Second Act (10 page)

Claudia had given a lot of thought to the theme of her own Saturnalia banquet. ‘What do you think about setting it round the zodiac?’ she asked Drusilla.

‘Prrrr.’

‘Yes, I thought so.’

Beef to represent Taurus, the bull. Crabs for Cancer, mutton for Aries, mullets for Pisces and so on.

‘But it probably won’t do to serve spit-roasted virgins or stuffed water bearers,’ she told the cat, draining the last of the sacrificial wine. ‘This is where I’m relying on the expertise of our illustrious Cook.’

Aromas of smoked garlic, honeyed hams, poached pears and yeasty bread met her in the kitchen doorway. In the flurry of activity, bronze ladles clanged against baking pans, earthenware pots clunked together, baskets scraped the tiled floor. Someone winced, cursing in a guttural Teutonic tongue as they burned themselves on the water heater as they passed by, and voices became raised as two of the slaves fought over who should clean the cauldron, it was their turn yesterday, and who should get the job of pickling onions, you know it makes their eyes water. Twenty extra mouths were taking their toll, then. Not, perhaps, the most judicious moment to raise the subject of zodiac banquets with the Cook. Especially when that happened to be his guttural Teutonic tongue cursing the water heater back there. But this was the eleventh and there wasn’t time to spare.

Suddenly, she felt Drusilla stiffen against her collarbone. The purring stopped.

‘Hrrow.’

Her expression was that of a leopard on a fresh kill who had just spotted a lion approaching. Claudia followed Drusilla’s gaze and saw one of the actors sidling in through the back entrance, pinching the bottom of one of the kitchen maids before snatching a leftover rissole and skipping out the door to the slave quarters.

Skyles, of course.

Skyles, who had taken off his tunic in the Forum, ostensibly to spare Erinna’s modesty.

Skyles, who’d left the Forum two hours ago with the maestro and the others.

Skyles. Who had only just returned…

Tail wide and thrashing, Drusilla jumped down and ran off. Across the atrium, Claudia watched as the young castrato muttered something to Renata and scampered down the corridor as fast as his chubby legs would carry him in the direction Skyles had taken. Claudia followed. No doors sealed off the rooms in the slave quarters. Only Leonides and the Cook were afforded the luxury of privacy, the rest had to make do with heavy tapestries hung across the opening of their rooms.

‘Well?’ Periander’s girlish voice was rendered even higher with breathless excitement. ‘How did you get on, then?’

Skyles chuckled. It was a deep chuckle, made all the more resonant in a small room. ‘The minute I didn’t come home with the others, Peri my mate, you knew exactly how I got on.’

‘So tell me what happened.’

The actor laughed again. ‘For a boy with no balls, you have one helluva sex drive.’

‘For the last time, Sky, I’m not a boy, I’m sixteen, and will you bloody hurry before Renata comes looking for me. Who was she this time, eh? Was she patrician? What did she say when she picked you up? Where did she take you? Come on, Sky, what did you do?’

‘You’re a little pervert, you know that, Peri?’ There was a creak as Skyles made himself comfortable on the bed. ‘No, she wasn’t patrician,’ he said. ‘But she had a nice house on the Quirinal—’

Behind the curtain, pale blue and embroidered with dolphins and seashells around a rather portly Venus rising from the waves, Claudia eavesdropped on a concise but graphic description of his latest conquest’s charms and sexual foibles. That was the last time she’d look at
this
tapestry in the same light, she thought. Talk about a new dimension to the term sky blue.

‘Blimey.’ Peri’s breath came out in a whistle. ‘The dirty slut!
And
she made you shag her in the atrium, where anybody might walk in?’

‘I think that was the point of the exercise, Peri. The danger.’

‘Ju-p-es,’ Periander said, incredulity stretching out the single syllable, and Claudia could almost picture his rosebud mouth dropping open in astonishment. ‘You don’t half pick ’em, Sky.’

‘I don’t pick
them
at all. They pick me.’

