The Curse-Maker (16 page)

She looked up at me, her mouth trembling. I was unpinning her tunic. When I started to unwrap her breast band, she tried to push my hands away.

“N-no, Ardur, I—I'm not—”

I held her hands in mine and raised them to my lips.

“I don't know what you see, Gwyna. I see a woman with a beautiful, miraculous body, as desirable as the day I first saw it. More so, if possible. You don't have anything to hide, and nothing—nothing—to be ashamed of.”

She stared at me for what seemed like forever. I unraveled her breast band and looked at her.

Her breasts were fuller, just as lovely. But all she could remember was the milk that had started to flow in them, and the baby that would never suckle.

I held her eyes up with my own. “You take my breath away.”

My hands cupped them, and she shuddered while I used my tongue.

“Ardur—Ardur, not—not now…”

“Now is the best time. No more waiting. No more running away. For either of us.”

After a few minutes, I gave my attention to the small briefs, as my hands molded the line of her hips down to her legs. She shuddered again when I slid them off. It was the first time I'd seen her naked since I'd left home, so long ago.

Her abdomen was gently swollen, and she hadn't lost all the extra weight of the pregnancy. The telltale signs others had noticed, but not her blind husband.

I led her into the
tepidarium
and gently washed her with a sponge. I touched every part of her, made it mine again. She stopped shaking so much every time she felt my hands. Then I rubbed her back and buttocks with oil and massaged her legs, stomach, and breasts until her nipples were ready to burst.

We climbed out of the pool together, and I dried her with a towel. She reached a hand up to my face and kissed me, softly first, but with a growing need to blot out the night. While our mouths were still intertwined, I picked her up in my arms and stumbled toward the bedroom.

We kept kissing while I kicked the door and laid her gently on the bed. Then my mouth traveled lower down her breasts to below her belly, until she objected.

“Ardur—what—no—”

“Shhh. Trust me, my love. Trust me.”

The happiness I felt when she gasped with pleasure, and gave herself over to it, helped cleanse some of the guilt and washed away a little of the pain. It was equaled later when we were both crying out, not with sorrow, but with a love that was our whole life. Toward morning, we fell asleep in each other's arms.

*   *   *

I woke up before dawn. Gwyna nestled in the crook of my arm, hair tousled and curling on my chest. She groaned and stretched and opened an eye.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning to you. How do you feel?”

She blushed. “Like a loose woman.”

Some anemic moonlight filtered in from the small window. She sat up and stretched again, making a shadow on the wall.

I yawned. “You feel nothing like a loose woman. I've had a few.”

She threw her pillow on my face, and I reached up and pulled her down on my chest again.

“Ardur.”

“Yes, love?”

“What—what do you think happened last night?”

I sat up in bed, set her in front of me. “A fraud, Gwyna. Someone put Faro up to it. Someone's trying to hurt us.”

Her face held doubt as if she were reluctant to let it go. That was the problem with cons like Faro's. That's what made them so evil.

“Darling—listen to me. None of that—none—was real or true. Please believe me.”

She lowered her eyes and shook her head. “All—all right, Ardur, but who—who knew about me?”

“Philo, for one. Sulpicia, for another.”

“Sulpicia? Philo, I can understand—I—I asked him about it—said a friend of mine—”

“He would've guessed it was you, and Sulpicia may've had—I don't know—some similar experiences. Maybe she recognized how you felt. She seemed to—well, be sorry.”

Gwyna looked over at me with a little of her normal spirit. “When I want her pity I'll ask for it.”

“The point is that they knew, and maybe other people—women—could guess. Everybody except your doctor husband, of course. Too busy sticking his head up—”

Her fingers brushed my lips. “Shhh. I don't want to hear it. It's over.”

“It'll be over when I'm done with Faro. I'm sorry, but I think I ruined all the rest of our social life in Aquae Sulis.”

“What did you do?”

“I told Materna to shut her face before I shut it for her.”

She shook her head. “We can't forsake appearances. That might be exactly what they want us to do. Give up going to the baths, give up Aquae Sulis. We can't, Ardur. Or we'll let them win.”

