The Triumph, Page 2

  Marcus thrived on a military life. As Marcus’ talent for strategy had blossomed, he had risen in rank. Although Marcus was his commander on the battlefield each year, when they returned home, they resumed being friends and neighbors. As the years had passed, and especially after the dragon had damn near taken his leg off, Flavius had answered the muster more reluctantly each year. He had begun to hope that the tribunes would see that the injury to his leg had made him an old man before his time. But every year when he presented himself for the dilectus, Marcus contrived that Flavius was chosen to serve in his legion. And at the end of each campaign, when they returned home together, always they slipped comfortably back into their old friendship.

  Had Marcus ever wanted to be anything but a soldier? Even now, as Flavius looked up at him in his cage, he doubted it. When they were boys, after their chores, Marcus had always wanted to be fighting with staves or staging ambushes on the neighbor’s goats. Flavius had preferred the hunt to a battle, and on the evenings when he persuaded Marcus to follow him on his quests, his friend had been unstinting in his amazement and praise of Flavius’ skills. He excelled at stealth and marksmanship. Flavius well remembered the sweetness of the long evenings of late summer, when the two boys had lounged by a small fire, savoring the smell of plundered apples baking by the embers and a small game bird sizzling over the last of the flames. Flavius’ thoughts would wander to whether he might persuade his father to let him range farther in search of larger game, but for Marcus, the dream was always the same.

  “I know my destiny,” he had confided to Flavius, more than once. “I’ve seen it in my dreams. I shall rise through the ranks, to be a praetor or a consul, just as my father did before me. And then I shall lead my troops forth into war.”

  “To kill a thousand of the enemy?” Flavius would ask, grinning.

  “A thousand? No! Five thousand, ten thousand will fall to my strategy. And I shall be summoned back to Rome and awarded a Triumph. I shall be paraded through the streets, with wagons full of my plunder, and my captives walking barefoot behind me. My army will follow me, of course, and you, Flavius, you I promise will be in the first rank. My wife and my grown sons will be honored with me. And I, I shall be stained as red as this apple, and my toga whiter than snow. At Jupiter’s temple, I will sacrifice six white bulls to him. All of Rome will line the streets to cheer me. This I know, Flavius. I’ve seen it.”

  He’d smiled at his friend’s posturing. “Don’t forget the best part of it, Marcus. There will be a slave in the chariot with you, standing just back of your shoulder and leaning forward to whisper into your ear the words that remind you that every hero is mortal. And thus you will be kept humble.” He grinned. “Perhaps, instead of a slave, they will let me do that!”

  “Mortal? The body perhaps is mortal, Flavius. But once a man has had a Triumph, once he is an imperator, then his legend is immortal and will be passed on through all the generations of soldiers that will ever spill blood on the earth.”

  One of the stolen apples had popped on the fire, spitting out a tiny missile of pulp and then draining a sweet stream of hot juice into the embers. Flavius had speared it with the small stick he was using to tend their meal and drawn it back from the fire’s edge. He held it up gravely on its skewer. “Memento mori!” he had toasted it gravely, and then blown on it before scalding his mouth with an incautious bite of it.

  * * * *

  Regulus tried to decide if the evening was as chill as it seemed. The day had been hot enough to bake him. But now, as the sunlight that jabbed through his hazed vision turned the world to a bloody red, he felt chilled.

  His eyeballs were too dried to see clearly, but he could still perceive that the light was fading. So the cooler evening was finally coming. Or death. Blindness would make the light fade, and blood loss could make a man cold. He well knew that. He’d lost count of the times when he’d lent his cloak to wrap a dying man. Flavius, he suddenly thought. He’d knelt by Flavius and tucked his cloak around him as he shivered. But Flavius hadn’t died, had he? Had he? No, not then. Not then, but now? Was Flavius alive now? Or had he left him dead on that last battlefield?