There was a scraping sound, which Claudia identified as the boy scuffing his sandal on the flagstone, the sort of action people take before embarking on contentious issues.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ Peri said carefully. ‘I mean, you’re a great guy and everything, but what I don’t understand is: why don’t these women throw themselves at Ion? No offence, Sky, but he’s tall, bearded, handsome as sin and with shoulders like a bleedin’ ox. You’d think the tarts would be tossing their knickers his way, but they don’t. Why always you?’

‘Haven’t a clue, mate,’ Skyles laughed. ‘What’s your opinion, milady?’

Bugger. Claudia pushed the drape aside. No point in asking how he knew she was there. Hell, perhaps every woman he encountered listened at his keyholes? Tapping her fingertip against the wooden door frame, she glanced at the eager-faced castrato sitting on the opposite bunk, plumpness bulging out his maroon and yellow tunic just as amazement bulged out his dark-brown velvet eyes. A greater contrast to the man sprawled out on his pallet, hands behind his head, his legs crossed leisurely at the ankle, could not be imagined.

‘Well?’ Skyles prompted quietly.

Peri was right. There was nothing out of the ordinary about Skyles. Sure, his body was lean and hard, but he was of average height, average build, and shaven skulls flatter very few men. Hardly a head-turner, then.

At least, not on paper.

But how does one define sex appeal? The white scars that criss-crossed his back? The craggy, lived-in face—a face far too old for a man of thirty-five? Maybe it had something to do with that taunting-the-world look in his eye? The air of indifference about what people thought of him? Or was it a combination of all these things?

‘Frankly, I have no idea,’ she said.

‘Liar,’ Skyles countered softly, patting the solid lump that passed for a mattress and indicating to Periander to make himself scarce.

‘Candied cherries?’ he asked.

Claudia curled her legs underneath her and wondered what Julia would m
a
ke of this. Rich merchant’s widow and commoner alone together in a windowless broom cupboard lit by a solitary candle. With the actor offering luxury goods to a woman who could afford the whole tree.

‘My mother told me never to take sweets from strange men.’

‘I strike you as strange, do I?’ He laughed softly under his breath. ‘Wine, then.’

It wasn’t a question. He leaned over, poured two mugs of red wine and handed one to her. The mug was chipped, and read ‘Drink me dry’ on the outside.

‘To success,’ he said, chinking the rim of his earthenware cup against hers.

‘In what?’ she asked. The wine was fruity and coarse, dry enough to strip paint, and Skyles wasn’t a man to water his wine. Or indeed any other aspect of his life, come to that.

‘You tell me.’

He shifted the weight on to one elbow, and now his thighs were but a sylph’s breath from her shins. She could feel the heat pulsing out from his tanned, naked flesh. His pallet smelled of cool, mountain forests. She sipped from the mug and tried to remember whether his gaze had ever left hers from the moment she’d stepped into his room.

‘Do they pay you, these women?’

He drew a deep breath, held it for a count of three, then exhaled slowly. ‘They offer, but I never accept.’

He waited for her to ask the inevitable, but Claudia remained silent, and the question hung in the air between them, heavy as a thundercloud, every bit as loaded.

In silence, coarse wine was sipped from chipped mugs.

*

The day commemorating the Festival of the Lambs was drawing to a close. Four times a year, in December, January, March and May, a ram would lay down its life as the priest invoked the sun’s rays to shine favourably on the soil, that there might be neither drought nor deluge and that Rome, therefore, would not starve. Fat chance of that happening, Orbilio thought, his weary legs tramping up Piper Street towards the Esquiline. A quarter century of peace had brought a stability to the Empire that its citizens had never known before, and with peace came prosperity. Slaves outnumbered Romans ten to one on farms, tending the land better than a wet nurse. Armies of labourers were constantly manuring, irrigating, pruning and weeding to ensure maximum harvests, optimum qualities, all at a price people could afford. Droughts and deluges might be a problem, but thank Jupiter, they were no longer a crisis, and this was down to the work of one man. Augustus.

