The Blood of Gods A Novel of Rome - By Conn Iggulden Page 0,36

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Octavian was not sure the fast run had been worth it. He’d come into Rome two days before the will was to be read, but the world of peace and order he had known had been torn apart. According to a friend of Maecenas who’d offered them his home, it had been even worse before and was beginning to settle down, but great sections of the city had been reduced to blackened beams and grubby citizens picking through the rubble for anything valuable. Tens of thousands were starving, roving the streets in gangs in search of food. More than once he and his friends had to draw swords just to cross neighbourhoods that had become feral even in daylight. The city looked as if it had been in a war and Octavian could hardly reconcile the reality with his memories. In a way, it suited the grief he felt for Julius, a fitting landscape for such a loss.

‘Here she is at last,’ Agrippa said under his breath.

Octavian snapped back from his reverie as the priestess of Vesta came out. He had been searching the crowd for the faces of men he knew. If Brutus had been there, he did not know what he would have done, but there was no sign of the man he wanted to see dead above all others. Two days in Rome had been enough to hear the details of the assassination and he burned with new energy at the thought of those Liberatores who sought to profit from murdering a good man. In the silence of his own thoughts, in the shadow of the temple of Vesta, he swore oaths of vengeance. The state of the city was the crop they had sown, the result of their greed and jealousy. He had not known what strength could come from hate, not before seeing Rome again.

As the priestess unbound the will of Caesar from its box and lead straps, Octavian continued to glance back at the crowd. He recognised some faces he thought might be senators, but in cloaks and mantles against the morning cold, he could not be certain. He had been away too long.

Agrippa nudged him to pay attention as the priestess scanned the first tablet, a line appearing on her forehead. When she looked up, she seemed to stare straight at Octavian. He waited, his heart thumping painfully in his chest and his mouth drying, so that he ran his tongue around the inside to free his lips.

‘“For the honour of Rome, hear the will of Gaius Julius Caesar,”’ she began.

Octavian clenched his fists, hardly able to stand the tension. He felt Gracchus look over at him, the man’s expression unreadable.

‘“Gaius Octavian is my heir. I acknowledge him as blood of my blood and, by these words, I claim and adopt him as my son.”’

Octavian felt a great shudder run through him and he would have staggered if Agrippa hadn’t put out an arm. His hearing vanished in the pounding of his pulse and when he felt an itch on his face, he scrubbed at it, leaving a red welt on his skin. It was too much to take in and he hardly heard the lines that followed, watching the priestess of Vesta hand down the tablets as she read them out. At one point, the men and women in the crowd cheered raucously and Octavian could not understand why. He was numb with emotion, overwhelmed at the hand of Caesar reaching out from death to touch him.

The face of Gracchus was the picture of sourness as he considered the fortune his patron could have had, with a tenth of Caesar’s wealth. It was almost a legend, how much gold the leader of Rome had brought back from his conquests, at one point flooding so much of it into the city that it devalued the currency by almost a third. Octavian was the heir to all of it and Gracchus decided on the instant to be a more amenable companion. He would never again stand in the presence of such wealth, he was certain. Reaching out, he was about to clap Octavian on the back, but Maecenas caught the wrist and just smiled at him.

‘Let’s not make a show, not here,’ Maecenas said in a low voice. ‘We are unknown to the crowd and that is the way it should stay until we have had a little time to think about all this.’

Gracchus forced a sickly grin and nodded, jerking back