He turned to leave rather than disturb the rest he must need, but a whispering voice stopped him.
‘Gaius? I thought it was you.’
‘Renius. I wanted to thank you.’ Gaius approached the bed and drew up a chair beside the figure. The eyes were open and clear and Gaius blinked as he took in the features. It must have been the dim light, but Renius looked younger. Surely not, yet there was no denying that some of the deep-seam wrinkles had lessened and a few black hairs could be seen at the temples, almost invisible in the light, but standing out against the white bristles.
‘You look … well,’ Gaius managed.
Renius gave a short, hard chuckle. ‘Cabera healed me and it has worked wonders. He was more surprised than anyone, said I must have a destiny or something, to be so affected by him. In truth, I feel strong, although my left arm is still useless. Lucius wanted to take it off, rather than have it flapping around. I … may let him, when the rest of me has healed.’
Gaius absorbed this in silence, fighting back painful memories.
‘So much has happened in such a short time,’ he said. ‘I am glad you are still here.’
‘I couldn’t save your father. I was too far away and finished myself. Cabera said he died instantly, with a blade in his heart. Most likely, he wouldn’t even have known it.’
‘It’s all right. You don’t need to tell me. I know he would have wanted to be on that wall. I would have wanted it too, but I was left in my room, and …’
‘You got out though, didn’t you? I’m glad you did, as it turned out. Tubruk says you saved him right at the end, like a … reserve force.’ The old man smiled and coughed for a while. Gaius waited patiently until the fit was over.
‘It was my order to leave you out of it. You were too weak for hours of fighting and your father agreed with me. He wanted you safe. Still, I’m glad you got out for the end of it.’
‘So am I. I fought with Renius!’ Gaius said, his eyes brimming with tears, though he smiled.
‘I always fight with Renius,’ muttered the old man. ‘It isn’t that much to sing about.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The dawn light was cold and grey; the skies clear over the estate lands. Horns sounded low and mournful, drowning the cheerful birdsong that seemed so inappropriate for a day marking the passing of a life. The house was stripped of ornament save for a cypress branch over the main gate to warn priests of Jupiter not to enter while the body was still inside.
Three times the horns moaned and finally the people chanted, ‘Conclamatum est’ – the sadness has been sounded. The grounds inside the gates were filled with mourners from the city, dressed in rough wool togas, unwashed and unshaven to show their grief.
Gaius stood by the gates with Tubruk and Marcus and watched as his father’s body was brought out feet first and laid gently in the open carriage that would take him to the funeral pyre. The crowd waited, heads bowed in prayer or thought as Gaius walked stiffly to the body.
He looked down into the face he had known and loved all his life and tried to remember it when the eyes could open and the strong hand reach out to grip his shoulder or ruffle his hair. Those same hands lay still at his sides, the skin clean and shining with oil. The wounds from the defence of the walls were covered by the folds of his toga, but there was nothing of life there. No rise and fall of breath; the skin looked wrong, too pale. He wondered if it would be cold to the touch, but could not reach out.
‘Goodbye, my father,’ he whispered and almost faltered as grief swelled in him. The crowd watched and he steadied himself. No shame in front of the old man. Some of them would be friends, unknown to him, but some would be carrion birds, come to judge his weakness for themselves. He felt a spike of anger at this and was able to smother the sadness. He reached out and took his father’s hand, bowing his head. The skin felt like cloth, rough and cool under his grip.
‘Conclamatum est,’ he said aloud and the crowd murmured the words again.
He stood back and watched in silence as his mother approached the man who had been her husband. He could see her shaking under her dirty wool cloak. Her hair had not been tended by slaves and stood out in wild disarray. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hand trembled as she touched his father for the last time. Gaius tensed, and begged inside that she would complete the ritual without disgrace. Standing so close, he alone could hear the words she said as she bent low over the face of his father.
‘Why have you left me alone, my love? Who will now make me laugh when I am sad and hold me in the darkness? This is not what we dreamed. You promised me you would always be there when I am tired and angry with the world.’
She began to sob in heaves and Tubruk signalled to the nurse he’d hired for her. As with the doctors, she had brought no physical improvement, but Aurelia seemed to draw comfort from the Roman matron, perhaps simply from female companionship. It was enough for Tubruk to keep her on, and he nodded as she took Aurelia’s arm gently and led her away into the darkened house.
Gaius breathed out slowly, suddenly aware of the crowd again. Tears came into his eyes and were ignored as they brimmed and held against his lashes.
Tubruk approached and spoke quietly to him. ‘She will be all right,’ he said, but they both knew it wasn’t true.
One by one, the other mourners came to pay their respects to the body and more than a few spoke to Gaius afterwards, praising his father and pressing him to contact them in the city.
‘He was always straight with me, even when profit lay the other way,’ said one grey-haired man in a rough toga. ‘He owned a fifth part of my shops in the city and lent me the money to buy them. He was one of the rare ones you could trust with anything and he was always fair.’
Gaius gripped his hand strongly. ‘Thank you. Tubruk will make arrangements to discuss the future with you.’
The man nodded. ‘If he is watching me, I want him to see me being straight with his son. I owe him that and more.’
