Marius' Mules V: Hades' Gate (19 page)

He momentarily glanced around and realised with a start that Berengarus had turned and followed him.

"Never turn back on Berengarus again" the Barbarian growled. "You do: I kill. Simple."

"Oh just piss off and leave me alone" Fronto snapped, deliberately and provocatively turning his back on the brute and stomping out across the flags into the garden, where Lucilia and Julia reclined on a bench in the sunshine while a slave served them chilled fruit juice.

"Marcus! There you are." Lucilia announced as she spotted him approaching. "Where did you get to?"

"Just reliving old campaigns with one of Pompey's guards."

"Someone you served with?" Lucilia smiled.

"After a fashion." He turned to the slave with the jug. "Do you have anything stronger?"

"At this time of the morning?" his young wife disapproved.

"Old campaigns sometimes need dulling a little."

Julia nodded calmly. "My dear husband says much the same sometimes." She peered around the garden and then smiled and waved. "Berengarus? Be a darling and fetch an amphora of wine and a jug of water."

Fronto felt his pulse speed up just a little at the lightness in Julia's voice as she turned a conspiratorial smile on Lucilia.

"He's big and hairy, but he's such a kitten really."

The sound of Fronto's grinding teeth echoed dully across the patio.

* * * * *

Fronto rolled the leg of his faded military issue breeches down over the padding around the knee, where they rucked up a little and failed to reach the full length to just below the joint. There were still some officers and men in the legions who preferred to go all natural and airy under their tunic the way everyone had back in Hispania, but with the weather further north, every year saw more men adopt the Gallic tradition. Soon, they'd probably be wearing the full length wool things and damn the consequences. It was better than your legs turning blue in winter.

Stretching the leg, he winced once again. The Greek medicus had told him to wrap it as tightly as he could to get the greatest level of support, while still allowing reasonable movement.

It felt peculiar and looked worse, but he had to admit that, as he put pressure on the floor with his foot, the knee pained him less than usual. The medicus - he had finally relented yesterday and visited the quack practitioner - had carefully checked him over and announced that, despite the pain, there was actually nothing wrong with the joint. It was simply a bad 'sprain' or something that should have healed long ago, but instead of strengthening it, Fronto had been favouring the other leg and allowing it to weaken yet further.

It had actually surprised Fronto when the man had measured his legs and showed him the comparison. His good leg was considerably bigger and more muscular. His weak one had seemed spindly and stringy by comparison. Half a year of neglect and his leg was pathetic. It was that more than anything that had made him decide he had hit the bottom of the trough and it was time to start climbing up again.

He was not a young man, and he knew it, but he had always had a level of fitness well below his age. He had used to outrun the young raw recruits. Now he wheezed when he climbed out of the bath.

No more.

He looked the length of the running track. It seemed impossibly far. The sounds of laughter and splashing from the Piscina Publica - a wide open swimming reservoir - saturated the area. Here, alongside the public pool where the children frolicked, a private running track and small palaestra stood for the exercise of the Roman physique.

Fronto tried to ignore the perfect specimens of manhood that used the park, all rippling muscles and firm abdomens, oiled and tanned in the early summer sun. He tried to ignore the fleshy folds he knew were safely hidden inside his faded military tunic and peered at the hairy, less-than-muscular leg.

All this would change.

Nearby a man grunted as he lifted a bar of weights that looked to Fronto impossibly heavy. Behind him, a man vaulted over a low wall again and again, sometimes spinning or somersaulting in the air. Fronto called him some unkind things and stood, wincing.

Fixing his gaze on the far end of the track, which looked like it might be halfway to Syria, he took a deep breath. One glance and then he dropped to a crouch, his mind replacing that featureless brick wall at the far end painted with rude graffiti, with an image of a nice bowl of pork loin and buttered flatbread. Mmmmm.

He ran.

The first hundred paces were fine. In fact, he began to wonder what all the fuss had been about and why he had been putting all this off for so long.

