by R. W. Peake
“I need you to bring me some of the best vellum you can find,” I instructed him, then added, “and at least four sheets.”
When he returned, I did something quite unusual for me; instead of dictating to Alex, whose hand is better than mine, I sent him to find Clustuminus and inform my Optio that he would be overseeing the Century for a time, then I sat down and, very carefully, began writing. It took me more than a third of a watch, but I was oddly proud of myself that I did not need to use the spare sheet, perhaps the most potent sign of the care I was taking with this document, along with the copy I made that would be sent to Rome and the one I would give to Macer, which may be the most important I ever write. Even more significant than this account, but I confess that I rejoice in my heart knowing there is now someone to whom this will go, along with those scrolls already dictated to Diocles by my Avus. Once I was done, I rose from my desk, and walked to the Cohort office, asking Lucco if Macer was in his office. When he nodded, I knocked on his door, then once he bade entry, I crossed to his desk, holding out one of the scrolls, which I had attached to the spools myself.
“What’s that?” Macer asked curiously.
“It’s my new will,” I told him, which clearly surprised him.
Macer had been the holder of my will since my second year with the 1st, and while he reached out to accept it, I saw a mixture of amusement and concern on his face.
“Did you finally find a whore you can’t live without?” he joked, then, completely by accident, actually guessed the truth, though I managed to avoid letting on that he had done so. “Or did you find your long-lost son or something?”
The smile I gave him felt completely false, and he knew me well enough that I was certain he would pick up on it, yet somehow, I managed to respond in the same joking manner, “Something like that.” Then, making it up on the fly, I added, “Now that Alex’s brother is with us, I wanted to make sure he was included. I don’t want him to feel left out.”
He shrugged, accepting this easily enough, taking the will and placing it in his strongbox, and I only breathed easier when I saw him lock it.
Turning back to me, he asked, “So? Are your men ready?”
This had become something of a running joke, because I always answered the same way, snorting and countering, “Readier than yours, Pilus Prior.”
And, as he always did, he responded with a grin, saying only, “We’ll see.”
Saluting, which was a bit unusual for an exchange like this, Macer returned it nevertheless, and I turned to leave.
“Pullus,” his voice stopped me, and I looked back to see that, while he was smiling, there was a look of concern, “are you sure everything’s all right?”
“Better than they’ve been in a long time,” I assured him, then exited his quarters.
And now, this is where I must end. We are on campaign, and Gaesorix and his Batavians have reported that contact with the Marsi is imminent, probably happening tomorrow. As always, I will be at the head of my Century, but this time, I will be fighting with the knowledge that my son is nearby, and while it is a new sensation, it is also a truly wonderful, terrible, and awesome feeling, rolled into one.
Epilogue
“Is it true?”
Giulia Livinius Volusenus stood, having risen from her favorite couch, frozen in place, staring at her son Gnaeus, who, without any advance warning whatsoever, had somehow managed to obtain leave from his posting in Ubiorum to come to Mogontiacum, where she now lived. Despite her shock at his sudden appearance in the villa that she had purchased recently, along with the abrupt and seemingly elliptical manner in which he was addressing her, somehow, Giulia knew exactly what her son was asking.
Nevertheless, she did not reply, looking up at him with an outward calm she did not feel, which prompted him to repeat, this time more distinctly, “Is. It. True?”
There was a long silence, while mother and son regarded each other, the latter with an expression on his face that she had never seen before and could not readily identify.
“Yes,” Giulia finally replied, hearing the quaver in her voice, but far more concerned with her son’s reaction to her confirmation; the gods knew as well as she did that Gnaeus had a volcanic temper, something that she knew he got from his father.
However, his reaction not only surprised her, she found it quite worrisome, because he suddenly staggered to the nearest couch and collapsed so heavily onto it that she could hear the wood cracking, although it bore his considerable weight. For the rest of her days, Giulia Livinius Volusenus would remember the stricken expression on her son’s face as he regarded her with a look of such sadness that, before he uttered the words, although she did not know exactly how Gnaeus had learned the truth, she suddenly understood why he was there, confronting her.
“He’s…” she began, then could not form the words, but there had always been a bond between mother and son that meant he instantly understood her question.
“Yes, Mother,” she could tell he was trying to imbue his words with a cold anger, but she heard the pain there, “Titus Pullus is dead.”
Despite being certain this was the case, Giulia could not keep the sob from bursting from her, and, like Gnaeus, she dropped back onto the couch, burying her face in her hands and leaning her elbows on her knees as she began to weep. She was unable to see it, but her son’s rigid expression underwent a similar transformation, his own eyes filling with tears, both at the sight of his mother’s grief and for the sense of a loss that he could never have described, mainly because he barely understood it himself. Nevertheless, he did not rise from his seat to go to Giulia’s side to comfort her; there was still a healthy dose of anger in the swirling emotions he was feeling in the moment, and he did not trust himself to contain his temper. How could she have lied to him all these years? he wondered as he stared at her heaving shoulders. She had not shown this much grief when Quintus Claudius Volusenus, the man he had been told all of his life was his father, had died unexpectedly, and it was this display of raw pain on her part that unsettled him, although that was not all of it. No, what had shaken him to his core, even before he had ridden like the Furies from Ubiorum to Mogontiacum to confront his mother, was the recognition that, when the truth had been revealed to him, in the form of the will of Titus Porcinianus Pullus, somewhere deep inside him, he had been fairly certain that Pullus was his real father for some time. Giulia would have been shocked to know that, as angry as Gnaeus was with her, a fair proportion was aimed at himself for being too cowardly to confront Pullus with his suspicions, which he knew now had been with him almost from the first moment he had first met the Quartus Princeps Prior, although he was the Quartus Pilus Prior at the time of his death. And, along with the anger was a massive sense of guilt, because Pullus had sacrificed himself to save Gnaeus’ life during the recently concluded campaign to finally avenge the Varus disaster, against Arminius and his confederation of German tribes. What would have surprised Volusenus a great deal, at least until he gave it some thought, was that in this moment, the mix of emotions he was experiencing mirrored those his mother was dealing with, just a matter of a few feet away. Slowly, her sobs subsided, and so did Gnaeus’ anger, until she finally lifted her face from her hands, her eyes red and already puffy, her cheeks wet with her tears.
Regarding her son for a span of heartbeats, she finally said, in a voice made hoarse by grief, “I suppose we have a lot to talk about.”
This was such a massive understatement that, to his horror, Gnaeus’ first reaction was to burst out in laughter, but it was the kind that just as quickly transformed itself into tears, and then it was his turn to begin sobbing as his mother had, mimicking her posture to bury his face in his hands. In his case, it was to hide his shame at what he thought of as a display of weakness; Roman men, especially Roman Centurions, were not supposed to show this side of themselves, even in front of their mothers. Regardless of this, when he felt her gentle touch on his shoulder, without any thought about how it would a
ppear to the servants, he buried his head in her breast, pouring out his grief for all that he had lost, before he ever had a chance to fully understand what it meant that Titus Pullus was his father.