Chapter Eleven: Noble Men

Part 14 – First Business



 As the legions appeared in the empire’s cities, the riots ended. The people re-emerged from their homes where they’d hidden, and the normal routine of daily life resumed. Caesar and Catullus Senior were hailed both for the victory in the Aztec war and for restoring order. Once the Plebeian Assembly and the Senate resumed meeting, they both passed the lex Fides Libertas. All religions were now equal before the law; and once they saw that the world did not end, nor open up and swallow them whole, people began to realize that this was a good thing.

The Fourteenth Legion de-mobilized, the bulk of its members retiring from the service, including Lucius Rutullus Lepidus. Now that he was nearly thirty years of age and had the means to do so, it was time for him to begin a different type of public service than that in Rome’s armed forces. In a few short months he would be entering the Senate, the first step in what he intended to be a long and illustrious political career. That meant he had several matters demanding his attention.

Taking Caesar’s hint, he’d hired Quintus Servilius Caepio the moment the clerk had been released from service himself and had put him in charge of his accounts, especially his new gold mine. With Caepio in charge of his new fortune, Lucius was certain that the books would be kept in proper order, right down to the last denarius. After combing through the records of the formerly Aztec gold mine, Caepio had informed his new employer that he would, within a few years, be one of the richest men in Rome. In fact, the gold mine was already turning a profit before Lucius finished his last military duities.

This was good news for Lucius in many respects. An aspiring politician had to keep up appearances, so some of his newfound wealth had to be spent—or, as Caepio put it, invested—to accrue social and political capital rather than the economic variety. Lucius had therefore purchased a fashionable house on Rome’s Palatine Hill. He also bought a home nearby for his mother, and invested his two younger sisters with handsome dowries, so he knew he’d be needing his new house’s study to not only meet with his clients, but also with his sisters’ suitors.

In addition, his house required servants. Cuicatl had come back to Rome with him, refusing to part ways with the Roman soldier who had saved her from selling her body on the war-torn streets of her home town. He installed her as the maid in his new household. But a maid, reflected Lucius Rutullus, needed a male counterpart, and he had someone in mind.

“Me, sir?” Gnaeus Decumius said, astonished. “But I don’t know the first thing about being a… a… butler!”

“You can learn,” Lucius told him confidently. “How hard can it be, compared to fighting for your life on a battlefield? And I know you’ll run the household with military precision. Right, centurion?”

The former legionary straightened to attention, his gut in, his chest out. “SIR!” He’d been given an order by his commanding officer—for he’d always think of Lucius in that way—and he would do his utmost to carry it out.
Gnaeus Decumius knew, as well, what his first duty had to be. For though Lucius Rutullus had thrown himself full-force into his new life, there was one crucial part of it that he was neglecting.

Thus, on the very first day of his new job, right after Lucius finished breakfast, Gnaeus Decumius greeted him bearing a gleaming white tunic and a toga that Cuicatl had whitened even further by infusing it with chalk. The tunic bore the broad purple stripe of a senator on its right-hand side.

“Time for you to get dressed, sir!” Decumius announced. “Big day today!”

Lucius stared at the toga and especially the tunic in surprise. “I don’t officially become a senator until next month…” he objected.

“Tish! A mere formality, and you need to look your best,” Decumius said as he helped Lucius out of his ordinary tunic and into the white one, then wrapped the toga around his new employer’s tall, muscular form, settling its folds into the crook of his left arm.

Decumius stepped back to admire his handiwork. To look good in a toga, a man had to be tall, lean of hip, and broad of shoulder. Fortunately, Lucius was all three.

“Very distinguished, sir!” the former Centurion said.

“Why is today a big day?” Lucius asked, eyeing his new butler suspiciously.

“Today is a big day,” Decumius said, “because you’re going to see her today. No more putting it off, which is what you’ve been doing. Besides, this place needs a woman’s touch, if I do say so myself. No offense to Cuicatl, mind; the girl’s a lovely singer and an excellent maid, but she can’t decorate worth spit.”

“You should marry that girl when she’s of age,” Lucius said with a grin. The former centurion’s uncharacteristic blush told Lucius that he’d been thinking the same thing.

“Here now, don’t you go changing the subject!” Decumius said. “It’s not about my marriage today, it’s about yours!”

“Gnaeus Decumius…” Lucius started to say, shaking his head.

“No! No more excuses!” Decumius said angrily, walking behind Lucius and giving him a gentle shove between the shoulder blades. “Get moving, soldier! Up and at ‘em!”

