The guests remained still and expressionless, while Lucius, having acknowledged the message, moved to the end of the room, his fine-boned, intelligent face as expressionless as his deep-set brown eyes. Each craned forward as their host made an offering at the altar dedicated to the dio domicilus, a sacrifice to the family Genius, for it was by this Lares, this household God, that a man such as Lucius Falerius, and his ancestors before him, achieved immortality. They knew by the sacrifice of a black puppy that Ameliana had been delivered of a son. Moments later, like a well staged appearance in a drama, the child, carried by a midwife in a wicker basket, wrapped loosely in a swaddling cloth, was brought into the chapel, still yelling mightily, the small puckered face bright pink with fury and the coal black hair which capped his head still glistening from the scented water in which it had been bathed.
Ragas took the basket and approached his master, so the true moment had arrived; a man’s wife could be delivered of a child and that child might be a boy, but he was not yet the son of Lucius, not yet a true descendant of the Falerii, who could trace their line back to the days when Aeneas, fleeing from the ruins of Troy, had founded the city of Rome. In the period between the birth and what followed the child was an orphan. If the next stage of the family ritual was omitted it would remain so and shame would fall on the head of Ameliana Falerius from this day forth. Tension was heightened by a sudden pause, as the slave held up the basket, close enough for Lucius to see the child, but just too far away for his master to touch. The guests could only wonder at the way the pair locked eyes, the slave smiling, his master frowning, before the basket was inched a fraction closer. Lucius did not move a muscle, almost teasing his audience in the way he examined the child, carefully lifting the swaddling cloth to confirm his sex, daring someone to break the spell.
Raising his head he looked around the room, inspecting each face in the flickering light. Suddenly he frowned, for the one person he had hoped to see was absent. Young Quintus Cornelius was there, in the uniform of a military tribune, his face like the others covered in a sheen of sweat, but the boy’s father, Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus, had not answered the summons, even though he had returned to Italy from Spain. What of the bonds they had sworn as children, sealing them in blood, oaths renewed through years of friendship; that they would always attend upon each other in any hour of need or celebration?
Nothing counted as much as the birth of a firstborn child, quite possibly a son, especially for a man who had been married without issue for nearly twenty years, but it was more than that. His greatest friend and staunchest political ally, absent from Rome for two years, had not come to aid the patrician cause at a time when he and his class were under threat, when a real possibility existed that a conflict might break out between the rival factions seeking to control the power of the Roman State. To treat Lucius so was a grave breach of obligation, made more so by the help that the perpetrator had received in pursuit of his own ambitions. Aulus would never have been given command in Spain if Lucius Falerius had not used all his prestige, and marshalled all his adherents in the Senate, to secure the appointment. Yet the beneficiary, Rome’s most successful soldier, declined to appear at a moment when his mere presence might tip what was a very delicate balance. With the nagging thought that his friend was less committed to the cause than he, and had no care for the effect his non-appearance had on wavering senators, the timing of this absence smacked of a deliberate insult.
The murmuring of his guests, like a low but rising moan, brought Lucius back to the present and he felt a flash of anger, immediately tinged with regret for what might be an over-hasty judgement, as he conjured up a series of images of himself and his childhood companion; playing just out of infancy, growing up together at a time when he could still wrestle Aulus with some chance of winning, even risking damnation in that prank in the Sibylline cave, sharing terror at the prophecy and relief when that fear abated as they grew to manhood, till at least he, Lucius, could make jokes about eagles, unlike his friend, who could not even observe one in flight without calling down Jove to aid him. He had stood with Aulus when his own two sons had been born, his happiness at his friend’s good fortune tinged with regret that he himself was childless.
