Man Eater

Interesting, she thought, because not all his opponents would have been skilled fighters. The vast majority were common criminals sentenced to die in the arena. Like his own family, for instance.

Salvian, fearing conspiracy among the giggles, rode his horse closer to the car, the tuneless clanking of his ill-fitting armour drowning the boundary calls of the flycatchers, the courting coos of the turtle doves.

‘You never fancied joining up, then?’ He couldn’t always have been fat, and in his youth Pallas would have stood head and shoulders above the average legionary.

‘Me?’ He took a bite of black pudding and patted his ample girth. ‘You’ll not catch me with steel in my belly, better the surfeit than the sword.’

She thought long and hard about the next question. ‘And you never married?’

‘Oh, I married, I married. In fact, come to think of it,’ he grimaced theatrically, ‘I’m still married.’

Claudia’s affection for the fat man was growing stronger by the minute. ‘What went wrong?’

Pallas laughed, his chins shaking, and he wagged his pudgy finger. ‘You don’t want to know, you really, really don’t.’

With a whoop and a cheer, they overtook the plodding ox cart, resisting the urge to pull faces at Alis and Euphemia, and it was there, on the brow of the hill, that Claudia got her first glimpse of the sulphur pools. You could tell the channel that fed them by a straight line of wild cane stretching back to infinity but which terminated in a crashing, splashing waterfall the height of a cottage. Below these falls, a series of smaller cascades had been carved by the blue torrent to leave a score of shallow saucer-shaped pools, some no wider than a wine press, others the width of a bedroom, before the warm waters became lost in the river they tumbled into.

The same river where, stripped to his loincloth and plastered with grey-black mud, stood the man she most wanted to avoid. Silly cow, she told herself. Still can’t tell the difference between passion and compassion, can you? His eyes weren’t dark with lust last night, he was apologizing because he hadn’t cleared your name.

‘You made good progress.’ He rinsed the health-giving slime off his skin and bounded on to the bank.

‘I have just two words to say to you, Orbilio. One rhymes with pod, the other with toff.’

The gracious bow and twinkling eyes implied he hadn’t heard, but Claudia knew better. To her left, a small cave had been hollowed into the rock, its mouth covered by deerskins and guarded by a dragon, where freeborn women could rent bathing shifts. Claudia tipped the crone and marched inside.

‘Oi! Where d’you think you’re going?’ An aged claw snapped over Salvian’s wrist.

‘I’m ac-c-companying my prisoner.’

‘Not in ’ere, you ain’t. Not unless you’re a girlie.’ To the delight of the crowd, her hand whipped up his tunic and a raucous cackle confirmed her suspicions. ‘Nope.’ As women shrieked and men hooted, Claudia took advantage to duck round the drapes and up the steps of a tiny stone building with just two columns and a weathered old portico. Mingling with the throng, she became as anonymous as the next woman-unlike certain young men in full military uniform who stuck out like sore thumbs. Very, very sore thumbs.

The shrine, it seemed, served both Metaneira, the nymph who lived in the river, and Thoas, the sulphur god who plunged into her, and was suitably revered by men and women seeking improvements in their own love lives. And not all of them married to one another, to judge from the inscriptions on the lead sheets which had been so tenderly consigned to the sacred pool.

A pinched-nosed priestess dripping with gold filigree stood on call to aid the lovers, selling simple cyclamen at five times its value. Powder the root and he’s yours for ever, madam. Roving eye, dearie? My magic potion will cure that. Claudia sniffed the proffered flagon and detected only vervain. No wonder the old bag stooped with the weight of the gold!

Predictably the friezes were also of a suggestive nature, and you could hardly move for children sniggering and whispering as their grubby fingers traced the rudest of the paintings. Claudia kissed a coin and tossed it in the fountain for Metaneira, who, even if she possessed Tulola’s incredible stamina, must be heartily sick of Thoas’ attentions by now.