XXIV
The party was in full swing by the time Marcus Cornelius Orbilio had composed himself. On the pretext of checking the security of the courtyard, the animal sheds, the barns and the outhouses, his feet had covered some considerable distance and it was only now, standing barefoot on the marble floor of the atrium, that he fully appreciated the benefits of his own handmade patrician boots. Making his inspection, Orbilio had been only too glad of the cheap woollen tunic which itched and the rough leather sandals which flipped and flopped and chafed and blistered. They took his mind off a woman with wild curls and wilder eyes who kindled a white-hot passion inside him.
For the past hour or more he had breathed nothing but the acid stench of animal ordure, yet he could taste only the heavy, heady spice of her perfume. Was he being fanciful in thinking, in that distinctive mix of rare aromatics, there was a faint hint of the Indus Valley, the subtle fragrance of Babylonian lilies? He had been to Babylonia, spent long, hot nights under her stars as longhaired men in embroidered robes played thin and haunting melodies for the dancing girls, and he still remembered how those same girls jangled as they swayed in time to the music and the graceful way they arched under his love-making.
He wanted to take Claudia to Babylon, to Nineveh, now, this minute. He wanted to show her the wide, open skies, the rich, fertile plains, feel the baking sun of the desert, the sluggish pull of the Euphrates. He wanted to sail with her down the Tigris, show her ancient sites and magical rites, mysteries and pyramids and strange symbols etched on the walls. But most of all, by the gods yes, most of all he’d wanted to pull her into his arms and claim her as his own.
There on her bed, which was soft and springy and smelled of nothing but her, he had wanted to kiss and caress her, slowly, tenderly, nibbling and nuzzling until the crowing of the cock when the first motes of dust danced in shafts of early-morning sunshine and then-and then Orbilio rammed his feet back into his penitent sandals and winced at the blisters with an emotion close to pleasure. He was so close, dammit, so close! Spearing his fingers through his hair, he remembered the rise and fall of her breasts in that slinky blue tunic, the one wayward curl which caught in her eyelashes, the way her tongue darted over her lips to cover the tremor in her voice.
He could have pursued it.
Then and there, she was ripe for the taking, he knew it, she knew it. One hair’s breadth, that’s how close he was. A hair’s breadth from heaven and, Orbilio swallowed, equally a hair’s breadth from hell. To seduce her then, while she was vulnerable, and he would have lost her for ever. Janus, though, how he had burned for her. Still burned for her He steadied one hand against a column and thought how a man should make love to Claudia Seferius. Of the hundred lamps on every windowsill, chest, table and chair. Of a night full of laughter and longing, passion and pain. He imagined the lingering build-up, the tantalizing and the teasing, the stopping and the starting. Mother of Tarquin, the knowledge that he’d have to wait weeks, maybe months, wrenched at his gut, but to put a halter on Claudia Seferius would, at this moment, be like trying to bottle moonlight. At the Pictor family shrine, Marcus Cornelius poured a libation.
I cannot promise celibacy, he offered silently, there will be women, I cannot live without them, but so you accept my libation, hear also my vow. Such liaisons will mean nothing to me, for in my own way I pledge, henceforth, fidelity to Claudia Seferius.
Through the heavy oak doors of the banqueting hall, he could hear the babble of pitilessly cheerful chatter, relentless shrieks of laughter, and among it all, the distinctive cadences of a tempestuous widow with wicked curls and sinful eyes who marched to the beat of her personal drum and woe betide the man who interferes with the tempo. Orbilio silently saluted her. Far from perfect, that vow was the best he could offer. He would continue to seek physical gratification from other women, but when he made love, when he truly gave of himself, it would be to one woman and one woman only.
The timing he would leave up to her.
Inching open the door, he was greeted by a scene that might well have come from a Bacchanalian orgy. Tables and couches had been pushed back to accommodate a race, now in full throttle, where the mounts were men and the riders the women, their skirts hitched high to gain adequate purchase. The subject of his pledge was clinging like a limpet to a red-faced Pallas, Alis rather daintily to Corbulo, Tulola to Barea and Euphemia’s lusty thighs were clamped round Sergius, whose recovery was (Claudia was right) more than adequate. In the van, however, and leading by a considerable margin, strong sturdy Timoleon barely tottered under the weight of the junior tribune, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the party spirit by pretending to whip his horse along the straights. Taranis, the only man without a partner (and that presumably down to Orbilio), acted as umpire and marked each lap of the columns with a pitcher of wine.
Unseen, Orbilio quietly closed the door and decided there was only one way he could possibly make his entrance at this late stage.
The question is, where, at this time of night, could he find someone capable of harnessing a camel?
*
The bloody thing spat and shat all over the shop and stank worse than a midden in summer, but you couldn’t have scripted a better comedy had you won the myrtle crown as a playwright. Accustomed to the shifting sands of its Libyan home, the reflective marble of the banqueting hall came as a right nasty shock to old Humpy, who promptly showed his dissatisfaction by attempting to ditch his rider at full gallop.
Amazed by the speed it could reach from a standing start, bets were immediately placed on how much longer the valiant rider could hang on.
Barea clapped Salvian on the back and espoused the benefits of army training, although everyone else seemed of the opinion that it was Orbilio’s grip, rather than his jousting experience, that saved the day.
Four times the shimmering surface rose up to grab him, but you don’t have a pedigree stretching back to Apollo without some adhesive qualities and by the time poor Humpy had come to terms with this slippery, slidy flooring, Marcus Cornelius Orbilio was being greeted with raucous approval and generally hailed as a hero, even though his body appeared to be doing another circuit without the aid of the camel. By the time Orbilio’s eyes had stopped rolling, a heated debate was in progress, since the camp was now firmly divided between whether Humpy surrendered on the eighth or the ninth lap and what do you mean, you can’t help, you were riding the stupid thing, weren’t you?
When the general consensus had more or less settled on nine, Taranis pointed out that the animal appeared to be backing into Tulola’s cheetah, who would have got quite a decent fanghold had Corbulo not jerked Humpy out of range at the last moment, a debt it repaid by doing its damnedest to bite him until it was hauled away, honking and urinating, so that by the time a cohort of slaves had mopped up with sawdust and perfumed the room with incense and juniper, there was not a dry eye in the house and brave was the man (or woman) who could stand up straight after that.
Wisely Tulola calmed things down by calling for the roasts, because, as Pallas said, ‘A man’s gotta chew what a man’s gotta chew.’
It was wellnigh impossible, thought Claudia, rubbing the stitch in her side, to picture one of these people as a cold-blooded murderer.
Indeed, thinking about it logically, why should they be?
Supersleuth was a policeman, whose job revolved round intricate cases of treason, corruption, forgery and extortion-crimes that had two facets in common. One, they were all committed against the State, and two, by their very nature they had to be complex. More often than not murder ran hand in hand with such activities, usually in an effort to kick over the traces, and as a result his investigations would necessitate plunging deep. (How else could he have uncovered her own past?) Simple solutions were rare animals as far as the Security Police were concerned, and the case he’d made about Claudia being framed had, at the time, made sense.