Emperor: The Death of Kings E#2 (15 page)

One of the bowmen tripped and fell flat, bringing most of the column to a staggering halt. Julius sighed. About three years to train them would be useful, as well.

  CHAPTER
12
  

S
ervilia sat on the edge of the couch, her back straight. The tension was clear in every line of her, but Brutus felt he should not speak first. He had been awake for most of the night without resolving anything. Three times he had decided not to visit the house near Quirinal hill, but each time had been an empty gesture of defiance. There had never really been a moment when he wouldn’t have come to her. He felt nothing like a son’s love, yet some nebulous ideal made him return, with all the fascination of picking scabs and watching himself bleed for her.

He had wanted her to come for him when he was a child, when he was alone and frightened of the world. When Marius’s wife had smothered him with her need for a son, he had recoiled from it, unnerved by emotions he didn’t really understand. Still, the woman who faced him had a call on him that no one else had, not Tubruk, not even Julius.

In the unnatural stillness, he drank her in, looking for something he couldn’t name or even try to understand. She wore a pure white stola against sun-dark skin without any jewelry. As it had been the day before, her long hair was unbound, and when she moved, it was with a lithe grace that made it a pleasure just to watch her walk and sit, as much as he might admire the perfect gait of a leopard or deer. Her eyes were too large, he decided, and her chin too strong for classical beauty, yet he could not look away from her, noting the lines that marked her eyes and around her mouth. She seemed coiled and taut, ready to leap up and run from him as she had before. He waited and wondered how much of the tension showed in his own features.

“Why did you come?” she asked, breaking the awful silence. How many answers to that question had he thought through! Scene after scene had played in his imagination in the night: scorning her, offending her, embracing her. None of it had prepared him for the actual moment.

“When I was a child, I used to imagine what you were like. I wanted to see you, even once, just to know who you were. I wanted to know what you looked like.” He heard his voice tremble and a spasm of anger rushed through him. He would
not
shame himself. He would
not
speak like a child to this woman, this whore.

“I have always thought of you, Marcus,” she said. “I started many letters to you, but I never sent them.”

Brutus took a grip on his thoughts. He had never heard his name from her mouth in all his years of being alive. It made him angry, and anger allowed him to speak calmly to her.

“What was my father like?” he asked.

She looked away at the walls of the simple room where they sat.

“He was a good man, very strong and as tall as you are. I only knew him for two years before he died, but I remember he was very pleased to have a son. He named you and took you to the temple of Mars to have you blessed by the priests. He became ill that year and was taken before winter. The doctors couldn’t treat him, but there was very little pain at the end.”

Brutus felt his eyes fill and brushed at them angrily as she continued.

“I . . . couldn’t bring you up. I was a child myself and I wasn’t ready or able to be a mother. I left you with his friend and ran away.” Her voice broke completely on the last phrase, and she opened her clenched hand to reveal a crumpled cloth that she used to wipe her eyes.

Brutus watched her with a peculiar sense of detachment, as if nothing she did or said could touch him. The anger had drained away and he felt almost light-headed. There was a question he had to ask, but it came easily now.

“Why didn’t you come for me while I was growing up?”

She didn’t answer for a long time, using the cloth to touch away the tears until her breathing had steadied and she was able to look at him again. She held her head with a fragile dignity.

“I did not want you to be ashamed.”

His unnatural calm gave way to the emotions sweeping him, revealed as straw in a storm.

“I might have been,” he whispered hoarsely. “I heard someone talking about you a long time ago and I tried to pretend it was a mistake, to put you out of my mind. It is true then, that you . . .”

He couldn’t say the words to her, but she straightened still further, her eyes glittering.

“That I am a whore? Perhaps. I was once, though when the men you know are powerful enough, they call you a courtesan, or even a companion.” She grimaced, her mouth twisting.

