A Note on the Chapter Title: Quirinus — Romulus, the founder of Rome, was deified as Quirinus after his death. Quirinus was a war god and a god of the Roman people and state.
Kurama's countrymen were easy to see beyond the iron bars of the rocking, wood-bellied cage he was confined to. They stumbled with bloody feet wrapped in rags, the soil of the Gallic lowlands clinging to their body. Many had stuffed herbs, tatters of cloth, soft loam, leaves, whatever they could find into the gaps between manacles and flesh. Their faces, thin and starved at the first, were thinning further, the hard march, ill usage, and scant rations felt to the very marrow of their bones. Almost daily a pregnant woman or a too-young child collapsed: if the legionaries couldn't rouse them, they were given the culling blow and thrown into a ditch, sans burial rites of any kind.
Kurama was still primped and fattened and oiled, tended to like a fine young colt they prepared for market day. He saw the hate-filled glances of the other Celts; heard their soft jeering when the same mute woman who'd tended to him in Londinium undressed him and plucked him clean. It made his soul bleed, but he endured it, keeping his chin straight and his shining green eyes level. He looked so like a noble chieftain, a venerable warrior, that in other circumstances they would have respected him. Kurama understood: it is hard to see a kinsman in a shaven boy whose wild hair has been tamed and trimmed to ever-softening crimson curls, forced from the traditional Celtic dreadlocks.
The Gauls came to see them as the army and captives wound along straight Roman roads, making a headless writhing snake of people and horses. In the upper regions of Gaul, there was pity or apathy on the watchers' faces. Taunts had been kept to a minimum once the coast, which Britons often plundered when food was scarce, was cleared. The farther south they travelled, however, the more the faces changed. Here in the area the legionaries called Province, the sight of Roman airs were common. Kurama was shocked to see base corruptions of Celtic hairstyles mixed with shaven faces; grown men with cheeks as smooth as a girl's. Kurama was offended, and looked away, though he'd learned to watch when he heard the taunting voices of little boys, who were apt to throw stones or rotting things at the passing slaves. One stone hit a legionary, and Kurama thought the boy would be killed before his father, a rich merchant, intervened, groveling and offering a handful of hard-won gold coins.
Kurama watched the boy released and the father ushering him away, already scolding him lowly in an odd mix of Latin and his tribal tongue. Thinking of Shuuichi's unknown fate, Kurama couldn't overcome the disdain that washed over him, like one of the Romans' noxious herbal baths.
When Kurama was captured, all those months ago, it had been during the final legs of winter's power. Now, the last patches of ice were liquefying, the rivers and streams of Gaul swollen with snowmelt. The first flowers were peeking out from their seeds only to be trodden under marching feet, and the woods rang with returning songbirds in the grey mornings Kurama spent curled in the corner of his cell, arising from the Egyptian cotton he'd been provided with to listen to the comely chirrups.
Then, without fail, he walked around his narrow prison (benches, bedding, and chamber pot) and conjured up images of his mother stirring a fine stew of turnips and potatoes, the cooked meat of a hare, and forest herbs, thick with cream and flour and smelling like all of nature's bounty was in the pot. In his memory, which was still fresh in those days, Shiori would look up and smile when he came in sweating from his day in the fields and laugh at his weariness, banishing it. The natural light faded from his mind, sunset echoes dancing on the neat onion whitewash covering the wattle and daub sides of their cottage, a sweet little building that could barely hold the three of them and their faithful dog, Briar. Shuuichi would return with the hound from shepherding their flock, all of whom, ram and ewe alike, had been slaughtered, stolen, or sold in the long, fruitless war.
Simple days. Happy days. They were over, and once the sun rose, and the soft magic of daybreak faded into the ugly clarity of morning, they were banished from Kurama's mind. The march stirred then, slave children crying as they awakened to whips and labor and unfamiliar surroundings. In those dawns, though, everything seemed closer and more real, more terrible, and his loss felt so great he thought he would die of it. It was his fate to live, however.
The mountains, when they came upon them, were bold ink strokes against the sky, seeming to go up and on forever, wreathed by clouds: but they were as cruel as they were beautiful. Kurama, General Hiei and all the captives and legionaries felt the closeness of Rome. The snow still lingered in the passages that would truck the army, but after a few days of indecision the orders were given, and a great confusion of legionaries and their horses started forward, wheeling, cart horses and warhorses alike called in to break the snow.
