Druid had then taken into his fingers. He called it his talisman, the harbinger of his destiny. How many times had Masugori listened as Brennos had told him that the man who wore this would conquer the legions. Like so many prophecies, it had not come to pass; someone, somewhere, had misread the omens.
‘He refuses to believe that we cannot fight you and win.’
Aulus had asked his next question with some hesitation, feeling, deep in his being that he already knew the answer. ‘And what does he intend now?’
‘Not surrender. He has gone north into the mountains. A man like Brennos will want to question the gods from a place close to the sky, but he will return. He swears it is his fate to confront Rome, only the means and the method elude him. Nothing has happened to dent that belief.’
The sun had been behind Brennos as he had uttered his parting words, framing his red-gold hair like a halo. Even in shadow his bright blue eyes had blazed with anger while his parting words, which had sounded so much like a prophecy, were seared into the young chieftain’s brain.
‘Go, make your peace, Masugori, but before either you or I are dust, every man who accepts Rome’s word will end as bones on a bloody battlefield, heaped high to bring glory to a Roman general.’
Those were the very last words Brennos had uttered, as he lifted the golden eagle and put it to his lips.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Falerii house was empty now, the guests gone, leaving Lucius alone. Outside the atrium was cold from the air of late winter. It was rare for a man of his eminence to be afforded such solitude, but the death in childbirth of his wife had forced even the most ardent supplicant away from his door. He stared at the papers before him, untouched on his desk, and allowed himself a quiet smile. The last to depart had been his closest political allies, all famous men, all noble and some of the best brains in the Senate, yet not even they guessed what was about to happen. With exquisite timing his band of hired thugs, wrapped in heavy, hooded cloaks, had been led in via the servants’ quarters by his Dacian body slave, just as the last senator had exited through the front gate. Their leader, Gafon, manager of a gladiator school who had lost everything gambling, saluted Lucius Falerius with his sword as he emerged from his private study.
‘Leave your men here,’ said Lucius sharply, indicating to Ragas that he should watch them lest they be tempted to pilfer something.
‘As you command, Lu…’
Gafon was not allowed to finish as the senator cut across him. ‘I shall not use your name, be so good as to avoid using mine.’
His eyes flicked past the object of this rebuke to the shadowy group of men. Their leader bowed, sword still held in salute, but he was looking obsequiously at Lucius’s back. The older man had already spun on his heel to re- enter his study. Gafon turned to his men and with a shrug sought to play down the insult, seeking to convey that for what they were earning tonight, the purple-striped bastard could be as snooty as he liked.
‘Would that you had come alone,’ Lucius said, warming his hands at the brazier before finally raising his deep brown eyes to engage those of his visitor.
‘I didn’t see the need, your honour.’
The eyes closed and the body tensed as Lucius tried to control his anger, the effort making his slender frame shake slightly. Normally the most controlled of men he was surprised at this reaction, even more alarmed at the thought that he was actually nervous.
‘It is not for you to see anything!’
‘If we do right tonight no one is going to have too much doubt who’s behind it. No band of drunken youngsters is going to kill a man like…’ Gafon hesitated, not wishing to use the name. ‘Regardless of how far gone they are.’
‘There is a difference between cackling rumour in the market-place and evidence sufficient to lay before a praetor.’
That last word made Gafon swallow hard; the mere mention of a magistrate was enough to remind him of how close he stood to being sold into debt bondage. Winter was no time for games and gladiator fights. If he did not come up with some money soon his creditors would take over his property and sell him off as a farm labourer to some distant rancher.
‘What is important is that the deed is undertaken unseen. If you are observed, and you are connected to me, I will pay the penalty for your misjudgement.’
The debt-ridden manager had a sudden fear that the commission was going to be withdrawn, which was not something that would go down well with the party of cut-throats he had gathered. If they found out that they had emerged from their slums for no reward they might just decide to take it out on him.
Lucius Falerius was considering abandoning the whole affair. He had a personal matter to settle as well as a political one, so a degree of self-examination was required to separate the two and ensure that one was not overshadowing the other. This idiot was right; if he and his band succeeded tonight, few would hesitate to lay the blame for what happened at his door. The idea that some of the drunken patrician youths who infested the streets and taverns, with too much money and too little sense, would murder a plebeian tribune was risible. Would it have been wiser to hang onto a few of his guests, so that they could swear he was home, grief stricken and wailing at the moment when Tiberius Livonius breathed his last?
No! Evidence from his friends would not be believed; if anything it would only serve to convince the rumour mill of the truth of their speculations. His best defence lay in avoiding such a contrivance and he would rather rely on his word alone. It had to be done; a formal break that would force men to decide which camp they adhered to. Some senators, either from a belief that the ideas of Tiberius Livonius would enhance their prospects, or even, in a very few cases, from misguided ideology, backed proposals that Lucius knew to be inimical to the safety of the Republic. Once let Livonius alter the balance of power in the Comita Tribalis, and it would be lost forever, turning what was an easily bypassed talking shop into a legislature to challenge the Senate.
His so-called Agrarian Law, limiting the amount of public land a citizen could hold, struck at the very heart of the faction Lucius represented. That was bad enough; the idea that the same land, sequestered to the state, should be divided up into small lots and gifted to the landless scum who filled the poorest quarters of Rome, was nothing less than a bribe to the mob. To Lucius that was a recipe for endless trouble, because the mob could never be satisfied; to give in to their demands once was to open the door to an endless run of fresh claims.
Worse was the plebeian tribune’s desire to extend Roman citizenship to the whole of Italy, which would permanently dilute patrician power by widening the franchise. This would strike at the wealth and political authority of the same class by allowing inter-marriage, as well as extending to such people the kind of trade concessions that buttressed senatorial wealth. With a keen sense of history, Lucius Falerius knew that empires were unstable constructs, with no gods-given right to continued existence. What was being proposed would weaken the Roman state, and once the spirit of the Goddess Discordia was let loose, there was no telling where matters would end. Tiberius Livonius had to be stopped, and the best way to kill off the body of such ideas was to chop off the head.
He cared nothing for himself in this; the power and majesty of Rome was everything to Lucius Falerius. He had given his every waking moment for a full thirty years to increasing that Imperium so would gladly give his last breath to maintain it. To his mind only the optimates could be entrusted with such a task; they were the men who had supervised the creation of the empire; they must combine to fight off the populares who, by appealing to the base greed of the lower orders, would drag Rome down, as other empires had been, by a fatal weakening of the structure of authority that had brought about success. Nothing counted against that single object, certainly not the life of one senator. Without doubt they would point to him, but who would believe that a man just delivered of a son, with his wife newly dead because of it, would choose that moment to murder his greatest political rival?
For the first time in two decades that Sibylline prophecy surfaced, and he recalled that night in the cave, as well as the terrors and reflections that had followed; Aulus so fearful, he determined to be rational. His childhood friend had certainly tamed his mighty foe; was this the moment he would strike to save Rome’s fame? Was there some truth in that Sibylline nonsense after all? The image of the eagle he had never forgotten, but surely it did not apply to a man like Livonius, unless the gods saw him as a bird of prey bringing down the Roman state. No! His
