Dinner was a protracted affair, with music and dancing between courses and if nothing else, Arbil proved a generous and hospitable host.
‘Stay the night,’ he suggested, and Claudia thought, why the hell not? ‘Now perhaps you will excuse us? This lovely lady and I have business to discuss. Come, my dear, come with me.’
As he took her arm, Claudia became aware of a flicker from Angel, and the warning in her eyes was unmistakable. Claudia’s brows furrowed in thought as Arbil led the way to his office.
Declining a glass of the thick brown sludge he called date liqueur, she settled herself in a high-backed chair and listened to the mechanics of subdividing the slaves, the methods of identifying those most suitable for training and then the process of deciding which trades they’d be most suited to. She couldn’t say at what stage she noticed, but after a while, a strange light burned in the Babylonian’s eyes. His fingers began to tap his armrest, his words rambled. Then suddenly he lunged over the desk, his fat hands gripping Claudia’s shoulders.
‘By Marduk, you’re beautiful,’ he was saying, his accent slurring heavily as his lips tried to find hers.
She felt his bristly, too-black beard scraping her cheek.
‘You’re so bloody desirable, Claudia, d’you know that?’
Reaching for the nearest thing to hand, Claudia upended the contents of the liqueur jug over his head.
‘Wha—?’ Arbil spluttered. The dye from his hair streaked his cheeks, the curls from his beard had dropped out and his jowls were shaking in utter perplexity. ‘Claudia, I’m sorry,’ he said, wringing his hands. ‘Holy Marduk, forgive me, I…I don’t know what came over me.’
‘About a pint.’
Surprisingly, Arbil didn’t even smile. His hands were trembling as he buried his head in them, and he began to babble about memory lapses and blackouts and strange behaviour patterns.
He didn’t even notice when she slipped away.
*
The complex lapsed into silence, broken only by the occasional cry from a baby or the distant bark of a fox, and a velvet sky twinkled with the lights of a million silver stars. From woods high up the hillside, two owls exchanged hoots and the cloying scent of night stocks wafted through the open shutters of Claudia’s guest room. It was well after midnight, but she was reluctant to lie on some creaky contraption which threatened to launch her over the treetops at the first threat of a sneeze. The night was warm, and in any case she was far from sleepy. Leaning her elbows on the windowsill, Claudia watched the silent white shape of a barn owl cut through the air and listened to the high-pitched squeaks of the bats while her mind bounced like a stone on a trampoline. Something about Arbil disturbed her, and it was not that ham-fisted charge in his office. Incidents like that she brushed off—no, it was something deeper which niggled away at her composure.
The Babylonian had gone overboard to show a perfect stranger round his premises. His top management were co-opted as guides, his hospitality was unstinting, yet it didn’t add up. Claudia appealed to the waning moon for inspiration. What was wrong here? She closed her eyes and tried to get inside the slave trader’s mind. Oh-oh. Her lashes sprang apart in the darkness. Oh-oh! She had thought—and indeed Marcus Cornelius had thought—they’d been clever by sending her here, but Arbil had rumbled Claudia from the beginning. The shrewd old sod knew that, sooner or later, a connection would be made between the murders in Rome and his own establishment and that someone would be along to investigate. Her whole visit had been run like a stage play, dammit, she was merely a puppet. They must be laughing in their spring-loaded beds!
A horse snickered softly from the stables. Well, it proves one thing, at least. Underneath it all, Arbil is nervous, otherwise he’d simply have dismissed the accusation with a wave of his hand. Oh yes, she thought, licking her lips. We are definitely on the right track here.
She was just at the point of asking herself where the word ‘we’ fitted in, when a movement caught her eye. There was no disguising that waddle and in the bright three-quarters moon she could see he was cradling an object in his arms. Swinging her legs over the windowsill, Claudia hurried after him. Whatever he carried, not only was it large and stiff and heavy, Arbil felt it necessary to conceal his burden under a blanket. It stank of death and putrefaction, and the smell made her retch.
