The emperor’s eyes narrowed as his servant’s words sank in, and Perennis stared at the chamberlain in barely disguised horror as Commodus leaned forward and gestured his chamberlain closer.
‘That much gold? And these men have marched all the way from Britannia to bring me this fortune?’
Cleander smiled slightly, calculating that he had sufficient control of the conversation to allow Albinus to speak.
‘Senator? This was after all your idea …’
Remaining rigidly at attention, the senator spoke quickly, knowing that Perennis was seething with poorly disguised fury at the sudden uncontrollable turn of events.
‘Hail Caesar! May it please you Caesar, Tribune Scaurus here was the officer who liberated this prize from the barbarians north of the wall built by the divine Antoninus Pius, utterly destroying our last remaining enemy on the frontier in the process. He brought his discovery to the attention of the imperial Sixth Legion’s acting commander …’ He paused, as if searching his memory for the name. ‘Ah yes, Camp Prefect Castus.’
Perennis started again, his eyes betraying his surprise at not hearing Sorex’s name.
‘But I gave orders for there to be no operations north of the wall! All units were to hold in place until—’
‘Yes, Prefect Perennis.’ Albinus and Scaurus had considered their story with the greatest of care before leaving the transit barracks, and the senator was swift to cut Perennis off before he could take control of the situation, the urgency of his interjection spurred by the knowledge of what the praetorians would do to him if he failed to get his story out. ‘Having taken advantage of a brief opportunity to kill five thousand barbarians, and liberate this startling quantity of gold from them, that most experienced officer Prefect Castus quite correctly deemed it best if Tribune Scaurus marched it south under the guard of his two auxiliary cohorts, rather than have it fall under the control of any single senior officer. The prefect deemed it best to remove the temptation presented by so much wealth, so to speak, enough gold to buy the loyalty of the Britannia legions, and in doing so take the chance to pay homage to your imperial glory, Caesar. Tribune Scaurus and I were colleagues in Dacia, and so he thought it best to bring the gold here to Rome, into my safekeeping. At my suggestion his fifteen hundred spearmen have brought the spoils of war to your palace, Caesar, every man sworn to die in defence of their emperor, every man the veteran of a dozen battles fought in your name to bring you triumph!’
Perennis stared at him for a long moment in the silence that followed, then turned to face the emperor, either rage or a mortal fear for his own life making his right eye quiver minutely.
‘Caesar, with your permission, I feel that it would be unwise for us to indulge these fantasies any longer … I’ll have these men …’
‘Us, Prefect?’ Cleander’s voice was still soft, but it cut across the praetorian commander with more than sufficient authority to silence him. ‘You feel it unwise for us to indulge these fantasies? Surely it is Caesar’s place to determine if this gift is a fantasy. Caesar’s place, Prefect, and not yours. After all, a million aureii should prove difficult to conjure out of thin air, wouldn’t you say? It is of course your decision, my Caesar …’
Commodus spoke quickly, waving aside Perennis’s horrified protests, his eyes gleaming with the excitement of the moment.
‘Bring in this gift, Cleander, and prove that what you say is true. Prefect Perennis, order your men back to their places.’
The freedman strode back to the doors, ignoring the praetorians who had frozen where they stood at the emperor’s command, and flung them open again to reveal the startled guardsmen they had passed moments before. He called out a command in a loud, clear voice at odds with the previous softness of his tone.
‘Bring in the gold!’
The door to the room where the Tungrians waited opened in response to his shouted command, and one by one the chests were carried through it and up the wide corridor into the anteroom. Cleander stepped closer to the door guards, and Marcus barely heard his softly spoken words as he muttered a dire warning.
‘These chests contain the proof of your prefect’s treachery. Make any attempt to block their entry to the throne room and I promise you that you’ll die with him. Just not as quickly …’
Stepping back into the room, he raised a hand to point to the gold bearers’ slow procession as the first of the chests approached the doorway.
