Dream Boat (24 page)

He's not going to die, stop thinking like that. You can save him. Find Flavia, get that oath sworn.

You can.

You can save him. There's still time . .
.just.

Around her, the commune laughed and babbled and acted as though this was another normal day. Better than a normal day, in fact, because this was the first day of Ibis, a day for rejoicing. A holiday. Sacrifices, hymns, dancing and music, wrestling, feasting and fun. Bitterness rose in Claudia's throat. These people, jigging around in their festive wigs and blue scarab amulets, were not touched by tragedy, impending or otherwise. Misfortune was a thing of the past, because in this valley life was fresh and new and you didn't have to watch ageing parents die a painful, lingering death or worry about unfaithful spouses, wayward kids, politics, jobs, the threat of war. Moneylenders, debt collectors, robbers, muggers might as well belong to another world, strange and mythical creatures with horns, wings and claws - for Mentu's cult members had left their financial burdens behind at the gate.

Someone else had taken over their problems. Someone else was in control of their lives. Here existed only a simple pecking order, safe boundaries behind which they could hide. These people - these happy, clapping, dancing people - had relinquished reality along with their responsibilities. Nothing could shock them. Nothing could touch on a nerve. They had abdicated. Real life no longer happened.

But you can't leave behind your own shortcomings.

Look at them! Dressed up in their best bib and tucker, in thick plaited wigs which had been handed out for the occasion, every one identical, irrespective of the wearer's sex. Women gyrated, in sharply pleated shifts with straps which passed over their shoulders, garlands round their necks and kohl around their eyes, with men who wore white ankle-length kilts fastened with a broad sash round the waist. They couldn't give a toss whether their brothers or sisters were sick or miserable, how their pet rabbit was faring, whether Cousin Lucia had bowed to pressure from her family to marry that gap-toothed old widower, or found happiness with the man she loved.

And suddenly Claudia realised they were not harmless, gormless Pyramidiots buffered by the rigid conformity of commune life. These were hard, self-centred, selfish scum who'd absconded with the family silver and - like Flavia -had thought only of themselves, and to buggery with everyone else. They could not be touched, because they were incapable of making deep emotional attachments for the simple reason that they did not have the equipment in the first place. These miserable sons of bitches damned well deserved each other and Mentu - may the gods smile on him - was welcome to feast off their selfish inadequacies.

She hauled off the heavy, black wig, running the myriad plaits between her fingers. Reality would catch up with them soon enough, of course. They'd become ill. Some would die. They would tire of the brewing, the baking, the slogging in the fields, simply because they hailed from soft, middle-class families with soft, middle-class values. But in the meantime, this was the day of the Ibis and the day was all that they lived

for! For them, there was no yesterday, not even any tomorrow. They certainly wouldn't lose sleep about nebulous concerns, such as the welfare of a few retainers: whether they were well, being schooled, actually receiving the bonuses they'd been promised. That was not their affair any more. Physical and moral welfare was someone else's responsibility, they'd left all that behind, and who cares whether one more poor sod ends being torn apart by a pack of ravenous dogs?

I care. Oh, Junius, I care . . .

Eight hours and counting.

Fat tears trickled in black, kohly streaks down her cheeks. I shouldn't have made him wear Gaius's toga. I should not have left him alone in the Camensis. I certainly should not have come on this wild goose chase! All I've done is waste valuable time.

A vice clamped round Claudia's throat. Play fast and loose with your own life, if you must - but don't balls up anyone else's! Tears of self-pity pricked in her eyes. Conceited bitch. Miss Know-it-all! You think you can handle this stuff on your own, when the stark reality is you're nothing but a rank amateur and a bloody poor one at that. You bungle the kidnap, you get a loyal bodyguard thrown in the dungeons, and you can't even find a fifteen-year-old girl in an enclosed valley.

What shall I do?
Someone help me. Someone tell me what I should do.

But as usual, Claudia Seferius was on her own.

The valley began to swim around her as she twisted the plaits of her wig into knots. Should she cut her losses and go back to Rome? If there had been anything Claudia could have done to bail out her bodyguard, she would have taken that action in the first place and not come swanning out here!

Yet it had seemed so right at the time. Grab Flavia, and carry the troublesome bitch back to Rome where the oath had already been drafted.

Seven hours and counting.

As the vice tightened round her windpipe and an eagle clawed at her heart, she pictured the dungeons. Dank, dark,

smelly at the finest of times, the heat and the deluge would have made them unbearable. The wardens were brutes - they had to be. She pictured the Gaul, one side of his face battered, swollen and raw. So vivid was the image, that she could see clearly the contusions and cuts, matted hair, one eye almost closed, his face filthy.

No. Not filthy, the dark colour was from bruising. His skin was actually quite clean . . .

Claudia blinked. She'd eaten little last night and nothing this morning, dehydration and heat had finally got to her. She began to laugh. The picture was so bloody realistic! The laughter became manic and high.

'Ouch!'
The slap to her face stung like hell.

'I'm sorry, but you were getting hysterical.'

Hysterical? Me? When my delusions slap me and then apologise? Claudia reeled. So this is what it's like.
Cracking up.
Losing your mind . . .

'Did I hurt you?' The phantasm was shaking her now! 'Madam, are you all right?'

'All right?' What sort of insanity is it, that lures people into conversations with apparitions? 'When I'm talking to someone who's locked up seventy miles south in jail. Of course I'm all bloody right.'

'Actually, it's sixty-four miles and I'm not in jail,' Junius grinned. 'Didn't you know, you can't chain a Gaul for long.' He shrugged his broad shoulders. 'It's our nature,' he said, 'we get restless.'

