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The garden belonged to Caesar.
This was a fact Brutus had known for years, though it lay unexamined. From the trimmed lemon trees to the small rectangular pool where fish darted between shadows — all of it was Caesar’s by purchase and by care. By the attention he gave to things that could not speak: the wounded vine, the olive too long on the branch. The bench where he sat when the falling sickness pressed behind his eyes.
Brutus had come here often. He could not remember when the visits had ceased.
The evening was late and the cicadas had begun their nightly chorus, a low pulse in the air that made the city feel distant, almost imagined. Brutus stood at the edge of the pool, watching the fish. They were all orange and ornamental, nothing like the dark green predators that flashed in the Tiber. All orange bar one, that is: a small thing, flitting between the others, purely white. Caesar had brought them from Greece, years ago. They had outlived the man who imported them.
He had not meant to come. His feet were traitors already.
From the house behind him, he could hear voices. Calpurnia’s slaves, moving through the atrium. Someone was crying — a woman’s cry, quickly stifled. The household was in that strange suspension between death and funeral, when the body was present but the man was memory.
Brutus did not turn toward the sound.
He thought instead of the last time he had stood here, in the exact spot, with the same fish circling beneath him. It had been spring then, not summer. The lemons had been hard and green. Caesar had stood beside him, and said something about the Gauls. About Vercingetorix, perhaps, or the siege of Alesia. Brutus could not remember the words. He remembered only the warmth of the shoulder, and the way Caesar’s voice had dropped when he spoke of the dead.
They fought well, he had said. They deserved to lose with dignity.
Brutus had thought then that it was a strange thing to say. He thought it now, again, and wondered if Caesar had been speaking of himself.
The fish scattered. A leaf had fallen into the pool, sending ripples across the surface. Brutus watched them spread and die.
He should leave.
This thought was derived more from habit than conviction. He should leave this garden, and this house, and this city. He should go to his own home, where Portia waited with her careful eyes. He should sleep, if sleep were possible. He should prepare.
The Ides were in three days.
But his feet remained. They had carried him here, and here they would stay until something released them. Until the fish stopped circling, perhaps. Until the cicadas fell silent. Until—
A sound behind him. Not footsteps — he would have recognised footsteps. The soft drag of fabric against stone. Someone emerging from the colonnade, then, their hesitation betraying the uncertainty of their welcome.
Brutus turned.
He had half-expected Calpurnia, but it was a slave, a young man he did not recognise carrying a small lamp. The flame caught his face in profile, flickering against the hollow of his cheekbone.
“Dominus,” the slave said, and stopped. Flustered. “I— forgive me. I thought—“
He had thought it was Caesar. Standing in the dusk, in the garden, as Caesar had stood a thousand times. The same posture, even.
Brutus said nothing. The slave’s face went red.
“I was to bring the lamp,” he said, holding it up briskly. “The Dominus, he liked the lamp, in the evenings. By the pool. For the fish, I think.”
Brutus looked at the lamp. It was bronze, and intricately worked. A gift, then, from some provincial king. It held a single flame. “For the fish?”
“Well, to look at the fish.”
Brutus raised an eyebrow. “I was unaware the Dominus was so fond of his fish.”
The slave attempted a smile. “The Dominus was fond of one fish.” He inclined his head towards a rapidly disappearing white tail. “He said the flame made it look orange like the others.”
Brutus stared.
The white fish had vanished completely now, merging with the dark water, but he could still see it in his mind’s eye. He had not noticed it before. He had stood here a hundred times, a thousand, and he had never noticed that one of them was different.
“The flame made it look orange,” he repeated.
The slave nodded, encouraged by the repetition. “He thought if it looked like them, they might accept it.” Brutus looked down at the flame. The flame was small and steady, and absurdly inadequate to the task it had been set. A single point of light, night after night, trying to make a white fish orange.
“How long.”
“Sir?”
“How long did he do this.”
The slave considered this. “Years, I think. Before my time. The old steward told me. The Dominus would come out here, late, when he couldn’t sleep. Light the lamp and watch the fish.” He paused. “Just the white one, really.”
