And now it looked as if he would not. Never mind. Even if he left his bones in Syria, a part of him lived forever in the grasses outside Rome.
“This one will make a fanner,” his grandsire said approvingly at a supper as frugal as that of their tenants. Chickpeas. Some lettuces. Cheese. Very little meat. His father seemed pleased. His mother, like the good woman that she was, sat and tended her wool.
Quintus slipped a hand into his tunic to feel the small bronze statue. It seemed to warm at the praise. He thought then that his life was beginning. But that was the evening he first heard the name “Sulla.” He heard it more in the days to come until he came to hate the sound. Often he heard it coupled with the name “Marius,” spoken by his father in a tone of reverence that rivaled the way he addressed to his grandsire.
In the days that followed, Quintus’s bulla lay upon the house altar. Wrapped in an unfamiliar toga virilis, he stood beside his grandsire to watch his father march away. The old man kept a hawk’s dignity, but he looked as worn as the tombs on the Via Appia they passed on their way into the City of Seven Hills. Even Quintus’s bronze figurine, frozen in its ancient dance, had been no more weathered. But six months later, he saw how much older his grandsire could look. A man had come to the door, his tunic poor, his body twisted by ill-healed wounds. Not the sort of man a gentleman wanted visiting him, Quintus thought, until he saw the care with which the stranger limped over the threshhold, careful not to stumble and thus bring bad luck to the house.
He could not have brought more ill-luck to the house had he fallen flat. The news he brought was the death of Quintus’s father.
“Did he die well?” asked the old man.
The visitor nodded.
“Then I have a son yet,” he said.
Quintus had clasped his hand about his talisman. It paused in its dance, and one of the bronze torches stung his palm as if it were in truth alight. His mother, who had lingered to hear, had grasped her spindle so hard that blood dripped onto the bleached wool. She opened her mouth to cry out, but the old man’s hand forestalled her lamentations. It shook once, then closed, clasping the hand of his son’s friend, urging him to accept what hospitality the house could muster.
“Leave that wailing to hired mourners,” he commanded. He was paterfamilias. He was obeyed.
No body was ever returned to the farmhouse near the Tiber, just as none would come back from Carrhae. His father slept gods only knew where, not in the roadside tomb carved with a mantling Roman eagle rather than mourning figures. Some whispered that his father had died a rebel and it were best to cut the ceremonies short or omit them altogether: His grandsire stood by the tomb in his toga, dark for mourning, refusing to veil his head with a fold of cloth as anyone had a right to at the funeral of his only son. Perforce, Quintus too did not cover his head or face. He fought to keep his mouth from jerking in grief, trying to convince himself that that battle meant as much to him as the wars between Marius and Sulla that had robbed him of a father and his country of its peace.
Like two dogs, he thought, as curs fight on the paving stones, who fought over a stolen haunch until both beasts were bleeding and the meat was spoiled.
Whenever he might, he escaped to the river. The voice he had come to trust crooned comfort for his loss, a comfort that warmed him even as he returned to a cold hearth and a mother whose life turned feverish, flaming high and fitful like a dancer’s torch, then guttering out as if it were thrust into sand.
They had few slaves left. Even Quintus’s grandsire took his turn at tending her. But she died, and it seemed to Quintus that his dark mourning toga was made of lead, not his mother’s wool. Even the coos of the doves by the riverbank seemed to mourn her.
“She was a good, thrifty woman,” said his grandsire. “I have my son’s son yet. And my land.”
Quintus’s mother had served him well and loved his son well, but the old man did not weep. One weakness only he showed: that Decia, who loved her husband so well that she could not live without him, should not lie alone in the family tomb, but instead sleep in peace beneath the olive trees of their farm. She would hear the doves and the voices, Quintus thought. He took comfort from that, if nothing else.
The day after that the orders came: They were displaced, evicted from the farm they had held since the Tarquins ruled.
Come with me, Quintus implored the shadowy figure in the water.
I cannot.
I will win back these lands, he vowed.
Whatever comes, you will see me again.
They had sold his mother’s jewelry that should have gone to Quintus’s wife, if ever he should be able now to marry and if any decent gens would welcome him. They had taken space in one of the insulae within the City itself, and the old man had declared his intent of pleading his case to some of the greatest men in the Senate.
Life as a client for such as he—as well ask the cliff to melt as the old eagle to bend his neck and smile. Quintus knew that shuttling between the insula and his patron’s house on the Palatine shortened his grandfather’s life as surely as a fever. It had been harder to be a sycophant, Quintus thought, than to lose at Carrhae.
With each attempt at a bow, each delayed petition, the knowledge came upon him. Their family had no skill at this type of battle. They would never see their farm again.
He thought his grandsire knew it too.
Neither ever spoke the thought aloud.
In the end, the old man had been relieved to die. He had secured for Quintus the little that he could—an appointment as a tribune in Crassus’s service. Perhaps the grandson’s more supple back could secure what he could not—a return to favor and their old home. If not, it was honorable service, or an honorable death.
Shouts boomed out, echoing in the marsh like a Greek actor’s tragic speech, made louder by the mask. The voices held an edge of rage, made uglier by panic.
Quintus flicked a glance around his pitiful command. His men sat, heads between knees. Even in the dark, he could see that their faces wore the glazed, far-away look of men about to turn children again, retreating from an intolerable world.
Rufus met his eyes and shrugged. His hand fell to his gladius. If the men could not or would not march when the order came, it would be the blade for them, as it had been earlier.
Quintus could not permit that. And there was something he could do. At the very least, he could gather information and perhaps use it to keep his men alive a little longer.
Pulling away from the centurion, he crept forward, his boots making sucking noises in the marsh, chafing at his aching feet. He thought to discard them, then changed his mind.
He could be no more welcome at this staff meeting than he had been at any of the others. Lucilius would raise both supercilious brows. Someone else might sniff, as if at manure brought within the Senate chamber. Crassus might damn him with a frown.
Surprising, wasn’t it, this close to death, how little any of that mattered?
There was no Via Principalis, no orderly encampment in the marsh. Quintus wondered if Crassus had ever seen the need for such a thing, even when he was victorious. Someone had made a half-hearted attempt to set up a tent for the proconsul. It leaned drunkenly against some brush and a half-drowned tree, and every time fresh shouts erupted, it appeared to sag. Even the wings of the Eagle on guard outside seemed to droop as if the standard itself was ashamed.
It had been one thing for Quintus to approach the proconsul enthroned in the midst of a proper camp, with all the other patricians around him, their stares casting him back to his days as a client, cringing on the Palatine. This shabbiness no more meant “proconsul” or “Rome” than some nameless fat man in robes, wallowing drunk in an alley, was the Pontifex Maximus.
They were all going to die, anyhow, weren’t they? He was damned if he would observe the false niceties of rank even in death. Squaring his shoulders as a tribune ought to do, he pushed into the sorry tent, drew himself into the salute…