The Blood of Gods A Novel of Rome - By Conn Iggulden Page 0,135

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 there 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