The Gods of War (6 page)

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.’

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 appreciatively, then smiled at Aquila and Fabius.

‘We’ll see you both another time.’ Then he looked at Donatus, flat on the other table. ‘Don’t expect I’ll see him though.’ Both Aquila and Fabius looked at the same time. Fabius, less experienced, was unsure, but Aquila knew. Donatus was dead. Scappius grinned and turned to leave. ‘You should have left him where he was.’

‘What have you done,’ snapped Demetrius, breaking the silence that followed the trio’s departure.

‘I ain’t done anything,’ said Fabius angrily, and
in a very liberal interpretation of the truth.

‘Don’t give me that, you good-for-nothing bugger. People like Scappius don’t go calling for no reason.’ Demetrius prodded the dead man on his table. ‘And who is this?’

Aquila explained, trying to minimise Fabius’s role and maximise his courage in going to the rescue of his stricken friend, but it was having no effect on the father, whose face grew darker at every word.

‘I want you out of this house,’ he said, pointing at Fabius as soon as Aquila had finished.