Jack Ludlow: The Sword of Revenge

The awareness he had of this wooded world had not deserted Aquila following the events of four seasons past; it could hardly be otherwise with Minca his constant companion. The huge dog was lying still, hardly breathing while Aquila checked his traps, but he stood as his master backed towards him, pointed ears pricked as he sensed danger, soundlessly on Aquila’s heels as the boy passed him. Soon they were out in an open field, playing as a boy and dog should, engaged in a tug of war over a thick stick, as the sun rose over the mountains to the east to light the fields of pasture and the quietly grazing cattle.

Aquila pretended not to see the men lurking at the edge of the wood, a party that, once they moved, had made a sound that would not have disgraced a herd of those same cattle. The sight of Minca would keep them there; huge and frightening to a stranger, the animal was to a friend as gentle as the lambs he used to tend. He was also, now, Aquila’s dog; Gadoric, the Celtic slave-shepherd who had raised him from a puppy, had been taken south to a place called Sicily, where he was apparently likely to die a slow and wasting death toiling in the fields, poorly fed and labouring under a killer sun.

When the boy thought of Gadoric, one-eyed, tall and fair, and in truth a warrior not a pastoral custodian, his one-time tutor and friend, tears pricked the corners of his eyes; he had been one of the few people in the world that Aquila had loved. Another was the girl Sosia, young and beautiful, like Gadoric a slave owned by Cassius Barbinus. Finally there was Fulmina, the woman who had raised him, the woman he thought of as his mother. All three had gone from his life in one horrendous day; Gadoric to Sicily, Sosia to Rome and Fulmina to Hades.

Before dying Fulmina had told him the truth of his birth; that the people he had called Mama and Papa were not his real parents, that he had been found deep in the forest, well away from any habitation, left there on the morning after the Feast of Lupercalia, exposed by someone who had not wanted him to live. Now all he was left with was a hankering for the only person to whom he could say he was close, the man he had called Papa, Clodius Terentius, serving for years in the Illyricum legion, and surely long past the time at which he was due home.

The finding of him in that forest glade had, Fulmina insisted, been a marvel. First, Clodius being in the woods, waking from a bout of heavy drinking, then the weak sun of a Febricus morning that lit that one patch in which he lay. Whoever had laid him on the ground had left him in the swaddling clothes in which he had been wrapped after his birth, thick enough to blunt the night-time cold. When these thoughts of loss and longing became intolerable, Aquila would visit the gurgling riverside spot where he had been found and wonder at the nature of the people who had abandoned him. He would see in his mind’s eye ghostly figures on horseback — Clodius had seen hoof prints — figures whose faces were indistinct death-masks, or horrible, hooded apparitions that spoke of Hades and desecration. He would look up to the distant mountains over which the sun rose each day, one with a strange cap shaped like a votive cup, home to the soaring eagles after whom he had been named.

At other times he would go to where the hut in which he had been raised once stood. Standing before that spot he would touch the leather amulet that had been Fulmina’s last gift to him, something she had kept hidden all his life. Well-tanned leather and shining with beeswax, it bore on it a raised device of an eagle in flight, wings outstretched. He never took it off his arm, because Fulmina had told him that what it contained, stitched inside, was the harbinger of his destiny. She had also made him swear not to unpick that stitching until he was old enough to fear no man, a vow he had made before the turf altar of their tiny abode, an oath which he would never break.

There was guilt too when he stood and remembered, given how little time he had spent here in the last year of Fulmina’s life; in Gadoric he had found someone who had been like the soldier father he so missed. Every waking hour, as well as many a nocturnal one, had been spent in his company. Pretending to be witless and older than his years, Gadoric walked with a stoop, his face hidden by a wide straw hat, as he tended the Cassius Barbinus flock of sheep. He had certainly fooled Aquila the day they met; an intended shock to an old shepherd had turned full circle into surprise for the boy, that made doubly so by the dog he had neither seen nor anticipated. Minca would have taken out his throat if the one-eyed shepherd had not intervened.

Intrigued by the boy’s strange colouring, Gadoric had taken Aquila into his confidence, revealing the truth — that he desired only one thing, a chance to return to his own homeland. He had also taken to a boy who was keen to learn and had the time to do so, until, as a trio, which included Minca, they became inseparable. The Celt had taught Aquila to use a spear he had stolen, how to fire a flint-tipped arrow and how to use a wooden sword, to stab, parry, cut and stun with the pommel. He had taught Aquila some of his barbarous tongue, in exchange for an improvement from the boy’s rustic Latin, which the Celt would need if he were to escape. By the light of a tallow wad he had told him long Celtic sagas, which the lad struggled to fully understand, yet knowing that they were tales of the kind of courage and fortitude of which he dreamt.

He was taught that birds’ eggs in nests were to be left to hatch, the chickens would provide such food; care should be taken not to kill a cub, be it bear, wolf, fox, stoat or ferret, for these animals lived in concert with the trees, the sky and the rivers which were part of Gadoric’s religion. He was encouraged to eat only fully grown fish and when hunting bird or beast to take only what was necessary so that the land would continue to flourish and produce until eternity.

With the sun lighting the nearby Via Appia, Aquila left the forest behind, heading for the place where he now lived, the half-built house of Piscius Dabo. He would not call Dabo’s place home, for it could never be that. It was a roof under which he could lay his head till the day his adopted father Clodius came home. Then together they could rebuild the hut, which had formed the funeral pyre of Fulmina, and life could go back to some semblance of what it had once been.

Those gathered for the dedication of the tomb were the relatives and closest friends of the deceased, men of station. Naturally this included Aulus’s childhood companion, Lucius Falerius Nerva, one of the two reigning censors and at present the most powerful senator in Rome. While most stood around, heads bowed, he looked about him with an air that bordered on the impious, as if examining each attendee to measure the depth and honesty of their respect, by his actions implying to Titus Cornelius, even if he did not intend it, that he was, himself, lacking in that attribute.

A thin man, with narrow features and thinning hair, the ex-consul was feared as much as he was respected. He had been Aulus’s friend since the time both learnt to talk and on the rare occasions when Titus’s father had mentioned the man it had always been with admiration for his abilities as an administrator, with reservations regarding his use of the power he wielded in the Senate. As the hazel eyes swung onto the widow, the Falerii face took on an expression of mild disdain. Claudia Cornelia, unable to see out of the side of her cowl, did not observe the look, but Titus did. Lucius had never quite accepted the second marriage of Aulus Cornelius, seeing it as a piece of gross foolishness that a man nearing forty, and as famous and wealthy as Macedonicus, should wed a slip of a girl who, at the nuptials, was a mere sixteen.