Skyles. Who had only just returned…
Tail wide and thrashing, Drusilla jumped down and ran off. Across the atrium, Claudia watched as the young castrato muttered something to Renata and scampered down the corridor as fast as his chubby legs would carry him in the direction Skyles had taken. Claudia followed. No doors sealed off the rooms in the slave quarters. Only Leonides and the Cook were afforded the luxury of privacy, the rest had to make do with heavy tapestries hung across the opening of their rooms.
‘Well?’ Periander’s girlish voice was rendered even higher with breathless excitement. ‘How did you get on, then?’
Skyles chuckled. It was a deep chuckle, made all the more resonant in a small room. ‘The minute I didn’t come home with the others, Peri my mate, you knew exactly how I got on.’
‘So tell me what happened.’
The actor laughed again. ‘For a boy with no balls, you have one helluva sex drive.’
‘For the last time, Sky, I’m not a boy, I’m sixteen, and will you bloody hurry before Renata comes looking for me. Who was she this time, eh? Was she patrician? What did she say when she picked you up? Where did she take you? Come on, Sky, what did you do?’
‘You’re a little pervert, you know that, Peri?’ There was a creak as Skyles made himself comfortable on the bed. ‘No, she wasn’t patrician,’ he said. ‘But she had a nice house on the Quirinal-’
Behind the curtain, pale blue and embroidered with dolphins and seashells around a rather portly Venus rising from the waves, Claudia eavesdropped on a concise but graphic description of his latest conquest’s charms and sexual foibles. That was the last time she’d look at this tapestry in the same light, she thought. Talk about a new dimension to the term sky blue.
‘Blimey.’ Peri’s breath came out in a whistle. ‘The dirty slut! And she made you shag her in the atrium, where anybody might walk in?’
‘I think that was the point of the exercise, Peri. The danger.’
‘Ju-p-es,’ Periander said, incredulity stretching out the single syllable, and Claudia could almost picture his rosebud mouth dropping open in astonishment. ‘You don’t half pick ’em, Sky.’
‘I don’t pick them at all. They pick me.’
There was a scraping sound, which Claudia identified as the boy scuffing his sandal on the flagstone, the sort of action people take before embarking on contentious issues.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ Peri said carefully. ‘I mean, you’re a great guy and everything, but what I don’t understand is: why don’t these women throw themselves at Ion? No offence, Sky, but he’s tall, bearded, handsome as sin and with shoulders like a bleedin’ ox. You’d think the tarts would be tossing their knickers his way, but they don’t. Why always you?’
‘Haven’t a clue, mate,’ Skyles laughed. ‘What’s your opinion, milady?’
Bugger. Claudia pushed the drape aside. No point in asking how he knew she was there. Hell, perhaps every woman he encountered listened at his keyholes? Tapping her fingertip against the wooden door frame, she glanced at the eager-faced castrato sitting on the opposite bunk, plumpness bulging out his maroon and yellow tunic just as amazement bulged out his dark-brown velvet eyes. A greater contrast to the man sprawled out on his pallet, hands behind his head, his legs crossed leisurely at the ankle, could not be imagined.
‘Well?’ Skyles prompted quietly.
Peri was right. There was nothing out of the ordinary about Skyles. Sure, his body was lean and hard, but he was of average height, average build, and shaven skulls flatter very few men. Hardly a head-turner, then.
At least, not on paper.
But how does one define sex appeal? The white scars that criss-crossed his back? The craggy, lived-in face-a face far too old for a man of thirty-five? Maybe it had something to do with that taunting-the-world look in his eye? The air of indifference about what people thought of him? Or was it a combination of all these things?
‘Frankly, I have no idea,’ she said.
‘Liar,’ Skyles countered softly, patting the solid lump that passed for a mattress and indicating to Periander to make himself scarce.
‘Candied cherries?’ he asked.
Claudia curled her legs underneath her and wondered what Julia would m a ke of this. Rich merchant’s widow and commoner alone together in a windowless broom cupboard lit by a solitary candle. With the actor offering luxury goods to a woman who could afford the whole tree.
‘My mother told me never to take sweets from strange men.’
‘I strike you as strange, do I?’ He laughed softly under his breath. ‘Wine, then.’
It wasn’t a question. He leaned over, poured two mugs of red wine and handed one to her. The mug was chipped, and read ‘Drink me dry’ on the outside.
‘To success,’ he said, chinking the rim of his earthenware cup against hers.
‘In what?’ she asked. The wine was fruity and coarse, dry enough to strip paint, and Skyles wasn’t a man to water his wine. Or indeed any other aspect of his life, come to that.
‘You tell me.’
He shifted the weight on to one elbow, and now his thighs were but a sylph’s breath from her shins. She could feel the heat pulsing out from his tanned, naked flesh. His pallet smelled of cool, mountain forests. She sipped from the mug and tried to remember whether his gaze had ever left hers from the moment she’d stepped into his room.
‘Do they pay you, these women?’
He drew a deep breath, held it for a count of three, then exhaled slowly. ‘They offer, but I never accept.’
He waited for her to ask the inevitable, but Claudia remained silent, and the question hung in the air between them, heavy as a thundercloud, every bit as loaded.
In silence, coarse wine was sipped from chipped mugs.
*
The day commemorating the Festival of the Lambs was drawing to a close. Four times a year, in December, January, March and May, a ram would lay down its life as the priest invoked the sun’s rays to shine favourably on the soil, that there might be neither drought nor deluge and that Rome, therefore, would not starve. Fat chance of that happening, Orbilio thought, his weary legs tramping up Piper Street towards the Esquiline. A quarter century of peace had brought a stability to the Empire that its citizens had never known before, and with peace came prosperity. Slaves outnumbered Romans ten to one on farms, tending the land better than a wet nurse. Armies of labourers were constantly manuring, irrigating, pruning and weeding to ensure maximum harvests, optimum qualities, all at a price people could afford. Droughts and deluges might be a problem, but thank Jupiter, they were no longer a crisis, and this was down to the work of one man. Augustus.
His boast was that he had inherited a city of brick and had turned it to marble, eighty-two temples alone. Now Rome gleamed from every angle that the sun’s invoked rays hit, blinding in its brilliance with the gold on the columns and the bronze on the statues, but the glints reflected far more than one man’s building programme. These marbles and metals, the intricate frieze work, the skill of the men who laid the mosaics and painted the frescoes reflected serenity. A nation that was no longer burying young men in the prime of their life was a nation which thrived. It had grown strong on food that was as cheap as it was plentiful. On the fresh water that came in on the aqueducts and kept the city clean. On the sharp fall in street crime (December excepted).
Orbilio turned into Fig Street. The ancient tree from which the road got its name had long since withered away, but several of its cubs scrambled over the walls of the shops and apartment blocks, scenting the street with the smell of ripe fruit in the summer. From behind a shutter, he heard the late-night clack of a loom, a cough from an upstairs window. A pack of feral dogs loped down an alleyway, off to scavenge the middens.
But peace did not suit everyone, he reflected. Sextus Valerius Cotta was due to address the Senate, calling for more war, more expansion, more territories, more riches. Despite little support in the Assembly, Orbilio knew that greed was a strong puller of crowds. The Arch-Hawk had many a supporter among ordinary citizens, especially those whose lives could do with a bit of enriching.