The Pillars of Rome (20 page)

‘You are comfortable?’

‘I am a prisoner.’

The haughty pose she struck then clearly amused him. ‘I have been a prisoner in my time, lady, and it was not like this. When you fear to sleep lest the rats eat your toes you will know what being a prisoner means.’

‘My husband?’

‘Is alive and still in command of his army.’ Brennos sighed then, before adding, with a toss of the head, ‘Those fools behave as if we won a great victory. They are telling each other how brave they are.’ His face held a strange expression, which Claudia thought, at first, was despair, but closer
examination showed it to be frustration. ‘Your husband is a good soldier.’

‘The very best that Rome has,’ Claudia replied, pompously.

Brennos smiled then, for the first time. ‘Then I can be sure that once I’ve beaten him, I have nothing to fear.’

‘You won’t beat Aulus, and even if you did, another army would arrive next year.’

‘And another the year after,’ he replied, in a voice that showed no trace of fear at the prospect. ‘That is always assuming I stay here and wait to be attacked. Instead of putting them to all the trouble of marching to Spain I’ll meet them outside the gates of Rome.’

Claudia had to stop herself laughing then. His words, calmly delivered as they were, still sounded like madness to her. ‘You think yourself greater than Hannibal.’

‘Not me, lady,’ Brennos said, taking the gold eagle charm between his fingers, an act which drew it once more to Claudia’s attention. It flashed in the torchlight as he moved it, seeming to have come alive, as if the bird was actually flying. ‘But the race to which I belong. Your husband was lucky today, so we will meet again. He has to be lucky once more, indeed every time he fights the Celtic tribes. They only need to be lucky once.’

As he spoke he strode towards a jug and basin,
undoing his sword belt and peeling off his smock. With a start Claudia realised that this tent was his own, obvious really since she was his personal prisoner. She tried to avert her gaze as he picked up the water jug and emptied half the contents over his head, but the image of the muscles moving in that broad, tanned back stayed with her. The flap opened again to admit two girls, one of whom had fresh clothes for Brennos, while the other carried a tray of food, which she laid on the sheepskin bedcover. Neither said a word, yet Claudia observed interest in the way they gazed at him, looks that made her wonder at his own domestic arrangements. Was there a wife or a series of concubines ready to satisfy his needs? Why was she curious?

‘Eat,’ he commanded.

She was hungry, ravenous in fact, but she also had her pride. ‘I have no desire to take anything from you.’

That look of frustration crossed his face again. ‘Please don’t be foolish. I have sent a message to your husband, saying if he wants you back he and his legions must quit Spain.’

‘He will never agree to that.’

‘No, he won’t. I doubt your being my prisoner will affect a single act of his as a soldier.’

‘Then you might as well kill me now.’

Claudia knew she had struck a pose as she said
that, her head turned away, eyes raised in an attempt to imbue her words with a degree of nobility. She stayed like that as he approached her, very aware of his proximity as he stood by her chair. His hand reached out to touch her chin and pull her head round, the contact sending a shiver through her whole body.

‘You would face death, I think, with that same look.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Roman pride.’

‘Roman spirit.’

His hand dropped to the edge of her cloak, opening it slightly to reveal her naked flesh. A single finger was brushed across her skin, and all the time those blue eyes held hers, in a locked gaze she could not break. She felt her body react to his touch, a tingling that went down her arms to her fingertips, a feeling halfway between an ache and pleasure that forced her to clench the muscles of her stomach. Two things Claudia knew: that she should not feel like this, it was wrong and wicked; it was also a sensation she had never before experienced, and one that she did not want to stop.

‘I would want that Roman spirit maintained, which means you must eat. We brought the wagon with your possessions back from the battlefield. You should wash and dress as well.’

Both physical and eye contact were broken
simultaneously. Brennos picked up his huge sword, with its heavy curved blade, broad at the base and narrow near the handle, then the torch.

‘And you should sleep. We leave here at first light.’

Claudia tried, only to find her efforts punctuated by screams and wailing, leaving her unsure if what she was hearing came from her dreams or reality. When Brennos came back his clean smock was coated with blood so fresh and copious that it glistened in the torchlight. Through one narrowed eye she watched him as he stripped again, unable to properly hear the soft incantations that sounded like prayer. With his head back, eyes closed, the eagle talisman at his neck held in one hand, he looked very much like a man asking for forgiveness.

Brennos kept Claudia close to him, wherever he went. The Celt-Iberians moved camp often, rarely staying in one spot for more than the three days it took to strip the country around them of surplus food. Most of the time her world was bound by deep wooded valleys and rocky escarpments, with only an occasional glimpse of the coastal plain controlled by her own people, the one constant being a blazing sun punctuated every few days by tremendous rain-storms full of thunder and lightning. When they pitched their tents she was assigned to his; when they rode, her horse was
rarely more than a few feet from him and since he treated her with respect it was impossible not to respond, just as it was impossible, even for someone who could not speak a word of the language, to pick up the hint of the problems that Brennos laboured under.

As they rode out of that first camp the bodies of the slaughtered, men, women and children, were still lying where they had fallen. Over the following days she learnt that these were tribal chiefs and their families, men who thought one battle with Rome quite sufficient and who had wanted to return to their own lands with what they had managed to acquire. She could see the way that those tribal leaders still with him looked at Brennos; there was no love in their attentiveness, more a caution born of a desire to survive. Yet he held them together as a fighting force by some unnamed power, their forays to find Romans to harry always resulting in a return to the camp with booty in abundance. Each sortie would be followed by celebration and the recounting of long heroic tales to follow the feasting and drinking, all watched and heard by a leader who could not keep out of his eye a slight look of scorn. For all that they did as he asked.

