A Mixture of Madness, Book II of The Bow - By Levkoff, Andrew Page 0,101

you not wish to hear the end of the tale?”

Bowing contritely, I bade him continue.

“I left the senate, gathered my lictors and entourage, and was preparing to leave the city when this vaunted Tribune of the Plebs shows up again. This time Ateius, failing to incite the crowd to detain me, attempts instead to have me arrested!”

“I understand Pompeius intervened on your behalf?”

Crassus’ expression darkened. “It is true, and it rankles deeply that I was forced to accept his assistance. Like it or not, he does have a following, and with his soothing words and paternal smiles, he parted the crowds in the comitium as a liburna under full sail cuts through hospitable seas.

“Why would he aid you? With respect, your enmity is mutual.”

“Why else? To hasten us out of the city and so out of his thinning hair. Our alliance is broken. Both Pompeius and Caesar would like nothing better than to see me fail, or if the gods might grant their secret, special prayers, to find themselves on the speaker’s rostra draped in black and reciting the laudatio funebris in my recently departed honor.

“Are you certain, my lord? Did not Caesar write from Gaul to encourage you?”

“Of course he encourages me! Think on it, Alexander. He believes my failure is fated, because I do not meet the requirement of the Sibylline oracles. I will fail because I am not a king. And when I do, the senate will grant him as many legions as it takes to avenge me; they will withhold nothing from him, including a crown.”

“And so he allows Publius to slip away, to become another martyred hero?”

“I believe that is his thinking, yes.” Crassus tilted his head toward the roiling sky. “Once I counted him an ally and I had thought, a friend. I believed I could take the measure of any man with but a glance, but it shames me to think how blind I was to his true nature. If I could be so wrong about Caesar, who is to say the image I hold of myself is not equally warped and contorted?”

“For that answer, you need only look into the eyes of your wife and sons.”

“My wife, yes.” Crassus' eyes drifted away, then refocused. “You were present the night Caesar became my enemy. Publius must never know. As for Marcus, my eldest, he is an accountant, not a warrior. Let Caesar keep him as quaestor to guard his swelling treasury. The general has little to fear from him, and I frankly, have little use for him in Parthia. He will stay in Gaul to be our ears in Caesar’s camp.

“Do not look so dismayed, my old friend. I mean to turn their scheming to advantage. As much as Caesar and Pompeius think they will benefit from my departure, how much more then, will their stars fall when I return triumphant? I am no virgin legionary on his first sortie. Orodes cannot throw against us but a fraction of the army Spartacus managed to put into the field. And what became of him and his rabble?”

The memory made me grimace. “I have seen the fate of six thousand of them—survivors caught and executed after the final battle. For more than a year after the war, unless you had a fast horse, a stomach made of Margianian steel or a wagonload of ampullae filled with Egyptian perfume, you could not travel the Via Appia between Capua and Rome without retching. A brace of nailed corpses every hundred feet for sixty miles, the sky black with crows for months—dominus, the horror and cruelty of it was too much.”

“Because I love you, Alexander, and because I know that in matters of education and philosophy, you are at least my equal, I will not have you beaten for what I would consider impudence in any other man. Leave politics to the politicians. The crucifixions were a harsh but necessary deterrent. If I had it to do all over again, I would change nothing. And that is the point, is it not? By executing the survivors in the most ignominious, dishonorable way possible, I have insured that ‘doing it all over again’ will never be necessary. And mark me, Alexander, I will deal just as severely with Orodes, should he have the temerity to face me.”

I stopped and turned a resolute face to my master. “I have served you, Marcus Licinius, for more years than I probably have left to live. I believe that, save for your wife,