Authors: Marilyn Todd
Orbilio shuddered. He was not sorry the man was dead, the bastard had been a sadist and a thug who had enjoyed killing
for its own sake, but he himself felt only sadness and revulsion when he was forced to take a life - and make no mistake, he'd had no option with the guard. To leave the man unconscious was too risky. Apart from his own life, there was Claudia's to consider, also Flea's and Flavia's, plus - although he had to admit he didn't give a toss here either way - Junius as well. Therefore, it was with a clear conscience, if not exactly a light one, that Orbilio had slipped into the dead man's clothes, buckled on his weapons and concealed his body in the undergrowth.
And it was precisely because the taking of a human life, however necessary, did not lie easy with him, that Orbilio did not hear at first the footsteps on the gallery outside. He turned. Saw a lump of wood swinging violently towards him.
Smelled something which was neither corn nor tansy.
Then his world turned black.
Claudia found it easier than she'd envisaged to give her female minder the slip.
She waited until after Mentu 'swallowed' the deadly poison but, while biding her time, found nothing but admiration for the theatrical skills of the Holy Council. The way Isis gasped and Thoth dropped his scrolls of wisdom, you'd think the High Priest had slipped up and given Mentu the stuff he'd fed the goat! That was the clever bit, she decided. The High Priest, with his bare arms and shaven chest, could not possibly conceal a second potion on his person, therefore the crowd would readily accept that Mentu drank the same draught as the goat. They would not suspect that, concealed inside the goblet, might be a tiny phial of foxglove, henbane, celandine or belladonna, which would have been rammed down the poor animal's gullet.
However, if the Holy Council were born thespians, Mentu took the laurel crown. Claudia almost applauded as the fat Pharaoh's twitches mirrored that of the dying goat. The cramps, the rigidity, the ghastly noises in the back of the throat. Well done, Shabak! Her eyes had flickered across to old Bluejaw
over there, a walking testimony of apothecary skills! He daren't dose the goat with cowbane, spurge or fool's parsley which induced a messy death by vomiting (and worse!). He'd picked a 'clean' quick poison which attacked the heart.
Ah, yes, the heart! That same dripping lump which the black jackal, Anubis, placed upon the Sacred Scales of Truth and which - surprise, surprise - balanced perfectly with the ostrich feather on the other side. What is it, Mentu? A block of gold, fashioned as a feather? Or won't you waste your precious metal, are we looking at a lump of painted lead?
Reverently, the cow and the falcon bent over the corpse, their floating robes conveniently blocking the view as Anubis replaced the heart into the Pharaoh's bloody, lifeless body. Not too fast, now. Don't let the punters think it's easy. A few more rites and rituals, let's string it out a bit - that's the stuff! A spot of handwashing, some mumbled prayers, a splash or two of holy water on the 'corpse'. Well done. Keep the audience on tenterhooks! Taking advantage of Mercy's absorption with the resurrection drama, Claudia slipped away.
'Behold your son, O Lord of the West.' The voice of Anubis rang out smooth and harmonious, as the voice of every conman should. 'Behold Osiris, whose heart has been found to be without evil, and whose virtue Thoth has recorded, Thoth from whom no secret can be hid.'
When the ibis's beak wagged up and down as his human hands held aloft the Sacred Scroll of Truth to show the people where judgement had been recorded, Claudia all but laughed. To think they'd paid good money to be part of this, as well! She could just imagine the sales pitch in the Forum.
'Roll up, roll up. Bring us your gold and silver, and in return we'll dress you in itchy, shapeless clothes, feed you meagre meals and work you harder than a mule.'
It's a wonder the barkers weren't crushed in the rush!
She was still grinning when she slipped through the temple forecourt gates. Oh, little terracotta ears cemented to the wall. What secrets have you heard?
'You've heard, then?'
Claudia sucked in her breath. Who—? What—? Then she realised that Penno, old Rabbitface himself, was striding towards her, his thin face pinched and drawn, and that he could not
possibly
have read her thoughts. The tips of his gravity-defying ears were pink.
