Ave, Caesarion (The Rise of Caesarion's Rome Book 1)

by Deborah Davitt

Caesarion closed his eyes. “They gave me the damned grass crown,” he told her wearily. “That night, after we’d gotten the remnants of the Seventh back across the bridge. Couldn’t even burn the bodies of the dead—too many Goths and too much forest. Some of the men of the Seventh came to me with a crown made of ivy vines stripped from the trees. Oak leaves. And what little grass actually grows in that night-dark forest. Put it on my head for saving them. It’s in a chest in my room. Slowly falling to bits.” He sighed. “I didn’t want a triumph. It wasn’t a victory. The men of the Tenth who fought with me deserved the recognition. Theirs was the real courage.” He twisted in the chair, and got one arm around her waist. Pulled her alongside him. “I promise, I don’t wallow in it. But when I see it in my dreams, all I see for the next day is the bodies. Men frozen where they stood,” he added, his throat closing. “Shields still over their heads, white frost covering them. Erasing their faces, thank the gods, because I don’t think I could bear to remember their expressions.”

  She stroked his hair lightly. “What helps you not to see it?” she asked gently.

  “Exhaustion,” he told her wryly, lifting his head and putting a smile on his lips that he didn’t feel. “I’ll probably get Alexander, Tiberius, and Drusus to spar with me and some of the Praetorians today. They need the practice, especially Alexander and Tiberius. They need to be ready when we go to Hispania next year. Then . . . probably a long ride. You can come along with me.” The smile felt slightly more genuine now as he added, raising his eyebrows, “You can read Elektra to me in Hellene wherever we stop off.”

  “Mother caught me reading that last week. She has odd opinions on the play.” A rueful chuckle in her voice now.

  “Mother has odd opinions on everything.” He looked up. “What did she say about it?”

  “She said it was a wonderful example of Hellene prudery.”

  Caesarion laughed out loud. “Those two words have never been coupled to each other in the whole of history,” he told her. “The best love poetry, the most shocking comedies, all Hellene—”

  “Hellenes have comedies?” Eurydice asked, in mock surprise. “All I’ve gotten so far are tragedies.”

  “Your tutors likely wouldn’t have thought Aristophanes was appropriate for you. I’ll give you the scrolls if you’re interested. There’s a revival of one of his plays being done at Pompey’s theater right now—Lysistrata, the breaker of armies.” He grinned at her, feeling a welcome sort of relief and normalcy creep through him. “I should take you, Alexander, and Tiberius. The others are too young still.”

  Her eyes flickered. “It wouldn’t be inappropriate for me to go?”

  “You’d be with family. And being with family, you wouldn’t have to go sit in the women’s seats.” He paused. “Perhaps Rome needs to see us more often, out doing normal Roman things. And seeing the mysterious witch who is sister to the Emperor blush down to her toes would help de-mystify you.” He gave her a companionable squeeze, and then released her to stand, feeling much better, somehow. “But you were saying about Elektra, and Mother’s opinion that it’s all prudery?”

  Eurydice frowned. “I didn’t quite understand,” she said slowly. “But both Sophocles and Euripides end the play with the brother and sister having avenged their father’s death by killing their mother. And then they have to flee the Furies for the crime of kin-slaying, even though the gods demanded that they exact that vengeance. Mother said that the real story is the twenty years that they spent running after the death of their mother. Elektra washing the blood from her brother’s back every night, as the Furies whipped them through the world. Binding the wounds. Comforting him in every way that a woman can.”

  “Every way?” he repeated, as dryly as he could. Ah. There’s Mother’s problem with the work. And for a moment, he could see it, himself. For twenty years, Orestes and Elektra would have had no one to turn to at all for love or comfort or physical relief. They were exiled, proscribed, reviled by every human whom they met. And if they were already damned for kin-slaying . . . why not take relief in each other’s arms?