“I thought you might be ashamed of me, and I couldn’t face seeing that in my son. Do not expect
me
to feel that shame. I lost that too long ago to even remember. I would live my life differently if I could go back, but I don’t know anyone who hasn’t the same useless, idle dream. I will not live my life now with my head bowed in guilt every day! Even for you.”

“Why did you ask me to come back today?” Brutus asked, suddenly incredulous that he had answered the call so easily.

“I wanted to see if your father would still be proud of you. I wanted to see if
I
was proud of you! I have done many things in my life that I regret, but having you has comforted me whenever it was all too much to bear.”

“You left me! Don’t say it comforted you, you never even came to see me. I didn’t even know where you were in the city! You might have gone anywhere.”

Servilia held up four rigid fingers to him, folding her thumb under them.

“Four times I have moved house since you were a baby. Each time I sent a message to Tubruk to say where I was. He has always known how to contact me.”

“I didn’t know,” he replied, struck by her intensity.

“You never asked him,” she said, dropping her hand back into her lap.

The silence began again as if it had never been broken, suddenly swelling into the spaces between them. Brutus found himself looking for something he could say that would finally confound her, allowing him to walk out and away with dignity. Cutting remarks came and went in his thoughts until he finally saw that he was being a fool. Did he despise her, feel shame about her life or her past? He looked inside for an answer and found one. He felt not a scrap of shame. He knew in part it was because he had led men as an officer in a legion. If he had come to her when he had done nothing, he might hate her, but he had stood and measured his worth in the eyes of enemies and friends and was not afraid to measure it in hers.

“I . . . don’t care what you have done,” he said slowly. “You are my mother.”

She burst into a guffaw of laughter, rocking back into the couch. Once again he was lost in front of this strange woman, who was able to shatter every moment of calm he could summon.

“How nobly you say it!” she said through laughter. “Such a stern face to give me absolution. Did you not understand me at all? I know more about the way this city runs than any senator in his little robe and trim beard. I have more wealth than I could ever spend and more power in my word than you can imagine. You forgive me for my wicked life? My son, it breaks my heart to see how young you are. It reminds me of how young I was, once.”

Her face became still and the laughter died from her lips.

“If I wanted you to forgive me anything, it would be for the years I could have had with you. Who I am, I would not change for anything, and the paths I have traveled to reach this day, this hour! They cannot be forgiven. You don’t have the right or the privilege to do it.”

“Then what do you want with me? I can’t just shrug and tell you to forget that I grew to manhood without you. I needed you once, but those I trust and love are the ones who were with me then. You were not there.”

He stood and looked down at her, confused and hurt. She stood with him.

“Will you leave me now?” she said quietly.

Brutus threw up his hands in despair.

“Do you want me to come back?” he asked.

“Very much,” she said, reaching out to touch him on the arm. The contact made the room waver and blur.

“Good. Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” she confirmed, smiling through tears.

*      *      *

Lucius Auriga hawked and spat irritably. There was something about the air of central Greece that always dried his throat, especially when the sun was warm. He would much rather have been enjoying an afternoon sleep in the shade of his house than be summoned to this vast plain, where the constant breeze wore at his temper. It wasn’t fitting for a Roman to be at the call of Greeks, no matter what their standing, he thought. It would no doubt be another complaint for him to deal with, as if he had nothing more to fill the days than to listen to their griping. He tugged his toga into position as they approached him. He must not seem discomfited by their choice of meeting place. After all, they were forbidden to ride, whereas he could simply mount up and be back inside the walls of Pharsalus before dark.

The man who had sent the summons walked unhurriedly toward them with two companions. His enormous shoulders and arms hung loosely, swinging slightly with his long stride. He looked as if he was fresh down from the mountains that broke the horizon all around them, and for a moment Lucius shivered delicately. At least they had not come armed, he thought. Mithridates was not usually a man who remembered to obey the laws of Rome. Lucius studied him as he walked over the scrub grass and wildflowers. He knew the locals still called him the king, and at least he walked like one, with his head unbowed, despite his disastrous rebellion.