  Men always complained of the cold when they were dying, if they had breath left to speak. The cold and the enveloping darkness troubled them, or they expressed regrets in a muttered word or a sigh as he knelt beside the fallen man. As if the cold or the dark were what a man should worry about when his entrails were spilled in the dust next to him, or half his body’s blood was congealing in a pool beneath him. Still, it was a small comfort to offer, the lending of a cloak for the usually brief time it took a man to bleed out from a battle wound. A small comfort he would have welcomed just now. The touch of one friendly hand, one word from a friend to send him on his way. But he was alone.

  No one would come to wrap him in a cloak, or to take his hand, or even to speak his name. No one would crouch down beside him and say, “Regulus, you died well. You were a fine consul, a loyal centurion, and a good citizen. Rome will remember you. You died a hero’s death.” No. His parched tongue tried to wet his cracked lips. Another stupid reflex of the body. Tongue, lips, teeth. Silly, useless words now. None of them applied to him. As stupid as his mind, going on thinking, thinking, thinking while his body spiraled down into death.

  Something landed on the top of his suspended cage. A bird, it would have to be a bird up here. Not a serpent, not a dragon. It was not heavy, he didn’t think, but it was enough to make the cage rock a tiny bit.

  And enough to make the spikes bite just that much deeper. He held his breath and waited. Soon, they’d reach something vital, and he would die. But not just yet. No. Not just yet. He tightened his grip on the bars of his cage, or tried to. They’d shackled his hands higher than his heart, and they were numb now. It made no sense to cling to life when his body was already ruined. They’d broken so many parts of him that he could no longer catalog them. He did remember the moment when he suddenly knew that they weren’t going to stop. He’d known that before they began, of course. They’d promised him that. The Carthaginians had sent him forth, bound doubly by his word and their promise. They’d made him promise to return. In turn, the Carthaginians had promised that if he did not convince the Roman magistrates to accept the terms of the treaty, they would kill him on his return.

  He recalled standing among slaves as the Carthaginian envoys presented their terms. He had not shouted out that he was a Roman citizen, had not announced that he was Consul Marcus Attillius Regulus. No. He was ashamed to return to Rome in such a way and he had no intention of being a tool for the Carthaginians. They had had to bring him forward and announce him to the Magistrates themselves. And then he had done the only thing he could do. He denounced the treaty and its harsh terms, and advised the Magistrates to refuse it.

  And they had.

  And then he had kept his honor by keeping his word to his captors. He returned to Carthage with them.

  So, he’d known all along that the Carthaginians would kill him. Known with his mind. But that was different from knowing with his body. His body hadn’t known. His body had believed that somehow, he’d be able to go on living. If his body hadn’t believed that, his torturers would not have been able to wring scream after scream from him.

  He’d tried not to scream, of course. All men tried, at first, not to scream under torture. But sooner or later, they all did. And sooner or later, they all stopped even pretending to try not to scream. He could command one hundred men and they’d obeyed him in his days as a centurion, and as a general and as a consul he could command thousands. When he had told the Magistrates that they should refuse the terms of the treaty, they had listened. But when he had commanded his own body not to scream, it hadn’t listened to him. It had screamed and screamed, as if somehow that would mitigate the pain. It didn’t. And then, at some crucial point, when they had broken so many parts of him that he could no longer keep count, when really, no part of him was left whole, even his body had known that he wa
s going to die. And then it had stopped screaming.

  A very long time after that, or perhaps only a short time that seemed like a long time, they’d stopped actively torturing him. Was it hours or days ago that they’d rolled him down to the city gates inside his spiked cage? Did it matter?

  He listened to the sounds of the city below him. Earlier, there had been crowd noises. Exclamations, shouts of disgust and ridicule, mocking laughter and the stupid shouts of triumph from men who had never fought, never even tortured, but somehow thought they could claim his death as their victory. By virtue of what? he’d wanted to ask them. That you were whelped on a piece of dirt somewhere near the place where my torturer was born? Does that make seeing me dangle in a cage over your city gate a victory for you? You have no victory here. I told the Magistrates to refuse the treaty. Rome will not go down on its knees before you. I saw to that. If I could not give my country the victory it deserved, at least I have preserved it from accepting a defeat.

