Emperor: The Blood of Gods (Special Edition) (Emperor Series, Book 5) (12 page)

The crowd stilled as they heard singing coming from the House of Virgins, straining to catch the first glimpse of the Vestal virgins. Mark Antony suppressed a smile as he saw them, more aware than most of the power of pageantry in the city. They bore small cymbals on their fingers and wrists and clashed them together with every step so that the discordant sound rose above their voices. He watched as the procession formed in front of the temple and the song built to a climax followed by total silence. Disappointingly, the young women revealed almost nothing in their stola dresses and long palla robes that concealed their legs. The priestess had shown more flesh when he visited her before and he had to smile at the adolescent part of him. Each one had been chosen for physical perfection, but they had vowed thirty years of celibacy before they could leave the temple. Looking at some of the faces, Mark Antony could not help thinking it was a shocking waste.

He waited through a ritual of thanks to Minerva and Vesta, only sighing as the sun rose and the heat built. After what seemed an age, they brought a wooden platform from the temple, draping it with dark red cloth. Quintina Fabia stepped up to it and her eyes met those of Mark Antony, perhaps recalling that he too had stood and spoken to Rome not long before. The effects could still be seen around them. He saw cold amusement in her eyes, but he was interested only in the carved cedar box brought out from the temple. It was both locked and sealed, so that two of the women had to strike the binding with hammers before they could open the lid. From inside, they raised a square block of wax tablets, wrapped around in strips of lead and then marked in a great disc of wax sealed by Caesar himself. Mark Antony shuddered at the thought of his friend’s hand being the last to touch it before that day.

They handed the block up to the priestess and she used a knife to cut away the wax, showing everyone there that it remained untouched. With care, she bent back the lead strips and passed them down. What remained were five wooden tablets with a thin sheen of wax on their surfaces. Mark Antony could not see the words inscribed there, but he inched forward with everyone else, suddenly desperate to know what Caesar had written.

Untouched by the impatience of the crowd, Quintina Fabia handed four of the tablets back to her companions and read the first to herself, nodding slightly at the end. When she had finished, she looked up at the massed crowd.

‘“For the honour of Rome, hear the will of Gaius Julius Caesar,”’ she began. She paused and Mark Antony groaned quietly at the theatrical impulse.

‘Come on,’ he muttered.

She glanced over to him as if she had heard before continuing to read.

‘“Gaius Octavian is my heir. I acknowledge him as blood of my blood and, by these words, I claim and adopt him as my son.”’

The crowd murmured and Mark Antony saw the small group of four stiffen almost as one, looking at each other in shock and wonderment. The simple words were typical of the man who had written them, without ornament or fanciful rhetoric. Yet Caesar had written and lodged the will before his return from Egypt, perhaps even before he had left Rome to fight Pompey in Greece. He had not known then that the Egyptian queen would bear him an heir. Mark Antony breathed slowly as he thought it through. It would have been better to have some foreign whelp as the main inheritor, one who could never come to Rome and contest for what was legally his. The consul had met Octavian a few years before, but he had been little more than a boy and Mark Antony could not even recall his face. He looked up as the priestess continued.

‘“All that I have is his, beyond the sums and properties I allocate here. Of those, the first is the garden estate by the river Tiber. That is my first gift to the people of Rome, in perpetuity, that they may take their ease there as public land.”’

As the crowd muttered in wonderment, she handed down the tablet and took up two more. Her eyebrows rose as she read silently before speaking the words.

‘“As well as a place to walk in the sun, I give each citizen of Rome three hundred sesterces from my estate, to be spent as they see fit. They were my champions in life. I cannot do less for them in death.”’

This time, the reaction from the crowd was a roar of excitement. Three hundred silver coins was a huge sum, enough to feed a family for months. Mark Antony rubbed his forehead as he tried to work out the total. The last census had recorded almost a million inhabitants of the city, though only half of those would be citizens. Wryly, he acknowledged that the riots would have reduced the number, yet still they swarmed like ants and they would all demand their money from the treasure houses controlled by the Senate. Caesar could not have known, but that simple bequest was a blow against the Liberatores. They would not be able to walk the streets without the shout of ‘Murderers!’ going up, not after this. He closed his eyes briefly in memory of his friend. Even in death, Julius had struck back at his enemies.

