Queen of the Night Read Online Free PDF

years earlier.
    'Oh yes,' the actor shouted from the tail of the cart. 'He was so depraved,' the man's hand slipped to his crotch and he made an obscene gesture, 'he used to go into the Imperial Gardens and make love to the moon, whom he regarded as his wife.'
    This immediately provoked a shocked denial from a woman in the audience and the declamation was transformed, much to the delight of all, into a fierce slanging match about sexual practices. Claudia half listened as she studied the props piled on the huge cart pulled by serene-looking bullocks. She recognised the grotesque face masks, the imitation jars, the pieces of scenery which could be hastily assembled to fashion a tree, a wall or the door of a house. She recalled her own days with Felix journeying from town to town: such a strange time, always on the move. Since she had settled at the She Asses, her life had been transformed. She was a secret official of the Empress, a confidante of the powerful Presbyter Sylvester and, she concluded wryly, the protector of Uncle Polybius, about whose night-time meetings with shadowy figures in the garden she was growing increasingly suspicious.
    Lost in her own thoughts, one hand holding her parasol, the other grasping Murranus', Claudia was startled from her reverie when they reached the Flavian Gate. She glanced up and stared around at the outhouses, barracks and fences, as well as the makeshift market which had grown up there. Guards in half-armour lounged in the shade gambling, whilst their officer, a German clad in tawdry finery, stood surveying the crowd. Claudia wondered idly if the officer was from Burrus' cohort. She knew the real watchers were hidden away. The Ethiopian with his braided hair selling bruised fruit from his wheelbarrow; the scrawny girl offering sulphur matches; the priest of some minor deity clad in dirty saffron robes, chanting over a pot of flame: perhaps they were spies. Or was it the sharp-faced, balding pimp, with three of his ladies, all bewigged, painted and clinking with cheap jewellery, looking for custom, yelling that he had set up an awning in a shady corner just inside the city walls? Any of these could be the 'surveyors' of the Empress Helena, looking for faces, studying those flocking into the city, recalling descriptions and searching for anything untoward.
    The entire crowd fell silent as military horns wailed a fanfare. An execution party came marching out, sixteen men under their decurion, divided into squads of four. Each squad guarded a prisoner, a beam across his shoulder, being dragged out to be crucified at the Palace of Bones. Once these had passed, Claudia and Murranus joined the rest of the crowds as they surged through the gateway on to the thoroughfare, which immediately radiated out into narrow runnels, alleyways and side streets.
    Claudia heaved a sigh of relief, as she always did whenever she returned to this quarter. It might be stinking, noisy and colourful, but this was her home, a safe place where she could recognise people and knew who they really were, a bustling rabbit warren of narrow lanes cluttered with open-air stalls. The traders set up their makeshift shops in the crumbling loggia and peristyles or at the mouths of alleyways, selling everything from pots to cakes. On the walls around them garishly daubed notices proclaimed the price of certain goods and where these could be bought, as well as the names of candidates for the next election to some municipal office. Claudia and Murranus were well known here and were greeted with good-natured teasing and salutations.
    Torquatus the Tonsor, a seller-of-potions-cum-barber-cum-leech, had, as usual, procured the best position under a giant gnarled sycamore tree in the square near the She Asses tavern. Torquatus spent his days shaving people, cutting their hair, listening avidly to their medical ailments and, as he put it, offering his 'best advice', which, he solemnly assured his customers, came from leading imperial