Magnus and the Crossroads Brotherhood Read online

  ‘We can afford to take on a few new faces with what we got last night plus the extra income that’s sure to come from Terentius, that should help,’ Servius pointed out, taking his turn. ‘Twelve! Double it again.’

  Jovita placed the food on the table as Magnus matched the bet. ‘Festus has slipped back into unconsciousness again,’ she said, wiping the grease off her hands on to her tunic, ‘and the wound’s started to ooze. There’s nothing more I can do.’

  ‘Call for a proper doctor, then,’ Magnus said, shaking the dice cup. ‘We owe it to him and it ain’t as if we can’t afford it.’

  Jovita nodded and walked off.

  Magnus slammed the cup upside down on the table, keeping the dice hidden. ‘What about Tigran and his cousin? They did well last night and they’ve got nothing, so they’d be loyal if we give them a chance.’

  ‘They ain’t citizens.’

  ‘We’ll give them less of a percentage then, like auxiliaries, if you take my meaning?’ Magnus lifted the cup slightly towards him, peered under and cracked it back down. ‘Shit! Fortuna spent the last of my luck last night.’

  Servius scraped his winnings towards him. ‘Then I can’t see a problem. I’ll send one of the lads to find them later.’

  ‘Marcus Salvius Magnus.’

  Magnus looked up to see Terentius standing at the end of the table, holding a purse.

  ‘I’ve come to thank you for looking after my interests,’ he said, placing the purse in front of Magnus, ‘and to assure you that I won’t tell anyone what I know about the events of last night.’

  ‘That would be wise, for both our sakes, Terentius.’ Magnus pushed the purse back. ‘There’s no need to pay me, it was covered by your percentage.’

  ‘This isn’t a payment, Magnus. This was Blandinus’ purse that he brought to spend with me yesterday. It would be wrong for me to keep it. I’ve heard how he was found and I’m sorry that I was, in a way, responsible.’

  ‘Yeah well, that’s the thing about patronage, it goes both ways and you never get something for nothing not even if you’re the emperor.’

  Terentius nodded, smiling sadly. ‘Still, one good thing came out of Blandinus’ death: that bastard Macro has got his wish, he’s taken Blandinus’ position. I shan’t be missing that particular tribune patrolling our streets. Keep the purse.’

  Magnus picked it up and felt its weight. ‘Perhaps I’ll use it for what it was intended for and spend it in your house.’

  ‘You’ve no need to bring any money if you visit me. As I’ve always told you: you can have the run of my establishment for free.’

  ‘I know, Terentius my friend; but as we all know, no one gives something for nothing.’

  Terentius inclined his head, turned gracefully and walked away.

  ‘Are you really thinking of giving that a try?’ Servius asked, taking a mouthful of pork.

  ‘Why not? Don’t judge it until you’ve tried it and besides, change pleases. And it would be on Blandinus.’ Magnus grinned and tipped out the coins onto the table. His eyes widened in surprise. ‘That’s forty Denarii or so.’

  ‘Blandinus must have been planning quite a night.’

  ‘Yeah. And Terentius must be feeling very bad about him to give up that amount of money.’

  ‘Strange morals for a whore-boy master.’

  Magnus looked up and watched Terentius walking away along the Alta Semita. ‘Very strange,’ he agreed as a party of travellers on horseback followed by a litter, coming towards him, caught his eye. He picked up the dice and threw them. ‘Three sixes, Venus. Fortuna’s back with me.’ He looked over to his brothers still playing dice on the table next to him. ‘I’ll do this one, lads, they’ve got guards and a litter; I’d say that they could well afford our services. Stay alert.’

  He studied the party as they approached. Behind three mounted guards rode an equestrian in his mid-fifties flanked by what looked to be his two sons. He was talking animatedly with the youth riding on his right who had a look of awe on his round, sun-tanned face as he looked about.

  Getting up off the bench, Magnus timed his walk so that he got between the party and their guards and stood, four-square, in front of the leading traveller’s horse, forcing it to stop. Magnus looked up at the man, his face set hard and menacing. ‘You’ll be needing protection, sir, if you’re thinking of going down that road.’

