Like Octavian beside him, Ciro carried a deep bag tied to his saddle, and he reached into it to grasp a handful of silver coins, each bearing the face of the man they followed. The coins rang on the stones of the city and Julius saw children run from their hiding places to snatch them before they could come to rest. He remembered standing at Marius’s side in a Triumph long ago and seeing the crowd dip in waves to receive the offerings. It was more than the silver that they wanted and only the poorest would spend the coins. Many more would be kept for a blessing, or made into a pendant for a wife or lover. They carried the face of a man who had become famous through his battles in Gaul and yet was still a stranger to all but a very few.

The shrill excitement of the children brought out their parents. More and more of them came to reach for the coins and laugh with relief. The column had not come to destroy or loot the city, not after such a start.

Ciro and Octavian emptied the bags quickly and two more were passed forward to them. The crowd had begun to thicken, as if half of Rome had been waiting for some unseen signal. They did not all smile at the sight of so many armed men on the streets. Many of the faces were angry and dark, but as the column wound its way through the city, they grew fewer, lost amongst the rest.

Julius passed the old house of Marius, glancing through the gates to the courtyard he had seen first as a boy. He looked behind him for Brutus and knew that he shared the same memories. The old place was shuttered and bare, but it would be opened again and given life. Julius enjoyed the metaphor and tried to frame it into something appropriate for the speech he would make, choosing and discarding words as he rode. He preferred to be seen as a spontaneous speaker, but every phrase had been written in the wheatfields, with Adàn.

It was eerie to retrace the steps he had marched with the old Primigenia, before they had been scattered by the enemies of his family. His uncle had walked right up to the steps of the Senate house and demanded the Triumph they owed him. Julius shook his head in amused memory as he recalled the bull of a man Marius had been. The laws had meant nothing to him and the city had worshipped his irreverence, electing him consul more times than any man in the city’s history. They were different, wilder days then and the world had been smaller.