There were many things Claudia did not understand. She did not understand how he'd escaped the inescapable. She did not understand how he'd discovered this beautiful valley of Ra. She did not understand how he'd been able to distinguish his mistress among the mass of identikit kits.

Most of all, though, she did not understand why Junius had never troubled to buy himself his freedom! Heaven knows, it was not from lack of funds or opportunity and while some foreigners might envisage Roman slaves as downtrodden drudges, reliant on meagre kitchen scraps and a blanket to wrap themselves in at night, the myth could not be further from reality. Many slaves were downright rich. Saving their salaries, they bought businesses such as hairdressers, wigmakers, tailoring, which they ran out of hours, while others, for instance, hired out their talents as artists, musicians, wrestlers. Indeed, more than one barbarian had learned his lesson the hard way, when he came face to face with the Emperor's administration and discovered a vast army of slaves beavering away inside the Imperial Palace, issuing mandates and supervising appointments, enforcing laws and implementing Senate initiatives on Augustus's behalf on everything from the judiciary to public roads to tax. Few governors and magistrates, provincial prefects and aediles dared look down their noses at the Emperor's vassal bureaucrats! However, Junius was no imperial civil servant in a cushy sinecure, he ran no business out of hours, which meant his wealth was simply clocking up. Why would he not wish to buy his independence?

'I'm sorry, Junius.' Claudia's mind had been wandering, as

minds tend to do with relief. 'What did you say?' Her knees were knocking like castanets. She could not believe it. He was alive! Junius was alive! Reprieved and well and in no danger of being fed to the bears!

'I was merely thanking you for bribing the jailers.'

Me?
'Oh, Junius!' She patted his arm reassuringly. 'Good heavens, it was the least I could do!'

'When I returned home, Leonides brought me up to date with events,' the young Gaul said. 'How Flavia staged her own kidnap to join the Brothers of Horus and that, with us lot languishing in the cells, you'd hired yourself another bodyguard, but he was worried, he said, because he had no idea where you were.'

That's because I didn't know myself the location of Mentu's funny farm.

'Security.' She winked, tapping the side of her nose.

Strange. He'd made no mention of Flavia shopping him, suggesting that either Leonides had drawn a veil over the issue or . . . or Junius was here on a mission of personal revenge! Indeed, what else would lure him so far from Rome, where no one would blame him for staying home and nursing his rather nasty-looking wounds? His mistress was perfectly safe. He'd said himself, he knew about the hired henchmen, so what plan, she wondered, fermented inside that bruised and swollen head? What form would his retaliation take?

And how the hell had he walked free from Death Row?

'How the hell did you find me?' she asked.

'Leonides told me you'd gone to see the patrician.' Around them, the dancing continued to a haunting mix of sistrum and drum, harp and pipes which carried on the breeze down the valley. 'I paid a visit to his house.'

'Orbilio told you I was here?'

'Him!' Junius executed a uniquely Gallic gesture then unceremoniously spat on the damp earth. 'He was in no position to speak, that one, much less give directions!'

'You do know he's under house arrest?'

'He was under a pile of half-naked, slobbering Amazons!'

Junius somehow managed to convey that Junoesque wasn't the word to describe these slappers, while also leaving Claudia in no doubt as to his feelings on finding the one person she had looked to for assistance helplessly drunk. 'The guards said he'd been partying since—'

'So how
did
you find me?' Claudia had no desire to hear about Orbilio's indulgences. He was single, free, could do what he liked. And the pain round her heart was indigestion, because she'd eaten no breakfast this morning and very little dinner last night.

'His steward put me on to the Brothers of Horus, where some bald bloke in a squalid apartment told me where I could join. I spun him some yarn about being the son of a Gaulish horse trader who'd been to university in Alexandria and had "found" Ra while I was there, and since the patrician's steward lent me this expensive tunic, a jewelled dagger and a few of the patrician's baubles, the priest accepted my story.'

'He'll accept any story,' Claudia replied tartly, 'so long as you have a suitable donation.' A jewelled dagger wouldn't buy him beyond a job in the fields, although he might be promoted to the back-breaking threshing floor, depending on the quality of Orbilio's 'baubles'.

'I'm down to help out in the brewery,' Junius said, with a suspiciously innocent air, and Claudia grinned.

Junius had availed himself of a few extras while Tingi's back happened to be turned . . . 'Your education with me isn't entirely wasted, then!' Hadn't she always said the boy had shown promise?

'These people.' He frowned. 'They're not what I envisaged.'

Me neither. Claudia followed his eyes to a couple in their sixties who had apparently lived such dull and blameless lives that they felt more than eligible for resurrection in the Afterlife, especially since, for one or the other of them, that gentle tap on the shoulder might not be far away.

'Only the young ones make the headlines,' she explained.

In her few short hours here, Claudia had assimilated pretty much all there was to know about the Pyramidiot way of life.

'And because there's no direct contact with the outside world -' scribes pen any letters to families on Central Store papyrus and arrange their despatch - 'no one hears about couples who simply calf off from society, or the likes of middle-aged women' (e.g. Mercy) 'who walk out on violent husbands. What's particularly worrying, though, is that seemingly rational adults' (e.g. Mercy) 'swallow so many dubious tales.'

'Such as?' Junius prompted.

'How about not one, but
three
men coming a cropper when they try to leave? One gored by a rutting boar, another mistaken by the guards for an assassin creeping in, and an unlucky third tripped backwards and impaled himself on the protective stakes.'

'Wouldn't the assassin have been creeping the wrong way?'

'And how can one impale oneself on an outward, downward facing spike? But that's not the half of it,' she said, licking her finger and wiping away the thick runnels of kohl from her cheek. 'Where three burly fellows failed, no less than six of the weaker sex have succeeded in sneaking through unseen
and 
unchallenged, yet nobody questions the official explanation. I find that extremely odd.'