The Blood of Gods A Novel of Rome - By Conn Iggulden Page 0,115

years, surviving by being more ruthless and more ready to kill than any of his men. It had been a brutal school and he knew he would never be able to go back to the innocent child he had once been with Lavinia. His smile widened into the gale, showing his canines as his lips pulled back. None of that mattered. Cassius and Brutus had killed the tyrant and at last he had a chance to ravage and burn Octavian’s forces. One day he would restore everything the family of Caesar had taken from him and that was all he cared about, all he needed to know. His father’s shade watched him. The old man’s honour was worth a run through a storm.

Driven by some strange joy he did not understand, Sextus began to sing into the wind, a sailor’s work tune. He sang badly but with great volume and it was loud enough to cause the captain to look up from his misery, staring in disbelief. Others in the crew grinned at the sight and sound of their young leader roaring and stamping his feet at the prow.

He felt the weight of the cloak as Lavinia came back, looking at him as if he had gone mad as she draped it over his wet shoulders.

‘They are saying some sea monster is wailing up here,’ she said. ‘Shall I tell them it’s just your singing?’

He grinned at her, pulling the cloak around him. The storm was tossing the sea into froth and vicious spray that stung his face as the galley crashed on.

‘Hold on to the prow with me,’ he shouted back. ‘The ship needs a little of our luck.’

They stayed there together, arm in arm, until the fleet rounded the point and the storm was left to grumble and flash behind them.

Agrippa scratched at a smear of mud on his forehead as it dried and itched. He could hardly remember when he had managed to snatch more than a few hours’ sleep and he was exhausted. It was done. Two thousand men with shovels and wheeled carts had dug a trench just over a mile long and only the final section waited to be breached. He had more than thirty surveyors working with them, checking the depth with long rods as the men toiled. It had to be twenty-four feet wide to accommodate the narrow galleys, even with the oars pulled right in and stacked on the decks, but the width had not caused as many problems as the depth. Agrippa had spent a day having the surveyors go over their figures again and again, but the shallow galleys had to float free or the entire enterprise would be worthless. He looked at the huge gates that held the lake waters back. They had been a tale in themselves, with expert builders driving wooden beams into the clay with enormous weights suspended above them, lifted and dropped a hundred times by teams of sweating labourers. They’d dug out foundations a short distance from the lake, sinking a trench back to the water. His carpenters had worked day and night and when the first short length breached and filled, the massive gates held, forming a short spur. None of the trench men had enjoyed standing close to them as they dug away from the gates towards the sea. The wood groaned occasionally and water sprayed from tiny holes, dribbling along the trench and making the earth sticky and wet. It had been hard, but as the surveyors had promised him, two thousand men could build almost anything and the thing was done at last.

On the lake, his galleys still flitted and lunged at each other, each new crew building the stamina they needed while they practised boarding. He’d had archery targets set up all along the shore of the lake for them to use and one of the top-heavy corvus ships anchored on the water, which now resembled a porcupine for the number of shafts sticking out of its timbers. He scowled at the sight of it, wondering who had failed to give the order to collect the arrows. Every one was precious, though entire industries had grown up around Neapolis to supply him. He had all his carts sent north as obviously as possible for a hundred miles before cutting west and back south, but even so Agrippa suspected his secrecy was a complete farce. His men had to chase local boys away almost every day as they crept