‘Lies, Husband, all lies,’ she cried.
Coldly, he ordered her to fetch his children and go into the temple, then gave the same instructions to all his concubines, except Galina, who was childless. When they had obeyed, Brennos took a falcata off one of his remaining guards. It was a huge weapon, a thick curved blade, with one razor-sharp edge designed to remove a head or a limb at a single stroke. He entered the temple himself and shut the great wooden door. The screaming started almost immediately, but there were no cries of pain. Within a little time the sounds died away, to be replaced by an eerie silence, then the door opened and Brennos emerged, covered in blood from head to foot.
He looked around the silent crowd. ‘They sought to replace me with a child of mine. There are now no children of mine, nor mothers to breed them.’
He walked over to Galina and stood before her. ‘Who threw the spear?’
She indicated Masugori, who stood rock still, shocked to the marrow at the barbarity of what Brennos had done, and fully expecting to suffer the same fate as his family. Brennos walked over to look at the conspirators. Ambon was untouched, Luekon badly wounded and Minoveros nearly dead from the spear in his chest. Three swift strokes with the mighty falcata removed their heads, sending great founts of blood up from their trunks. He picked up Luekon’s head by the long black hair.
‘This one should be sent to Rome.’
CHAPTER THREE
Calpurnia, Demetrius’s daughter, was a delight; slim and graceful, she was the same age as Aquila. He had seen her that first day in the shop, covered in flour and sweat, which certainly did not do her justice, though the smile never changed. Washed, with her black hair properly combed, Calpurnia was a different girl. She had a happy disposition, which seemed to be at war with an interior sadness, and there was tension in the house, evident by the way conversations between her and her mother were abruptly terminated when their new ‘relative’ appeared. She treated her father with some reserve, and generally tried to be elsewhere when he was around.
Alone among the Terentius family, she welcomed Aquila without avarice, doing all she could to see to his comfort and seeking nothing in return, washed and repaired his clothes and even polished his battered leather armour with beeswax, restoring it to something that looked reasonably respectable. The charm intrigued her, but Aquila never found it easy to speculate about his birth, and the frown that greeted her first question was enough to ensure her future silence on that subject.
But she did seek him out, making a point of being around when he was at home. Typical of a youth his age, Aquila was unaware of how much she admired him; unaware he was so different, taller, with even the golden tone of his skin so unlike all the other young men she knew. Alone at night, she prayed that Aquila had come to rescue her, and the more she conjured up his image in her mind, the more fanciful her thoughts became. To Calpurnia he was like the son of a god, placed on earth to right the wrongs of mankind, and they were alone in the house the day she told him. That made him laugh and he was able to point out that such a notion was not just a Roman myth but existed in both the Greek and Celtic religions as well. That intrigued her even more, so he was forced to describe how he knew such things.
There was, of necessity, a care in his descriptions: of Gadoric, who had taught him about the beliefs of the Celtic religion; that the gods lived in the trees and in the earth; the same man who had taught him to hunt only to eat, never to merely display prowess. The Celt’s most abiding religious conviction was that a warrior dying in battle went to sit with the gods in a special place, where the tales of their heroic deeds became the stuff of legend. Gadoric had certainly achieved that; though he did not describe it to Calpurnia, as he talked, he had the image of his friend’s death in his mind, of him charging a line of Roman cavalry with no hope of survival, yelling the war cries he had learnt as a child.
When talking of the Greeks he was even more circumspect. Sicily, and his activities there under the tutelage of Didius Flaccus, could not be mentioned, but he had heard from many members of the slave army of the deities they worshipped, very like Roman gods but with different names, as well as the pantheon of heroes whose deeds were told and retold to inspire the timorous, the fearful, and most of all those brave enough to wish to emulate them. But there was another side to Greek belief; no man should seek too much, certainly no mere mortal should challenge the supremacy of the gods, which led to the sin of hubris, a transgression that would see a man humbled, or even destroyed.
And there were heroines too, for, if Zeus was male, there were enough female and powerful goddesses to make a woman feel equal to a man. Calpurnia was much taken with these Greek tales and made Aquila tell them over and over again. For a girl who rarely travelled outside her own close-by Roman streets, and would only rarely visit a temple, the stories he had learnt from the rebellious slaves brought an embarrassing light of hero-worship into her huge brown eyes, until, eventually, with much gentle chiding that it was a suitable adornment for a girl, he was persuaded to let her wear his charm. With great care Calpurnia put it on, shivering slightly as the metal touched her smooth olive skin.
‘I feel impious,’ she said, and immediately removed it. ‘It has a meaning, this eagle? I felt it when it touched my skin.’ The girl could see that she was making him uncomfortable and changed the subject. ‘You were never formally adopted, were you, Aquila?’
‘No.’
She gave him a dazzling smile. ‘Then we’re not truly related, are we?’
‘That pleases you?’
‘Oh yes. The relatives our Roman gods have given me do not inspire me to love the breed.’
‘I worry about Fabius. He’ll get into real trouble one day.’
She laughed. ‘Fabius will take one step sideways, then some innocent fellow, a bystander, will find he’s accused of something he knows nothing about.’
They sat in silence and she rubbed the golden eagle between her fingers. ‘I sense a darkness in you, Aquila, secrets that you will not tell anyone.’
That made him more guarded. ‘I cannot think what they are.’
‘You have an aura about you.’
He smiled. ‘Only when the sun is at my back.’
His levity did not please her. ‘Perhaps because we’re not family, I can’t be trusted.’
‘I trust you more than anyone else in the house, Calpurnia, you know that.’
Her head dropped and she spoke softly. ‘That doesn’t rate me very highly.’
Aquila moved closer, lifting her chin. ‘It was meant to.’
Her upturned face lit up again, with that dazzling smile and she pushed the chain over his head. ‘I am too nosy for my own good.’
‘Nonsense. You say the charm means something. Why should it “mean” anything? It was wrapped round my foot when Clodius, your grandfather, found me. All it means is that one of my true parents wanted me to live, though not enough, it seems, to want to find me.’
Calpurnia sensed the bitterness in that last outburst and touched the charm again. ‘It’s very valuable.’
For the first time, Aquila voiced something that had only ever been a thought. ‘Perhaps it would have been better if Fulmina hadn’t kept it for me. Not that she handed it to me as you see it. She made a leather amulet to hide it, making me promise not to reveal it until I felt no man could harm me.’
‘How would you know when that would be?’
Aquila was thinking about the day he had unpicked Fulmina’s stitching; the day, on the way to Sicily, he had taken a spear to a beetle-browed bully called Toger, one of the band of ruffians Didius Flaccus had recruited to help him make money on the farms he was going to run for Cassius Barbinus. He had not confronted Toger for what the man had tried to do to him in his night-time cot, but because the ex-gladiator had killed the thing Aquila loved most: Minca, the dog he had inherited from Gadoric. A trained fighter, Toger had scoffed at the notion of a mere boy threatening him. He died with Aquila’s spear in his throat, pumping blood into the hard, packed earth at his feet.