Ave, Caesarion

by Deborah Davitt

  Alexander looked up at the stars. “First thing in the morning,” he muttered wearily.

  Which was when Tiberius finally found him. “Busy day,” his friend commented, striding along the rear of the command building.

  “They all seem to be.” Alexander rubbed at his eyes for a moment. “Don’t mind me. I’m sitting here trying to figure out ways to save Caesarion from himself.”

  “The men are grumbling a bit. But the wine improved their mood.” Tiberius stopped a few feet away, and shook his head now. “I wish they all could have seen them,” he added abruptly. “Seeing the face of Mars . . . .” He trailed off. “Made everything feel worthwhile,” he finally concluded.

  Alexander nodded. “I know what you mean,” he admitted. “I feel a little more . . . focused. On what needs to be done.” He nodded to the nearby window, and added, more quietly, “You’re all right with . . . them?”

  Tiberius grimaced. “If I hadn’t seen Mars and Venus bless the union personally, I wouldn’t be,” he admitted, just as quietly. “But as you told me months ago . . . Egypt has different standards. So does Hellas. If my own gods approve . . . how can I not?”

  Alexander smiled, deeply relieved. “Incidentally,” he said now, lightly, “I seem to be remarkably focused on things other than duty at the moment. If I damn Venus, is that blasphemy?”

  A rueful snort. “Yes. Yes, it is.” Tiberius stretched. “I’d give a small fortune for a woman right now.” The admission sounded shame-faced. “We could always share her.”

  “That’s always a pleasant option.” Alexander nodded. “Though after Hellas, I thought we agreed on that. Not till we can find a woman who’s willing to swear by the Styx that she genuinely enjoys it.”

  They’d stayed in a variety of noble homes in Hellas; that was the best option available to patricians. But they’d also had to resort to renting rooms above tavernas once or twice, and those had proven to have the best privacy, ironically, of any place in their travels. They’d been able to experiment freely there, and had rapidly discovered what each of them liked—and didn’t like. But privacy in a legion camp was damned near impossible to find. And the rules of the legion were extremely firm on certain behaviors. Freeborn males weren’t supposed to fuck each other. That road led to infamio for whichever of the two accepted the passive role. If someone happened to own a young male slave, however, a freeborn male could certainly have his cock sucked or fuck the ass in question freely. The question was always one of exerting dominance over someone else of a lower social stature—be they male or female. Being conquered was not acceptable for a freeborn adult male—preferring it was considered a sign of some sort of illness. But dozens of men kept young male concubines, called puers, boys, in theoretically loving relationships, though they were usually expected to give the young men up after marriage . . . and the puer was supposed to stay in the household afterwards, his long hair cut, and might even father children on the female slaves.

  Fortunately, neither of us actually likes the passive role. We both find it degrading and disrespectful to each other. But try explaining all the other options available to the unimaginative. And it all boils down to regulations and the discipline of the legions. Get caught with another freeborn man, and you can be clubbed to death. But fuck one of the cooks, and you’re . . . tolerated. He exhaled. And thus, they hadn’t so much as touched one another since coming to active duty. Our tent is right next to Cicero Minor’s headquarters, complete with his wife and brood, and the other tribunes have tents to the other sides of us. Cloth walls are thin, and unless there’s a damned good reason, I’d prefer not to get a reputation that puts me on the same level as an actor.

  Tiberius simply nodded. “Then I suppose we’ll just have to endure Venus’ curse for a while.”

  “Damnation,” Alexander swore, and laughed. And feeling somehow better, he followed Tiberius off into the camp, in search of some of the wine that neither of them had yet sampled. Alexander hoped that it would both quell his libido and stop his head from spinning through all the necessary things that he saw in his path.

