SAMPLE THE STORY BY READING CHAPTER ONE

Dusk lay across the field of battle, over the broken bodies and the shattered swords, with the dented shields turned red by the dying sun. Where a flaming catapult lighted the gathering darkness, a man came walking. His armor was hacked and dented, broken at the shoulder where a strip of cut leather dangled limply to his stride.

He was a tall man, thick through the shoulders. Above iron greaves, the muscles in his naked thighs bunched and rippled. His scabbard clanked against the lappets of his cuirass, mournful in the silence. His forehead was wide below closely cropped bronze hair. A mobile mouth and deep-set eyes marked him as a humorous, sometimes thoughtful man.

The man paused before the burning catapult, looking up at the twisting flames. He took off his helmet and wiped his wet forehead with a fold of his red legate's cloak. A cool Etesian wind was coming off the Cambunians to sweep across this plain of Philippi. It made the flames roar savagely, but the man was grateful to it.

The wind gave him new life, so that he could go on. To his left, the dying sun was a huge red ball of flame on a reed marsh. Like black fingers, the stalks of the reeds thrust upward through the water. They might be the hands of the mercenaries that the Fifth Macedonian had hit here and shattered this afternoon, he thought wryly. He himself had commanded the Alaudae legion for Marc Antony.

Killing on the battlefield or even on the sands of a gladiatorial area had become a way of life for him, Paulus Didius realized. His family had purchased the rank of tribune for him in his early youth. Looking back, he wondered how he'd ever managed to live through those campaigns against the Tencteri of Gaul, or those bloody slaughters along the Rhine against those Germanic tribes. Now that he wore the red tunic of the legate over his cuirass, he was a veteran among veterans. Just as his father the Senator wore his toga trabea, so he wore the caligulae and crested helmet.

The ache of overlong swordplay and the marching and running he'd done with the Fifth Alaudae this day was alive in his muscles. Well, he was used to that. Rest could wait.

There was a task he had to do, first.

He skirted the marsh, his eyes staring at the grassy water, at the slim lengths of the reeds, at the distant cypress trees that were like priests of Nemi, with their low branches wide-flung. The man he hunted was somewhere around here. The last he'd seen him was when he went scurrying, red military cloak flapping around his spindly shanks, running in terror of his life.

Paulus Didius grinned at the remembrance.

“Octavian Caesar bolting for the water like a marsh rat!” he thought maliciously.

And this was the man who, with Marc Antony and Lepidus, was supposed to inherit the world of Julius Caesar! Divide the world into three parts: give one to Antony, one to Octavian, one to Lepidus! All the world was Roman now, anyhow. Or as good as Roman. All a man had to do was take a few legions into Persia or Armenia, or even into Egypt where that voluptuous harlot, Cleopatra, was queen, and there would be no opposition anywhere.

Gaius Julius Caesar had been consumed on his blazing funeral pyre a little more than two years ago. This afternoon at Philippi his murderers, Decimus Brutus and Cassius, had been smashed into the ground. The victory belonged to Antony. Of course, Octavian had fought with them; at least, his legions had fought. Octavian himself—an adopted son of Julius Caesar, and what a joke that was!—had run for shelter in the marshes.

Paulus stood for a moment, feeling the wind grow colder. It was darker. Above him, he could see stars in the sky, and a faint curve of moon.

“If I don't find the fool soon, there'll be an end to him,” he said harshly, vexed at his failure.

Paulus felt that he owed something to the son of Julius Caesar. Caesar had given him the chance to show what he could do at Castra Bonnensia, a town of the Ubi, when the Ninth had split wide open before the charge of those Germanic ax-men. A tribune with the Fifth Legion—everybody called them the Larks—he had been ordered forward to fill the gap. To his own vast surprise, he had taken his legionaries right through those fur-clad savages, cut them apart, and then brought his men back again, slaughtering as they came.

Oh, he had always been big and strong. He had inherited his size from his maternal grandfather. And he worked out every day at the Greek gymnasium with his tutor, Axilos. The fact of the matter was he could use a sword with any man. That, he supposed, was what had sent him into the gladiatorial arena, later. But his success at leading troops had been the great surprise, and had pleased him most.