  THE RACING FACTIONS

  This story takes place after the end of Rome’s Executioner; Magnus, who has all his life been a passionate supporter of the Green Racing Faction, gets cheated out of his winnings by a dodgy bookmaker – a guaranteed way to annoy him considerably – and vengeance is required. What better way to have it than by fixing a race, a thing that people still try to do all over the world to this day?

  Meanwhile, Gaius Vespasius Pollo is attempting to get his nephew, Sabinus, elected as a quaestor, the position in which we find Vespasian’s elder brother serving in Judaea in the prologue of The False God of Rome.

  Ruthlessly pursuing self-interest was a natural goal for Romans of all classes; however, there were other things that united the citizens of Rome and one of the most important was the succession of religious festivals that punctuated the year with public holidays; I decided to start having festivities – in this case the Lupercalia and the Equirria – act as the backdrop for each story giving extra flavour to my imagining of life in the greatest city in the empire.

  I also was able to expand Magnus’ world by bringing other characters from the Vespasian books and seeing one of them, in particular, in a situation that only Magnus could witness, not Vespasian ...

  ROME, FEBRUARY AD 32

  THE STALLIONS’ EYES rolled; specks of foam flew from their mouths as they answered their charioteer’s call and accelerated down the track. Barrel chests sucked dusty air into their straining lungs whilst pounding hearts pumped blood to the muscles in their legs working to the very limit of their power as they pulled a light chariot seven times around the track. They felt the reins tug back; they slowed, their current sprint over and another corner to be rounded. The inside horse wheeled left in response to a sharp pull on the reins and led his three stable mates, at a speed at which they could just keep their footing, around the turning post at the far end of the spina, the central barrier of the Circus Maximus. Feeling another bite of the four-lash whip, they looked up the 350 paces of the dust-clouded straight and they were away again, inciting each other to greater effort in the fury of the race in which they were leading.

  Their driver, in the colours of the Green Racing Faction, risked a quick glance over his shoulder to one of the three White chariots, just four paces behind, but gaining; beyond it his Green team-mate drew out into the track in an attempt to pull level with the chasing White. The leading Green driver snatched a small skin of water thrown at him by a boy from his team stationed on the spina; he squirted its contents over his dirt-encrusted face and into his parched mouth, discarded it and pulled his team to the right to avoid the mangled wreckage of two chariots, a Blue and a Red. A couple of well-aimed curses, written on folded lead sheets and studded with nails, flew past him as he neared the spectators; pulling back to the right, closer to the spina and out of range of the hurled missiles, he sped on, showering grit all over the crash. Within it, public slaves struggled to cut loose writhing horses entangled in the debris, whose screeches were lost in the tumult of a quarter of a million voices roaring on the ten remaining chariots. Waving the flags of their favoured faction, the citizens of Rome screamed themselves hoarse, stamping their feet on the stepped-stone seating, urging on the teams upon whom over a million sesterces was riding in bets.

  The Green driver pulled on the reins wrapped about his waist and slid his team, in a spray of sand, around the turning post closest to the twelve starting boxes positioned next to the towering wood and iron arched gates of the circus; the next lap began. High on a column above the spina the fifth of seven bronze dolphins, marking the progress of the race, tilted d
own and the noise of the crowd escalated even more, echoing around the Palatine and Aventine Hills, overlooking the Circus Maximus on either side, and on to the rest of the Seven Hills of Rome.

  ‘Come on, you Greens! This one has to be ours, lads!’ Marcus Salvius Magnus bawled in excitement to his two companions as the second-placed White chariot misjudged the corner, losing crucial ground and allowing the second Green team to come alongside. Magnus’ breath steamed as the temperature fell with the sun. The baying, sweat-reeking crowd around him, on the Aventine side of the main gates, sported Green colours and had worked themselves up into a frenzied celebration at the prospect of their team’s first win of the day.

  ‘Twenty-five denarii at eight to one! That’s two hundred, or eight hundred sesterces; Ignatius ain’t going to like that, Magnus,’ the huge bald man next to him shouted, punching the stump of his left wrist in the air.

