The Gods of War (2 page)

There was a powerful legacy. Not great wealth; Lucius had put too much time into the care of
Rome and its empire to amass much money, though the boy was comfortably off and had the prospect of a marriage that would bring a massive dowry. The real inheritance was political; as the son of a man so influential – with a list of clients almost too long to recount – he could expect to inherit some of that authority. Not all, he was too young for that, but enough to make his mark in the world. It was now time to find out just how potent that was.

Before they left for that fateful journey to Sicily, Lucius had sealed many of his most secret scrolls in chests, to be placed in the cellar. In these wooden containers lay all Marcellus needed to take his place in the world. He took a lamp down the worn stone steps rather than fetch the trunks up to his father’s study. That stopped him: he had to remind himself that the study was his now; he was the head of the household. There had been an awkward moment at the Forum, where he had gone to announce his loss, when Appius Claudius, the richest man in Rome, had reminded him of his obligations towards his daughter.

That, more than anything, served to bring home to Marcellus that he was now the master of his own destiny. It also underlined his potential; Appius Claudius still saw the betrothal as desirable. Did he, given that his preferences lay
elsewhere? Ever since he had donned his manly gown he had been in thrall to Valeria Trebonia, but the entire Trebonii family was out of Rome, so he had not yet put that to the test. Once he had suggested to his father that he should marry Valeria, only to have the notion ridiculed. To a Falerii, who could trace their family name back to before the Tarquin Kings, the Trebonii were parvenus, too recently elevated, not fit to merit the connection.

That was something to consider later; time now to examine his inheritance. A whole glass of sand later, he sat, surrounded by scrolls, wondering how he had lived with his father all these years without really knowing him. Every scroll made him cringe; they contained personal details, none of them flattering, of all the people Lucius had called friends and clients. Details of financial and sexual scandals: wives who had indulged in adulterous relations, naming the men involved, often more than one; senators and knights who had blatantly stolen from the public purse, hoarded scarce commodities or indulged in impeachable rapacity as they governed the provinces of the empire.

One contained a poem, and scratched in the corner were the names Sibyl and Aulus, which must refer to an oracle and Aulus Cornelius, his
father’s childhood friend, while the remainder had lots of scribbled notes. The reading of it made no sense.

One shall tame a mighty foe,

The other strike to save Rome’s fame.

Neither will achieve their aim.

Look aloft if you dare, though what you fear cannot fly,

Both will face it before you die
.

There were a surprising number of scrolls relating to the Cornelii family, which Marcellus opened reluctantly. He could not believe that, locked away, they contained praise of his father’s lifelong friend. Aulus Cornelius had been, to him, the very embodiment of Roman virtue, a successful general not once but twice; a soldier’s soldier revered by the men he led; tall, handsome, with a noble brow, the very embodiment of the Roman
imperium
. Bound to his father by a youthful blood oath, Aulus and Lucius had been like two peas in a pod until something happened to ruin their mutual attachment. Marcellus now learnt how and when that deep companionship had become fractured.

It could not be just that Aulus had failed to attend Marcellus’s birth – certainly a deep breach of his obligations – but enough to threaten a
lifelong friendship? Reading on, the reason for that absence shocked him. Campaigning in Spain, fighting a rebel leader called Brennos, Aulus’s second wife, twenty years his junior, had been taken prisoner by the Celt-Iberians. It took two seasons of hard fighting to get her back, and when discovered, she was found to be with child. Aulus had failed to attend his birth because he was attending that of his wife’s bastard, a fact unearthed by a Nubian spy, a slave that Lucius had placed in his old friend’s house.

There were good grounds to believe the child had been exposed, a perfectly natural thing to do, though there were patrician husbands who would have killed their own wife rather than risk the disgrace. More interesting was the information the slave had supplied, which indicated that the Lady Claudia was tormented by the location of that exposure, that she had in fact searched as though expecting to find the child alive, strange behaviour when any sensible person would do whatever they could to put such a damning event behind them.

Marcellus hardly knew the Lady Claudia Cornelia and at first he wondered how her disgrace fitted into these chests, these records of misdemeanour. Then it dawned on him; it would have been a weapon to hold over Aulus, and even
though Claudia was only Quintus Cornelius’s stepmother, it would also serve as a means to embarrass the oldest son of the Cornelii house, a man Lucius was grooming to a position of power, designated to hold that together till Marcellus could come into his own. Any deviation from that obligation would see the scroll on public display, which would ruin the family name in a world where nothing was held to be more important.

His father had said he would not be pleased by what he found and, as usual, Lucius had been right, but what to do? He could call people in to see him, one by one, and give them the scrolls pertaining to them, but they would then know they had been read. It would only be a matter of time before the city was full of gossip, damaging his father’s reputation and, by association, his own. The best thing to do would be to burn the lot, a notion he considered long and hard, knowing haste was a mistake. Clearly some of the crimes listed in these scrolls deserved punishment. If he could not burn them all, which should he keep?

Carefully, Marcellus put the scrolls back. The last bundle in his hand related to the recently returned Governor of Illyricum, Vegetius Flaminus, with a list of the evidence that Aulus 
Cornelius, heading a senatorial commission, had mustered against him in the recent rebellion. There was also a true account of the campaign: the number of dead, not all enemy combatants, which negated the Flamian triumph; his venal rapacity as governor; and finally a report from a retired centurion called Didius Flaccus, which told how Vegetius, knowing they were isolated, had deliberately left Aulus and the men he led to die at the Pass of Thralaxas. There was enough here not only to impeach the man, but to see him stripped and thrown off the Tarpeian Rock.

