Free Jail Bait by Marilyn Todd

risking the auction block for?
    She was heartily relieved that the triple arch loomed before the question required an answer.
    Cal’s pyre had burned through and, to the piping of flautists, attendants swept the smouldering debris into a pile, sprinkling it with a purifying mix of wine and water before sifting it into the urn. Flapping the ostrich feathers brought on a tight constriction inside Claudia’s ribs. Was it really only yesterday Cal had grabbed that parchment fan from her hand in the sizzling heat of the walnut grove and whipped up, not just a breeze, but a whole storm of passion? As the lid closed for ever on the pottery urn, her vision clouded at the memory of chiselled features which would never again break into a self-mocking grin, of hands stilled for ever from turning somersaults.
    ‘I’ll be waiting.’
    The words echoed in her head and Claudia bit deep into her lower lip. From now on, whenever she inhaled the astringency of alecost she would think of Cal, and more than ever she was glad she hadn’t succumbed to her desires in the clandestine anonymity of the cave. “Who would know? Claudia would know. Now, at least, his shade could walk the Elysian Fields with one less stain on its soul.
    Claudia blew into her handkerchief. It was so bloody unfair. Cal was too young to die, to be murdered. He’d been in the prime of his life, guzzling every opportunity which presented itself before maturity took a hold of his character and twisted it out of all recognition. Beside one of the tombs, a freckle-faced girl of maybe seven or eight rolled a hoop with a bone. For her, the world was a blank stucco wall upon which she could paint out her destiny, and whether the child turned out a thin-lipped virago, a brow-beaten doormat or a drink-raddled jade, only time or a clairvoyant could tell. But at least the future was hers to chart out.
    Cal had been denied that opportunity.
    A fat tear trickled down Claudia’s cheek and angrily she brushed it away. Our characters are the product of the decisions we make, and Cal ought at least to have been given a fighting chance. To die nobly in battle, perhaps, or face down disease with some dignity. Even hand-to-hand combat with his killer would have been preferable to having his neck wrung like a chicken’s.
    It was too soon, the emotions still too raw, for Claudia to set her mind to considering who might have murdered Cal, or even why.
    Yet, if only she had turned around, Claudia Seferius would have seen his killer standing behind her, deep in the shadows of the triple-arch gateway.
    Watching intently.

X
    Under the circumstances—heat which sweat-stained their clothes and attracted ravenous insects, the funeral going on all around them—you’d expect the citizens of Spesium to ease up a bit, but no. If anything, people seemed more careworn, more anxious. Farmers had fetched their cheeses, eggs and cattle in for market day, they were damned well going to sell them, and the Corn Measurer doled out the grain, flanked by two solid henchmen who put paid to all thoughts of pilfering. Rich men and poor, artists and administrators frantically thrust and jostled through the crush, shouting and squeezing and gripping their purses amid the clatter of wheelwrights and the grinding of shovels mixing cement as more and more apartment blocks were thrown up. So much brick dust, thought Claudia, so much construction, I could almost be back in Rome.
    Then she saw him, standing head and shoulders above the crowd, a whopping great bear of a man with a black bushy beard and hair spiking out in a thousand directions, shaded by a scarlet awning over his stall. He was, at that moment, offering half-price enemas to a portly magistrate.
    ‘Dorcan, you old fraud!’ Claudia waited until the lardball waddled off before approaching the giant. ‘I thought I caught a glimpse of your ugly mug earlier.’ She examined the array of potions laid out on the counter. ‘What brings you so far