  ‘Too right, Marius, we’ve finally got that bastard bookmaker this time, and with our biggest bet of the day.’ Magnus’ scarred, ex-boxer’s face creased into a grin; he looked down at the wooden receipt for the bet, signed by the bookmaker Ignatius, grasped in a massive fist of his other companion. ‘Two hundred denarii – that’s almost as much as a legionary earns in a year! It’ll make Ignatius’ eyes water and swell the Brotherhood’s coffers nicely. Fancy a couple of whores tonight, Sextus?’

  ‘A couple of whores?’ Sextus ruminated, slowly digesting the thought whilst keeping his eyes fixed on the action down on the track far below, where the second Green driver was drawing a small knife from the protective leather strapping around his chest. ‘Right you are, Magnus, if you’re sure we can afford it after what we’ve lost today.’

  ‘We’ve lost five denarii in nine races, my slow friend, that’s forty-five; we’re one hundred and fifty-five denarii up. We could afford five hundred whores.’

  Sextus’ ox-like face creased with strained concentration as he tried – but failed – to get to grips with such advanced arithmetic. ‘With learning like that, Brother, I can understand how you got to be the patronus of our Crossroads Brotherhood.’

  ‘If the leader of the Brotherhood can’t count, Sextus, then how is he going to be able to check that everyone in the South Quirinal has paid their rightful dues to us in order to enjoy our continued protection?’

  ‘Then that rules me out of ever becoming leader.’

  ‘Yes, that and the fact that you’d have to kill me first.’

  The crowd’s thrilled roar drew Magnus’ attention back to the race as the White and Green chariots touched wheels, shattering the eight spokes in both of them in a hail of splintering wood. The Green immediately slashed at the reins tied around his waist with his knife and, severing them, bailed out as the wheels of both vehicles fragmented. At a speed of more than thirty miles per hour, the chariots’ unsupported sides juddered down on to the sand, their naked axles gouging deep furrows, abruptly slowing them and jerking the traces of the two teams of horses, causing them to slew into each other and rebound. With the weight of its driver gone, the Green chariot twisted up into the air, its remaining wheel spinning freely, and arced, with delicious inevitability, over on to the White charioteer. The fast-rotating iron tyre scraped through the skin of his neck with a spray of blood as it knocked him sideways off the chariot to crunch down, unconscious, on to the track with the reins still wrapped about his waist; his team ran on, dragging him along the scouring sand as his vehicle disintegrated around him.

  The leading Green was clear.

  ‘A selfless act, and the best way to deal with the favourite,’ Magnus pronounced at the top of his voice, watching with approval the downed Green charioteer scrabble to his feet and leap on to the spina, narrowly avoiding a trampled death beneath the hooves of three chasing teams. ‘One and a half laps to go and nobody near our man; we’ll collect the money, brothers, and then go and wait outside the senators’ enclosure to escort Senator Pollo home.’

  With the result of the race now a foregone conclusion most of the crowd sat back down and amused themselves by watching the attempts of the crashed White’s hortator – the single horsemen attached to each of the twelve racers for exactly this purpose – to pull up the bolting team before their charioteer had all the skin scraped from his limbs. Only the Green faction stayed standing to cheer on the progress of their hero of the moment.

  Sure of victory and uninterested in the White charioteer’s fate, Magnus looked around for one of the bookmakers’ slaves who patrolled the crowd with leather bags around their waists, taking bets on behalf of their owners. ‘You, boy!’ he shouted, spotting one of Ignatius’ many slaves circulating amongst the spectators. ‘Over here.’

  The elderly slave gave a deferential nod and made his way through the celebrating Green supporters, who had begun pointing and droning crude chants at the White faction on the Palatine side of the gates; they replied with obscene gestures and jeering.

  The seventh dolphin fell as the Green chariot, its driver punching the air, crossed the winning line in front of the White faction’s seats; the Greens’ joy was completed by the sight of the White charioteer being carried away, quite evidently dead.

  ‘Where’s your master, boy?’ Magnus asked as the slave approached.

  The old man pointed to the colonnaded walkway above the seating. ‘Up there, sir, next to the statue of Neptune.’

