I nodded. "Meto wasn't even in Crassus's household, properly speaking. He was an errand boy in one of Crassus's villas on the coast, in Baiae. That's where I first met him, during the slave revolt of Spartacus. There had been a murder, presumably by some runaway slaves. Crassus intended to kill every slave in the household in retribution, including Meto. Imagine, slaughtering an innocent child in the arena!"
"Roman justice is sometimes hard," agreed Tiro.
"Crassus wasn't entirely pleased with the way things turned out. When it was all over, he sent Meto off to an estate in Sicily. Do you know what Meto was doing, when I finally tracked him down? He was a scarecrow. It was terrible for him. Endless days in the hot sun, the buzz of insects in the grain, the hungry crows always coming back, the foreman beating him if any of the crop was eaten. He had nightmares about it for years afterward. Perhaps he still does."
"I should think by now he's seen enough horrors as a soldier to drive out that nightmare and replace it with others," observed Tiro. "What made him want to become a soldier?"
"Catilina." I saw Tiro wrinkle his nose at the mention of the radical insurgent who had been Cicero's enemy. "When he was sixteen, he fell in love with Catilina, or the idea of Catilina, and ran off to fight for him. I was there, too, at the battle of Pistoria, when Catilina's dreams ended. Meto and I survived, by the favor of the gods. That taste of battle was more than enough to satisfy any curiosity I ever had about warfare and slaughter, but Meto wanted more. He needed another leader to follow, more battles to fight. It has something to do with being born a slave, I think. I freed him. I made him my son, and never treated him as anything less than my own flesh and blood. But he never quite felt a sense of birthright, a sureness of belonging. The night before his toga day, when he was sixteen…"
I caught myself. Why I was speaking so candidly? The mood of an army camp on the brink of battle has a way of loosening a man's tongue. "On the eve of his toga day, Meto had the nightmare- the scarecrow nightmare. I told him that was all in the past. He knew that, but he didn't feel it. Becoming my son, becoming a citizen- it all felt unreal to him. In his heart, he was still a frightened, helpless slaveboy. It wasn't until he went off to Gaul and found favor with Caesar that he seemed finally to put his beginnings behind him. He found the place where he belonged, and the leader he was looking for. And yet, now-" I stopped myself from going further. "I don't pretend to understand him, Tiro, not completely. But I am his father, as surely as if he came from my seed."
"You love him very much," said Tiro quietly.
"More than anything else. Too much, perhaps."
XIX
"I'm not a swimmer," I said.
After eating, we had returned to the lookout post on the hill north of the city. Tiro, Fortex, and I sat on horseback, surveying the view. It was much as I had seen it the day before, except that the harbor was now crowded with moored transport ships, and the harbor entrance had been pinched a bit tighter, thanks to new rafts hastily added to the end of each breakwater. Tiro had said he wanted a final look at the lay of the land and the disposition of Caesar's forces, but I was beginning to suspect that he had no idea of what to do next and was searching for a way to get inside the city walls.
Lacking the wings of Daedalus, this could be done in only two ways: by land or by water. Entry by land would require getting past the front line of Caesar's heavily manned trenches, traversing the no man's land before the city wall, and then penetrating or scaling the wall itself. We could hardly do any of this in secret. Long before we crossed the front line, the attackers would order us to stop or be killed as defectors. Even if we crossed the no man's land alive, the defenders might fire upon us long before we could explain ourselves, and they could hardly be expected to open the gates or let down ladders even if they wanted to help us.
That left the possibility of approaching Brundisium by water. The city wall that fronted the harbor was shorter and less heavily guarded than the landward wall, but scarcely less formidable to three men without wings. Outside this wall, a narrow road ran along the waterfront and gave access to the port situated at the tip of the peninsula, but the entire length of this road had been covered with a veritable thicket of spikes and caltrops to make passage impossible and discourage even small boats from landing. There was only one point of possible ingress: the port itself, where gates in the walls opened onto a wide boardwalk and several large quays projected into the water. The gates to the port were open and there seemed to be a great deal of activity on the quays, but as yet there was no sign that the ships moored there were being readied for departure.
"What did you say, Gordianus?" mumbled Tiro, gazing intently at the prospect.
"I said, I'm not a swimmer. I've always been a city boy, you know. Born and raised in Rome."
Tiro blinked. "People swim in the Tiber all the time. Upstream from the Cloaca Maxima, anyway."
"No, Tiro. People splash in the Tiber, and float across on planks, and in dry years they wade across. That's not the same as swimming across a harbor with arrows falling around you."
"Who said anything about swimming?" said Tiro. "Do you see those little fishermen's huts down there, on our side of the channel? Just a stone's throw away, facing the city across the harbor?"
I nodded. The huts were few and spaced well apart. I hadn't even noticed them in the twilight of the previous day, distracted by the battle at the harbor entrance.
"The huts looked abandoned," said Tiro. "No signs of life. The fishermen have all retreated inside the city walls. But they left their boats behind. They're only skiffs, too small to be of any use to Caesar, so they've just been left there, pulled up on the sandy beach. I can see five or six of them from here. We have our choice. I have my eye on that one with the white sail. Less visible than, say, the one with the orange sail."
"Do you know anything about sailing a vessel like that?"
"You might be surprised by the things I know, Gordianus."
"Once we're out in the harbor, what then?"
"We sail directly for the quay. The channel can't be more than a quarter of a mile across."
"What if the current's against us? What if Caesar's men come after us?"
"Then Fortex shall have to row harder," said Tiro.
Fortex rubbed his jaw.
"And you may have to swim," added Tiro.
I didn't like the sound of that.
• • •
We were halfway down the hillside, our horses picking their own path through the bramble, when a voice called out from the ridge behind us.
"You can't go down there! It's off-limits!"
It was the centurion in charge of the lookout. Tiro turned and waved. He held a hand to his ear, flashed a stupid grin and shrugged, as if to say he couldn't make out what the man was saying. "Ride on," he whispered. "Look straight ahead. Ignore him. Head directly for the skiff. Faster!"
We urged our mounts down the hillside and reached the narrow beach. Behind us, I heard the galloping footfall of a horse.
"How many?" said Tiro, keeping his eyes ahead.
Fortex glanced over his shoulder. "Just the one."
"Good. He thinks we're harmless, then. We'll allow him to go on thinking that as long as possible. You know what to do, Fortex."
At the strip of beach between the hut and the skiff we dismounted. The centurion was closing on us. I drew close to Tiro.
"What do you mean to do to him?"
"What do you think?"
"Does it have to be like this?"
"We made a bargain, Gordianus. You took me into Caesar's tent, and I'm to get you into Brundisium. Do you want to come along or not? This is war. Did you think there'd be no bloodshed? Just be glad it's not your blood about to be spilled."