astonishing speed, crashed against an overhanging tree, swirled round, and headed straight into a boulder. As Claudia watched, she felt her bones turn to chalkdust. One strong gust and they’d blow clean away. Up it rose, the cage, to stand on its end. With only an imperceptible change in the roaring in her ears, she heard it dash against the rock, saw it break into five, then ten. By the time it reached the rim of the waterfall, there was nothing left but firewood.

She could hear a demented magpie chattering, then realized it was her own teeth.

Deflected by that brush with death, Claudia failed to realize what Corbulo was up to. He’d unbound the loops of his hair and was using the dark blue ribbon to tie Claudia’s wrists. Perhaps the reason she hadn’t noticed was that he’d left a good cubit of space between them. Could she—wild thought—get behind him and throttle him with it?

‘I’ve given six months of my life to get you,’ he hissed, his fingers digging deep into her arms as he shook her. ‘Six months, and every day with my life on the line, but did Crito flinch from the most dangerous animals on Jove’s earth? Did he hesitate to put poison into the wine of those mercenaries?’

Claudia gulped the steamy air in the hope it would steady her legs. ‘Poison’s a woman’s tool,’ she rasped, but she never finished the sentence. The blow from the trainer sent her reeling to the ground, twisting her leg beneath her.

‘Don’t you dare suggest that,’ he snarled. ‘Who knifed Fronto? Who snapped that Greek doxy’s neck in full view of a hundred revellers? Tell me that doesn’t take balls.’

Claudia grimaced at the pain in her knee. It wasn’t me Coronis was shooting nervous glances at, she realized now, it was Corbulo. Both at the elephant show and during Macer’s questioning, he’d deliberately stationed himself beside me, knowing any jittery looks from the girl would be deflected by yours truly here. Callous bastard.

He snatched a handful of her hair. ‘And what about the planning? Don’t you think that took guts?’ Claudia screamed as he twisted her curls. ‘Well, answer me, my fine and fancy lady.’

‘Yes! Yes,’ she screamed. ‘I’m sorry.’

Corbulo glanced over his shoulder to the valley shrouded by swirling steam. ‘Oh, you will be,’ he said. ‘You will be.’ Using her hair like a leash, he hauled her, whimpering, to her feet. ‘You wouldn’t believe what I’ve gone through, you and that charmed life of yours.’

‘Please—’

‘Doping the beasts to set the schedule back. Sucking up to Sergius and his whore of a sister. Fawning over that slimeball Fronto.’

‘Corbulo, please! You’re hurting me!’

‘Crito. The name’s Crito.’ He began to drag her towards the edge. ‘You may as well get used to it, because we’ll be together through all eternity, Claudia. One way or another…I’ll take my lands with me.’

‘What—?’ She didn’t need to ask the question, suddenly it was clear. Now she understood why he had left so much slack between her wrists. He intended to slip it over his head, so her arms would be round his body when he leapt from the precipice.

‘This way I can watch the terror on your face all the way to the bottom.’

Frantically Claudia scrabbled on the rocks. ‘Why didn’t you just kill me at the beginning?’

The grip on her hair didn’t waver and the cliff came ever closer. ‘Revenge, you bitch. Revenge. I wanted to watch you suffer, the way my family and I had to suffer. I wanted to see you rot in a gaolhouse. See you exiled. Penniless. Disgraced.’

He jerked her to her feet, and Claudia tasted blood from the blow that sent her flying.

‘Well,’ he fought to loop her arms over his, ‘you denied me that pleasure, but at least I’ll die happy.’

‘No you bloody won’t!’ she yelled.

Claudia’s kneecap smashed into his groin. His face, the red paint streaked by the watery air, contorted into a gargoyle as he let go of her arms. Gagging, gasping, he reached for his dagger, but for once Corbulo the trainer was too slow.

With all her strength Claudia pushed.

Like the leopard’s cage, Corbulo seesawed back and forth, wobbling, wavering, teetering on the brink. But with each tremulous sway, the momentum was gaining, until slowly the balance shifted. Claudia held her breath. It could go either way…

Sweet Jupiter, it could still go either way!

Then, with a strangled yelp, Corbulo pitched forward into the boiling waters.

But not before he’d grabbed hold of Claudia.

Together they tumbled into oblivion.

XXXV

I am dead, she thought. I have died, and Charon is taking me across the Styx in his little grey ferry boat. I can feel it bobbing, and I am weightless.

She could feel, too, the rage of the Underworld. It throbbed, vibrated, rumbled. The fury of a hundred million souls wrenched from their bodies. She could feel their pain. In her shoulders, in her arms, in her wrists…

Janus, Croesus and the girl next door, ghosts, be buggered—this pain is real. It was searing her joints and her ligaments and her tendons, and Claudia, with great trepidation, opened her eyes.

Shit!

The weightlessness, the bobbing, it made sense now. She was hanging. In mid-bloody-air, she was hanging, and the reason she was suspended, the cause of the pain shooting up her arms and biting into her wrists, was Corbulo’s stupid Etruscan fillet.

