Stone Cold Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR MARILYN TODD

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Stone Cold

  By Marilyn Todd

  Copyright 2015 by Marilyn Todd

  Cover Copyright 2015 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 2005.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Marilyn Todd and Untreed Reads Publishing

  I, Claudia

  Virgin Territory

  Man Eater

  Wolf Whistle

  Jail Bait

  Black Salamander

  Dream Boat

  Dark Horse

  Second Act

  Widow’s Pique

  www.untreedreads.com

  Stone Cold

  MARILYN TODD

  To Jasmine & Peter –

  good neighbours,

  good friends,

  good times

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR MARILYN TODD

  ‘Claudia—a superbitch who keeps us all on the edge where she loves to live... The Roman detail is deft, the pace as fast as a champion gladiator.’ Sunday Express

  ‘A timeless heroine for today—you’ll be hooked.’ Company

  'An endearing adventuress who regards mortal danger as just another bawdy challenge.’ She

  ‘Terrific read...thoroughly entertaining.’ The Bookseller

  ‘Marilyn Todd’s wonderful fictional creation—a bawdy superbitch with a talent for sleuthing—[is] an-enormous triumph.’ Ms London

  'A daring debut from a promising writer.’ Oxford Times

  ‘Feisty and fun.’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘Claudia lives life at the cutting edge, and has a way with the sword to prove it.’ Newcastle Upon Tyne Evening Chronicle

  ‘If you’re looking for a romp through the streets of Rome in 13BC, then this is the book to buy!’ Books Magazine

  'As juiciest as the ripest grape, this is a vintage romp to savour.’ Northern Echo

  ‘Claudia and Marcus make a volatile, clever and strong couple...an excellent escapist fantasy.’ Historical Novel Review

  “Delectably enjoyable.” Daily Mail.

  One

  Deep in the dense, dark forests of south-west Gaul, a young woman gathers berries in the afternoon. From time to time she pauses to nibble on brambles that shine like ravens' wings, or clusters of ripe red raspberries that scent the air and show the teeth marks of mice. There is no wind in the forest, and what little sunshine manages to penetrate the aromatic canopy is sprinkled with butterflies and powdered with fine particles that float in the stillness.

  Passing slender rowans, their branches heavy with ripening fruits, the girl is reminded that her father uses this bark in his tannery, just like he uses the bark from holm oak and the young branches of sumach. She smiles, revealing dimples in both cheeks. Soon she will be married, and then (praise the Hammer God!) there will be an end to the stench of stale urine that every tanner uses to loosen the wool and hair from the hides.

  Brigetia had never grown used to it.

  Even though she was born here, she has never grown used to scraping the slime off the skins then shunting the sludge into the river, but, come the next quarter of the moon, she'll be free of all that, andfor ever. Her sister can jolly well take over the task of collecting piss pots from the homesteads and emptying them into cisterns that are sited far too close to the house for her liking. Brigetia will be moving into her husband's house in the village! Then his widowed mother will have to give up her place by the hearth and Brigetia can start raising chickens and children, her hams hanging from the rafters, her stews bubbling in cauldrons without taint from any damn tannery.

  Brigetia smiles again, and the dimples in her cheeks turn to pits. Ah, but what a strapping fellow Orix is, with thighs

  like tree trunks to sire lusty sons and a strong back to make the siring a pleasure! As she tucks rosehips into her basket, she pictures him preparing for their wedding, first looping his long hair into the traditional Santon war knot before donning the tribal Virility Helmet adorned with stout prodding horns. What feasts and celebrations are in store! Stretching on tiptoes to reach an overhang of elderberries, she sees drinking cups brimming over with foaming ale and can almost smell the ox roasting on the spit as the pipes and drums of the marriage dance echo round the forest. The sun begins to sink, and as Brigetia tosses her gold braids over her shoulder, flycatchers trill in the ancient gnarled oaks, turtle doves coo and, in the distance, a woodcutter's axe chops with rhythmic regularity.

  Behind a holly bush, eyes monitor Brigetia's every move.

  They follow the curve of her ripening breasts, the sway of her pubescent hips, the velvety plumpness of her dimpled cheeks. For a split second, the eyes flicker back towards the village, where coils of grey smoke spiral up from the treetops, testimony that food is being prepared over cooking fires by the womenfolk for men who will not cease labouring until the sun has sunk a lot lower yet. Not that it makes a jot of difference. Nobody walks this woodland path, for it ends at the tannery and there are better - and more fragrant - routes to the river for those who live in the village.

  The Watcher's attention reverts to Brigetia.

  To the clearness of her complexion and the brightness of her blue eyes.

  Every now and again she stops to hold up her left hand and admire the betrothal ring that gleams on her thirdfinger. That the ring has been exquisitely crafted the Watcher can tell from here. The intricacy of the whorls etched in the bronze reflect the skill of the engraver, which in turn reflects the esteem in which her young bridegroom holds her. Quite right, too. The girl is perfect. Perfect in every way.

