Angry and hurt, Lucius had allowed a spy to be placed in the Cornelii house — indeed the slave was still in place — the aim to ensure that Aulus was a passive not an active enemy. Thoas, a tall and handsome Numidian, had been conjoined with Claudia’s handmaiden, which put him very close to the centre of the household and even closer to the lady herself, and it transpired that it was she who was the key to the mystery of Aulus’s failure to attend and say prayers at the birth of his son. It had taken several years to unearth, but eventually the truth emerged, now all written up in a scroll that Lucius kept locked in his strongbox, and if it vindicated Aulus from any hint of conspiracy, it did nothing to raise him in the estimation of the man he had failed.
On campaign in Spain, Claudia had been captured by the Celt-Iberian rebels. When found, two campaigning seasons later, she had been with child and plainly Aulus was not the father. No doubt she had been the plaything of her captors, to be used and abused at will, and though not a sensual man the thought produced, as it had in the past, a certain pulse of blood to the loins as he imagined her repeatedly taken against her will, perhaps by multiple participants. She must have been quite a prize, only seventeen and striking, so he assumed that whoever had fathered her bastard would have been from the higher reaches of the tribal society, a chieftain perhaps.
It made no odds; Aulus, who should have killed her on sight, had refused to set her aside, had, on the same night as Marcellus was born, overseen a secret birth in a deserted villa in the Alban Hills, before taking the child and exposing him in a place where death was certain. Lucius had to repress a thought that would have made him laugh out loud if he had pursued it. He was conjuring up another carved panel for the sarcophagus, one which showed the great Macedonicus adorned with a pair of cuckold’s horns.
Titus had moved to the other side of the tomb as the priests began their prayers, prior to the sacrifice of a goat, to look at the panel that represented that Iberian campaign as well as his father’s heroic death in Illyricum. Lucius Falerius joined him there to examine those same images, curious and slightly troubled to note on the neck of the man Aulus had fought in Iberia a device, which on close inspection looked like an eagle in flight. Standing beside Titus he could not resist alluding to both it and the wearer.
‘Brennos, chieftain of the Duncani.’
‘You’ve seen the device?’
‘No. Only heard about it from a hundred different throats. No one mentions the man without a reference to his talisman.’
Lucius nodded, as if something obscure had been made plain. ‘Your father ranted to me about this Brennos after their first encounter, and by the Gods he hated him. He said the man was the greatest threat to Rome since Hannibal.’
‘I judge by your tone you did not agree with him?’
‘I thought him obsessed.’
‘Then I too must be that.’
‘I have read all the despatches from Spain these last three years, Titus. They are alarmist to say the least and I know you had a hand in the compilation of many of them. I showed them to Aulus before he left for Illyricum and he backed up everything you said.’
‘My father did not exaggerate, and neither did I. Brennos is a serious threat to Rome.’
Lucius’s gesture was one of uncertainty; he did not want to openly disagree with the younger man on such a day and in such a setting. ‘I am apprehensive enough to ensure that I know what the fellow is up to. He is spied on constantly, as you well know.’
Titus was tempted to insist that the Senate should do more, but it was not his place to talk in such a manner to the leading man in Rome. Brennos was probably a menace greater than Lucius would grasp; the censor had not fought the man, both Titus and his father, at different times, had. A Druid from the northern islands, the man preached a message that, if implemented, would indeed make him more dangerous than Hannibal, and his name alone was a warning. Another Brennos, at the head of a great Celtic confederation, had ravaged Greece and burnt half the city of Rome hundreds of years before. His namesake was intent on uniting that same confederation, his aim not to partly burn the city but to destroy the whole empire. The carving on the sarcophagus showed him defeated, yet Brennos was far from that. Yes, he had lost a campaign, had been beaten by Aulus, but that had seemed to do no more than inspire him to continue. If anything, he was more powerful now than he had been years before.
‘I came across Brennos in my last action, just before I was informed of my father’s death.’
‘Really,’ Lucius responded absentmindedly, his eyes still fixed on the carving and quite specifically on that eagle device on his neck.
‘He led a raiding party into the area of my command. A fool of a centurion, who should have known better, with a full cohort, chased them deep into the hills, ignoring strict instructions to avoid such a thing. He got them trapped in a defile from which there was no escape. The right hand of every soldier was cut off and they were sent back to us.’
‘And the centurion?’
‘Was hacked to pieces by Brennos, before my eyes.’
‘This device around his neck, what do you know of that?’
What was it about Lucius’s voice? Titus could not quite place the tone, but it lacked the assurance with which the censor had previously expressed himself. ‘It is some kind of talisman. I have been told that it came from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, taken by his namesake when he sacked Greece, and that he wears it because of a prophecy.’
There was a definite tremor in Lucius’s voice as he repeated the word. ‘Prophecy?’
‘It is said that one day, a man wearing that will stand in the Temple of Jupiter Maximus and that man will have conquered the city of Rome.’
All that Titus noted was the quiver in the voice; with Lucius looking so intently at the sarcophagus, he could not see the man’s face. If he had he would have been made more curious, because it was a countenance drained of blood, and behind that was a mind in turmoil and a heart beating too fast for comfort. As children Lucius and Aulus had made an illicit visit to a Sybil, wrong because it was something barred to mere boys. Right at this moment Lucius was recalling the events of that night — the fearful stench of the dank cave, the bones of dead creatures at their feet, made more gruesome by the indifferent torchlight, the dark wrinkled face of the old crone of a seer who had not been fooled by their purloined manly garments. She had known them for what they were, yet she had spoken a prophecy to encompass their joint futures, the words of which were burnt into Lucius’s brain…
One will tame a mighty foe, the other strike to save Rome’s fame.
Neither will achieve their aim.
Look aloft if you dare, though what you fear cannot fly.
Both will see it before you die.
The Sybil, without any hint of ink or stylus, had executed on a piece of papyrus the blood-red drawing of an eagle in flight, before throwing it to Lucius. As she intoned those words, and without any sign of physical contact, the drawing had burst into flames in his hand. Try as he might to laugh it off, that prophecy still affected Lucius; he had even questioned those who came back from Illyricum to see if there were any eagle signs connected to Aulus’s death, yet here was one before his very eyes. The censor put a hand out, touching the cold stone of the sarcophagus to steady himself. He felt Titus’s arm on his and heard, through a rushing of blood to his head, the words the young man said.
‘Are you all right, Eminence?’
Lucius loosely waved his other hand; what could a carved stone eagle do to him? He could not die now, his work was unfinished. The prophecy was false; he had convinced himself of that in the past and he must hold on to his scepticism now. Seers were unreliable, prophecies couched as riddles were too obscure to claim to be absolute truth.