Cholon edged away, not wanting to listen to such words, but Flaccus barely noticed. He was staring at the sculpted images of the Macedonian triumph; Aulus on his chariot wearing a crown of laurel leaves, behind him chained slaves bearing jars filled with gold, wondering if one day, as it had been vouchsafed to him by every teller of fortunes he had ever consulted, such wealth would come to him. He had been so close to cornucopia in Illyricum, but it had been snatched from his grasp and the remembrance of that deepened his irritability.
His mood was not enhanced on the return to the Cornelii house, as, walking well behind Quintus, Flaccus was too far away to get at any of the coins the man was chucking to the crowd. Not that there was any gold in there; it would be copper at best, though there was one consolation he had on reentering the house. He was treated to a decent meal of the kind he dare not splash out on himself. Taking care to ensure that no one was looking, Flaccus pilfered as much food as he could and drank as much wine as the servants were prepared to pour into his cup, so that by the time he left he had in his mouth the taste which made him want to continue.
The stuff he drank in his local tavern was nowhere near the quality of what he had imbibed in the Cornelii house, but what it lacked in flavour it made up for in potency, so that Flaccus was intoxicated enough to do something he normally restrained himself from; he began to recount his experiences of fighting and leading a century in the Roman army. His fellow-drinkers listened to his stories with respect but when he became really drunk, banging his fist on the table as he tried to persuade them that he had been within an inch of untold wealth, indeed a wagon full of gold, that lifelong comfort had slipped through his fingers due to the stupidity of a legionary called Clodius Terentius, attention wavered. By the time he began to recount the enigmatic prophecy he had heard so often, that indicated he would be rich anyway, he was talking to himself.
‘A golden aura, that’s what the man said, which means great wealth. And men cheering like I’ve won a great victory. It will come to pass one day, you mark my words, and when it does I shall find better company to share a drink with than you arsewipes, that’s for certain.’
It was just as well he was mumbling to himself; anyone close enough to his drunken ramblings would have heard him confess to the murder of an elderly Illyrian soothsayer, in between the curses with which he damned the man for expiring without telling him the truth about his future in plain language.
In the tablinum of the Cornelii house, where Aulus had at one time conducted all his business, an increasingly angry Quintus was reading the will. Cholon heard the words that set him free and even though he had known it was coming, he was again overcome with emotion. It was not the manumission which angered Quintus, it was money; a sizeable sum had been bequeathed to the Greek so that he would be, in freedom, more than comfortable. A fortune already gifted to the Lady Claudia could not be reclaimed and Titus, too, was left a sum enough to avoid the need to beg for corporeal sustenance from his brother. But to top it all came the bequest to the dependants of those who had died at Thralaxas, laid out in a codicil that Cholon had brought back from Illyricum. Quintus first questioned its veracity and, once persuaded that the terms must be met, complained that he would be ruined. It was nonsense of course, as Claudia observed.
‘My dear Quintus, you are just not the richest man in Rome any more. I dare say your father had faith in you to gain that accolade on your own merits.’
The long day ended with each of the Cornelii going to their own suites, to harbour their own thoughts. Quintus had with him a list of his father’s numerous debtors and was looking through it to see whom he could force into early repayment. Titus had visited the family altar on his way and paid private obeisance to his father’s memory, aware that he had been in awe of the man when he was alive and was even more so now that he was dead. Cholon went to the slave quarters for the last time to cry himself to sleep. Tomorrow he must look for a place to live; he could not abide the idea of residing under a roof of which Quintus Cornelius was the master.
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
