The Pillars of Rome (42 page)

‘Which is?’

‘Near Aprilium, General.’

‘How near?’ asked Aulus sharply.

‘Half a league south, just off the Via Appia.’

‘And the boy’s how old?’

Clodius had to use his fingers to be sure. ‘Eleven, since it’s summer now. I found him in mid-
Febricus
, the morning after the Feast of
Lupercalia
.’

Aulus’s voice was hard now. ‘You’re near the mountains, are you not?’

‘Not near, exactly, your honour, but you can see them from my place. There’s one, an extinct volcano, which has a top shaped just like a votive cup…’

Clodius stopped talking as he heard the general swear softly. It had no force in it, rather it was the curse of a man who had failed. All the eagerness was gone from his voice. ‘Yesterday, I came across you when you were drawing something in the sand?’

‘Well, I have to admit it’s upset me. As I said, when we found the lad, he had this charm on his foot. Gold it was, with the wings picked out to show the feathers.’

‘Wings?’

‘Yes, General. Did I not say? The charm was shaped like an eagle in flight. If only she’d let me sell it, I wouldn’t be here now.’ Clodius finally put some passion into his voice. ‘Damn Fulmina and her dreams.’

A great gust of air left Aulus’s lungs. He recalled
Claudia, that day in the back of that wagon in Spain, and realised with a stab of despair that the truth had been there in her eyes for him to see, but he had been too stupid, or too relieved that she had survived, to see it. Like dice slowly rolling to show
Venus
, each act, each word, each long silence of hers fell into a pattern that represented the truth; that the child in her womb was there through desire not violation; that the infant he had tried to dispose of was alive. It was with a sense of despair that the one thing he had prized above everything, his honour, had made him a fool, such a one that the only word for it was
Hubris
.

‘I shouldn’t go sneering at women’s dreams, my friend,’ said Aulus sadly. ‘They have a way of coming true.’

‘They’re moving, General,’ called a voice from along the other end of the palisade. Aulus looked up. The first tinge of the false dawn lit the sky.

‘You were right, soldier,’ he said, pulling himself up. He reached down to help Clodius to his feet.

‘Could you help me lash myself to the palisade, General? I can’t fight balanced on one leg.’ Aulus took the rope and wound it round the spiked top of the defensive wall. Clodius spoke again, bitterness in his voice, moaning to the very end. ‘Don’t suppose we’ll get a proper burial either.’

‘I’ve done my best, soldier,’ his commander replied.

Clodius’s thoughts had moved on, so he failed even to register the answer. ‘General, I don’t suppose you have a spare coin on you.’

Aulus could not know that for Clodius scrounging was a lifetime’s habit. He reached into his belt and produced a gold denarii, placing it in the legionary’s hand. ‘Make sure you don’t swallow it.’

Clodius looked down at the coin, winking at him in the light from the flickering torches. His voice was low and even. ‘A piece of my own gold, at last!’

The enemy had removed their dead and in doing so had slowed their attack so, by the time they were ready, the sky was lightening to the east. They approached the palisade, stopping just out of range.

‘Gold,’ said Clodius in a louder voice to the man nearest him, holding up the coin. ‘It’s brought me nothing but trouble.’

He slipped it under his tongue just as the enemy started their charge. He wasn’t thinking about approaching death, he was wondering what his general was doing carrying a torch, now that it was getting light.

The gaps were too big, they couldn’t hold the line. The fighting was on the step now, with the wounded men at an even greater disadvantage. Aulus was bleeding from more than a dozen wounds, so there was no point in waiting any longer. He managed to stab the enemy nearest to
him, creating enough of an opening, though it was hard to push his way out, with all these men intent on killing him. His mind registered the spear that gored its way into his side and the torch nearly dropped out of his hand, but he managed to hold on to it, long enough to drop it onto the oil-soaked brushwood stacked against the palisade. The flames shot up immediately from the tinder dry faggots.

‘A proper burial, soldier,’ he said.

No one heard the words since no Roman was alive to listen. Aulus died, as the flames licked around him, from dozens of sword thrusts, in his mind trying to conjure up an image of a small boy, with red-gold hair and a strange name, somehow mixed up with a prophecy he had heard when only a child himself. He saw the eagle, his destiny, drawn in the sand and his lips formed the word ‘Aquila’. But there was no breath left to say it, only the vision of that same object round Claudia’s neck, mixed with curses and another image; that of the man who had owned it originally, a man he would never now have the pleasure of killing.

Several leagues to the north Flaccus and Cholon sat quietly on their horses. The centurion was near dead with fatigue, the slave red-eyed from copious weeping. They could see, to the south of them, the smoke billowing up from the burning wall; smoke that marked the funeral pyre of Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus and his remaining legionaries.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

‘Kill them all, Trebener. Their skulls will decorate the walls of your dwelling and bring you much respect.’

The Roman soldiers trapped in the Iberian defile did not hear these words but they could see above them the man who had uttered them. Tall, with red-gold hair, he was armed only with a heavy
falcata
, simply dressed apart from one gold object at his throat, which caught the sun and flashed as he made a wide sweep with his arm to encompass the intended victims.

‘I cannot do that, Brennos.’

The man who answered was very different; small beside Brennos, he had dark hair over pale facial skin and was decorated as a Celt-Iberian chieftain should be: on his head an elaborate helmet crowned with a sculpted boar, a thick and valuable gold torque encircled his neck and he wore several more on his arms. His chest was covered in a breastplate
of hardened leather richly enhanced to exaggerate his muscular physique. Trebener, chieftain of the Averici knew the Romans well, he and his tribe living as they did in an uneasy peace, close to the settled plains which they inhabited along the Mediterranean shore. His reluctance to massacre those he saw as his enemies was not based on anything like mercy, but on self-preservation; if one thing was guaranteed to bring down upon his tribe massive retribution from the most powerful state in the world, it would be a pile of dead legionary bodies crying out for vengeance.