‘These boxes full of gold are carried by loyal auxiliary soldiers of the First and Second Tungrian Cohorts, Caesar, the men who captured this magnificent prize for you. And note, Perennis, they are unarmed, and represent no threat to our beloved emperor.’
Marcus, his gaze fixed on Perennis, saw the prefect’s eyes narrow again at the mention of the Tungrians, his face taking on the slightly puzzled expression of a man who knew that the word should mean more to him than it did, as Cleander continued his address to the emperor.
‘These men have proven their loyalty to you on a dozen battlefields across the northern empire, as you can see from their faces, and now they bring you the spoils of their struggles as homage to your pre-eminence among all Romans.’
As the first chest was carried into the throne room Marcus realised the brutal logic that had underlain Albinus’s selection of men to carry the gold through the city. Not only were the soldiers he had chosen among the biggest and strongest men in the two cohorts, but to a man their faces were disfigured by scars inflicted on them by their enemies in the succession of battles that the Tungrians had fought since the beginning of Calgus’s rebellion two years before.
‘That’s close enough!’
Perennis had regained something of his composure in the face of looming disaster, and stepped forward to stop the procession, drawing his sword in a rasp of iron on scabbard fittings. Cleander smiled crookedly at him, shaking his head slightly as the Tungrians lowered their burdens carefully to the throne room’s intricate mosaic floor.
‘I always thought that being the only member of the imperial court to carry a sword was a purely ceremonial privilege. After all, the days when the emperor Trajan told his prefect to use his for him as long as he ruled well, but against him if he ruled badly, are long gone, are they not? But to draw your sword in the presence of the emperor, Prefect? Who presents Caesar with the greater threat, I wonder, his loyal servants who have risked their lives to win him a fortune, or any man who dares to unsheathe a blade in his presence, no matter how elevated his position? But no matter, I’m sure Caesar knows best …’
He strode across the room and threw back the lid of the closest chest and thrust a fist into the sea of gold coins within, pulling out a handful and nodding to Albinus, who quickly opened the other boxes to reveal the treasure that filled them almost to their brims. Striding past the praetorian prefect he went down on one knee before the emperor, holding out the coins while Perennis looked on white-faced.
‘Here, my Caesar, look at these coins, and tell me if Prefect Perennis’s charge of fantasy rings true.’ He waited while Commodus stared down at the small heap of gleaming gold coins in his lap, then picked one up and peered more closely at it. ‘See how the reverse of the coin is decorated with an image of Britannia, to represent your victory over the barbarians who sought to steal the province from you. It is traditional, I believe, for Britannia to be depicted in chains after such a victory, of course, but you can overlook such an oversight, I’m sure, unless there is some deeper meaning …’ He looked up at the emperor with his face perfectly straight. ‘And now, Caesar, look at the head that adorns these coins.’
Commodus turned the aureus over in his hand, staring down at it for a long moment before his face creased in a frown.
‘But this isn’t my head.’
Cleander spoke again, his voice subtly changing tone to that of a man reluctantly revealing a distasteful truth.
‘Indeed, Caesar, and nor is it your beloved father’s. Upon a closer inspection I realised that the profile depi
cted on these coins seems to be that of your praetorian prefect. But I’m sure there is some rational explanation. What do the words around the coin’s rim say?’
The young emperor’s voice fell to a whisper.
‘Imperator … Fides Exercitum?’
For a moment the throne room was utterly silent, as Commodus digested the full magnitude of what had been revealed by the three simple words that circled the profile of his closest adviser.
‘Emperor? Loyalty of the soldiers?!’
The words were bellowed at the top of the emperor’s voice as he rose from the throne in a scatter of flashing gold, turning to point an accusatory finger at the recoiling Perennis who raised his hands in helpless defence, his unsheathed sword unwittingly held out before him.
‘M-my C-caesar …’
‘Emperor?! Fucking EMPEROR?!’ Commodus strode forward, putting a finger in the prefect’s face with an apparent disdain for the sword less than a foot from his body. ‘You sought to take my throne, and now you raise your sword to me?! Seize him!’
