One of the bowmen tripped and fell flat, bringing most of the column to a staggering halt. Julius sighed. About three years to train them would be useful, as well.

Chapter 12

                  CHAPTER 12                  

Servilia sat on the edge of the couch, her back straight. The tension was clear in every line of her, but Brutus felt he should not speak first. He had been awake for most of the night without resolving anything. Three times he had decided not to visit the house near Quirinal hill, but each time had been an empty gesture of defiance. There had never really been a moment when he wouldn’t have come to her. He felt nothing like a son’s love, yet some nebulous ideal made him return, with all the fascination of picking scabs and watching himself bleed for her.

He had wanted her to come for him when he was a child, when he was alone and frightened of the world. When Marius’s wife had smothered him with her need for a son, he had recoiled from it, unnerved by emotions he didn’t really understand. Still, the woman who faced him had a call on him that no one else had, not Tubruk, not even Julius.

In the unnatural stillness, he drank her in, looking for something he couldn’t name or even try to understand. She wore a pure white stola against sun-dark skin without any jewelry. As it had been the day before, her long hair was unbound, and when she moved, it was with a lithe grace that made it a pleasure just to watch her walk and sit, as much as he might admire the perfect gait of a leopard or deer. Her eyes were too large, he decided, and her chin too strong for classical beauty, yet he could not look away from her, noting the lines that marked her eyes and around her mouth. She seemed coiled and taut, ready to leap up and run from him as she had before. He waited and wondered how much of the tension showed in his own features.

“Why did you come?” she asked, breaking the awful silence. How many answers to that question had he thought through! Scene after scene had played in his imagination in the night: scorning her, offending her, embracing her. None of it had prepared him for the actual moment.

“When I was a child, I used to imagine what you were like. I wanted to see you, even once, just to know who you were. I wanted to know what you looked like.” He heard his voice tremble and a spasm of anger rushed through him. He would not shame himself. He would not speak like a child to this woman, this whore.

“I have always thought of you, Marcus,” she said. “I started many letters to you, but I never sent them.”