Sticking to the shadows, Claudia followed silently. So still was the night she could hear Arbil puffing with the weight, saw his knees buckle with the strain. They passed rows of cultivated fields, skirted the edge of his olive grove and now the path was leading uphill into deep and denser woodland. For all the night was warm, she wished she’d brought a wrap, she had started to shiver. He stopped in a clearing, and the gibbous moon lit the scene brighter than torchlight. Retreating to a cushion of pine needles, Claudia crouched. And waited.
Arbil looked around, a hideous furtive gesture. Carefully he laid down his stinking burden and Claudia clamped her hand over her mouth as he untied the blanket. So sure was she that the Babylonian had been carrying a corpse that she nearly cried aloud when just three logs and some strange idol tumbled out. She puffed out her cheeks with relief. The idol had a lion’s head, and it was that which stank like a charnel house. Arbil had started a fire, but not using his own logs. The fire let off the smell of gum juniper, and small flames licked upwards from a bowl on the ground. Claudia sucked in her breath.
‘Shamash!’ Arbil’s distinctive brogue echoed round the woods. ‘Great god who brings us light, great judge of heaven, hear my plea.’
With an earsplitting boom, he beat his kettle drum and Claudia’s breath shot from her lungs.
‘Take the demon from my accursed body.’ Boom! ‘Take the demon who has seized my soul.’ Boom!
Seven times that bloodcurdling drum echoed through the trees. Seven times Claudia could not contain her gasps.
‘O Shamash, giver of life, cast forth the demon in my body and imprison him in the image I have made according to your wish. See, I have taken dust from a neglected grave and mixed it with the blood of bulls—’
Well, that explained its colour and obnoxious pong, but why the lion’s head?
‘—to make a likeness of the evil demon Lamashtu’—(thank you)—‘and I have threaded precious gems round its neck as you insist.’
Arbil made a tripod of the logs around the stinking icon then sprinkled what appeared to be flour in a circle all around it.
‘Shamash, I beseech you, take the demon—’ before completing the circle, he paused, ‘—NOW.’ A final throw of powder sealed the ring. ‘It is done,’ he sighed, wiping a hand across his sweating face. ‘It is done.’
Placing the bowl of burning juniper close to the white line, Arbil laid himself prostrate on the ground, an intimate communion between himself and his god, Shamash, and when he finally spoke again, it was the lion he addressed.
‘I know you hear me, Lamashtu, imprisoned within the magic circle.’ His voice was thick with satisfaction. ‘Know now that in three days your evil powers shall be gone, for on the third day after sunset I will take you from this place and bury you deep in a spot known only to me, where—for all eternity—you shall remain, alive but stripped of power, a living death.’
He stepped back and nodded solemnly.
‘So be it, according to the law of Shamash.’
Claudia waited until he was well clear of the woods before approaching the pagan structure. Lamashtu’s snarling face was set with sapphires for eyes and around his neck hung a leather bag containing Arbil’s sacrifice of precious gems. What lies so heavily on your conscience, she asked, that you imagine yourself possessed by demons which need exorcising in the middle of the night? What torments you, Arbil?
Back in the complex, Claudia noticed a light still burned in the slave master’s bedroom and through a crack in the shutters she could see him, the palms of his hands flat against the wall. Correction, flat against a portrait on the wall. That of the younger son. Arbil was crooning, she could just about make out his words.
‘Shannu. Oh my son, my son, what have I done?’
His forehead rested against the handsome painted brow, his shoulders heaved, and from her vantage point outside his window, Claudia watched fat tears roll silently down Arbil’s bearded cheeks.
XXVII
By the time Claudia prised her eyelids apart, Apollo had already driven his blazing chariot quite a height above the eastern horizon. She stretched lazily and yawned. The eerie events of last night coupled with this strange, criss-cross mattress combined to give the impression of having spent the night floating on water, and the fact that the bed stood considerably higher off the ground than traditional Roman couches merely added to the drifting effect.
Perhaps Arbil’s ritual had been part of that illusion? Now, with the floor bathed in morning sunshine, such behaviour seemed highly improbable. Arbil was a hard-boiled businessman, ruthless in his dealings, a lecher and a hedonist. All too often these traits went hand in hand, he’d be no exception—but superstitious one minute, full of maudlin pity the next? Put it down to the beer, Claudia. It went to your head and made you hallucinate— Hang on! She sat up. Did I say hallucinate? Her brain fermenting, Claudia jumped out of bed. Holy shit. Why didn’t I see it before…?