He dropped in the last bundle and relocked the wooden chest, before making his way back to the study to find his father’s steward waiting with the latest despatches from the frontiers, asking what he should do with them now that Lucius was dead. This correspondence was not for his young eyes; in reality consular communications, they had come to his father because he was powerful enough to make or break the people who wrote them. Despite that, Marcellus went through them, only half taking in the news that there was more trouble on the border shared with the empire of Parthia.

There was something from each province and potential trouble spot, and Marcellus knew that in the scroll racks that lined the study walls lay
years of correspondence relating to every matter of import to the empire. Fratricidal strife in Africa, the bribes necessary to keep at bay various tribes north of Cisalpine Gaul and a positive report from Illyricum, so recently the seat of revolt. He stopped when he came to a despatch from the senior consul, Servius Caepio, in Spain. Having read it, Marcellus decided he disliked the contents. Like the chest in the cellar, it contained written proof that his father would not only condone but actively encourage murder. Never mind that it was a barbarian called Brennos who was marked for assassination. Rome, to his mind, should fight such people, not try to engage renegade Celts to murder them.

There had been scrolls relating to this Brennos in the chests below, old reports from Aulus Cornelius, the man who had fought him first, as well as from Aulus’s youngest son Titus, made many years later. They described a man of tall stature and golden hair, a Druid shaman from the misty lands of the north, simple of dress but with a commanding personality. There was only one thing that really marked him out, a device he wore at his neck, gold, shaped like an eagle in flight. For a moment Marcellus’s mind went to that image which had so terrified his father, had been, to him, some kind of harbinger of doom.
The notion of a connection was too fanciful; the owner of that gewgaw was in Spain, his father had been near Neapolis.
A powerful shaman
they said about Brennos; no one had power over that distance.

He told the slave to send the scrolls on to the Forum and, alone again, he considered going to the family altar to say prayers for the soul of his father, which reminded him he must order a death mask to place with those of all his other ancestors. But he felt lonely; he wanted comfort, so before going to pray, Marcellus went to visit the chamber of the best gift he had ever had from his father, the slave girl Sosia, who looked so like Valeria Trebonia they could be twins.

And unlike Valeria, Sosia was his property, to do with whatever he wished.

CHAPTER ONE

The return to Rome of Cholon Pyliades served as a sharp reminder to Claudia Cornelia of the limitations placed on her by her situation as the widow of a patrician noble. A freed Greek, the former body slave to her late husband, Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus, he could travel as freely as he wished; she could not. Claudia had missed his company while he had been in Neapolis and Sicily, so she did her best to welcome him warmly, suppressing any feelings of resentment. Not that such a thing precluded the odd barbed comment, especially when she heard of his intention to attend the funeral rites of Lucius Falerius Nerva.

‘I never thought that you, of all people, would attend such an event.’

The Greek smiled, knowing there was no real malice in the words. ‘I think your late husband must have understood Lucius Falerius better than
you or I. After all, he held him in high esteem, despite the fact that they disagreed on so many things. Perhaps the bonds of childhood friendship were stronger than we knew.’

Claudia replied with mock gravity, her dislike of Lucius being well known. ‘You’re right, Cholon, Aulus would have attended the old goat’s funeral, in spite of the way the swine treated him. He forgave too easily.’

‘Then I am absolved?’

Claudia had not quite finished baiting him. ‘There was a time you would have gone just to ensure the old vulture was dead.’

‘True, but I met him in Neapolis only to discover he was an interesting man, and the irony is that when I got to know him, I found his ideas were more Greek than Roman.’

Cholon did not say that Lucius had used him as an intermediary; it had been he who had taken the Roman terms to the leaders of the slave revolt and persuaded them to accept them. Right now, he was amused by the shocked reaction of his host.

‘Lucius Falerius saw himself as the complete Roman. He would not be pleased to hear you say that!’

‘Not the words, perhaps, but I think the sentiment would please him. He was far from as
stiff-necked as he appeared and I did discover that he was remarkably free from the cant you normally suffer from Roman senators. I think Lucius understood his world and knew what he wanted to preserve. Perhaps he was illiberal with the means he needed to employ to gain his ends, but he was clever. Certainly what he did in Sicily was positively Alexandrian in its subtlety. Not Roman at all!’

‘What would a Roman have done?’ asked Claudia.

‘Put the entire island to the sword or lined the roads with crucifixions, then strutted like a peacock, full of virtue because of his actions.’

‘I doubt my late husband would have done that.’

The Greek suddenly looked grave, partly because she had referred to the nature of his late master, but more for the wistful look on Claudia’s face. To Cholon, there had never been anyone like Aulus Cornelius, the conqueror of Macedonia, the man who had humbled the heirs of Alexander the Great, yet never lost that quality of modesty which defined him. It had not been for his military prowess that his Greek slave had loved him, but for his very nature. Sitting here with Claudia, he was reminded of how she had hurt him, and how he had
withstood that for year after year with a stoicism that made him even more of a paragon. He knew the reason and had to compose himself then; too much deliberation on the life and death of his late master was inclined to induce copious tears.

‘No, Lady, he would have freed them all, and then dared the Senate to override him.’

They sat silently for a while, each with their own recollections of a man who had stood alone, not aloof, but one who refused to support any faction, yet was there when the call came if Rome needed him. It was Cholon who finally spoke. ‘I am about to commit a shocking breach of manners.’