He wouldn’t be able to show her her father’s body. Or her sister’s.
He might not be able to look at them himself.
Balbus had been as close as a father to him even before he had met and been wooed by the man’s daughter. He was as close a friend as Fronto had ever had – one of a very diminished circle, these days. And Balbina was so young – had witnessed so many horrors in her short life, yet had been starting to recover, they’d thought. Panic was starting to give way now to anger.
He pushed in through the door, knowing now what he was going to find and hoping against hope that he could catch a few of these bastards and gut them in the name of Nemesis – the lady of vengeance.
Two more bodies lay in the vestibule. One – a guard with a sword – had knocked over the shrine to the household gods as he had taken his fatal blow and fallen. The thoroughness of these Roman-haters was evident in that the attackers had wasted time pausing to grind the figures of the villa’s spirit protectors into dust and broken shards under their heels. The other corpse was a young serving girl, the blow that had killed her smashing her spine in the lower back as she ran from the intruders. Fronto reached up to the twin figurines hanging at his neck.
Fortuna give me your blessing in my sword arm tonight. Nemesis, give me the bastards to use it on.
As he paused in the atrium, taking in the pile of bodies that had been dumped in a tangled pile in the central impluvium pool, Cavarinos appeared at his side. The Arvernian noble looked every bit as angry and vengeful as he and Fronto gave thanks to Fortuna for bringing him a Gaulish friend on whom he felt he could truly rely in his time of need.
‘Not there?’ Cavarinos murmured.
Fronto peered at the pile, the once-delicate square pool with its mosaic floor now filled with dark crimson liquid, obscuring the pattern beneath. There were seven of them, accompanied by the odd separated limb, but none of them wore the good clothes that would mark out Balbus, nor could he see the bald head, framed by faint wisps of grey hair. No children either, thank the gods.
‘Doesn’t look like it.’ He tried not to think about what Cavarinos had told him – about how the killers tended to take Roman officers and torture them to death, displaying their broken bodies in an almost ritualistic fashion. Of course they wouldn’t just heap Balbus – a former legate – in a pile with the servants.
He didn’t even need to give the orders. Zeno and Evagoras disappeared through doors to the left, searching, while Aurelius and Biorix did the same to the right. Balbus was a semi-regular visitor to Fronto’s villa, and all the staff and guards knew him well enough to recognise him.
‘They’ve been and gone,’ Fronto said through gritted teeth.
Cavarinos nodded. ‘This is a tomb, not a fight.’
Fronto let out a low grunt. Nemesis was taunting him.
‘Come on.’
Leaving the others to search, Fronto led Cavarinos off to the farther rooms. A quick glance found no Balbus in the old man’s chamber, triclinium or office, though the latter held the villa’s chief servant – the master’s favoured man – draped over the table with his arms removed at the shoulders and a gladius driven down through his neck and the table top, emerging beneath, where the dripping into the dark lake had almost stopped. It had been some time since the attack, then.
‘Unless he tried for the servants’ quarters, he probably ran for the baths and he’ll have had Balbina with him. She’d be his first concern.’
Leading the Arvernian through the side passage into the bath suite, he was surprised to find the place partially-filled with choking smoke. Baffled, he blinked away the grimy itchy soot, bending low to avoid the worst, which fugged the room from chest to ceiling height. Two rooms revealed nothing, but the third was fascinating. The warm room had been damaged. A wide heavy basalt labrum had stood on a pedestal, filled with cold water to complement the heated floor, but that labrum lay on its side, the bowl chipped and broken. For a moment Fronto simply believed that the water had evaporated from the floor with the warmth, but then he realised that the heat in the floor was mediocre at best. And one of the square stone slabs that formed the floor had clearly been moved. The surrounding stones were still a little wet, but this one was dry. His heart leaping with hope, Fronto pointed at it.
‘Help me.’
Using his hard-won Gallic sword somewhat ignominiously, he used the tip to lever up the edge of the stone square until Cavarinos slid his fingers beneath and heaved, nodding. Fronto joined him, casting aside the sword and lifting the stone enough to drop it back.
A gleaming blade lanced out of the darkness and scored a narrow line across Fronto’s forearm before he could leap back.
‘Pax!’ he shouted. ‘It’s me!’
As he edged towards the lip of the hole and peered down, his vision still poor with the smoke above, he spotted the most welcome sight of his day. Balbus sat, painful and blackened in the stunted space below floor, where the heat from the furnace circulated to warm the floor. The youngest daughter sat beside him, soot-black but wild-eyed. The old man’s sword wavered for a moment.
‘Marcus?’
Fronto cast a thousand simultaneous thanks to Fortuna, promising her an altar for this, and grinned down at his father-in-law. ‘At least you had the sense to hide.’
‘I saw what they did to my best men. I’m a soldier, not an idiot, Marcus.’
As the two men reached down and lifted the young girl to freedom, then helped the old man out of the cramped space, Balbus straightened with a hiss of pain, rubbing his sore back.
‘That was a stroke of genius,’ Fronto laughed. ‘You used the labrum of water to extinguish the furnace?’
Balbus nodded, coughing in the thick atmosphere. ‘I hadn’t quite counted on the quantity of smoke. We almost expired from that alone.’
‘Ha.’ Fronto turned as Biorix appeared. ‘They’re safe. Round up the men and get ready to head back. We’ll deal with all this mess in the daylight.’
As the big former legionary hurried off, Fronto looked his father- and sister-in-law up and down. ‘Let’s get a horse and get you over to my place. Then we can get you in the bath and cleaned up.’
Balbus gave him a sour look. ‘If it’s alright with you, I’ll just dunk myself in the horse trough here before we leave. I’ve had quite enough of bath suites for one night.’
* * * * *
Fronto sat with Balbus, the old man busily cleaning out a sooty ear with a square of linen. Cavarinos and Masgava also occupied the room, every other available able-bodied man in an assigned position around the villa keeping watch while a few lucky ones caught up on sleep. In a couple of hours the sun would begin to make its presence felt, and in just under an hour the rota would change, different men going to rest and those relatively refreshed rising to take their place.
Lucilia had been ecstatic at her family’s return and Fronto had found himself musing that if they all lived through the next day or so, his home life would be considerably more relaxed for a while. Indeed, despite his bloody exertions the previous afternoon and the soulless horror of what he’d seen in his father-in-law’s house, he felt blessed and immensely relieved that everyone he really cared for in Massilia was now under one roof with a very watchful guard, Balbina safe with Fronto’s own boys
Balbus had repeatedly refused Fronto’s insistence that he bathe to remove the layer of grime and dirt that even a dip in a horse trough had done little to remove, but a brief sharp word from his daughter had put paid to that and the old man had emerged from the baths refreshed and clean, dressed in Fronto’s clothes. Fronto and Cavarinos had also changed, their own bloodied apparel sitting in a washing pile. It had made Fronto chuckle to see the Arvernian in a Roman officer’s spare tunic and belt, though Cavarinos had looked less than pleased with the change, and had insisted on retaining his trousers, despite their state.