Julius Caesar had laughed and wagered a thousand sesterces on him when, in a fit of whimsy, he went into the Circus to face a Spanish net-and-trident man. With Caesar as his patron, his fame as a gladiator was assured, a fame that his genuine fighting ability soon spread throughout the Empire. He grew rich at his new trade; not that he needed the money. The Didii family were wealthy, owning more than their share of gold and land. Caesar made his move socially acceptable.

Now all Rome called him gladiator nobilis, the gentleman gladiator. Paulus liked to think that the name was a sign of their affection and respect.

And so Paulus Didius, though Antony's man, could not forget an old friend. Octavian Caesar, adoptive son of Julius Caesar, was somewhere in this bog, by the pearl girdle of Venus!

He did not risk a shout.

There were ears to listen on the dying battlefields. Here ragged men and women crept to and fro, cutting off dead men's fingers for their rings, stealing their armor, their weapons, whatever jewels they might wear or carry in their service pouches. And these ghouls could carry a tale as well as a decent man.

He saw the hand first, clinging to the twisted roots of a floating cypress log, and then the white, pinched face streaked with mud.

Paulus went into the muck to his knees, hands dipping into the water and the mire, lifting the man up and out. He was surprised at how little Octavian weighed. He shifted Octavian into his arms, then walked with him away from the marsh and to firm, dry ground.

He made a fire, and began to undress his discovery. When Octavian was naked—Mars, what a bag of bones!—Paulus wrapped him in his cloak and sat him near the fire, huddled over and shivering. His clothes he laid out carefully to dry.

“I would have died, you know.”

The voice was calm. Paulus turned from the garments and looked across the flames at the man who was one of the two most powerful men in Rome. He wanted to say something clever, but nothing would come to him. He shrugged. “I know that,” he said. “Otherwise, I would not have come.”

“I am trying to find a reason as to why you should save a man whom Antony hates,” Octavian said.

“Your father helped me, once,” Paulus reminded him.

Octavian smiled and leaned back. A hand touched his curls, twisted them a moment, rearranging them. Just in this manner had Julius Caesar straightened his own thinning locks. It was a mark of vanity in the man, Paulus thought.

“I ought to be ashamed, oughtn't I?” Octavian asked agreeably. “And yet, I'm not. I've never been a gladiator. I'm a man of brains. My brains told me I had no business on that field, and so I ran away. Tell me, Paulus, ought I slay myself in despair?”

Octavian was laughing at him silently, Paulus realized. He grinned back, honestly. “You're a smart man, Octavian. More than once, I've wanted to run in the Circus Maximus but stood my ground like a fool. I never had the courage to run away.”

Octavian sighed. “There was no place to run, Paulus. On a battlefield there is always a place to run. There aren't fifty thousand pairs of eyes fixed on you as there are in the arena. Every man is too busy saving his own skin to bother about yours.”

His hand twisted a golden wristlet free of his arm. Five big emeralds made green fire in their golden beds. He held it out so the firelight touched it brightly. “Take it,” he urged Paulus gently. “As evidence of my good will. I know you don't need the money it represents. Consider it a peace offering between us.”

“No.” Paulus smiled. “Antony might think you were buying me.”

Octavian considered him while he redonned the bracelet. “Are you an ambitious man? Are the three fates weaving a pattern of your life and mine? Do Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos have nothing else to do but tangle our skeins together? Or are you so venal that you weigh rewards, and overlook a lesser prize for a greater in the future?”

Paulus laughed, a rich shout of honest mirth. This was the difference between Octavian Caesar and Marc Antony. Octavian sought for hidden motives. Antony would have taken off a second bracelet and made him accept the two of them, then sent him a girl that night in token of his admiration. A man could be awed by the cold, clear thinking of Octavian; Antony he would adore because of his earthy honesty.

As he shook out the drying clothes, freeing them of mud, he said something of this to Octavian, who listened with his head bent.

