Claudia, attended by her maid Callista, prepared for bed, sure that she would not sleep. She would lie looking at the ceiling and wonder, for the thousandth time, about the small russet-haired boy, her love-child by the Celtic chieftain Brennos, that Aulus and Cholon had taken from her just after his birth and exposed. Where was a mystery; she only knew that he had left on horseback and not returned till dawn the next day. Lying in darkness she would envisage gloomy woods and hungry predators, feeding on the small, still living, screaming carcass, waking dreams that were nightmares and her mind would always turn to the charm she had put around the baby’s foot in the hope that someone would find him and, realising he had at least one rich and concerned parent, raise him to manhood.
Solid gold, shaped like an eagle in flight, with the wings picked out in subtle engraving, it had once hung around the neck of the only man she had ever truly loved; the boy’s father, Brennos.
CHAPTER TWO
Piscius Dabo did not like Aquila and he did not like having to provide a roof over his head, especially since he was forced daily to admit that the boy, whom he had attempted to tame, had fought him to a standstill. No blows had been exchanged: the fisticuffs had occurred between his own children, especially his eldest son Annius, though for very much the same reason: Aquila’s refusal to toil in the fields. Annius, who had already put on his manly gown, was a good two years older than Aquila, but there was no difference in their height and build, nor in their willingness to fight each other. So it was a fair match, until Dabo’s other children intervened, ganging up on Aquila and overpowering him by numbers.
Rufurius, Dabo’s second boy, originally as willing to thump Aquila as the rest, had recently shown a marked reluctance to take part, only joining in when personally threatened, and that, allied to Aquila’s increasing growth, meant beatings were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The object of all this anger was not unwilling to work, provided the task suited him and his prowess with trap and snare. That and his ability to tickle fish meant that he contributed more to the pot than he would ever manage labouring in a field. Stolen food of course, and the Barbinus overseer would skin him alive if he found the culprit, but Dabo was not doing the thieving himself, nor averse to free food on his table, so he turned a blind eye to the source.
Aquila, when not hunting, would work happily around the villa, feeding the hens and pigs, or chopping wood for the fire, another source of friction since proximity meant that he could eat when he liked, while helping himself to the water from the well, this while the others toiled in the blazing heat with no more food or water than they could carry. And these days, given their father’s prosperity, they had to work quite a distance from the house.
The dog was a real problem; Dabo’s own mutts were terrified of it, hiding their tails and whining submissively if it came close. Aquila had reacted angrily the first time Dabo had suggested chaining Minca up, making it plain that both he and the animal would be off up the road at the first opportunity. The boy’s blank refusal to be used as an extra farm labourer could only be altered by a sound buffet round the ears, but it would be a brave man who would do that with the dog loose. The huge black and brown animal, who would sit immobile as Dabo’s children fought Aquila, bared his teeth if the older man even came close. Nor could Dabo just kill the damn thing; if he did, he knew that it would be Aquila he would have to chain up. The boy had a spear hidden somewhere and Dabo had already learnt, on the day that Fulmina died and he had sought him out in the woods, that Aquila knew how to use it. It had thudded into a tree right by Dabo’s head, and he knew, from the look in the boy’s eye, that he had missed deliberately.
His own children could not understand; their father constantly moaned to them about Aquila, but was curiously reluctant to do or say anything to the culprit himself. They could not know that every time the boy angered him, he conjured up a vision of Aquila running away to the nearest town, telling the tale of his life on this farm and the man who owned it, which might lead to a tax-gatherer calling at his door. That stayed the hand and whip that he so liberally used on his own offspring. As far as the Roman state was concerned, Piscius Dabo was serving with the legions in Illyricum; the fact that the person who was doing the soldiering was none other than Clodius Terentius, Aquila’s adoptive father, was the cause of the aforesaid worry.
They had swapped places because Clodius was on his uppers, a landless, wage-paid day labourer, which exempted him from service. Dabo was doing well, which snared him, because in the Roman State only those with property could be trusted to defend it. A man who had lost his land — Clodius had lost his own holding because of his stint in the legions — did not qualify for the Dilectus. Dabo had only held on to his own farm because his father had looked after it while he was a serving soldier. So pauper Clodius, recipient of the corn dole, had been exempt from the call-up; farmer Piscius Dabo, who could feed himself and his family, was not. Never mind his sons were too young to look after the place while he was away; never mind that the fields would go to rack because he was not there to tend them. Rome had been made great by fighting farmers; it would stay great the same way. Getting Clodius drunk, and having him review a life that was far from perfect, then recalling with a rosy tint the time they had soldiered together, Dabo had persuaded him to sign up under his name.
Serving legionaries were exempt from the land tax, so for all the time Clodius served in Dabo’s place he had paid not a bronze ass to the local legate and because of that he had enjoyed an extra degree of prosperity. One of his neighbours, who had gone off to fight in the same legion as Clodius, had left a wife and two children to look after his holding. The eldest boy, the mainstay of the farm, had died of a flux, so the place was going to ruin. All it needed was one more thing to go wrong and the wife would be forced off the land before her husband could get home and put the place to rights. So ‘good neighbour’ Dabo had stepped in and bought her out at a knock-down price of her harvest brought in for free, added to half of his own. He was now the owner of three farms; with one more Dabo would definitely have enough land to realise his dream and change over from crop growing to rearing cattle. He would start small, he already had a goodly number of pigs, but there was actual money to be made in ranching and sheep rearing, real copper and silver coin, instead of the near-total barter system that he was engaged in now.
A tax-gatherer seeking ten years’ dues now would ruin him, for he was over-extended, busy turning his humble home into something approaching a proper villa that would go with the status to which he aspired; the future rancher had committed the small amount of actual money he had to paying for that. Hard to imagine now, in amongst all the filth and rubble and the dust blown into every chamber in the old part of the house, but it was Dabo’s dream to live and die like a true gent, a knight with an income of a hundred thousand sesterces. Ranching would bring him that — not all at once, but in time, as with real money he could change over from seed to pasture, then buy up a whole load more properties from neighbours struggling to make ends meet.
That Clodius’s service had lasted ten years had surprised Dabo as much as it had, no doubt, infuriated his old companion. News had filtered through that, after some great and bloody battles, the campaign in Illyricum was over. The 10th Legion would return to Italy to be disbanded and so would Clodius, so Dabo only had to wait a few more months and he would be freed from the burden of his contract. No point in antagonising anyone at this stage, so much to the annoyance of his hard-pressed offspring, and at some cost to his own blood pressure, he let Aquila do pretty much as he pleased.