Marilyn Todd - Black Salamander

Since the group comprised mostly the middle-merchant classes, accustomed to their own personal hairdressers, masseurs, valets and barbers (the novelty of washing out their smalls and cooking their own dinner had worn off fast enough), hysteria had quickly set in, although it was Gemma, the brick-maker’s seventeen-year-old daughter, who voiced what many feared-that they’d never reach Vesontio alive.

They had clambered up hills, they had skidded down again, skirted ridges and forded endless foaming streams, they’d spent a night huddled round a camp fire while wolves howled and bears snuffled worryingly close in the undergrowth. Every bark of a deer made them jittery, each drum of the woodpecker, each squirrel’s harsh chatter. And now, as the plateau levelled out, the enormity of what the band was facing was rammed home to them.

All around, hills-endless, endless hills-rippled outwards in every direction. Bobbled with minute and distant trees, their greenness was broken only by tongues of grey bare rock on which eagles, soaring proudly on the thermals, had built eyries.

‘We’re lost,’ Gemma sniffed. ‘We’re lost and we’re going to die!’

Many of the women, and more than one of the men, were weeping openly now. Fatigue sets in fast on those who live soft, and it was easy to identify shoots which had sprung from hardy stock. Excluding the drivers, rugged types, used to hard physical exercise, and Theo, of course, accustomed to route marches and digging defence lines and ditches, one or two surprises manifested themselves among the party. Not quite in keeping with his cover as a designer of mosaic floors, Orbilio’s stint in the army was exposed when he lent his strong arm to assisting the ladies, leaving Claudia to ponder whether his stripping to the waist had been a necessity, or whether it was simply a ploy to take their minds off their ordeal? Mind you, who’d be fool enough to be distracted by that broad chest and those glistening, undulating muscles, or that little scar just to the left of…

Where was I? Oh, yes. Claudia plucked another fistful of sorrel leaves. Musing on the revelations thrown up by this ill-fated expedition. She squeezed the juice in her hands. Clemens, for instance. The rotundity on him was going-to-seed fat, rather than hereditary corpulence, and the priest, as he set up a makeshift altar in the clearing, showed few signs of emotional wilt. Iliona was clearly as robust as she was beautiful, contriving to look a million sesterces with her lilac bodice tucked inside dark purple pantaloons and, since she’d discarded not one hollow bangle, she jangled a different tune with each sultry swing of her hips. Small wonder Titus summoned up the energy to lead his wife away from the group, to return with a barely concealed grin on his face.

‘Our bodies will be torn apart by foxes and lynx,’ Gemma wailed, ‘our bones left to rot where they fall.’

‘I’m afraid she’s right about our being lost,’ Orbilio admitted, ‘and with no sun to guide us, under cloud cover we could be walking these forests in circles.’ He turned to Theo. ‘I thought you were taking bearings?’

The insinuation was subtle, but the insinuation was still there.

‘Maybe it’s your fault,’ the legionary flung back. Not for him any grovelling explanations. Straight for the jugular. ‘Have you considered that, Mister-Know-It-All-Patrician? You insisted on coming up here, remember?’

Wiping more of the cooling sorrel down the V of her bodice, Claudia noticed that Marcus didn’t dignify Theo’s accusation with a reply. His eyelids merely narrowed as he rubbed the bridge of his nose.

‘I don’t see that establishing blame brings us closer to Vesontio,’ Maria snapped, smack on target as usual. ‘We have no direction, no food, no shelter-oh, for heaven’s sake, child, stop that godawful blubbering!’

‘The girl’s terrified,’ Dexter said, putting one arm around Gemma and taking her hand with the other. ‘Now you’re not to worry,’ he told her. Her parents were no use. They were snivelling wrecks themselves. ‘We’re all going to be fine. Trust me. Once the clouds lift, we’ll be able to sort ourselves out, we just have to wait here a while.’

‘You heard what she said,’ Gemma gulped. ‘No food, no water.’

‘Maria, you’ll have to give me a hand here?’ Dexter said, throwing an exasperated glance over his shoulder.

‘Why?’ his wife shot back. ‘You already have one more than you started with!’ And with that, she stomped off, leaving Dexter to comfort the girl as best he could.

‘We’ll camp here until the weather changes,’ Theo said, piling up sticks for a fire, even though it was only midafternoon. ‘When it does, we’ll set our course by the sun and move off.’

‘That could be days,’ Volso whined. ‘And what about water?’

‘We can eat the mules,’ Theo said, ‘and ration our water. Hell, we’ve seen enough rivers these past couple of days, there’s bound to be a stream nearby.’

‘The injured drivers are in considerable pain,’ Claudia pointed out. ‘The henbane ran out yesterday, and although I’ve applied poultices of comfrey and elder leaves, they’ve merely eased the swelling, not the pain.’

‘I might be able to fill that breach.’ Titus slung his backpack to the ground and beckoned Claudia across. ‘This stuff’-he pitched his voice low, so only she could hear-‘is called laudanum. It’s a narcotic, but I doubt they’ll become addicted in so short a time.’

Claudia took the dark-coloured resin between her fingers. It was sticky and smelled sweet. ‘What do you do with it?’

‘Leave that to me,’ Titus said, fixing her with the one eye not covered by his fringe as he smiled his ambiguous smile.

Claudia said nothing, and as she handed back the lump of gooey gum, she grabbed the spice merchant’s backpack.

‘Hey!’

‘Well, you never know what else might help. Cloves and turmeric work miracles on bruises,’ she breezed, ignoring Titus’s dilemma between snatching back his satchel or behaving in a gentlemanly fashion since the focus of half the group was upon them.

But there was nothing inside his bag which remotely resembled a yellow deerskin pouch.

The laudanum worked fast, draining the pain lines from the wounded men’s faces. In no time Theo had a roaring fire going, the sound of tinder crackling and the sight of clear blue flames leaping out of the plane-wood comforted everyone, not merely the wounded. Wild strawberries were gathered and a few mushrooms, while burdock roots made the basis of another dreary soup. Dexter sat beside a puffy-faced Gemma, droning on about the various documents he’d bound over the years-the painstaking restoration work on the Sybilline prophecies. Poetry for the great Virgil himself. Although, he confessed ruefully, the bread-and-butter stuff came from binding old senatorial archives, principally for the Treasury Department. Dull stuff, but sufficient to keep Gemma’s mind off her fears, while others sought solace in religion. On a rough turf altar, Clemens spread out hawthorn to invoke the custody of Mercury, god of merchants who protected the departing month of June. That done, he laid out birch upon his makeshift altar, an offering for mighty Juno, after whom the month was named, and finally he set oak leaves, sacred to July, all round the grassy mound and called upon Jupiter, who would be stepping in tomorrow to protect the coming month, to hear their prayers.

Many, watching Clemens, believed him diligent. Claudia called it hedging his bets.

‘As a matter of idle curiosity, why were you searching Titus’s bag?’ Had the shadows not been swallowed by the sun, Orbilio’s would have cast itself over Claudia.

‘Me? Don’t be ridiculous.’ She pushed past him.