“That's fine. We'll go to the baths. I'll wear a toga. But I'm still going to handle it in my own way.”

My jaw hurt. Gwyna ran a finger down my cheek. “Ardur—don't put yourself in danger. I know you want to hurt Faro.”

“I don't want to hurt him. I want to kill him.”

She lay stomach down on the pillow and propped herself up with her elbows. The view of her cleavage distracted me.

“What about Bibax? Where does he fit in?”

“I don't know, and I don't—goddamn it. Shit!”

“What is it?”

“I was supposed to meet Calpurnius last night at the spring. At the fifth hour.”

“You were busy at the fifth hour.” She gave me a half-smile.

My tongue was slow. “We were both a little—busy—last night.”

I set her in my lap. She wove her arms around my neck, and started to make a few noises when I buried my face in her breasts. Then a knock sounded at the door.

I looked at Gwyna, and she smiled. I was breathing hard.

“What?! What the hell is it?”

A thin voice came through the wood. “So sorry, sir—but there's someone here—very important—need you.”

That's all I got. Lineus was too well bred to be any louder. A lesson in deportment I never quite mastered.

“Just wait a goddamn minute!”

Gwyna climbed off of me and put her feet on the floor. “Go on, Ardur. It must be something serious. We have”—she leaned over and brushed her lips against my neck—“we have the rest of our lives.”

It felt almost as good to hear it as it would to prove it. I still grumbled when I threw on a dirty tunic and laced some sandals halfway on my feet. She was getting dressed more carefully.

“Go on. I'll meet you in the dining room.”

I kissed her cheek, then opened the door with unnecessary violence. It made me feel better.

Lineus was hovering in the background. “Please, sir—it's very important.”

“It better be. Who's here?”

“A gentleman, sir. A Philo. He said you'd know him by that name.”

Philo? At my house? This early?

“What time is it?” I asked Lineus abruptly.

“Not even the first hour of morning, sir. He arrived just a few minutes ago.”

I grunted and strode into the dining room. Philo was sitting in a chair, looking immaculate as ever. Did he go to sleep like that?

The expression on his face was the kind you saved for the cases you couldn't help.

“Arcturus—I'm sorry to wake you—”

“What is it?”

“It's—it's a priest.”

My stomach knotted up, and I knew what he was going to say before the words started to form, and then I saw them come out with a terrible kind of slowness, as if he were speaking underwater.

“They found him—just half an hour ago—in the drain. He's been murdered.”

Calpurnius. Goddamn it.
Cui
fucking
bono.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Philo walked beside me, stride for stride, echoing my own anxiety. There wasn't much light to see by. Dawn was wearing black today.

The cool breeze from the western hills blew through the yellow dust and yellower leaves, sweeping them in flurries down the worn stone paths, toward the one place in Aquae Sulis everything ended up. The baths.

Bibax died next to them; Calpurnius died underneath them. Others died from deals made, curses cast, and money furtively handed over into a ready palm—all around the blue-green waters of Sulis. She must wonder why the hell she bothers.

The good doctor said little. The ragged light, playing hide-and-seek with the clouds that threatened rain, caught the fine lines in his face and dug them into crags. He looked his age today. I can't say it bothered me much.

Octavio had fetched him out of bed in a panic. Philo had in turn fetched Papirius. No one knew who to blame for bringing Grattius. The three of them were waiting for us with various degrees of impatience by the large drain, along with a smaller man in filthy robes, obviously terrified.

The drain was typical Roman engineering—efficient, well built, and designed for maximum exploitation of resources. In this case, it let Papirius and company exploit the goddess.

My eyes traced the path of the pipes. Up above, somebody opened a sluice at the top of the spring. The sacred waters—carrying sacred gold and other donations to the Sulis Mutual Benefit Society—rushed through pipes and emptied into this drain via a wide terra-cotta channel. The drain was made large enough for men to walk through and clean or repair it—or pick up anything Sulis left behind.

Other pipes ran from the baths into the same system. I expected the spring was cleaned nearly as often as the pools were. No one bathed in it, but then nobody threw gold necklaces in the
caldarium,
either.

