‘Less sure now than I was, Brennos.’
Brennos leant forward and pulled out Masugori’s sword. ‘The wearing of weapons, in my lands, is a privilege only afforded to friends or guards.’
He spun round, his eyes raking the crowd, before walking over to Luekon, who seemed to shrink as he approached. Unable to look him in the eye, he stared instead at the gold eagle round his neck, as Brennos removed his weapon. The charm seemed to mock him, its spreading wings alluding to a freedom he knew he had lost.
‘Look at me,’ said Brennos softly. The other man shook his head, but Brennos put one sword under his chin and pushed, so that Luekon had no choice. The blue eyes were like ice and the voice droned on, as Brennos spoke to his victim. ‘You are a spy, a traitor to your race, Luekon, and you will tell me why you came. A man like you does not travel so far, unless he has come to see someone…’
On and on went the voice, as Luekon felt the power slip from his limbs. Minoveros and Ambon had moved to the front of the crowd, their hands edging towards their swords. They assumed that Brennos could not see them, but they underestimated his powers; he could feel them.
‘The names, Luekon?’
‘Mino…’
The two nephews, about to be exposed, jumped forward as Brennos pushed Luekon’s own blade hard into the man’s unresisting gut, then he hacked down Ambon’s weapon with Masugori’s sword, so hard that the young man dropped it. Minoveros raised his to strike, just as a spear flashed past his intended victim and took him in the chest. Brennos did not look to see who had saved his life, for he had Ambon at his mercy, the point of his sword at the bodyguard’s throat. Luekon, still in a catatonic state, stood swaying, as if unaware of the gaping wound in his stomach. Brennos turned back to him, holding his eyes, again talking softly to reimpose his spell. When he asked a question, his victim replied without hesitation and the whole story spilt out, into a crowded arena in which the smallest gasp could be heard. Finally Brennos turned and fixed Cara with a stare.
‘Lies, Husband, all lies,’ she cried.
Coldly, he ordered her to fetch his children and go into the temple, then gave the same instructions to all his concubines, except Galina, who was childless. When they had obeyed, Brennos took a falcata off one of his remaining guards. It was a huge weapon, a thick curved blade, with one razor-sharp edge designed to remove a head or a limb at a single stroke. He entered the temple himself and shut the great wooden door. The screaming started almost immediately, but there were no cries of pain. Within a little time the sounds died away, to be replaced by an eerie silence, then the door opened and Brennos emerged, covered in blood from head to foot.
He looked around the silent crowd. ‘They sought to replace me with a child of mine. There are now no children of mine, nor mothers to breed them.’
He walked over to Galina and stood before her. ‘Who threw the spear?’
She indicated Masugori, who stood rock still, shocked to the marrow at the barbarity of what Brennos had done, and fully expecting to suffer the same fate as his family. Brennos walked over to look at the conspirators. Ambon was untouched, Luekon badly wounded and Minoveros nearly dead from the spear in his chest. Three swift strokes with the mighty falcata removed their heads, sending great founts of blood up from their trunks. He picked up Luekon’s head by the long black hair.
‘This one should be sent to Rome.’
CHAPTER THREE
Calpurnia, Demetrius’s daughter, was a delight; slim and graceful, she was the same age as Aquila. He had seen her that first day in the shop, covered in flour and sweat, which certainly did not do her justice, though the smile never changed. Washed, with her black hair properly combed, Calpurnia was a different girl. She had a happy disposition, which seemed to be at war with an interior sadness, and there was tension in the house, evident by the way conversations between her and her mother were abruptly terminated when their new ‘relative’ appeared. She treated her father with some reserve, and generally tried to be elsewhere when he was around.
Alone among the Terentius family, she welcomed Aquila without avarice, doing all she could to see to his comfort and seeking nothing in return, washed and repaired his clothes and even polished his battered leather armour with beeswax, restoring it to something that looked reasonably respectable. The charm intrigued her, but Aquila never found it easy to speculate about his birth, and the frown that greeted her first question was enough to ensure her future silence on that subject.
But she did seek him out, making a point of being around when he was at home. Typical of a youth his age, Aquila was unaware of how much she admired him; unaware he was so different, taller, with even the golden tone of his skin so unlike all the other young men she knew. Alone at night, she prayed that Aquila had come to rescue her, and the more she conjured up his image in her mind, the more fanciful her thoughts became. To Calpurnia he was like the son of a god, placed on earth to right the wrongs of mankind, and they were alone in the house the day she told him. That made him laugh and he was able to point out that such a notion was not just a Roman myth but existed in both the Greek and Celtic religions as well. That intrigued her even more, so he was forced to describe how he knew such things.
There was, of necessity, a care in his descriptions: of Gadoric, who had taught him about the beliefs of the Celtic religion; that the gods lived in the trees and in the earth; the same man who had taught him to hunt only to eat, never to merely display prowess. The Celt’s most abiding religious conviction was that a warrior dying in battle went to sit with the gods in a special place, where the tales of their heroic deeds became the stuff of legend. Gadoric had certainly achieved that; though he did not describe it to Calpurnia, as he talked, he had the image of his friend’s death in his mind, of him charging a line of Roman cavalry with no hope of survival, yelling the war cries he had learnt as a child.
When talking of the Greeks he was even more circumspect. Sicily, and his activities there under the tutelage of Didius Flaccus, could not be mentioned, but he had heard from many members of the slave army of the deities they worshipped, very like Roman gods but with different names, as well as the pantheon of heroes whose deeds were told and retold to inspire the timorous, the fearful, and most of all those brave enough to wish to emulate them. But there was another side to Greek belief; no man should seek too much, certainly no mere mortal should challenge the supremacy of the gods, which led to the sin of hubris, a transgression that would see a man humbled, or even destroyed.
And there were heroines too, for, if Zeus was male, there were enough female and powerful goddesses to make a woman feel equal to a man. Calpurnia was much taken with these Greek tales and made Aquila tell them over and over again. For a girl who rarely travelled outside her own close-by Roman streets, and would only rarely visit a temple, the stories he had learnt from the rebellious slaves brought an embarrassing light of hero-worship into her huge brown eyes, until, eventually, with much gentle chiding that it was a suitable adornment for a girl, he was persuaded to let her wear his charm. With great care Calpurnia put it on, shivering slightly as the metal touched her smooth olive skin.
‘I feel impious,’ she said, and immediately removed it. ‘It has a meaning, this eagle? I felt it when it touched my skin.’ The girl could see that she was making him uncomfortable and changed the subject. ‘You were never formally adopted, were you, Aquila?’
‘No.’
She gave him a dazzling smile. ‘Then we’re not truly related, are we?’
‘That pleases you?’
‘Oh yes. The relatives our Roman gods have given me do not inspire me to love the breed.’
‘I worry about Fabius. He’ll get into real trouble one day.’
She laughed. ‘Fabius will take one step sideways, then some innocent fellow, a bystander, will find he’s accused of something he knows nothing about.’
They sat in silence and she rubbed the golden eagle between her fingers. ‘I sense a darkness in you, Aquila, secrets that you will not tell anyone.’
That made him more guarded. ‘I cannot think what they are.’
‘You have an aura about you.’
He smiled. ‘Only when the sun is at my back.’