  Chapter XV: Whispers on the Wind

  October 19, 17 AC

  The campaign season ended on the same day every year, no matter where in the world Roman soldiers found themselves. This was a matter of both religious and pragmatic importance—in Rome, the salii would parade around the city today, and carefully store away the shield of Numa and all its replicas, signaling the end of the season for war. Legionnaires in the Italian peninsula would cleanse and purify their weapons, before storing them for next year, in much the way farmers cleaned and stored their tools, keeping the damp of winter from rusting their edges. The professional legionnaires would continue to train through the winter months, ensuring that they stayed strong and sharp. Men wounded badly enough on a campaign to be remanded home to Rome would struggle to return to fitness.

  And for the legionnaires camped in Illyria with Antony and in Hispania with Caesarion, it was time to settle in for the winter. To remain vigilant against any attacks by the locals, but to rest from active offensives. The terrain in Hispania was rough, and the mountains attracted snow. At the lower elevations, the roads in this Gallic area seemed to be little more than mud tracks, which wouldn’t let their supply wagons and ballistae move with any real ease anyway.

  Eurydice looked out the window of the new castra, built in an area called Medulas. Outside, nothing but mountains and trees, though the camp had been set up near a relatively friendly town of natives to the area, who called themselves the Lemavi. Gold torcs around the necks of their nobles—gold that they just picked up off the streambeds in this region. Caesarion and Alexander had heard that, and, with Matru and Malleolus and a handful of other translators, had made the Lemavi an offer. Swear fealty to Rome, and Rome would send miners and engineers to their lands. To look for where all this gold actually came from in the mountains through which the creeks washed. And the Lemavi would share in the wealth.

  It probably shouldn’t have been so surprising how quickly the small tribe had agreed to that, but they were surrounded by fractious competitors for the wealth of the region—the Baedi, the Intramici, the Bibali, and the horse-loving Equaesi, who were, like many of the tribes here, fierce warriors and expert cavalrymen. Being made wealthy and not having to protect that wealth personally? At only the cost of some taxes and a Roman governor? Had sounded ideal to them.

  They’d met with representatives of the Cantabri in Iunius. Matru, their hostage druid, had done his best to convince these “highlanders,” as the tribes around them called them, to pay reparations to Rome and submit. Alexander had told Caesarion his demands were temperate, but just—ten percent of their population, given over as slaves, and a yearly tribute of a talent of silver to be paid in perpetuity. “The alternative,” Caesarion had told the Cantabri representatives through Matru’s translation, “is your destruction.”

  The Cantabri had refused.

  They’d then pushed through the mountains around the Cantabri to make it to the sea-facing region of Gallaecia, where Caesarion had sent couriers south to the region already held by Rome, known as Lusitania. He’d called up ten thousand auxiliary cavalry and archers from that region to supplement the Tenth and Seventh, and had gone about taking Gallaecia, one tribal region at a time. In three months, he’d controlled everything from the mountains to the Sea of Atlas—thanks in large part to Eurydice’s ability to survey surrounding terrain and make him aware of enemy troop movements. She’d sat in on every planning meeting, watching as Tiberius’ eyes gleamed as he moved markers around the sand table, proposing strategies to deal with—and even take advantage of—the uneven terrain.

  That had left six weeks to take Astures, a smaller region east of Gallaecia—and Astures had fallen rapidly. Which left only the Cantabri themselves, unpacified, but surrounded on both sides of their mountains, which were a fortress in themselves. In the spring, the Fourth, with its replenished and freshly trained troops would leave
the castra in the west that Caesarion had named Gravidus, in honor of Mars, and hit the Cantabri from the right. And the Seventh, Tenth, and their auxiliaries would hit them from the left.

  But now that winter threatened, the auxiliaries had to be sent home. “No sense paying and feeding them if they’re not doing anything,” Caesarion had told her when she’d asked why. And the new castra bustled with activity as supplies came in on wagons, and the men set up smoking huts to preserve the meat from local goats that they slaughtered. Even a couple of elderly donkeys, unable to pull their loads one day longer, were slaughtered, rather than waste feed on them over the winter months. Their sinewy flesh would be seasoned with fennel and dried by a hearth, to be served later as field rations or in savory stews.

