Part
Two: A Vision of Greatness
Blood red wine sloshed slightly on the campaign table as Captain Tiro allowed his cup to drop unceremoniously on the wood. Cocking his head, then, he looked curiously to his colonel. "Do you think they'll move?" he asked casually.
"Move?" Valerius Thrasius snorted. "Not if they know what's good for them."
Tiro shrugged casually. "Well, considering that most provincial governors who chose to rebel against the empire aren't very intelligent, do you think they'll move?"
"Depends." The colonel drained the remainder of his drink in one, long gulp. "I know Niger ain't the sharpest man Rome ever bred, but I would have taken him to be more intelligent than this. After all, he's both a soldier and a politician; the first means he knows what he's getting into, and the second says that he knows that Rome actually likes our new emperor." Valerius returned Tiro's shrug with his own, then added. "Now, I may be rather drunk at the moment, but it seems to me as if there's something fishy going on here."
"You're probably right," the captain agreed.
"I hate fish," Valerius groused in reply, and they laughed together before the older man turned serious and continued. "To answer your question, I think they might, unless the general – excuse me, the emperor – can convince them the folly of doing so. Either way, I think that this will be concluded within a week or two."
"Why's that?"
"Because the emperor does not have the patience for anything longer than that," Valerius replied. "And if I figured out that something's wrong with this situation, Maximus sure as hell has."
Outside, the sun of southern Italia sank beneath the horizon, leaving only reds and golds to adorn the sky in its wake. Under the waning light, though, a lone, weary figure strode toward the Imperial tent network, stopping only to consult with the praetorians stationed at the entrance to the courtyard the three connecting tents enclosed. Both guards nodded respectfully to the shadowy figure, and moved aside to let him pass.
"Sire?" a voice drifted from the shadows in the tent's entranceway, but empty silence greeted it. "Caesar?"
Only the light scratching of a pen on parchment echoed through the stillness, and the general shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. Oh, he was observant enough to know that his old friend was inside, and intelligent enough to know that he was being ignored; the only question was why. After all, he had been sent for, and reason led to believe that he was more or less expected. Irritated, he finally hissed, "Maximus!"
The pen never stopped moving as he queried, "Yes?"
"You sent for me, sire?" The impatience in Quintus voice spoke the
lengths to which he was unwilling to go. The words he meant, but did not dare say, clearly amounted to the …And
you're ignoring me because…?
"I heard you the first time. I merely chose to ignore you until you had something useful to say," Maximus replied evenly, then looked up and quirked a smile. He gestured to a chair in front of his desk. "Sit down, Quintus."
Hesitating only slightly, his old friend moved from the entranceway and dropped into the offered seat. Taking a split second to study him before continuing, Maximus frowned inwardly at Quintus' discomfort and embarrassment. He'd not seen the older man for over a year now, and though much had happened in that time, Maximus preferred to think that he hadn't changed all that much. Nor, he suspected, had Quintus changed, but that was hardly the point… The world had changed, and that clearly made the general uneasy. Sighing, Maximus looked his old friend straight in the eye, determined to get the necessities over with.
"How long have we known each other?" he asked abruptly.
"Almost sixteen years –"
Maximus cut the other man off before he could continue, and add the honorific that he so did not want to hear. "Half my life," he pointed out. "Almost half of yours. We have dug trenches in the freezing mud side by side. We have fought with each other and beside each other. We have bled together. We have nearly died together more than once. So if you call me by my first name, no one is going to kill you." He arched an eyebrow to drive the point home. "Correct?"
"Caesar, I –"
Aggravation nearly blossomed into full-blooded fury, but Maximus clamped down on his temper. "Enough!" he snapped, and saw Quintus jerk back in surprise as he rose and began to pace around the room. "I am sick and tired of this over-cautious form of flattery. If my best friend can not treat me like a normal human being, then who can?"
