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'A marble merchant, didn't she say?'
    'Sculptor,' Nikias corrected.
    'Not,' Claudia's jaw fell to the floor and bounced twice, 'not the Magnus?'
    'I only hire the best,' Leo said.
    'Magnus doesn't simply recreate a superficial likeness,' Nikias said. 'Next time you stroll through the garden, read the expressions on the figures he's sculpted, see how his subjects carry themselves, the way they look back at you, and you'll find yourself looking at their hopes and aspirations, their virtues and their faults, their energies and frailties. Take a long hard look at them, Claudia. Get to know the people Magnus captured. Because by looking at his sculptures, you're staring straight into these people's souls.'
    The stunned silence which followed was broken only by the clack-clack-clack of the dancer's castanets. No one had ever heard Nikias speak for so long. Or with such passion.
    Leo cleared his throat. 'Yes. Well. If you kiddies will excuse me, I'm for an early night.'
    He made a circuitous loop round the central table, as though by avoiding the piles of overturned seafood, the mangled poultry and splattered peaches he could somehow pretend Lydia's visit had not taken place.
    'Given that I have to spear a fish in the morning,' he added.
    'You're making a mistake, Leo.'
    Leo faltered. Perhaps having thought the taciturn artist had shot his bolt, he was surprised to find himself mistaken. Or perhaps he was just not used to people standing up to him in this way.
    'Are you threatening me, Nikias?' He chuckled.
    'Nope.' Nikias leaned back on his couch and stared at a point on the ceiling. 'But I'm not prepared to let you butcher a tame dolphin, either. Not when it means so much to the children.'
    'They'll forget soon enough,' Leo said, dismissing the notion with a wave of his hand. 'Isn't that right, Shamshi, old man?'
    The Persian laced his bony hands together and locked his dark eyes on Claudia's. 'I've said everything I have to say,' he lisped quietly. 'Before a new light is born in the sky, bad news will come over the water.'
    The last click of the castanets died away in an echo.
    'When the gods speak,' Shamshi whispered, 'only a fool covers his ears.'

Five

    Drifting on her swansdown mattress beneath a damask coverlet scented with rose petals, Claudia dreamed. She dreamed of thumping great lobsters, of crayfish and, of course, those succulent white truffles from the forests on the Istrian mainland, and there was nothing to interrupt her aromatic slumber. In Rome, darkness signalled the opening of the city gates to traffic, and thus there was a rowdy cacophony of rumbling wagons, cracking bullwhips, shouts from the drivers, tavern brawls, the whinnies and neighs of the dray animals and the constant clatter, clack and bang of loading and unloading. In Arcadia there was only silence, broken, perhaps, by the odd creak of settlement, the muffled sound of a door closing, the faint too-woo of an owl in the pinewoods behind the villa.
    Nestled into the dip at the base of Claudia's spine, Drusilla, her blue-eyed, cross-eyed, dark Egyptian cat twitched her whiskers and dreamed, too. She dreamed about big fat spiders, crunchy moths and the mice she would torment in the morning.
    Peace. Perfect peace. The night was warm, the air pleasant and, together as always, mistress and cat slept, and the three-quarters moon rose in the sky. Far away, a fox barked, and a nightjar churred on the wing.
    Fire!
    A sixth sense alerted her, even before her throat prickled with the distinctive tang of burning. Claudia swung her legs over the side of the bed, stubbing her heel in the dark on its bronze foot. Like every room of this single-storey villa, hers had double doors opening outwards. Throwing open the shutters, she saw that, less than a hundred paces from the house, flames were licking through the roof of a small building raised on vermin-thwarting stilts.
    Leo's grain store.
    With a low howl from the back of her