The praetorians closest to Perennis snapped out of their amazement and stepped forward, gripping the man who until a moment before had been the master of their world. Perennis allowed the sword to fall from his hand, and it clattered loudly onto the mosaic to lie unnoticed at his feet. Cleander stood in silence with a grim smile of satisfaction, watching as Commodus’s volcanic temper took hold and burst from him in an angry roar.
‘I’ll have you beheaded, here and now, you scheming bastard. I’ll have your guts ripped out while you’re still alive to watch, and then I’ll …’
‘Caesar!’
Every man in the room turned to stare at Scaurus, both Cleander and Albinus gazing in amazement as the tribune stepped forward and snapped to attention. Commodus turned slowly to face him with a blank-eyed scowl of fury, and for an instant Marcus was convinced that the emperor was about to take out his ire on the man with the temerity to interrupt his furious screams of rage.
‘Forgive my interjection, my Caesar, but I must bring a matter of great importance to your attention before you pass judgement on this man.’
Falling silent, Scaurus waited with a commendably blank face for Commodus’s reaction. Again the entire throne room seemed to hold its breath, and the emperor stared down from his dais at the lone figure standing before him. When he spoke his voice was calm, although it seemed to Marcus as though his grasp on the rage that had boiled through him a moment before was tenuous at best.
‘And who are you, that dares to interrupt your emperor? Perhaps I’ll have your tongue cut out to teach you to respect the throne a little better?’
Scaurus went down on his knees, lowering his gaze submissively.
‘Caesar, I will happily cut out my own tongue if you command it, if only you will hear me out.’
Commodus stepped down from the dais and walked with slow, deliberate footsteps across a tiled representation of a retiarius, the gladiator’s net and trident held ready to strike, producing an ornately engraved dagger from within the folds of his toga.
‘I carry this with me at all times, and have done ever since that idiot Quintianus tried to knife me on my way home from the theatre one night. My praetorians were too slow in realising that he was among them, and if he had not stopped to shout that the senate had sent him to kill me he’d have put this blade in my guts. Ever since then I’ve gone everywhere armed with the very knife that would have killed me if he’d not been such a fool.’ He paced to a halt before Scaurus with the knife raised. ‘So, tell me your story, Tribune, and believe me, if I don’t believe it merited your impudence then I’ll cut your tongue out myself!’
From his position behind Scaurus and slightly to one side, Marcus could see the emperor’s face with the knife’s blade held up before it barely inches from that of his tribune, his eyes gleaming with purpose, but Scaurus’s voice was as level as ever when he replied, without any hint of the threat hanging over him.
‘Caesar, the praetorian prefect sent one of his sons to Britannia in the position of military tribune three years ago. While serving with the Sixth Legion on the frontier the younger Perennis betrayed his legatus to a rebel leader, and sent the legion into an ambush that cost both the legatus’s life and the legion’s standard. He hoped to profit from the legatus’s death by the grant of a field promotion to command what was left of the Sixth.’
‘That’s a damned lie, Caesar, my son would never have …’
Commodus spun on his heel, turning to glare at Perennis.
‘One more word from you, Perennis, and your short remaining span of life will become very much more painful!’
He slowly turned back to face Scaurus, his tone now more questioning than threatening.
‘I am aware of the eagle’s loss, as I am aware that a tribune of the Sixth appointed by the former praetorian prefect has recently restored that legion’s honour by recapturing the eagle.’
Scaurus shook his head.
‘Not so, Caesar. The eagle that now parades before the Sixth is a replica, carefully fabricated to match the original’s exact specification, but no more the genuine article than the man who discovered it. The eagle’s “discovery” was planned by the praetorian prefect, and simply intended to undo the damage done by his son, of whose treachery and death he was informed by an anonymous letter written by a senior officer in the army of Britannia.’
Commodus narrowed his eyes, leaning close to Scaurus and speaking softly in his ear.
‘And you have proof of these accusations?’
Scaurus nodded slowly.
‘I do, Caesar. The centurion standing behind me not only witnessed the original act of betrayal, but he also killed the prefect’s son as punishment for his treachery. I therefore felt it fitting to send him north of the Antonine Wall when rumours emerged that the eagle was being held in a barbarian fortress, and at the cost of many good men’s lives he managed to recover it along with an item which, while somewhat gruesome, provides provenance for the eagle. If I may, Caesar?’
Commodus nodded, and Scaurus turned to gesture to Marcus. Under Albinus’s disbelieving eyes the young centurion crossed to the last of the chests, thrusting his arm into the gold and searching for a moment before pulling out the eagle that had been rescued from The Fang. He stepped forward and knelt before Commodus, holding up the battered golden standard in both hands. Distracted, the emperor handed his knife to a guardsman and took the eagle, holding it up to the lamplight.
‘It looks genuine enough, even if it’s perhaps a bit too battered to be the real thing. But this alone is not proof, it could easily be a fake.’
Scaurus bowed his head momentarily in acknowledgement of the emperor’s point.
‘Indeed Caesar, on its own this is not enough to prove my case. But as I said, that isn’t all that Centurion Corvus here managed to rescue from the barbarians.’
Marcus paced across to the first chest and dug his hands into the coins, pulling a heavy bag from within the treasure’s depths. Reaching into its open neck, he held up the preserved head of his dead birth father.
‘This is the head of the Sixth Legion’s legatus, Gaius Calidius Sollemnis, Caesar, hacked from his dead body on the same afternoon that the eagle was lost. Senator Albinus can doubtless stand witness that this is indeed his head. Forgive the smell of cedar oil, I had the legatus’s head preserved in it until very recently, and it is rather pervasive.’
The senator nodded slowly, unable to take his eyes from the grotesque object before him.
‘Indeed I can, Caesar. He was a family friend. Thanks to these men he can now be accorded some measure of peace, and burial in his family’s plot.’
Albinus stared at Scaurus for a moment, and Marcus read a hard edge in the glance that had not been there before. The emperor took the head from the young centurion, sniffing with distaste at the aroma rising from it.
‘All of which is very touching, but you still haven’t proven that this is really the Sixth’s standard.’
Scaurus nodded.
‘In that case Caesar, allow me to present the definitive proof.’
He reached into his toga. Half a dozen men tensed, hands on the hilts of their swords, only to relax when he pulled out nothing more threatening than a pair of writing tablets.
‘Here is the proof, Caesar.’ He held up one of the notepads, its exterior battered and discoloured by a dark-brown stain. ‘This tablet is a record maintained by the Sixth Legion’s standard bearer, a man of great diligence who wrote a painstaking description of his eagle, noting its every little scratch and dent, before he died in battle fighting to his last breath in its defence. You will note that the tablet’s exterior is stained with his blood. And this — ’ he held up the second tablet, its wooden case crisp-edged and without blemish ‘- this is the sworn testimony of a Sixth Legion centurion, a man who knew the standard bearer better than any other man alive since they were brothers, that this tablet belonged to his sibling, and that the notes inside are an accurate description of the eagle. If I may?’