Emperor: The Blood of Gods (Special Edition) (Emperor Series, Book 5) (42 page)

Lavinia came up from the hold, looking green from the hours she had spent in the foetid gloom. She saw the galleys chasing them and the shore ahead and her heart broke for her brother. He was a beautiful figure as he stood on the prow and watched the shallows with desperate concentration. Even then, he smiled at her when she touched his arm.

‘Hold on to me,’ he said. ‘If we hit a rock, it will be a hard blow at this speed. I do not know the coast here.’

She gripped his arm as the ship shuddered suddenly, the long shallow keel rubbing along a shelving shore. Sextus swore under his breath, terrified his galley would grind to a halt on a sandbank, leaving him stranded with land so close. His oar-master bellowed orders and the rowers cried out in agony, but the shuddering ceased and the galley lurched and dropped into deeper water.

‘Nearly there!’ Sextus yelled back.

In the same moment, one of the rowers fell dead and the man’s oar fouled those around it, so that the galley began to turn in the surf.

‘Close enough,’ Sextus said to Lavinia.

He had hoped for a landing that would put the galley right up onto the beach, but instead it bobbed and lurched in the surf, splintering oars on one side. He extended a hand to his sister.

‘Come on, you’ll have to get your skirts wet.’

Together, they climbed down, jumping the last part into white-frothed waves. There was sand under his feet and he felt some of his fear lift as he saw the enemy galleys sweeping back and forth out at sea. They had seen him almost ground on the sandbank and they could only stare and send arrows that fell short.

The galley rocked in a swell that would eventually batter her into pieces. Yet he had brought his crew safely to land and they clambered down, jumping into deeper water as the ship bobbed back and forth. In the lower deck, the rowers sat like dead men, panting and limp. Slowly, they left their oars and came out, red-eyed and exhausted. More than one stepped into the sea and simply vanished, too tired even to make the few paces to shore. Others helped their oar-mates, dragging each other until they collapsed on the burning sand.

As they gathered in exhausted silence, Sextus and Lavinia looked up at a sea that was becoming choppy and white-flecked. Burning and overturned hulls stretched into the distance, the ashes of all his hopes.

His captain, Quintus, had survived. The legion officer had fallen into the surf as he made landfall and he looked bedraggled and weary.

‘Do you have further orders, sir?’ he said.

Sextus almost laughed at the absurdity of it.

‘Could you carry them out, Quintus, if I did? The fleet has gone. We are landsmen once again.’ He thought for a moment and went on. ‘But there could be other survivors. Take the men up to a high point and search the coast. My sister and I will head for the closest town.’

Quintus saluted stiffly, calling to the men to follow him. They staggered off to find a way up the cliffs and for a time Sextus was content just to sit on the hot yellow sand and look out to sea. Lavinia watched him, unable to find words that could begin to comfort her brother. Gulls called overhead and the galley creaked as it rolled and shuddered in the surf. After a long time, he smiled at his sister.

‘Come on,’ he said, taking her hand. He guided Lavinia over the dunes to the bottom of the cliffs, looking for any sort of path that would take them away from the bitter sea at his back.

‘What will happen now?’ Lavinia asked.

He shrugged, shaking his head.

‘Caesar and Mark Antony will cross,’ he said. ‘I can’t stop them.’

‘No, Sextus. I mean, what will happen to us?’

In response, he showed her a small pouch from his belt.

‘I won’t let anything happen to you. I have a few gems and gold coins. If we can reach a town, we’ll be safe enough. From there, we’ll go back to Spain. There are still men there who remember our father, Lavinia. They will keep us safe.’

Though there were goat paths, the going was very steep. He and his sister had to climb steadily, struggling for handholds in withered scrub bushes. The shadows moved as they went and for a time both of them recalled climbing hills as children. They were panting as they reached the top of the cliffs and Sextus raced Lavinia over the crest. He came to a shocked halt at what he saw ahead, giving out a groan that was halfway between anger and utter despair. Behind him, Lavinia looked up fearfully at the sound.

Quintus was there with those of the crew who had gone with him. Their hands were bound and they had no fight left in them. A line of legionary soldiers was watching with interest, standing in formation.

A plumed centurion stepped forward. He had watched the flagship beach and he stared at the young man and his sister as they approached, brushing sand and dirt from their hands.

‘Sextus Pompey? I have orders from the triumvirs Caesar and Antony for your arrest. Your name is on the list of proscriptions.’

Sextus turned to his sister, passing her the pouch out of sight of the men at his back.

‘Thank you for showing me the path,’ he said, stepping away from her.

The centurion’s eyes flicked between Lavinia and Sextus, seeing the same blond hair in them both. The girl was clearly terrified. The centurion cleared his throat, making a quick decision. He was a father to daughters himself and his orders had said nothing about a sister.

‘If you’ll come quietly, sir, I’ll have one of my men escort the … local girl back to town.’

Sextus sagged slightly, struggling to hide the fear that had smothered him since sighting the men. He knew what the proscription list meant. He could see it in the delighted expressions of the soldiers waiting for him as they wondered how they would spend the bounty on his head.

‘Thank you, Centurion,’ he said, closing his eyes for a moment and swaying as tiredness finally caught up to him. ‘I would appreciate it if you chose a … trustworthy man as an escort.’

‘Don’t worry about that, sir. We don’t make war on women.’

Sextus saw Lavinia look back at him with wide, horrified eyes as a burly legionary took her gently by the arm and guided her away.