Quintus turned toward him, meeting his angry and challenging gaze evenly. "Maximus," he said quietly, intentionally stressing his first name and bringing a stormy frown to the emperor's face. "You are the Emperor of Rome."
Suddenly cold once more as his habit of control asserted itself, Maximus looked to his old friend, feeling acute disappointment for his inability to be understood. In the beginning, way back in Germania, he had known he would hate being the most powerful man in Rome. He'd never thought he could despise it this much. "And I am just a man," he pointed out softly, crossing his arms. "Emperor or no, just a man. I imagine it's easy to forget that, in this world of flattery and hero-worship in which we live, but I will not. One thing that Marcus Aurelius taught me was that no matter what you see on the outside, an emperor is the same as every other man on the inside.
"But to remain like that, to remember that, a good emperor needs people who will tell him when he is wrong, who will tell him when he had made a mistake, and above all, will remind him that he is not a god. That he is not perfect – that he is just a man. He needs people willing to treat him normally. I did that for Marcus. I need you to do that for me."
Quintus' eyebrows rose, but he seemed at a loss for words, so Maximus continued, as he reseated himself, his fury gone, but intensity remaining. "When I left the North, a little over a year ago, we were friends. I would like to believe that we still are. All I am asking is that you remember that I am the same man who stood beside you there."
Their eyes met, and the older man took a deep breath. "You don't ask for much, do you?"
Maximus snorted. "Hey, at least it's not you in this chair."
Despite himself, Quintus chuckled. "No kidding," he replied, then turned serious. "I would never want it."
The Emperor of Rome looked him in the eye. "Neither did I."
Gaius Pescennius Niger looked to his second in command, Marcus Antonius Gordianus, and tried not to look irritated. The younger man was clearly the darling of their troops, yet Niger could not shake the idea that there was something wrong with him… Twenty-four years old, handsome, and unfailingly loyal, Gordianus was all a governor could ask for in a quaestor, but sometimes Niger wondered if he was ambitious as well. Actually, the governor knew full well of Gordianus' ambitions, but he figured that could be dealt with in time – after all, if their attempt did succeed, the younger man had every reason to believe he would be named Niger's heir, since the governor had no sons of his own, and his only eligible male relative, a scrawny and scholarly nephew with no world outside of his books, was definitely in his uncle's disfavor.
At the moment, though, Gordianus was not earning any brownie points in his governor's book. He was fretting. He was drinking too much. And he was nervous.
Niger hated nervous subordinates.
"What is it now?" Niger demanded, then without waiting for a reply, gestured angrily to the couch across from his own. "Sit down, Marcus, before you have a heart attack." The younger man sat obediently, and again reached for his drink. The governor, however, beat him too it, and kept the cup well out of Gordianus' reach. "Well? What is bothering you?"
"Nothing, really…" the quaestor trailed off. "It's just that I did not expect him to act so quickly. Our plans said we could be in Italia before they had arrayed troops to meet us."
So it's this again, Niger fumed silently. Doesn't he understand that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy? So they acted faster than we thought they could. So what? Now we just have to change our plans a bit. Not a problem.
But something inside him felt that it was.
Something was wrong.
"In the long run, Marcus, it does not matter where we meet them. It only matters that we win," he reminded his second-in-command.
"Yet our scouts say that the pretender is in Rhegium already, and we have yet to cross into Italia at all. From where they are, they can stop our crossing, and we could be stuck here in Sicilia." Again, Gordianus shifted nervously, but refrained from rising once more.
"They cannot possibly stop us under the cover of darkness, Marcus Antonius," Niger pointed out quietly, explaining the situation patiently, as he might have to an especially slow child. Damn, if Gordianus did not remind him of one at times… "That is why we leave tonight."
The nervousness disappeared as if a giant hand had suddenly swept it from the younger man's mind, and he smiled appreciatively as he considered his commander's talents. "They will never expect us to move so soon," he said in quiet awe.
