‘I came across Brennos in my last action, just before I was informed of my father’s death.’

‘Really,’ Lucius responded absentmindedly, his eyes still fixed on the carving and quite specifically on that eagle device on his neck.

‘He led a raiding party into the area of my command. A fool of a centurion, who should have known better, with a full cohort, chased them deep into the hills, ignoring strict instructions to avoid such a thing. He got them trapped in a defile from which there was no escape. The right hand of every soldier was cut off and they were sent back to us.’

‘And the centurion?’

‘Was hacked to pieces by Brennos, before my eyes.’

‘This device around his neck, what do you know of that?’

What was it about Lucius’s voice? Titus could not quite place the tone, but it lacked the assurance with which the censor had previously expressed himself. ‘It is some kind of talisman. I have been told that it came from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, taken by his namesake when he sacked Greece, and that he wears it because of a prophecy.’

There was a definite tremor in Lucius’s voice as he repeated the word. ‘Prophecy?’

‘It is said that one day, a man wearing that will stand in the Temple of Jupiter Maximus and that man will have conquered the city of Rome.’

All that Titus noted was the quiver in the voice; with Lucius looking so intently at the sarcophagus, he could not see the man’s face. If he had he would have been made more curious, because it was a countenance drained of blood, and behind that was a mind in turmoil and a heart beating too fast for comfort. As children Lucius and Aulus had made an illicit visit to a Sybil, wrong because it was something barred to mere boys. Right at this moment Lucius was recalling the events of that night — the fearful stench of the dank cave, the bones of dead creatures at their feet, made more gruesome by the indifferent torchlight, the dark wrinkled face of the old crone of a seer who had not been fooled by their purloined manly garments. She had known them for what they were, yet she had spoken a prophecy to encompass their joint futures, the words of which were burnt into Lucius’s brain…