Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [5]
'I am not interested in such tribal nonsense. Or in the demented ramblings of a race of cowards and traitors.’
Now Calaphilus lost his temper again, though more in sadness than in anger. 'You just do not listen, do you? The Jews are a people who celebrate the fact that they raised themselves from slavery. They have a tradition of forbearance going back to a time before Rome was even Rome as we know it.'
Marcus LardIla seemed to have become bored with the lecture he was getting. He yawned, loudly, and picked up his tunic as he stood to leave.
'Fortunately for Rome,' continued Calaphilus, ignoring his subordinate's blatant rudeness, ‘both the Zealots and the Pharisees are usually too busy fighting amongst themselves and with a new internal faction. A cult of nomadic insurrectionists called the Christians, whom I presume you will be unfamiliar with?'
'Should I know of these people?'
Calaphilus began to laugh. 'You will, boy, you will. They are a nuisance to Rome as of now but, seemingly, they are of more threat to the Jews. I am thoroughly content to see them tear each other apart if it means that we are left to police Byzantium as we have for the last 200 years. Many good men have fought and died protecting this outpost and I will not believe that they fought and died for nothing. Because, unlike you, my sacramentunz means something to me.’
Enraged at the suggestion that he did not care about his sacred oath, Marcus turned on his general, a hand dramatically clutching the hilt of his sword. 'I fight as well as any man, beneath the aquilia of my legion, and I shall kill with great vengeance whomsoever suggests otherwise. I leave the machinations of politics to those who are too weak to fight and die,' he continued, dismissively. 'And history was never my strong point.’
The shadows of twilight were stretching across the city as Marcus reached his villa to find his wife, Agrinella, and their friend, Fabius Actium, already eating supper. He threw his tunic onto a marbled statue of the God Augustus with little ceremony and squatted down on a pillow beside them, kicking off his sandals and stuffing a handful of cold meat into his mouth before washing his hands in the flower-scented water bowl.
Ì am starved. Wine,' he bellowed to a nearby serving girl as he splashed water onto his sunburnt face, and deeply inhaled the smell of jasmine. 'And make it quick or I shall have some haste beaten into you.' He smiled charmingly at his guest as the girl began to fill his goblet. 'Fabius, you old rascal. I apologise for my inhospitable late arrival. That ancient cretin Calaphilus wanted to give me a lesson in Jewish history that I could well have done without.’
`The man is such a vulgar bore,' noted Agrinella with a timely yawn, as she reached for a grape and slipped it into her mouth.
`Marcus is contemptuous of Calaphilus's handling of the current situation vis-a-vis the Jews, and he has every right to be,' Fabius explained. 'Instead of being asked his counsel, he is shunned or ignored publicly and treated shamefully in private.'
Marcus clearly agreed. 'With a praefectus keen to see the military powerless and castrated, what Byzantium needs is strength, not weak old fools. People like us, Fabius.'
Às one tribune to another,' confided Fabius in a low, conspiratorial whisper, `what is needed here, I believe, is direct action.' His raucous laughter, and that of Agrinella, was halted by a sour look on Marcus's face as he swallowed his wine.
`Cartethus,’ he roared. The tall and slightly stooping figure of the head of the household appeared instantly at Marcus's