Dark Horse (22 page)

Someone had squeezed the breath from her body. Taken the bones from her legs. Pleurisy, right?

'You're right, Marcus, I can't deny it.' Was that pathetic croak hers? 'There is something between us.' Shaking her wrists free, she saw that his pupils were black and that a pulse beat at the side of his temple.

'Say it,' he whispered.

The earth seemed to spin, suck her down, she wanted to cry, to laugh, to be somewhere - anywhere - else. She wanted to die. Die in a sandalwood heaven.

'For gods' sake, Claudia, say it.'

'Very well.' She closed her eyes. Dredged up every ounce of her strength. 'I'll tell you exactly what's between us, Marcus. It's . . .'

'Yes?'

Claudia swallowed. 'It's a dumb-bell. Someone left it behind after they'd worked out in this yard, and now if you'll excuse me.' She stepped over the weight. 'I have some vineyards to visit.'

The demon watched a ray glide through the water. The sea was so clear, every rippling movement of the ray's wings was cleanly visible, even the cloud of small silver fish spiralling alongside, and for a moment the demon envied the sinuous adventurer the freedom to come and go as he pleased.

Other adventurers had come and gone from this island -Jason in his fifty-oared
Argo,
Odysseus in his black ship from Troy - but nothing had really changed. Should the shades of the heroes return to these thyme-scented hills, they would still recognize the vultures, the snake hawks, the violet-blue coral, the twisted oaks, fragrant pines, the same sandy beaches and white rocky coves on which they had idled their time all those generations before.

Centuries peeled back.

To the day the
Argo
became trapped in this very gulf by a flotilla under the command of Medea's brother, Apsyrtus. Thanks to the connivance of his treacherous lover, Jason had been able to steal the Golden Fleece from under the nose of her father, but he had not bargained on the ferocity with which the family wanted it back. Nor the revenge they sought on the perfidious bitch who'd enabled him to take it from them.

In its mind, the demon saw the blockade close in. The trap tighten. There is nowhere for the
Argo
to run.

A plan forms in Medea's mind. Under cover of night she rows ashore. Sends word to her brother that she's been abducted, held captive, raped even. Remorseful (how could he have misjudged her?) Apsyrtus charges in to rescue his sister. 
Betrayal.
She kills him. Dismembers his corpse and throws the body parts into the sea. Medea's plan is successful.

First the fleet must collect the mangled remains, since

Illyrian custom decrees that bodies must be complete to make their journey into the afterlife and there was no way they could let the son of the king down.

Then, leaderless, the flotilla quickly falls into disarray, allowing Jason to sail off with the Fleece, making Medea his wife.

The demon had always been a sucker for happy endings.

The heat was moulding the pale-blue cotton of Claudia's gown to her flesh like a second skin as she stormed up the vertiginous hillside. Bristly coats clipped short for the summer, goats nibbled noisily among the sea of small blue thistles as the young goatherd, no more than twelve, played a haunting tune on the pan pipes.

Earthquakes and tidal waves, volcanoes and hurricanes couldn't stop Claudia Seferius leaving this wretched island. She sent a stone winging into oblivion down the slope. Dammit, Mercury riding Pegasus wouldn't be fast enough for her tonight. Crunching on the strewing balm, yellowed and crisped from months without rain, Claudia's sandals released waves of lemon scent into the air as from time to time she stumbled over a boulder on the dusty path until, at last, a sun which had seemed particularly pig-headed about dipping today, began to fulfil its obligations. Two hours, she calculated, before the moon rose, then it was Junius down in the cove, the Istrian mainland by midnight. Even so! Good as that sounded, any technique which produces more, sells for less and still makes a bloody good profit has to be worth checking out. And now here they were. Leo's famous vineyards, where established practice had been thrown out of the window and trampled into the ground. Jupiter, Juno and Mars! If the climb hadn't already done it, the sight of his leafy green soldiers standing in rigid phalanxes would have taken Claudia's breath right away. Slowly, she walked down the aisles.

Carefully, she inspected the ranks.