  Magnus tugged at the sleeves of Marius’ and Sextus’ tunics. ‘Come on, lads; let’s cash our bet with the man himself so that we can have the pleasure of seeing his face.’

  His Crossroads Brethren grinned in anticipation of Ignatius’ expression as he counted out what would, in all likelihood, be his biggest payout of the day. The thought of supplementing the considerable income paid to the South Quirinal Crossroads Brotherhood by local traders and residents in return for protection from rival brotherhoods was a cheering one. They barged past the old slave, who was immediately set upon by other Green supporters who had laid wagers with Ignatius and were now keen to claim their winnings.

  The noise of the crowd died down as teams of public slaves poured on to the track to remove mangled chariots and the carcasses of horses and to clear it of thrown objects in preparation for the next race. Magnus and his brothers forced their way to the steps leading up to the walkway and negotiated a path through the tangle of individuals using them as overflow seating. Eventually, after pushing through the crush of people, who, unable to get a seat, were obliged to stand along the colonnade, they managed to get to the walkway that ran along the entire Aventine side of the circus.

  ‘Now where’s the statue of Neptune?’ Magnus muttered, looking along the carved images of gods and great men that punctuated the colonnade; between them, at regular intervals, were wooden desks at which bookmakers sat counting coinage and clacking abacuses, surrounded by piles of wax tablets, and guarded by thuggish-looking men with cudgels. ‘There it is; I’d know Neptune’s trident anywhere.’

  Ignatius’ four guards shifted warily, nervous at being approached by three men just as brutish as themselves; they slapped their cudgels into the palms of their hands, feeling their weight with threatening intent.

  Magnus raised his hand in a conciliatory gesture. ‘No need for that sort of behaviour, lads; we’re here to collect our rightful winnings from my old friend Ignatius.’

  The man seated behind the desk looked up, midway through tallying a pile of bronze sesterces; his face was as fearsome as those of the men guarding him: lantern jaw, broken nose, dark eyes sunken beneath an overhanging forehead. His attire, however, was not that of a street thug: those days were long behind him, their memory preserved in the livid scars on his left cheek and well-muscled forearms; beneath his white, citizen’s toga he wore a saffron-coloured tunic of finest wool and around his neck, falling to the pectoral muscles on his expansive chest, hung the heaviest and longest gold-linked chain that Magnus had ever seen. ‘Magnus, to what do I owe this dubious pleasure?’ His voice was deep and gruff and his accent betra
yed his lowly roots in Rome’s poorest district, the Subura, although he did his best to cover it. ‘I trust that I’ve been having a good afternoon at your expense?’

  ‘A very good afternoon for the first nine races, Ignatius, you took forty-five in silver off us; a pity about the last race, though. Give him the receipt, Sextus.’

  Ignatius leant forward and took the proffered piece of wood bearing his signature along with the number of the bet. ‘Two hundred and eleven.’ Taking up a wax tablet from the top of a pile, he scanned it quickly, raising his pronounced eyebrows and tutted. ‘It seems I owe you money.’

  ‘It does look that way.’

  Ignatius pulled out a heavy-looking strong-box from under the desk. ‘I’d better pay it then, although I don’t understand why you came all the way up here for such a trifling amount when you could have saved yourself the trouble and had one of my slaves pay it out.’

  ‘Yeah, very funny, Ignatius; that’s going to be your biggest payout today. Now get on with it.’

  Ignatius shrugged and unlocked the box; he scooped out a large double handful of silver denarii and began to count them out into stacks of ten. When he had completed four and a half such piles he stopped and pushed them across the desk, toppling them with a metallic clatter.

  ‘That’s our business completed, I believe.’

  ‘I may not be able to read, Ignatius, but I can certainly count, and that is nowhere near two hundred denarii plus our original twenty-five stake.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right, my friend; that’s forty denarii and your original five stake.’

  ‘We put down twenty-five. Sextus, tell him, you laid the bet.’

  Sextus nodded slowly at the memory. ‘Yeah, Magnus, the slave was a young lad with curly black hair; I gave him twenty-five in silver on the Greens’ first chariot at eight to one.’