Octavian was not exhausted. He suspected he needed a new word to describe what he was and he had certainly passed ‘exhausted’ weeks before. It was not that he did not sleep or eat. He did both and sometimes slept like a dead man before rising again after a few hours. He ate with mindless precision, tasting nothing as he forced his body to go on. Yet each day brought so many tasks and demands on him that he found himself sweating constantly from the first moment he came awake before dawn to the last collapse into his bed, usually still clothed. The sheer complexity of moving and supplying twenty legions and all their auxiliaries required a staff of thousands, an entire legion of clerks and factors. They worked under his orders and yet at times they were apparently unable to do anything unless he had signed it off.

It was one area where Mark Antony showed no particular talent, though Octavian suspected the older man was happy enough to let him take the burden. Whenever the responsibility was left to the ex-consul, Octavian found the work remained undone until he was forced to take over. He could not shake the suspicion that he was being subtly manipulated, but a thousand tasks would have been unfinished if he had ignored them in turn – and the legions would still be waiting to cross to Greece.

Keeping Rome secure from attack while he was away for a campaign had proved to be a logistical nightmare. His co-consul Pedius was content to rule the Senate and they offered no resistance in the city, but the rest of it! Simply moving tens of thousands of men across country, while always securing food and water for them, had been a mountain to climb on its own. After months of blockades, diverting a third of Rome’s remaining grain stores to feed hungry soldiers had hardly reduced tension in the capital. Yet Octavian knew supply would play a major part in the campaign against Brutus and Cassius in Greece. Starving men did not fight well.

He doubted Cassius and Brutus had such worries. They could strip the east of food and fighting men and deal with the consequences later. There were times when Octavian wondered if he might triumph in Greece only to spend a dozen years putting down uprisings on Roman lands.

The legions he had left behind looked presentable enough, but for anyone who knew, their training had barely begun. Again, Mark Antony had seemed blithely uninterested. It had been Octavian who’d raised three new legions on the mainland, paying a bounty to a generation of young men to join, then marching them off to barrack towns while they were still half-drunk and dazed with the change in fortunes.

He could feel the galley moving under his feet in a gentle swell, waiting for the sun to rise before they landed. It was Octavian’s fifth crossing in a month. Every hour of daylight had been used to launch galleys crammed with soldiers, but they had lost two ships and almost six hundred men in the early landings. The galleys had struck each other, turning over just far enough from shore to make survival almost impossible for those on board. After that, the captains had been more cautious, but the crossing had slowed further and the entire operation had lost another week from the original plans.

Octavian stared east as the sky lightened. The early sun cast a pale gleam over the Greek coast, where the army was assembling and marching inland. He shook his head in awe at the thought. Twenty legions were a greater force than had ever been brought together in one place. As well as a hundred thousand soldiers, there were another forty thousand camp followers and staff and thirteen thousand cavalry taking up space on the galleys Agrippa had managed to salvage after his battles. The coast of Greece had been ravaged for miles, with new roads driven inland just to accommodate the mass of equipment and men coming in each day.

Octavian groaned when he thought of the costs. The coffers of Rome were empty; he had seen to that himself as he toured the treasure houses of the argentarii and the Senate. He had orders out to every mine and coin house in Roman possession to increase production, but without new workers it would be years before they had enough even for the dips and peaks of normal production. He knew there was still wealth in Rome – some of the senators had made fortunes from the estates of those proscribed and from lending gold at high rates during the crisis. Octavian carried notes from more than a dozen of them, for tens of millions of aurei. The debts would be a burden on the state for a generation, but he had not had a choice and had sealed his name to them all as the needs increased. For a time, he had held back the fortunes he had inherited, but then he plunged those too into the war chest for the campaign. He tried not to think of how quickly they had vanished.

As the sun’s light increased, the galley captain picked his spot on new docks built for the landings, easing his craft safely in. Octavian waited for the corvus to be raised and dropped to the port side and stepped ashore.

A dozen men waited for him and he forced a smile for them, which became real when he saw Maecenas and Agrippa were there. He felt as if he had been swallowed up in the group as soon as he stepped away from the galley. The small crowd surrounded him and as each man tried to claim his attention, he felt a nauseating lethargy dull his responses. He shook his head and tried to crush the feeling yet again, to make himself think and work at high speed just one more time.

He could not understand what was happening to him. He was young and fit, but sleep and food no longer seemed to restore his spirit or his flesh. Each morning he would surface in confusion, batting away at unseen horrors before realising he was awake once more. As soon as he had washed and dressed, he would be back at work, cudgelling his brain into thinking of clever answers and solutions.

‘Give the consul a little room, would you?’ Agrippa snapped suddenly.

Octavian shook his head, his senses sharpening. He had been walking away from the docks, with men on all sides calling questions and trying to show him sheaves of documents. He understood he had been answering them, but for the life of him he could not recall what he’d said. Agrippa had sensed something was wrong in his friend’s blank eyes and used his size to push a few of the men aside despite their outrage.

‘No, Pentias, nothing is that important,’ Octavian heard Maecenas reply to another man’s demand. ‘Now why don’t you give us a moment without your noise? The army isn’t going to collapse because you had to wait, is it?’

Octavian had no idea who the other speaker was, but whatever he said in reply was a mistake, as Maecenas stepped hard into him and the pair were left behind for a while in furious argument.

Over the previous month the port of Dyrrhachium had changed so much as to be unrecognisable. That was one thing about legions, Octavian thought dully. They could build anything. He looked up as he reached a main road leading back into what was now a major town. Huge warehouses loomed on both sides, well guarded for the wealth of food and gear they contained. The legions had felled trees and sawed planks to be nailed and pegged together until they had made entire streets. Stores and smithies were working night and day and the stink of leather-workers’ vats lay thick in the air. It would all be left behind when they marched, but they would go with new nails in their sandals and the right tack for the extraordinarii, patched or replaced. He had seen a thousand orders for requisition and cargo and the details swam before his eyes as he walked on.