‘I see. And you’re presumably hoping that we will be the “means” by which you collect your payment?’
The former frumentari shrugged.
‘I had assumed that we had a shared interest. Perhaps I was mistaken in my belief that you were burning with the desire to right the wrong done to your centurion’s father, and so many other innocent victims of these men’s depredations?’
Scaurus nodded briskly.
‘Very well, we’ll play your game, Excingus, but not here. We’ll meet tomorrow morning then, as soon after dawn as you like. Come to the transit barracks on the Ostia road and ask for the Tungrians. Your safety is assured.’
‘I’d rather not-’
Scaurus barked a laugh, his grin lopsided with wry amusement.
‘I’m sure you’d much rather not come onto our ground, but then the choice isn’t yours to make, not unless you want to miss the opportunity to collect whatever generous bounty the senator has put on our, as yet unrevealed, target’s head. And now, Informant, I’d say that your welcome here has reached its limit. I suggest you leave before the doctor here changes her mind, and requests me to have you killed as recompense for the orderly whose murder you so casually ordered. It would be a request I would find hard to refuse.’
Excingus nodded dourly and turned for the door.
‘If you guarantee my safety then I will come to your camp. But be aware, gentlemen, that should you break that vow I will have left a very clear trail to your door.’
‘One more thing, Informant …’
He turned back in the doorway and made an exaggerated bow.
‘How might I help you further, Domina?’
Felicia walked forward and stared into his eyes.
‘What did you do with the previous occupants of this house?’
Excingus laughed softly.
‘Ah, so now that you have possession of your father’s house, you wonder what price was paid to allow you to walk back in. Worried that I had your former husband’s family put to the knife, are you?’
She held the stare, her lip curling in disgust.
‘It did cross my mind.’
His face creased into an affronted frown.
‘Then put it out of your mind, madam. This is Rome, not the sort of frontier village you’ve become used to, and I am most assuredly not given to the wanton acts of murder that are the emperor’s preserve. Your former brother-in-law and the rest of his family are safely tucked away somewhere not too far from here.’
He turned and left without waiting for a reply, leaving the Tungrians staring after him and the barbarians in particular fingering the hafts of the knives they had secreted about them. Julius shook his head in disbelief, raising an eyebrow at Scaurus.
‘Really, Tribune? We’re going to work with him after what he did in Britannia? He’ll sell us out without any hesitation whatsoever.’
The senior officer answered, still staring at the door through which Excingus had made his exit.
‘I see little choice. As of now we don’t even know which of the four of them he has in mind for this “opportunity”, so we either take the chance he’s presenting, with an eye open to the risk he presents, or we let it pass and give up on the whole thing.’
The two men stared at each other in silence for a moment before Cotta interjected.
‘I’d say that you’re both right.’ He gestured to Scaurus. ‘The tribune has it correct when he says that there’s no way we can take the vengeance we’re seeking without that man. But on the other hand, the first spear is right to say that we can trust that odious bastard no further than we can piss … begging your pardon ladies.’
Felicia and Annia smiled demurely, and the former soldier continued with his face slowly reddening.
‘Anyway … what I was going to say was that there might be a way to bring a greater element of trust to the relationship.’
Julius frowned in disbelief.
‘Greater trust? You’re suggesting that we might give that boot-scraped piece of shit the benefit of the doubt?’
Cotta shook his head.
‘Not exactly. The problem is that right now we only have two choices: either to trust him blindly or to kill him. One choice is recklessly naive, while the other ends any hope we have of taking revenge for the death of Marcus’s father. What I have in mind might just give us a third option.’
‘You don’t want to know, Marcus, leave it at that.’
Cotta shook his head firmly at his former protégée, his mouth set in a tight line of determination.
‘I have to know. I need to understand just how bad it-’
The veteran cut him off with a sweeping chop of his hand.
‘Just about as bad as you can imagine, for all the fact that you’ve seen the ugly face of war. Some things are just better not being discussed, or you’ll end up going mad simply because they were here and you weren’t.’
Marcus stood up and paced away across the small garden. Beyond the house’s wall the sounds of the city were ever present: the slap of feet on cobbles, the shouts of shopkeepers and street hawkers rising in an incessant discordant chorus. Scaurus had taken his escort of barbarians back down the hill, leaving the young centurion to spend the evening with his wife under the watchful eyes of his friend and several of Cotta’s men.
‘And that’s my point. I wasn’t here, but they were. My entire family gone, overnight, and me never any the wiser as to what happened to them. For all I know they may have been sold into sl-’ He fell silent at the look on his friend’s face, as Cotta’s last line of resistance crumbled. ‘What?’
‘Lucius.’
His face took on a haunted expression, and Marcus recalled that Cotta and the gladiator had started training his younger brother only the year before his own enforced exile to Britannia. He waited patiently for the former soldier to compose himself.
‘I heard later that Lucius was sold to one of Pilinius’s friends. Seems that the senator had no need of him, given the number of women who were taken from your father’s villa, so he disposed of him in return for enough money to buy himself a formal toga.’
Having broken his silence he was unable to stop talking.
‘Your mother and sisters were served up as part of one of Pilinius’s parties. I don’t know what happens behind the walls of his villa, but I do know what the end result is. One of the servants who got away in the confusion came to find me a few days later, and took me to the illegal dumping ground out past the Esquiline gate. Your sister Livia’s body was lying there naked, with its eyes already pecked out by the crows. We buried her, and searched the pits for anyone else from the household, but we didn’t find anything to tell us the fate of the rest of your family, or any of their household for that matter.’
Marcus looked at him for a moment, and imagined the revolting task of searching the infamous dump, strewn with rotting corpses and infested with vermin and wild dogs.
‘Thank you.’
The two men were quiet for a moment.
‘Your father was tortured, of course. They will have thrown his body in the main sewer to be flushed into the Tiber, I’d imagine.’
Marcus was silent for a moment longer.
‘I’m going to kill them all. Each and every one of the men who did this to my family are going to look me in the eyes as they die, and realise that they are no better than wild animals. And when I’ve killed all four of these Knives, I’ll only have one more man to deal with.’
Cotta put a hand on his arm, shaking his head slowly.
‘Do you remember when I used to tell you never to back down from a fight, or a slur on your honour? To hit any man that threatened you with either first, any way you could, and to keep on hitting him until he’d stopped fighting back?’
‘Yes. My father said much the same thing to me more than once, albeit somewhat less graphically.’
The veteran’s face was deadly serious.
‘Just this once, ignore us both. You have a wife and child, you have friends who respect you and a new life to enjoy. Take that prize and run with it Marcus, and ignore the bloody path that leads to revenge, or you’ll end up losing everything! There are more important things, as you’ll only find out the hard way if you go up against these men.’