The Emperor Series: Books 1-5

by Conn Iggulden

  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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  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 ther
e 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.

  In theory, there was no reason why the clerks and factors couldn’t accompany him anywhere on the vast coastal camp. Yet as the group began to pass through the tents of soldiers, Maecenas and Agrippa managed to dissuade the others from clamouring too loudly for his attention. On the previous trip, Octavian had stopped Agrippa throwing a man into the sea as he pressed too close on the docks, but this time the strange lethargy that overcame him made it difficult to object and he merely stared as the big man held another back and told him in sharp, short words what he could do with his requisitions.

  The three of them went on alone after that, with Agrippa glaring back to make sure they did not dare to follow.

  ‘Thank the gods this is the last time,’ Agrippa said.

  The sun was still rising and the road ahead was filled with its glare and the promise of another hot day under an empty blue sky. They passed through the oldest camps, the places claimed by the first men to land six weeks before. Legionaries were early risers by instinct and order, so there were already thousands of men moving around, scraping bowls of warm oats into themselves, or sipping at hot tisanes. Many more were sparring lightly, keeping limber and loosening muscles made tight by sleeping on the stony ground. There was a friendly air to the camp and more than a few called out as they spotted Agrippa, recognising the big man and pointing him out to their tent-mates. He had become famous for a brief time: the man who had smashed the Roman fleet and won the chance to cross.

  Octavian felt a weight pressing behind his eyes as he reached the top of the coastal hills and looked out onto the plains beyond. In the morning light, he could not see an end to the vast camp that stretched in all directions. It took a better eye than his to see the line of demarcation between the two forces, but it was there. Mark Antony had sole command of his own legions and Octavian felt a sullen anger at the reminder of another irritation. His colleague had insisted on crossing first. As a result, his legions had taken the very best spots near water and shade. The ex-consul then had the gall to complain at every lost day after that, while Octavian brought his own legions to Greece. Away from Rome, Mark Antony had been able to ignore the host of problems at home and concentrate only on deploying his forces and scouting the land ahead. It had seemed a small thing at the time, but allowing Mark Antony to land first had established the man’s legions as the vanguard without any formal decision. Octavian found himself biting his inside lip and gave a weary smile as he thought of Pedius back in Rome, no doubt doing the same thing.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Maecenas said.

  Octavian looked up, his eyes blank as he tried to think back. He remembered a bowl of oats and honey, but it might have been the previous day. Little details such as meals had sunk into the mass of things he was too tired to consider or remember.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ he said, though he changed his mind as he spoke and realised he was. Some gleam of energy returned to him then and his gaze sharpened. ‘The last of the horses will be over by noon. I have the personal oath of the harbour master at Brundisium, for whatever that’s worth. It’s done at last, Maecenas. We’ll march today.’

  Maecenas saw Octavian’s hands were shaking and his expression changed to one of concern as his eyes flicked back to Agrippa and then down once more, drawing the big man’s attention.

  ‘I think you should try to eat,’ he said. ‘Even if Mark Antony moves at this moment, we won’t be marching for hours yet. Get something hot and take a nap or something. Gods, Octavian, you look exhausted. You’ve done enough for the moment.’

  ‘Not exhausted,’ Octavian mumbled. ‘Need a new word.’ With an effort, he summoned his will and stood a little straighter, forcing his muddled thoughts back to clarity. ‘Yes, I’ll eat something,’ he said. ‘But, Agrippa, would you go back and fetch those clerks for me? I can’t just ignore them.’

  ‘You can; I keep telling you,’ Agrippa replied. ‘I’ll have a word with them and see if anything really can’t keep. I doubt there’s much at this point.’

  ‘All right,’ Octavian replied, unable to hide his relief. He was sick of the details. Like the soldiers in camp all around him, he wanted to get moving and he wanted to fight. Putting his seal to some legion arrangement to buy a thousand saddles from some Greek merchant was no longer on his list of priorities.

  The three of them approached the command tent and Octavian’s heart sank as he saw another dozen men waiting for him, their faces lighting up as they spotted him.

  Mark Antony was in a fine mood as he dismounted. His command post was right up at the leading edge of the host of legions that had landed in Greece. He’d made it a habit to ride along the outer perimeter each morning as the sun came up, knowing the men would see him in his polished armour and cloak and take heart from it. He liked as many of his men as possible to see h
im each day, to be reminded that they fought for an individual rather than a faceless Senate. He had long suspected such things mattered when it came to the morale of individual legions, and those he commanded were, for the most part, strangers to him. A few remembered him from campaigning with Julius and when they greeted him, he made a point of stopping and spending a moment with them that he knew they would remember for the rest of their lives. It was not much to ask of a commander and they were thrilled that he bothered to speak to common soldiers, especially when he truly recalled a name or a place from the distant past. Men who had been young when they fought Vercingetorix were now senior soldiers, many earning a higher rank in the intervening years. When his memory sparked a scene from those days, Mark Antony could hardly believe so much time had passed. It made him feel old.

  ‘Legates,’ he said in greeting to the men waiting for him. ‘What a beautiful morning. Have you news from the coast?’

  He asked the same question each day and in all honesty he could not believe it was taking Octavian so long to land his forces. There had been times when he’d been tempted to take his legions inland and let Octavian catch him up, but good sense had overridden each impulse. He had spies and informers enough among the population to know that Brutus and Cassius had assembled a huge army. He would need every legion he had – and perhaps more than he had.

  The thought of Rome in the hands of men like Consul Pedius had worried him enough to leave Lepidus behind in the city. His co-triumvir would sit out the conflict in relative safety, but at least Mark Antony would not come home to find he had lost Rome while fighting his enemies. There had been too many surprises since the assassination and he trusted Lepidus to lack the ambition he would need to reach beyond his grasp.

  As a result, Mark Antony had been forced to appoint another to command his left wing. He was uncertain as to whether Pontius Fabius was the ablest of his generals, but he was the most senior, with almost twenty-five years of service in every post from senator to legion tribune. Mark Antony noted how, as his new second in command, the man stood subtly apart, and he was not surprised when it was Pontius who spoke for the other legates.