Man Eater

Claudia called on the spirits of the Umbrian woodlands to trip the mares, derail the crate, make her arms grow another cubit so she could undo the bolt. In stories and the epics, Corbulo would be unseated by an overhanging branch…

‘What land?’ she shouted back. She could hear the mules puffing, and she’d never heard animals pant like that. It was almost continuous.

‘My land, I’m talking my land.’ His voice was ragged from working the reins. ‘It was easy to persuade Fronto that it was to his own advantage, setting fire to the olive groves. I told him, if the land was burned-the olives, the vines-we could buy it cheap, him and me, and go into business together.’

‘You mean, you set up me and Quintilian?’ Whether you liked this man or not, it was a clever sting. ‘Why?’

The mares had not stopped to give Corbulo a rest-this was the end of the line. The air seemed steamy, damp. Claudia half expected to hear Cinna’s Cappadocian anecdotes cutting through the heavy atmosphere. Let me help you with them buskins, duck. Claudia felt delirium rising, the rapid welling of panic.

‘Corbulo.’ There was an urgency in her voice now. ‘What is it that’s so special about those particular plots of land?’

‘Those?’ he asked casually, unharnessing the crate. ‘Nothing. Arson was just a means of getting you away from your precious cronies in Rome. Why do you think I paid that masseuse in the bath house to suggest the damned shortcut?’

There was a jolt as the cage settled. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

Corbulo was staring at her as though she was a rather backward camel he was training. ‘How else could I get my lands back?’ he asked patiently. ‘Now tell me, Claudia.’ He lifted one end of the cage and began to turn it sideways. ‘Isn’t that a lovely view?’

The mules hadn’t been puffing. The boom hadn’t been inside her head. The dampness wasn’t panic.

This was panic!

Claudia Seferius stared wide-eyed through the bars of her cage. Adjacent on the precipice, before it fell 500 feet to the valley below, churned a massive, roaring, crashing waterfall.

XXXIV

Where do you begin to describe terror? Is it this sudden inability to breathe? The gasping for breath? The shallow snatches of air? Is it the blast of freezing air that hits you? The sensation of falling? Reeling? Of spiralling into unconsciousness?

At the brink of oblivion, Claudia pulled herself back. You can’t give in, a voice inside her screamed. While you’re conscious, you have at least a chance.

Corbulo stood on the edge and placed his hands on his hips.

Claudia pressed her fingers to her temples and battled with hysteria.

Marble Falls, the locals called it. She remembered now. Officially they were named after the engineer who, two centuries previously, diverted the forces of two rushing torrents and a lake in order to drain the marshy uplands and put paid once and for all to the flooding which blighted this ancient landscape. But Marble Falls was more appropriate, the Umbrian people felt, because viewed from the bottom, a wall of white marble fell from the hillside.

Viewed from the top, it was awesome.

Droplets of water, breaking free of the liquid marble, rose in their thousands to cloud the valley and now, with the sun heating them in earnest, manufactured humid, claustrophobic air. Lush vegetation-birch and poplar and willow-hung over the cascade to breathe in the excitement of the raging forces, their leaves turned to silver by the swirling steam.

Even on her knees, Claudia felt herself swaying. It was wide enough to launch a ship, this torrent, one of the mighty ocean-going merchantmen, a ten-thousander as they were called. What chance a tiny crate?

Tentatively she craned her neck. Rocks, boulders, more trees, more bushes, smaller cascades where the exuberant waters split and rejoined, split and rejoined as they abandoned themselves to the forces of gravity. Her vision blurred, and not from the spray. At the bottom, although obscured by the hot, dense clouds, this mighty mass of water plunged into the river Plennia, renamed after the same engineer who built the falls and widened the stream to cope with the torrent.

Claudia hoped his ghost walked and his grave was turned over by jackals.

‘I didn’t-’ She stopped, took another breath and forced herself to hang on to it. ‘I didn’t know Etruscans were famed for leaping to their deaths over waterfalls,’ she said in a voice with only the slightest tremble in it.

Corbulo turned. ‘You never know when to stop, do you? You and that tongue of yours?’

Claudia forced the jellified twigs that were her legs into a sitting position and hugged her knees in a nonchalant fashion. From that angle, only she could see that her fingers were white from the fear and that her hands shook like a baby bird’s wings unless she clasped them tight.

‘Why? Will begging save my life? You’ve convinced yourself you own my lands, that by killing me you’ll get them back. So go ahead. Push the damned cage. Then see where it gets you.’