instantly. Green eyes like yours are distinctive enough, but when you add in the squint they’re unmistakable. You’re the man behind the metal, I’m sure of that much, and through your vanity you’ve nailed yourself to the cross I’ll have my men put up for you in the morning.’ He paused while the other man turned away, his face blank. ‘Nothing to say?’
Caninus stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then lowered his gaze to look defiantly straight back at Scaurus, answering the question with four terse words. The tribune’s eyes widened, and his usual aristocratic reserve vanished in an instant, replaced by something much harder, that he usually managed to keep concealed.
‘He’s fucking what?’
Caninus continued to look at the tribune, his jaw set hard.
‘You heard me right the first time, Tribune. He is my brother. Obduro is my brother. My identical twin, as it happens.’
Scaurus stood open-mouthed and stared at Caninus for a long moment, then lowered his head and put both fists on the table between them, his knuckles white against the wood’s age-darkened surface. When he looked up, his face was dark with barely controlled anger, but his voice was calm and steady.
‘And, assuming that I can make the huge leap of faith required to swallow this story, you’d seriously have me believe that this wasn’t worth telling me before?’
The prefect shrugged, his expression downcast.
‘If I’d told you at the start you would have removed me from all of the discussion and the decision-making, without a second thought.’
Scaurus laughed hollowly.
‘You’re not wrong there! It won’t surprise you to know that’s exactly what’s going through my mind at the moment, even if you are telling me the truth at long last.’ He shook his head. ‘So, from the beginning, tell me the story of how you and your twin end up in such violent opposition. And on such very different paths in life, for that matter.’ He picked a chair close to one of the torches illuminating the room and sat down, his eyes so deep in shadow that they were impossible to read. ‘And this had better be spectacularly convincing, or you’ll be feeding the crows by lunchtime tomorrow.’
Caninus leaned back against the wall behind him and rubbed his tired eyes with a finger and thumb.
‘It’s a relief to tell someone, if I’m honest. I’ve been keeping this from the men around me for so long that it’s started to eat into me. His name is Sextus. He was born less than a hundred heartbeats after me, and for all practical purposes we’re identical, right down to the squint. You can prove it easily enough; just have a copy of the relevant census records delivered from the governor’s office and you’ll find us both. We were born here in the city, just over thirty years ago, so we’ll be detailed in the census that fell between then and the day we both left to pursue our separate destinies.’
He gestured to a chair, and raised his eyebrows in question. Scaurus grunted his assent, his hand still firmly placed on his sword’s hilt. The prefect slumped into the chair, leaning back with the air of a man relieving himself of a heavy burden.
‘Thank you. We were just like the twins you read about in the histories as we were growing up, closer than two peas in a pod and just as indistinguishable. Our mother had pendants made for us when she realised we were identical, discs with our numbers punched into them on chains left deliberately short, and by the time we were of a mind to exchange them they were impossible to remove without breaking the links. And she always told us there’d be hell to pay if that happened.’ He pulled down the neck of his tunic to reveal the circle of metal hanging at his throat, holding it up for Scaurus to examine. ‘You can see the number five punched into the metal. It’s not pretty workmanship, but it is my only link with my mother. The plague took her a few years ago, although I expect it was only taking advantage of all those years of backbreaking work she put in to keep the pair of us fed.’
He shook his head, tucking the pendant away beneath the tunic’s smooth wool. ‘She was right to take the precaution, and to drum into us that breaking those chains would bring us more grief than any fun we could have by pretending to be each other. We were forever proving our mutual bond by exercising the same stupidities and getting into the same trouble, but for all that we were a good pair of lads, more or less. We learned to fight early, of course, our squints made sure of that, although he was always better at it than me, whereas I was the one who always managed to turn around whatever wit was thrown at us and throw it right back, only harder. That got me a few hidings, as you can imagine, so by the time we were ten we were a right pair of hard little bastards, but harmless enough. Harmless enough until our balls dropped and the hair started sprouting, and I was first at that as well, even if it was only by a few weeks. Before that happened we were inseparable, and you’d never see one of us without the other; but as we began to enter manhood that closeness started to cool off. We were looking for our own paths in life, I suppose, and we started to push each other, competing where we used to cooperate. Inside a year we weren’t “the cock-eyed twins” any more, we were Quintus and Sextus, each with our own friends and our own ways of doing things. He was the real hard man, whereas I was the smoother of the two of us, with more of a way about me, and while I was never what you’d call a religious man, he turned to the worship of Arduenna with all the zeal of a forest hunter. We still knocked about together, of course, but we were developing different ways of getting what we wanted, him with his fists and me with my wits. Gods, what a team we’d have made; we’d have gone through the local gangs like shit through a goose long before now, but it wasn’t to be. It was a girl that ripped us apart…’
Scaurus nodded his understanding, his initial incredulity cooling towards curiosity.
‘Just like the histories, eh? What was her name?’
‘Lucia. I forget the family name, although it wouldn’t be hard to dig out of the records. She was the daughter of a wealthy family but she liked to slum it with the poor boys, if you know what I mean, and we both certainly qualified for that description. She liked the hint of danger, I guess, although she ended up getting rather more than she’d bargained for. We both fell for her, you see, and for the first time in our lives there was something we both wanted that couldn’t be shared. She made a choice, and that choice was to be with me. It wasn’t much, only a few nights when she could sneak out of her family’s house, but she was my first proper love, and so of course I was convinced we’d find a way to be together for the rest of our lives. I expect she would have dropped me soon enough, and broken my heart for a few weeks, but she didn’t get the chance.’
He paused for a moment, looking up at the ceiling again, and Scaurus prompted him in a gentler tone of voice.
‘Your brother found the pair of you?’
Caninus nodded.
‘Yes, he hunted all over the city until he found the place I used to take her to, a disused stable on the east side where I was sure we’d have privacy. Perhaps he followed me, perhaps someone sold the information to him, I’ll never know. He burst in on us and pulled a knife on me, already furious that I’d lied to him, but beside himself with rage when he saw the proof that I’d won her, and that he’d lost. As she jumped up with her hands out to stop him, he put his foot through a rotten floorboard, and in falling he put the knife into her thigh up to the handle. She bled to death in my arms, while he raved at me about how I’d betrayed him and I shouted back for him to kill me if that was what he wanted. I think he would have done it as well, if I hadn’t already been covered in her blood. In the end he calmed down enough to realise what he’d done. It wasn’t just the murder of an innocent girl, enough to see him dead on its own, but it looked horribly like the abduction, rape and slaughter of the daughter of a wealthy citizen. We both knew that her father paid protection to the most powerful of the city’s gangs, and that he wouldn’t hesitate to call them in to take revenge for her, not to mention to save his face by avoiding the admission that she’d strayed from his protection. And there’s nothing that gang leaders like more than having a chance to turn their thugs loose in a cause in which the common people see them as the deliverers of justice, rather than as the robbing scum they are. Since our relationship wasn’t exactly a closely guarded secret I knew that I’d be the one they’d come looking for first, and no matter how loudly I might protest my innocence all I could do would be to condemn us both to having our throats cut in the city square, once the bastards had broken every bone in our bodies, of course.’
He shook his head.
‘We were both doomed, unless we got out of the city before she was missed the next morning, so we both knew that we’d have to go under the city wall and make a run for it, once we’d buried her body under the floorboards and packed it tight with some old sawdust to keep the smell down. The River Worm flows into the city through an arch in the south-eastern section of the wall, and we both knew how to lift the gate that defends it.
