The Emperor's Knives (7 page)

‘Best if you come with us, Tribune. The senator wants a word with you, and it’s probably best not to have the plebs gawping at us while he’s doing it, eh?’

He shot Marcus a knowing glance and then raised a questioning eyebrow at Scaurus, who looked appraisingly at the men encircling his command.

‘Your men
are
armed, I presume, Centurion Cotta?’

The retired soldier snapped out a terse order.

‘Swords!’

Each of his men pushed a hand into their roll of cloth, pulling a short infantry gladius from the fabric. Scaurus shrugged, his glance at Marcus eloquent, then turned to follow Albinus up the street. Thirty paces brought them out into the shade of a small square surrounded on all sides by insulae, and the burly senator waited silently in its middle until his hired swordsmen had herded the Tungrians into the enclosed space, grinning as Julius and Dubnus looked about them with expressions promising swift violence, clearly restrained only by the weapons that hemmed them in on all sides.

‘Perfect, isn’t it? I own the buildings around us, of course, which is why there aren’t idlers dangling out of every window!’

Scaurus looked about him with thinly disguised amusement.

‘Always one for the theatrical, aren’t you Senator?’

The big man smiled broadly back at him, revelling in his domination of the situation he had so clearly engineered.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t call this theatrical, Rutilius Scaurus, I’d be using the term
gladiatorial.
’

The tribune shook his head in bemusement.

‘Gladiatorial? What, do you intend to turn your men loose on us in some sort of pitched battle? What do you think the urban cohorts will make of that? I’m sure they’ll be along soon enough, given the spectacle you made back there with so much illegal iron on the street.’

Albinus shook his head, his smile widening.

‘Oh, I doubt it. The local tribune has managed to get himself rather deeper into debt than might have been sensible, so once I’d purchased that debt it was relatively easy to persuade him to keep his men clear of the area for rather more time than I need for this carefully constructed scenario to play out. Centurion?’

Cotta stepped forward, dropping a sword at Marcus’s feet with a clang of iron on stone, and shot him another pointed glance that narrowed Julius’s eyes with a sudden suspicion. The senator pointed to the weapon, his voice taking on a triumphant tone as he barked out an order.

‘Pick up the sword, Valerius Aquila! Pick up the sword, and prepare to fight for your life!’

Scaurus stepped forward, his expression hardening, and a pair of Albinus’s ex-legion bodyguards moved swiftly to block any attempt to approach their master.

‘What the fuck are you playing at,
Decimus
?’

Albinus grinned back at him from behind his protectors.

‘Nice try, Rutilius Scaurus, but no amount of impudence is going to distract me from delivering this lesson to you. Perhaps the death of your pet centurion will teach you to exercise a little more humility with your betters. Now, pick up the sword,
boy
, or I’ll have my man here kill you anyway, defenceless or not.’

Marcus smiled tolerantly in the face of the insult, bending to take the sword by its hilt.

‘Be warned, Roman …’ Martos stepped forward to stand beside Scaurus and raised a finger to the senator, his expression murderous. ‘If this man is harmed here while you hide behind those swords, I will find you and tear your heart from your body with my bare hands!’

Albinus raised his eyebrows in mock terror.

‘And how will you make that happen, when a word from me will see you dead on the cobbles beside him? Would anybody else like to consider volunteering for a place in the closest refuse pit? No? Let’s be about it then! Centurion!’

Cotta stepped forward, reaching forward to tap Marcus’s blade with his own with an evil grin.

‘You ready to fight, youngster?’

Marcus looked at Scaurus with a helpless shrug, discarding his toga on the square’s cobbles for one of the senator’s bodyguards to remove.

‘This has been coming ever since this man and I laid eyes on each other that night on the Palatine Hill, Tribune.’

Scaurus nodded in reply, and the two men dropped into fighting crouches, each of them watching the other as they circled slowly. Cotta looked his opponent up and down, nodding reluctant approval at the younger man’s muscular frame.