“Antony is very popular in Rome.” Octavian sighed.

“He's a man of the people. Like the Roman mob. He goes out and gets drunk with them. He isn't above taking a likely tavern wench in full view of his officers, who are doing the same thing with other women. He acts first and thinks later.”

Octavian smiled slyly. “He does think, though?”

Paulus grinned. “He thinks about certain things. He doesn't go delving into men's hearts to discover why they rescue him from death by drowning or by freezing. The act itself is everything with him.”

“Yes, it would be. It is his weakness.”

Octavian stood and dropped the cloak. Slowly, he began to dress. Paulus picked up his own cloak and threw it about his shoulders. It was growing cold now, for it was the autumn of the year. He waited while Octavian improved his appearance, bending to use the polished blade of his naked sword as a mirror.

Straightening, Octavian said, “Have you given any thought as to what will happen now?”

Paulus was surprised. Did this man read minds? As the Consul dressed, he had been considering that very thing. Now Brutus and Cassius were dead, Antony and Octavian might well be at each other's throats until one of them won precedence, and rule of Rome.

“Antony could order your murder,” he said slowly. “I do not think he will do that, however. He's a generous man. He'll be too happy with his victory to be petty.”

“Oh?” Octavian looked bemused. He put out a hand to halt Paulus, who had started to turn away. “Perhaps I should run this night as I ran this afternoon. That way, I would be sure to stay alive.”

Paulus shrugged. “There are times when a man who plays for big stakes must take a risk. If he wins, he can go on to bigger things.”

Octavian considered him, head bent to one side. “Such thoughts were my own, and I am noted for my wisdom, if not for my bravery. Come, let us walk together and find Antony.”

They went side by side across the battlefield, past the dead bodies and the burning onagers. It was black now, with only the moonlight and the red flames of the blazing war engines to light their path. Once when Octavian stumbled, Paulus prevented his fall.

After a while, Octavian began to chuckle.

“By rights, you should have put a blade between my ribs back there. You know how much Hortus Sempronius hates you.”

Hortus Sempronius was a tribune in the command of Octavian Caesar. Two years before, in Rome, in the days when Julius Caesar lay on his funeral pyre, Paulus Didius had made three enemies. One of them had been Amenobarbus, the Egyptian counselor of Queen Cleopatra. Another had been Hortus Sempronius.

And Berenice Athaglos, the girl who was the most important of all.

The summons from Marc Antony found Paulus in the little stone cubicle that was his carcere in the depths of the Circus Maximus. His slave was kneeling, fitting a greave to his left leg below the white cotton of his gladiatorial kilt. Ordinarily, a gladiator would see no one before he took his place for the combat on the arena sands. But when a man was such a gladiator as Paulus—a scion of a noble family, wealthy enough to put on gladiatorial shows if he wanted and not fight in them—one made allowances.

The perfumed dandy minced through the archway, carrying news from Antony. This was Appius, one of the actors turned courtiers with whom Antony surrounded himself these days. He held a pomade ball set in golden wires at his nose to keep out the smells of sweat and liniment.

“He says to come at once, this very instant,” simpered the fop, arranging the pleats of his toga more carefully. “You are not to fight this day. You are to come instead to his house on the Via Sacra, and speak with him.”

Paulus smiled grimly. “Not fight when the seats are filled with men who've come to see me matched against an imported retarius from Spain?” His thumb jerked upwards as the crowd roared in echo to a human scream. “Someone just died up there. They want to see some blood. Mine or the Spaniard's, it makes no difference. But they want to see it.”

“Antony said to come.”

Paulus walked the length of the little room that held a wooden bench and table, and a rack for his swords, shields and armor. He knew the fickle popularity of the masses. For the past four years he had made his name a byword in the city. His strength and the craft of his swordplay brought him safely out of every encounter, and made the man on the streets adore him. Men like Dolabella and Amantius had won fortunes by backing him.