  He hadn’t said any such words to his gallery, of course. His mouth, tongue, and teeth were no longer useful for talking. He’d almost wished, at one point, that his torturers were pretending to wring information from him. If that had been their pretense, they’d have left him a mouth to babble with when they’d hurt him badly enough. But they’d been freed from any need to pretend they were doing anything other than hurting him as much as they could without killing him. And so they had done their worst, or perhaps they thought of it as their best. Torturers, he knew from employing them, were not interested in information or confessions. They weren’t even interested in reforming the wicked or making them sorry for their misdeeds. Torturers were interested in hurting people. That was all. He’d seen how it aroused them, how their eyes glittered and their mouths grew wet. It was in how lovingly they handled their tools and the great thought they gave to how they applied them. Torture, he thought, was sex for the sexless. Not a one of them ever worked for anything except his own joy in hurting. They were not warriors, not soldiers; perhaps they were not men at all. They were torturers. Consumers of pain, and they’d fed off his screams, just as the carrion birds waited to consume his flesh. The torturers were tools, servants of the ones who commanded them. And in his case, the men who had commanded the torturers were simply keeping a promise to him.

  His thoughts were jumping around like fleas evacuating the carcass of a dead animal. The mental image pleased him for a moment, and then it vanished from his mind. He cast his thoughts wider, tried to find an image or an idea to cling to, anything that would distract him from the slow pain of dying. There was his wife to think of, Julia. She would mourn and miss him. How many soldiers could say that of women left behind and know that it was true? And his sons, Marcus and Gaius. They would hear of their father’s death, and it would stiffen their resolution to defend Rome. They’d realize more clearly just what evil dogs these Carthaginians were. They would not feel shamed that he had been defeated and captured. They would take pride in how he had not scrabbled for a chance at life by betraying his country. No. He’d defied Carthage. If he could not leave his boys a Triumph to remember him by, at least he would leave them his honorable death as a loyal Roman.

  They’d hear how he died. He had no doubt of that. The Senate would noise it about. It would put some fire in their bellies, to think of Marcus Atillius Regulus, once a proud consul of the Roman legions, tormented and hung up to die like fresh meat hung to bleed in a butcher’s stall. The Senate would make certain that everyone heard of how he died.

  It would be the last use they’d make of him. He knew that and didn’t resent it. But gods, gods, how much longer must it take him to die?

  * * * *

  Flavius realized that he had been standing and staring too long. The stream of people moving into the city had parted to go around him. Earlier, he was sure, there had been a standing audience for Marcus’ last moments. But the stubborn soldier had defeated those gawkers. He’d refused to die for them.

  Flavius crossed the street to a merchant hawking slabs of flat bread. It smelled wonderful. He had a few coins from a purse he’d cut last week. At one time, he would have been shamed to resort to common thievery, but he had learned to justify it to himself. Even if he no longer wore the armor of a Roman soldier, soldier he was, and every Carthaginian remained his enemy. Stealing from them, even killing one if the opportunity were offered, was no different from hunting any other sort of prey. It had been a good pouch he’d cut, a leather one with woven throngs, and inside it was half a dozen coins, a small knife, a man’s ring, and a slab of wax. He took out his smallest coin and held it up for the bread merchant to see, scowling darkly all the while. The merchant shook his head disdainfully. Flavius let his scowl darken as he brought another small coin from the twisted rag at his hip and offered it as well. The merchant muttered, “You will beggar me!” but picked up one of his smaller loaves and offered it. Flavius handed over the two bits of metal and took the bread without thanks. Today he would take no chance of his accent betraying him.

