Marius' Mules V: Hades' Gate (30 page)

He would have to join them presently. The battle here was over almost before it had begun, but the next fight would be critical. Wheat Valley must hold until the Romans turned away for the autumn, or the Catuvellauni would be destroyed.

Chapter Nine

SEPTEMBRIS

Fronto alighted from the litter in a sombre manner. Next to him Lucilia dropped down lightly, aided by the large, imposing form of Masgava, dressed now in a plain tunic and boots, cut of good cloth at a well-regarded seamstress'. He had no weapon and yet Fronto felt safer in his company than had he a half dozen knife-wielding thugs by his side.

"Remember to be patient and easy" he reminded his wife. "Julia tires very quickly and anything could cause her difficulties. At the first sign of weariness or trouble, we make our apologies and leave."

"She might appreciate the support."

"She will appreciate the freedom and relief that solitude affords more."

For eight days now Fronto and his wife had alternated with Faleria and Galronus in visiting the stricken daughter of Caesar. Galronus always looked strained and faintly uncomfortable before and after the visits - Pompey and Julia were nothing to him - but he bore the burden for Faleria, who he loved.

Since that incident a week previously when Pompey had returned home, healthy but shaken and spattered with other men's blood, Julia's health had risen and fallen like the waves of the Mare Nostrum. She had borne all the pain and trouble stoically. Amazingly so, in fact, and if anyone ever needed proof of her familial connections with Caesar, then her hardiness, her bloody-minded refusal to succumb to despair and her sheer strength of will were that proof.

The midwives had clustered around Julia and worried and clucked and flustered. The three women had all agreed that the child had been unharmed, despite the torrents of blood, but that Julia had been weakened to a dangerous degree by the shock to her system.

A medicus had arrived on the scene in moments, demanding that she be bled to balance the humors in her body, but the midwives had little need to argue with him as the general himself, quickly disrobed of his grisly garment, had personally slapped and ejected the physician. She had bled enough, he said.

Fronto felt slightly uncomfortable himself now at these visits. His only ties to Julia were though the former commander who he had forsaken and his sister, who was never present at these times. Lucilia was a friend of the poor girl's, but a recent one, and Pompey was still at best a social acquaintance. Every visit brought with it the difficulty of being in the former general's presence as he watched his love struggle. And every visit brought him into the presence of Berengarus the north-man, who seemed to be ever at Pompey's side these days.

As usual Fronto quietly asked Masgava to stay with the litter. Bringing a dangerous professional killer into the general's house would hardly be the best, most sociable of decisions.

Lucilia rapped on the door and waited.

Behind her, Fronto moved from foot to foot, not through nerves, but more the urge to get this uncomfortable visit over and get back to his routine.

Routine.

That meant the exercise and training to an extent that would make most legionaries quail. Velius was the only man Fronto had ever known to run a trainee from dawn 'til dusk with no break for food, pausing only to keep the victim watered. It looked worryingly like Masgava was building up to the same. Yesterday, Fronto had jogged from the house down the slopes of the Aventine, past the carceres of the Circus, skirting the Forum Boarium and then back along the narrow way between the Circus and the Palatine before trudging wearily back up the south eastern slope of the hill and home. Masgava had claimed it less than two miles in total though Fronto found it difficult to believe it had been any less than three.

One thing was certain: it was working.

For all his grumbling and shirking (wherever possible - which was sadly not as often as he would like under the watchful gaze of the master) his knee was strengthening all the time. Between the running that built it up and the exercises to carry out in the morning and evening, he no longer needed to sink to any available seat after walking a hundred paces.

His reverie was interrupted as the door opened just wide enough to show the man-mountain that was Berengarus behind it. Fronto frowned. The Germanic thug was not doorman material and never would be. Pompey had less hairy, belligerent slaves in his household for such duties.

"We are here for Julia." Lucilia announced with a smile that would cheer most men. The barbarian, however, narrowed his eyes in a manner that Fronto really did not like.

