Wolf Whistle

She wiped her hair from her eyes. After a long, slow massage with aromatic oils, you’ll be fine. Muscle fatigue fades, so do bruises. You can throw yourself into the Games, there’s five full days left, and today there’s a play on by Terence. Later, there’s a reading by torchlight. Ovid. Or was it Virgil? Afterwards there’ll be dancing and drinking and music, we’ll all wear garlands, and incense will burn on every street corner. I must have been mad to think of leaving the city!

‘Junius,’ she said, spitting out another large chunk of Comet’s mane. ‘Make sure it’s mares who pull the car to Arbil’s ranch.’

I’ve no wish to fly on Pegasus again.

XXV

The landscape opened up. There were shrines at crossroad junctions, picnickers by the roadside, and musicians on the move, making it easy not to think of Magic. Soon the hillsides would be swathed in drifts of blossoms from the blackthorn and the pear. Isn’t that this year’s first swallowtail, fluttering drunkenly across the clearing? Watch the baby bunnies scatter at the clip-clop of the wheels.

Forget the gush of blood upon the flagstones of the granary.

Forget the rancid stench of his clothing and his breath.

Forget his slithering pursuit. His filthy, ugly hands upon your flesh.

Let the warble of the skylark mask the screeching of his threats. Pray the sight of bounding deer smothers the obscene intimacy of his touch…

‘I think that’s it, there.’

Claudia was jolted out of her nightmare when Junius tapped the driver on the shoulder and pointed to a narrow turning on the right. The rich brown soil had become thinner, she noticed, and less fertile, being mostly olive groves; and the incline had grown markedly sharper. About half a mile along they passed a sign.

THESE LANDS BELONG TO ARBIL. THEY ARE SUBJECT TO BABYLONIAN LAW.

A few minutes later they caught up with a cart, its axle low from charcoal and logs, fresh rushes and grass. Cabbages and parsnips bulged out of sacks, there were red beets and white, rhubarb and carrots. Coneys, pheasant and teal hung from rings around their broken necks and joggled with the bumps of the wheels. Then the wagon turned into a shed where a gang of youths dispensed pulses, dried fruit and grain. Each had a blue tattoo on his arm, and Claudia shivered. These then, were the Children of Arbil. The enormity of the complex was breathtaking. And the noise! Even prepared for Arbil raising kids as cash crops, Claudia hadn’t quite grasped the immensity of his task. The profusion of workers tilling, hoeing, irrigating and manuring the light, dry soil, called to one another as they worked. Oxen bent to the plough lowed mournfully. Chickens clucked, donkeys brayed, pigs, sheep and goats put in their own oars. Babies bawled, children squealed, there was singing, chanting, hammering and sawing from a constant throb of people. Hundreds of children live here, she thought, her eyes brimming with tears. Hundreds of children, for whom this was their only home, Arbil their only parent. Hundreds of them. Unwanted-and unloved.

Her car rumbled through an imposing marble gateway into a courtyard ringed with fountains and shaded with plane trees and shrubs. Statues of strange gods bearing even stranger symbols stood guard. Her eye caught an eight-point star beside one, bulls by another. And there was no mistaking that dragon! Waiting in the cool of a colonnade scented with pots of hothouse lilies, Claudia noticed movement behind the terracotta grid which bisected the garden and on the pretext of sniffing the oleanders which grew against the screen, put her eye to the diamond aperture. Three men huddled round the wicket gate, talking in tones too low to make out. One, she could see clearly. Dressed foppishly, with hair half-way down his shoulders, he bore the hook nose that betrayed his ancestry. That would be Sargon, the son, but there was something about him that seemed vaguely familiar. Where the devil had she seen him before? And what made her think of music? Of trumpets and drums?

The second of the trio was visible to her only in profile, but his distinctive Greekness stood out. Handsome, strong, he, too, had a sharp taste in dress-look at those fancy fringed boots. But…wasn’t he also familiar? For a moment she couldn’t place him, then, with a shudder, Claudia recognized the lush embroidery on his cuffs. Jupiter, Juno and Mars, this was one of the Midden Hunters who had passed her the night she found Jovi. The cultured one who’d been taking the bet.

Pushing the bush aside for a better view of the third man, Claudia’s heart skipped a beat. He wore a simple belted tunic and high riding boots, but unlike his companions, there were no rings on his fingers, no gold torque hung round his neck. He was nodding, this third man. Making his mane of hair unmistakable.

Now what, Claudia frowned, brings Kaeso out here?

‘Yes?’ The hostility of the voice could have cracked ice.