Quintina Fabia continued, listing the individual sums left to clients. Many shouted for quiet so they could hear, but the chattering went on even so, all around them. They would have to apply to the temple to read the tablets in private if they wanted to hear those details, Mark Antony thought. Remembering his own meeting with the priestess, he wished them luck.

She worked her way through to the last of the five tablets, allocating gold and land to members of his family and all those who had supported Caesar. Mark Antony heard his name and bellowed for those around him to be silent. His voice succeeded in crushing the noise of the crowd where others had failed.

‘“… to whom I give fifty thousand aurei. I give an equal sum to Marcus Brutus. They were, and are, my friends.”’

Mark Antony felt the gaze of the crowd on him. He could not hide his shock at hearing Brutus given the same amount. Mark Antony had lavished gold on the lifestyle of a consul and his own clients. Although the legacy was generous, it would barely cover his debts. He shook his head, aware of the awe in those who looked on him and yet bitter. Fifty thousand was not so much for the man who had roused the crowd on Caesar’s behalf. It was certainly far more than Brutus deserved.

‘“The rest is the property of Gaius Octavian, adopted as my son, into the house of Julii. I leave Rome in your hands.”’

Quintina Fabia stopped speaking and handed the last tablet down to her waiting followers. Mark Antony was astonished to see the gleam of tears in her eyes. There had been no grand words, just the business of recording Caesar’s legacies and responsibilities. It was, in fact, the will of a man who did not truly believe he was going to die. He felt his own eyes prickle at the thought. If Julius had lodged the will with the temple before leaving Rome, it was the year he had made Mark Antony governor of the city, trusting him completely. It was a window to the past, to a different Rome.

As the priestess stepped down, Mark Antony turned away, his men moving smoothly with him so that the crowd was forced to part. They did not understand why he looked so angry. Behind him, a clear voice rang out. As Mark Antony heard, he stopped and turned to listen, his men facing outwards to counter any threat.

Octavian remembered Mark Antony very well. The consul had changed little over the intervening years, whereas Octavian had gone from a boy to a young man. As the consul arrived at first light, Maecenas had marked his presence first. Agrippa used the breadth of his shoulders to come between them, relying on the crowd to hide Octavian. It was their second day in the city, after a ride of three hundred miles from Brundisium. They had been forced to change horses many times, almost always losing quality in the mounts. Maecenas had arranged for their own horses to be stabled at the first stopping place, but at that point none of them knew if they would be going back to the coast.

The legionary, Gracchus, had not been a pleasant companion on that journey. Knowing he was at best tolerated, he barely spoke, but he remained doggedly in their company as they rode and planned, dropping exhausted into rough beds at the closest inn they could find as the sun set. He had his own funds from the tribune and more than once had slept in the stables to eke out his coins while Maecenas ordered the best rooms.

Octavian was not sure the fast run had been worth it. He’d come into Rome two days before the will was to be read, but the world of peace and order he had known had been torn apart. According to a friend of Maecenas who’d offered them his home, it had been even worse before and was beginning to settle down, but great sections of the city had been reduced to blackened beams and grubby citizens picking through the rubble for anything valuable. Tens of thousands were starving, roving the streets in gangs in search of food. More than once he and his friends had to draw swords just to cross neighbourhoods that had become feral even in daylight. The city looked as if it had been in a war and Octavian could hardly reconcile the reality with his memories. In a way, it suited the grief he felt for Julius, a fitting landscape for such a loss.

‘Here she is at last,’ Agrippa said under his breath.

Octavian snapped back from his reverie as the priestess of Vesta came out. He had been searching the crowd for the faces of men he knew. If Brutus had been there, he did not know what he would have done, but there was no sign of the man he wanted to see dead above all others. Two days in Rome had been enough to hear the details of the assassination and he burned with new energy at the thought of those Liberatores who sought to profit from murdering a good man. In the silence of his own thoughts, in the shadow of the temple of Vesta, he swore oaths of vengeance. The state of the city was the crop they had sown, the result of their greed and jealousy. He had not known what strength could come from hate, not before seeing Rome again.