Niger forced himself to smile. "That's why we are," he said aloud, but inside, he was thinking: If we don't move, Messana will become a death trap for my army, because Gordianus is right; if they block our crossing, we're stuck here, and I will not endanger these people. Unlike me, they are innocent.
Four hours later, from the bow of the merchant ship, Isis, Sicilia's governor watched the waves roll over her carved wooden prow, and tried to quiet the matching rocking in his gut. Intellectually, he knew that he had no choice but to cross now – first, because he could not allow himself to be trapped on Sicilia, where he could do no more than restrict Rome's grain supply, which would be only a pinprick of an annoyance to the Empire at best; and second, because crossing now gave him the element of surprise. It was a short journey between Italia and her sister island, and night had just fallen, which would allow his men an ample amount of rest before they struck out to face their own countrymen –
That thought brought a frown to his face. His men were loyal, yes; but their first loyalty was to Rome. Yes, they loved him, yet they were old legions, the 7th and 8th Gemina, and they had served Rome well in their time. Most of the men were veterans of Lucius Verus' Parthian campaign, and that meant they could have hardly forgotten what it was like to serve an emperor…And some would probably even know the man whom Niger was trying to oust.
Another frown creased his features. Rumors of the succession conflict in Rome had reached Sicilia quickly, and had run rampant once they had arrived. Somehow, the small island had missed the news that Marcus Aurelius' chosen successor was one other than his son, so it came as a great shock to hear of the political war waged between Commodus and his father's popular general. What worried Niger, though, was the fact that those rumors had died off. While they had heard of the Senate's conformation of Maximus, Niger had heard nothing further, except that the young general still had many enemies in Rome who were more than willing to accept an alternative leader – so long as it was not Commodus.
A senator himself, and proconsul, Niger had never tried to hide his ambitions. In fact, they had been well enough known that his old acquaintance and colleague – never, though, a friend – Marcus Didius Julianius Falco, had written to him, telling him of the problems in Rome and specifically the eagerness of his "allies" – who he did not name, of course – to find another man to occupy the throne. While Niger was not willing to trust Falco any further than he could throw him, he did know that the other man had excellent political contacts, and knew the empire and its senate well. And Niger was in a position to do something about the chaos… And make himself emperor while he was at it.
Suddenly, he chuckled to himself. To end the chaos gripping our dear empire… Yes, that was a good sounding motive, but the governor had no wish to fool himself. He was moving on Rome now, not because he wanted to fix anything, but because he had a craving for power. Long had he watched the throne, waiting and holding his breath, knowing that Marcus Aurelius was too strong and too popular to successfully oppose – and, in a moment of truth, Niger would have admitted his own loyalty to the man. Aurelius had been…different from any other ruler Rome had ever known. Niger had always known he could never have rebelled against the man, yet he'd also been secure in the knowledge that he would outlive the old emperor. Now, though, the old emperor was dead, and there was no rule stating that the his heir had to be the one he chose… Or, Niger reflected, at least there was no rule specifying that the chosen heir had to last long.
"They move, Sire!"
Even as the young scout entered the tent, Quintus' jaw dropped open as Maximus turned to him with a grin that simply stated, I told you so! "They come…" he mused, trailing a the tip of a dagger over the map. "So we meet them… here."
His officers stared at where the dagger had halted. "That's just off the coast," Valerius pointed out. "We don't have the time to get there before they do, Sire."
Inwardly, Maximus winched at his old friend's formality, but knew he had no choice, so did not complain. "We don't need to," he replied. "Niger will land and set up camp. By dawn, we will be there, though, and waiting for him."
Slow smiles spread across the men's faces at his words, and he knew what they were thinking…Thank the gods that some things never change.
"Let's move."
As dawn broke over the tip of Italia's "boot," Niger's two legions awoke. Within moments, though, the alarm went out – they were surrounded. Niger rushed out of his command tent, only half dressed, to encounter a panicked corps of officers, but even then, his eyes were scanning the semi-dark horizon, noticing the standards of the four legions facing him, and reality drove the point home. Not only was he surrounded, boxed in with his back to the ocean, but he was also outnumbered two to one.