Heard what, she wondered? 'Yes, of course I have.'
'Don't know how she did it,' he muttered, twisting his twig-like fingers in his hands. 'Locked her in myself, can't imagine how the thieving bitch escaped.'
'Flea escaped?'
Penno didn't seem to notice the obvious contradiction - that Claudia had patently
not
heard the news.
She smiled. Being so scrawny, it would have been relatively easy, she realised, for Flea to squeeze through the bars. Thieves sneak through small gaps all the time. Their size and flexibility is their stock-in-trade.
'I think I know where she might be,' Claudia told the temple warden, who stopped shaking his rabbit head and muttering about poor security to twist his face into an unclassifiable expression.
'Really?'
'I'll go and check, if you like.'
Penno's eyes narrowed. 'You will?' Thin, suspicious, he didn't trust her.
'Well, there are two places Flea could be hiding.' She chose two in opposite directions. 'So you take the bakehouse, and I'll check out the ladies bath house.'
He had no choice. But casting a glance over her shoulder, Claudia felt a prickle of unease when she realised was Penno following her with his eyes.
His face was ugly. His ears were a curiosity.
But his eyes were just plain creepy.
'Hey!' The voice startled her. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'
Damn. Outside the doctor-dentist-apothecary hut, Claudia turned a radiant smile upon her blue-jawed accuser. 'Where
I come from,' she said sweetly, 'it's customary to venerate the gods with flowers. I plan to do the same for Thoth, by weaving him a garland.'
'There are plenty of wild plants,' Shabak growled, 'without you buggering up my medicine garden.' His attention focussed on the bouquet in her hand. 'Why those two in particular?'
Ah. 'Because . . . where I come from, purple means honour and, er, yellow symbolises devotion.'
'Just where
do
you come from?'
Glad you asked me that. Claudia took a leap into the dark. 'Originally,' she breezed, 'Iberia, but of course I've lived in Rome since I was a child.'
'Iberia?'
Juno, sweet Queen of Heaven, if you're listening to this, I beg you not to give him Spanish ancestry. Claudia had attributed his swarthy skin and blue-black hair as hailing from the East, possibly as far afield as the Indus Valley . . .
'Baetica, to be precise,' she said. 'It's in the south.'
'Arid country, then?'
'I'm afraid I remember very little - apart,' she added with a girlish smile, 'from the customs which my family preserved.'
Shabak grunted and that, dammit, meant nothing. 'Those flowers,' he began.
'Pretty, aren't they?'
A frown knitted his dark brows. 'You do know what they're used for?'
'Me?' Time for a light, silvery laugh. 'Good heavens, botany's a black art to me, I barely know their names. This is a buttercup, I know that much, while the other one - don't tell me, it's ajuga, right?'
'Globe flower,' he said dryly, 'and purple columbine.'
He chewed his lower lip for several seconds, and again Claudia was struck by the thinness of his wiry frame. She recalled seeing him with Geb, and the contrast between the two men. One large and forbidding, the other small and unsmiling. If one was the Barbary ape on two legs, she remembered thinking, then Shabak was the agile monkey.
'This garden is reserved for me and my trained assistants only,' he said at length, although his mind seemed to be preoccupied with something else, she wondered what. Why wasn't he at the temple service? 'I must ask you to respect our Hippocratic laws.'
You did say hypocritic?
With a few tinkling apologies along the lines of being new here, she had no idea, so sorry and all that, Claudia left the doctor standing in the middle of his path, stroking his long blue shiny jaw in thought. There was something on that man's mind, and no mistake. She prayed it wasn't her! And that it had no connection with the flowers in her hand, because Shabak would know damned well what effect these two would have. Nothing serious, of course, and the symptoms would be temporary. But by the time Claudia had finished, Min the Grand Vizier would be in real discomfort! Cramps. Cold sweats. Nausea. He'd have difficulty breathing (that'll worry him!) and, best of all, the problems he'd encounter passing water would make the strongest bull's eyes water!