He picked up a sword and hefted its balance. A favorite gladiator was a marked man in Rome. As he walked the streets, he was cheered by men who'd won hard money by betting on him. Perfumed women waited outside the arena to take him home with them in the temporary absence of their husbands. He ate the best foods, drank expensive Falernian, and slept with some of the prettiest women in Rome.

And yet, Paulus Didius wanted something more than this.

The sword-blade slammed the tabletop as he cursed in exasperation. Frankly, he did not know what he wanted; he was aware only of an unrest in him, a seeking after purpose and meaning to his life. This was the real reason he took to the gladiatorial sands. He could vent the fevers of his energy against a Spanish trident or a Mauretanian ax Some day he might not be as lucky as he had been this far. It was not the fear of death that moved him, however, so much as it was his inward hunger for a goal.

Marc Antony might be offering that goal.

“I will come,” he said to Appius. Then to his slave, he said, “Unfasten the straps. I'll give you a wax tablet to take to the praetor.”

Appius brought him along the Via Sacra to the big mansion that had once been the property of Pompey. It was a fine mansion, of Numidian marble and Cordovan bronze. Striped awnings shadowed the flagged sidewalk. From the high windows, open against the unusually warm spring weather, came the sound of zithers and flutes. It was like Marc Antony to order his slaves to play music, even though hundreds of the most influential men in Rome were fleeing the city because of the recent murder of Julius Caesar. Chaos itself ruled the streets.

The bronze grille door clanged open. They moved through the vestibulum, past the hearth and altar in the atrium into the peristyle. A woman was kneeling at the edge of the pool, tossing crumbs from a silver bowl to the fish. She wore a thin tunic, that traditional Egyptian garment that hung from the shoulders on two diagonal straps, leaving the breasts bare and tightly hugging the hips and thighs. White leather sandals protected tiny ivory feet whose soles were tinted red with henna. A byssus cape under a gold collar did not quite hide the heavy young bosom.

She glanced up idly, and Paulus swallowed hard.

Venus volgivaga! This one was a beauty, with that rich black hair falling around her shoulders and her eyes darkened by kohl. There was red salve on her mouth, too, that made it look like an overripe fruit.

“Go tell Antony I'm here,” he flung at Appius, and went to stand beside the woman.

Her blue eyes were cold and haughty. Well, he'd seen other slave women like this, before he taught them who was master. He put a hand to her arm and lifted her easily to her feet. The aristocratic features were Grecian in mold, darkened now by fury.

“Take your hands off me!” she hissed.

“Now, girl. No need for temper. I'm Paulus Didius, the tribune. Who owns you? Antony? The Egyptian wench? I'll buy you from them. Turn around.”

The anger in her lifted her breasts into the thin stuff of her mantle. Full and white, they were, he noted, and was pleased. His gaze ran down the byssus to the round of her hips, and to the long, slim legs. This one was no ordinary slave. She must have been something, back where she came from: the daughter of a general, maybe, or even sister to a conquered king.

His hand still held her arm. He liked the feel of the rich skin under his palm, and stroked her from elbow to armpit. His hand turned her so he could study her from the rear.

She twisted her arm free, and stood panting. “You're just like every other Roman I've ever met!” she spat. “A boor. An arrogant popinjay who thinks he owns the earth!”

“We do, don't we?”

Her head went back. “And Egypt? Is Egypt of so little concern that you treat her like a captured province?”

“So? You belong to Cleopatra. Well!” Paulus walked around the girl, studying her from head to toes before he remembered that it was he who'd given in, and not her. He scowled a moment, then laughed ruefully. “I've got to buy you now. Whatever Egypt wants, I'll pay.”

Her haughty sniff made him flush. His arm went out, hooked around her waist and tugged her in against him. She would have lifted her hands to claw at him—he could read that intention in her blazing eyes—but his arm pinioned her elbows to her sides.

Paulus put his free hand in her loose black hair and tugged it back until she was forced to look up at him. “It isn't often I'm willing to buy a girl slave for pleasure,” he told her. “Consider it a compliment. Now kiss me, and let's have no more nonsense. I've taken a fancy to you. I'll pay whatever price Cleopatra wants. Ten hillside farms, if she says so. Who knows? You may be worth them.”