"Lucilia…"

His wife waved him aside with a negligent hand and Berengarus made to close the door again until a voice from inside said something that was not quite audible through the gap. At the unheard order, the door swung open and the barbarian stepped aside.

Fronto knew something was dreadfully wrong the moment his foot crossed the threshold. He had never been a really devout man, his devotions to the Gods mostly simple lip-service or the desperation of the near-terminally endangered, but he had a soft spot for Nemesis and Fortuna - vengeance and luck quite simply - who had become his patron Goddesses. A healthy and balanced, if confused and conflicting, belief in both fate and chance - a grudging recognition of the former and a high regard for the latter - had given him a strange sense of impending troubles that had manifested in various manners through the years. He refused to think of it as anything other than a natural ability.

His natural ability was playing him up something terrible this morning telling him fairly urgently to piss off and come back another day.

"Lucilia, this is a bad time. Let's go home."

"Hush, Marcus."

As Fronto, starting to feel distinctly uneasy, reached out to grasp his wife's shoulder, Pompey appeared in the atrium from the 'triumphal' corridor. His face was an ashen grey, his eyes puffy, pink and bloodshot. He was simply attired in a very military style red tunic, and that colour was shockingly echoed by the crimson that stained his hands and lower arms - blood that had dried on some time ago and which no attempt had been made to remove. He could easily have been ritually sacrificing a goat or some such, but Fronto's preternatural senses were telling him something else.

"Lucilia…"

"How fares Julia?" she asked the house's patron, though her voice shook as she saw his arms and realised that something was, as her husband's tone had suggested, quite wrong.

Pompey's eyes, 'til now downcast, came up to meet those of his guests.

Lucilia actually took a step back, bumping into her husband.

Though the puffiness and colour of the old general's face clearly told of hours of tears and the wrench of grief, it was not loss or despair they read in his cold eyes. It was rage, barely controlled beneath a seal of steel.

"Lucilia…" Fronto urged once more, as his wife trod on his toe stepping back.

"Master Pompey?" his wife asked, quietly, with a carefully measured combination of sympathy and guardedness.

"You have the temerity to come here? Today?"

Fronto was edging back towards the door, his hand on Lucilia's arm, encouraging her to follow him, but he paused for a moment, that same strange sense warning him. He glanced over his shoulder only to see that Berengarus had stepped between them and the door.

"Pompey" he said quietly. "Julia is not well?" He knew the answer, of course, but the question bought him conversation time during which he could try and think his way out of their apparent predicament. In the old days, he would have faced up to the old general, meeting anger with like, prepared to fight tooth and nail to leave. Not so now, with a young wife sharing the same danger. Now, his first thought had to be her safety. And of everything here, two things were certain: Julia had died, and they were anything but safe.

"Her weakness finally overcame her in the middle of the night" the general said, his voice quiet and carrying an undertone of menace. "She passed while birthing the boy."

Lucilia jerked in Fronto's grasp, her urge to run to the pleasant, young mother almost overwhelming. Fronto tightened his grasp. None of the other doors in the room would lead anywhere useful. Only the exit to the garden, blocked by the general himself, and the door to the street, covered by the barbarian. Unless they could talk their way out, which seemed increasingly unlikely, he would have to put one or the other down. His mind reeled. He was in better shape than he had been for many months but nowhere near the peak of his ability, and he hardly fancied his chances against the aging general, let alone the colossus behind him.

Helpfully, Lucilia continued to string the discussion along, buying him time.

"A boy? The Gods be praised for taking the oppressive darkness and drawing from it a small light."

"A
snuffed
light" Pompey snarled. "Dead before he could ever even see his father. As dead as my heart.
As dead as my joy
." The muscles in his arms flexed a warning. "As dead as my ties to your monster of a master" he added, his eyes slipping from Lucilia to her husband.

Fronto nodded fractionally.
An argument
. He had to draw Masgava's attention without supplying due warning to the pair in the room, else they might bring the rest of the general's motley force of thugs into the fray.

