Marilyn Todd - Black Salamander

Titus had finished his brief explanation of how the convoy came to be stranded, their dismal efforts to locate the road to Vesontio and their subsequent sighting of the plume of smoke rising through the trees which led them here. The Silver Fox made no reply, merely tossing more logs on the fire before piling on great joints of bloodied meat, which sizzled with mouth-watering speed on the rack over the flames.

‘We have come to ask,’ Titus said, ‘if you would act as our guide to Vesontio.’

‘There are thirty-three of us,’ Clemens piped up, list-maker to the end. ‘Ten of the fairer sex, twenty-three men, five horses, two of them mules, the rest mares.’

‘And their weight?’ Silver Fox asked, and Clemens stuttered for an answer before he realized the hermit was joking.

Theo, whose authority had slipped away yet again, snapped, ‘Well, will you?’

The woodsman wiped his hands down the sides of his pantaloons and grunted. ‘Perhaps.’ Slowly he walked the length of the weary band, looking each one up and down, gauging their strengths, their weaknesses, their very souls as it were.

‘Barbarian,’ Maria hissed, as his searing glance passed over her. ‘What does he look like?’

‘What do we?’ Claudia smiled back. Filthy after two days trekking overland, many of them whey-faced from worry, but everybody tired and thirsty and missing their comfy feather beds.

Strangely, the woodsman seemed unfazed by Iliona. Perhaps it was her traditional island dress, the oiled curls around her ears (teeth sick-makingly immaculate despite the rigours) or the fact that her braceleted arm was looped through her spice merchant husband’s, but the Silver Fox passed on unperturbed, although his lips pursed at the cadaverous astrologer and smiled faintly at old Hanno. Rapier eyes narrowed as he took in Orbilio’s patrician stance, and flashed a ghost of surprise at a fellow Gaul travelling in Roman dress among the Romans. But the figure his eyes kept flicking back to was a girl with a mass of tumbling curls, most of them askew, who clearly was no Cretan, yet wore baggy lilac pants…

‘One gold piece for each one of the group,’ he said at length. ‘Including the’-he was about to say horses, when he caught Drusilla’s haughty stare-‘livestock.’

‘Thirty-nine gold pieces!’ Volso’s voice turned soprano in his outrage. ‘That’s utterly preposterous!’

‘I agree,’ the hermit said equably. ‘Let’s make it a round forty.’

‘Ten would be daylight robbery.’

‘Forty-five.’

‘Twelve.’

‘Fifty.’

‘Fifty it is.’ Orbilio stepped forward and crushed Volso with a virulent glare. ‘Will you shake on it?’ he asked the woodsman.

‘I will.’ Two strong hands clasped each other’s forearms, and when dark eyes locked onto blue, no one present could fail to see that this was a contest of strength. And not necessarily of physical stamina. ‘And you are?’ the Silver Fox asked, when they’d let go.

‘A designer of mosaic floors.’

‘Really?’ He seemed to find that amusing. ‘Can you design one for that hovel there?’

‘Do you want me to?’ Orbilio asked.

‘I’ll turn the meat over,’ the Silver Fox said. ‘It’s starting to burn.’

As the flames crackled and spat and appetizing aromas radiated round the clearing, Claudia could hear Theo giving Volso a verbal battering, insisting he ought not antagonize this man any more, he was the only goddamn chance they had left. Without a guide, they were hog-tied.

‘You heard Junius,’ he hissed under his breath. ‘Now they know we’ve been here, the village won’t lift a finger to help. They’ll treat us as contaminated, too.’

The astrologer was not going quietly. ‘But five thousand sesterces? That’s outrageous,’ he blustered. ‘It takes me six months to earn a figure like that.’

‘It takes me six bloody years,’ Theo blasted back. ‘Now, please, Volso, keep on his good side, eh?’

As the woodsman poured out a pitcher of foaming brown beer, sharpening his knife on a whetstone prior to carving more meat, Claudia had a sneaky suspicion that this Silver Fox was enjoying himself.

One thing she knew for certain, however, was that he’d have guided the party to Vesontio for a mere fraction of the price.

Without haste and without the slightest trace of ostentation, Night spread her soft dark veil over the encampment, her labours made easier by low clouds and the dense canopy. Slowly, too, the fire died, until all that remained was a pile of smouldering ash, ghostly white in the blackness. Only the occasional red flash, a hiss, a spark ventured forth, each effort fainter than the last, like the final gallant breaths of a warrior bleeding to death on the battlefield. Moths, dark and furtive, fluttered warily, attracted by the glowing, ruby-red coals. An owl called. ‘Hoo-wit. Hoo-wit.’ Another, in the distance, answered back.

Claudia tiptoed down the path. Behind her, fitful snorts came from fitful sleepers, the beer and the roast heavy on their stomachs. One of the mares whinnied softly, scuffing the ground with her hoof. His head on a folded horse blanket, Hanno snored open mouthed and toothless and didn’t stir. Claudia passed on. Past the bright, white signposts of silver birch to the open space beyond, where the grass became springy underfoot and redolent with fragrant orchids and honey-scented clover, to the place where water seeped from a fissure underground in a series of soft clicks to form a deep, dark pool. Mice, voles and hedgehogs rustled unseen in the undergrowth around the little wooden shrine which had been built for a deity worshipped here since the very dawn of time.

The air pulsated with the heat, with the crickets, with the bubbles, with unknown pagan rites and with expectation overlaid with an irrational, unnamed fear…

She let her eyes grow accustomed to the gloom. No doubt the water from this spring picked up its skirts and ran full pelt once it was clear of its beginnings, but here, as though ashamed of itself, it crept away in silence through the grass. Claudia heard, rather than saw, bats flit across the pool and since only priests were allowed inside Sequani shrines, the infant river, its cries muffled by the grass, passed beneath the feet of a wooden carving as though crawling on its belly in obeisance. The nymph of the source, she presumed, for there was no question the figure was female. Even across the fountainhead, her silvered breast band glittered in the dark.

Crouching down, Claudia peered at her reflection, but such was the constant underground activity-ring after ring of tiny concentric circles, each one touching, overlapping several others-that the waters blurred her pale image, multiplying it, as though she was seeing double. Sweet Juno, she was seeing double!

‘Orbilio! Aren’t you ever off duty?’

‘They’ll be able to engrave “tireless to the end” upon my tombstone.’

‘They’ll be able to engrave it pretty damn soon, unless you ease up.’ Funny how her heart seemed to beat that little bit faster whenever he was around. Must be an allergic reaction to the sandalwood. ‘Talk about paranoia, connecting this little group with Republican conspiracies. From what I’ve heard, Tiberius will be named Regent any day, and with his stepson as deputy, Augustus will be sitting very pretty. Stable, one might say. Not that the word means anything to you, of course.’

‘Hmm.’ Orbilio scratched at his jaw, and above the sawing of the crickets, Claudia heard the faint rasp of stubble. And then, if further proof was needed that he was cracking up, Marcus knelt down, brought out a handful of wild strawberries from his handkerchief, laid them upon a flat stone then proceeded to arrange them neatly into a squishy, rosy cairn. ‘Do you know what I am doing?’