Chapter Text
Marcus Junius Brutus, imperator, is shut inside the command tent for the sixth consecutive hour. He is trying to write a letter to his brother-in-law who will be dead in ten months. The effort is failing; he keeps knocking ink over his paper and starting over again. He changes topics.
Across camp it is a December—no, a January evening. Behind the officers’ tents where they store captives, a pair of soldiers cloaked up to their necks haul a crate and bundles of thick cloth. The crate is for obvious reasons. The cloth is for the blood, if it comes to it.
But it won’t: it’s been days since the man, the criminal—Mark Antony’s brother—stopped slitting all the guards’ throats and demanding to see the imperator. They don’t expect anything in the area of a real fight now. They find their suspicions correct.
The prisoner on the ground is spent to a spasming puddle. Altogether, his arms and legs are skinny as a tied-up bundle of string. Somebody is forcing a rope over his neck, and he’s screaming at the walls, I’m innocent—I’m the proconsul of Macedonia, I’m innocent—
The air’s wrung out. The rope snaps backward: there is a single, final crack. He stops struggling.
You already know this, don’t you?
Now forget it. This is not a difficult task; under the right light, any dead thing can become anyone else.
Gaius’s favorite toga was dark, sea-green turquoise. Under sunlight it could be the color of a deep sea, not the smooth blue kind, but the green of a wind-chopped ocean hiding a thousand wreckages from thousands of storms. Under candlelight, the tunic is a brackish brown against the gold trim and it matches his eyes. Under darkness it is not there at all.
The right color does not have to exist. There need only be an idea: an artist takes a reference, his eyes caress the model, and beneath his caring hands he sculpts the model into—
Art, some may put it, but depending on skill and depending on circumstance, it may better be called fantasy.