Noting the way roots were kept moist with piles of manure, fertilizing the plants at the same time. Memorizing the angle of lean to maximize exposure of the grapes to the sun. Imagine

the look on her bailiff's face when she ordered him to rip up the existing overhead trellises, pull out the elms which gave the old poles their anchorage, then plant new vines like espaliered apples! Imagine the look on the faces of those bastard merchants who'd driven her to the brink of ruin! They'd be laughing on the other sides of their faces, once they realized her profits were soaring. Let's see who's driving who then!

'Only mad people laugh to themselves,' a world-weary voice said.

Claudia found herself looking down at the olive-grove nymph, who had now miraculously transformed herself into a dryad of the vineyards. (Although the dryad was still no closer to having a wet towel rubbed over her face.)

'Who's laughing?' she said. 'The dust up here makes me sneeze.'

'It's not dusty,' the girl pointed out, a fat bunch of marigolds in her fist.

'Oh dear, it looks like my secret's out.' Claudia unclipped her brooch, the one shaped like a monkey and inlaid with carnelians and Baltic amber. 'But if you keep my secret, this is yours.'

'Wow!' A grimy finger traced the monkey's outline. 'Really,
really
mine?'

'Really,
really
yours,' she assured the rabbit-eyed scrap.

'Have you ever seen a real monkey? I haven't. I don't suppose this is real amber, do you? Someone said monkeys have tails like a cat, but I think they'd be more like a squirrel's, and anyway they're as big as bears, although I've never seen a squirrel that size. Can you help me pin this to my tunic?'

As Claudia knelt to attach the brooch to the filthy rag the child called a tunic, it occurred to her that she'd done a 'Leo' herself, charging headfirst without stopping to think. Because of its value, Nanai’ was more likely to confiscate the brooch to buy food for her massive brood.

'What's your name?' she asked.

'Snowdrop.'

'Because you keep your clothes so white?'

The grubby little face scowled. 'Snowdrop
isn't
a nickname.'

'Well, Snowdrop.' Claudia slipped off a ring of Gaulish silver and pressed it into the girl's free hand. 'You can give this to your mother.'

'You mean Nanai?' Rabbit eyes rolled in exasperation. 'Good heavens! Nanai's not our mother! We're orphans. Didn't you know?'

Er. No. Actually, I didn't - and that put an entirely different slant on Leo and Nanai's conversation. No tradesmen's dispute. No continuous gestation. These were strays she'd picked up. Strays which Leo had been subsidizing over the years.

'Come with me,' Snowdrop ordered. 'There's something I want to show you.'

She led the way along a winding goat track through the scrub, all the time cautioning Claudia to mind her arms on the brambles, watch out for rabbit holes, this bit was slippery, careful she didn't snag her gown on the roses, mind this fallen tree branch.

'Thinking about it,' she said, 'I'm not so sure you
are
mad. You were laughing at Leo's vines, weren't you, but you shouldn't.'

'So sorry, milady.' Claudia pulled a solemn face. 'Very remiss of me to speak ill of the dead.'

'Is it? Then you'd better tell Nanai, because she's been saying all sorts of horrible things about Leo this morning, but that's not what I meant. Nanai says that when someone tries really, really hard to do something, you should never laugh at them, because it's always better to have tried and failed, than not have tried at all. Anyway, there's nothing to laugh at. Leo's method might be odd, but it does ever so well. He got much bigger grapes than when the vines ran the other way, dangling down, only - promise you won't tell?'

Claudia sucked in her cheeks. 'Vestal virgins' honour.'

'Well, the thing is, we've been taking a quarter of the crop. For Nanai, of course. We wouldn't dream of taking them otherwise. That would be stealing.'

'But it's all right to do it for Nanai?'

'Yes, because it's not as if we were eating them, is it? They still go to make wine.'

Claudia's mind suddenly found itself making rapid calculations. If Leo believed his yield to be twenty per cent down and was still content with the margin, whereas in reality they were twenty-five per cent up.

Oh, mamma, I'm home!

'Nanai’ sells the grapes to someone in the town, and he ships them to Istria, and that's where they're made into wine.'

'Well, that's all right, then. As long as it isn't stealing.'

Snowdrop flashed her an old-fashioned look. 'Are you making fun of me?'