Surprisingly, Shabak's gaze was still riveted upon her, so she pretended to have trouble with her shoe while she collected up a few more wild flowers and stuck them in the bunch. Her plan was coming along nicely. The juice of this little wayside blossom rubbed into his pillows, sheets and mattress and Min can look forward to a few lovely raised blisters here, a delicious skin rash there.
Claudia made a mental note to focus on his loin cloths. Shabak finally lost interest, by which time it was quite some bouquet she had accumulated. Ah, well. No reason not to spread her generosity to others.
The black tomcat in Mentu's chamber hadn't moved, and even when Claudia had finished doctoring the leader's wine and clothes and bedlinens, the lazy creature only yawned and tucked its paw in. Cats, thankfully, were immune to the effects of her pot-pourri, although in this one's case, she acknowledged that it probably would not have noticed.
She breezed around the deserted wing. A little bit for Bast, a little bit for Horus, a nice big squeeze ofjuices in the bath. (That'll heat the water up!) She treated their towels, paid particular attention to the feathers in their bolsters. Things were going well. The theatricals outside the temple would continue for a while longer - Mentu would milk his happy resurrection for all it was worth - Claudia had time to poke around here at her leisure.
Because it seemed to her, that under cover of Mentu's carefully constructed con, a sick killer could mingle freely in the crowd.
He would be cold, compassionless, selfish to a 'I - and would be at pains to put on a front to disguise his brutish ways. The mantle of a caring physician, for instance. Or might he prefer to dramatise his role, such as the thug-like Keeper of the Central Store? Then again, clipped speech disguises many moods—
Stop this, it's nonsense! The cloying atmosphere is getting to you, don't fall into its trap! If six girls (seven if you count the little laundress) have gone missing from this commune, the most likely explanation is that they've been sold on as slaves, probably to brothels in the Orient. The trade was not unknown. Claudia felt her spirits lift. In which case, my girl, there'll be documented evidence here somewhere.
Her search began with Min, taking care, of course, to doctor every surface thoroughly along the way. Shabak
might
put two and two together and mix up a fast antidote, but with luck (and whatever had occupied his thoughts back there) the meeting in the medicine patch would have slipped the physician's mind. Nimble fingers riffled in Min's trunks and chests.
Everyone has secrets. Most people write them down. Not necessarily directly, although some do like to keep a diary, but they retain mementoes which, in isolation, mean precious little, but which - when put together - carry a great deal of significance. Like Min's collection of pornographic sketches, for instance, in which women were uniformly humiliated and abused. She skimmed through the illustrations and concluded that, in Min's eyes, women were born for man's use and his
pleasure. No doubt he also kicked his brother's tomcat, should it ever venture into this room!
The only other papers hidden in his strongbox were accounts and, judging from his ticks and comments in the margins, Min worshipped money even over Ra. Women might not be respected. Gold was. He was salting stashes of it away in secret - and, according to these records, in places Mentu didn't know about. Oh dear, oh dear. You naughty boy. You're out to double-cross your younger brother.
Well, that was their affair, perhaps they'd come to blows when it came to light and kill each other in the process. But certainly any receipt for the sale of young girls to brothels would be lodged among these papers. And, dammit, there were none—
She backtracked to the office, where the papers were in neat order, and could tell from the registry that Neco was obviously right at home overseeing a large number of clerks and scribes, secretaries and accountants. As she had suspected, records were kept of every confessional heard at the terracotta ears - time, date, confidante's name, all listed alongside - but there was nothing suggestive of sales to Oriental brothels.
Penno's room was decorated with hieroglyphics depicting the Day of Judgement - Anubis, weighing out some poor sod's heart, with Osiris set to lead him to the Underworld should the feather in the jackal's hand balance on the scales. Below the scales, there squatted a hideously misshapen monster licking its chops. Seth, of course. The Devourer of Souls. She peered closer at the long, curved snout and stiffly tufted tail. No wonder the dead man was looking worried!