Others followed and Gaius was proud to see the genuine sadness his father had left behind. There was a world in Rome that the son had never seen, but his father had been a decent man and that mattered to him, that the city was a little poorer because his father would no longer walk the streets.
One man was dressed in a clean toga of good white wool, standing out in the crowd of mourners. He did not pause at the carriage, but came straight to Gaius.
‘I am here for Marius the consul. He is away from the city, but wanted to send me to let you know your father will not be forgotten by him.’
Gaius thanked him politely, his mind working furiously. ‘Send the message that I will call on Consul Marius when he is next in the city.’
The man nodded. ‘Your uncle will receive you warmly, I am sure. He will be at his town house three weeks from today. I will let him know.’ The messenger made his way back through the crowd and out of the gates and Gaius watched him go.
Marcus moved to his shoulder, his voice low. ‘Already you are not so alone as you were,’ he said.
Gaius thought of his mother’s words. ‘No. He has set my standard and I will meet it. I will not be a lesser man when I lie there and my son greets those who knew me. I swear it.’
Into the dawn silence came the low voices of the praeficae women, singing softly the same phrases of loss over and over. It was a mournful sound and the world was filled with it as the horses pulled the carriage with his father out of the gates in slow time, with the people falling in behind, heads bowed.
In only a few minutes the courtyard was empty again and Gaius waited for Tubruk, who had gone inside to check on Aurelia.
‘Are you coming?’ Gaius asked him as he returned.
Tubruk shook his head. ‘I will stay to serve your mother. I don’t want her alone at this time.’
Tears came again into Gaius’ eyes and he reached out for the older man’s arm.
‘Close the gates behind me, Tubruk. I don’t think I can do it.’
‘You must. Your fa
ther is gone to the tomb and you must follow, but first the gates must be shut by the new master. It is not my place to take yours. Close up the estate for mourning and go and light the funeral pyre. These are your last tasks before I will call you master. Go now.’
Words would not come from his throat and Gaius turned away, pulling the heavy gates shut behind him. The funeral procession had not gone far with their measured step and he walked after them slowly, his back straight and his heart aching.
The crematorium was outside the city, near the family tomb. For decades, burials within the walls of Rome had been forbidden as the city filled every scrap of available space with buildings. Gaius watched in silence as his father’s body was laid on a high pyre that hid him from view in the centre of it. The wood and straw were soaked with perfumed oils and the odour of flowers hung heavily in the air as the praeficae changed their dirge to one of hope and rebirth. Gaius was brought a sputtering torch by the man who had prepared his father’s body for the funeral. He had the dark eyes and calm face of a man used to death and grief and Gaius thanked him with distant politeness.
Gaius approached the pyre and felt the gaze of all the mourners on him. He would show them no public weakness, he vowed to himself. Rome and his father watched to see if he would falter, but he would not.
Close, the smell of the perfumes was almost overpowering. Gaius reached out with a silver coin and opened his father’s loose mouth, pressing the metal against the dry coolness of the tongue. It would pay the ferryman, Charon, and his father would reach the quiet lands beyond. He closed the mouth gently and stood back, pressing the smoking torch against the oily straw stuffed between the branches at the base of the pyre. A memory of the smell of burning feathers slipped into his mind and was gone before he could identify it.
The fire grew quickly, with popping twigs and a crackle that was loud against the soft songs of the praeficae. Gaius stepped back from the heat as his face reddened and held the torch limply in his hand. It was the end of childhood while he was yet a child. The city called him and he did not feel ready. The Senate called him and he was terrified. But he would not fail his father’s memory and would meet the challenges as they came. In three weeks, he would leave the estate and enter Rome as a citizen, a member of the nobilitas.
At last, he wept.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘Rome – the largest city in the world,’ Marcus said, shaking his head in wonder as they passed into the vast paved expanse of the forum. Great bronze statues gazed down on the small group as they walked their horses through the bustling pedestrians.
‘You don’t realise how big everything is until you get up close,’ Cabera replied, his usual confidence muted. The pyramids of Egypt seemed larger in his memory, but the people there looked always to the past with their tombs. Here, the great structures were for the living and he felt the optimism of it.
Alexandria too seemed awed, though in part it was at how much everything had changed in the five years since Gaius’ father had bought her to work in his kitchens. She wondered if the man who had owned her mother was somewhere still in the city and shuddered as she recalled his face, remembering how he had treated them. Her mother had never been free and died a slave after a fever struck her and several others in the slave pens beneath one of the sale houses. Such plagues were fairly common and the big slave auctions were accustomed to passing over a few bodies each month, accepting a few coins for them from the ash-makers. She remembered, though, and the waxen stillness of her mother still pressed against her arms in dreams. She shuddered again and shook her head as if to clear it.
‘I will not die a slave,’ she thought to herself, and Cabera turned to look at her, almost as if he had heard the thought. He nodded and winked and she smiled at him. She had liked him from the first. He was another who didn’t quite fit, wherever he found himself.