"Hold!" Fronto barked loudly. "Firstly, Caesar is
not
my master. Secondly, your ire is ill-aimed. We have visited your wife and supported her in every way possible. My wife and sister have been with her and helped her every step of the way. That she did not have the robustness to bring your child into the world is a tragedy, but not our doing. What cause have you to launch your anger at us?"

It mattered not, in truth. Fronto had known from the first time he had socialised with the general, months ago now, that Pompey had the heart and spleen of a savage animal, carefully encased in a veneer of civilisation. The man could explode at any time and Julia's passing seemed to have been enough of a trigger. Fronto's voice had risen in a tone of defensive anger - faked, of course, as he was too busy keeping the situation in mind, with the corner of his eye flicking back to Berengarus to make sure the thug was not closing on him. The loud, sharp tone was designed in truth not to stand against Pompey, but to cut through the atmosphere and pierce the door, hopefully reaching Masgava where he waited near the litter. Would the gladiator know to do anything? Would he
choose
to?

Pompey took a couple of steps forward, his hand coming up pointing, accusingly with a blood-stained finger that quivered a little.

"I know you're Caesar's creature. You always were, like that runt Clodius, even when he claimed to be serving me, or Brutus, or Antonius or any of the whole shipload of whoremongers, catamites, villains and traitors. I should have known to what lengths you would go two years ago when you had the audacity to interrupt a meeting of your betters and threaten me on the beak-nosed despot's behalf. But I chose to believe that you had broken your ties to him and that perhaps you might be of use to me."

The hand stopped wagging its index finger and made a sweeping motion instead.

"But no. You were, are, and forever will be Caesar's monkey, doing his dirty work and poisoning the world for the rest of us."

Lucilia's mouth formed a shocked 'O'.

Fronto's voice became indignant - strangely so as he pushed it up a notch of volume again, willing Masgava to be close to the door and not testing the ripeness of fruit on the stalls at the far side of the street.

"Whether you think me Caesar's man or not, what has that got to do with this nightmare? Your wife failed to birth a child. It's horrible, but hardly a first. These things happen. Have you lost your wits? Your reason?"

The general stopped, his eyes bulging, the veins at his temple throbbing faster. Fronto realised Pompey was ready to explode and that every tiny push from him could cause the whole situation to become deadly dangerous.

"I found your poison" Pompey spat. "The vial that has been ruining her. Did your sister plan this herself, or did you supply her with the toxin?"

Fronto's brow wrinkled. What was the old man blathering about?

His memory furnished him with an image of Faleria giving the heavily-pregnant girl an elixir of Raspberry and calming herbs in the hope that the old traditional infusion would help ease her difficulties.

"Don't be an idiot." His tone had dropped again, because now he really was angry. Too angry to push the volume of his voice. "A herbal infusion to calm a pregnant woman! Nothing more."

A low growl rose in Pompey's throat.

"I knew that eagle-faced lunatic would eventually turn on me, but I had not realised just how far he would go. To kill his
own daughter
just to deprive me of a love and an heir. Because this has his brand stamped all over it. You are a mindless lackey, Fronto, without the balls for this wickedness, but Caesar would drown Rome in a sea of blood if it suited his purposes."

It struck Fronto just how easily that last statement might just as easily be applied to the general in front of him as the one in Gaul. Again, Fronto felt his own ire grow and forced himself to keep it in check. Lucilia had to be his first concern.

"You can believe what you like, Pompey, but neither I nor my wife or sister had any hand in Julia's death; and Caesar may be a touch manipulative and heartless, but he would no more subject his own daughter to the slightest pain than he would himself. He may play wild with the lives of his enemies, but his family and friends are inviolable!"

The ease with which he had instantly leapt to the defence of his former commander startled Fronto. The general was shaking now and the former legate of the Tenth felt the tension in the room rising to a critical level.

His time was up.

No help was coming.

Turning, he came face to chest with Berengarus and angled his eyes up to meet the big barbarian's glare.