That did it. With a hiss of fury, Lais hurled a footstool through the air, and as Claudia ducked, she surged towards the table. Smoke had obliterated the three fighting men, but not the fruit knife Lais was after.
‘Shame,’ Claudia tutted. ‘Just four inches, eh? No wonder you couldn’t get enough of the Spaniard.’
Under the pancake of cosmetics, rage coloured her ravaged face and a claw lashed round the hilt of the fruit knife. Hard eyes glittered in the smoke-filled room, twin mirrors of the blaze round the door frame. Come on, come on, Claudia willed. Lunge at me, Lais. She twizzled her own thin-bladed knife in the air as a taunt. Lunge at me, you evil cow.
A stranger to physical action, Lais made an ineffectual thrust through the air.
‘Tut, tut.’ Claudia tightened her grip on the object she’d seized and hidden behind her back. ‘Is that the best you can do?’
Lais glanced round. She was alone in facing the enemy. She had no option but fight For a dance of twelve steps, they sized up and parried, oblivious to the flames and the smoke, until with a bloodcurdling scream Lais lost her temper. She charged forward, stabbing hard. Claudia dived, sticking out a judicious foot as she fell. Lais tripped, and Claudia smiled to herself. Gotcha. Dropping her knife, she grasped with both hands the piece of wood she’d concealed behind her back and cracked it down hard on Lais’ head. The harpy’s eyes rolled upwards and she sank face forward on to the mosaic floor.
‘Nothing communicates quite like a piece of four by two,’ Claudia told her unconscious majesty, picking a splinter out of her finger. ‘And how are you feeling, Kamar?’ The physician was incoherent with pain and fear and shock. ‘Up to standing trial? I think we can patch you up enough for that.’
The fire had taken a hold, crackling the rafters and devouring Lais’ prized treasure chests. Remus! The ceiling would crash any minute.
‘Tarraco?’ Suddenly she couldn’t see for the smoke. ‘Tarraco?’
She was coughing now, couldn’t speak. Tiles showered down, sending up clouds of plaster and clay and knocking Claudia off her feet. When the dust settled and she hauled herself upright, she could feel rain on her face. Shit. The ceiling at the far end had gone. Pinned under a rafter, Kamar’s feet twitched in their death throes,
Overhead, the flames spat and crackled. The plaster began to bow. The doorway was a wall of orange fire.
‘Tarraco?’ This time, Claudia’s voice had a tremulous quality.
‘Here,’ a voice rasped. ‘Over here.’
Stumbling across the overturned furniture, slipping in puddles of rain and blood, Claudia was aware of two men on their knees, their weapons long gone, slugging it out in a fist fight. Then one saw the knife which Claudia had dropped and he lunged-and through the black and red, the blood and the smoke, Claudia recognized Cyrus. She screamed as he reached it before her, his fist closing over the hilt. As Tarraco frantically clawed at the air, Cyrus raised himself high, brought up his fist, took aim, then…keeled backwards into the rubble.
‘What the…?’ The Spaniard turned. In the doorway, a man with high patrician boots was beckoning them towards him. He was barely able to stand.
‘I thought you might want your dagger back.’ Orbilio grinned.
‘Then why did you give it to Cyrus?’ Tarraco returned the smile, hauling himself to his feet. One arm hung limp and useless at his side, there was a cut down his cheek, a slash near the collar bone and what looked like a stab wound in his thigh.
Claudia had a notion that she’d be the one working the oars back to Atlantis.
Miraculously, though it was charred and smoking and black, the door jamb was no longer alight. Drips of water trickled down and over the threshold. How..?
‘That was the purpose of your atrium pool?’ Marcus asked. ‘Emergency fire-fighting equipment? Now are you two going to stand there all day, or do I have to carry you both, one on each shoulder?’
Hauling Lais across the smoke-filled chamber by her dyed hair (and none too worried about any obstacles the bitch might encounter), Claudia paused, panting and coughing, in the doorway. ‘Do me a favour, Orbilio,’ she wheezed. ‘Next time, come to the party earlier, will you?’
‘What?’ he flashed back. ‘And break up your cosy girl talk? No fear.’
She watched him stagger down the atrium, his prisoner firmly secured, though still unconscious. Perhaps it was just as well, in the long run, that Lais was alone in facing trial and public execution. Isolation and loneliness at the end of her life would be just as much punishment as being hated and reviled, laughed and spat on. The minions might have got away, but without their mastermind, they’d be simple thugs, easy to trace. At least Lais would get her comeuppance.
Oh, no! ‘Where’s Pul?’ she shrieked. ‘Where the hell’s Pul?’
‘Calm down,’ a thick accent soothed, and Claudia followed the direction that his bloodied finger indicated.
Flat on his back, his walrus moustache pointing up to the open sky through the rafters, the massive Oriental stared up at the rains through one slanted, almond eye.
But only one eye.
A spear was sticking out of the other.
‘Is speciality of mine.’ Tarraco shrugged modestly.
When she laughed, the laughter felt good. But for some reason, her eyes had filled with salt water, and there was a low humming sound in her ears.
Outside, Orbilio had tied Lais to a post and was fetching the one boat which hadn’t been holed.
‘What will you do?’ she asked Tarraco.
The roof of Lais’ hidden chamber had long since collapsed, melting and contaminating the contents of her treasure chests. The storehouses had gone, kitchens, two whole wings, there was precious little left of the villa. Tuder wouldn’t have recognized the place now. But the ancient Etruscans who buried their dead here might, though.
‘There is nothing left, that’s for sure,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Nothing to salvage, nothing-’ he broke off, blinked and looked away ‘-to stay for. I shall go back to Spain.’ Suddenly his dark, dark eyes were boring into hers. ‘I don’t suppose…?’
No, Tarraco. Don’t suppose. Please-never suppose. Something wet dribbled down Claudia’s cheek. The rain, of course. What else. Louder and louder, the strange humming sound filled the air.
‘W-what?’ She cleared her throat and started again. ‘What’s that noise?’
On the foreshore, Orbilio was using every last ounce of effort to heave Lais into the boat.
‘That?’ Tarraco let out a snort of ironic laughter. ‘That is Memnon. The colossus. Did I not tell you that, one day, you would listen with me as he calls to his mother, the dawn? The statue is hollow.’ There was a sad, sad smile in his eyes. ‘The warm air makes a resonance. Like a song.’ Claudia stared up at the sky and out across the lake to Atlantis. The torrential rains were easing to a drizzle, soft and gentle on the waters of Lake Plasimene. The thunder and lightning had burned themselves out, and now the sky was bright in the east. The fluke heatwave had finally been killed by a fluke storm.
Who says life does not mirror nature?
As she heaved on the oars, with Orbilio slumped white-faced and asleep in the bow and Lais out cold, Claudia listened to the mournful song of the fifty-foot colossus.
‘Hey!’ She cupped her hands round her mouth to ensure her voice carried back to the island. ‘I haven’t thanked you,’ she yelled, ‘for saving my life in the tomb.’
‘No,’ a deep voice echoed back, ‘but you will.’
As she reached for a kerchief to blow her nose, Claudia felt something hard under the seat. A woodcarving. Curious, she pulled it out. A peacock, with all its tailfeathers displayed. Laughing through her tears, Claudia squinted back to the island, to the man with dark eyes and a long mane which hung like drapes to veil his expression, but he’d been swallowed up by the island.
As though he had never existed.