Octavio's torch flicked orange light in everyone's faces. I brushed it away, and it bounced on the brick walls and made teasing little shadows that promised to tell me what I wanted to know.

I asked: “Where is he?”

Papirius answered, distaste on his face. He clutched his long mantle, raising it several inches off the ground. The head priest was clearly not impressed with the temple sanitary system.

“He's—he's inside.”

I looked over at Philo. “Have you—”

He shook his head before I could get the question out. “No. I—I turned him over, saw that it was too late, and suggested we get you.”

I grunted and headed down into the drain. Small steps were built into the rock for the cleaners, who would come along and replace missing bricks or repair leaks to the pipe whenever the sluice wasn't open. The wide, half-pipe channel carried the bulk of the water and mud through the hole. In the darkness of it, presumably in the channel, was the body of Calpurnius.

I looked up to where they were all staring down at me, and held up a hand.

“Somebody give me a goddamn lamp.”

Philo handed me a two-wick portable with a sturdy handle and a picture of Apollo and Daphne carved on it. The light was flickering, and the cold, dank air from the black hole of the drain threatened to snuff it out permanently.

I shielded it with my left hand and walked in, stooping half a foot so I could fit. The acrid odor of the burning wick blended with the volcanic bite of the water and the clean smell of wet earth. The walls were still wet and slippery a couple of feet up the sides, and a fine brown and yellow silt oozed along the channel like snail slime. I got about five feet in and finally saw Calpurnius.

He was lying facedown in the channel, his legs bent behind him in an unnatural pose by the force of the water and mud that had run over him. Poor bastard. The water didn't leave him any cleaner.

His robe was caked in silt, his thin hair coated with it. His hands were bent into claws, as if he tried to scratch his way out.

I set the lamp down gingerly, and hoped like hell it wouldn't blow out. I had just discovered that I didn't like drains.

Calpurnius was heavier than he looked, and there wasn't much room to maneuver. I tried not to let his head hit the terra-cotta when I wrestled him over, but his legs and arms smacked the hard surface with a thump.

“What's going on? Are you all right, Arcturus?” Philo's voice echoed weirdly in the muddy tunnel.

“Yeah. I'll be a few minutes.”

I thought for a minute the lamp was playing tricks on me. Calpurnius's face was twisted into something inhuman. The tongue extended, lips drawing over teeth in a grimace of absolute horror. Mud filled the mouth and nose and eyes, which had been open when the water came.

I felt his hands. They hung toward his side and were curved as if he tried to scratch himself. Stiffness wasn't fully formed. The drain was cold, but the water and mud were warm. That made it hard to tell.

Neck was splotchy. Ground-in dirt on the back of his head, what looked like blood. I felt the skull gingerly. The skin was broken along the back. Shit. I should've caught it earlier. I didn't want to flip him again.

I lifted his arms and took a closer look at his fingers and the heel of his palms. There—more skin torn. Both hands. Confirmation. No need to check the legs.

I stood up and nearly cracked my head. I was running out of time, and missing something. The lamp was wavering with uncertainty. So was I.

I bent down again quickly, tried to scoop water from the channel into my hand. I poured a few drops on Calpurnius's face. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

I tore a piece of his wet robe, using a jagged piece of flint that lay in the channel. His nose and his mouth disgorged finger-fulls of silt and mud. Then his mouth threw up a piece of lead.

It was wedged in, like Bibax's, but was a thick, rectangular piece that could've come straight off a pipe. I pried it out between Calpurnius's tortured lips and dunked it in the channel. Under the lamp I could just make out a thick, straight line dug in with a stylus. I tilted the lead until it caught the flame just right. It read
ULTOR
in capitals.

I tucked it into my tunic. One last place to check before we moved the body. I rubbed the mud out of Calpurnius's eyes until I could see some of the iris. The rims were red and inflamed, like they always were—one reason he looked like a rat. But underneath the mud the skin glistened faintly, as if an unguent or cream had been rubbed in. That was before he was dragged facedown into the drain. Dead.