A man coughed.

Paulus turned to find Marc Antony and a small, shapely woman beside him, framed in the peristyle archway. Antony was a heavyset man in his forties. Curling black hair helmeted the wide, fleshy face set above a bull neck. Immense strength showed in his thick arms and legs, in the depth of his barrel chest and wide shoulders. Laughter had put crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes, as drunken orgies rimmed them with dark crescents.

Cleopatra smiled faintly as her glance went from the girl to the Roman. Her pert face seemed to be formed of smooth ivory, and her dark eyes were lustrous. A jeweled headband about her black hair held the sacred asp.

A tall man moved from behind Cleopatra. He was lean, with a face marked by perpetual worry in its striped cloth headdress, the claft, that he affected. He wore the typical kalasiris, and carried a long staff with a carved, golden bull's head.

“Kneel to Cleopatra,” he said to Paulus.

“I'll buy her, Egypt,” Paulus said to Cleopatra. “I'll give you ten thousand sesterces for her!”

The thin black eyebrows of royal Egypt rose curiously as she studied the girl who could draw such a large bid. The tall man took a step, bringing the butt of his staff onto the tiled floor with a ringing clang.

“I said kneel. Kneel to the queen!”

“A Roman kneels to no one,” Paulus said. “Go learn manners, Egyptian.”

With a hoarse cry, the lean man leaped forward. His right arm swung up and down as he brought the staff across Paulus's shoulder.

Stung, Paulus Didius moved before anyone could stop him. His large hands went out and tightened. He lifted the struggling Egyptian above his head and threw him toward the fish-pool Flat on his back, Amenobarbus landed, geysering water. A wave ran to the beveled edge and spilled over.

Sputtering, the man rose to the surface, bobbing in the water, flailing it with skinny arms. “Fool!” he screamed. “You shall be flayed alive for this! I am Amenobarbus, chief counsel to Cleopatra. I—”

“Oh, Amenobarbus, be still!” Cleopatra said. She looked at Paulus steadily. “The tribune and I are engaged in a business deal,” she said.

The girl beside Paulus gasped and went rigid. He grinned down at her. “Name your own price, Egypt. I'll pay anything in reason. Or maybe out of reason, too. I find there's a madness in me.”

“Well, Berenice?” Cleopatra said lightly. “Shall I sell you?”

“No one can sell me!” the girl hissed. “I am an Egyptian noblewoman!”

“One of my handmaidens.” Cleopatra smiled.

Paulus felt the red flush move from his throat into his face. His embarrassment was only momentary, however; few Romans were sensitive to the feelings of foreigners. Paulus found that disappointment flooded out any other emotion. Gods, to be able to bed this creature! The fight she would put up before he overcame her! He wondered if she had a price. Roman women did, even the noblest of them.

Amenobarbus clambered from the pool and stood wet and dripping, his skinny chest rising and falling. He glared at Paulus, but he spoke to the girl.

“Go to your room, Berenice Athaglos,” the lean man said.

Paulus held his eyes on her until she disappeared through the archway. Something inside him clutched and held him in a vise. He had a sinking feeling that it might be despair.

As Paulus walked side by side with Octavian across the battlefield, that despair bit into him again. Now he could admit, with fatigue from the long fighting of the day beginning to work in his veins, that he had been a fool, back there in Rome.

Arrogant and haughty, he had no thought for anyone but himself. See a pretty wench; taste her lips, learn the softness of her flesh, and bed her. The years taught caution to a man. Now, he would have gone about it differently. It was too late for that. Berenice hated him.

Ah, he had seen enough of her in Rome to realize that! Antony had put him at the head of a cohort of picked veterans that formed a bodyguard for Cleopatra, which necessitated his seeing Berenice Athaglos almost daily. Her blue eyes looked right through him, as if he did not exist. Nothing he did—offering to escort her to the theater, sending her a necklace of matched pearls from Britain, a ruby ring worth a small fortune, or finding her alone in the shadows of the atrium and apologizing more than once—had any effect on her.

