Wolf Whistle

The Babylonian had gone overboard to show a perfect stranger round his premises. His top management were co-opted as guides, his hospitality was unstinting, yet it didn’t add up. Claudia appealed to the waning moon for inspiration. What was wrong here? She closed her eyes and tried to get inside the slave trader’s mind. Oh-oh. Her lashes sprang apart in the darkness. Oh-oh! She had thought-and indeed Marcus Cornelius had thought-they’d been clever by sending her here, but Arbil had rumbled Claudia from the beginning. The shrewd old sod knew that, sooner or later, a connection would be made between the murders in Rome and his own establishment and that someone would be along to investigate. Her whole visit had been run like a stage play, dammit, she was merely a puppet. They must be laughing in their spring-loaded beds!

A horse snickered softly from the stables. Well, it proves one thing, at least. Underneath it all, Arbil is nervous, otherwise he’d simply have dismissed the accusation with a wave of his hand. Oh yes, she thought, licking her lips. We are definitely on the right track here.

She was just at the point of asking herself where the word ‘we’ fitted in, when a movement caught her eye. There was no disguising that waddle and in the bright three-quarters moon she could see he was cradling an object in his arms. Swinging her legs over the windowsill, Claudia hurried after him. Whatever he carried, not only was it large and stiff and heavy, Arbil felt it necessary to conceal his burden under a blanket. It stank of death and putrefaction, and the smell made her retch.

Sticking to the shadows, Claudia followed silently. So still was the night she could hear Arbil puffing with the weight, saw his knees buckle with the strain. They passed rows of cultivated fields, skirted the edge of his olive grove and now the path was leading uphill into deep and denser woodland. For all the night was warm, she wished she’d brought a wrap, she had started to shiver. He stopped in a clearing, and the gibbous moon lit the scene brighter than torchlight. Retreating to a cushion of pine needles, Claudia crouched. And waited.

Arbil looked around, a hideous furtive gesture. Carefully he laid down his stinking burden and Claudia clamped her hand over her mouth as he untied the blanket. So sure was she that the Babylonian had been carrying a corpse that she nearly cried aloud when just three logs and some strange idol tumbled out. She puffed out her cheeks with relief. The idol had a lion’s head, and it was that which stank like a charnel house. Arbil had started a fire, but not using his own logs. The fire let off the smell of gum juniper, and small flames licked upwards from a bowl on the ground. Claudia sucked in her breath.

‘Shamash!’ Arbil’s distinctive brogue echoed round the woods. ‘Great god who brings us light, great judge of heaven, hear my plea.’

With an earsplitting boom, he beat his kettle drum and Claudia’s breath shot from her lungs.

‘Take the demon from my accursed body.’ Boom! ‘Take the demon who has seized my soul.’ Boom!

Seven times that bloodcurdling drum echoed through the trees. Seven times Claudia could not contain her gasps.

‘O Shamash, giver of life, cast forth the demon in my body and imprison him in the image I have made according to your wish. See, I have taken dust from a neglected grave and mixed it with the blood of bulls-’

Well, that explained its colour and obnoxious pong, but why the lion’s head?

‘-to make a likeness of the evil demon Lamashtu’-(thank you)-‘and I have threaded precious gems round its neck as you insist.’

Arbil made a tripod of the logs around the stinking icon then sprinkled what appeared to be flour in a circle all around it.

‘Shamash, I beseech you, take the demon-’ before completing the circle, he paused, ‘-NOW.’ A final throw of powder sealed the ring. ‘It is done,’ he sighed, wiping a hand across his sweating face. ‘It is done.’

Placing the bowl of burning juniper close to the white line, Arbil laid himself prostrate on the ground, an intimate communion between himself and his god, Shamash, and when he finally spoke again, it was the lion he addressed.

‘I know you hear me, Lamashtu, imprisoned within the magic circle.’ His voice was thick with satisfaction. ‘Know now that in three days your evil powers shall be gone, for on the third day after sunset I will take you from this place and bury you deep in a spot known only to me, where-for all eternity-you shall remain, alive but stripped of power, a living death.’

He stepped back and nodded solemnly.

‘So be it, according to the law of Shamash.’