Marilyn Todd - Scorpion Rising

'No.' Claudia could barely speak the words. 'She killed herself because she had nothing to live for and, believe me, Gabali, there is a difference.'

She would never know what made her mother slit her wrists that afternoon. Was suicide a notion she'd contemplated once, twice, a hundred times before? Was it a spur-of-the-moment decision? An impulse driven by wine? Maybe, like Claudia, it was the not-knowing that finally eroded her strength. Of seeing the man she had married and with whom she'd raised a child march off to war and never come home. Being nothing more than a lowly orderly, his absence, even death, was not worth recording. For four years her mother would have lived with the uncertainty of not knowing if it was her drunkenness that drove him away.

'Suicide occurs when the burdens of life are too heavy to bear and death seems the only way out,' she told Gabali. 'It's not rational, but that's the point. And it certainly isn't because no one loves them.'

It's just that that person's love isn't enough.

A shame Claudia had carried too long 'I hope you are right, Merchant Seferius. I hope to the gods you are right, but with all my heart I thank you for getting to the truth, and I thank you, Marcus, for suggesting I go to her for help.'

'WHAT?'

'If I lied to you, I apologize,' he said. 'But the HundredHanded-'

'Lied to me?'

'- refused to even meet with me when I turned to them for justice-'

'Gabali, you threatened me with-'

'- and if they would not help, nor the local judiciary, Manion said my only recourse then was the Security Police.'

Claudia's anger found a new outlet. 'Manion said?'

'I did not lie when I said I worked for the Scorpion,' he said in his soft Andalus accent, and did nobody care about the storm crashing around them? 'I merely omitted that, from time to time, I also undertake certain contracts for your friend here, contracts that might be too sensitive, leastways politically, for Rome.'

'You work for Orbilio?'

It must have been the wind screaming through the branches, because he didn't seem to hear her.

'Through my contacts with the College, I wangled Ptian a job as a guard, then engineered Manion a place in the slave auction, even though he was expecting an attempt on his life. That was why he joined the queue at the last minute, switching places with your friend here-'

'He is not a friend, and he certainly isn't mine,' Claudia hissed.

'- to throw the sniper off guard, but the attempt was more subtle than that.'

'The raven.' She refused to even look at Orbilio. 'But if it wasn't Manion who shot that bird, who on earth wanted the Scorpion dead?'

'Ptian, of course.' Ptian had no intention of sharing power, he explained. 'He wanted to be known as the man who led Aquitania to freedom, so he killed a raven with an arrow flying Manion's colours in a plan that should have been foolproof.'

Foolproof? Then Claudia remembered the way Ptian had blown on his ring, buffing it up on his pants like Manion. The ring was silver — like Manion's. Engraved — like Manion's. Doubtless one of many characteristics that Ptian had copied to mould himself into what he assumed was the embodiment of a rebel leader. Were we only able to see ourselves as other people see us, she reflected wryly. Because then he'd see that he was nothing but a shallow imitation, a thug and a bully, without character of his own. But bloated on self-importance mixed with smugness and a certain native cunning, Ptian would have considered himself the intelligent one, not Manion. He was the hero, the man to lead Gaul, and no wonder the emblem on his ring was the phoenix. It symbolized a new leader rising from the ashes of subjugation. But Ptian was also a coward. If he was to kill Manion, he had to be sure to succeed.

No one crosses the Scorpion and lives.

No indeed. Just as no one thrown into this pit ever comes out, not even their bones.

'You anticipated the attempt on Manion's life to be through trickery not direct action,' she told Gabali. 'That's why you brought a long rope.'

And who better to smuggle one in than the man who used to throw victims into the Pit?

'Si.' Gabali's smile lacked warmth. 'To think like an assassin, it is best to be an assassin. To shoot the Scorpion in public would draw too much attention and risked killing the wrong man.'

'Yet Manion believed Ptian would still take the gamble?'

'He was closing in on him and needed to stop him. Ptian knew this-'

'Wait.' Too many things had happened in too short a time. Her head pounded from overload. 'Wait. He needed to stop him?'

'Manion knows that sedition is not the answer. Unlike Ptian, he truly appreciates how immense your empire stretches, how powerful its authority, how mighty its retribution, whereas Ptian continually underestimated its strength and chose to disregard its…'

Claudia had ceased to listen.

I've read a lot about Rome and its conquests lately. There was so much to learn, too.

'Gabali, when Manion talked about the civil wars that tore us apart, yet said how Caesar still managed to conquer much of Gaul, he wasn't suggesting Aquitania could follow suit at all, was he?'

He was telling her that he understood how powerful the Empire was.

'Here.' Orbilio wrapped his strong arm around her. 'You're shivering.'

But not with the cold, and though she tried to shake his arm off, the strength had leached from her body.

'And the fact that we annexed Egypt while still bitterly divided didn't mean Gaul could do the same,' she said dully.

Gabali's face changed from anguished to something approaching alarm as he picked up the tone of her words. 'No, Merchant Seferius, it did not.'

'I want what's best for my people, he said, and when he said victory, I thought he meant over us, but dear god, he meant victory over Ptian. Sweet Janus, Orbilio, don't you see what I've done?' She could hardly speak from teeth that wouldn't stop chattering. 'Manion was the second man I killed tonight.'

May the gods have mercy, she'd just murdered an innocent man.

Once words are written down, they become frozen, Beth had said, and once something freezes it dies.

But like nature and the seasons, change is as inevitable as it is anticipated, and in the way that an acorn grows into an oak or a tadpole turns into a frog, so she understood that the Hundred-Handed must also change, or the order would die.

It had taken tragedy upon tragedy for her to see this, but as she sat at the birth point on the pentagram table, cradling her swollen bruised jaw, she understood that her role went beyond simply overseeing the propitious start of new years and new lives. It was to encourage the birth of new ideas.

She had been wrong to suppress the truth about Clytie. The pentagram priestesses had known almost from the start that she had killed herself on that rock. The heavy-handed, almost clownish cosmetics on her face smacked of a child's handiwork, and the arrangement of her body revealed an innocence which no copycat killer would have thought of. She had immediately instituted a search and found a stick in which Clytie had notched her reasons for killing herself, a stick so thin that it had blown into the bushes in the wind. But a stick nonetheless. And for their sins, the pentagram covered it up.

They agreed that by keeping it quiet, the tragedy would blow over, and agreed with the Death Priestess that no blame should be attached to the three little conspirators for moving her body.

The pentagram priestesses were wrong.

We are all of us accountable for our actions, Beth thought, even a twelve-year-old child, and it matters not a jot whether that decision is wrong or it's right, that decision is not ours. It was Clytie's. She should at least have told Gabali the truth when he came searching for answers, but she remembered the fierce love he'd held for Mavor and the passion she'd shared with him, and equally the passion of unrequited love that beat in the heart of Fearn. Better, the pentagram priestesses agreed, that Gabali was fobbed off and the quicker Mavor would get over him. Once again, they miscalculated.