Goddess of Death Read Free

arches set into the two protecting walls of the castle, the stone bridge, and the parking lot below.
    It was empty. The intruders had long gone. But the colonel remained, staring sightlessly over the wall, one arm clutching the warm stone, with the panorama of plains and valleys and hills extending before him, towards the west.
    He was stone dead, but one hand, still draped stiffly over the wall, seemed to point accusingly towards the track taken by the fleeing men who had killed him. It was an image that remained, hauntingly, with Ricardo Angeli for the rest of his life.

1
    ‘I GET THE impression you don’t like your job.’
    Arnold Landon sipped at the coffee he had just poured from the flask and made no immediate reply. His glance slipped along the high ridge in front of him: beyond it the distant Cheviots were rimed with a late spring snow. Not for the first time he thought about those long dead men of the legions who had guarded the northern frontiers of their Britain. Many would have been native to these lands, but a larger number would have been trained, hard-bitten men who would have travelled far from their homelands in Italy, France, Syria, Iraq and other distant Roman territories. Professional soldiers who had been promised farms on their retirement: ruthless, disciplined killers, but builders also as was evidenced by Hadrian’s Wall, the wooden and stone forts that they had erected from Wallsend on the east coast to Carlisle in the west, men who had narrow ambitions that most would not attain, but who took pride in their work and left carved stones behind them, to proclaim what they had built and achieved.
    He tasted the bitterness of the coffee in his mouth and looked sideways to Karl Spedding. His deputy in the Department of Museums and Antiquities was standing huddled in his overcoat, arms folded across his narrow chest, an incongruous woollen cap pulled down low on his forehead. If anyone was not happyin his job it was Karl Spedding, far from the museum offices he had known in southern Europe, warm, cosy, dusty, relaxed. Spedding bore little relation to his distant Germanic ancestors, the men of the legions who had struggled on foot over these windswept hills, cold, bedraggled, but committed to follow in the triumph-seeking footsteps of their leaders. His hawkish features seemed always tense with concentration, his attitude somehow gritty with displeasure at the way life had treated him.
    ‘If anyone’s unhappy, I would have said it was you,’ Arnold gave word to the thought after a short silence.
    Spedding’s mouth twisted as he flicked a sideways glance to Arnold and shook his head. ‘You are right to some extent. But not completely. You must remember that taking this job was my own idea. The location, here in the north of England, with this dreadful climate, it is not a first choice for me, this I will admit. But I am doing what I want to do. Roman sites like this are fascinating : and I have dug at locations around the world.’ He glanced down at the exposed fort site some fifty yards below them on the sloping hill. ‘In somewhat better weather, I will admit. But after some years working in museums, it is good to return to the actual physical activity of searching for history, rather than merely recording it, storing it, preparing it for exhibition .’
    Arnold caught the slight shiver that shook Spedding’s shoulders , and smiled. ‘Even so, I’m sure you would have preferred to do your digging in the warmth of Egypt, or Syria, or Libya. Or Turkey, for that matter, which is where I believe you last undertook this kind of work.’
    ‘History is history,’ Spedding replied curtly, unwilling to concede the point. ‘But it was not my intention to talk about my feelings: it’s yours I was interested in.’
    Arnold sipped his coffee again, reflectively. Spedding was right, of course. His deputy had formerly been employed at the Pradak Museum in Rome and had made his personal choice inapplying