‘You’re a fighting soldier, from the look of you. Britannia, was it?’ Marcus nodded, focusing intently on the other man’s eyes as Cotta shook his head in apparent disgust. ‘Full of tunic lifters and arse pokers, Britannia. It’s a shame your old man didn’t send you somewhere character-forming before they murdered him.’

The younger man feinted forward with the point of his gladius, watching in cold amusement as his opponent stepped back and parried easily.

‘What, somewhere like Dacia?’

Cotta snorted his ridicule.

‘Dacia? Land of cock suckers. And don’t bother telling me about Germania either, the whole province is riddled with queers. No boy, if you want to be a real soldier then you need to get sand in your crack!’

He advanced swiftly, testing Marcus’s defence with half a dozen swift strokes, grinning as the Tungrian retreated closer and closer to the men guarding the exit from the square. As his seventh cut sliced in low, aimed at Marcus’s left thigh, the younger man tossed his sword into his left hand and parried it wide, stepping quickly forward and twisting to punch a half-fist into Cotta’s right bicep and then straightened his body, using the momentum to swing a vicious back fist at the grimacing centurion’s face. Cotta barely managed to duck out of the blow’s path, giving the younger man all the time he needed to swivel to his right and hook the veteran’s leg with his extended left boot. The older man fell back onto the cobbles with a grunt of expelled breath, the sword falling from his nerveless fingers.

‘Get at him! Kill him while he’s down!’

Ignoring Dubnus’s bellowed encouragement, Marcus bent to pick up the fallen weapon, watching as Cotta recovered his footing and took a sword from each of the two nearest men. The veteran stood out of sword’s reach for a moment, breathing hard and appraising his opponent with a new respect.

‘I heard you were taught to fight by a soldier and a gladiator. Which one of them taught you that little move?’

Marcus closed the distance between them, scraping the soles of his boots across the cobbles.

‘The soldier, as I recall. He wasn’t up to much when it came to swordplay, but he knew more than enough dirty tricks.’

Cotta raised his blades.

‘Sounds like my kind of man. The gladiator must have been a faggot if he taught you to fight with two swords.’

Marcus shrugged again, his eyes locked on the points of Cotta’s blades, stepping closer still until the tips of their swords were touching.

‘He made a start. I perfected the style in a few battles that you might have heard of while you were lazing around Rome protecting fat-arsed politicians from their own stupidity.’

Both men lunged forward at the same time, their swords meeting each other and pushing wide as the soldier snapped his head forward to butt Marcus in the face, but the younger man was ready for the attack, ducking his head and then wrenching it back up to deliver a heavy blow to Cotta’s chin. The former soldier staggered backwards, spitting blood from his bleeding tongue and spluttering with laughter.

‘You cheeky young bastard!’

Marcus held his swords out ostentatiously wide of his body, then dropped them onto the ground with a clatter of iron on stone.

‘Shall we go to bare knuckles then, Cotta, or have you had enough?’

The older man shook his head, tossing his own weapons aside and feeling his jaw.

‘Fuck that, I think you’ve already broken one of my teeth.’

Albinus bridled, pointing at Marcus with a face contorted with rage.

‘What the
fuck
are you doing, Cotta?!
Kill
him!’

The ex-centurion wiped the blood from his mouth, shaking his head with a tight smile of warning.

‘If you want him dead so badly, Senator, you feel free to try to kill him.’

The senator put his face inches from the veteran’s, his features twisted by a snarl of rage.

‘I paid well for you to set up this cosy little business, Centurion, which means that I
own
you. Either you do as I tell you, and leave this traitor’s spawn bleeding here in the street, or I’ll have you …’

Something within Cotta snapped, abruptly and without warning, and Scaurus pursed his lips as the ex-soldier took a handful of his sponsor’s toga.

‘Paid me well, did you?’ He reached into his belt purse and dropped a handful of gold coins onto the cobbles. ‘There’s your money, Senator!’ He pulled the toga down until Albinus’s head was level with his chest, bending to snarl into the terrified man’s ear, grinding his words out through gritted teeth. ‘And you’ll have me what? Killed?’ He laughed down into the senator’s face.
‘Hah!
I’ll disembowel any man you send after me, and then I’ll strangle you with the bastard’s guts!’