And there was no way out.
No way out.
Sudden heaviness weighed down on his soul, and he realized that almost eleven thousand deaths would be on his hands by the time the sun set over the empire he had wished to rule. Ambitious he had always been, yes, but Niger loved his country. He had never wished for this… Never had he wanted to lead his own country to certain death, all in the name of foolish ambition and grandiose dreams. The governor merely blinked, though, knowing more reaction would be disheartening for his men and trying to present a confident front for those who had so loyally followed him, but he knew it was useless. He'd never been a miracle worker, and the gods certainly weren't going to grant him that ability today.
A hand grasped his arm, and Niger felt it shaking in the face of his own inhuman calm. They were already dead. Gordianus just didn't know it yet. "What do we do, General?" the younger man gasped.
"What we have to, Marcus," Niger replied. "We do what we have to do."
"Valerius!"
"Sire?" his infantry commander replied immediately, suddenly at his side. Maximus smiled slightly in private amusement – it still sounded strange to be addressed as such – but spoke without letting his eyes leave the enemy camp.
"Send a messenger to Governor Niger," Maximus said evenly. "I want to speak to him."
"Yes, sir." Valerius turned away, but suddenly the emperor's head snapped around to follow the colonel's back, his mind working furiously. His men were arrayed in a large semi-circle, with him at the center, and it gave him a perfect view of the chaos and confusion raging in Niger's camp… Perhaps there was another way.
"Belay that…" he said thoughtfully, and his colonel stopped obediently, watching him, and waiting for new orders. "I have a better idea."
Niger looked up from his map as Gordianus called his name. No, rather, the younger man screamed his name. Although he was fully prepared to launch into a tirade on his quaestor's lack of control, the words died on his lips as his eyes focused on the six praetorians riding into his camp…and the other man who rode with them. For if six praetorians in their black armor were not enough of a shock for any army, the man they escorted was. Although Niger had never even seen Maximus Decimus Meridius, he knew full well that the youngish man garbed in gold armor and the Imperial purple could be no other. For a moment, the governor stood silently, only staring at his adversary, who had been so audacious to ride into an enemy camp –
What a gamble, he admitted to himself. And boy is it paying off.
Every man along the emperor's path stopped and stared, their eyes wide, nervous, and… respectful. Niger had to admit that Maximus cut a good figure, and he rode his dapple gray stallion like the warrior he had been – and clearly still was. His relative youth was a harsh contrast to the old emperor's age and frailty, but the same intensity and will burned in his otherwise calm eyes. The old instincts of a soldier lit off within the governor, and he knew that the man was a leader…and one he could never hope to surpass. Ambition, this time, would not be enough.
Motion caught the corner of his eye, and Niger's head snapped around just in time to see the first soldier – Titus Flavius, his legions' senior centurion – drop to one knee in a sign of allegiance and respect. With hardly a whisper of protest, the rest of the men followed suit as the emperor passed, leaving only Niger and his officers standing in Caesar's path. Silently, the praetorians and their emperor halted their mounts before them, and all seven men dismounted. But only the emperor moved forward, poised and cool, with a warrior's confidence.
Again, Niger simply stared, unable to act in the few eternal seconds of the emperor's approach. Life offered him two choices, but one was one that his pride would not have considered even ten minutes ago. Ten minutes ago, he had been prepared to go down fighting, trapped though he was. Ten minutes ago, surrender would not have been an option, for he'd never have believed that his army could betray him, and yet they clearly loved Maximus. His men did not have to know the emperor; they only had to know who and what he was – one of their own. Thus, not a one of them, Niger realized, would stand against him…or, at least, certainly not in the name of an older and ambitious, politician.
The whirlwind of his mind slowed, and stopped. Better to end this with honor, as befitting a Roman senator and general, than to fight irrationally to the end. Common sense was a very Roman virtue – Niger merely prayed that mercy was as well. For once, he was thankful that he had no family to bring down with him.
