‘Caesar levies new legions? Then he has a new campaign in the works?’
‘That, I cannot say,’ Hirtius replied. ‘I just have the orders to pass on.’
Antonius turned to Fronto. ‘I do believe that the campaigning season is to begin a little early this year. At least we’ll have no time to pick up cobwebs before we get our teeth into the fight.’ He smiled apologetically at the girls. ‘I am so sorry ladies, but we will have to cut short our visit. For the sake of family and propriety, we will remain long enough for you to pay your respects, but then, the morning after next, we must be aboard the trireme and making for Massilia.’
He turned his eager smile on Fronto and the veteran legate was suddenly — and worryingly — put in mind of an excited puppy.
‘Fabulous,’ he grumbled.
* * * * *
Fronto scratched his head as he reached the end of the street and looked this way and that.
‘I don’t know. Apart from Pompey’s new theatre and his house, the last time I set foot in the Campus Martius I was a fresh faced tribune. The whole place is different now. When I was last here there were a few scattered houses and insulae and a lot of greenery. Now it looks like the bloody Subura! When did the senate ratify selling off all the land?’
‘You’ve been away from Rome for a long time,’ Palmatus sighed. ‘The senate would rip out your kidney and sell it back to you if they thought they could get away with it. Rich men selling land to other rich men to erect shoddy death-traps to rent to the poor.’
Fronto frowned. ‘You’re an absolute barrel of laughs, you are.’
‘I tell it how it is,’ the former legionary shrugged. ‘By rights I should be sitting in one of these side streets joining the rest of the plebs as they glare at you and mutter curses against the nobles. Strange how the fates lead a man, eh?’
Balbus, his face dark and humourless, gestured to the right hand fork. ‘If you two have quite finished bickering, we’ll go that way first.’
Fronto nodded, falling quiet. He quite enjoyed his banter with Palmatus. The low-born soldier was unusually outspoken for a pleb among patricians, but that tended to happen when Fronto got to know them, much to his mother’s constant irritation. When confronted with loss and sadness, Fronto habitually resorted to either irreverent humour or vengeful anger, as circumstances dictated. Neither, however, was appropriate today, and he was having trouble maintaining the serenity that he felt his friends and family expected.
Balbus led the group on towards the family mausoleum of the Lucilii, Palmatus and Masgava prowling along the sides of the party like wolves, watching for trouble. There was no real reason for them to have come along. The streets of Rome were dangerous these days, but Fronto felt certain that he, Balbus and Galronus would be able to handle any trouble that came their way. The pair had refused to stay behind, though, and had appointed themselves as guards in the mean streets of Rome, Masgava occasionally pausing to rest his still-aching gut.
‘Sad, the way all the mausolea that have stood out on these roads for so long are getting lost among housing now,’ Fronto sighed. ‘Shouldn’t be allowed, really.’
‘Rome grows,’ shrugged the practical Palmatus. ‘New residents have to go somewhere, and the insulae are already too tall. Where else are you going to put them, if you don’t expand the city?’
‘Still seems wrong. A decade ago, Balbus’ family would have had a nice little garden plot around their mausoleum. Maybe a few cypresses in a line. Now half a dozen families of dirty scrotes will stand in its shadow, scratching their privates and pissing on the path.’
His sister shot him a warning glance, and Fronto realised too late how insensitive that had sounded. He opened his mouth to apologise and back-track, but decided he needn’t bother. Neither Balbus nor Lucilia were paying him any attention, their spirits troubled as they approached the tomb’s location, and young Balbina — once a lively spirit — was her usual silent self, unseeing and apparently unfeeling.
The group wandered on in silence a few more moments, taking two more turns until Fronto could no longer guess which way was north, though the further they went, the less housing was in evidence, with more open green spaces between. The rush of water that underlay the everyday sounds of the city confirmed that they had come close to the Tiber, probably at that section where it turned from north to the west and then south. A large, white residence, clearly the property of a wealthy merchant or suchlike — a ‘wannabe’ noble, judging by the level of ostentation in such a low priced region — stood within an area of untouched scrub land and just beyond it, a small square garden surrounded on three sides by ordered rows of cypresses contained a modest brick-built columbarium, a garland-and-wreath decorative panel running around the structure at head height and a marble panel set into the front bearing an inscription detailing the family who owned it.
Balbus took a key from the chain on his purse-string and approached the building’s side, unlocking the iron gate and swinging it open. There was no solid door, but the bars on the gate had been spaced close enough to prevent birds entering the mausoleum and nesting there.
Taking down the small oil lamp from the shelf by the door, Balbus scrabbled around, found the flint and steel and struck a few times until the light-source began to flicker, its guttering flame illuminating the building’s interior with a warm orange glow. Palmatus, Masgava and Galronus arrayed themselves outside like a defensive force, the latter handing over to Fronto the bag he had brought with him as the rest entered the structure. Fronto allowed Balbus and the ladies in first, bringing up the rear and withdrawing a small jar from the bag, cracking the seal.
As with all columbaria, the building’s walls consisted of row upon row of small arched recesses, reminiscent of a dovecote, each one for a family member’s cinerary urn, though only a dozen or so had been filled. The Lucilii were not old nobility, apparently. Given the lack of occupants it did not take long to locate the niche with the new urn, the identifying plaque beneath freshly-made.
Fronto found suddenly, and unexpectedly, that a lump had risen in his throat. Corvinia had been a delight to know. She had been a haven of civility in that first bloody and androcentric year of Caesar’s campaign, with her small and neat Roman house incongruously placed among the military camps near Geneva. She had invited him — a complete stranger — into her home as though she had known him for years and had fed and watered him. She would have been his mother in law, he realised with surprising sadness.
And she had died — indirectly, admittedly — because of him. Or rather because of blood feuds against him. Though he had done nothing as far as he was concerned to bring it all about, he could not deny more than a sliver of guilt over the matter.
Sorry, he mouthed silently to the shade of his mother in law. By tradition, they should be eating a sacred meal — he’d bought cakes, bread and a few bright flowers in the market especially — but he doubted, given the means of Corvinia’s passing, that any of them would have much of an appetite.
Balbus was talking quietly — barely a murmur really — to Corvinia. Fronto deliberately closed his ears to the conversation — it was a private thing and he had no wish to intrude. He was here mostly for them to lean on should they feel the need.
But instead of murmuring, Lucilia was silent and still. If she was talking to her mother, it was in the privacy of her skull, while no hint of emotion showed upon her stony surface. Trying not to interrupt their private thoughts, Fronto shuffled quietly across to the small altar in the corner and made a libation of the expensive wine they had bought at an overpriced stall beneath the columned front of the temple of Portunus, filling the bowl-shaped depression on the altar top and mouthing the words of dedication silently. With a small shrug he retrieved one of the cakes from his bag, broke off a piece, placing it on the altar, and then consumed the rest while he waited.