Pentheus had died very slowly, his mouth stuffed with the rich garment he had been wearing when he was dragged from his bed. The boy’s knife had worked relentlessly on the body, revelling in what he saw in the pain-filled eyes. Finally, with the man still alive, Aquila had chopped off his hands and feet, doing to Pentheus what he had done to Flaccus. The broken body he had disposed of as he had the others, by taking them out to their high balconies and throwing them into the ravine and the fast-flowing river below. Prior to that, using their bright red blood, he had drawn the image that defined him on each of their walls, the same as the gold talisman he wore round his neck, shaped like an eagle in flight.
At times, as he walked, he wondered if he had a future, but taking that object in his hand, he would be overcome by a strange feeling. He had been told it was his destiny but were the predictions true? There was only one place to go now and perhaps the answer he sought would lie there: the centre of his world; the city of Rome.
It was impossible to pass by the only place he had ever called home, not that there was anything left to see, but this was where had stood his adoptive parents’ hut. The familiarity was tempered by a strange sensation that everything seemed smaller than he remembered: the stream in which he had learnt to swim which ran into the Liris River, the trees in the nearby woods, even the distance between the hut and the busy Via Appia half a league away. Only the mountains to the east looked the same, rising in tiers, covered in dense forests, with that strange-shaped extinct volcano, with a cap shaped like a votive cup, the tallest of them all.