The Sword of Revenge Read Free Page B

of the Feast of Lupercalia. Worse, with the whole edifice of empire in peril, an impious act, the bloody removal of a Plebeian Tribune, had been required to protect that imperium . Lucius looked to Aulus, of all people, for backing; his childhood friend had not met his obligations and neither had he offered an explanation for that failure, thus creating a suspicion that far from being a partisan of the faction that Lucius led, the Optimates , he had joined the ranks of his enemies, the Populares . Bad as that was, it was not as troubling at that which followed; Aulus, in front of the whole Senate, having defended Lucius against an accusation of murder, had gone on to declare himself independent of all factions. He had deserted Lucius and the Patrician cause at the very time when his support was vital to success.
    Angry and hurt, Lucius had allowed a spy to be placed in the Cornelii house – indeed the slave was still in place – the aim to ensure that Aulus was apassive not an active enemy. Thoas, a tall and handsome Numidian, had been conjoined with Claudia’s handmaiden, which put him very close to the centre of the household and even closer to the lady herself, and it transpired that it was she who was the key to the mystery of Aulus’s failure to attend and say prayers at the birth of his son. It had taken several years to unearth, but eventually the truth emerged, now all written up in a scroll that Lucius kept locked in his strongbox, and if it vindicated Aulus from any hint of conspiracy, it did nothing to raise him in the estimation of the man he had failed.
    On campaign in Spain, Claudia had been captured by the Celt-Iberian rebels. When found, two campaigning seasons later, she had been with child and plainly Aulus was not the father. No doubt she had been the plaything of her captors, to be used and abused at will, and though not a sensual man the thought produced, as it had in the past, a certain pulse of blood to the loins as he imagined her repeatedly taken against her will, perhaps by multiple participants. She must have been quite a prize, only seventeen and striking, so he assumed that whoever had fathered her bastard would have been from the higher reaches of the tribal society, a chieftain perhaps.
    It made no odds; Aulus, who should have killed her on sight, had refused to set her aside, had, onthe same night as Marcellus was born, overseen a secret birth in a deserted villa in the Alban Hills, before taking the child and exposing him in a place where death was certain. Lucius had to repress a thought that would have made him laugh out loud if he had pursued it. He was conjuring up another carved panel for the sarcophagus, one which showed the great Macedonicus adorned with a pair of cuckold’s horns.
    Titus had moved to the other side of the tomb as the priests began their prayers, prior to the sacrifice of a goat, to look at the panel that represented that Iberian campaign as well as his father’s heroic death in Illyricum. Lucius Falerius joined him there to examine those same images, curious and slightly troubled to note on the neck of the man Aulus had fought in Iberia a device, which on close inspection looked like an eagle in flight. Standing beside Titus he could not resist alluding to both it and the wearer.
    ‘Brennos, chieftain of the Duncani.’
    ‘You’ve seen the device?’
    ‘No. Only heard about it from a hundred different throats. No one mentions the man without a reference to his talisman.’
    Lucius nodded, as if something obscure had been made plain. ‘Your father ranted to me about this Brennos after their first encounter, and by the Gods he hated him. He said the man was the greatest threat to Rome since Hannibal.’
    ‘I judge by your tone you did not agree with him?’
    ‘I thought him obsessed.’
    ‘Then I too must be that.’
    ‘I have read all the despatches from Spain these last three years, Titus. They are alarmist to say the least and I know you had a hand in