All history now, Lucius thought, and before my time like everything else in this uncomfortable country. Even if the chance came to take the post of governor, he knew he would refuse it. They were such an unpleasant people. It baffled him how such coarse and vulgar farmers could have produced mathematics of such extraordinary complexity. If he hadn’t studied Euclid and Aristotle, he would never have accepted the posting out of Italy, but the thought of meeting such minds had been intoxicating to the young commander. He sighed to himself. Not a Euclid to be found in a city of them.

Mithridates didn’t smile as he halted before the small group of eight soldiers Lucius had brought with him. Turning on the spot, he gazed into the distance all around, then took a deep breath of air, filling his powerful chest and closing his eyes.

“Well? I have come here as you requested,” Lucius said loudly, forgetting for a moment that he must appear calm and unruffled. Mithridates opened his eyes.

“Do you know what this place is?” he said. Lucius shook his head. “This is the very spot where I was defeated by your people three years ago.” He raised his thick arm with the fingers outstretched, pointing.

“That hill, can you see that? They had archers in the woods there, pouring down fire on us. We got to them in the end, though they had trapped and spiked the ground. A lot of men were lost in removing them, but we couldn’t leave them at our back, you see? It destroys morale.”

“Yes, but . . .” Lucius began. Mithridates raised his hand with the palm flat.

“Shhh,” he said. “Let me tell the story.” The man stood a foot higher than Lucius and seemed to carry a strength that forbade interruption. His bare arm reached out again, the corded muscles moving under the skin with his fingers.

“Where the land creases there, I had sling men, the best I have ever fought with. They brought down many of your people and then took up swords to join their brothers at the end. The main lines were behind you, and my men were astonished at the skill they saw. Such formations! I counted seven different calls in the battle, though there could have been more. The square, of course, and horns to encircle. The wedge—oh, it was something to see them form a wedge in the midst of my men. They used the shields so well. I think the men of Sparta would have held them, but on that day we were destroyed.”

“I don’t think . . .” Lucius tried again.

“Over there was my tent, not forty paces from where we stand today. The ground was mud then. Even now, these flowers and grasses look strange to me when I imagine that battle. My wife and daughters were there.”

Mithridates the king smiled, his eyes distant. “I shouldn’t have let them come, but I never thought the Romans would cover so much distance in a single night. As soon as we realized they were in the area, they were on us, attacking. My wife was killed at the end, and my daughters dragged out and murdered. My youngest girl was only fourteen and she had her back broken first before they cut her throat.”

Lucius felt the blood draining from his face as he listened. There was such an intensity in the man’s slow movements that he almost took a step back into the arms of his soldiers. He had heard the story when he first arrived, but there was something chilling in listening to the calm voice describe such horrors.

Mithridates looked at Lucius and his finger pointed at the younger man’s chest.

“Where you are standing is where I knelt, tied and battered, surrounded by a ring of legionaries. I thought they would kill me then, and I invited it. I had heard my family screaming, you see, and I wanted to go with them. It started to rain, I remember, and the ground was sodden. Some of my people say rain is the tears of gods, have you ever heard that? I understood it then.”

“Please . . .” Lucius whispered, just wanting to ride away and not hear any more.

Mithridates ignored him or didn’t hear him through the memories. At times it seemed as if he had forgotten the Romans were there at all.

“I saw Sulla arrive and dismount. He wore the whitest toga I have ever seen. You have to remember that everything else was covered in blood and mud and filth. He looked . . . untouched by it all and that . . .” He shook his head slightly. “That was the strangest thing to see. He told me the men who had killed my wife and daughters had been executed, did you know that? He didn’t have to hang them, and I didn’t understand what he could want from me until he offered me a choice. Live and not raise arms again while he lived, or die at that moment, by his sword. I think if he hadn’t said that about the men who killed my girls, I would have chosen death, but I took the chance he gave me. It was the right choice. I was able to see my sons again, at least.”