‘You and I are going to have a little talk.’
Fronto could feel the others close behind him. ‘You three could maybe have been a little more help.’
Cavarinos snorted. ‘I couldn’t get past you. You were too busy blocking the way getting beaten to a pulp.’
Fronto sighed, keeping his gaze locked on the young warrior in front of him. ‘He was alone?’
‘Yes,’ Aurelius replied. ‘But there’s twelve kit bags here, so the rest will be back at some point.’
Fronto nodded. ‘We might not want to be here when that happens. Four against eleven isn’t good odds.’ He turned back to the young warrior, applying just the slightest pressure to the sword in his hand. ‘Now, I would like you to tell my friend here everything about the Sons of Taranis.’
‘Fuck you, Roman.’
Fronto resisted the urge to just push the blade and counted to ten in his head.
‘Fronto…’ Cavarinos said quietly.
‘Fronto?’ snapped the young warrior at his sword’s point. ‘The commander of the Tenth?’
‘The same,’ grunted Fronto.
The warrior laughed, which caused several small lacerations at his neck. Blood trickled in three rivulets down into his tunic. ‘The Roman hero of Alesia playing the Greek merchant and hiding from his enemies in Massilia. You fool, Roman. No one could save you and your putrid master from the vengeance of Taranis!’
Fronto tried to hold back a sneer that threatened to cover his face, with only moderate success. ‘I have no fear of your god’s vengeance, young Aneunos, son of Lucterius.’ He was gratified by the widening of the young man’s eyes. ‘Yes, I know all about you. And your leader Molacos, too. So I know that it is not the vengeance of Taranis that I face, but the rather paltry retaliation of a failed warrior chief.’
‘You have no idea…’
Fronto drew another bead of blood with the tip of the sword. ‘Oh just stop babbling your threats. I don’t fear you or your people. And we will not let you go to Rome and free your king. Even Vercingetorix knows your cause is over. Your people are beaten, Aneunos. Gaul is Caesar’s now. And next year it will be Rome every bit as much as Narbo or Illyricum, with its own governor and tax system. And then it will get roads. And aqueducts, and temples and fora, and eventually maybe even citizenship. But it will never again be your tribes. And I can understand how that saddens you, but it’s the truth and what you are trying to do is only going to kill thousands more of your people. Caesar will put down your new army, and I will stop your own little mission.’
‘You will do nothing,’ sneered the Gaul.
‘Be quiet.’
‘You will be too busy mourning.’
Fronto frowned and, distracted for just a heartbeat, he was unable to stop the young warrior as he lunged forward, driving his own throat onto Fronto’s sword. The spray of crimson from the arteries washed across Fronto, as well as Cavarinos at his shoulder, and then soaked the windowsill and the table as he fell away, gurgling and shaking. Fronto leapt back, almost knocking Cavarinos to the floor again.
‘The idiot.’
‘He didn’t want to tell you anything,’ muttered Biorix, unhelpfully as he reached down to the table next to the window and brought up a Gallic ritual mask of terracotta, glazed with some darker tone and with a strangely expressionless straight mouth.
‘I can see that. But…’
Fronto stopped. ‘Mourning?’
‘Oh shit,’ said Aurelius quietly. ‘One of them here. Eleven absent.’
‘The villa!’
Seconds later, armed with blades from the room and two of them coated liberally with blood, the four men were pounding back along the corridor and down the stairs. As they burst into the bar, armed and bloodied, a clamour arose among the patrons, and the innkeeper, white-faced and apoplectic, screamed imprecations at them.
Then they were out in the street, turning uphill and racing for the villa outside the walls, high on the hills and overlooking the sea.
* * * * *
Fronto’s heart was hammering fit to burst and his breath coming in sore, rasping gasps as the four men emerged at the crest of the hill on the villa’s access road and raced towards the open gateway to the villa. The sun, threatened by an encroaching layer of cloud, had finally disappeared beneath the perfect horizon of the sea at the moment they had passed through the Eparchion Gate and the mile and a half from there had been a tiring slog in the gathering gloom, that cloud bank sliding over the world to lock in the heat and shut out the light.
The villa stood solid and stoic, issuing a welcoming golden glow from its windows and front doorway, and Fronto at first felt a massive wash of relief flood his senses as he’d half expected to arrive and find the house a burning mass. There were at least a dozen men at the villa, all trained and armed now, protecting the family. Masgava had chosen and trained the men well and his rota made sure that the villa was always protected since Cavarinos had brought his tidings of danger. And yet despite a parity of numbers against the eleven remaining enemies, Fronto had found himself reassessing as they ran.
The young Gaul they had fought had been good. He was maybe twenty summers at most, and that was being kind, and he had been lightly built and relatively inexperienced. Yet he had almost done for Fronto – a man more than two decades his senior and with a lifetime of combat experience – with sheer speed, strength and skill. And if he was the youngest and least trained of these ‘Sons of Taranis’, the gods only knew what the rest were like. Certainly they would be more than a match for the hired men of Masgava’s force.
Still, the villa seemed quiet.
Too quiet?
His heart began to race again. Why were there no patrols or guards outside to challenge them? Why was the front door wide open and issuing that welcome glow when the place was supposedly sealed against intruders?
His mouth suddenly felt unpleasantly dry. He had spent the winter tired beyond belief, plagued by nightmares of those dying Gauls – especially the young lads. The children. And this afternoon another such soul had joined that nightmare throng to await him in his dreams. But suddenly all of that seemed trivial and immaterial, for in his imagined nightmares he now pictured himself holding the butchered remains of Lucilia and the boys.
Ice filled his veins.
The open door called to him desperately and yet he dreaded passing through it.
The four men reached the gate in the outer wall – also open – and ran inside, crossing the lawn rather than the gravel path that might attract too much attention. Fronto in the lead, they bore down on the glowing rectangle of his home’s door and Fronto gripped the sword in his hand so tight that it almost shook.
His breathe held, fingers tight and face white with fear, Fronto edged towards the door.
‘What in the name of Baal Hamon’s ballsack happened to you?’
Fronto’s feet left the ground in panic at the soft spoken words close by, and if he’d thought his heart had already been pounding before, now was truly something else. His throat felt as though it were pulsing with each hammering, racing beat. A shadow detached itself from the darkness of the walls a few feet from the open door and Fronto felt a maelstrom of panic, anger and confusion as Masgava stepped into the light, his teeth and eyes shining bright in his dark features.
‘For the love of life itself don’t do that!’ Fronto gasped.
Masgava was merely studying Fronto and his gaze led the Roman to look down. In the golden glow of the doorway the swathe of drying blood across his chiton was rather prominent, and the sword in his grip was still oily red with spots of coagulation. He must look a sight.
‘I say again,’ the big man said quietly, ‘what happened to you?’
Fronto brushed the question aside. ‘Is everyone alright?’