Lucius soon found himself being pushed and hectored down his hallway towards his front door. Cuicatl was there, holding the door open and looking at Lucius sternly as Decumius gave him a friendly but firm shove out into the street.

“And don’t come back here until you’ve been to see her!” he said, then closed the door.

Lucius stood in the street, looking around in amused bewilderment. He had, after all, just been kicked out of his own home by his servants—as though he were a hapless character in one of the comedic plays he’d enjoyed as a youth.

“Plautus would have loved this,” he muttered.

Decumius leaned out of one of the front windows. “Come on now sir, get going,” he pleaded. “The worst she can do is say no!” Then he popped back inside.

Lucius took a deep breath, shook his head while smiling ruefully, and set off in the direction of Claudia’s house, which was further up the Palatine Hill than his own. Gnaeus Decumius, he thought, you have several outstanding qualities, but an imagination is not one of them! There are many things far worse that Claudia can do to me than merely saying ‘no’!

As he had a long walk up to her front door, he had time to consider them all. She could slam that same door in his face, accusing him of letting her husband die. Or she could laugh in his face, his miserable wreck of a face, asking why she’d ever hitch her wagon to a battle-scarred, used-up warhorse like him. Or, worst of all, she could simply turn away and quietly but firmly tell him that she never wanted to see him again.

More than once he considered abandoning what he thought must surely be a fool’s errand. She hadn’t remarried. And why should she? A Roman widow, especially a wealthy one such as she, enjoyed a certain amount of freedom and independence that no mere wife or daughter could ever know. Her paterfamilias could suggest that she remarry, but custom dictated that he could no longer force her, not that Claudia’s father, that most Roman of Romans, ever would, or would need to.

They’d been in love when they were mere children, Lucius reflected as he climbed the Palatine. That was years ago. He’d been through a war. She’d been through a marriage, and widowhood. He acknowledged that his feelings hadn’t changed, but had to allow that perhaps hers had.

He passed several people on the street, and their reaction to him didn’t help his mood. He saw them looking at him, heard them whisper behind him as he passed on. It was the eye patch, he thought. That, and the other many scars visible on the few parts of his body not hidden by the tunic and toga—and those, of course, concealed still more.

Even after all he had accomplished, he was still too humble to realize that the people on the street recognized him, and were staring in awe at the greatest hero of the Aztec war; he didn’t realize that they regarded his battle scars as marks of honour, especially that lost eye, for the story of the gallant way in which it had been sacrificed was fast becoming legend. As Catullus Senior had told Caesar, people were adding the cognomen ‘Aztecus’ to his name.

But he knew none of this, would not know it for several days, would not understand it for several months and, as another sign of his humility, would never get used to it. Instead, his thoughts grew darker. What was he, except a malformed monster? And here he was, climbing up a hill to the dwelling of a goddess. For that vision of Claudia as Minerva, so brave and resplendent in her late husband’s helmet, shield, and weaponry as she faced down an angry mob single-handed, had not left him. It had been seared in to his consciousness, and it only served to remind him how high above her he was—and how out of his reach.

Thus, by the time he reached Claudia’s door, he was in an utterly dejected state, having reviewed the principal reasons she had to reject him as a suitor, and knowing there were more besides. So he stood before her door, intimidated once again by the grandness of her house. Even though this was not the one where she had grown up and where her father had so gently broken his heart all those years ago, it was just as grand. The Pulchurii and the Catullii did not lack money, unlike his own family. At least until just recently.

Unexpectedly, at that moment, an aphorism from Confucius entered his mind: The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration. And how difficult, he chided himself, was it to simply knock on a door? Which he promptly raised his hand and did.

The middle-aged manservant who answered a moment later glanced at him, blinked, and bowed respectfully.

“I am…” Lucius began to say.

“Yes, I know,” the man assured him. “This way, sir,” he said, and led Lucius into the atrium, then into a study, which was empty save for an orderly desk and several well-stocked bookshelves.

The servant turned and whispered to a maid, who scurried off after a wide-eyed glance at Lucius. Then the man lit a lamp, bowed, and left him alone in the study.

Lucius glanced at the desk, and noticed the ink in a small bottle upon it, and several quills with freshly-cut nubs; he read the titles of the books, and immediately noticed works by Plautus and Seneca among them. He took a deep breath as memories flooded his mind, of lazy afternoons spent on the shore of a lake, sunlight sparkling on the water, a boy and a girl chatting and laughing without a single care in the world as they read plays to one another. It seemed a lifetime ago, now—more like a dream than something he’d lived through.