Expelling one last deep breath, Niger knelt before the emperor. Protocol only demanded that he bow, yet he was sure that Maximus would recognize the significance of the gesture.
Silence reigned long and loud, until the emperor spoke quietly. "I would speak to you in private, Governor," Maximus said calmly.
Surprised, Niger came to his feet. "Yes, sire."
As the governor lead the way toward his own tent, the ranking praetorian moved to follow his emperor, but Maximus glanced over his shoulder and shook his head slightly. When the praetorian frowned, the emperor softened it with a smile. "Not this time, Colonel," he said softly.
Though clearly displeased, the praetorian remained behind, and once more, Niger found himself surprised. In private generally meant with praetorians in tow, he knew, and for an emperor to leave them behind when conversing with a man who had done his best to replace the said Caesar was…risky. Either Maximus was a fool, which he did not seem, or he felt he had nothing to fear.
The tent flap closed silently behind the emperor, and Niger turned to face him, waiting for Maximus to speak, yet studying him all the while. It was now easier to understand why men followed him, and why the Senate had acquiesced to his occupation of the throne – the man had a presence. He did not need to speak to radiate confidence and power. Truly, he was perhaps the most well-fitted for the role of Caesar out of those who'd held the post in the last fifty years – at least on the surface. Outwardly, he seemed ideal. But only time would tell if the strength he had shown on the field could transfer into that of a good ruler.
Finally, the Emperor spoke, his calm eyes burning into Niger's with every word. "What was your aim, Governor?" he said coldly.
"Rome, sire," Niger answered truthfully, knowing that this was no time for lying. Nor, of course, did he have anything to lose by telling the truth. He would have been content to die for his country, yet to die for his own foolish ambition seemed such a sorry way to go.
"I thought as much." The younger man's voice was devoid of emotion, and his face unreadable as he continued. "And what would you have done if you succeeded?"
Taking a deep breath, Niger looked the emperor in the eye. "I would have ruled, Caesar."
"You have watched and waited for a long time, haven't you, Niger?"
Maximus' insight was slightly unnerving, but the governor reminded himself that this was the protégé of Marcus Aurelius…and the old man was far to wise to leave an uninformed or incompetent successor. Aside all else, Niger had respected the old man he had once called Caesar. "Yes, sire," he finally replied.
Caesar nodded, but an interesting gleam entered his eyes. "What made you wait?"
Averting his eyes, he told the truth that he would have admitted to very few. "I would not rebel against Marcus Aurelius."
"Why not?" Maximus challenged.
"He was my emperor."
"As am I," Maximus pointed out.
"He was different," Niger snapped back, almost against his will, then added the honorific as an afterthought as he regained control of himself and wondered what such an outburst would cost him. "Sire."
Unangered, the emperor challenged him once more. "You hardly know me."
"Perhaps that is the reason," the governor admitted.
"The reason," Maximus mused, his voice suddenly soft. "You were loyal to Marcus Aurelius…was that because he was too popular to depose, or because of who he was?"
Again, such an insight threw the older man off-guard and forced him into telling the truth. "Because of who he was," Niger admitted.
"He was a great man," the emperor said softly. "And he loved Rome…As do I." Once more, his eyes met the governor's and Niger found himself unable to break away. "He asked me to carry on his dream, and I will – not because I want this power, but because I have a responsibility to the Empire. And because he asked me to.
"You served him well, and you followed him, as I did, not merely because he was the emperor, but for who he was. You knew his goals, and you respected them. You shared them. So tell me…Can you not still serve his dream in a different form?
"I do not buy men's loyalties, but I can promise you that you won't regret it."
~~~~~ Hello again…. Part 3 is in the making. I do have a question – this, in combination
with "Echoes in Eternity," is on the verge of turning into a series of its own. Anyone have an idea what to name it?
As always, please R&R and tell me what you
think.
Robin