Scaurus strolled forwards, patting Cotta on the arm.

‘I think your point is made, Centurion.’

Albinus staggered back, propelled by a push from Cotta’s broad hand, pointing a trembling finger at the former soldier.

‘If I can’t buy you, I’ll buy your men! Ten gold aurei for the man that puts his iron through that treacherous bastard’s guts!’

There was a moment of silence as the former soldier stared at him with naked disgust, until at length he spat bloody phlegm across the coins scattered at his feet. When he spoke his voice was cold, as if his anger had burned out and been replaced by something harder and more implacable.

‘You could offer them fifty apiece and I doubt you’d have any takers. We’ve something in common, these men and I, which is that we’ve all faced the empire’s enemies together, and bled, and lost our mates, while all
you’ve
ever done is sit on the back of a horse and come up with a succession of good ways for us to risk our lives to bring
you
glory. So I’ll give you two choices, Senator. You can leave now, with an escort of my men to protect you from the kind of scum who’ll take your purse and slap you about if you’re lucky, and drag you away never to be seen again if you’re not. Or you can open your mouth to say any words other than “
thank you, Cotta
” and then you’ll find out what it’s like to walk home alone with me following ten paces behind you, making sure every pimp, thug and murderer on the street knows just how vulnerable you are.’

He stood and stared at the white-faced Albinus, his expression still taut with anger.

‘Just three little words. Any
fucking
time you like, Senator …’

As the silence stretched out, Dubnus turned to a grinning Julius with a look of confusion, shaking his massive head in puzzlement.

‘Am I missing something here?’

2

‘Was it the dream again, my love?’

When Felicia awoke the next morning she found Marcus sitting by their quarter’s window, his eyes fixed on the lights burning on the walls of the city, the impending dawn still no more than a smudge of grey on the eastern horizon. She had lived with him for long enough to know what would have awoken him early, and the answer to her whispered question was already clear in her mind even as she asked it. He nodded, smiling across the room at her in the light of the single lamp burning in the corner, although his expression was more haunted than happy. She beckoned him with a crooked finger.

‘Come back to bed then, before Appius wakes up.’

He padded softly across the room and slid in behind his wife, warming his feet on her calves despite her quiet protests, pulling her to him and cupping her breasts in one hand.

‘Our meeting with Lucius Carius Sigilis’s father yesterday seems to have inspired the ghosts of my family to greater efforts. Twice last night and again this morning they came to me in my dreams, showing me their injuries and entreating me to take revenge for our family’s slaughter.’

She snuggled back against him, reaching a hand up to stroke his face.

‘My darling, you know that this is just—’

‘Just my sleeping mind, working on the events of the day and tortured by my guilt at having survived such horror?’ Felicia turned to face him, her expression growing more troubled as she realised that he was staring at the wall behind her. ‘That may well be the case, but I cannot live the rest of my life haunted by these dreams, whether they be my family’s ghosts or simply my mind’s way of coping with the reality of their horrific murders while I escaped from their killers. And now that I have the names of the four men who murdered my father, my brother, my sisters, and probably sold the rest of our household into slavery, I am bound to act against them.’ He paused before speaking again, knowing that his wife had to know the news he had kept to himself the previous evening. ‘A gang leader, a praetorian, a senator and a gladiator: Brutus, Dorso, Pilinius and Mortiferum. We got their names from an unlikely source though.’

Felicia frowned at something in her husband’s voice and sat up in bed, turning to look down at him in the light of the lamp burning by their son’s cot.

‘Unlikely?’

Marcus looked up at her, clearly trying to gauge her possible reaction before he spoke again.

‘Excingus.’

Her eyes opened wide with shock.

‘Excingus?!
The grain officer who kidnapped me and tried to murder us both?’

‘The same.’

‘And you didn’t …?’

‘Kill him? He was under Senator Sigilis’s protection. And taking my knife to him wouldn’t have changed anything, although it would have prevented me from learning the identities of the men who killed my father.’

Felicia looked back at him with a grave expression.

‘And if he hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t be planning to kill them all, would you? This can only end badly Marcus …’