LITMIR.BIZ

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      Septimus was awakened from his light doze by the approaching steps of a guard detail. The familiar sound and unfamiliar surroundings meant he was instantly awake and on guard. Atticus was already standing in the middle of their quarters, his eyes locked on the door. He had never relaxed. The door was flung open and Scipio’s guard commander was framed in the entrance. He looked from one man to the other.

      ‘You are free to go but I need to know your whereabouts should the consul need to summon you.’

      His abrupt statement caught the two men off guard and Septimus took a second to form his reply.

      ‘We will be at the Capito house, my family home, in the Caelian quarter,’ he said.

      ‘Or at the castrum in Ostia with our ship,’ Atticus added.

      The guard commander nodded and stepped back from the door before leading the guard detail away.

      ‘So!’ Atticus said as he turned to face Septimus, happy at the order of release, ‘we’re going to your family home?’

      ‘Yes,’ replied Septimus with a smile, ‘just as soon as I’ve shown you some of the sights of Rome.’

      The centurion stood up and began to walk out into the late evening sunshine.

      ‘And if the consul comes looking for us while we’re out seeing the sights?’ the captain asked.

      ‘There’s no way he’ll look for us tonight; not if he’s just ordered us away.’

      ‘So we’ll be at your family home tomorrow. Will that leave us enough time to see the sights?’

      ‘Trust me, Atticus: when it comes to the sights I’m going to show you, one night is never enough – but one night is all most men can handle.’

      Scipio stormed into the tablinum, the master bedroom of his home, ripping off his toga as he went. He roared for wine to be brought and an instant later a slave entered and proffered the senator a golden goblet. Scipio snatched the drink and downed it in one, the tannic acidity of the wine only exacerbating the burning sensation of rage in his chest. The slave held up the amphora to refill the goblet, but Scipio grabbed the flask himself and ordered the slave to be gone. As the slave left the room, Scipio’s wife, Fabiola, entered. Her face was a mask of concern at the sight of her enraged husband. Scipio wheeled around and saw her standing by the now-closed door.

      ‘Fools!’ he spat. ‘Feeble-minded, incompetent fools.’

      Fabiola knew better than to question the source of his rage. She had seen this before, although never so intense. Everyone who was aware of the intimate workings of the Senate knew it to be a ponderous, frustratingly conservative beast. With three hundred of the city’s greatest egos confined within one chamber, it was common for the plans of one man, or even one group of men, however well-meaning or well thought out, to be thwarted by the sheer verbosity and squabbling of the Senate. It was plainly obvious that the plans they had earlier discussed had been undone. To question the reason would only give Scipio a focus for his rage and, although he had never struck her, Fabiola had long since realized that her husband had a barely contained violent streak.

      ‘Three hours!’ he continued. ‘Three hours the fools debated. Like a gaggle of chattering slave women in the market. Three hours and they failed to even vote on the creation of a fleet, never mind its commander.’

      Scipio emptied another goblet of wine, again in one swallow. It did nothing to calm his emotions.

      ‘That bastard Duilius. It was his doing. He had one of his pups question my proposal. Just a simple question. But a perfect blow. It was almost as if he had prepared in advance; as if he knew about the blockade before I announced it. His little thrust exposed a chink, just a tiny chink.’

      Scipio continued pacing, his fist clenched by his side, his knuckles white from the pressure. ‘But it was enough. Enough for the indecisive old men to pause and debate. Before long they weren’t even sure if a fleet was necessary, and if it was they debated over who would bear the cost. Now it will be a week before we go to vote. A week instead of a minute – all because of Gaius Duilius.’

      Fabiola, her mind agitated by the mood of her husband, could only watch Scipio vent his rage. As he raved, her mind picked up something he had said: something about it seeming that Duilius had known what Scipio was going to announce before he did. She calmed her emotions and partially faded out the voice of her husband in order to think the point through.

      The more she considered the possibility, the more she believed it to be true. Someone must have informed Duilius. But who? And when? Of course the galley that had escorted Scipio from Sicily was full of people who knew of the blockade, but it was docked in the castrum in Ostia, a twenty-five-mile round trip on busy roads, and not an easy place for a civilian to enter. She discounted that and focused on the more obvious sources: Scipio’s praetoriani guard, the captain and centurion of the galley, and the household slaves. It became more and more obvious that the leak had come from among their number.

      She continued to watch her husband in silence, waiting for him to calm down. Only then would she approach him and offer her advice and comfort. When he was soothed and once more himself, perhaps tomorrow she thought, she would inform him of her suspicions. If there was a spy within the walls of her husband’s house, Fabiola was sure that, once found, she would witness the full fury of the violence she always suspected her husband was capable of.

      Septimus led Atticus to a bathhouse as the dying sun in the western sky was touching the taller buildings of Rome. The bathhouse was no more than a hundred yards off the main piazza of the Forum Magnum, and yet Atticus was struck by how different the surrounding area was from the vaulted temples and soaring statues of the city’s central forum. Here the streets were narrow and the apartment buildings towered eight storeys high, while underfoot the laneways of the plebeian quarter were strewn with human and animal filth, creating a stench that rose to infuse the very walls of the surrounding houses.

      Atticus’s mind was instantly transported back to the city of Locri and the backstreets he had called home for the first fourteen years of his life; the long summer days when he fished with his father and his stomach was full, and the hard, cold winters when the storms kept the fleet bottled up and the poorer inhabitants of Locri teetered on the brink of starvation. On those dark winter days, Atticus would escape the hovel he shared with his family and spend his days scavenging on streets no different from those that now surrounded him, and he marked the distance he had travelled since his childhood.

      ‘After dark I wouldn’t march a squad of ten legionaries through these streets,’ Septimus remarked with a wry smile, and Atticus caught a hint of disdain in the centurion’s voice.

      The main door of the bathhouse was flanked by two large thuggish men, but they allowed Septimus and Atticus to pass unchallenged while inside Septimus was immediately recognized by an older woman who greeted patrons as they entered.

      ‘My older brothers, Tiberius and Claudius, first brought me here on my sixteenth birthday,’ Septimus explained with a smile, ‘and I’ve come back at least once a year since then.’

      Septimus produced the requisite amount of silver and both men were ushered into an antechamber, where slaves quickly stripped them of their kit before they were led to the caldarium, a large tiled room dominated by a central bath of steaming, scented water. Atticus groaned loudly in content as he slipped into the bath, the hot water quickly infusing his muscles pleasurably and chasing all tension from his limbs. The sensation was amazing, and he sweated stoically before the near-unbearable heat forced him to rise. He was immediately led to a low table where a female slave rubbed oil into his skin before removing it with a strigil and, with a sense of cleanliness Atticus had never felt before, he was shown to the tepidarium chamber, where Septimus was already immersed in the lukewarm bath. Again Atticus groaned as he entered the water and Septimus laughed loudly.

      ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘what do you think?’

      ‘By the gods, Septimus, this is the way to live,’ Atticus laughed as two beautiful

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