  He broke the bread into small pieces and ate it dry, casting furtive glances up at Marcus as he did so. It felt traitorous to eat while his friend was dying, but he was hungry, and the activity gave him an excuse to loiter where he was. Marcus held steady. He gripped the bars of his cage and stared down at the passing folk. Some still looked up at him as they passed, but others scarcely noticed the dying man in the cage. Perhaps it was because he did not look as if he were dying. Yet Flavius looked up at him and knew. His boyhood friend was past saving. Even if a Roman legion had miraculously appeared to rescue him, Marcus would still die. There was a dusky color to his hands and feet that spoke of blood settling. The attentions of the torturers had left streaks of blood that had dried as brown stripes on his face and his chest and thighs. Yet Marcus stood and waited and Flavius stood and watched and waited, even though he could not say why.

  It seemed only fitting. After all, Marcus had once kept a death watch for him.

  It had been years ago. Six years? Seven? And it had not been that far from this dusty, evil city. They had been trying to cross the Bagradas River at a place where it ran through thick brush and verdant reeds that grew higher than a man’s head. The Bagradas Valley was a rich and fertile swath of ground that received the waters from the Tells on either side of it. On the flanks of the Tells, cork and oak and pine forests grew. The banks of the wide river were thick with both vegetation and stinging insects. Marcus had been a general then, but not yet risen to the rank of consul. That title he would earn by cutting a swath of destruction across Carthage. It had been a summer of conquest for him. That day, Marcus pushed infantry, horse, and archers to move swiftly as he sought for the best place to ford the Bagradas. He had chosen a prime spot for his evening camp, on a rise that overlooked a river. The troops settled in to create the standard fortification, a ditch and a wall made from the upflung dirt. Marcus had sent his scouts ahead to survey the fording place. They had returned too soon, to report unusual activity by the water’s edge.

  “We saw a snake, sir. A huge snake. By the river.”

  Flavius had been in earshot of that first report. Sometimes of an evening, after the boundaries were set for the night, he’d go by Marcus’ tent. If the general was not too busy, he’d find time for some talk with his old friend. But that evening, as he approached, he was blocked by a huddle of men clustered around the tent. Marcus stood scowling, while the two velites reporting to him looked at the ground and shifted sheepishly. Flavius had seen Marcus’ consternation that they had even dared to return to report such a thing. “Amazing,” he had responded, his voice dripping sarcasm. “That we should encounter a snake on an African riverbank. Is that why you fled back here before determining if we can ford there tomorrow?”

  The velites had exchanged glances. They were among the poorest of the soldiers that were recruited, often without enough money to equip themselves well and accorded little status by their fellows. In battle, they were skirmishers and j
avelin throwers, not recognized as formally belonging to any group. They had been sent to scout precisely because they were expendable. They knew it and did not like it. Flavius could scarcely blame them for retreating from whatever they had seen. They had to watch out for their own backs. One of the men was wet to the waist. The other man spoke. “We couldn’t see all of it, sir. But what we saw was, well, immense. We saw a piece of its side moving past us through the tall river grass. It was the diameter of a hogshead, sir, and that was close to the end of it. We aren’t cowards. We went toward it, for a better look. And then, close to a hundred feet away, this head reared up from the reeds.”

  “Glowing eyes!” broke in the other scout. “On my word, sir, big glowing eyes. And it hissed at us, but the hiss was more like whistling. I had to cover my ears. It kept to the water, and the reeds hid most of it from us, but what we could see was immense. From the size of its eyes and head, it had to be—”

  “That’s twice now that you’ve admitted coming back to report to me on something that you haven’t completely seen,” Marcus had observed coldly. “It is the function of a scout, is it not, to see things and then come back to report? Rather than to come back to report what he has not seen?”

  The first man scowled and looked at his feet. The second scout flushed a deep red. He didn’t meet Marcus’s gaze, but there was no shame in his voice as he said, “Some things are so strange that even a glimpse of one should be reported. That is no ordinary snake, sir. And I’m not just speaking of its size, though it dwarfs any other snake I’ve ever seen. Its eyes glowed when it looked at us. And it more whistled than hissed. It didn’t flee at the sight of us, as most snakes would. No. It challenged us. And so we came back to report it to you.”