His boast was that he had inherited a city of brick and had turned it to marble, eighty-two temples alone. Now Rome gleamed from every angle that the sun’s invoked rays hit, blinding in its brilliance with the gold on the columns and the bronze on the statues, but the glints reflected far more than one man’s building programme. These marbles and metals, the intricate frieze work, the skill of the men who laid the mosaics and painted the frescoes reflected serenity. A nation that was no longer burying young men in the prime of their life was a nation which thrived. It had grown strong on food that was as cheap as it was plentiful. On the fresh water that came in on the aqueducts and kept the city clean. On the sharp fall in street crime (December excepted).

Orbilio turned into Fig Street. The ancient tree from which the road got its name had long since withered away, but several of its cubs scrambled over the walls of the shops and apartment blocks, scenting the street with the smell of ripe fruit in the summer. From behind a shutter, he heard the late-night clack of a loom, a cough from an upstairs window. A pack of feral dogs loped down an alleyway, off to scavenge the middens.

But peace did not suit everyone, he reflected. Sextus Valerius Cotta was due to address the Senate, calling for more war, more expansion, more territories, more riches. Despite little support in the Assembly, Orbilio knew that greed was a strong puller of crowds. The Arch-Hawk had many a supporter among ordinary citizens, especially those whose lives could do with a bit of enriching.

‘Why should the Empire rest on her laurels,’ they cried, carrying his echo into the streets, ‘when we can get our hands on the gold mines of Dacia?’

Living in death-trap tenements, where burglary was rife and fire claimed victims every night of the year, Cotta’s followers saw a future in which they paid fewer taxes and less tribute once the shipping revenues from the Black Sea fell into Roman hands. They saw valuable minerals from the Orient rebuilding their slums the way the spoils of war had raised temples of marble from brick. They saw Indian spices paying for water coming straight to their courtyards, Britannia paying for their sons to be educated, African campaigns providing them with beds stuffed with feathers not straw, and where the only thing that moved on the mattress was the occupant, not the fleas.

‘Rome
can
win,’ they rallied. ‘Our army is the best in the world, we have wealth on our side, strength in discipline, let’s not waste the opportunity.’

Impoverished men with impoverished vision, they couldn’t grasp the Emperor’s argument that strength lay in holding on. In reinforcing ties with one’s neighbours, rather than testing them. Strength lay in trade. In security.
In peace.
Only with stability could the Empire stand firm. One had to consolidate before one moved on.

‘Bullshit,’ the crowed bayed. ‘We’ve done it before, we can do it again, the eagle and the hawk are invincible.’

All Orbilio could hope for was that, this close to Saturnalia, Cotta’s incitements would fall on deaf ears. Young or old, rich or poor, sick or healthy, this was a season when people were happy and heaven knows, no month matched December for festivals. Eighteen, to be precise, with chariot races, dancing, donkey derbies and banquets, processions, dedications and music. This would herald a New Year. A fresh start for everyone. Halcyon days, indeed.

And on the loose, the Halcyon Rapist.

At the top of Fig Street, Marcus paused to tickle the ears of a bright-eyed ginger kitten and found himself trapped as the kitten rolled over and demanded a belly rub, squirming and purring with pleasure.

‘It’s all right for you, you rascal. The most you ever have to do to keep vermin off the streets is chase rats.’

At which point, the kitten discovered that toga hems were the gateway to a wonderful playground, and it was with considerable difficulty that he disengaged the sharp little claws and repositioned the squirming bundle back on the pavement. Being a kitten, of course, and not a puppy, it instantly dismissed its new acquaintance in favour of phantom moths, squirting up the fig tree like liquid.

The streets were eerily quiet. The fourth Lamb Festival of the year was also a holiday for beasts of burden, so no delivery carts rattled over the cobbles tonight, and no plod of oxen or whinny of mules broke through the silence. Only the odd creak of a barrow, the off-key song of a late-night carouser in the distance, the shuffle of a funeral bier as it was carried away for cremation unmourned. Walking these silent streets without even his own shadow for company, Orbilio could see how a young woman could be hauled into an alleyway and raped. But nights like this were rare in Rome. Day and night the city bristled with frantic activity, and it was a well-worn joke that more people died from insomnia than the plague. Moreover, the rapist snatched his victims in daylight.