The praetorians closest to Perennis snapped out of their amazement and stepped forward, gripping the man who until a moment before had been the master of their world. Perennis allowed the sword to fall from his hand, and it clattered loudly onto the mosaic to lie unnoticed at his feet. Cleander stood in silence with a grim smile of satisfaction, watching as Commodus’s volcanic temper took hold and burst from him in an angry roar.
‘I’ll have you beheaded, here and now, you scheming bastard. I’ll have your guts ripped out while you’re still alive to watch, and then I’ll …’
‘Caesar!’
Every man in the room turned to stare at Scaurus, both Cleander and Albinus gazing in amazement as the tribune stepped forward and snapped to attention. Commodus turned slowly to face him with a blank-eyed scowl of fury, and for an instant Marcus was convinced that the emperor was about to take out his ire on the man with the temerity to interrupt his furious screams of rage.
‘Forgive my interjection, my Caesar, but I must bring a matter of great importance to your attention before you pass judgement on this man.’
Falling silent, Scaurus waited with a commendably blank face for Commodus’s reaction. Again the entire throne room seemed to hold its breath, and the emperor stared down from his dais at the lone figure standing before him. When he spoke his voice was calm, although it seemed to Marcus as though his grasp on the rage that had boiled through him a moment before was tenuous at best.
‘And who are you, that dares to interrupt your emperor? Perhaps I’ll have your tongue cut out to teach you to respect the throne a little better?’
Scaurus went down on his knees, lowering his gaze submissively.
‘Caesar, I will happily cut out my own tongue if you command it, if only you will hear me out.’
Commodus stepped down from the dais and walked with slow, deliberate footsteps across a tiled representation of a retiarius, the gladiator’s net and trident held ready to strike, producing an ornately engraved dagger from within the folds of his toga.
‘I carry this with me at all times, and have done ever since that idiot Quintianus tried to knife me on my way home from the theatre one night. My praetorians were too slow in realising that he was among them, and if he had not stopped to shout that the senate had sent him to kill me he’d have put this blade in my guts. Ever since then I’ve gone everywhere armed with the very knife that would have killed me if he’d not been such a fool.’ He paced to a halt before Scaurus with the knife raised. ‘So, tell me your story, Tribune, and believe me, if I don’t believe it merited your impudence then I’ll cut your tongue out myself!’
From his position behind Scaurus and slightly to one side, Marcus could see the emperor’s face with the knife’s blade held up before it barely inches from that of his tribune, his eyes gleaming with purpose, but Scaurus’s voice was as level as ever when he replied, without any hint of the threat hanging over him.
‘Caesar, the praetorian prefect sent one of his sons to Britannia in the position of military tribune three years ago. While serving with the Sixth Legion on the frontier the younger Perennis betrayed his legatus to a rebel leader, and sent the legion into an ambush that cost both the legatus’s life and the legion’s standard. He hoped to profit from the legatus’s death by the grant of a field promotion to command what was left of the Sixth.’
‘That’s a damned lie, Caesar, my son would never have …’
Commodus spun on his heel, turning to glare at Perennis.
‘One more word from you, Perennis, and your short remaining span of life will become very much more painful!’
He slowly turned back to face Scaurus, his tone now more questioning than threatening.
‘I am aware of the eagle’s loss, as I am aware that a tribune of the Sixth appointed by the former praetorian prefect has recently restored that legion’s honour by recapturing the eagle.’
Scaurus shook his head.
‘Not so, Caesar. The eagle that now parades before the Sixth is a replica, carefully fabricated to match the original’s exact specification, but no more the genuine article than the man who discovered it. The eagle’s “discovery” was planned by the praetorian prefect, and simply intended to undo the damage done by his son, of whose treachery and death he was informed by an anonymous letter written by a senior officer in the army of Britannia.’
Commodus narrowed his eyes, leaning close to Scaurus and speaking softly in his ear.