He stirred himself from his reverie and looked at some of the other books, recognizing titles by Confucius and his esteemed friend Mencius. He then smiled as he realized that this was her study. It was unusual for a proper Roman woman to have a study of her own, but the fact that Claudia had one did not surprise or scandalize him at all; in fact, he found the idea pleasing, for he had always admired her keen mind as much as her beauty.
He’d lost an eye in the war, but his ears had lost none of their sharpness. He was snooping about in the study for any clue he could glean as to how welcome he would be in her house—and in her heart; at the same time, he kept his ears perked for any audible clues of the same nature. Thus, from across the courtyard, he heard the maid open a door and say nothing more than, ‘He’s here.’

So he was expected. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? He couldn’t decide. He stopped looking around and stood stock still, facing the study door at full attention as though he was still a legionary, standing on a parade ground. He resisted the urge to fidget. A toga did not tolerate fidgeting very well, after all.

A few moments later, the door of the study opened, and the manservant walked in, followed by Claudia. At the sight of her, all his breath left his body. When he’d seen her for the first time in years a few weeks before, looking for all the world like the ancient Roman goddess of war and wisdom, he’d been too distracted—not to mention awed—to see her for who she was. Now she stood before him clad not in armour and weaponry, but in a long, simple dress of bleached wool. He felt no less awestruck than he had before, however.

Gone was the girl he had known; she was a full-grown woman now, and all the more beautiful for it. Her complexion was as unblemished as ever, her skin still creamy and glowing as if lit from within, her auburn hair lustrous. She had not borne any children and her long white dress did not do much to hide the benefit of that to her figure, which was just a little fuller than he remembered, but in all the right places.

“That will be all, Titus,” she said evenly to the servant, her face impassive, every inch the patrician. No hint as to her feelings were betrayed by her placid countenance. The door closed behind her. They were alone.

Their eyes met, but they said nothing. Lucius swallowed hard and fought off a sudden urge to retreat—to mumble some apology and vanish out the door. But he stood his ground. He had to see it through. He drew a breath, urged himself to speak the words he’d rehearsed so often on the voyage home, words that were suddenly so difficult to remember.

Then he saw her eyes shimmer, saw the slightest tremble of her lower lip. A single tear spilled from her right eye. And Lucius, suddenly horrified that he should be the cause of any sorrow on her part, was struck dumb. He could not speak, could not move.

But she moved. In a flash, Claudia threw herself at him, her Roman reserve disappearing in an instant as more tears spilled from those hazel eyes he loved so much. Suddenly she was pressed against him, her arms around his broad shoulders, her face pressed against his, her breasts crushed against his chest. Her body heaved with sobs, and she clung to him as though she were drowning and only he could save her. Instinctively he wrapped his strong arms around her slender body, offering what comfort he could, before he, too, succumbed and was sobbing as well.

They wept for the loss of a good man they had both loved. They wept for the loss of so many years when they were not and could not be together. They wept for the experiences they had been through, for the tender innocence they could never regain. And they wept because they were, finally, united, and because it was so good and so sweet to simply be alive.

Then her lips found his, and the flow of tears began to ebb as they gave in to a passion born so many years before and so long denied. Without being fully aware that they had done so, they left the study and found themselves in her bedroom. She closed the door behind them, and in an instant his toga and tunic were on the floor, her dress next to them. Over the course of the next hour, she kissed every scar that his many battles had left upon his body—even beneath that eye patch, just to prove to him that it didn’t bother her one bit. Then she kissed the parts of his body that weren’t scarred. He returned the favour soon afterwards.

As they lay together some time later, their ardour cooling, naked bodies entwined, she raised her head, propping it up with her hand, and shot him a look of cool patrician anger.

“You’re a fool, Lucius Rutullus,” she said. His good eye opened wide as he looked back at her in shock. It wasn’t the sort of thing a man expected to hear at a moment like that. “Do you honestly think me so naïve that I am unaware of the simple fact that people die in a war?” she said, the subtlest of tremors in her voice. Suddenly ashamed, he turned away from her. She reached out, took gentle but firm hold of his chin, and forced him to look into her eyes again. “And explain to me how, after eight years of active service in Rome’s legions, that you could be ignorant of that fact? Did you really think I’d blame you for his death?”

He didn’t answer her. She sighed. “Well, I didn’t,” she said. “But you blamed yourself. More fool you. I can forgive that foolishness on your part, though. What I find harder to forgive is nearly four years passing without a single word from you! Do you know how many nights I laid in this bed, sleepless, worrying about you, having to rely on others for news about you, to know if you were dead or alive?” Though her voice shook with the frustration and the anger she had felt, her hand caressed his cheek tenderly as she spoke.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I wanted to write to you… I picked up paper and quill so often, but…” He sighed heavily. “People think I’m a brave man, but I can be a great coward sometimes.”