Below her, two rivers and a lake launched themselves into space, and she remembered doing the same with Corbulo. What happened? She kneed him in the goolies, it made him sick, and when he reeled, she gave him a shove. She remembered that. Claudia looked down into a sea of steam, felt her head swim and looked up again. By the gods, yes. That son-of-a-bitch lunged for her, and over they went, the two of them. Corbulo, the man with a chip on his shoulder the size of a pine tree. Corbulo, who could forgive his father for gambling away the family’s heritage and selling his sister for a few coppers a shot, but who could not forgive the person who bought that land fair and square in the first place. Corbulo, whose sense of duty had so warped over the years, it rotted his mind, his reason and his dignity. It had desensitized him to other people’s feelings, desecrated his own emotions. He could not even see that by lowering himself, as he put it, to training wild beasts, he had unleashed a prodigious talent that would have made him rich beyond words. Rich enough to buy lands equalling Claudia’s and beyond, but his rancid mind was set on one track only. Reclaiming a birthright that wasn’t his.

It was a wonder he hadn’t taken a pop at the Emperor. It was Augustus who instigated the Land Purchase Scheme. Augustus whose rapid expansionist policies stabilized the merchant classes. Augustus who, in the best possible motives, had consolidated this distinctly uneven distribution of wealth.

Not that she’d been thinking such cerebral thoughts as she toppled over the cliff. Her mind was purely on survival, and when she saw a branch—the same branch the cage crashed into—she hung on to it with both hands. She heard the woollen tunic rip, and as she clung to the tree, she saw a flash of gold as the sun caught Corbulo’s torque. Then he was under, she saw his arms stiff above the boiling waters, saw a swirl of white as Corbulo’s kilt was swept off in the torrent. Like a knitted doll, he was dashed from rock to rock. His tanned torso, red paint washed off long ago, was thrown up momentarily by the tumbling force, then it was pitched into the abyss. The angle of his head, the twisted limbs, told her that, if not already dead, Corbulo could not survive many more seconds.

There was a creak, a crack and she could feel the branch giving way. Desperately she swung herself to the right, into the body of the tree, but it was not strong enough to take her weight. She had crashed through the tree, a young birch, into the tree below, and then the one below that.

Where she hung now, like a pheasant on a hook, the only thing between her and certain death, paradoxically, a dark blue ribbon which belonged to the man who tried to kill her. Dammit, Corbulo, you were too lazy, too stubborn to work at the training, you never even tried to buy us out. Your contempt for me—or rather, my lands and my money—contaminated all logic. Claudia’s fists closed round the fillet to ease the strain on her bleeding wrists. You thought yourself superior—manipulating Fronto, bribing a homesick Greek girl, ingratiating yourself with Sergius Pictor, setting up Quintilian and me. Did you ever, even once, wake up in the morning and see yourself as you really were? Did the mirror never throw back the reflection of the shabby, shallow, self-obsessed individual who looked in it? Did you never cringe at yourself, Corbulo?

Her fingers could take the strain no longer. She let go of the fillet and winced as the ribbon dug into her wrists. Her shoulders were on fire, her head was swimming with the pain. The woollen tunic, the one that reeked of onions and sweat, had long since slipped away. Corbulo had torn it, the branches had torn it, there was little left by the time she was caught by the canopy. She wondered what the ploughman was like, the owner of the tunic. Would he be cross at losing it? Would he thrash around looking for it? Curse the fool who stole it? Grumble all the morning? Isn’t it funny, she thought, what goes through your mind at a time like this?

Everything here is white or it’s green. The world is condensed. I can see spray, it washes over my face, my feet, my legs. I can see water, thousands upon thousands of gallons, rushing below me. Or I can see green, varying shades of green, from the poplars, the birches, the willows. Oh yes, and blue. That one, small, fragile piece of blue…

Above her, although she couldn’t see it through the blur, the sky would also be blue. Not this dreary, twilight blue, it would be vibrant, fresh, the colour of speedwells. There might be a few clouds streaked across it. Mares’ tails. Light, white, dancing clouds. Skittish clouds. Happy, silly, carefree clouds.

Clouds filled her eyes and dribbled down her cheeks. Dammit, I can’t even see the bloody sky. Talk about irony. He gets the quick death, I just hang here until his stupid, stupid ribbon chafes through. She glanced down into the white froth and shuddered.

‘Claudia Seferius, what the hell are you doing there?’

Sweet Janus, the trees are talking back! Wildly she flung her head from side to side. This is not happening. It is not, not happening.

‘Couldn’t you see I was in trouble back there at the villa?’

Overhead, the wavy mop of Marcus Cornelius Orbilio was being saturated in the spray. He seemed to be securing one end of the mare’s reins over a branch, though the concentration couldn’t wipe the grin off his face.

‘I—’ She cleared her throat. ‘I knew you’d be fine without interference from me.’

The tears down her face turned into a watercourse. I should have known Corbulo couldn’t fell you with just one stick, she thought. For once, he’d underestimated his man. Patricians? Soft as sand, he’d have said, not stopping to consider whether any broke the mould. Whether any worked out at the gymnasium with weights. Whether any had muscles strong enough to repel the odd whack with a vaulting pole…