The Boy Who Stepped Through Time by Anna Ciddor

Author:Anna Ciddor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

23

TOWN HOUSE

AS THE DOORS BEGAN TO open Perry had a glimpse of two men inside, then Maximus strode forward, cloak swinging. The next instant all Perry could see was a crowd of people filling the entrance. He and Carotus rushed to join them, but they had to jig up and down, waiting impatiently, till the more important people had gone through first.

At last it was the boys’ turn. They stepped into a long, narrow room, lit only by a few bronze oil lamps on stands along the walls.

Half-lit by the flickering flames, the two men waited at one side to greet the new arrivals. One of them was tall and thin, the other shorter, with broad shoulders. They both looked much grander than any of the servants at Villa Rubia. They wore coloured leggings and tunics with elaborate decorations on the sleeves and hems.

The short man stood to attention while everyone passed – the doorman, thought Perry – but the other man spoke to each arrival in greeting. When the boys drew near, he eyed them keenly under his beetling black brows. He had a lean, clean-shaven face, swarthy skin, black hair, and a long nose with flaring nostrils.

‘He looks like a mule,’ Carotus murmured to Perry, and the two of them were sniggering as they reached him.

‘I am Urbinus, the steward,’ he glowered. ‘And you two need to smarten up. I don’t tolerate monkeys in this house.’

As the steward strode off to join Maximus at the front of the procession, Carotus pulled a face at his back.

‘Mule-face,’ he muttered.

‘I can hear a fountain,’ said Perry.

Carotus listened.

‘You’re right, I bet that’s the courtyard garden over there,’ he said, pointing at a pool of light ahead of them.

But when they reached it, it was not a garden. It was a vast room with sunlight shining through a square hole in the roof, onto a pond of gleaming marble. The room had grand decorations everywhere: carved and painted columns holding up the roof, a pattern of black-and-white mosaics all over the floor … But not a single tree, not even a citron in a pot, and the fountain was just a stone urn trickling water in the pond.

People were starting to move away, disappearing down corridors in all directions.

‘Let’s look in there,’ said Perry, pointing at a huge dining room on the other side of the pond. The floor of it seemed alive with the writhing figures of beasts and gods made of coloured mosaic tiles.

They were just about to step through the wide double doors when someone grabbed them by the backs of their tunics.

‘What do you monkeys think you’re up to?’ snapped Urbinus. ‘Take yourselves to the kitchen. Be off with you.’

He shoved them towards a narrow corridor on the far side of the house.

‘Huh,’ said Carotus, and he jerked his tunic straight before he stalked away.

But when they reached the corridor, he stopped and looked to left and right in puzzlement.

‘This house is crazy,’ he exclaimed. ‘The rooms are all over the place.

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