  The Watcher waits until Brigetia bends down to gather a handful of bilberries.

  The woodland floor is soft and springy.

  The Watcher's feet make no sound.

  Two

  'Make way! Make way for the Governor!'

  It was a testament to the soldier's vocal chords, Claudia decided, that he was able to make himself heard above the jangle of breastplates and the tramp of hobnail boots crunching over the bridge.

  'Come on, you lot!' he shouted. 'Move aside, move aside!' An old peasant foolish enough not to have learned Latin in his own country suddenly found himself in the gutter as the chariot trotted past, a triumph in imperial purple and gold, the heads of the pure white horses held appropriately high as their braided tails bobbed and their hooves clip-clopped in perfect harmony over the cobblestones. No sooner had the Governor and his escort passed, however, than the gap was immediately filled again with riders, carters, donkeys and pack mules vying for space amid the swarms of pedestrians entering and exiting the city.

  Standing in the middle of the bridge, resting her arms on the warm stonework as she leaned over the side, Claudia watched the bob of traffic in the slow-moving waters of the Carent. As was to be expected, most were Gauls, the women clad in jaunty fringed skirts that fell to mid-calf, their menfolk with long hair whitened with lime and sporting such luxuriant moustaches that they overhung their top lips like the willows that lined this twisting river. But not all the traffic on the bridge was local, nor was Santon the only tongue spoken. Claudia cast her eyes across to the skyline reflected in the shimmering current and drummed her fingers.

  Nestling beneath the high wide skies that were so typical of this part of Gaul and surrounded by gentle rolling hills and wooded river valleys, lush water meadows and forests rich in game, Santonum should have been the answer to Claudia's

  prayers. She watched trout swimming lazily in the shadows of the bridge's pillars and swallows dipping and diving on the water, and thought that, dammit, this is the capital of Aquitania. The authorities should have turned somersaults to help one of their own who'd trekked halfway across the bloody Empire just for this. Instead, what did s
he get?

  'Terribly sorry, milady. The files were destroyed in a fire.'

  'Our records were shipped back to Rome.'

  'There was a flood . ..'

  '. . . mould . . .'

  '. . . mice . . .'

  She'd tried the barracks, the State Records Office, the temples, the tribunals. She'd done the full tour of scribes, secretaries, lawyers and civil servants. She'd bribed and gossiped her way round the basilicas and bath houses that were springing up in this new town like weeds and yet - what a coincidence - every person she spoke to would really have liked to have helped, were it not for the Fates conspiring against them. You wouldn't credit so many natural disasters could have befallen one city, but it seemed there was no limit to the excuses she'd encountered, much less the inventiveness of the excusers. Quite why these people hadn't taken up careers as playwrights she had no idea, but if Officialdom was hoping Claudia Seferius would give up and go home, it might as well wait for the moon to drop out of the sky.

  'Stay here,' she instructed her bodyguard.

  'But—'

  'Butts are for archers, Junius, and whilst they might equally apply to jokes and billygoats, they are not, however, for you.'

  The young Gaul's mouth opened and closed as he fumbled for a suitable response, but by the time he'd come up with one, it was too late. He was being skewered by a glare that would make a cheesemaker proud, since it could separate curds from whey in less than ten seconds.

  'Here,' she insisted.

  There were many reasons why a wealthy young widow might need a bodyguard - protection from bandits, rapists and thieves to name but a few - but there are certain aspects of one's private life that a girl is obliged to keep private and, on those occasions, compromises to safety must be weighed up.

  'Jupiter, Juno and Mars! Are you deaf, man?'

  She'd barely reached the end of the bridge and he was behind her.

  'I cannot leave you unaccompanied, my lady. Who knows what danger might—'

  'Junius,' she hissed, 'if you move so much as one inch from this spot, I'll guzzle your gizzards with gravy.'

  You couldn't fault him as a bodyguard, she supposed, sweeping beyond the elegant limestone buildings fronted by shops that sold everything from potions to padlocks to peas into an unstructured tumble of thatched roundhouses and wooden shacks along the river. The boy had muscles of steel, was a dab hand with the sword and his knowledge of this guttural tongue was proving invaluable on this trip. It was just that Claudia's own shadow rarely stuck that close, and every time she turned his gaze was clinging tighter than limpets to a rock in a storm. At the corner, where a coppersmith in red check pantaloons was attempting to hammer flat a large sheet of twisted metal, Claudia glanced over her shoulder. Good. Junius might be fidgeting with his dagger and looking for all the world like he'd swallowed a wasp, but it was more than his life was worth to move from that bridge. Turning away from the river, she ducked down an alley fragrant with cooking smells. Here, women sang lilting songs as they draped laundry over wickerwork frames while others chopped herbs with their babies strapped to their backs.