Kurama was dragged from his cage and lashed to a horse, a dun mare with a world-weary step. Being the son of a peasant, Kurama could barely ride, and jostled and jarred along miserably, not knowing how to keep his heels down or how to sit in the saddle. Even for plowing his family had had an ox, Cornu, long since sold. He slipped and bumped this way and that, his hands bound before him, until his ass, his calves, and his thighs were sore, strained and red, while the icy winds of the mountaintops plucked at him and chapped his skin, reddening his face, the glare off the snow burning his skin. He felt shamed, to burn and peel like a lily-fingered Latin noble, but there was little he could do. He felt some vindication when his keepers checked him, day after day, and clucked to each other over the work that would have to be done on the other side of the mountain to undo what the travel had done. They always left him tied to his horse in the end, a horse whose name he did not know, and didn't want to know, since it would be in Latin and he was now learning so little new of it that he was frustrated by its very thought.
From his vantage point, he saw the long drop down the side of the mountain, and he saw men and beasts fall prey to it. A heavyset man tripped at the top of a slave line, and in an instant twenty people had been dragged to their deaths, so abruptly that many never had time to scream. Kurama pitied them. Death was good, but to die of a fall, far from home, in enemy hands, was dishonorable.
Kurama began to wake up at night in a cold sweat, overwhelmed with images of those he had seen die. He went back to sleep afterwards, mostly, always with the sense that he was skirting something. He was, too: he never watched his mother's death. That was kept in a box in his heart, wound over tightly with twine. When the memory threatened to come back, he pictured wrapping more and more string around it, good taut spun rope, until it couldn't open.
When the path they followed into the mountain finally turned down, and Kurama was afraid of sliding over the horse's head instead of off its hind, the legionaries rejoiced, but Kurama did not. Wild plans for escape filled his head, even as they passed the snows and trotted down until the ground was level, rich with blankets of green moss and merry streams. The scraggly pines of the mountaintop were replaced with true forests, which quickly shrank and thinned into farmland, neat rows where the occasional farmer plowed or tilled or planted his spring seed and grain.
Sometimes dirty peasant children, looking no thicker or better fed than the slaves in the line, scratched themselves watching the long miserable river of limping, footsore slaves and soldiers wind through the fearfully straight roads, which could only lead to one place. Kurama never knew when they passed into Italy, for of course, all of this was Rome to him. He saw prosperous towns and impoverished shacks and looked upon them with equal hate. He was moved back to a cage (he wasn't sorry to see the end of his riding) with a blanket thrown over it so he couldn't incur any more damage from the sun. Much of his journey after that was spent in darkness, which quickly became maddening.
He couldn't complain, however. It would have been weak, with children no older than six forced to trudge all these miles on their own two feet. He paced, cursed the horses that pulled his pen, and spent his time repeating the new words he'd learned in Latin to himself, hoping to lodge them in his memory and perfect pronunciation. The cloth dulled sound and everything smelt of sweat, leather, chamber pot and horses. He was thus unprepared (though he'd heard the low moans of pain from his countrymen) when someone, cruelly or kindly he could not at first tell, ripped off the tarp.
Kurama gawked. He gaped. In fact, his eyes were round as coins. The seven hills that lay spread before him like a whore with her legs open, like an anthill, teeming with people, held more humanity than Kurama had ever seen in all the rest of his life put together. There was no section of road or ledge that wasn't moving with man and beast, and the massive marble walls of each separate section, the villas and houses, the slums and markets that leaked out beyond the gates and down into the swamps between each hill, they all astounded him.
He'd heard the noise increasing to a dull roar, smelt the stench of what he hadn't recognized as the odor of unwashed millions and their animals, of melding aromas of foods and spices and incense from every corner of the known world, of the rank rich stink of tightly-packed humanity, but that hadn't prepared him for the shining marble domes of Pompey's theater, the hoards of birds that wheeled above the rooftops in great brown clouds, or the influx of travelers on foot, on horse- or donkey-back, on ornate pavilions carried by strong-armed groups of slaves, or in farmer's carts.
Noble and common, rich and poor, of every race of man that Kurama thought could exist in all the world, they ran or jogged or walked or rested or road as per their liking, away from, towards, and around the greatest city of all the world, Rome, the heart of an Empire. The masses parted around and were pushed and jostled to the side before the long line of cheerful legionaries and weary, wide-eyed slaves. Kurama covered his head and thought he would be sick, but soon looked up again seconds afterward to take more in. It was an overload of the senses after the shapeless sweating darkness of the tarp.
He'd forgotten to look for the reason his tarp had been removed. Kurama was so flabbergasted by the panorama before him that he barely struggled when two legionaries who had opened the door behind him dragged Kurama from the cage, forcing him to trip on the wooden lip of the doorway. The three men, Kurama putting up a slowly increasing fight, wound through all the city-goers, secreting Kurama off towards the high white walls of a villa they were passing, overrun with flowering creepers. Overwhelmed, Kurama knew nothing more than that Mukuro must have been mad, simply mad, to challenge the great lolling mob of Rome.