  The door banged open behind her, and Eurydice jumped, startled, and turned to find Caesarion there. “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” she said, smiling. “Didn’t a courier arrive with dispatches and letters?”

  “Yes. There’s word from Mother, actually.” He caught her hand to kiss it lightly. Six months into their unorthodox marriage, Eurydice still felt giddy every time he did that. “The couriers with our letters heading towards Rome kept hitting bad weather on the sea. Then they had to cross the mountains and find us once the return messages came.” A faintly lopsided smile crossed his face. “We haven’t exactly been sitting still.” He handed her the roll of parchment, with Cleopatra’s personal seal still in place across it. “Read it to me. My eyes burn from all the smoke in the air.” He unbuckled his armor and set it on its stand as she popped the seal loose and unrolled the letter, taking a seat at the desk as she did. “Well?” Caesarion asked, settling onto the wide sleeping couch with a groan and leaning down to unbuckle his greaves and boots. “What does she say?”

  “Hold on. She didn’t write in Latin or Hellene. It’s not even demotic.” Demotic was the simplified script form of Egyptian that they’d all learned as children. “She wrote it in hieratic. The temple script. It’s hard going.”

  Caesarion looked up at that. “That’s what you sent our last letter to her in, yes? The one in which we told her about our marriage?”

  Eurydice nodded. “Then she’s responding in kind. You’re the only person here who can read that. She must really not have wanted anyone to understand what she said.”

  She nodded again, her brows crinkling as she struggled to put the words together. Finally, translating as she read it, she said, “To my dear son, Pharaoh and Emperor, greetings. Your last set of dispatches arrived in Rome sorely late, having taken two months to reach my hands. I wish you heartiest congratulations on your marriage, but question the advisability of conducting it in the wilds of Hispania, far from where the eyes of Rome can see. This does not provide the union with the necessary legitimacy it requires. While the gods themselves may have blessed you, Rome will be slow to accord you the same respect. I recommend an immediate secondary ceremony on your return to Rome, conducted by a priestess of Isis and whatever priestess of Juno you can find who can be bribed into performing the Roman rites against the will of her peers.”

  Caesarion rolled to his back on the couch and put a forearm over his eyes. “That’s Mother. All the salt and none of the sweet.”

  Eurydice’s lips quirked up at the corners, and she moved now from the chair to the sleeping couch to continue on. “As I write this, other letters have reached Rome from your men. Cicero Minor was discreet, but some of your younger tribunes and more literate centurions have loose tongues. Rumors have already begun to fly about the Emperor who’s . . .” Eurydice choked. “Ah, the next word’s not in hieratic,” she said, quite unable to read the word out loud.

  “Fucking his sister?” Caesarion interpreted, raising his arm from his eyes. The term in Latin was futtare.

  Eurydice cringed a little. “That. Yes.”

  “It’s a perfectly good word, if a blunt one. It describes precisely what we do in bed.” He sat up and rubbed a hand gently up and down her arm. “It does, however, lack in nuance. There should be a word that describes the same exact act, but done by two people who are in love and married.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Fu-amor-ate? No, that sounds like something’s going up in smoke. I’ve no gift for words.” His thumb worked against her arm gently. “I’ll designate a poet to work on it. That young Ovidus who ran at the Lupercal, perhaps.”

  As she was meant to, Eurydice choked with laughter, and finally collapsed against his side, shaking with a mix of amusement and deep embarrassment. “Keep reading,” Caesarion told her, leaning back so that they could both recline now.

  Eurydice cleared her throat and tried to find her place in the scroll again. “Ah . . . although these rumors are tempered by outrageous reports of divine visitations. No one here quite knows what to believe, but people will believe a malicious falsehood sooner than a virtuous truth. It appeals to the base metal in all of us.”

  Caesarion sighed. “There is that. I apparently should have sent a formal notification to the Senate—no. I should have dropped everything in the middle of a war, gotten on a ship, and gone back to Rome and told them all to their faces.”

