Man Eater

Come on, kid. I know you can find your way Hitching the hem of her borrowed nightshift, Claudia hunkered over the little round brazier, warming her hands as light from the flickering lantern danced off the bronze. On paper, there should have been no problem with the road north of Narni, since it used to be the original Via Flaminia. However, in an effort to speed up travel and facilitate commerce within and beyond the boundaries of the Empire, Augustus had diverted this vital artery eastwards, round the other side of the mountains. So what if fifteen years had passed since then? Give us credit-we Romans build roads to last. Sure, the waysides are a little overgrown, but we’re making progress, aren’t we?

Then it happened. The…accident.

Picking up the looking-glass, a patchwork of cuts and bruises stared back at her, legacies of that…accident. Hmm. Claudia scanned aquatic friezes on unfamiliar walls, the garish oriental bedspread over a bed cast in silver. She smelled the heavy clover-like scent of the night-shift which hung stiff and strange from her shoulders-and vowed never to cut corners again. Never, ever, ever.

Taking one last peek out of the window, Claudia sighed. If there was ever light at the end of this particular tunnel, some smart-arse must have blown it out.

Jabbing back the bedclothes, she kicked off her sandals. This wasn’t the first time Drusilla had stayed out all night, but it was the first time in their seven years of sharing secrets and sustenance and shelter that she’d physically gone missing. Claudia snatched at the cat’s blanket and pressed it to her cheek, lingering over the matted fur and snagged fabric until her eyelids finally grew heavy. With one puff, the flame from the lamp flickered and died and she felt herself being sucked into sleep.

Down, and down, and down.

After a while, after a very long while, Claudia Seferius stopped fighting, and the thin crescent of the moon rose even higher in the heavens.

Thick mist, white like smoke, obliterated all vision and muffled every sound, even the hoofs clip-clopping in unison along grooves worn by countless wheels before them. The road, peeling itself back to admit them, revealed itself as little more than a ghost road. No brightly garbed Syrian merchants. No rumble of wagons. No loud-mouthed students travelling to university in Athens or Massilia or Alexandria. Gone were the actors, the athletes, the dispatch-carriers who once tramped these stones. Gone, too, the constant straggle of labourers, beggars, immigrants, in search of a better life. But in her dream, their shades lingered silently, leaving just the faintest whiff of commerce and philosophy, soldiering and whoring.

Hemmed in by the green-grey hazy hills for which Umbria was famous, home to boar and badger, wolf and porcupine, the sounds you would normally expect to hear-the rushing snowmelts, the territorial birdsong, the scrape of dead antler against bark-these sounds were deadened by the mist’s embrace. Tiny pearls of moisture embroidered her cloak.

It was like a dream within a dream.

Oblivion in a white cocoon. Then Trumpets. Shouts. Drums. Riders, six maybe seven of them, charging in and out, in and out of the fog. She saw the mares’ eyes rolling in fear, smelled the acid steam from their nostrils. They began to rear. The driver (she could see him now) was wrestling with the reins.

Abruptly the dream changed again. The riders had gone, but so also had the gig and the driver and the horses, and she was spinning through space. Thick, white, silent space. She saw the ground hurtling towards her, heard a scream…

Except The screech wasn’t part of the dream. Shrill and penetrating, it shattered the night and Claudia shot bolt upright in bed. A second scream rang out, and Claudia Seferius was out of bed and kicking over the brazier before she remembered.

‘Mingy, mangy, flea-bitten mishmash.’

Her voice echoed in the dark as she pushed away the curls that had tumbled into her eyes. This zoo is beginning to get on my whiskers! A big cat snarled, silencing the monkey. Well, that was something, she thought. At least it put paid to the shrieks.

She flopped back on to the couch. Ah yes, the dream. Fiction? If only. Instead her troubled mind had been rerunning the morning’s escapades. Events she could well have done without, thank you very much.

Small red embers glowered like a hundred eyes on the mosaic, but they would all too rapidly cool and the stars would have a long way to travel before the slaves would be up, stoking the furnace that would blast welcome warm air round the ducts under the floor. Claudia wriggled beneath the counterpane and dismissed from her mind the yobs who had forced her off the road. Make no mistake, their turn would come. She’d had a jolly good look at three of the little toe-rags.