Virgin Territory Read Free

I’ve never heard of. To stay with someone I don’t know. While my whole future hangs in the balance and the crew want to chuck my cat overboard…
    Hell, on top of that—look, I’ve broken my bloody nail.

II
    Ask yourself this. If you’d just spent the past three days being tossed around boiling seas with salt water chapping your cheeks and bilge water slapping your ankles, would your first thought on stepping ashore be for a fortune teller?
    Claudia barged past.
    ‘I see the image of a ram,’ a Sicilian voice called after her, ‘and arrangements for a wedding.’
    Claudia rolled her eyes. Every man, woman and child in Syracuse could see the image of a ram, that was the shape of the Furrina’s red, carved sternpost.
    ‘I see a funeral—’
    ‘You’ll see your own bloody funeral if you don’t get out of my way, now clear off!’
    Where was her bodyguard, for gods’ sake? Surely Junius had got his sea-legs back by now?
    ‘—and I see love blossoming for you. A tall—’
    Don’t tell me. A tall, dark, handsome stranger. Claudia pulled up short and heard a satisfying thump as the fortune teller tripped over a rope. What was it about these people, hustling you all the time? Respected astrologers she could understand, theirs was a science, an art—but these frauds? Weddings, funerals, tall, dark, handsome strangers. Originality was hardly her strong point.
    To her credit, the fortune teller, with her mass of red hair and generous bosom (neither of which was her own), might have many things to learn, but tenacity wasn’t one of them. She’d already picked herself up and was limping up the wharf after her quarry.
    ‘For just two sesterces, I can whisper the name of your future husband in your ear.’
    ‘For just two sesterces, I can have any one of these big, burly porters throw you in the harbour.’
    ‘You wouldn’t…?’
    But the look on Claudia’s face told the fortune teller that she just might, and the subsequent arrival of a muscular, Gaulish-looking slave at her elbow tended to confirm the issue. The redhead vanished.
    To Claudia’s surprise, Sabina had not been at all perturbed by the storm, though neither had she been eager to stretch her legs. She’d wait till the last minute before disembarking, she said. Well, that was her loss, because Syracuse was fun. It was big and bustly, noisy and colourful. Fortune tellers apart, it thrust its wine shops and whores, food stalls and physicians upon you the instant you set foot on solid land and after a long sea voyage, Claudia decided, as she marched back to supervise her luggage, the men would probably need them all. It was merely a question of priorities.
    On every step, round every pillar, under every towering statue along the harbourside, clerks and merchants, watermen and wharfies went about their business through the constantly changing tide of humanity, waving, gesticulating, holding up fingers— five, I said five —as bales and crates and sacks changed hands to the clank of the tally pieces. Donkeys brayed under the noonday sun, bright pennants and banners flapped in the breeze.
    Despite an abundance of temples, theatres and other public buildings to testify that, regardless of two hundred years of Roman occupation, this was still the gem in a once-Greek crown, the city had a curiously cosmopolitan feel, with its assortment of brightly coloured tunics and dark coloured slaves. Great tusks of ivory lay piled on the quay alongside Lebanese cedars and Carthaginian camels honking in protest. A tigress, bound for the arena, snarled inside her cage. A Syrian aristocrat in floppy hat and pantaloons gathered together his brood of little Syrian aristocratlets. Yet for all that, Syracuse had contrived to remain Greek.
    Yes, there were togas in evidence, but it seemed the good men of Sicily weren’t perhaps so status-conscious as their counterparts in Rome, for here far more of them took advantage of the Greek pallium. It was lighter and smaller and