‘And you have proof of these accusations?’
Scaurus nodded slowly.
‘I do, Caesar. The centurion standing behind me not only witnessed the original act of betrayal, but he also killed the prefect’s son as punishment for his treachery. I therefore felt it fitting to send him north of the Antonine Wall when rumours emerged that the eagle was being held in a barbarian fortress, and at the cost of many good men’s lives he managed to recover it along with an item which, while somewhat gruesome, provides provenance for the eagle. If I may, Caesar?’
Commodus nodded, and Scaurus turned to gesture to Marcus. Under Albinus’s disbelieving eyes the young centurion crossed to the last of the chests, thrusting his arm into the gold and searching for a moment before pulling out the eagle that had been rescued from The Fang. He stepped forward and knelt before Commodus, holding up the battered golden standard in both hands. Distracted, the emperor handed his knife to a guardsman and took the eagle, holding it up to the lamplight.
‘It looks genuine enough, even if it’s perhaps a bit too battered to be the real thing. But this alone is not proof, it could easily be a fake.’
Scaurus bowed his head momentarily in acknowledgement of the emperor’s point.
‘Indeed Caesar, on its own this is not enough to prove my case. But as I said, that isn’t all that Centurion Corvus here managed to rescue from the barbarians.’
Marcus paced across to the first chest and dug his hands into the coins, pulling a heavy bag from within the treasure’s depths. Reaching into its open neck, he held up the preserved head of his dead birth father.
‘This is the head of the Sixth Legion’s legatus, Gaius Calidius Sollemnis, Caesar, hacked from his dead body on the same afternoon that the eagle was lost. Senator Albinus can doubtless stand witness that this is indeed his head. Forgive the smell of cedar oil, I had the legatus’s head preserved in it until very recently, and it is rather pervasive.’
The senator nodded slowly, unable to take his eyes from the grotesque object before him.
‘Indeed I can, Caesar. He was a family friend. Thanks to these men he can now be accorded some measure of peace, and burial in his family’s plot.’
Albinus stared at Scaurus for a moment, and Marcus read a hard edge in the glance that had not been there before. The emperor took the head from the young centurion, sniffing with distaste at the aroma rising from it.
‘All of which is very touching, but you still haven’t proven that this is really the Sixth’s stan
dard.’
Scaurus nodded.
‘In that case Caesar, allow me to present the definitive proof.’
He reached into his toga. Half a dozen men tensed, hands on the hilts of their swords, only to relax when he pulled out nothing more threatening than a pair of writing tablets.
‘Here is the proof, Caesar.’ He held up one of the notepads, its exterior battered and discoloured by a dark-brown stain. ‘This tablet is a record maintained by the Sixth Legion’s standard bearer, a man of great diligence who wrote a painstaking description of his eagle, noting its every little scratch and dent, before he died in battle fighting to his last breath in its defence. You will note that the tablet’s exterior is stained with his blood. And this –’ he held up the second tablet, its wooden case crisp-edged and without blemish ‘– this is the sworn testimony of a Sixth Legion centurion, a man who knew the standard bearer better than any other man alive since they were brothers, that this tablet belonged to his sibling, and that the notes inside are an accurate description of the eagle. If I may?’
He reached out a hand towards the eagle, pointing to a deep score on the underside of its left wing, then opened the stained tablet and read from the notes scratched into its wax.
‘Scratch, two inches long, incurred in battle against the Batavian traitor cohorts. Vengeance delivered.’
Commodus nodded slowly, passing the eagle to Cleander.
‘Well now, it seems that the tribune here has indeed earned the right to interrupt his emperor, at least on this occasion. Chamberlain, you are hereby instructed to have this eagle refurbished and returned to the Sixth Legion, and to remove any stain from the legion’s records connected with its loss. It seems that Legatus Sollemnis was the victim of yet more of the former praetorian prefect’s poisonous ways …’ He paused, a peculiar smile crossing his face. ‘But before you do, I’ve an idea. You, come here.’
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