  Eurydice suddenly looked deeply embarrassed, as if she’d just realized what she’d said. “No one else to turn to but one another,” she replied hastily. “Not a single soul in all the world who would understand the burdens that they carried, but each other. But Hellenes, Mother said, are far too immersed in vengeance—the vengeance of the gods, or the revenge of man—to ever understand real love or real tragedy. And she thinks the tragedy begins when they’re finally forgiven by the very gods that demanded that they take vengeance. Brought back into the loving embrace of Hellene civilization. And separated from each other by the bonds of civilization, forever.” She eyed him cautiously. “I honestly don’t know what to think of her interpretation of the legends.”

  Caesarion swallowed. Gods. Mother can put a pin on things when she wants to. Disturbed anew, he moved, putting a desk between them. “Hers is a very Egyptian point of view,” he said carefully. “So . . . perhaps instead of the play, you can practice some of these spells you stole from Tahut’s book while we’re well away from the house. No need to scare the servants.” Their own servants had always been Egyptian, but half their household was leaving with their mother in a week to join Antony’s house. He frowned. “For security’s sake, I should import more from Egypt, but that sends a bad message to Rome.” Gods, is everything I do going to be politically motivated from now on?

  “Hire Roman ones,” Eurydice told him, shrugging. She seemed as relieved as he was to change topics.

  “Egyptian servants who don’t speak Latin are safer for you, Alexander, and Selene,” he told her, still frowning. “The other houses will jump on the chance to insert spies into our household that way. That was their first move, in fact. Trying to poison me, and catching Lepidus instead, with poison left in my cup by a Roman servant.”

  “That was Mother and Father’s policy when they were trying to protect you, growing up,” Eurydice replied thoughtfully. “Circumstances have changed. I can only hide what I am in so much. Alexander told me yesterday that rumor already has named me Circe.” She shook her head. “Apparently, the other houses are convinced that I can turn men into pigs. Alexander told me that if anyone asks me about that, I should tell them that men need no magical assistance in that.”

  Caesarion laughed. The sentiment was purely Alexander in its wry, cheerful cynicism. “Did our brother have any other helpful notions?”

  She shrugged. “A few. He suggested that there are two tacks that we could take. His first option was to make me more foreign, more mysterious. More frightening. More or less what Mother’s done for years. The evil queen, scheming behind the scenes with magic and poisons in her hands. Fear, he said, was a very good substitute for respect.”

  “Mother schemes very well when necessary, but poison is not her favorite tool. Too many people she’s known have died of it.” Caesarion waved a hand. “I understand, however. He was speaking to public perceptions of her as the sorceress-queen who beguiled Caesar—and now has beguiled Antony, too. Though Antony doesn’t precisely act beguiled in public.” No, he acts every bit the crass populist he always has. Keeping most of the mutters at bay, thereby. “I’m not sure I like the idea of making you more frightening to the commons,” he added. “Even people who know you have had a tendency to pull back from you. Selene doesn’t let you hug her anymore, does she?”

  Eurydice winced. “No, she doesn’t.”

  Our youngest sister really must get over her fears. I let it go when she recoiled from me—I understand it. Overnight, I went from brother to head of family and Emperor, and the true face of my god-born nature was revealed. But Eurydice? How can Selene find her so frightening? “Did Alexander have any other notions?”

  She nodded. “His second option was akin to what you just said, yourself. That the people of Rome need to see us doing Roman things. We can’t keep Roman servants from gossiping, but we can try to ensure loyalty. Hire freemen and pay them well.
Hire the wives of the legionnaires of the Tenth—if any are willing to work outside of their homes. Admittedly, most of them won’t wish to do so.” Another faint shrug. “I’ve been looking through Mother’s household accounts. Which are even more cryptically written than Tahut’s spells. I think the budget would cover both those things, while keeping the Hellene pedagogues in place for Octavia, Selene, and Drusus.”

  He gave her a surprised look. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Mother handed me the accounts and the keys last week,” she acknowledged tiredly. “With strict instructions on what to wear to her wedding. Which includes kohl around my eyes and some of her more extravagant jewelry. So much for looking more Roman than Roman. In her opinion, I need to leave that to you.”

