Besides. She looked down at the overgrown cherub, his little plump hands clutched to his breast, and knew that Greek physicians had a word for his condition. Paranoia, they called it. Insanity characterized by feelings of acute persecution.
'Please, you have King's ear, he will listen. When you give him details of murders, he have no choice but to listen, because Mazares, he will stop at nothing to — atchooooo-!'
Recoiling from the mammoth sneeze, Claudia's knees connected with a crate full of peacocks, tipping her backwards. By the time she'd finished giving the delivery man a frank opinion of his navigational skills (a view, incidentally, shared by the peacocks), Raspor's little bald pate was bobbing deep into the crowd.
'Hey!' she called after him. 'Who the hell's this Mazares?'
'I am,' a deep velvety voice drawled in her ear. 'I the hell am this Mazares.'
'Well, about bloody time,' she said, taking in the King's envoy's swirling moustache, the goatee beard that, rather irritatingly, only served to emphasize his strong jaw as his firm grip helped her up. 'I've been hanging around this dock for hours.'
'At least you managed to take the weight off your feet while you were waiting.'
A torque of solid gold hung round his neck, engraved with creatures she didn't recognize. In the Histrian sunshine, it glinted almost as much as the amusement in his lazy, catkin-green eyes.
'However, I am here now, My Lady, at your service.'
The glossy curls dipped in greeting.
'May Rome and Histria find unity in your visit, and may peace and harmony be our guide. This way, please.'
Every inch as tall as the ponytailed oaf who'd propositioned her earlier, Mazares was lean where the oak tree was broad, and his long, dark curls fell to his shoulders in a manner reminiscent of Apollo. On the wrong side of forty, only a smattering of grey at the temples and a deeper-than-usual imprint of crow's feet round his eyes betrayed his age, and his trousers were the tightest she'd ever seen. One careless stoop and he'd be showing more than just his solidarity, she decided.
'I don't think so.'
'My Lady?'
'I'm sorry if you've mistaken me for some vacuous little bimbo who follows strangers at the snap of their fingers, but before we proceed further, Mazares, you will show me your master's seal.'
'The lady wishes to inspect my credentials?' The twinkle in his eye clicked up a notch. 'Well, well. Who is Mazares to argue with such a request?'
Slowly, deliberately, and quite uncaring of the nudged ribs among the crowd that had gathered, he untied the drawstring of his crisp white linen shirt. And each time he looped another cross-thread free to reveal more of his broad, tanned, Histrian chest, he made it clear that it was another challenge he was throwing down.
'Feel free to inspect anything you wish,' he rumbled, holding wide his shirt to expose a carpet of dark, springy curls that spiralled towards his belt in a V. His skin smelled of cool mountain forests.
Regal envoy or not, Claudia was damned if she was going to pander to such insufferable arrogance. She grabbed the seal that dangled from the thin gold chain around his neck and yanked, so that, like a dog on a leash, Mazares was forced to jerk forwards with it. Even though she was intent on authenticating the woodpecker overarched by a rainbow, she couldn't miss the change behind his eyes. The grin on his lips didn't falter, though, she'd give him that.
'Satisfied, My Lady?' he purred.
One step too far, my friend. One step too bloody far.
'My dear Mazares,' she trilled, flicking the seal away in a dismissive gesture. 'It takes far more than that to satisfy a red-blooded young woman like me.'
'Aye,' a gravelly Histrian accent muttered behind her, and there was a strong scent of leather about it. 'But unfortunately we're right out of three-headed gorillas.'
She spun round and found herself face to collarbone with the human oak she'd encountered earlier.
'I'm Pavan.' The badger-pickler clicked his heels in crisp military fashion as he bowed, but his steely grey gaze remained locked with hers. 'Commander of the Royal Histrian Guard,' he added, almost as an afterthought.
If there was a worse way to learn that gruzi vol meant welcome, Claudia couldn't think of one at the moment.
Four
Even the most cursory glance beyond the harbour made it obvious why those sneeze-inducing blocks of limestone were being discharged in such quantity. Pula was one huge construction site, with a rash of triumphal arches going up here, the ground being cleared for an amphitheatre there, what looked like a bathhouse going up next to the barracks while, across the way, town houses, shops and tenements stood in varying stages of completion.
This was because Pula had the dubious distinction of being the only city in the Empire to be built twice in thirty years.
What started out as a small fortress to guard Rome's naval base at the head of the Adriatic quickly mushroomed into a thriving trading post that serviced lands far beyond imperial boundaries and provided a crucial, not to mention profitable, link in the Amber Road that ran in an almost straight line to the Baltic.
Pula's mistake lay in backing the wrong side in the civil war after Julius Caesar's assassination. To teach the traitors a lesson, Augustus razed Pula to the ground, but give a chap his due. The Emperor was man enough to admit he'd made a mistake and, before you could say what-the-devil-made-us-think-backing-Mark-Antony-was-a-good-idea, the combination of geography, politics and that lynchpin of the Empire, trade, had the architects' pens scratching, and now Pula was once more poised to take her rightful place on the world's commercial stage.
Claudia wasn't stupid. She knew that if she was to have any kind of role in this forthcoming drama, rubbing Histrian power brokers up the wrong way wasn't the best way to go about it.
Mazares was one thing. This strutting cockerel had needed taking down a peg or two, but alienating both the King's envoy and the head of his personal bodyguard was no way to secure royal contracts. From now on, if anything was to be offensive, it would have to be her charm.
So when Mazares eventually got round to re-tying his shirt at the same leisurely (one might almost say insolent) pace, she simply shot him her most dazzling smile. Even when he asked was there anything else she'd like to look at while she was about it, she merely told him with the utmost graciousness that if there was any sightseeing in Pula, she'd do it on her way home, thanks all the same, because right now her priority was to meet with the King and find out exactly what he had in mind regarding this particular contract.
Maybe it was her imagination, but she thought she caught a swift exchange of glances between the envoy and the general before Mazares said smoothly: 'Naturally, My Lady. This way, please.'
But when he ushered her towards a galley tied up at the far end of the quay, enough was enough.
'I thought we were going to the capital,' she said sharply. 'Which, according to my map, is just one hour's ride.'
'On Pegasus, maybe.' Mazares didn't even break his stride. 'But you need to understand the politics here.'
The trouble with biting one's tongue is the bitter taste it leaves in the mouth. But she bit, and although the teeth marks started to hurt, she refrained from reminding him that, honestly, she would hardly have set out on a trade expedition unless she had a fair grip of the situation, now would she?