As the priestess unbound the will of Caesar from its box and lead straps, Octavian continued to glance back at the crowd. He recognised some faces he thought might be senators, but in cloaks and mantles against the morning cold, he could not be certain. He had been away too long.

Agrippa nudged him to pay attention as the priestess scanned the first tablet, a line appearing on her forehead. When she looked up, she seemed to stare straight at Octavian. He waited, his heart thumping painfully in his chest and his mouth drying, so that he ran his tongue around the inside to free his lips.

‘“For the honour of Rome, hear the will of Gaius Julius Caesar,”’ she began.

Octavian clenched his fists, hardly able to stand the tension. He felt Gracchus look over at him, the man’s expression unreadable.

‘“Gaius Octavian is my heir. I acknowledge him as blood of my blood and, by these words, I claim and adopt him as my son.”’

Octavian felt a great shudder run through him and he would have staggered if Agrippa hadn’t put out an arm. His hearing vanished in the pounding of his pulse and when he felt an itch on his face, he scrubbed at it, leaving a red welt on his skin. It was too much to take in and he hardly heard the lines that followed, watching the priestess of Vesta hand down the tablets as she read them out. At one point, the men and women in the crowd cheered raucously and Octavian could not understand why. He was numb with emotion, overwhelmed at the hand of Caesar reaching out from death to touch him.

The face of Gracchus was the picture of sourness as he considered the fortune his patron could have had, with a tenth of Caesar’s wealth. It was almost a legend, how much gold the leader of Rome had brought back from his conquests, at one point flooding so much of it into the city that it devalued the currency by almost a third. Octavian was the heir to all of it and Gracchus decided on the instant to be a more amenable companion. He would never again stand in the presence of such wealth, he was certain. Reaching out, he was about to clap Octavian on the back, but Maecenas caught the wrist and just smiled at him.

‘Let’s not make a show, not here,’ Maecenas said in a low voice. ‘We are unknown to the crowd and that is the way it should stay until we have had a little time to think about all this.’

Gracchus forced a sickly grin and nodded, jerking back his arm from a grip of surprising strength. He had not seen Maecenas spar or train in their rush from the coast and he never noticed the short blade in the noble’s other hand as he let go, or the fact that Agrippa was behind him, ready to hammer him into the ground at the first sign of aggression.

The list of clients and individual bequests seemed to take an age. Octavian glowered in disgust when he heard the name of Brutus and the huge sum of gold left to him. There was no mention of Cleopatra and the son that she had borne. All Maecenas’ friends knew was that she had left Rome after the assassination, presumably to go home to Egypt.

‘“The rest is the property of Gaius Octavian, adopted as my son, into the house of Julii. I leave Rome in your hands.”’

Octavian felt his eyes sting. It was too easy to imagine Julius sitting in some quiet room, writing the words in wax, with the future laid out before him. Octavian began to wish he was alive for the thousandth time since hearing the news, then wrestled himself free of the thought as it formed. There was no going back, no wishing away of the new Rome.

The priestess handed down the last tablet and saw it placed with reverence back into the chest. One of her acolytes put out a hand and she stepped down, her part finished. Octavian looked around him as the crowd exhaled held breaths and began to talk. He saw Mark Antony nod to his men and begin to move.

‘Time to go, I think,’ Maecenas said softly by his ear. ‘We can use the house of Brucellus this evening. It is untouched by the riots and he promises to provide a fine meal for us. There is a lot to discuss.’

Octavian felt his friend’s hand on his shoulder, gently pushing him away from the temple of Vesta. He resisted, suddenly sick of being made to walk in secrecy in his own city.

‘Priestess!’ he shouted, without warning.

Maecenas stiffened at his side.

‘What are you doing?’ he hissed. ‘Half the Senate have spies here! Let me get you away first and then we can decide what to do.’