Her smile was always cold, pitying. You can't help being what you are, her attitude said. You're a Roman and a barbarian.

Egypt was three thousand years old, Rome but five hundred. Egypt knew the cultures of Aramaea, Phoenicia, Israel, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Crete. Rome knew only the vineyards and grazelands of Italia and its long, bitter fight with Carthage.

Octavian said, “Well, Paulus? There's still time to kill me, if you want. Marc Antony would give you more than an emerald bracelet for my head.”

The sky was flecked with bright stars, against which the distant war engines made red flares as they burned. Men were coming and going among the corpses here, carrying them away for burial. No one would notice one more body.

“I'm no murderer,” he growled.

“Brutus was, and Cassius. They killed my father for their own profit, giving out that they rebelled against tyranny. Tyranny! The tyranny of seeing a great man come into his own! Well, they paid their price, today.”

A centurion saluted as he passed them with a burial detail. Octavian returned the gesture languidly, chuckling.

“It will be too late, shortly,” he said. “I think I can see Antony's tent from here, with all the battle standards in front of it.”

Paulus peered at him. “You seem anxious to die, Consul.”

“No. I'm only testing you. Hortus Sempronius would have killed Antony a long time ago, if the situation were reserved.”

Hortus Sempronius was another name out of that past in Rome. Paulus made a wry face. He had a talent for turning people against him. Berenice and Amenobarbus, then Hortus Sempronius. He wondered idly which one hated him the most. . . .

Cleopatra had remained in Rome for a full month after Julius Caesar died. When that month was up, word came from Antony. A ship lay anchored in the Tiber, to take Egypt and her royal party to Ostia and a waiting bireme. Paulus must see that she reached that ship safely. Antony also sent word that Octavian Caesar might make an attempt to capture her.

She was Egypt to both men. Egypt, from which Rome bought the corn that fed its fickle populace, and the wheat for its round loaves of bread. Paulus knew she was more than that. Cleopatra had been Caesar's mistress. Some of his glory, his power, might fall on the man who made her his own mistress. She was a kind of crown, in a way.

It was his job to get her out of Rome.

Paulus Didius sent away the legionaries that formed her guard. A small party would have a better chance of slipping through the back alleys without attracting attention. He himself would act as their escort.

At the last minute, he learned that Berenice Athaglos was to stay on in Rome, to act as liaison between Antony and Cleopatra. She was the one person in Rome whom Egypt could fully trust. Paulus did not know whether to be glad or sorry. A Berenice in Alexandria could be forgotten; a Berenice in Rome was a constant reminder of his enslavement to a seemingly hopeless passion.

It was night when the street door of the villa opened onto the River Way. Paulus went first, in full armor and with a shield over his shoulder, a hand on his sword-hilt beneath the dark woolen paenula. Cleopatra followed, holding a small box filled with jewels worth a kingdom. Iras was next. Charmian came out clasping the sleeping Caesarion in her arms. Earlier, Amenobarbus and the servants had gone to the ship.

Paulus took the women in his wake at a rapid walk. He knew these Roman back ways and side streets. In his years as a gladiator, he'd become familiar enough with them.

The moon was hidden above dark clouds. The little party could see the mosaic walls of the buildings, the pillars of the upper balconies whose iron grille railings were hung with drapes and furs. In the distance, a burst of drunken laughter and song told of a party. Once, at a street intersection, they saw a litter being carried by four armed slaves.

They made no noise other than the pad of sandals and the faint swish of the women's stolas. Paulus held his sword away from his armor so that no metallic clink could betray them.

He was worried. It went too smoothly. Octavian would make his try for the Egyptian queen; she was too important to his ambition for him to ignore her. A pearl to Venus Genetrix if she sees me through this night, he thought.

A wagon rattled over cobblestones two streets away. Probably some wine-seller carrying bulging bladders from Tusculum in his hooped van. They passed a door where four slaves slept beside an empty litter, waiting for their master.

