Man Eater

And what about that irritating gleam in her eye? Hardly a warm, inviting twinkle, and when you boil it right down, there’s nothing inviting about Tulola at all. Strikingly beautiful, maybe, but Claudia had known dozens of plain women, often dumpy with it, whose zest for life made them ripe fruits for red-blooded men to pluck, both parties reaping enormous pleasure from even the most casual of couplings. Surely the harem doesn’t consist solely of lazy men, who can’t be bothered to court a woman and therefore enjoy being ‘picked’ when the fancy takes her? Timoleon might fit the bill, possibly the Celt and the horse-breaker, too, but Corbulo? He struck Claudia as very much his own man, did Corbulo. And why did Tulola try to give the impression she was bisexual?

The Negroes, Claudia suspected, were the key. Them and the cheetah, she owned both and Tulola was about power. Power over men. Power to shock. That, she believed, gave her power over women, because, in her eyes, the more outrageous the behaviour, the more superior she became. Why couldn’t she see the system didn’t work? Pallas hit the button when he said the men don’t last long. Casual, competitive sex has a time limit, and it’s they who move on, rather than Tulola pushing them. To revenge herself on what she would see as perfidy, she opts for different characteristics next time round, and the cycle is perpetuated.

‘Silly bitch has it all wrong,’ Claudia confided to the comatose cat. ‘You see, Drusilla, men are rather like mosaics. Lay ’em right, and you can walk all over them for the rest of your life.’

Very carefully Claudia upended her wine jug over the orange tunic.

Marilyn Todd

Man Eater

VII

As a statesman, Quintilian did not feel he set much of an example. As a picture of misery and decrepitude, he was brilliant. Shoulders bent, he plodded up the Capitol, succoured by the knowledge that the Senate was in recess until the end of next month. Ample time to peruse laws and initiatives at leisure and concentrate on private business.

Stopping by the Temple of Jupiter, not so much to admire the view as to let the jarring subside, Quintilian looked down on the Theatre of Marcellus in all its travertine glory, then beyond, to the island that divided the Tiber’s strong current. Had he been lower-born, he could have crossed that stone bridge and spent the night in the temple. Rumour had it, Aesculapius himself came to sick pilgrims in the form of a snake and cured them while they slept. Senators, alas, were required to find more dignified alternatives.

He groaned, remembering the time when he just had the toothache.

Gingerly he moved his tongue round his mouth until it found a hole where a walnut could fit comfortably and where the teeth either side felt like wagon wheels. So badly had the abscess nagged him that, when the dentist said the tooth had to be pulled, Quintilian jumped at the chance for relief. Only when he was strapped in that bloodstained chair did he begin to have misgivings. It is not a pleasant experience, he reflected miserably, to have an ulcerated gum scraped away from a tooth, which then gets shaken until it’s loose enough for the forceps. He had never known such pain. And the blood!

‘Don’t worry, old chap,’ the dentist had said, cheerfully pocketing his five sesterces. ‘The swelling will go down in a day or two, and the bruising should fade in a week.’

‘Ung.’

‘What’s that? Worried the bone underneath broke?’

‘Ung, ung.’ It never occurred to him.

‘Well, if you like, we can pop the old probe in,’ the dentist flexed some ghastly bronze apparatus between his reddened fingers, ‘see what’s where,’ he swabbed his patient’s bleeding mouth with a towel, ‘and fish any loose bits out with this.’

At the sight of the second instrument, long and thin and pronged and grooved, Quintilian was out of the shop and up the street faster than you could say here’s-your-change-and now the pain was even more excruciating.

‘Ridiculous, going out in your state,’ his wife had barked. ‘What are you trying to prove?’

Since his wife was always calling his abilities into question, he pretended not to hear.

‘Well, don’t come crawling to me when infection sets in,’ she shouted after him. ‘Oh, and the Consul’s coming to dinner.’

Next to the Emperor, consuls were Rome’s most influential citizens and his wife lived for the day Quintilian stepped into office, except disappointment was to be her destiny. He didn’t want a bloody consulship. He was lucky, he supposed, gazing across the Tiber to where another great granary was going up, that women can’t vote or she’d be lobbying direct. He grunted with satisfaction at the granary’s progress, it was one of his pet projects. At the last count, twelve million bushels of wheat were being shipped in each summer, and the figure was set to rise.