His levity did not please her. ‘Perhaps because we’re not family, I can’t be trusted.’
‘I trust you more than anyone else in the house, Calpurnia, you know that.’
Her head dropped and she spoke softly. ‘That doesn’t rate me very highly.’
Aquila moved closer, lifting her chin. ‘It was meant to.’
Her upturned face lit up again, with that dazzling smile and she pushed the chain over his head. ‘I am too nosy for my own good.’
‘Nonsense. You say the charm means something. Why should it “mean” anything? It was wrapped round my foot when Clodius, your grandfather, found me. All it means is that one of my true parents wanted me to live, though not enough, it seems, to want to find me.’
Calpurnia sensed the bitterness in that last outburst and touched the charm again. ‘It’s very valuable.’
For the first time, Aquila voiced something that had only ever been a thought. ‘Perhaps it would have been better if Fulmina hadn’t kept it for me. Not that she handed it to me as you see it. She made a leather amulet to hide it, making me promise not to reveal it until I felt no man could harm me.’
‘How would you know when that would be?’
Aquila was thinking about the day he had unpicked Fulmina’s stitching; the day, on the way to Sicily, he had taken a spear to a beetle-browed bully called Toger, one of the band of ruffians Didius Flaccus had recruited to help him make money on the farms he was going to run for Cassius Barbinus. He had not confronted Toger for what the man had tried to do to him in his night-time cot, but because the ex-gladiator had killed the thing Aquila loved most: Minca, the dog he had inherited from Gadoric. A trained fighter, Toger had scoffed at the notion of a mere boy threatening him. He died with Aquila’s spear in his throat, pumping blood into the hard, packed earth at his feet.
‘I knew,’ he replied, but he did not reveal what he was thinking. ‘I could have left it in there and maybe people would stop asking me about it.’
‘It is better to wear it.’
Calpurnia said this with total conviction, and then she blushed at her own forcefulness.
‘Is it really? Your grandmother had dreams, which she told me about just before she died.’
‘What kind of dreams?’
He was even reluctant to answer a question like that, but having said that he trusted her he could hardly stop now, though in relating the notion he tried to make them sound like some kind of joke.
‘She saw me on a horse, being cheered by the crowds, as if I was celebrating a triumph. The Feast of Saturnalia probably, with me as the city fool. There was an old soothsayer she used to consult as well, a smelly old thing called Drisia. She kept yelling at me to come to Rome. I didn’t believe either of them.’
Aquila gave a small humourless laugh, though Calpurnia did not seem to be in the mood for too much jollity. He explained Fulmina’s dreams more fully, watching as the girl turned the charm in her fingers. All the time he spoke, her expression deepened, becoming sad.
‘Then you will leave here,’ she said, when he had finished.
‘What?’
‘Can I ask you for a favour? That I be allowed to wear it once more.’
Aquila reached for the chain, but Calpurnia held up her hand. ‘No, not now.’
‘Why are you sad, Calpurnia?’
There was a faint trace of a sob in the voice, even though she was trying to be funny. But he could not see her eyes because she was bent over. ‘Don’t ever let Fabius get his hands on it.’
‘I was just doin’ a favour for a friend,’ said Fabius.
Aquila sat up in his cot, wide awake enough to see by the tallow guttering in the lantern that his ‘nephew’s’ smock was covered in blood. The story tumbled out; he had told Aquila about some of the tougher criminal gangs in Rome before, and the toughest of the lot was led by a man called Commodus.
‘It was Donatus’s stuff in the first place, except the bastards took it off him. He knew it was in Commodus’s warehouse down by the docks and he set out to pinch it back again. I said I would keep a lookout for him.’
‘Surely they would have guessed who’d done it?’
‘They’d never think that Donatus had the nerve and he already had a buyer, so the stuff would have been shifted before dawn.’ It had not gone to plan, for the warehouse was better guarded than Donatus had supposed. ‘I had to leave him in a doorway a hundred paces from the warehouse. He had taken a knife in the guts. I got him away from the dockside, but I couldn’t carry him any more.’
Aquila looked at the blood on Fabius’s smock; he did not have to ask if Donatus was badly hurt. ‘He may be dead by now.’
‘What if he isn’t,’ Fabius protested, jerking his ‘uncle’. ‘I can’t just desert him.’
Aquila shook his head slowly, but he was on his feet and dressing as he did so. ‘I should leave you to your fate.’
‘If they find him and get him to talk, he’ll tell them about me. My life won’t be worth much then.’
That was a final plea, a tug at Aquila’s feelings; Fabius would go back for him anyway. ‘Get hold of something to bandage him with.’
‘Why the sword?’ asked Fabius, as Aquila strapped it on.
‘Perhaps if you or your friend had learnt to use one of these, you wouldn’t be in so much trouble.’
He had added his knife and his spear by the time they emerged into the street, coming out through the bakery. The ovens were fired up, full of loaves of bread, the great table covered in dough and flour.
‘Where’s Demetrius?’ asked Aquila, pausing.
He had always been asleep when the morning bread was made. Fabius gave him a funny look, and indicated that they should hurry. They found Donatus, still alive, but in considerable pain, in the doorway where Fabius had left him. Aquila examined him swiftly, but the darkness made any proper assessment impossible.
‘We can’t do anything here. We must get him to a place with some light.’
‘We’d better not take him back to his house. His wife is worse than Commodus.’
‘The bakery,’ said Aquila, strapping his spear to his back.
Donatus gasped with pain as they lifted him, but he did not scream. Fabius picked the route, staying to the alleyways, and they stumbled a lot, for Donatus was no lightweight and his legs were forever giving way beneath him. Demetrius was still absent in the bakery, though by the look of the loaves cooling on the racks he had been and gone. Aquila put his weapons aside and they laid Donatus on one of the tables and started to cut away his smock.
‘Fabius Terentius! Well I never,’ said the voice from the doorway.
Aquila guessed this to be Commodus, just by the look of fear on Fabius’s face. He was a real hard horse, with a broken nose and scarred cheeks, carrying a sword in one hand and a heavy club in the other. The two men behind him, likewise armed with clubs, looked just as evil, with the kind of low foreheads that reminded him of the fellow called Toger, the first man Aquila had killed.
‘We wondered who’d been with him.’
‘You followed us?’
‘Who’s this?’ said the visitor.
‘Who’s asking?’ said Aquila, edging closer to his spear.
‘It’s Commodus’s brother, Scappius,’ said Fabius quickly. ‘This is a friend from the country. I asked him to come and help carry Donatus. He had nothing to do with breaking into the warehouse.’
The man looked Aquila up and down, puzzled by his height, the sword and the colour of his long hair. Then his eyes lit on the charm, opening greedily as he realised it was gold.
‘Is that so?’
The spear was up, which caused Scappius to take a pace back. Demetrius walked in, his face red and sweating, as though he had not moved an inch from the front of his oven. He looked and sounded guilty, instead of surprised. ‘What’s goin’ on?’
‘Nothing, Demetrius,’ Aquila replied, in a voice devoid of emotion. ‘These men were just leaving.’
Scappius looked at the spear, then into the stranger’s bright blue eyes and he realised that being the brother of one of the most frightening men in Rome meant nothing, since there was no fear in them. He knew that he would die if they started anything right away, so he smiled, sure in the knowledge that time was on his side. There was no threat as he walked slowly toward the nearest table, where he picked up a thick round loaf and sniffed at it
