The Bow of Heaven - Book I: The Other Al - By Andrew Levkoff Page 0,6

us who survived did so not out of cowardice, but for the slimmest and most fragile of unuttered hopes that one day our lot would improve.

I was to discover that even when such miracles are granted, and life’s burdens lighten, hope comes not as a solitary friend, but is joined by confederates of guilt and shame that sit like harpies in judgment over every goodness that fortune bestows. I survived, and some would say I flourished. But never think for an instant as this tale unfolds that mine has been an easy life. Even in the best of times in the house of Crassus, even after I had opened the smallest of places in my heart where I secretly, silently call him ‘friend,’ he was still and forever my master.

Chapter II

82 BCE - Fall, Rome

Year of the consulship of

Gaius Marius the Younger and Gnaeus Papirius Carbo

Sulla’s enemies fell one by one. He commanded the bulk of his legions to abandon the siege of Praeneste in a final push to win his civil war at the very gates of Rome. But the general’s dream of dictatorship was almost crushed at the base of the city walls. All would have been lost if not for Marcus Licinius Crassus, only thirty-three years old, who with 2,500 Spaniards fighting on Sulla’s right broke the flank of the defenders at the Colline Gate. The city was now Sulla’s. He had paid for it with the lives of fifty thousand Romans. The peaceful life of study and contemplation I had hoped to live was buried beneath an avalanche of carnage. I watched the ashes rise from the pyres that burned for weeks about the city and mourned not only for the Athens I would never see again, but also for the lives of these strangers who choked the air with their ascent into a foreign sky.

I quickly learned that in this place, treasure had no value unless it was accompanied by victorious war, political gain or domination over multitudes. Learning, education, philosophy – these things, pursued for their own sake were worthless. Strength, influence, power - this was the currency of Rome.

Which left me utterly destitute. Yet it was my education that saved me. Although the fighting was over, the slaughter continued. Before Sulla’s armies had breached the city’s gates, Marius the younger had sought to create a majority of senators and supporters by eliminating any voice that might be raised against him. Politicians and patricians known to be partial to Sulla were murdered in their homes and in the streets. Whole families were destroyed. The Forum ran with blood, festooned with the heads of those loyal to Sulla. In this Marius was much like his father, the elder Marius, who five years earlier sought to destroy the irrepressible Sulla when his duties as a Roman general called upon him to abandon the city to put down the rebellious king of Pontus. Two victims of that earlier purge had been Crassus’ father and his only remaining older brother.

***

The officer of the century in which I served was gifted the captives from the ten contuberniums under his command. With the money he got for us at auction, he might buy drink and whores to last a week, and perhaps have a bit left over to replace his fraying belt. That is, if he could find a shop or a tavern that was open for business. The city was in chaos. Gone were the days when no armed soldier was allowed within the pomerium, the city’s ancient boundary, unless it was for the brief span required to celebrate a triumph. To my bleary eyes this was a celebration of slaughter, and those who did not take part stood vigil over a once great city devouring itself whole. Rome was ruled by gangs of vicious and undisciplined children playing at king-of-the-hill. It was a terrifying time, for these “children” had devoted, armored men at their backs, their swords bright and bloody.

The gates which Sulla’s army had fought so hard to breach were now barred shut. No one could leave, and the screams of those who had sided with the vanquished echoed all around us. We marched south, single file through narrow, stinking streets, our passage often made unbearable by the bodies through which we were forced to tread. In spite of my own chattering teeth, I thanked Athena that the fetid smell was blunted somewhat by November’s chill. Even so, all too often the ropes that bound us to