Marilyn Todd - Dark Horse

Faster than a cobra strike, Jason was on top of her, pinning her down. A hundred and eighty pounds of immovable muscle smelling of cinnamon and raw masculinity.

'I have a cure for women who talk too much,' he rasped, drawing his lips down on hers.

A girl doesn't dance for her supper in a rough tough naval tavern in just a bangle and some skimpy bits of cotton without learning the odd trick or two. Jason might be strong and athletic, but compared to a drunken sailor who hasn't had a woman in weeks, he was a baby.

'There go my chances of fathering children,' he wheezed.

'I don't kiss killers.'

'So I noticed.' Eyes watering, he tried to unbend and found being doubled up much more comfortable. After a few minutes in which his face eventually lost its green tinge, he said, 'I make no apologies for what I've done.'

'That's a coincidence, because neither do I.'

He hobbled on to all fours, then hauled himself upright with the help of a stripling. 'They need to change the name of this valley,' he said, wiping the cataract of sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. 'Call it the Land of a Thousand and One Waterfalls.' He staggered into the lake up to his groin.

'Is it my imagination or is there steam rising off the surface?' he asked.

Still trying to charm me, eh? Even when you've admitted the atrocities, you're still trying to charm me. Cat and mouse. The old I-know-that-you-know-and-you-know-that-I-know-that-you-know routine. Bluff and double bluff. How can I possibly be the monster you think I am? Do I look like a sick, depraved killer? No, you don't, Jason, and that's your camouflage. Just like the mild little man back in Rome who went around strangling women for kicks. So meek, so well mannered, so utterly trustworthy that his victims literally invited him into their homes. But you, Jason. You're a wolf in wolf's clothing, and that's the genius of your disguise. No one suspects you to be worse than you are. Except me. I know what you are.

Yet she could still taste the mint on his breath and feel the imprint of his lips on her own, and the lips were not rough or chapped, and his breath had been warm, and the place where his hands had gripped her shoulders tingled and burned, and… and the sensation was far from unpleasant.

He waded out of the shallows and hauled on his red leather boots. 'Nothing quite like having your nuts twisted then marinated in ice-cold water to put a chap off his post-prandial nap,' he said, tweaking the axe out of the birch. 'So I suggest we knuckle down to the real business we came to this place for. Sorting out Geta.'

Claudia gulped. 'Define "we".'

'Straight choice,' he said. 'Either come with me and help. Or I tie you up and leave you here until I've finished.'

Tied up at the mercy of a playful psychopath like Bulis? I'd rather drink poison. On the other hand… 'What exactly are you proposing to do to him?' she asked.

'Why the hell do you think I've carried Geta on my shoulders all this way?' For twenty long seconds, hard grey eyes bored into hers. 'I'm going to bury the poor bugger, of course.'

The demon yawned, stretched, then settled back to sleep.

It had its victim exactly where it wanted it.

On the end of a string.

No hurry.

None at all.

When Jason said bury, of course, he meant it in the broadest sense of the word. As in 'disposal of body'. He did not mean inter, neither did he mean cremate. Fire, he explained, stripping the helmsman of his clothes, was Targitaos the sun god's holy gift. To defile this gift with human flesh would be an abomination and an outrage, so Scythian custom decreed that corpses be exposed.

'Exposed?' Different cultures, different customs, fair enough. The Egyptians embalmed. Britons interred. The Gallic and Nordic tribes favoured cremation. In parts of the land of Kush they were even rumoured to bury their dead upright in pits. But no civilized society, repeat none, left their loved ones to be picked clean by carrion!

'Has to be a willow,' he said, hacking away at the canopy with his battleaxe. He had stripped off his white shirt, revealing not only the bull, but tattoos of wryneck birds and cranes. As he chopped, the lynx on his back bared its fangs in a snarl as his muscles expanded. 'Willow is our sacred tree.'

Claudia thought of the leaf pattern engraved on the gold torque which glittered round his neck. Everything was symbolism with this race. The ritual every bit as important as the act. A point to bear in mind when Jason felt the bloodlust come upon him.

'The body has to be wrapped in an untanned skin.' His mouth twisted at one corner as he held up the velvety hide of the deer they had just eaten. 'Although I'd like to think there is a certain flexibility in the definition of "wrap".'

Either that or slaughter half the herd. Geta was a big man.

'According to legend,' Jason said, binding the hide tight, 'Geta's homeland was settled when two brothers followed a white stag to a beautiful and bountiful land. Hence the sacred deer skin.'

'You've gone to a lot of trouble,' Claudia said. 'You must have been fond of him.'

'Geta?' Jason gave the red mop one last affectionate pat. 'Not particularly, but he served me well and we are, after all, brothers in blood and Scythians take care of their own. It our code, and since Geta came from the Danube delta, it is to freshwater that he must return.'

'What about you?' Claudia asked quietly. 'Where will you return to?'

Jason stopped what he was doing and looked at her. For the first time, she saw a flicker of raw emotion behind those grey eyes. 'Without sons to carry the bull on their chests, my spirit will have nowhere to go.' Then he brightened. 'But if the bull is stamped on the chests of my sons? Then so long as my corpse lies where the sun and the moon can shine down on it, I'll be happy. Now then.' He hefted Geta over his shoulder and began to heave it up through the branches. 'Let's get this ugly lug settled once and for all.'

With Jason, of course, mere exposure wasn't enough. Having wrestled his compatriot up to his leafy bier, he insisted on adorning it with sacred insignia. Preferably, it would have been a crane, like the ones which migrate from the Danube delta in autumn to overwinter in Egypt, returning again in the spring to breed. Geta had to make do with a widgeon laid in his lap. But Jason's deadly arrow did manage to find a water serpent, the helmsman's clan totem, to place on his chest. And finally, in lieu of a reaping hook, he left the axe.

'Since we have no more use for it,' he added with a natty smile.

Clambering up the rocks between one of the hundreds of waterfalls, Claudia paused to look back down the valley. As the lakes fell away, to become pools of liquid emerald dwarfed by vertical walls of white rock, she had a bird's eye view of Geta's final resting place. A bizarre eagle's eyrie, flat on the tree tops, where his bones would eventually fall through the branches, back to the earth, the battleaxe along with them. Macabre, but then we all have rituals, she thought, remembering the sacrificial haunch of venison she had left under the willow, covered with spikes of lilac-blue vervain, when Jason hadn't been looking.

Geta might have kidnapped her twice — once on the night of the fire, and once again as she was leaving Nanai’ — and he might have been a pirate without conscience who had willingly crashed his own ship and let the crew drown rather than share the treasure he believed hidden by his captain in the cave, but the great flat-faced, slant-eyed ox had died saving her life.

Vervain was sacred to Venus, and although Venus could not possibly be the same goddess of love that the red-headed barbarian claimed as his clan protectress, maybe — just maybe — this Argimpasa of his, whose symbol was the serpent, might recognize the sanctity of the offering. For good measure, Claudia had strewn marigold petals, as well. Flowering all year round, they symbolized everlasting life and Geta would appreciate that, because, she suspected, he would already be at the helm of some celestial warship raiding the dark shores of Hades!