Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [84]
“How much?”
“Enough to keep you in whores until you die,” Antony said.
“And drink?”
“Who do you take me for? It will keep you in drink as well,” Antony said.
“Then I’m your man,” said the legionary, “whoever you are.” The others nodded, and Antony explained what he needed from them. At last, when he had made himself clear, sworn them to sobriety, and promised gold to them, he made his way from the bar and out into the street. He had more to accomplish, and this time he would improve on his performance.
In the private, tiled room where the senators sat, taking their afternoon steam bath, the walls were warm and slippery with oil. The vapor surrounding the men hung as thick as fog, and their voices echoed, disembodied, from out of the clouds. The senators had installed themselves far from the ears of the emperor and his dearest general.
“He claims to be descended from Apollo, though we all knew his mother, Atia, and she was nothing a god would touch, even accidentally in the dark while fumbling around on the temple floor, looking for something better,” muttered one of the senators.
Another senator splashed his hands in the water to make his point.
“Caesar Augustus is only a lowly great-nephew, and yet he dares to call himself Caesar, as though that drop of Julian blood were enough to counterbalance his moneylending grandfather!”
“And the slave!” cried another. “I have it on good authority that his great-grandfather was a freed slave who spent his life twisting rope in the South.”
The senators were appalled.
They shifted themselves on the mosaic-tiled benches, dangling their large, complaining feet into the scalding water below. They mopped sweat from off their shaven heads and muttered further.
“Augustus—”
“Call him Octavian!” shrilled one of the eldest. “He is a tiny child, scarcely sprouted from out of the earth! He is a spring asparagus!”
The other senators looked indulgently upon their elder and continued their lament.
“Augustus will destroy the system of logical discourse. He will shrink Rome until it is under the control of one mind, one voice, and one emperor.”
Emperor.
The thought made their testicles shrivel, and yet there was nothing to be done about it. They missed the old days of the republic, when they’d run things. When they’d run everything. The glorious days of speeches and arguments, scrolls and debates. The days when the Senate needed to be persuaded, for days on end, before coming to any decision. And perhaps bribed as well.
“Senators!” boomed a voice. “Senators of Rome!”
The men stopped what they were doing and peered into the steam, confused.
It was certainly some trickery, some pageant created to frighten old men. Something done with a trumpet or an actor, falsifying the tones that each of them knew very well.
And yet.
They’d heard him orate. They had heard him address the crowd, offering Caesar’s funerary speech. They had heard him cry battle. The voice was an impossible voice.
The man they knew was dead.
The temperature of the room began to drop as a figure emerged from the steam, dusky and faint, as shifting as any vapor. His chin was cleft, and his hair fell in dark, silvering curls over his forehead. His gilded armor was strapped upon him, and there was a wound in his abdomen. A bloody, mortal wound.
The senators murmured in terror. Mark Antony was dead in Egypt, dead nearly a year, and yet here he stood. His sandals did not touch the ground.
Three senators surged in the direction of escape, but cold clouds of fog blossomed over the doorway, and they could not find their way out. A skim of ice had formed over the tiles, and one senator slipped on it.
Another three pressed themselves against the walls of the bathhouse, hiding in the steam and praying to the gods that the spirit had not noticed them.
“I come to you from Hades, with tidings of dark deeds kept from you by the one you call Caesar,” the ghost said, his lip twisting up in