  'Ze lady would take a leetle 'oney cake, yes?'

  'Certainly,' she told the vendor, whisking it out of his hand.

  Vaguely, she was aware of someone being cursed loudly in the Gaulish language and thought she heard the words 'theeving beetch' shouted in her direction, but the honey cake was warm and distracting, and, besides, there were more pressing things on Claudia's mind.

  Her father, for one.

  Wiping the soft yellow crumbs from her mouth, her mind travelled back to the last time she'd seen him. Even though she was just ten years old the memory was vivid, and, although his features had blurred with the passage of time, she could, when she closed her eyes at night, still feel his whiskery cheeks against hers, and smell the masculine scent of his clothes.

  Each year it was the same. At the start of the campaign season, he'd march off behind the legions with the rest of the camp followers, and she would wave and wave until her little arms ached and the army was reduced to a dusty dot on the horizon. Then, in October, he'd trudge home again, tired and weary, but not so exhausted that he and her mother wouldn't spend the whole winter fighting, before he packed his bags again the following spring.

  Every year, except the year when Claudia turned ten. That March, her father set off - to Aquitania, as it happened - only this time he never came home.

  Perhaps it was plunging from sunshine to shade in the wooded enclave that was the leatherworkers' quarter, but suddenly her step faltered and the honey cake turned to ash on her tongue. Darker memories flooded back. Of her mother, drunk as usual, reeling from one office in Rome to another, trying to find out why her man hadn't returned with the legion and what compensation they were going to pay her. The soldiers' jeers echoed for years in Claudia's head and, young as she was then, the implication had been obvious.

  But had her father really had it to here with the nagging, the insults and the flying crockery and opted for a fresh start in the newly created town of Santonum? He hadn't been killed in combat, that's for sure, because Claudia remembered with humiliating clarity her mother's slurred screeching outside the tribune's office about how her man's name had still been on the lists for rations until the legion moved out, so why the eff couldn't the effing bureaucrats keep track of their own effing people?

  Sadly, she realized, he could have gone missing for any number of reasons. He might have died from injuries that, as he was a lowly orderly, would not have been recorded in military logs. He could have caught a fever, picked up dysentery, fallen victim to snakebite, even sustained something like a head injury from a fall which had blanked out his memory. It happens. But for Claudia the itch of uncertainty needed a scratch that was long overdue. She had to know whether he was alive or dead to fill in the missing gaps of her childhood - except the past was proving hard to dig, and for reasons she could not have imagined.

  Mice, mould, floods indeed! Rome, dammit, was covering something up, but it only needed a quick skim through the history books to remember that Rome had erected a stone wall once before! On that particular occasion, they walled off the entire toe of Italy in an attempt to starve Spartacus and his rebel slaves into submission. Unfortunately, in doing so, they'd overlooked the little matter of Spartacus being a gladiator whose very training encouraged him to think laterally and play dirty, rather than a soldier who employed the more traditional rules of combat. As Spartacus had marched his rebel army north in triumph, Rome had been left with an awful lot of egg on its face.

  All Claudia needed to do was visit the chicken house while the hens were still laying ...!

  At midday, the tavern was bursting with men clad in plaid pantaloons tucked into soft ankle boots knocking back goblets of ale that spilled over with foam and wolfing down bowls of steaming dark stew that reflected the bountiful forests which encircled this town. To their welcoming grins, she slipped into a seat by the door, while in the corner a boy whistled a tune on a cheap wooden flute and his friend beat time on a coney skin stretched over a hoop. But even as Claudia's toe began to tap to the jig, she was aware that whilst the majority of Santons had adapted to life under the eagle with cheerful enthusiasm there were plenty about who had not.

  Old memories die hard.

  Grudges linger from one generation to the next.

  Today the tribes might be allies, indebted to the troops who patrolled their borders and kept the roads and waterways free of bandits, and delighted that another army was daft enough to fight their wars for them, leaving foreign sons, not their own, mourned. But, forty years earlier, these same people had resisted invasion with a ferocity that Rome had not envisaged. First they slaughtered the men sent to conquer them - a whole army including their legate - then they routed the legionaries sent by Julius Caesar to avenge them. Oh, yes. The Santons were a force to be reckoned with.

  But times change. Leaders change. Politics invariably follow.

  One of the first acts instigated by the young Augustus

  after being crowned Emperor was to expand the trade links between Lyons and the town of Burdigala, on the Jirond estuary. Being expert potters, stonemasons and metalworkers in their own right, the Santons suddenly found huge markets opening up - and at profits they'd never dreamed of. Loyalties switched in a flash, and when the Emperor finally declared Santonum the capital of the new Province of Aquitania, the resulting rash of aqueducts, theatres, bath houses and temples bestowed on them such a sense of superiority over their fellow Aquitans that they actually saw this as liberty rather than conquest.