“Good man. It won’t come to that. What’s your name?” Julius asked him.

“Taranus, sir.”

Julius patted the horse on his quivering neck.

“Julius Caesar, and this is Marcus Brutus. There are your names. We’ll be back before the new watch, Taranus. On my word, we will.”

The guards moved aside to let them pass on Taranus’s order, and Julius found himself on the rocky plain, with the enemy somewhere ahead of them. When they were out of earshot of the guards, he rounded on Brutus.

“I can’t believe I let you persuade me into this. If Pompey hears about it, he’ll take the skin of our backs at least.”

Brutus shrugged, unconcerned. “He won’t if we can climb that rock. His scouts are horsemen, remember. They think anywhere they can’t take a horse can’t be climbed. I had a look at it before the light faded and the top will give us a good view. There’s enough moonlight to see the enemy camp, and that will be useful, no matter what Pompey says about us leaving camp.”

“You’d better be right,” Julius said grimly. “Come on, three hours isn’t long.”

The two young men broke into a run toward the black mass they saw silhouetted against the stars. It was a forbidding crag, a tooth in the plain.

*                                                      *                                                      *

“It’s bigger close up,” Brutus whispered, removing his sandals and sword for the climb. Though it would hurt their feet, the iron-shod sandals would slip and clatter on the stones and could alert the enemy. There was no way of telling how close they were to the patrols, but they had to be near.

Julius glanced at the moon and tried to estimate how long they had before it sank.

Unhappy with the calculation, he removed his sword and sandals and took a deep, slow breath. Without speaking, he reached for the first handhold, jamming his hand into a crack and heaving, his bare feet searching for grip.

Even with the moonlight to help them, it was a difficult and frightening climb. All the way up, Julius was tormented by the possibility that some slave archer would see them and spit them with shafts that would send them down to break on the rocky plain below. The spire of rock seemed to get taller as they climbed, and Julius was sure it was more than a hundred feet high, even two. After a time, his feet became numb blocks, barely able to hold him. His fingers were cramped and painful and he began to worry that they would never make it back to camp before being reported.

By his best guess, it took almost an hour to reach the barren crest of the rock, and for the first few moments, he and Brutus could do nothing more than lie panting, stretched flat as they waited for their tortured muscles to recover.