Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [84]
The door burst open and a terrified slave stood silhouetted in its frame.
Marcus allowed Agrinella to swing back to the floor. Both heads turned in the direction of the interloper.
‘What is the meaning of this loud intrusion?’ bellowed Marcus.
‘Forgive me, master,’ replied the slave, ‘Cartethus is nowhere to be found and an important visitor beseeches an audience with you.’
‘Get out of my way,’ said Antonia Vinicus, pushing the slave away from the door and looking closely at Marcus and Agrinella, their arms still wrapped around each other. ‘I pray to all of the Gods that I am not interrupting anything too interesting,’ she said with a calculated sneer.
‘Antonia,’ Marcus replied, with a sigh. ‘This is not a particularly good time for social intercourse.’
Agrinella giggled at Marcus’s deliberately coital double entendre, but Antonia wiped the smile from her friend’s face in an instant.
‘Edius Flavia has been arrested,’ she said flatly. ‘As far as I can ascertain, he was caught in flagrante del icto in the chamber of that simpering worm, Felicia.’
‘Arrested for what?’ asked Marcus, angrily. ‘Since when is the taking of a slave to your bed a crime of any description?’
Antonia laughed at Marcus’s naivety. ‘Sine the manipulative, and no doubt by now much richer, puella meretrix in question screamed "rape" with ten praetorian guards stationed just outside of her door.'
Now Marcus understood. 'He was tricked by cruel chicanery?'
`Yes, yes, he was a fool unto himself and all others,' Antonia replied. Ànd he will pay a heavy and deadly price for his rashness. But now we have a bigger problem to deal with than Edius's damnable libido.’
The shock of these revelations had quickly sobered Agrinella. `Sweet merciful gods, what are we to do?' she asked in a panic.
`That is very much for your husband to decide,' Antonia told her. `But whatever it is, make it quick. Calaphilus will not wait for long before he acts.'
Finally Barbara plucked up the courage to take another step into the market-place. And then another. And then another...
Before she knew it she was in the heart of the crowd.
Walking steadily and without fear in the very place where Vicki, Ian and the Doctor had last been seen.
Now, what to do?
Suddenly, the reality of the situation struck her. What had she been thinking?
She couldn't simply start asking people if they'd seen a young girl, a handsome man and an old man wandering about the city, could she? Those descriptions alone would make up half of the population of Byzantium.
Just face it, she told herself, they're dead. Let them rest in peace.
At the heart of any Roman city lay the forum, a large open space surrounded by markets, government buildings, baths, arenas and temples. Rich and poor of all of the nationalities of t he R oman em pire m ingled i n the bustling f orum w ithout barriers or distinctions between the various social classes. Even slaves were free within the forum.
That was something Barbara Wright, of Form 2A at Cricklewood Grammar School, aged twelve, had written in an exam almost twenty years ago. The teacher, Mr Dolphin, was an otherwise good-natured and likeable man, who had only used the cane on anyone once (that was when Robert Smedley sang While shepherds washed their socks by night, all seated on the ground, during a Christmas assembly). But he had not been at all impressed with Barbara's efforts. 'Simplistic and banal,' he had said, dismissively, in front of the whole class. 'You are capable of much better work than this buffoonery, Miss Wright,' he added.
Well, that's one in the eye for you, Mr Dolphin, thought Barbara.
Wherever you are.
History, for many like Dolphin, and other dry and stuffy men that she had met throughout her academic life, was not something to be touched and tasted, but rather a series of empty and vacuous facts; a kind