The complex was in full swing as she made a beeline for the segregation wing. Yesterday, Arbil had had his staff primed. Let’s see how they react when caught on the hop.
‘I can never keep track—look!’ The head eunuch indicated the spacious dormitory with its rows of ratproof terracotta chests, its bright red rugs, the neatly made beds and skylight windows. ‘There are a dozen girls in here at any one time, and the turnover’s so fast…’ It might be different, he suggested, if he slept in there with them, but his job wasn’t to police the girls, now was it? It was to prevent the boys sneaking in.
‘And do they?’ Claudia softened the question with a generous tinkle of silver. ‘Sneak in?’
The ageing eunuch declined the coins. ‘Arbil sells virgins,’ he said. ‘What they do when they leave here’s up to them, but until then they stay pure.’ He grinned. ‘That’s an order, and you don’t need me to tell you how Arbil feels about orders.’
Really? Tthe guards might be conscientious, but when hormones run hot, teenagers become highly inventive…
Claudia visited the hospital wing, the classrooms, the workshops, and looped past the lake where a score of youngsters thrashed around in the water. But each tutor and nursemaid said the same thing.
‘Master Sargon in the girls’ wing? Never.’
‘Boys and girls mixing? Oh, the shame of it!’
‘Silverstreak? No dear, we never let the children play with him, one can’t be too careful with a wolf…’
She gazed around the complex. Childish squeals accompanied piggybacks and hopscotch, one girl tied ribbons to a donkey’s tail, a boy mooned at a group of shrieking infants, another hopped on one leg as he tied an errant shoelace. She had not expected them to be happy.
And it was with a heavy sense of anticlimax that Claudia bumped into Angel picking oleanders in the
courtyard.
‘I like fresh flowers round the house,’ the girl said accusingly, and that was the thing about Angel. She could control her voice, but her body language took longer to catch up. The petals trembled in her hand, and there was a strange look in her eyes. Claudia remembered their encounter yesterday. Claudia was standing by those same oleanders peeping through the terracotta screen, and Angel had perceived her as an enemy…
‘They were very pretty flowers I saw in your bedroom,’ Claudia said mildly. ‘Thorn apple, weren’t they?’
Instantly the colour drained from Angel’s face, forcing the livid purple bruise into stark relief. Claudia bit her lip. Better by far Angel took the hint from a stranger, than for Arbil to find out.
In the atrium, Claudia glanced at the law plates of bronze and shivered. Oh yes. Far better.
*
Dino, Claudia decided, was the weak link. Time they had a cosy one-to-one.
She knocked on his bedroom door, and a plump housemaid answered. ‘Master Dinocrates? Him and Master Sargon’ll be in Rome by now, it’s market day, see.’
Croesus, she’d forgotten!
‘What about the Captain? Does he go with them?’ Shit. And Arbil had disappeared, too. Shut himself away, no one knew where, but this often happened of late. Shit, shit, shit!
‘Well, there’s so much business to conduct on a market day, ain’t there?’ The maid smiled, and, recalling the revelations of her search, Claudia decided the housemaid was a lot closer than the poor woman realized.
The corridor was deserted as Claudia swept down to the end. This time she checked over her shoulder before she pulled back the bolt, but dammit, the door still wouldn’t budge. Easing out a hairpin carved in the shape of a cat, its tail forming the pin, she wriggled it around in the lock. Snap! The tail broke near its tip, but—praise be to Juno—not before it had finished the job. The door creaked open on its black iron hinges.
What had she expected to find in this room? To be truthful, she wasn’t sure. A treasury, perhaps. Documents locked away. Records of the children who’d been ‘processed’ over the years. What she had never in a million years expected was to find herself looking at the second face from Arbil’s portraits.
‘Shannu?’
The handsome features creased into an open and amiable smile. ‘Hello.’ In his left hand he held a paintbrush, and on the table lay a palate. The paint dripping from both was a vibrant shade of yellow, the perfect match for winter aconites. The same colour paint covered every inch of wall and floor and ceiling. ‘Did you want something?’
Claudia felt her stomach churn. ‘No. No, I just came to…see what you were doing.’