Marilyn Todd - Sour Grapes

She remembered the pride on some of the little moons' faces, girls now destined to grow up wild and promiscuous, but with no knowledge of why they'd been scarred. And she remembered, too, the awkwardness and despair that ran through the others; girls like Vorda, who hated the honour they'd been bestowed and would grow up frigid and frightened of men.

Something congealed under Claudia's ribcage. If he'd touched Flavia — so much as laid a hand on the girl…

Oh, Vorda! No wonder you were crying, you poor darling. Kol the goatherd saw you. He saw you scrubbing your skin until it was raw, ashamed and sickened and scared. It wasn't the dye you wanted to wash out of your shawl. It was contact with your rapist's skin.

With exaggerated care, Claudia felt her way once again round the walls. She imagined little Vorda skipping in here, Timi's star pupil, possibly even her successor. How proud and excited she must have been. Her big day's approaching. She drinks. The wine is better than anything her family can afford. The virgin bride drinks deeply for Fufluns. As she dances, her mind becomes fuddled. Her vision blurs. She loses her balance. Emerging from the smoke and the darkness is a figure. Red, proud and fiercely erect. He removes her tunic. Takes off her underclothes. Shows her how aroused she has made him. What a privilege to awaken the god's passion. Feel what an honour it is… She's repulsed, but he's Fufluns. He's a god. He's the idol-made-man. She cannot deny him. He takes her.

But how? How when there are no openings in this wall? No catches, no levers, no locks sticking out — and he could not have been waiting inside the chamber, or Timi would know. How the bloody hell could this pervert perpetrate his evil, when there was no other entrance?

Suddenly Claudia knew. She knew how he'd got in, how he'd got out — just as she knew the name of the red monster who preyed on small girls. She wondered why she wasn't surprised.

Plucking a brand from the wall, Claudia picked her way down the stone steps. The plinth had moved easily, once she realized how the bastard had done it. The lever wasn't on any wall; it was by the floor, and like the pipes that had been installed in the villa, the mechanism that moved the statue aside had been expensive in the extreme. It had also been exceptionally well greased. Not a creak, not a groan, yet as she turned the handle, cogs moved the heavy stone plinth aside as though it was made out of cork.

At the foot of the steps, she followed the corridor. These Etruscans do like their underground chambers, she thought, passing row upon row of neat stone sarcophagi. They were not the oldest of tombs. Those had been tiny replica houses, but once the gods made it clear that the dead should be interred deep in the earth, as close to wolf-headed Aita's realm as they could manage, a complex array of passageways was excavated into the hillside, where the spirits of the rich had columns and courtyards to walk in and even the humblest had a niche. Her torch revealed joyous banquets on the walls, reflecting all the pleasures and enjoyment that the dead would delight in, and she tried not to picture the exultation in the rapist's heart as he strode smugly down this narrow corridor in the rock to take his own satisfaction.

Of course, it could have been any one of the three. Drugs?

Terrence sedated his neurotic sister with opiates. Tarchis used drugs in the shrine, albeit benevolently, and had free access to the temple physician. Lars had worked at the hot springs as a masseur and fed his wife those lovely extra minerals.

The wherewithal to fit that pricey turning-device?

Terrence had inherited more money than he could ever spend. Tarchis was in the perfect position to siphon off temple funds. Lars had free access to Eunice's capital, since men automatically take control of their wives' finances.

Cochineal dye abounded, so Terrence could have picked it up from any one of a dozen places locally, while Tarchis and Lars painted themselves on a regular basis.

How about access to the god's chamber through this secret burial passage?

Well, that was the point. They weren't secret, these tombs. The hills all around were riddled with tunnels, a landscape Lars would know intimately, having been born here, plus Terrence owned the land and would know every well-surveyed feature, while all High Priests were aware of what was in and around their own temples.

And since rapists hate women, that didn't narrow the list.

Terrence was openly contemptuous of Thalia and had remained deviously single to maintain his playboy lifestyle. Tarchis had made it quite plain where a woman's place was: in the wrong. And if a thirty-seven-year-old masseur had married a woman twenty years his senior purely for money, charm would be his disguise.

But only one of those three possessed the core quality required to rape repeatedly and with no conscience. As Claudia followed the passageway through endlessly painted rock faces, so many things fell into place. Heaven knows, there were enough artisans in Mercurium with the talent to design a mechanism with the cogs and gears needed to swivel poor Fufluns aside. But how many of them were young enough not to question the customer's motives yet sufficiently indifferent to religion not to find the request sacrilegious? Moreover, an artisan bright enough to start his own business at the tender age of sixteen

… Passing side chamber upon side chamber of sleeping Etruscans, she wondered how could this predator sleep? He slept, though, because he had no conscience. No remorse. He'd planned his campaign of rape with military precision, and of course it was not the hot springs that had been central to this story.

It was control. Rape was never about sex. It's always, always, about control…

The tunnel opened out into a large underground hall whose walls were lavishly decorated with figures and birds, animals and gods, and from which a flight of stone stairs swept upwards. But it was the wooden steps that caught Claudia's eye. New steps leading up to a door which, though locked, boasted a key on a hook on the wall. A spare. In case he somehow needed to make his escape via this route. Her lips pinched. Thought of everything, haven't you? Like the gears in Fufluns' chamber it turned silently. She was aware of her heart thumping against her ribcage as she eased open the door.

Straight into Terrence's bedroom.

'Claudia!'

The shock in his eyes was matched only by hers. Shit. She hadn't expected anything like this. She'd assumed the tunnel would exit into fresh air, but no. Terrence needed to extract every ounce of satisfaction from his abominable secret. Each time he looked at the wall, cunningly painted so the lock didn't show, he'd experience a ripple of pleasure and, of course, he'd been revelling all night like everyone else. Even fiends need their beauty sleep.

'This is an unexpected pleasure, I must say,' he said and she watched as surprise slowly changed to something she couldn't identify but which made her stomach turn over. Too late she realized it was cold calculation. Terrence had seen that she'd come here alone — and that she had no weapon, no bodyguard, nothing.

'You shouldn't have shown me that swivelling laurel. Without that, I would never have found the lever beneath the statue or made the connection between you and Lichas.'

What was it Orbilio said Hadrian had told him? 'Lichas said he loved me too much to let me waste my future on someone like him. He said I didn't know what he had done. I said I didn't care. He said I should, and when it got out my father would disown me.' They'd assumed the toy-maker was referring to some sexual liaison, perhaps even a promis 232 cuous past, when what he really meant was the contraption he'd designed on commission. 7 told him again I didn't care,' Hadrian told Marcus, to which Lichas replied, 'That's what you say now, but what about when we 're broke, when we 're the scandal of the town and no one will talk to us, and when the luxury you've been used to and the family who raised you are cut off?'