Brennos had a quality of command that Claudia had seen in her husband, but he had something else as well: an elemental ascendancy over those with
whom he dealt. As the days and weeks went by, she began to realise that a portion of that same power had taken a hold of her. Proximity tempered both her resolve and her pride. It was impossible to be with someone like Brennos and maintain a stiff Roman neck, hopeless to try and avoid conversation with a man so curious about Rome and its ways, who so entranced her with tales of his own past. So Claudia learnt of the land of mists and rain from which he had come, far to the north surrounded by angry water where gold and tin were mined and the people painted their faces blue. She heard of the ordeals undertaken by those like him who wished to serve as Druid priests, scourged by fire, earth and water, during the latter bound to a rock while the great western sea lashed at his naked body; of the vow each took to forsake the company of women for life.

Brennos could recount the history of his race, with stories harking back to beyond the mists of time; tell of battles won and heroes made; invoke the intercession of the Great God
Dagda
and his companion, the Earth Mother,
Morrigan
. He was a man who could describe, in detail, the potions that healed, as well as those which killed, reel off the entire canon of Celtic law, which he had been empowered to interpret. Less and less she thought of Aulus; her husband seemed to recede from her considerations, to become like a distant memory,
her thoughts taken up instead with imagined conversations with Brennos, and Claudia, though still only eighteen, was old enough and experienced enough to know that the growing feelings she harboured for this Celt were reciprocated. It was in the way he looked at her, the smile she saw that was given to few others. She could make him laugh too, and took pleasure from doing so, the guilt of that first night, at even speaking with an enemy, weakening as time went by.

As a man Brennos was naturally tactile, much given to touching those with whom he was in conversation. This applied to his tribal commanders as well as her, leaving her to wonder if they felt the same sensation, that feeling that imbued every pore on her skin with an ache of impatience. Claudia Cornelia went to sleep beside her husband recalling that it was she not Brennos who had acted to bring matters to a head. Pointedly she wore that same cloak with which he had covered her nakedness the first day they met. Not a shred of remorse did she feel as she took the hand of her tall blue-eyed Celt, to pull him to her and place her lips on his. There was no image of Aulus when she let that cloak slip from her shoulders to reveal the same naked body. Brennos had resisted, but feebly, unable, despite his vows, to cope with so determined a woman.

It was she who removed his smock, then knelt, her head against his groin, to untie the thongs that
held on his sandals. Brennos was half pleading with her to desist, but only vocally. For once, Claudia had the elemental power not him, a power strong enough to lead him to the sheepskin-covered bed, to pull his naked body onto hers. It was her hand on that eagle charm, not his, holding it behind his head so that it would not cause her pain. What came from Brennos’s throat as he made love to her sounded very much like that. She remembered it now, just as she remembered the sensations she had undergone, feelings that were as new to her as they were to her barbarian lover.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Titus Cornelius returned to Spain not as the youngest son of the great Macedonicus, a boy mounted on a cob, but as a fully fledged tribune commanding several centuries, to the very locality where his father had begun his campaign so many years before. He had even visited the battlefield, that long shallow valley where he had first experienced action. It was hard after so many years and in surroundings so peaceful to recall the thousands engaged, the clouds of dust, the clang of swords, the clamour of battle, the smell of blood and death. What lingered was the memory of what followed: the long, hard campaign; the constant risk of ambush as his father’s cohorts pushed their way into the mountains to flush out the enemy; the burning and pillaging that was necessary to suppress each tribe in turn; how his father had borne his own burden in silence, concentrating on the tactics necessary to isolate
and finally defeat Brennos. The endless list of tribes and chieftains who had eventually agreed to peace, each one obliged to leave blood relatives as hostages in the Roman encampment until the campaign was over, as a token of continued good behaviour.

Titus had regarded these sons and nephews of the tribal chiefs with all the arrogance of his race, but that mellowed with contact; they were barbarians, uncouth in speech and manners, but they also held a fascination for an enquiring mind. Tentative contact was established after the ritual exchange of a suspicious glare, this encouraged by his father’s habit of treating them as honoured guests instead of prisoners. The reasoning was simple; if these young men knew Rome better, they might respect her more.

Facets of their very different life were absorbed during the games they played; mock sword fights in which each side would learn how to parry each other’s weapons, short Roman sword against wooden
falcatas
. They engaged in archery and spear-throwing competitions, bouts of wrestling and boxing, horse races at which the Celts excelled and, once the campaign had reached a certain point of success, hunting expeditions. Titus learnt to tell one tribe from another, how to communicate basic expressions in their tongue, while teaching them the rudiments of Latin. They were not content to
compete with him, but more intent on besting some rival from another tribe. The interlocking relationships, hatreds and disputes between the various clans were too complex to master, and tact was necessary to avoid offence. In particular Aulus encouraged his son, when peace was finally brought to the frontier, to show respect and friendship to the leader of the Bregones, only a few years older than Titus, but a hereditary chieftain. In this case curiosity was mutual; Masugori could speak some Latin and wanted to know as much about Rome as Titus did about Celt-Iberian culture, and he became the person who tutored the young Roman in the language, local dialects, customs, and more importantly who hated who, knowledge that allowed him to understand more clearly those with whom he had contact.