And then, suddenly, the pain leaked through his euphoria and into his brain. The only reason he didn't collapse in a rolling ball of tangled limbs was the sheer confusion as to the pain's source. Clearly, the sharp, shooting agony was the knee, but it appeared to be fighting for prominence with the feeling that apparently someone had extricated his lungs and was grilling them while they were still in use. The burning was so intense he panicked and stumbled to a halt.

His hands dropped to his knees and he felt at the wad of bandaging.

It was intact. And apparently his lungs were still on the inside, despite the pain.

Still, it was the first time he had done more than amble across a tavern room in half a year. Not bad.

Turning, his face fell. The starting line from which he had set off was nightmarishly close. Turning back he frowned irritably. The end wall was still so far away he couldn't pick out individual bricks or bits of graffiti. He had made it barely a third of the way along the track! It had felt like a thousand paces, but in the old days he could have spat this far.

With a clenched jaw, he realised that this was one of those make-or-break moments, like the ones he had faced in so many battles. Either he would succumb to the pain and discomfort and the laziness, accept that he was getting too old, give up and go home - or… he would take the failure as a challenge and learn from it. Use it in a manly fashion to challenge himself and push through the limits, seeking to run a little further each time until he was sprinting the track with no trouble.

The guilt repeatedly smashed him in the face as he stooped to collect his belongings by the starting line and left the complex.

Perhaps there was a third option: a sensible and timely withdrawal to marshal his forces and bring forward the reserves.

He would come back tomorrow.

In the evening.

When all the Hercules wannabes would not be there to watch him flounder and fail.

With a sense of having neatly sidestepped failure with a spurious plan for future attempts, he strode toward the slope of the Aventine and home. At the corner of the street that led up towards the house of the Falerii, where a popular bakery stood, a wall was given over to the display of public notices. While the majority of these were private and sometimes cryptic, interspersed with the crude and rude comments scribbled or illustrated by the few commoners who could write, this was one of four cardinal points in the city where inscribed copies of the 'acta diurna' - the official public daily notices - were posted for those few who could read. Every hour or two a helpful priest from the small Temple of Picumnus across the road would pop out and read aloud the acta diurna for the rest.

Fronto approached with interest, noting the two servants of the state hanging the latest news on the wall and then pushing their cart off back into the city. The higher strata of society present milled around before the wall, running through the notices, and Fronto joined them. It was always worth catching up on the news before Faleria or Lucilia chided him for not paying attention. Besides, there might be the latest tidings from Gaul or Syria on there.

His eyes scanned the tablets, picking out small points of interest. There was very little of note and certainly nothing of martial interest.

He was about to turn and leave when he paused, a nagging feeling clawing at his consciousness that he had totally bypassed something he should have paid more attention to. Once again, this time taking more care, he scanned the tablets and finally, on the third one, there it was.

Deaths.

Should it worry him that notification of deaths were the only things that seemed to be of import to him? No one else seemed to have noticed the important piece of news. Or was it maybe that no one recognised its importance?

How many people in the city even knew who Aurelia Cotta was?

Apparently no one in this crowd, as he could not sense even a single intake of breath.

Fronto had met the lady Aurelia maybe half a dozen times in his life and always in the presence of her only son: Gaius Julius Caesar. While Fronto had never known Caesar's father, who had died some thirty years ago, the elderly Aurelia had been a force of nature who had always impressed him. There was no other way to describe her. It was quite clearly from her that Caesar and his two sisters had inherited their shrewdness, intelligence and self-control. The lady Aurelia had held the family together with her strength and fortitude despite having been made almost destitute during the proscriptions of Sulla. She was one of the cornerstones at the very least of the entire Julian family. She was also, though he would be loath to admit it, one of the few human beings that Caesar would willingly and readily bend his knee to. A woman, in fact, who Caesar would flip the world on its back to please. It was just possible that, apart from his own daughter, the lady Aurelia was the only person that Caesar would ever truly love.