‘I will learn useful skills and make things to sell and buy myself free,’ she thought, knowing the glory of the forum was affecting her and not caring. Who wouldn’t dream in such a place that looked as if it had been built by gods? You could see how to make a hut, just by looking at it, but who could imagine these columns being raised? Everything was bright and untouched by the filth she remembered, narrow dirty streets and ugly men hiring her mother by the hour, with the money going to the owner of the house.
There were no beggars or whores in the forum, only well-dressed, clean men and women, buying, selling, eating, drinking, arguing politics and money. On each side, the eye was filled with gargantuan temples in rich stone; huge columns with their head and feet gilded; great arches erected for military triumphs. Truly, this was the beating heart of empire. Each of them could feel it. There was a confidence here, an arrogance. While most of the world scrubbed in the dirt still, these people had power and astonishing wealth.
The only sign of the recent troubles was the grim presence of legionaries standing to attention at every corner, watching the crowds with cold eyes.
‘It is meant to make a man feel small,’ Renius muttered.
‘But it does not!’ Cabera continued, gaping around him. ‘It makes me feel proud that man can build this. What a race are we!’
Alexandria nodded silently. It showed that anything could be achieved; even, perhaps, freedom.
Small boys advertised their master’s wares from hundreds of tiny shops along the edges; barbers, carpenters, butchers, stonemasons, gold and silver jewellers, potters, mosaic makers, rug weavers, the list was endless, the colours and noises a blur.
‘That is the temple of Jupiter, on the Capitoline hill. We will come back and make a sacrifice when we have seen your uncle Marius,’ Tubruk said, relaxed and smiling in the morning sun. He was leading the group and raised his arm to halt them.
‘Wait. That man’s path will cross ours. He is a senior magistrate and must not be hindered.’
The others drew up and halted.
‘How do you know who he is?’ Marcus asked.
‘Do you see the man beside him? He is a lictor, a special attendant. Do you see that bundle on his shoulder? Those are wooden rods for scourging and a small axe for beheading. If the magistrate was bumped by one of our horses, say, he could order a death on the spot. He needs neither witnesses nor laws to apply. Best to avoid them completely, if we can.’
In silence, they all watched the man and his attendant as they crossed the plaza, seemingly unaware of the attention.
‘A dangerous place for the ignorant,’ Cabera whispered.
‘Everywhere is, in my experience,’ Renius grunted from the back.
Past the forum, they entered lesser streets that abandoned the straight lines of the main ones. Here, there were fewer names on the intersections. The houses were often four or even five storeys high and Cabera, in particular, gaped at these.
‘The view they must have! Are they very expensive, these top houses?’
‘Apartments, they are called, and no, they are the cheapest. They have no running water at that height and are in great danger from fire. If one starts on the bottom floor, those at the top rarely get out. You see how the windows are so small? That is to keep out the sun and rain, but it also means you can’t jump from them.’
They wound their way through the heavy stepping stones that crossed the sunken roads at intervals. Without these, the fastidious pedestrians would have had to step down into the slippery muck left by horses and donkeys. The wheels of carts had to be set a regulation width apart so that they could cross in the gaps and Cabera nodded to himself as he watched the process.
‘This is a well-planned city,’ he said. ‘I have never seen another like it.’
Tubruk laughed. ‘There is no other like it. They say Carthage was of similar beauty, but we destroyed that more than fifty years ago, sowing the land with salt so that it could never again rise in opposition to us.’
‘You speak almost as if a city is a living thing,’ Cabera replied.
‘Is it not? You can feel the life here. I could fe
el her welcoming me as I came through the gate. This is my home, as no other house can be.’
Gaius too could feel the life around him. Although he had never lived within the walls, it was his home as it was Tubruk’s – maybe more so as he was nobilitas, born free and of the greatest people in the world. ‘My people built this,’ he thought. ‘My ancestors put their hands on these stones and walked these streets. My father may have stood at that corner and my mother could have grown up in one of the gardens I can glimpse off the main street.’
His grip on the reins relaxed and Cabera looked at him and smiled, sensing the change of mood.
‘We are nearly there,’ Tubruk said. ‘At least Marius’ house is well away from the smell of dung in the streets. I don’t miss that, I can assure you.’
They turned off the busy road and walked the horses up a steep hill and a quieter, cleaner street.
‘These are the houses of the rich and powerful. They have estates in the country but mansions here, where they entertain and plot for more power and even more wealth,’ Tubruk continued, his voice blank enough of emotion to make Gaius glance at him. The houses were sealed from the public gaze by iron gates, taller than a man. Each was numbered and entered by a small door for those on foot. Tubruk explained that this was only the least part; the buildings went back and back, from private baths to stables to great courtyards, all hidden from the vulgar plebeians.
‘They set great store by privacy in Rome,’ Tubruk said. ‘Perhaps it is part of living in a city. Certainly, if you were just to drop in to a country estate you would be unlikely to cause offence, but here you must make appointments and announce yourself and wait and wait until they are ready to receive you. This is the one. I will tell the gatekeeper we have arrived.’
‘I’ll leave you here then,’ Renius said. ‘I must go to my own house and see if it has been damaged in the rioting.’
The Emperor Series: Books 1-5 Page 14