In the weeks since he’d come to the frontier, Juba had seen enough death to last him a lifetime—and still the barbarians refused to surrender to their inevitable defeat.
“Sir,” said the praetorian guard beside the tent. “Caesar is waiting.”
“Of course,” Juba said. He took a deep breath of air that was—despite the new fires across the valley—fresher than it had been for several days. The winds of the night had pushed away the fetid air of the encampment, which had been as oppressive as the summer sun here.
The praetorian was holding out his arm to indicate the path to the command tent, though Juba had walked it often enough to know the way. As if he had no other care in the world, Juba nodded and started making his way toward the field headquarters of the emperor of Rome, the man he and his wife were determined to kill.
* * *
In his tent, Augustus Caesar was sitting with several other commanders at the central table. He smiled when Juba entered. “My brother,” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you from any activities this morning?”
The fact that Juba had brought Cleopatra Selene with him when summoned to the frontier had been a source of more than a few lascivious comments through the weeks—the emperor himself had joked that the Numidians must be a most lustful people, given that their king was so insistent on continuing his passions on the campaign. Juba allowed the comments, even encouraged them, because it was easier than the truth of why he’d brought her along. It was true that they were in love—genuinely so, much to Juba’s delight after the arranged marriage—but it wasn’t sex that kept them together here, secreting off alone to the hidden little hollow they’d found behind the lines. It was vengeance.
And, he thought with a wry smile, a little sex, too.
“The lady Selene sends her regards, Caesar,” Juba said. He looked down, feigning some embarrassment.
Octavian laughed and motioned to a seat to his left. There were a few more snickers, but things quieted down quickly.
Sitting down, Juba noticed that Octavian’s stepson was watching him from the other end of the table. Juba, almost ten years older and growing up in the same household, had often looked upon Tiberius as a younger brother, and he’d always felt a kind of affinity for him. After all, he suspected that Tiberius, like himself, might have felt little love for Caesar. It was Octavian, after all, who had forced Tiberius’ mother, Livia, to divorce his father when he was three years old. But something had changed recently. Tiberius, now that he was fifteen, was old enough to accompany his stepfather on campaign, and some said that Augustus Caesar intended for Tiberius to rule after him. Juba wondered if perhaps the distance he was feeling between them was simply a result of Tiberius growing into a sense of himself as a man. Or was it something else?
Juba nodded at the young man, smiling as amicably as he could. Tiberius stared at him for a moment, a clouded look upon his face, before he nodded in return, the barest hint of a smile on his face. Then he turned away toward one of the other, older commanders and engaged him in conversation.
Juba let out a breath, not even sure why he’d been holding it. Then he took stock of the rest of the men in attendance. It was Carisius who had not yet shown up. He’d been one of the field generals who’d been directing the campaign in Cantabria before the emperor’s arrival, and it wasn’t like him to be late.
Rather than engage in meaningless talk with the other men, Juba busied himself with examining the large map of Cantabria that had been pulled out upon the table. The Roman positions, along with those of the enemy Cantabri, were wooden blocks of various size and shape upon it.
The campaign, they all knew, had been a difficult one.
Shortly after having himself declared Augustus Caesar, Octavian had ordered up his legions to begin preparations for an advance on distant Britannia, whose shores Julius Caesar had left twenty-seven years earlier. The new Caesar, it was widely known, intended on further legitimizing his position through a show of military force and the integration of new lands into the empire. But fate, it seemed, had different plans. The armies had only reached as far as southern Gaul when word arrived that the Cantabri, a barbarian tribe in northern Hispania, had rebelled against Roman authority. They’d murdered tax collectors, destroyed dozens of Roman villas and farms, and they were even threatening a massive assault on the central Roman town of Segisama. It was an outright rebellion, and it had to be stopped.
Juba hated his stepbrother, but he could not help but admire the efficiency with which he pivoted his massing forces, transferring his legions out of Gaul to the shores of Hispania. From the port of Tarraco they had marched up-river into the higher plains, and as the new year began Caesar had established a new base of operations in Segisama, where he initiated plans for a two-pronged assault that would strike Cantabria in the spring. One army would march northwest toward Arecelium. The other, under his personal command, would march north.
Juba and Selene, newly married, had remained in Rome during those months, reveling in their love and their shared thirst for Caesar’s destruction. They had listened to the reports as they came in. They had pored over maps, trying to glean the truth from the glowing accounts of glory that even the messengers knew for lies. And Selene had begun learning to control the Palladium, in the hope that it could be used to destroy Rome upon Caesar’s return.
And then one day the messenger came with news of the glorious victory over the Cantabrian forces at Amaya, along with the request that the king of Numidia set out to join Caesar on the frontier.
They knew there could be only one reason. Octavian once more intended to use the Trident of Poseidon to destroy his enemies. And he needed Juba to do it.
It had been six years since Juba had used the Trident in war—since he had killed hundreds by raising a wave to crush Mark Antony’s flagship at Actium—but for Juba the memory was still far too close. That he’d not yet been made by Caesar to use the artifact was simply a blessing that he considered too good to be true, as was the determination of Selene to remain by his side even as they rode past the piles of the bloating, bird-pecked Cantabri dead still unburied outside Amaya. More than once on their journey, Selene had woken him from a nightmare—when he wasn’t waking her from her own.
That he had not been called upon was curious to him. When he thought about it, he wondered if perhaps it was because there was so little water here. Even during the spring rains that fell as Juba and Selene had made their way up from the coast, it was clear that this was an arid climate: a landscape of rocks and red-brown earth, shrub-trees and tiled-roof houses with white walls to keep off the heat. Now that it was summer, the dryness of the air was enough to leave cracks like red spiderwebs across the backs of his hands.
In a strange way, though, it felt like home. Juba wasn’t like most of the men in the army of Augustus Caesar, a fact that was clear at a glance: he might be a Roman citizen, an adopted son of Julius Caesar himself, but his dark skin made him an outsider. He was a Numidian, and in the end he had more in common with the enemies of Rome than he did with those of the Eternal City. This had not gone unnoticed by the men. Juba knew that behind his back he was called the “dark prince,” among other, less dignified titles. He was a foreigner, yet in this foreign, desolate landscape much akin to his North African birthplace, he felt at home. That fact made life here in the Roman encampment at the edge of the world more than merely bearable. It made it comfortable.
So long as he didn’t have to use the Trident.
The sound of a commotion outside stirred Juba from his thoughts, and he looked up as the flaps parted and Carisius hurried inside. A short but stout man, the general was flustered and concerned. “Caesar,” he said, “it’s Corocotta. There’s been another attack.”