The Judgment of Caesar Read Online Free Page B

realize he had said too much, and scowled. “Ah, well, perhaps I’ll see you again when I get back. Or perhaps not.” He gave me a nudge in the ribs that was much too hard to be friendly, and then he pushed past me. I watched the officer descend the ramp and disappear from sight.
    While I was distracted, one of the guards had apparently announced my arrival, for without further preamble Centurion Macro pushed me toward the cabin. I stepped inside, and he shut the door behind me.
    The little room seemed dark after the bright sunshine. As my eyes adjusted, the first face I saw was that of a young woman, a strikingly beautiful Roman matron who sat in one corner with her hands folded on her lap, fixing me with a condescending stare. Even at sea, she had managed to take considerable pains with her appearance. Her hair was tinted with henna and piled atop her head in a complicated coif. Her wine-dark stola was belted about her shapely torso with chains of gold, and more gold shimmered amid the jewel-encrusted pectoral that adorned her throat and the lapis baubles that dangled from her earlobes. Pompey’s young wife had no doubt taken a great deal of jewelry with her when she fled from Rome with her husband; she must have lugged that jewelry from camp to camp as the arena of battle moved. If any woman had learned to look her best while on the move, and if any woman felt she had earned the right to wear her best jewels for any occasion, it was the long-suffering Cornelia.
    Pompey was not her first husband. Her previous marriage had been to Publius Crassus, the son of Marcus Crassus, the lifelong rival of Caesar and Pompey. When the elder Crassus set out to conquer Parthia some five years ago, he took his son with him; both perished when the Parthians massacred the invading Romans. Still young and beautiful, and famously well versed in literature, music, geometry, and philosophy, Cornelia had not remained a widow long. Some said her marriage to Pompey was a political union; others said it was a love-match. Whatever the nature of their relationship, through good times and bad she had remained steadfastly at his side.
    “So it is you, Finder!” The voice, so harsh it gave me a start, came from another corner. Pompey stepped forward, emerging from the deepest shadows in the room.
    On the last occasion I saw him, he had been possessed by an almost supernatural fury. There was a glint of that same fury even now in his eyes. He was dressed as if for battle, in gleaming armor, and carried himself stiffly, his chin high, his shoulders erect—a model of Roman dignity and self-control. But along with the glint of fury in his eyes, there was a glimmer of something else—fear, uncertainty, defeat. Those emotions, held carefully in check, nevertheless undermined the stiffly formal facade he presented, and it seemed to me that behind his gleaming armor and scowling countenance, Pompey the Great was a hollow man.
    Hollow, I thought—but hardly harmless. He fixed me with a gaze so intense that I had to struggle not to lower my eyes. When he saw that I refused to quail, he barked out a laugh.
    “Gordianus! As defiant as ever—or merely stupid? No, not stupid. That can’t be, since everyone credits you with being so very, very clever. But cleverness counts for nothing without the favor of the gods, and I think the gods must have deserted you, eh? For here you are, delivered into my hands—the last person on earth I should have thought to see today. And I must be the last person you expected to encounter!”
    “We’ve followed different paths to the same place, Great One. Perhaps it’s because the gods have withdrawn their favor from both of us.”
    He blanched. “You are a fool, and I shall see that you end like a fool. I’d thought you dead already when I left Brundisium, drowned like a rat after you jumped from my ship. Then Domitius Ahenobarbus joined me in Greece and told me he’d seen you alive in Massilia. ‘Impossible!’ I