“At my hands,” Crassus said pensively, rolling the sound of my accusation around in his mouth as if he were still back in the kitchen sampling tidbits. We walked a few more paces in the dimming light. When he spoke again, he held his left hand in his right while rolling the plain iron band around his third finger. “I have never removed this ring, not in thirty years. I have heard it said that a nerve connects this one finger directly to the heart, and that the band is worn here to symbolize the bond between husband and wife. Do you know of this, Alexander?”
“I have heard it, yes, but I am aware of no autopsy proving it either true or false.”
“I never gave it much thought,” he sighed, “one way or the other. But now I believe the theory has merit. Why is this? Because I can no longer feel the connection that held your mistress and I so close. Caesar cut it in Luca. I felt the fiber snap and recoil that night, felt the loose ends bunch and tighten. Since then, that severed cord has spread a foul numbness from here to here,” he said, pointing from his hand to his chest.
“Do not let him do this to you, dominus.”
“It is a thing accomplished and cannot be undone.” Crassus stopped walking and put a hand to his temples.
“Dominus, the city is in chaos. Publius Clodius sends out his gangs to replace considered government with reckless fear, and there is no one to stand against him. Pompeius replies with Milo and his men, violence to oppose violence. All this because you and Caesar, a man you hate, scheme to steal the consulship so you may share it with Pompeius, another you despise. It makes no sense.”
“I have no choice.”
“The people look to you for leadership. Take back your bribe to tribune Gaius Cato. Hold the election. You will win.”
“I must be certain. Without a second term as consul, I lose Syria.”
“The only certainty is that Romans are molested and beaten in the streets.”
“I will protect our people.”
“You cannot. Livia and Cornelia Metella came within moments of being raped today.”
Crassus' face contorted with pain. I thought his eyes were about to water, but instead, the cry sprang from his lips. “Alexander, with what philosophy can you heal me? Teach me some other way to repair this damaged heart, and I will be your attentive student.”
“Love your wife. Repair your marriage. If Aristotle could look upon you and lady Tertulla, he would declare your lives bound in a ‘relationship of shared virtue,’ the rarest and most noble of loves. Do not abandon her to seek revenge. Caesar’s crime was vicious and unimaginable. He believes that you are weak, that you will see no path but vengeance. If he is right, he has you. But you can be the stronger man; you do have a choice. Do not respond in kind. What he has done may not be forgivable, but, dominus, you must learn to make it forgettable.”
Crassus laughed, a dark, feral sound. “No human could do this thing. It is a task for a man with a heart carved from obsidian.”
“No, dominus.” I did something then I had never done in all my years bound to this man. I put my hand on his chest. He did not strike me. He did not step back. He waited, and I spoke. “It is a task worthy of this heart, of this man.” Crassus shook his head. I withdrew my hand, but did not surrender. “My lord, I beg of you, turn back from this course; only blood and sorrow lie at its end. No marriage should ever confront the test Caesar has forced upon yours. But the challenge lies before you; it cannot be avoided. Choose unwisely and everything you cherish will be destroyed. For the love of your wife, your people and your city, forget and forsake Caesar.”
The light of the day had almost gone, and Crassus stood before me, an aggregate of hardened shadows. He did not strike me down or call for guards to haul me away. He looked upon my face, but his eyes were focused on a point far distant and unreachable. In his gaze, I could see what he saw: humiliation, shame, and an anger that burned and sparkled on shimmering coals of memory; they would never be consumed. “I cannot forget,” he said. “I cannot forgive, and I will be avenged. You find my determination as unyielding and rigid as my sword? Know that it would crack and shatter before my lady’s. We are of one heart and one mind.”
“Then kill him.”
“Alexander, you surprise me.”
“In an hour Boaz could furnish me with the names of a hundred assassins.”
“The slave master could give you a thousand, but none would serve my purpose. I will not grant Caesar the most noble of deaths, a soldier’s death. I pray to Mars each day to keep him safe and unharmed until my return from Parthia. What is death by the blade but a moment’s agony. What justice lies at the point of a gladius? Would you have him poisoned? That is a woman’s way, and though it cause him to contort and foam till his bones splinter and his lungs ignite, it is yet an end too condensed, too generous for the man who raped my wife. Caesar has writ an indelible mark upon our marriage. He has besmirched our home with a permanent stain.”
“Dominus…”
“No, Alexander. I will not be satisfied till I have penned an equal scrawl across the remainder of his soulless existence.
“I will not be satisfied until I have stolen from him and destroyed the destiny he seeks-to return Rome to the days of kings; to be the first to ascend to his newly gilded throne to begin his dynasty.
“Until the day I walk the streets of our city and hear men both great and small respond with apathy and indifference to the name of Gaius Julius Caesar, I will not be satisfied.”
A stone bench lay just off the path where we stood; Crassus bent and reached for it. He sat, exhausted. The clouds above us, leached of color, now marched resolutely onwards, their greyed and ghostly bulks floating on the glow from a million lamps. “If you could only go to war alone,” I said.
“What? I am too tired for riddles, Alexander.”
“When I speak, dominus, the house of Crassus listens. When you speak, all Rome pays heed. Where Crassus goes, tens of thousands must follow. How many must journey to the edge of our world to mete out Caesar’s castigation?” I knelt before him. “You are the better man, dominus. Will you travel thirteen hundred miles for honor’s sake when your wife waits for you not fifty feet from this very spot? Is there an altar large enough to hold the years and the lives that must be sacrificed to balance your scales of retribution?”
Crassus spoke not in anger, but with a voice tired beyond his years. “Did you know, Alexander, that when you first came to me, there yet lingered serious debate over whether or not slaves had souls? If my judgment had fallen on the ignorant side of that silly notion as we converse here in this serene garden, it would make the task much less irksome to fetch my pugio and end your animal life. I am an enlightened man, Alexander, and I delight in the small barbs and vexations you hurl at me. Your soul notwithstanding, my old friend, you have gone too far. Tell me, do you hold your life so cheaply, even now that your Livia is returned?”
Livia and I were shackled to him with the same invisible chains, yet I bridled to hear him speak of her. “She is not my Livia, and no, dominus, I hold nothing. You have graciously assumed the burden of holding my life in your hands for me since the day we met, thirty years ago.”
Crassus took one of my hands in both of his; they were warm and soft, the manicured nails buffed and unbroken. He smiled as a proud father smiles at his son; as a man so secure in his vision of the future that he will see no other. “You should be grateful, Alexander. Evidently I hold it more dearly than you yourself. You must not speak of this again. Do you understand?”