They were different he knew, and not just physically: Aulus had none of the cynicism of his more worldly friend. He had a simple soldier’s view of things, unable or unwilling to grasp the subtlety necessary to achieve success in the political arena and he seemed to take good fortune as his due. Did he appreciate how much Lucius had aided him, helping to keep his armies in the field, assisting him to commands that gave him an arena for his manifest gifts? Sometimes Aulus angered him by his artlessness, his desire to see both sides of an argument, yet always that same trait — his palpable honesty — had brought forgiveness. Would it be so easy to forgive him for this? It was with some difficulty that he put both memories and irritation out of his mind. Lucius leant forward and with a swift motion lifted the child from the basket. He then raised it, arms fully extended, acknowledging to all that this boy was the fruit of his own loins, his son and heir. Great cries of joy erupted from the assembled guests and they pressed forward to praise the father and bless the child. Next door, the midwives, still praying to the Goddess Lucina, struggled in vain to save the life of a mother who, they all thought, at thirty-five, was too old to be bearing her first child.
Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus stood alone by the undecorated turf altar, dressed in a simple white garment, worn short and loose in the Greek fashion. The muffled moans of his wife, attended by a single young midwife, seemed to cause him an actual physical pain he struggled to contain. For all his pre-eminence as the foremost general of the Roman world, no guests attended this birth and no supplicants crowded the room. The walls of this borrowed villa were as bare as the altar and the single tallow wad guttering in the sconce lent the colonnaded room a ghostly feel. None of the normal rules of celebration were to be gifted to the birth of this child and the fact that it was taking place on the day of the Festival of Lupercalia was something that mocked rather than honoured the event.
‘Hot, honeyed wine,’ said Cholon, his young personal slave, proffering an unadorned stone goblet. Aulus shivered slightly in the chill of the early spring air as he took the drink. ‘Your cloak, master?’
‘No, thank you,’ Aulus replied automatically, his voice a hoarse whisper.
His servant was unsure if he had heard him right, though he never doubted any response would be polite. It always was, whether the person addressed was a common soldier or the noble monarch of a Roman client-state. No one exemplified more than Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus the virtues of which Rome was so proud; he was upright, honest and brave, a soldier’s soldier revered by his men. The fickle Rome mob cheered him too, as a man who paid more than lip service to ancient freedoms, yet when his city was in turmoil and he was desperately needed in Rome, here he was skulking in this empty country villa. The mob would not cheer him for that!
Cholon knew that lesser men, enmeshed in the dirty world of politics, sneered derisively at what they saw as his master’s arrogance. They would hold that a senator and ex-consul showed insufficient gravitas when he discarded his home, his responsibilities, his friends, even his toga on such an occasion, but the general who had humbled the heirs of Alexander the Great and brought powerful Macedonia to heel, so that it was now a vassal- state to the Roman Republic, could ignore and withstand the disapproval of anyone. His family was as ancient as any in Rome: the death masks of his ancestors stood proud in their decorated cupboards. These lined the walls of the family chapel in the home of the Cornelii on the Palatine Hill, situated right above the broad avenue of the Via Triumphalis.
Had he been in that chapel and sensed the disapproval of those ancestors at this clandestine birth, he would have looked at their masks with disdain. Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus was the greatest of his tribe, the foremost exemplar of the family Genius. His mask, on his death, would take pride of place above the family altar when future generations gathered for prayers. He prized his reputation as much as the next man, just as he felt keenly the need to maintain his honour, yet he would not see another suffer to retain that, especially one he loved. He could not bear that his wife should be shamed in public for something he held to be entirely his own fault.
Marcia, feeling nervous, stifled a yawn as she sat watching the nameless woman cradle the child to her breast, encouraging it to feed, but the infant, having already taken its fill, did not respond. Occasionally the lady moaned, exactly reproducing the sounds she had uttered in labour through the tooth-marked leather strap, now discarded. She had given birth, fists clenched, several minutes earlier, flat on her back like a peasant. An inexperienced midwife, who had never before attended on a birth unsupervised, Marcia knew that very few deliveries would be as uncomplicated as this, yet for all the ease of the birth, things seemed set to change. The girl sensed trouble and the manner of her summons to attend this lady provided little reassurance. She had been dragged from the Lupercalian celebrations, so pertinent to her trade, with the promise of a rich reward if she came at once.
Since the baby came quickly there had been little time to spare for curiosity. The woman had fought with enormous will power to hold her cries as the child emerged from her womb, her voice never rising above the labour
