The Pillars of Rome

CHAPTER TWELVE

Aulus rolled onto his back with that same angry feeling which had been with him since the first night he came home. The trouble was he could not bring himself to blame his young wife for her lack of interest, he being so much older than she. And that difference in age grew more marked with each passing year, a fact that had been made so much worse by the long separation of his proconsular service in Illyricum. He knew her skin was dry, so the sweat on his body seemed to mock him. She would not perspire, all the effort was from him, and had been for years.

‘I’m sorry, Aulus.’

‘Why do you sound so sad?’

‘Because I am. Because I cannot give you what you need.’

Aulus rolled back onto one elbow, his body above hers. He ran his hand over her firm breast, just brushing the nipple. Claudia, her eyes shut tight, gave an involuntary shiver. ‘It’s not as though you cannot feel. I thought time would be enough to heal you. I prayed that our life would be as it once was.’

She laughed softly, but it indicated misery, not happiness. ‘The perfect Roman couple, both of the finest stock despite the difference in age and a touch of Sabine blood in my past. A mature and garlanded warrior entwined, in the strictest marriage form, with his young bride. I think your old friend Lucius Falerius should be jealous.’

Aulus was perplexed. It was rare for Claudia to offer anything other than the persistent apology. ‘Is that not enough?’

‘It ought to be.’

His voice betrayed the anger he fought so hard to conceal beneath his habitual calm exterior. ‘That’s not what I asked!’

She opened her eyes and looked into his, then reached up and touched his face. ‘No woman has the right to demand more than a husband like you. You’re a gift from the gods.’

‘Yet you reject that gift at every turn,’ he snapped. ‘We hardly speak to each other during the day, you wander the house as though your mind is elsewhere, without guests we dine in near silence and here in bed you’re like a statue. Yet tonight, when Lucius sought to reproach my views, you leapt to my defence.’

‘I don’t know why you bother, Aulus.’

He spoke almost without feeling, determined to hide both the depth of his passion plus the guilt he felt for what had happened to her in Spain. ‘I bother because I love you.’

‘Any other man would have put me aside, perhaps for another wife.’

His hand wandered up from her breast to her throat. ‘I have the right to kill you, Claudia, if I so wish.’

‘I won’t struggle, Aulus, and I’ll gladly release you from the need to return my dowry.’

She had not meant her words to sound churlish, but the right tone for what she was trying to say eluded her.

‘Why!’ he shouted, stung at last to outright anger, his hand involuntarily closing round her windpipe. ‘Why?’

Her shoulders started to heave. Aulus saw she was crying and he released his grip, his head fell on her shoulder and he spoke softly, his words muffled by her skin. ‘Why?’

She strained to keep her voice level. ‘How glad I am that you are angry, husband. I often wish that you would show anger more often.’

When he replied the thickness in his own throat was obvious. ‘I need some kind of explanation, Claudia.’

‘Something died in me, Aulus. Something vital! For all your efforts you cannot revive it and I tell you now that is the last word I will say. I shall not speak of it again and if you wish to respond, do so by showing your anger. I hate your pity more than I hate anything in the world.’

With that Claudia turned her back on him, eyes tight shut as she recalled that day of the battle. She thought it odd that she could never remember the faces of those murderous tribesmen intent on raping her, even if she could quite easily recapture the feelings of loathing and disgust she had felt at the time. It was as if the change in her life was so total that she had blocked them out, as if the flashing falcata blade had sliced through the two separate parts of her existence, forever separating them. That decapitation had halted everyone, so the only sound she could hear was the sobbing and muffled screams of those women less fortunate than she. As her saviour helped her to her feet, wrapping her nakedness in a cloak of rough wool, his height became even more obvious. She barely came up to his chest and even through the dust in the air and the odour of death which surrounded her she had smelt him, a musky fragrance of fresh perspiration that had never left her memory. Then he had spoken, in perfect Latin, in a deep and harmonious voice to ask her if she was suffering from any pain.

‘No,’ Claudia had replied, aware, as the aches of her violation began to make themselves felt, that she was lying. Her arms hurt from the way she had been dragged around, her chest and back from the pummelling of the pushing and shoving. She could feel where her hair had been tugged till it nearly parted from her scalp and the throbbing by her eye she suspected had come from a blow to the side of the head.

‘Look at me.’

Claudia fought her own inclination to respond, as a way of stating defiance, a way of showing this barbarian she was not there to obey commands, but another force seemed to exert a more telling pressure that brought up her head. What struck her first were the eyes, large, piercing and bright blue, set in a face that was bronzed, not blackened by the sun, his hair golden and long. His hand came up slowly to touch her cheek right at the point where it now throbbed and those blue eyes closed while the face took on a look of deep concentration. Almost immediately Claudia felt the pain ease, and within seconds it had gone completely. He spoke swiftly as the eyes opened again, in a tribal argot she could not understand.

Claudia was subjected to a series of mixed emotions. She knew she had this man to thank for saving her honour — very likely her life — and she could not help but be impressed by his presence, the effortless ease with which he commanded respect, yet he was clearly an enemy, so she felt she should despise him. It was an emotion she tried very hard to conjure up, only to find that when she spoke her voice sounded meek.

‘Who are you?’

‘I am Brennos, the leader of the Celt-Iberians. I have told them to take you to our camp. You will be treated with all respect. Anyone who harms a hair on your head knows he will have to face me.’

‘The other women?’ Claudia asked, sure that every man was already dead.

‘Are of no interest to me. They do not have a Roman general for a husband.’

Isolation, in an unlit tent made of animal skins, allowed Claudia’s thoughts to run riot. She sat in the only chair, every possible scenario played out in her imagination: Aulus riding into the Celtic camp to rescue her; the same rescuer dragged in chains and defeated, to be burnt in a wicker cage before her eyes. In her head armies clashed and both sides won and lost, with her own possible fate mixed with the heat and blood of battle. What would Brennos do with her? Had he saved her from his fellow barbarians only to despoil her at his own leisure? Would she be sacrificed to one of their heathen gods? And through all of this two images fought for supremacy: first the face of Aulus, swarthy skin, black eyes, grave with his pepper and salt hair, concerned for her well-being, and second that of Brennos. It was not so much his face but his presence, a power of personality so great that she could still smell him, still hear his voice and the touch of his healing hand. The sounds from outside grew as night fell, plunging the interior of the tent into a pitch darkness that only served to enhance her disquiet, wandering from being brave to near panic and back again. Sleep proved impossible, every time she closed her eyes the image of those who had died that day leapt up like accusers. Opening them was little better; she felt as if their ghosts were in the tent, crowding in on her, demanding to know why she was alive while they had perished.

The growing clamour outside went some way to alleviating this, her confused and solitary state making it easy to translate the shouted sounds of a language she did not understand into her own native Latin. Individual voices predominated, interspersed with the sudden roars of acclamation. Then there was only one voice, angry, starting out even and rising steadily to a shout, soon to be joined by others in what seemed to be disagreement. More voices were added to the dispute until no one person could be heard, then the tent flap was hauled back, and Brennos, carrying a flaring torch, entered.

He was still coated in the dust of the day’s action, the great decapitating sword at his side, dressed in a loose smock and leggings held in place by the thongs of his sandals. As he stuck the torch in a metal sconce Claudia observed again his salient features, mentally recognising that he was extremely handsome, with his height, his broad shoulders and the lean, tanned face. That was before she sharply reminded herself he was the enemy of both her city and her husband. He looked around the tent, at the unused bed covered with a sheepskin, the wicker stand that held a basin and a jug of water, none of which she had used, then back to Claudia, still in her woollen cloak, her sitting pose rigid.

‘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.