Now all he was left with was a hankering for the only person to whom he could say he was close, the man he had called Papa, Clodius Terentius, serving for years in the Illyricum legion, and surely long past the time at which he was due home.

The finding of him in that forest glade had, Fulmina insisted, been a marvel. First, Clodius being in the woods, waking from a bout of heavy drinking, then the weak sun of a Febricus morning that lit that one patch in which he lay. Whoever had laid him on the ground had left him in the swaddling clothes in which he had been wrapped after his birth, thick enough to blunt the night-time cold. When these thoughts of loss and longing became intolerable, Aquila would visit the gurgling riverside spot where he had been found and wonder at the nature of the people who had abandoned him. He would see in his mind’s eye ghostly figures on horseback — Clodius had seen hoof prints — figures whose faces were indistinct death-masks, or horrible, hooded apparitions that spoke of Hades and desecration. He would look up to the distant mountains over which the sun rose each day, one with a strange cap shaped like a votive cup, home to the soaring eagles after whom he had been named.

At other times he would go to where the hut in which he had been raised once stood. Standing before that spot he would touch the leather amulet that had been Fulmina’s last gift to him, something she had kept hidden all his life. Well-tanned leather and shining with beeswax, it bore on it a raised device of an eagle in flight, wings outstretched. He never took it off his arm, because Fulmina had told him that what it contained, stitched inside, was the harbinger of his destiny. She had also made him swear not to unpick that stitching until he was old enough to fear no man, a vow he had made before the turf altar of their tiny abode, an oath which he would never break.