As he started towards her, I threw off my white veil.
'Falco!'
'Always check a pre-written contract just before you sign it, sir. Some villain may have altered a critical element! Sorry; we lied about Helena Justina wanting to read through the documents, but then we had already lied about Helena agreeing to marry you-'
Tullia gathered up her skirts and scurried for the door. I whipped open the mysterious box which the priest's assistant carries at any wedding. In our family the joke is that the youth keeps his lunch in it-but I had a sword.
'Don't move! Gnaeus Atius Pertinax, I arrest you in Vespasian's name-'
His lip curled, revealing a dog tooth unattractively. 'Trust you!' Then he turned his head and let out a screeching whistle. 'Two can cheat, Falco-' There was a rush of feet, and out from a corridor burst half a dozen tall, bristly-chinned warriors in scale-armour trousers and glistening bare chests. 'Every bridegroom wants his own witnesses at his wedding!' jeered Pertinax.
His supporters were not rushing forwards with the aim of flinging nuts. Pertinax had obviously given them orders to kill me.
Luckily I had not expected the victim of a trick wedding to respond with graceful oratory. My first reaction was surprise. My next was to get my back to the wall, my blade up, and my eye on them.
From a man of his type, something of this sort was inevitable. Heaven knows where he found them. They looked like German mercenaries, big, long-haired, flaxen braggarts, originally hired by the dead Emperor Vitellius-now stranded in Rome after the civil war, with their fare home drunk in the stews along the Tiber and a new, more fastidious Caesar who would not be employing foreign auxiliaries within Rome.
They were heavy in the belly from too much beer and black pudding but they could fight, especially with the odds in their favour at an easy six to one. Some grim auxiliary captain on the Rhine frontier had put these hulks through several years of legionary drill. Their weapons were the huge, flat-bladed Celtic type which they swung over their heads and at waist height while I, with my short Roman stabbing sword, was hard-pushed to duck in underneath. Beneath my priestly costume I had a leather jerkin and arm guards-not enough against six skirling maniacs who were enjoying themselves with the threat of slicing off my salted crackling like a Black Forest pig.
Pertinax laughed.
'Keep smiling,' I seethed, watching the Germans. 'I'll deal with your guttural lap dogs, and then I'll come for you!'
He shook his head, making for the exit. But Tullia was there first. Her terror of him, now he knew she had deceived him, made her foot fleet and her hand sure. She darted down the porter's corridor, past the two empty cubicles, and dragged open the huge, metal-plated door. Out rushed Tullia-and in thundered Milo instead.
At the sight of our humourless monster Pertinax skidded to a halt and turned about. I saw him run lightly to the staircase. I was trapped, hard-pressed by half a dozen heavy blades whose force when they touched down wrenched the power from my wrist as I desperately parried them. It was Curtius Gordianus who took off after Pertinax-an ungainly, sack-like figure fired with the long-nurtured hope of vengeance, who blundered upstairs at an alarming pace. He was wielding the small, sharp knife he had used in the ceremony, still wet from the throat of our sacrificial sheep.