  Caesarion laughed, not having to force the sound. “Of course she did.” He couldn’t reach across the desk to touch her, but wished he could. Though he’d taken this position specifically to prevent himself from just that. “Sister, I think that you should decide on your appearance for our mother’s wedding. If you choose to wear something Egyptian, by all means. If you wish to dress in Roman fashion? There’s jewelry Father kept from his aunt, Julia, that he never gave to Mother. I think you should have it.”

  Her eyes widened, and he dismissed any thanks she might have offered, nodding towards the door instead. “I’ll join you for breakfast in an hour. In the meantime,” he tapped a set of scrolls on his desk, “speaking of budgets, I should probably look over what the Senate sent me. They’re offering me a proposal on giving retiring legionnaires a credit in gold instead of in land. But I have no idea where they think we’ll get that money from.”

  As she left, however, Caesarion tried once more to unfocus his eyes. And was somehow comforted by the flickering shadows that leaped and bounded around the room. “Perhaps some new bargains with our lares might be in order,” he muttered under his breath. “Seems to me that you would be our most loyal protectors. And most useful, given that you’re invisible to those who don’t know how to look.”

  It might have been his imagination, but he thought he could hear soft laughter in the distance.

  ____________________

  Sextilis 18, 16 AC

  “You were there?” Tiberius asked with interest as he and Alexander sparred with heavy practice swords in the formal atrium, edging past the tile-lined pool there, at the heart of which was a small, lovely fountain. Alexander was fast on his feet, surprisingly so, and pressed his attack, pushing Tiberius towards the narrow hallway that connected the atrium with the peristylium garden. “You were there for the battle of the Weser?”

  “I was,” Alexander returned as Tiberius blocked another thought-fast jab with his shield. “Didn’t do much besides ride to the edge of the bridge.” Harsh breathing as Tiberius pushed back, testing Alexander’s defenses. Sandals sliding on the tile floors, wobble of a knee presenting an opening that Alexander barely parried in time. “Shit!”

  “Keep your shield up,” Tiberius told him. “That was almost your throat—”

  “I noticed that.” A flurry of attacks now, and Tiberius found himself pressed all the way into the peristylium after all, with the smell of cypress branches and green herbs growing. “Caesarion had ordered me to stay back, and truthfully, I weighed forty librae less than I do today and was four uncia shorter. The only thing . . . I could have done . . . was get . . . in the way.” The words were gritted out as he closed and slammed his shield into Tiberius’, pushing the other back, off the tile, into the softer, more yielding footing of the garden’s soil. And Tiberius pushed back, with all his strength, and felt Alexander’s feet, still on the tile, slip backwards.

  And with Alexander off-balance, he feinted high and then lashed out with a kick, trying to take his friend’s legs out from under him. Alexander staggered, got his shield up, and held off a flurry of blows from Tiberius now himself, managing to score a hit on his friend’s leg with his sword. “Shit!” Tiberius swore, jumping back. The thwack had hurt, but pain was a good reminder of how much worse it could have been, had the sword been a real one. “Greaves would have taken it—”

  “Probably, but not everyone wears those.” Alexander panted for a moment. The stifling heat even during the early morning hours meant that both of them were bathed in sweat from their activity. “Break for water?”

  “Sure.” Tiberius tossed his shield and sword onto the garden’s ground, wiping his face with his hands. After they’d dunked their heads under the fountain, he asked, quietly, “So is everything they say about that battle true?”

  Alexander’s expression went as bleak as he’d yet seen it. “I haven’t heard every rumor,” his friend said simply. “But trees ripped themselves free of the earth to fight for the Goths. And there was a dragon. The Tenth fought the trees and the Goths. Caesarion fought the dragon.”

  “And won?” Tiberius asked, incredulous.

  Alexander shook his head, his jaw set. “I think I’d call it a draw,” he replied tightly after a moment. “If the rider on the dragon hadn’t intervened and wounded Caesarion as badly as she did—”

  “Wait, he was wounded?”

