The spatula in the redhead’s hands clattered on to the tiles and for the first time the broad smile disappeared. It was left to the supervisor to explain.
‘Ah, now that.’ She exchanged sober glances with her assistant, who began to twist her finger in her fist as she stared at her feet. ‘We um…’ The Sarmatian accent grew more pronounced. ‘We didn’t think anyone knew-’
‘It was terrible,’ cut in the redhead. ‘My best friend was in charge, and she got the sack over that, but, honestly, it wasn’t her fault-’
‘It wasn’t any of our faults,’ the overseer corrected sternly. ‘When the girl left, the client was laughing and joking-’
‘Teasing her about her freckles, my friend said-’
‘Exactly. And when the girl returned two hours later…well, it was just one of those things. However,’ the Sarmatian woman sniffed, ‘you mustn’t blame the treatment, her heart simply stopped beating.’
‘It happens,’ the redhead added with a philosophical shrug.
‘Just not here?’
‘Pylades felt the tragedy could only damage Atlantis,’ the supervisor sniffed, ‘and I for one believe he was absolutely right to hush it up-look what effect it’s had on you, for a start. Wanting to come out halfway through-imagine!’
‘I still do,’ Claudia replied through gritted teeth. ‘Would you fetch the nutcracker?’
‘Nonsense, dear,’ the Sarmatian woman tutted. ‘Another hour and you’ll laugh about this. Come along.’
Taking the redhead by the elbow, the pair of them departed deaf to Claudia’s impassioned pleas, her threats, her curses.
Finally, with only swirling steam for company and a few ghostly gurgles from the pipes, Claudia felt the first faint flutterings of panic.
Dammit, I have to get out. She elbowed, she kicked, she used her shoulders, knees, she squirmed, she heaved, but the bloody mud wouldn’t shift. Not one tiny crack had appeared. For the first time since she’d slipped from her mother’s womb, Claudia Seferius lay absolutely helpless.
Except that here, in the cubicle, there were no warm and loving arms to scoop her into, no reassuring breast to suckle, no mother’s voice to soothe.
Claudia was entirely alone.
Her heart pounded erratically, her breathing quickened. In desperation, she turned to the green curtain, but it was no longer Arcadia, where the sun always shone and goats chomped as the goatherd blew on a flute. It was a piece of cloth upon which some clever madam had stitched a scene or two, that was all. There was nothing restful about it, nothing reassuring, it was merely a sheet.
So why then, thumped her heart, wasn’t the red curtain the same? Why not a two-dimensional portrayal of the siege of Troy on a single bolt of fabric? Look, there are the battlements, with Priam and his sons. There’s the wooden horse, and down there the warships, while a dozen brave heroes slugged it out, she recognized Hector and Achilles, Ajax and Lysander. That, too, is simply a curtain.
But it wasn’t. It was a reflection of the wrath of Sabbio Tullus. Of some terrible, unnamed repercussion. Of Tarraco, whose boat was moored here the day young Cal was killed. Beads of sweat broke out on her forehead. Tarraco already had one tragedy behind him and now his second wife had disappeared. His second rich, middle-aged wife, to be precise. Lais, who had inherited all of Tuder’s wealth with or without a certain Spaniard’s connivance…
With a shudder, Claudia realized she knew absolutely nothing about this place or the people in it, yet in the space of three short days she had become aware of a huge and deadly shadow hovering over Atlantis. Cal was dead and so, according to Lavinia’s gossip, were others.
A young mother last night in childbirth. The silversmith with the tumour. An orphan boy, whose cousin, as Lavinia pointed out, so fortuitously inherited. The woman who kept cats. The nightmare vision in Claudia’s dream came back to haunt her. And then there was the woman who died, lying on one of these very slabs…
This is madness, she told herself. Wild imaginings born of helplessness. But instinct fought back. And instinct told her that, by meddling, her own life might be in jeopardy…
What was that?
The hairs on her scalp began to prickle. Footsteps. Heavy. Male. Like drumbeats in a sinister play, they grew louder with each rhythmic beat. Closer. Closer…
Claudia stopped breathing. Please pass by. Sweet Jupiter in heaven, make them pass by.
The footsteps grew louder, and Claudia thought of Pul, his bulging pectorals, his shining skull with just that stupid topknot on the poll. She pictured that tight leather vest, straining from heavy musculature. The curved blade on his hip Holy shit, Pul wouldn’t need a weapon. He’d use a pillow, to hold over her face. No screams, no struggles. Just-what was the phrase that oh-so-homely Sarmatian woman used? Her heart would stop beating.
Like a white heifer to the sacrificial block, Claudia had allowed herself to be led to this chamber and imprisoned in a rigid coffin…and now she might pay the ultimate price for stupidity. Panic beat in her chest. I don’t want to die. Mighty Mars, help me! Please don’t let me die. She remembered how Pul’s almond eyes had followed her as she conversed with Dorcan after Cal’s funeral, had pinpointed her with hostility as she talked with Kamar at the Agonalia. Always around, always watchful. From the moment she’d first clapped eyes on him, Claudia had known Pul was evil…
The footsteps stopped, and now Claudia could only hear the terrible pounding of her blood in her ears. He was outside her cubicle. Waiting. For what? In her mind, she saw his monstrous walrus moustache lifting in a blood-thinning smile as he plumped the pillow he’d pulled from under her head…
Sweet Jupiter.
A brown hand closed round the curtain at the end of the cubicle. Brown on blue. They would be the last colours she ever saw in this life Slowly the hand drew back the drape.
XIX
Claudia opened her mouth and screamed. There was nothing subtle about the sound, it was a bug-scrunching, ear-splitting, milk-curdling yell which would have reached as far south as the Libyan deserts and north to the rugged homelands of the Scythians who’d invented this bloody treatment, may they rot with scrofulous sores. She squinted up her eyes, her nose, her entire face and she screamed. She screamed until her lungs were on fire. Until her tonsils were raw. Until, in fact, a whole platoon of attendants came running.
‘Mighty Earth Mother, what’s wrong?’ gasped the Sarmatian supervisor. ‘Are you in pain, dear?’
‘It was a spider,’ an amused baritone explained. ‘A big, hairy black thing which scuttled over her neck, but she’s fine now. I er-’ he lowered his voice to confide ‘-squashed it.’
Tittering broke out behind the curtains and Claudia dared not unscrew her eyes. She knew-she bloody knew that Sarmatian cow would be laughing at her. Her and a dozen others! She waited until the women clopped off.
‘Orbilio, you bastard!’ Her lungs were down to a burning wheeze. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘There’s no segregation in the treatment area,’ he said amiably. ‘I mean, who could make improper advances to a sarcophagus? Indeed,’ narrowed eyes capered the length of her mudpack and his mouth turned down at the edges, ‘who’d want to?’
She’d skin him. Flay him alive and then fly his hide as a kite.
‘I was not crying rape,’ she protested through tightly gritted teeth-and immediately realized her error. Perhaps, with luck, he was too busy sniggering to notice?
‘You weren’t, were you?’
Damn.
Orbilio leaned over, leaving her in no doubt that he had not misread the terror etched on her face when he pulled back the drapes. Watching a pulse beat at his neck and with the smell of his sandalwood unguent tingling down her throat, she waited for him to ask, ‘Who were you scared of, Claudia? Who did you think I was just now?’
Goes to show the scrambled state of your brains, you silly bitch! It sounded utterly preposterous, even to herself, to admit that she’d cowered in fear of her life from a total stranger with whom she’d exchanged not so much as a nod. Claudia sent a silent prayer of thanks to Jupiter that thoughts weren’t as easily communicated as words put down on parchment.