Man Eater

‘What-?’ She didn’t need to ask the question, suddenly it was clear. Now she understood why he had left so much slack between her wrists. He intended to slip it over his head, so her arms would be round his body when he leapt from the precipice.

‘This way I can watch the terror on your face all the way to the bottom.’

Frantically Claudia scrabbled on the rocks. ‘Why didn’t you just kill me at the beginning?’

The grip on her hair didn’t waver and the cliff came ever closer. ‘Revenge, you bitch. Revenge. I wanted to watch you suffer, the way my family and I had to suffer. I wanted to see you rot in a gaolhouse. See you exiled. Penniless. Disgraced.’

He jerked her to her feet, and Claudia tasted blood from the blow that sent her flying.

‘Well,’ he fought to loop her arms over his, ‘you denied me that pleasure, but at least I’ll die happy.’

‘No you bloody won’t!’ she yelled.

Claudia’s kneecap smashed into his groin. His face, the red paint streaked by the watery air, contorted into a gargoyle as he let go of her arms. Gagging, gasping, he reached for his dagger, but for once Corbulo the trainer was too slow.

With all her strength Claudia pushed.

Like the leopard’s cage, Corbulo seesawed back and forth, wobbling, wavering, teetering on the brink. But with each tremulous sway, the momentum was gaining, until slowly the balance shifted. Claudia held her breath. It could go either way…

Sweet Jupiter, it could still go either way!

Then, with a strangled yelp, Corbulo pitched forward into the boiling waters.

But not before he’d grabbed hold of Claudia.

Together they tumbled into oblivion.

XXXV

I am dead, she thought. I have died, and Charon is taking me across the Styx in his little grey ferry boat. I can feel it bobbing, and I am weightless.

She could feel, too, the rage of the Underworld. It throbbed, vibrated, rumbled. The fury of a hundred million souls wrenched from their bodies. She could feel their pain. In her shoulders, in her arms, in her wrists…

Janus, Croesus and the girl next door, ghosts, be buggered-this pain is real. It was searing her joints and her ligaments and her tendons, and Claudia, with great trepidation, opened her eyes.

Shit!

The weightlessness, the bobbing, it made sense now. She was hanging. In mid-bloody-air, she was hanging, and the reason she was suspended, the cause of the pain shooting up her arms and biting into her wrists, was Corbulo’s stupid Etruscan fillet.

Below her, two rivers and a lake launched themselves into space, and she remembered doing the same with Corbulo. What happened? She kneed him in the goolies, it made him sick, and when he reeled, she gave him a shove. She remembered that. Claudia looked down into a sea of steam, felt her head swim and looked up again. By the gods, yes. That son-of-a-bitch lunged for her, and over they went, the two of them. Corbulo, the man with a chip on his shoulder the size of a pine tree. Corbulo, who could forgive his father for gambling away the family’s heritage and selling his sister for a few coppers a shot, but who could not forgive the person who bought that land fair and square in the first place. Corbulo, whose sense of duty had so warped over the years, it rotted his mind, his reason and his dignity. It had desensitized him to other people’s feelings, desecrated his own emotions. He could not even see that by lowering himself, as he put it, to training wild beasts, he had unleashed a prodigious talent that would have made him rich beyond words. Rich enough to buy lands equalling Claudia’s and beyond, but his rancid mind was set on one track only. Reclaiming a birthright that wasn’t his.

It was a wonder he hadn’t taken a pop at the Emperor. It was Augustus who instigated the Land Purchase Scheme. Augustus whose rapid expansionist policies stabilized the merchant classes. Augustus who, in the best possible motives, had consolidated this distinctly uneven distribution of wealth.

Not that she’d been thinking such cerebral thoughts as she toppled over the cliff. Her mind was purely on survival, and when she saw a branch-the same branch the cage crashed into-she hung on to it with both hands. She heard the woollen tunic rip, and as she clung to the tree, she saw a flash of gold as the sun caught Corbulo’s torque. Then he was under, she saw his arms stiff above the boiling waters, saw a swirl of white as Corbulo’s kilt was swept off in the torrent. Like a knitted doll, he was dashed from rock to rock. His tanned torso, red paint washed off long ago, was thrown up momentarily by the tumbling force, then it was pitched into the abyss. The angle of his head, the twisted limbs, told her that, if not already dead, Corbulo could not survive many more seconds.

There was a creak, a crack and she could feel the branch giving way. Desperately she swung herself to the right, into the body of the tree, but it was not strong enough to take her weight. She had crashed through the tree, a young birch, into the tree below, and then the one below that.