The night aboard the transport had been a precarious one. It had been a tempest of all tempests, with waves that surpassed the height of the main mast, and blowing spray strong enough to tear a man over the side. Many a time had he watched helplessly as soldiers unaccustomed to sea travel were swept away by one of the moving mountains of green water. Many a time had he watched through salt-sprayed eyes as flashes of lightning revealed a world in turmoil, upturned hulls in their death throes, and the shrieking faces of the doomed bobbing in the boiling sea.
The century aboard Lucius's vessel had not been his own. In fact, the soldiers were not even from the Tenth Legion. They were the green troops of a newly formed Italian legion, made up of raw recruits that had sworn fealty to Caesar as a legitimate consul of Rome. Few, if any, of the green troops had ever experienced the savagery of battle, let alone the punishment that an angry sea can enact on those confined aboard a vessel. Lucius had experienced both on many occasions. A centurion's plume was not won easily. He was a battle-hardened veteran as his medals – the ones that, according to the prattling overseer, now lay on the bottom of the Adriatic – had attested. He had seen his share of battle, and knew the beast-like rage that got a man through such horrors. It was the only reason he was still alive.
The fight on the ship had been especially savage, and it had taken all of the discipline Lucius could muster to keep from snatching up a javelin and hurling it at the turd-sucking Optimates admiral who had ordered the slaughter. But, even in his rage, Lucius had the wherewithal to know that his fatigued arm, which normally threw with deadly accuracy, would have likely missed, and then he would have been feathered with arrows in the next moment.
The somewhat odd circumstances that had placed him aboard the ill-fated transport seemed to get odder with each passing day. He did not fully comprehend the elaborate intrigue of which he now found himself a part, but he knew that his murder had been one of the intended outcomes. It was with that in mind that he had surrendered. For dead men cannot settle scores, and he intended to fully repay the man responsible – the man who had sent him on this fool’s errand.
Lucius had not marched with the Tenth when it shipped out with Caesar all those weeks ago. He had been convalescing in Rome, recovering from wounds he had received in Spain. It was his first time ever setting foot in the renowned city – the seat of the empire for which he had fought for more than a decade – but the Rome he had read and dreamed about since his childhood, had turned out to be something of a disappointment. Around campfires in distant Gaul and Britannia, he had heard countless tales of Rome’s beauty and greatness, but he could not put those tales to the city through which he had groped for several weeks. The constant stench of sewage hung in the air, mixed with the aroma of rotting carcasses and flotsam backed up in the flooded Tiber. An impenetrable pall of smoke marred the view in every direction, to the extent that even the famed seven hills were mere shadows in the mist. Overcrowded streets, full of braying animals, merchants squabbling over every last sesterces, and a mob that never seemed placated, left Lucius longing for camp life. For all of the order and discipline Lucius had experienced in her legions, Rome itself had seemed a lawless cesspit of humanity, where every man from the lowest slave to the highest magistrate filled each day scheming against his rivals. Every race he had ever encountered was represented there, and they seemed more at home in the great city than he did. It was a confluence of cultures, a concentration of people who cared little what Rome’s armies did so long as the grain flowed and their businesses thrived. It was a noxious blend of the poor and the powerful, of those who had little and those who had much to lose. Masses of human beings lived on top of each other in multi-storied apartment buildings, smelling their neighbors' filth, hearing and often seeing their biological and carnal acts, and all amid the unremitting wail of infants.
Such sights were nothing new to Lucius. He had encountered similar conditions in countless villages and towns, some even worse, but he had never before seen it on such a grand scale. In sharp contrast to the destitute, the elite of Rome dwelt in houses of great opulence hemmed in by walls to shut out the unpleasant sights. Oftentimes, these houses even shared a block with the baser dwellings, and extravagant orgies transpired mere feet away from starvation and poverty.
It was to one of these debauches that Lucius was summoned in the midnight hour, four nights ago – the meeting that had started the chain of events by which he now pulled an oar and wore the chains of a slave.
Rome's current master of horse, the general Marcus Anthony – the de facto ruler of Rome while Caesar was away – had summoned him, and that was all Lucius had known when he had followed the messenger to the lavish villa in the Oppius district. He was led inside to find a debauch of staggering size underway, where Rome’s leading men mingled with the vilest of prostitutes. The naked men strewn throughout the villa were, by and large, Anthony's confidants, all of them drunk and all engaged in some sort of carnal act, some straddled by two or three women at once. Lucius recognized some of them from the campaign in Spain, but there were others, with grayer heads, that would have looked at home in a senator’s toga. The women were all coiffured in the latest fashions, their bodies glistening with scented oils. All seemed to be either laughing or swept up in a sensual trance. The many different perfumes that danced in Lucius’s nostrils did little to hide the presiding aroma, which was that of a well-frequented brothel.
“Lucius!” Anthony called to him from the other side of the room.
Lucius made his way across the expanse of gyrating human flesh, stepping over many intertwined bodies before reaching the couch where Anthony himself was engaged. With nothing else to do but wait, Lucius stood dutifully at attention as the master of horse finished a rather vocal coupling with a large-rumped woman, who made brief eye contact with Lucius before being forced to turn away by Antony's roughness. When the Master of Horse finally finished, he laughed heartily and smacked the whore on the rump to send her on her way.
"How do you fare, Lucius?" Antony said as he used a towel to dry the perspiration from his heaving chest.
"Well, sir."
"Glad I am to have you with me, Lucius,” Antony threw away the towel, and then drank wine from a cup which he first offered to Lucius. “When I heard you were lingering about, recovering from that near brush with death you had in Spain, I instantly called for your selection to my personal guard. I hope you don’t mind.”
“It was an honor, sir,” Lucius replied evenly, though in truth he was still puzzled by the appointment. There had been vacancies in the detachment of legionaries guarding Antony’s home and personal activities. As a centurion without a legion, Lucius had been ripe for the plucking. But he still found it odd that the boisterous Antony, with whom he had quarreled years ago on a nearly forgotten battlefield in far-off Gaul, would have chosen him. He did not like Antony, and from everything he had heard up until a few days ago, the feeling had been mutual. Ever since the appointment, Antony had been oddly congenial towards him, and this atypical conduct had prompted Lucius to be on his guard more than ever.
“It's your first time in Rome, is it not?"
“Yes, General.”
"Well, Lucius, what is your impression?” Antony gestured at the depravity all around them. "Have you ever seen a more hideous dump of human filth? These fat politicians, these wealthy bastards, leeching off of our public purse. It's pathetic."
Lucius thought he might ask the master of horse if he was not the host of this extravagant party, were these people not here at his bidding, and should he not be in Brundisium with the rest of the army preparing to cross over to Greece, but he knew such a challenge would not be wise.