  “Took the dragon’s claws through his shield to his arm. Whatever the rider did to him, he was as bathed in his own blood as we’re bathed in sweat.” Alexander bit off the ends of his words. “I was there. I saw what happened. The dragon refused to fight him after that. The . . . woman . . . on its back—she whipped it. The whip was made of finger bones and claws, Tiberius. And she beat her mount till blood poured from its sides, and it still refused to fight while Caesarion was in that state.” He shook his head, his eyes dazed as he sat down on the raised edge of the pool. “He was still standing, though. Pulled all the men back to the bridge, under fire from the Goths. Had the engineers strike the bridge with the Goths trying to pour across it. I don’t even know if he remembers that part. He finally fell unconscious in the saddle as we pulled back to our last fortified position. I had to hold him up. Which was a trick, since he still outweighs me by more than sixty librae.”

  Tiberius felt as if the world had sloped under him, like a tray in the hands of an untrained servant. He took a seat beside Alexander on the pool’s edge, shaking his head. “That’s. . . that’s something you hear about in legends. Hercules fighting the Hydra. Odysseus navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.”

  “Bothers your rationalism, does it?” Alexander rubbed at the back of his neck. “Bothered mine, too. Till I realized that just because it hasn’t been documented in some volume of natural history or another, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It simply means that we Romans haven’t seen it and categorized it yet.”

  “And how would you categorize the beast?” Tiberius asked, trying for a little faint humor.

  Alexander stared at him, his dark eyes empty. “The most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And what was surely the mount of a god of some sort.”

  Tiberius considered that. “Would you go back to Germania to fight?”

  “If ordered, yes, but I’d be praying to Mars every single day that Caesarion was along with us.” Clear, blunt words. “I’ll fight men, Tiberius. But fighting that thing would be like fighting a volcano. Purposeless for men like you and me.”

  Tiberius nodded slowly. He didn’t think Alexander lacked for courage, but he did think his friend might be overstating the case a little, out of hero-worship for Caesarion. “It was truly that bad?”

  “We lost half the Seventh, Ti. One third alone to the ice of the creature’s breath. A legion has close to six thousand men in it. So we lost two thousand men in the space of ten minutes.” Frustration in Alexander’s voice as he tried to convey the enormity of what he’d seen, and Tiberius stopped breathing for a moment. “The other thousand had already fallen to arrows and blades. Quintus Cicero was carried off the field by his men, unconscious since before the dragon arrived. He never saw it. Couldn’t attest to it. But those of his officers who survived did.”

  “All right, I
believe you,” Tiberius surrendered, then looked up as Drusus, his younger brother, clattered into the atrium. “Dis. Am I late?” he asked.

  Drusus looked annoyed. “Not yet, but if you don’t clean up soon, you will be,” he said, folding his arms over his fresh blue tunic.

  Alexander raised his eyebrows. “Going somewhere?”

  “Mother sent word. She’s still staying at Agrippa’s house, and wished to see us.” Tiberius heard his own voice cool. He knew that he owed his mother filial loyalty. But that didn’t mean he had to like the woman who’d given him birth. “I said I’d bring Drusus over this morning.”

  “Then for Juno’s sake, get cleaned up and dressed. You don’t want to visit covered in sweat.” Alexander scooped more water over his own head. “Will you be back in time for the theater?”

  “Yes. I don’t intend to make this a lengthy visit.” Tiberius stood, offering Alexander a hand to pull his friend to his feet. Simple camaraderie in public. Surprisingly easy to maintain, though every now and again he couldn’t help but think of some of what they did in private, and a flash of heat would flicker through him.

  He’d been born in Rome, but for most of his first nine years, he’d been raised in Hellas—retreating from this city to that as Octavian had steadily gained ground on his father’s rebels. Half a dozen different homes, each with a window he’d peered out of, watching the troops march off, and wishing he could go with his father. Instead, he’d been left with his chilly mother and the servants—though he had only dim memories of Livia in Hellas, as his father had been defeated when Tiberius was nearly four. And Livia had married Octavian in the garden of her former husband’s home. Given away by her former husband to her new one.

  Tiberius remembered the years after, however, much more clearly. Watching the servants out the window had been an education in itself. No privacy for the slaves—they’d snatched what little they could at the edge of the gardens outside each villa, and Tiberius had watched with the detached, puzzled interest of a child watching adult behavior, as male and female, and male and male, had coupled in the long grass. Later, bath house art had clarified a few points for him.