Wolf Whistle

‘You know bloody well I am, Sargon.’ He wagged a playful finger. ‘Provided you let me pick the cockerels in future.’

*

As nightwatchmen patrolled the warehouses and wharves and scavengers cruised the riverbanks for carrion, the light in Magic’s head grew stronger. Like a bright, white ball of lightning, it hurtled relentlessly towards his brain. He could see it, he could feel it, he could even fucking hear it. It was a loud light, screaming, flashing, bursting his skull open.

He tried hiding. Under the table. Under the bedcover. Inside the cupboard. But the light followed, screeching inside his head.

This time it would not go away.

This time there was no voice to comfort him.

Tears coursed down his cheeks, he tasted their salt on his tongue and, far beyond the boundaries of the light, he heard keening.

Time passed.

Manure carts and the shovellers who followed clattered on the cobbles far below. Downstairs, an old man snored loud enough to shake the lichens from the rooftiles, but Magic couldn’t hear for the serrated ball of flame inside his skull. He could feel it attacking his flesh from within. White hot. Burning. And this time there were no gentle whispers, no soft, sweet songs to stop the light from pressing on his eyeballs.

‘Bitch,’ he screamed. ‘Filthy, treacherous bitch!’

His fingers fumbled for the woollen doll. He’d stolen it this morning, from a child in the Cattle Market, and she’d cried when he snatched it from her hands.

‘Bitch!’

With a sharp peeling knife, he hacked and hacked at the doll.

‘Take that! And that! And that!’

As the first tinge of dawn reddened the sky above the Esquiline Hill, the baying inside Magic’s head began to subside and the hideous light slithered away. He watched a piece of his paper patchwork peel from the wall, touched the globs of fat where his tallow had guttered. Crawling out from under his bed, he stared at the doll in his hands.

At Claudia.

Her shredded tunic hung by a thread on one shoulder. Magic ripped it off and began to keen again, rocking back and forth upon his heels as he pressed the frock over his eyes.

‘No one could care for you the way I could,’ he wailed. ‘No one.’

He picked up the doll and examined the deep gouges on its back and its thighs and its breasts. Not its. Hers. Her back, and her thighs, and her breasts. Claudia’s breasts. Shaking fingers probed the rip marks in the wool. Claudia’s proud, generous breasts which she offered him every night, here in his room, when she came to him alone and in secret. Magic’s breathing became ragged. Last night, though, she hadn’t come. She had sent the light instead, and the light was evil. She had tricked him. The treacherous bitch had betrayed him.

He shook the doll. ‘I’ll teach you.’ His voice rose. ‘This is Magic you’re dealing with. Magic, you hear?’

Lighting the wick of another stinking tallow, he picked up his reed, sharpened the point and dipped it in ink.

‘don’t think you can deceive me you bitch’, Magic paused and looked up at the welter of copies round his bedroom walls, ‘ your mine understand you are mine and the next time we meet it shall be for eternity ’.

XXI

The sun was heartily sick of captivity. For a week he’d been bullied by a gang of grey clouds, but now, on the first day of the Megalesian Games, it was time to fight back. What he didn’t know, however, because he was behind with the news, was that the bald aedile responsible for organizing the Games had succumbed to the same fever which had laid low his five charioteers, so the sun’s first sight of Rome was hardly encouraging. Without expert guidance, the inaugural procession was late setting off, the lictors and statue-bearers hoping to catch up as they quick-marched double-time past the crowds lining the slopes of the Capitol without so much as a thought to the poor aedile wallowing in sweat and delirium. Less would they care about Severina, curled into a ball and howling like an animal for the girl whose throat had been cut in the Wolf Cave…

Instead the sun’s second punch found a weakness in the cloud cover over what, at first glance, appeared to be nothing more interesting than the office of a moneyed merchant. The window faced on to the peristyle, and so it was across the fountains and the birdbaths, the fan-trained peaches and the herbaries that his rays picked out a desk encrusted with ivory behind a high-backed chair complete with padded armrests and cushions. There were seats for two visitors, upholstered in azure-blue wool, plus chests of satinwood and maple and other grained woods. Fragrant elecampane burned in wall braziers, there were frescoes of flowers, ripe fruits and another of a leopard tamed and entranced by Orpheus’ lyre.

All this, of course, our flaming voyeur could find in any rich man’s office anywhere across the Empire.