It would not be long, now.

They were almost at the Tiber, where the bireme would be waiting. Overhead, the moon slid out past the clouds, lighting the street before them. Drunken laughter burst forth as a dozen shapes moved from the wall of a warehouse.

The laughter was too sudden. No wine sots would be so quiet one moment and so loud the next. Paulus felt alarm tingle in his spine. His hand went to the woman nearest him, pushing her into the shadows under a building overhang.

“There's a step-street ahead,” he said. “It leads up over a storehouse alley to the Pons Sublicius. The boat is anchored there. Quickly, quickly!”

The women went at a trot through the shadows and up the first of the steps. The drunken men were nearer now, calling out to them, promising the women untold delights and enough sesterces to make them rich, for an hour of their company.

Paulus waited until the women were ahead of him on the narrow stair. Then he whirled and went after them, three treads at a time. The men stopped shouting. He could hear the pound of their sandals on the flagstones.

A sword flashed in the moonlight.

“Kill the man,” someone said savagely.

“Then take the women!”

“All but one,” another man counseled.

Paulus came to the top of the step-street. Below, he could see the Tiber like a broad strip of silver, and the ships lying there at anchor. All around them the city was asleep, save for the three women moving like ghosts in their long white stolas, running down the stairs.

He turned, shifting the shield to his left arm and yanking his sword free of its scabbard. The men were coming up the steps as fast as they could run. Paulus let his eyes slide over them. These were no drunken fops. These were soldiers of the legions, with their short swords ready to cut into him.

He took a sword-stroke, and another, turning them neatly with the shield. His own blade licked out and a man fell away, crying out in the anguish of a slashed sword-arm. Only two men could come at him at the same time on this narrow stair. Even then, they would be crowded.

“One at a time,” a man called out with authority in his voice. Paulus sought out this man, found him lean and hard, with a sun-darkened face. An officer, undoubtedly—someone whom Octavian could trust.

Paulus grinned as he warded off a blow. If he could get to the officer and put him down, the others might think enough of him to carry him off for medical repairs. They would not take to their heels as undisciplined servants would do.

Paulus pressed forward, stabbing, lifting the shield, thrusting down. Two men fell away before his blade. Another took their place.

“Why does your commander hold back?” Paulus cried. “Is he afraid to fight?”

“Not he!” sobbed the man in front of him, desperately trying to slide away from the point that seemed to be everywhere at once.

Paulus laughed and hit the man on top of his head with the flat of his blade. The man dropped like an axed steer.

“Get away,” snarled the officer, moving forward.

His men fell back. The tribune stepped into the breach, sword out, a mocking smile on his lips. “I'll show you the way Hortus Sempronius fights!”

Paulus let him talk, taking his blows on hilt and shield. He could stand for hours here, for his sole purpose was delay. Hold them off long enough, and Cleopatra would win free of Rome. Over the rim of his shield he could see the lean, handsome face savagely distorted by rage. This one was not accustomed to having his way disputed.

Paulus took the offense, sweeping forward, banging his shield at the man, driving him back down the steps with cuts at the shoulder, at the wrist. His men were stumbling to get out of his way. Paulus backhanded his blade across the snarling face.

The officer screamed in the quick agony of a bashed nose. That'll spoil his good looks, Paulus thought wryly.

He whirled and ran for the stair-top

For a moment he stood watching the galley's sail fill with wind down there on the Tiber, like a little toy boat he once had owned and sailed on the shallow waters of the Anio. The oars were out and dipping. The vessel was moving swiftly, beginning its journey down the Tiber to Ostia, where it would swing east toward Egypt. Paulus turned and looked down the stair at the soldiers bent above their officer.

“You can go home now,” he called to them. “The ship is on its way.”

Two men lifted the officer with the broken nose. Blood was streaming from his nostrils into his mouth. Never before had Paulus seen eyes so filled with hate and rage.

“Hortus Sempronius will not forget this, gladiator! We'll see how well Antony will protect you when Octavian demands compensation!”

Paulus looked at him and laughed.

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