The Gods of War r-3

by Jack Ludlow

  The Gods of War

  ( Republic - 3 )

  Jack Ludlow

  Jack Ludlow

  The Gods of War

  PROLOGUE

  Aquila Terentius left the mountain town of Beneventum the morning after he killed the four Greeks, descending from the high hills of central Italy to the coastal plain and a proper Roman road, which would take him north.

  Forced by poverty to walk and hunt his food, he had much time to consider the recent events in his life. The experience of Sicily: arriving as a boy, leaving as a man; his own participation in the recent slave revolt: the dilemma of a Roman fighting against his own kind; the way his old friend and mentor had been sacrificed by the men upon whom he had taken his bloody revenge the previous night. They had betrayed the revolt they led and abandoned their slave army to Roman revenge, the beaten slaves — men, women and children — being herded and returned to the backbreaking work on the farms whence they had come. It was hard to see them as they had so recently been, a powerful army large enough to make Rome shiver.

  The quartet of traitorous Greeks, once slaves themselves, had been relaxed in their luxurious hilltop villa, feeling secure under the protection of local guards, with slaves of their own now to fetch and carry. The long ladder he had fashioned to get in and out of the villa had been broken up, the bark strips used to bind the crosspieces to the long central staff had become kindling, the wooden slats he had fashioned from tree branches, firewood to keep him warm for the remainder of the night. No one had seen him enter or leave, and he had killed three of the turncoats quickly and in total silence — the leader first, his tongue cut out, because that had been his weapon of choice to both inspire and then betray. Two of the others had been nonentities, lapdog pets of their chief, but the fourth, called Pentheus, had merited special treatment.

  He had been present at the death of Gadoric, the Celtic warrior Aquila had seen as a surrogate father, who died as he would have wished, charging his Roman enemies in a fight he could not win — a way to paradise for one of his religion. It was triple revenge; Pentheus had also murdered Didius Flaccus, the ex-centurion who had brought Aquila to Sicily in the first place and Phoebe, the girl with whom he had formed an attachment, she being consumed in the flames of Flaccus’s farmhouse.

  Pentheus had died very slowly, his mouth stuffed with the rich garment he had been wearing when he was dragged from his bed. The boy’s knife had worked relentlessly on the body, revelling in what he saw in the pain-filled eyes. Finally, with the man still alive, Aquila had chopped off his hands and feet, doing to Pentheus what he had done to Flaccus. The broken body he had disposed of as he had the others, by taking them out to their high balconies and throwing them into the ravine and the fast-flowing river below. Prior to that, using their bright red blood, he had drawn the image that defined him on each of their walls, the same as the gold talisman he wore round his neck, shaped like an eagle in flight.

  At times, as he walked, he wondered if he had a future, but taking that object in his hand, he would be overcome by a strange feeling. He had been told it was his destiny but were the predictions true? There was only one place to go now and perhaps the answer he sought would lie there: the centre of his world; the city of Rome.

  It was impossible to pass by the only place he had ever called home, not that there was anything left to see, but this was where had stood his adoptive parents’ hut. The familiarity was tempered by a strange sensation that everything seemed smaller than he remembered: the stream in which he had learnt to swim which ran into the Liris River, the trees in the nearby woods, even the distance between the hut and the busy Via Appia half a league away. Only the mountains to the east looked the same, rising in tiers, covered in dense forests, with that strange-shaped extinct volcano, with a cap shaped like a votive cup, the tallest of them all.

  Standing on the spot, Aquila could almost hear Fulmina’s voice, often berating her husband Clodius. It was she who had prophesied greatness for him, with a faith he had never been able to share; how could he, the child of peasants, do what she foretold? Only on the day she died did he hear the truth; he had been brought here as a newborn child, exposed in the nearby woods to die on the feast day of the Goddess Lupercalia.

  Clodius, occasionally drunk, always on the sharp end of his wife’s tongue, had been sleeping off a drinking bout. Woken by a baby crying for food, he had fetched him back to his wife, knowing it would assuage her anger. On his ankle had been the charm he now wore round his neck, an indication that at least one of his true parents wanted him to live. Had they sold it they could have lived in some comfort and Clodius would have been spared the need for service, and ultimately death, in the legions; then they did not speak of the power Fulmina felt, and the dreams that merely touching the charm had brought on.

  A wander round the district brought back other memories, like the day he had met Gadoric, a slave disguised as an addle-brained shepherd; of the dog Minca, huge and fierce to a stranger, as gentle as a lamb to a friend, long dead now. The shepherd hut was still there, occupied by another, sitting at the edge of the field where the Celt had taught him how to fight with a wooden sword, how to fire an untipped arrow and most of all how to use the spear he still carried, which Gadoric had stolen from the guards of his owner, the fat senator, Cassius Barbinus.