  “Well, if you’d done that, they’d say that you’d abandoned your duty for frivolous reasons—”

  “I am aware that I cannot win every battle, and that this is likely one of them. I’ll win the war, though. Keep reading.”

  She couldn’t help but chuckle at his resigned tone. “I had already planned to step down as queen of Egypt within the next four years to force the two of you into the actions that you both clearly desired, and which we all clearly understand as necessary for the good of two realms.”

  “Of course she did,” Caesarion said. “That clears the way for me to declare you my queen in Egypt. Gods only know how I’ll get the Senate to affirm you as my Empress in Rome, but that’s a problem for another day.”

  Eurydice nodded, not particularly looking forward to that part, herself. “As Eurydice is not quite ready to take over rule of the kingdom, I will refrain from this action for the near future. But I think it would be quite astonishing to be the only person of either gender in my house ever to retire peacefully from rule. Though I believe my dear Antony may laugh when he realizes that I no longer outrank him.”

  A snort from Caesarion. “What else is in there?” he asked as she paused, and slipped his arm behind her neck to play with her hair.

  Eurydice squinted at the spidery writing. “Antony’s pushed the Servilii so far that they’ve left both Illyria and Dalmatia, and the local Celts to the north of Dalmatia aren’t exactly welcoming the rebel Romans. His dispatches home have mentioned that so long as he’s there, he might as well secure the area properly.” She looked up. “Father was having problems with Illyria even before the Servilii fled there, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. The Dalmatians and Illyrians used to be subject kingdoms. The king of Dalmatia tried to give Crassus assistance getting to the Parthians back during the Carrhae disaster. Crassus, idiot that he was, thought that willing assistance was a trap.” He put his free hand over his eyes to rub there. “They’ve been gradually drifting towards the status of a province since then, but they started revolting against Rome since about the twelfth year of Father’s rule. He put them down once, and then, well . . . ” Caesarion sighed. “I inherited that mess, too. The Servilii just elevated it from occasional rioting to a renewed rebellion.”

  Eurydice nodded against his chest as she continued to read. “Not a lot else,” she told him. “Octavia’s decided to dye her hair red-gold, because she wants to look Hellene. And everyone knows Hellene women have red-gold hair. Selene’s tending to spend more and more time in her room playing her lyre or kithara than anything else. Mother doesn’t know why, and mostly doesn’t care, it seems. Her pregnancy is coming along as well as can be expected for someone past forty. Her medici aren’t unduly concerned. She—” Eurydice blinked. “She should be ready to give birth to our half-sibling practically any day now,” she commented. “It’
s October, and this letter’s dated in September.”

  “At least that one will be Antony’s responsibility and not mine,” Caesarion muttered.

  Eurydice rolled up the scroll and tapped him lightly on the head with it. “What a thing to say. Technically, that child would be in line for the throne of Egypt, too, you know—”

  “I will worry about that some other day.” He rolled to his side and kissed her. “Today, however, I have other things to worry about. So, get up. You start training . . . right about now.”

  “I—what?” Eurydice stared at him, flummoxed.

  “Half these Gallic tribes we’ve fought have had female warriors guarding their towns. I can’t break with centuries of tradition and make you a legionnaire as well as my wife and queen. But when Aucissa attacked you—”

  “I could barely stand,” she admitted, looking down. “I had no power left.”

  “True,” Caesarion said, sitting up now. “But I also noticed that when I closed to melee range with the druids, they weren’t casting spells. They reached for weapons—knives, mostly. It’s difficult to concentrate on your magic when someone’s attacking you, isn’t it?”

  Eurydice thought back to the horrible day on the mountain, and nodded silently. “I thought so. I’ve been keeping you to the rear on purpose since then. Haven’t had time to work with you on the problem.” Caesarion shrugged. “Winter quarters mean we now have plenty of time. We’ve got a training hall right here in the headquarters building. You and I and Alexander—and maybe Tiberius, if he can get his head around the idea of fighting with a woman—will spar a little in private.”