'Perish the thought.'

After a sharp descent through yet more gorse and more prickly juniper, the girl suddenly stopped. 'There,' she said, pointing. 'That's what I wanted to show you. That's where we live.'

Swarming over the yard (it had long since ceased to be a garden) was a storm of small children, every one of them younger than Snowdrop. In their brilliantly coloured rags, it was like watching a prism fracturing then remoulding, then splintering again in the twilight. At a rough count, Claudia made it thirteen - give or take a toddler or two - although, like Snowdrop's estimation, it was hard to be specific given that the whole gang were either tumbling over an assortment of dogs, goats and poultry or else skipping, hopscotching or swinging from a rope looped over a branch. One, she noticed, was simply asleep where he had fallen.

Grime was the only common denominator. Some of the children were chunky, others like twigs, some had flat noses, others snub. At least two of the tots had black skin with wild frizzy mops, while others had fine hair like dark silken caps, wild matted curls just like Snowdrop's, or heads of brilliant red spikes. The closer she approached, the more ear-splitting the racket.

'Nanai! Nanai, look who's come to visit!' Snowdrop shrieked over the noise. To Claudia she said, 'Go on in.'

Fat chance. There were far too many folds in Claudia's gown for fleas to disappear without trace. Until small, dry,

filthy fingers closed over her own, popping Claudia's resolve like a bubble.

Once, in the time before Leo moved all the workshop] on the estate close to the Villa Arcadia, this had been forge. Long, low and narrow, daylight penetrated the sing room at its peril, but there was little trace of the blacksmith today. A giant cauldron hung suspended from chains above the hearth, wafting out the smell of a stew which rarely saw mea Stinking tallows provided the light, but today, and despite the sinking sun, only one small, solitary flame flickered in a distant corner.

'She's not here,' Snowdrop announced unnecessarily. 'Sit down.' With a wave of her arm, she indicated the on high-backed chair in the place. 'I'll go and fetch her.'

Laying her bunch of marigolds beside a stack of wooden plates in the manner of a matronly housewife, Snowdrop gave the cauldron a quick stir with the paddle, checked the bread oven and inspected the level of the water butt before setting off to find Nanai’.

It was just as well, Claudia decided, that she hadn't sat down. The bundle of rags on the chair turned out to be a sleeping infant.

Adjusting her eyes to the gloom, she wandered around. Heaps of mattresses had been piled higgledy-piggledy against the back wall. Stools criss-crossed this way and that. A mass of small, patched clothes burst out of a wooden chest in the corner, cooking implements littered the table and toys littered the floor. A tornado would have left far less mess. The infant stirred, gurgled a bit, blew a few bubbles, then sucked its thumb back to sleep. It would not have seen more than one birthday, and it was anyone's guess what sex it was. Claudia picked up the little straw doll which had fallen to the floor and replaced it on the tiny chest.

Herbs hung from the overhead beam in thick bunches. Thyme, lavender, rosemary, oregano which could be used as rinses, disinfectants, in cooking, for strewing, for medicine, added to wax to make sweet-scented polish. Horsetails lay beside pots on the table, ready to scour them spotless. The large round loaf in the charcoal oven sent out tantalizing

aromas to combat the herbs, along with the smell of cloves, porridge, and clean wool piled high next to a loom. More wool steeped in buckets of plant dye. Bright yellow juniper; soft pink sorrel; creamy parsley.

At the far end, a moth-eaten tapestry curtained off part of the building. Claudia nudged it aside. Among the tangle of unmade bedclothes lay one black cat with half a tail and one mustard-coloured cat with exceptional whiskers. Wedged between the cats, infant twin boys lay entwined in each other's arms deep in sleep. Their faces hadn't seen water for weeks.

With no sign of Snowdrop returning, Claudia followed the path behind the back of the forge. As she did so, a three-year-old with grey eyes came barrelling round the corner. 'Ya!' he shouted, whipping an imaginary horse from his imaginary chariot. 'Ya, ya!' With no regard to pedestrians, the boy veered his chariot in a tight about-turn, knocking Claudia flying and trampling her foot in the process. 'Yeeha!'