  The land he walked on belonged to Cassius Barbinus; Sosia, the slave girl, with whom he had enjoyed a tender childhood romance, had belonged to Barbinus. Didius Flaccus, the ex-centurion who had taken him to Sicily, had worked for Barbinus. Aquila had lived with Flaccus and his ruffian guards on the fat senator’s Sicilian farms, and so, unwittingly, he had visited cruelty on the slaves in the name of profit. The man loomed so large in his life and here he was, standing in the woods that sheltered the cistern that fed the fountains and baths of the Barbinus villa, close to tears as he contemplated life without all the people who filled his memories.

  He was tempted to visit the Dabo farm, where he had gone to live after the death of Fulmina, but that was not a place of fond memories. He had hated Piscius Dabo for the way he had duped jolly but dim-witted Clodius into deputising for him when he was called up for a second stint in the legions, this so he could stay home and get rich. Was the old bugger Dabo still alive anyway, or was his farm now in the hands of his sons, Annius and Rufurius, boys he used to fight all the time?

  Old neighbours, recognising him, told him, with no sign of grief, that Piscius was dead: Annius Dabo, the eldest son and a born bully, had the farm, now a ranch, while Rufurius, who had at least tried to be friendly to orphaned Aquila, had got nothing, and was no longer in the vicinity. They also told him there was a legacy waiting for him in Aprilium, a bequest made by a general called Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus, who had died commanding a cohort of the 10th Legion at the Pass of Thralaxas in Illyricum, money for the support of the dependants of his fallen legionaries, Clodius being one of that number.

  Having established his identity with the priests at the temple, and because there was nothing for him now in the place in which he had grown up, he made his way back on the Via Appia, and continued to head north.

  Marcellus Falerius came back to a house on the Palatine Hill that seemed empty without his father. Ever since he could remember, the spacious atrium had been full of supplicants seeking favours from Rome’s most powerful politician, the leader of the optimates: now it had a hollow feel. The household slaves, normally so busy attending to those petitioners, were idle, in mourning, staying in their quarters, some no doubt praying to their own gods that they would be freed in their late master’s will. It was maddening that he had died at the very pinnacle of his career, having just put down a slave revolt in Sicily, not with fighting legions, as was the norm, but by s
heer cunning.

  Added to that, instead of lining the roads with crucified rebels, he had got them back to work on the farms from which they escaped, saving their owners, his fellow Roman senators, a fortune, as well as ensuring the city a harvest. Had he returned alive, he would have been hailed a victorious general for his defeat of an enemy, famine, that Rome feared more than any other. Instead he had died in a fountain of blood that seemed to come from every orifice in his body, his weeping son holding a hand that slowly gave up its strength.

  The study in which he laboured had the same bare feel, and Marcellus sat in the curile chair wondering what he would do next. His father had been such a commanding presence in his life, as well as the lives of many others, that the lack of his aura was almost tangible. Everyone who counted for anything in Rome would attend the ceremonies to mark his passing, though there would be few who would come because they loved him. Indeed, some so-called mourners would no doubt turn up to ensure that his death was not some hoax to catch them out: Lucius Falerius Nerva had been a scourge to those of high station who fell below what he considered the proper standards of behaviour for the patrician class. He had been feared rather than loved, his only guiding principle being the needs of the Republic he served so selflessly; indeed his whole life had been dedicated to Rome and the preservation of its distant borders. The youngster could hear the echo of his voice now, castigating him.

  ‘Rome first and always, Marcellus! Swear to me that you will always put Rome before everything.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ he said out loud, hoping that the parental spirit would hear him.

  He picked up the piece of papyrus on which he had drawn an image from the walls of that villa in Beneventum, gifted to the four leaders of the Sicilian slave revolt, men Lucius had suborned and bribed to betray their people with the prospect of a life of ease and comfort. They had not lived to enjoy their deceit; someone had taken revenge and killed them all in the most bloodthirsty fashion, and had left on the walls of each room this outline, a drawing of an eagle in flight, only the red on the original had been blood, not ink.

  Why had the mere sight of that image so terrified his father? On sight of it he had called for his litter in an obvious panic, and made an effort to get back to Rome, perhaps to seek the intercession of Jupiter Maximus. It had been in vain; Lucius Falerius, Rome’s senior senator, died like a nobody on the Via Appia, several leagues away from the city he revered, ignored, as was his tear-stained son, by those passing by, the citizens for whom he had laboured so long and so hard.

  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 fath
er’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.