‘It would be madness to kill them all.’

‘Then let them all go,’ Brennos replied.

Trebener looked around at the members of his tribe, in truth not one tenth of the warriors he could muster and of that number only a third had set out to raid some cattle from the coastal pasture. It was a common enough incursion, which usually resulted in a desultory pursuit, soon abandoned when the Averici got into the hills that marked the boundary between the interior and the Roman settlements of Hither Spain. If they had moved at their normal pace they would have easily outrun the chase. It had been Brennos’s notion to move slowly, to see how far the Romans would come, and the fool of a centurion below had taken the bait and kept on after the raiding tribesmen, seemingly determined to teach them a lesson. In doing so he had led his
men into a trap against numbers he could not hope to best, and he was now confined in a narrow defile that was the worst possible place to deploy the normal Roman tactics. The man was an idiot, but he was also one who had set the Averici chieftain a problem which he would rather not have. To kill eighty Roman soldiers would mean retribution at some point in the future; to let them go could bring trouble even sooner from the men he led, who would see such an act as one of weakness from a chieftain who was getting too old to properly command unquestioning respect.

‘I cannot do that either.’

‘You must do one or the other, Trebener, for no other course will make you friends, or reduce the number of your enemies.’

Brennos took the gold object in his hand, drawing Trebener’s eye towards what he knew to be the Druid shaman’s talisman. On a gold chain, shaped like an eagle in flight, it was recognised by those who saw him clutch it as a source of some kind of spiritual power. It had been in Brennos’s hand when he went amongst Trebener’s warriors and the ideas with which he seduced them were just as ambitious as those he had employed in the past; that Rome was mighty, but could be destroyed. It was twelve summers since Brennos had persuaded the tribes of the interior to combine against Rome and act like an army instead of a mob; twelve
summers since they had so very nearly humbled a whole legionary army on the very plains they had just raided.

Had Brennos known this would happen, for he had the gift to foretell the future? It was telling that, even here, surrounded by the men of his own tribe, Trebener had too much fear of the power of Brennos to demand of him an answer to that question. He scanned the horizon to the east, seeking the tell-tale signs of the mass movement of men, a trail of dust that would signal a second pursuit. A wisp of a cloud was all he could see, a few miles distant, one caused by a small group, probably on horses given the speed of their movement – nothing for him to worry about. The Averici chief stepped forward and looked down at the Romans in the defile. Swords sheathed, spears and shields down, these legionaries knew that they faced death.

Damn them, he thought, why had they not stopped as they usually did; why did they have to face him with such a dilemma. ‘Get me the centurion.’

Brennos was looking at the dust cloud thrown up by the approaching horsemen, sure in his mind that he knew who led them, the son of the Roman general he had fought and so nearly beaten years before. Aulus Cornelius had been the name of the father, Titus was that of the son. Not that he had met either of them, but just as they spied on him, he
sought information on them, as well as the wife of the enemy general, whom he had taken prisoner. Claudia Cornelia had been as haughty as only an aristocratic Roman lady could be, prepared to die rather than show fear, but two summers spent together, constantly on the move to avoid her husband and his soldiers had, gradually but inexorably, changed that. First had come respect, then friendship, until finally they had become lovers, and no woman Brennos had lain with since had come close to the passion she had aroused in him.

The last time he had seen her was when he sent her to a place of safety to bear the child of their union, escorted by the men he trusted most. All he knew was that they never reached their destination; the wagon in which she had been travelling had disappeared; he found the bones of his warriors where they had died trying to defend her. Claudia Cornelia and the child in her womb would be dead; Brennos could not believe that a proud Roman general, finding his wife with child by another man, would do anything other than kill her. It was something he himself would have done had the positions been reversed.

Titus Cornelius reined in his horse as soon as he saw the flashes from the Averici weapons and from that moment moved forward over the uneven ground with extreme caution; with an escort of a
dozen men he was not keen to get too close. How could the fool of a centurion lead his whole command this far into the hills, in pursuit of a few tribesmen and a herd of cattle? It was a standing instruction never to pursue the tribes unless their raiding became too troublesome, and then the Romans would mount a punitive raid in force to subdue them. Most of the time a little judicious bribery kept them in the mountains. The hope that he would come up with the soldiers and turn them back had faded as soon as he saw the sun glinting on the tips of what he was sure were tribal spears.

He stopped his horse abruptly, so quickly that the men riding behind nearly collided with him. A thought came that made, if not sense, certainly provided a reason as to why the pursuit had come so far. ‘He’s here.’

‘Sir?’ asked the rider behind him.

‘Brennos. He’s here. I can feel it.’

Those cavalrymen he could not see pulled faces, for the tribune’s fixation with the Celtic chieftain Brennos was no secret. There had, it was true, been an increase in raids by the various tribes up and down the frontier, so many and so frequent that it hinted at some kind of coordination. No one doubted this Brennos character to be dangerous but the idea that he, who lived several weeks’ march away in the deep interior, would be here, leading a cattle raid, was a joke.

‘You mean that trickster, sir?’

‘He’s no trickster.’

‘Happen he is your honour, seeing as how, if’n you’re right, he has managed to disappear a hundred of our men.’

‘More likely we’ll find them up ahead, in a heap of splintered bones.’

Titus could feel the sentiment even if he was not looking at the cavalrymen; they had no desire to join that heap, nor had the man leading them, but he knew that he had to keep going forward, if only to find out what had happened. He held up a wetted finger to feel the wind, which with the heat of the day was in the west, coming off the land, then he dismounted.