Free Jail Bait by Marilyn Todd Page B

the new theatre when it’s finished Dorcan couldn’t say. But Tarraco was a rum bird, in his opinion. A real dark horse.
    ‘What does he do out on Tuder’s island, do you know?’
    ‘Do?’ The big, black bushy eyebrows shot straight up. ‘Tarraco don’t do nothing, lovely. Tarraco owns the bloody place.’
    ‘But… What about Tuder? I thought—’
    ‘Tuder?’ Dorcan threw his head back and roared again. ‘If you’d kept them pretty eyes of yours open, you’d have seen the banker’s tomb right beside where they was burning Cal.’
    This time it was Claudia’s turn to be surprised. ‘You knew Cal?’
    Dorcan shrugged his massive shoulders and began straightening the jars and pots. ‘Not really, no.’
    Since he refused to meet her eye, Claudia fired off a different arrow. ‘Who’s that chap?’ she asked, indicating the kilted Oriental standing on the temple steps, fingering his walrus moustache.
    Dorcan puffed out his cheeks and rolled his eyes. ‘Now—that is a man you should avoid,’ he said soberly. ‘His name is Pul, and he’s not so much an Oriental as a half-caste. His father was a Bessian tribesman, his mother came from far beyond the Caucasus, that’s all anyone really knows of Pul. Except—’ he spoke from one side of his mouth ‘—he’s the law around here.’
    ‘Don’t give me that,’ Claudia scoffed. ‘What about the military?’
    ‘You see any hammered breastplates here? Any feathered helmets?’
    ‘There’s a barracks, I passed it on the way in yesterday.’
    ‘Sssh.’ The charlatan held up a cautionary finger as a goldsmith approached the booth, his apron sparkling with precious dust. ‘Colic, sir? I have the very remedy.’ He passed across a brew of myrtleberries crushed in white wine. ‘Drink this with every meal and in two days you’ll be fine.’
    Around them, the Forum buzzed like any other town on market day, with the squeal of fretful children, the protesting bleat of goats, the aromas of pepper, cumin and nutmeg in the air. Surveyors with their rods and lines pushed through the crowd, wagoners and carters spilled out of taverns, clapping one another on the back. How could it be possible, in a society run by an army which prized itself on discipline, that a civilian such as Pul could control a lively commercial centre?
    A distant echo rumbled inside Claudia’s head. Cal, laughing in the alder thicket. Remember the golden rule, he said. Whoever possesses the gold, rules.
    ‘You haven’t explained why Walruschops makes the law and not Pylades,’ she said.
    ‘Did I give you that impression? No, no, no.’ Again, Dorcan seemed intent on rearranging his relics. ‘I just meant Pul’s not a man to be crossed.’ His eyes alighted on the temple steps where Pul had been—but was no longer standing. ‘That was all.’
    The hell it was. But Claudia sensed she’d got all she could out of the big man this morning and, purchasing an alabaster pot containing a cream which he swore was the selfsame recipe used by Cleopatra to maintain her own flawless complexion, she set off back to Atlantis.
    Down on the lakeshore, a group of fowlers wearing wide-brimmed hats against the sun strode towards the town across the grass, the sacks on their backs bulging with the morning’s endeavours, their dogs splashing in the shallows, but siesta time held Atlantis in its thrall. The ramp was all but deserted when, from the bath house, Ruth emerged, her skin red and glowing from either fluster or the sweatroom, with a pile of towels in her arms. She was halfway up the red marble steps when Mosul came barrelling down, his face like thunder, knocking her to the ground. This time his head was no longer covered in ritual, and Claudia could see he was bald, apart from a horseshoe of grizzled grey hair. She watched as one by one Ruth picked up the towels, shook and refolded them, but her eyes, Claudia noticed, never left the priest’s back. The expression in them was of undiluted