“You’re no coward,” she said, shaking her head as she stroked his cheek. “You’re just too damned hard on yourself.” A rueful smile appeared on her lovely face. “I wrote you letters, you know. Dozens… no, hundreds of them.”

He frowned at her in surprise. “I never got them!” he said, bewildered.

“Because I never sent them,” she explained. The fingers of her right hand began to idly toy with the dark curls of his hair, twirling them about with her nails and fingertips. “I know you, Lucius. I knew what you were going through. And I knew you had to work it out on your own. I just didn’t think it would take you so long.” Her fingers stopped moving, and she raised her head slightly as she favoured him with a look he could only think to describe as regal. “Beyond that, I am a patrician noblewoman. I do not beg, Lucius Rutullus. Not even for you. You would do well to remember that.”

He stared at her for some time before he recovered the ability to speak. “You take my breath away, Claudia Pulchra.” He paused a moment, then smiled. “My Minerva,” he said.

She blinked in surprise. “Minerva?”

“That how you looked, that day,” he said, grinning. “During the riots. Holding off those curs all by yourself.”

She gasped and then buried her face in the crook of his arm. “Oh, I wish you’d never seen me like that!” she said miserably.

“Why not?” he asked, incredulous. “You looked like a goddess—like Minerva herself. You were magnificent!”

She raised her head. “I was?” she asked. He nodded his head enthusiastically. Still, she frowned, uncharacteristically uncertain of herself. “You didn’t think me… unwomanly?”

His eye opened wide, then gazed down at her naked body. “I could never, in a million years, ever make such an egregious error regarding your gender,” he said with a grin.

She smiled. “I was rather magnificent that day, wasn’t I?” she said brightly, giving her bed-tousled auburn locks a shake.

“You’re magnificent every day,” he said lovingly.

She pecked him on the cheek, the noblewoman retreating, the girl he’d known coming to the fore. “Compliments are good. I’ll have you know that I expect to have a lifetime filled with them.”

“You’ll get that,” he said, with a laugh, then laughed louder still.

“What’s so funny, you fool?” she asked him, smiling broadly.

“With, er, everything else that’s happened,” he said, one eyebrow raised, “I’ve nearly forgotten to fulfill the purpose of my visit.”

Moving with a speed and agility that told Claudia how formidable he must have been on the battlefield, Lucius shifted his body from beneath hers, rose from his reclining position, and then nimbly jumped over her, eliciting a squeal of surprise and a girlish giggle from her in the process. He came to rest on the floor on her side of the bed, where he dropped to one knee and took hold of both her hands in his own as she sat up.

“I love you, Claudia Pulchra,” he said, suddenly very serious. “I love you with all my heart. Will you marry me?”

She tortured him by taking a deep breath, frowning and pursing her lips thoughtfully, and rolling her eyes to look up towards the ceiling. After a moment that seemed like an eternity, she sighed and shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, all right,” she answered in a resigned tone. When she looked down and saw the shocked expression on his face, she broke out into peals of laughter and fell back on the bed.

“Why you little…” he growled. He rose and was on top of her in a flash, reaching for the places where he knew she was ticklish, making her writhe and squeal beneath him.

“I can see you know,” she said breathlessly once he’d relented in his attack, “that you’re in the presence of your new commanding officer.”

He frowned. “How so?”

“Certain parts of you are standing at attention,” she said, moving her hips beneath his.

He smiled hungrily while a low growl rumbled in his chest. He lowered his head, and their lips met yet again.

They were married a month later, the day after he entered the Senate, and it seemed as though all of Rome turned out to watch the ceremony uniting one of the city’s greatest war heroes with one of its greatest beauties. A crowd of thousands followed them to his home, cheering as he carried her over the threshold in the age-old Roman tradition. The crowd stood outside, crooning a few well-worn love songs—including a couple of bawdy, explicit ones, another Roman tradition—before respectfully leaving the couple alone in their new home and in one another’s arms.

He rested there in his marriage bed later that night, with the woman he’d always loved laying upon his chest, a son, unbeknownst to them yet, freshly conceived within her womb. His future assured, his family’s honour and position restored, and his place in the world at long last resolved, Lucius Rutullus Lepidus newly-cognominated Aztecus, for the first time in his life, finally experienced a lingering moment of genuine peace.