Fronto pictured the general, sitting as he was accustomed, in his folding campaign chair, poring over a table full of maps. Unbidden, an image of Caesar receiving this news leapt into his mind's eye, and the resulting picture was almost unbearable. Heart-breaking.

Suddenly, Fronto felt a wave of guilt. For the first time since he had turned his back on the general last autumn, he realised that no matter how many capable officers Caesar might have, there were some things that, Fronto having spent so long with the man, only he was qualified to deal with.

Grief was one of them.

For the first time in years it was distinctly possible that Caesar might need his shoulder to lean on; his and only his. And for the first time in years he was not there to provide it.

Ideas of a mad horse-relay ride to northern Gaul popped into his mind. If he left quickly enough, it was just possible that he might beat news of the death to the army.

No. Stupid!

It was no longer his place to be that person. And he had responsibilities here that he couldn't simply drop.

A moment later, his face set grim and his failed exercises entirely forgotten, Fronto was striding up the hill, wincing with every other step but otherwise ignoring it and making for home. By the time he reached the door, his mind had run through everything he could remember of his conversations with Catullus on the night of the wedding feast, but he was no closer to piecing together his forgotten foretelling. While Fronto was no great believer in prophecy - actively, rather than passively, disbelieving it - it was more than tempting to see the death of Aurelia Cotta as part of the same prediction.

He tried the door but found it locked tight. Of course. Hammering on the wood, he waited until Posco opened it and then strode inside. Faleria stood in the atrium as one of her endless young women arranged her best midnight blue stola and hung the gold necklace around her neck, adding a gold hair net, while another produced her best sandals.

"Going somewhere nice?"

"Not exactly" Faleria shot back at him, rather harshly. "The house of Pompey."

Fronto stepped forward and raised his hand. "Now might not exactly be the time."

"Now is
precisely
the time. I take it you refer to Aurelia Cotta?"

"Yes. Young Julia's going to have a lot on her mind right now."

"Why do you think I'm going, Marcus? Do use your brain once in a while."

"It's a family thing. Maybe you should leave her alone."

"Her father is a thousand miles away, Marcus, surrounded by barbarians. She hardly speaks to her aunts, and her husband might not be sympathetic enough an ear. At times like this, she needs a friend."

Fronto nodded slowly. "Then be careful. Want some company?"

"From you? No. I don't think that would help at all. You stay here and keep your wife busy - she wanted to come with me and I don't want to crowd poor Julia."

Fronto nodded and strode past her towards the peristyle garden, where he could hear voices. As he passed from the shadow of the house's interior out into the sunlit courtyard, he could see Lucilia sitting on that white marble bench, chatting away to Galronus, who stood nearby looking distinctly uncomfortable, as though he had been left guarding the lady and didn't know from what.

"Psst!" he hissed at the Remi officer, trying not to attract the attention of the Lucilia. After a moment, Galronus turned and saw Fronto. With a nod of recognition, and pausing politely only until Lucilia finished her diatribe and returned to her reading, he strode across the garden, his feet crunching on the gravel paths, and came to a halt in front of the house's master.

As usual these days, the Gallic nobleman was attired in the Roman style, but had opted against the toga - a tendency the two men shared. His long hair was well brushed and braided, but his chiselled, clean shaven jaw tore away most of the signs of barbarism from his person. Only the hair and the gold torc at his neck would really give him away. Otherwise he might as well be Roman.

"You've heard?" he asked.

"Just. I saw the acta diurna on the corner of Ostia and Lampmakers. A courier will be riding his horse to death to get the news to Caesar already."

Galronus nodded. "How will the general take it?"

"Badly, I suspect, though no one will notice. He'll contain it and force it down inside until he's alone in the winter, when he'll have the time and space to grieve. At least by then he'll have a grandson to take the edge off it."

"A bad way to go."