Conn Iggulden - The Death Of Kings

“He never had a father, Julius. A boy needs one more than a girl.”

Julius hesitated, not wanting the responsibility. “Between Renius and Tubruk, I daresay he'll grow straight.”

“They are not his blood, Julius,” she replied, holding his gaze until he looked away.

“All right ! I'll keep him with me, though I haven't had a moment's peace since coming back to the city. I'll look after him.”

She grinned impishly at him. “‘There is no greater exercise to a man's talents than the upbringing of his son,' ” she quoted.

Julius sighed. “My father used to say that,” he said.

“I know. And he was right. There's no future for that boy running on the streets of this city. None at all. Where would Brutus be if your family hadn't taken him in?”

“I have agreed, Alexandria. You don't need to beat it to death.”

Without warning, she raised her hand to touch the white scar that crossed his forehead. “Let me look at you,” she said, standing closer and whistling softly. “You're lucky to be alive. Is that why your eye is different?”

He shrugged, ready to turn the conversation away. Then the story spilled out of him, the fight on Accipiter, the head wound that took months to heal, the fits that remained with him.

“Nothing is the same since I left,” he said. “Or everything is and I have changed too much to see it. Cabera says the fits could be with me for the rest of my life, or stop tomorrow. There is no way of telling.” He held up his left hand and squinted at it, but it was steady.

“I sometimes think life is nothing more than pain with moments of joy,” she replied. “You are stronger than before, Julius, even with the wound. I've found the trick is to wait through the pain and take the moments of happiness without worrying about the future.”

He dropped his hand, suddenly ashamed that he had talked so intimately of his fears. It was not a burden for her, or anyone except himself. He was the head of a family, a tribune of Rome, and the general of Primigenia. Strange how he couldn't muster the sort of pleasure he knew such a dream would once have given him.

“Have you… seen Brutus?” Julius asked after a pause. She turned away and busied her hands with clearing up the tools on Tabbic's workbench.

“We are seeing each other,” she said.

“Oh. I haven't told him we… um…”

Alexandria laughed suddenly, looking at him over her shoulder. “You'd better not. There's enough competition between you two without putting me in the middle.”

To his astonishment, Julius recognized a spike of jealousy enter his thoughts. He struggled with it. She was not his and, except for a frozen perfect moment years before, never had been. She didn't seem to sense the private whirl of his memories as he looked at her.

“Keep him close to you, Julius. Rome is more dangerous than you know,” she said.

Julius almost grinned at the thought of what he had survived just to return to it, but the fact that his life mattered to her at all sobered him.

“I'll keep him close,” he said.

Julius dismounted from his horse to walk the last two miles to the estate outside the city. Plans swirled around his head as he strolled along with the reins wrapped around his arm. Since his return, events had moved too quickly to grasp. Gaining the tribune post, taking Marius's house and command of Primigenia, meeting Alexandria again. Julia. Octavian. Cornelia. She was like a stranger to him. He frowned as he walked along, lulled by the clicking of hooves in the dust at his side. Her memory had helped him through the worst of the captivity. The desire to return to her was a secret strength in him that overcame injury, sickness, and pain. Yet when he had finally held her, it was as if she were someone else. He hoped it would ease with time, but part of him still yearned for the wife he loved, though she was only a mile away and waiting for him.

The law case to come worried him not at all. He'd had more than six months of monotony in a ship cell to hone a defense of Marius, and if Antonidus hadn't given him the chance, he knew he would have forced the issue in some other way. Having his uncle continue as a figure of shame in the city was not something he could stand.

Cornelia came to the gate to meet him and he kissed her. Belatedly, it occurred to him that there were other things between husband and wife that he had neglected in the two nights since his return. Intimacy would restore his love for her, he was sure. With the exhaustion of his travels fast disappearing, he kissed her again, lingeringly, and preoccupied with his thoughts, he didn't notice her stiffen in sudden panic against him. He passed the horse into the care of the slave who waited in attendance.

“Are you all right?” he whispered, close to her ear. The smell of her perfume filled his lungs with coolness.

She nodded silently.

“Is the baby asleep, wife?”

She pulled her head back to look at him. “What do you have in mind?” she asked, fighting to remain calm.

“I'll show you, if you want,” he said, kissing her again. Her skin was pale and beautiful as they walked together into the privacy of the house.

He felt clumsy inside the bedroom, covering his nervousness with kisses between flinging his garments onto the floor. There was something wrong in her responses, but he couldn't be sure it wasn't just the long separation. They had known each other for such a little time, all in all, that he knew he shouldn't expect an easy intimacy and coaxed her to relax by stroking her neck and running his hands lightly down her back as they sat naked together, with only a single dim lamp to make the room gold.

Cornelia bore his kisses and wanted to sob out her grief for what had been hurt in her. She had told no one about what Sulla had done, not even Clodia. It was a shame she had hoped to forget, something she had successfully pressed deep away inside her until it almost hadn't happened. She moved with Julius as he became aroused, but felt nothing except fear as the memories of the final visit of the Dictator flashed into her mind unbidden. She heard again the cry of her daughter in the cot at her bedside as Sulla pressed on her, and tears seeped slowly from her eyes as the cruelty surfaced in her memories with appalling force.

“I don't think I can, Gaius,” she said, her voice breaking.

“What is it?” Julius replied, shocked at her tears.

Cornelia curled against him and he wrapped his arms around her body, resting his head on hers as sobs convulsed her.

“Has someone hurt you?” he whispered, and a great emptiness stole into his chest as he voiced the terrible thought.

She could not answer him at first, but then she began to whisper, her eyes tightly closed. Not the worst of it, but the beginning, the terror of her pregnancy, the helpless anger at knowing there was no one to stop Sulla in all Rome.

Julius felt a great sadness weight him down as he listened. Without warning, tears of rage and frustration came from him at what she had gone through. He controlled himself, viciously biting his lip against the questions he wanted to ask, the pointless stupid questions that would serve nothing except to wound both of them even further. None of it mattered, except for him to hold her and hold her until the sobbing slowly died away into tiny aching shivers.

“He is dead now, Lia. He cannot hurt you or frighten you anymore,” he said.

He told her how her love had kept him strong when he thought he would go insane in the dark cell, how proud he had been at the wedding, how much she meant to his life. His tears dried with hers, and as the moon sank toward dawn, they slept, slipping away from each other.