Brutus’ hand, which had been resting at his side, curled into a fist. The slave noticed at once. His face went pale. “I’ve said too much. Forgive me. I only— the Dominus was kind to me. To most I knew. And I thought—“
“You thought what?”
The slave looked at him then, directly, which slaves did not do. And as young and frightened as his eyes were, they carried with them something that looked, impossibly, like understanding.
“I thought you should know.”
Brutus uncurled his fist, unclenching one finger at a time. The nails had left crescents in his palm. “You may go.”
The slave hesitated, as if he might say more. Then he bowed, correctly this time, and withdrew. His footsteps faded into the house, into the ordinary dark.
The stone was warm when he knelt.
He had not expected that. The day’s heat, held in the marble, rising through the fabric of the tunic. He could feel it in his knees, and then his shins, all the cumulative points where his body met the ground. Warmth, from a sun that had set hours ago.
He reached out and touched the water.
Cold. Always cold, even in summer. The spring that fed it was deep underground. Caesar had told him once, smiling at his surprise.
Must everything be a temperature most fitting for us, Brutus? Caesar had grinned with none of the sharpness, none of the sneer he reserved for the Senate. What if you were a rock— and then he had gestured towards a rock that Brutus thought was particularly ugly —and quite fond of the coldness?
Brutus had grimaced. Had said something about how he’d prefer to be animate, and was about to list every possible animate thing he could have been within proximity, when Caesar had thrown his head back in laughter, and every possibility was forgotten.
Brutus’ hand now stayed in the water. The cold crept up his wrist, then his forearm, the pulse points where blood ran close to the surface. He did not withdraw.
The fish approached. They had known him for years. They had known Caesar longer. They circled near his hand, their bodies brushing against his fingers, soft and quick and gone.
One of them was white.
He saw it now, in the faint light of the lamp. It was hanging at the edge of the school, neither with them nor apart. Circling, always circling, in anticipation of something that would not come.
The first time he had met Caesar was lost in childhood, in his mother’s house, when Caesar was merely a name among many.
It was after Munda that Brutus understood him. The campaign in Spain was brutal and necessary, a civil war that should have ended years before. He had been young, younger than he remembered, and he had watched Caesar ride into the camp with dust on his face and something in his eyes Brutus had never encountered. Patience. A terrible patience with a terrible cost.
That night, they had sat together outside Caesar’s tent. The camp was unusually still: the men were exhausted and the prisoners were secured. Caesar had said nothing for a long time. Then, without looking at Brutus, he had spoken.
My father died when I was sixteen. Did you know that?
Brutus had not known. He had said so.
He collapsed in the street. He was putting on his shoes, if I recall, and he fell. And that was all. Caesar’s voice was flat. I thought, for years, that I would die the same way.
Brutus had made the point that Caesar usually had servants to help him put on his shoes, and Caesar’s face had contorted into amusement wrung dry.
I know. He had replied. And I won’t. I will die in my bed, surrounded by family. Or in battle. There is little left for me in-between.
Brutus had believed him. He still believed him, even with the bruise on his own conscience darkly blooming.
Caesar had not died in battle. He had not died in his bed. He had died in the Senate, surrounded by that which could hardly be called family, and the last thing he had seen—
The fish scattered. Brutus’ hand had moved, sending ripples across the surface. The white one was gone.
He withdrew his hand. The water dripped from his fingers, lifelessly cold.
The lamp was burning low. The flame had shrunk to a blue point, then a spark. And now, nothing.
Smoke rose in a thin thread, visible against the last of the light, before dissolving.
Brutus did not move. He could feel, it seemed, everything: stone surging and water receding and the sky furling and cicadas screaming and his breaths beating.
A splash snapped his eyes to the pool. The white fish had broken the surface for an instant, mouth gaping, then sank again.
Brutus shut his eyes. They had both known what they were, even then: what they were to do, and what it would mean. And it was neither betrayal, nor ambition, nor any of the names that it would be given, in the histories and the speeches and the long, bitter arguments of men who had not been there.
They had both known, they had both chosen. And it had led them here, to a garden in fading lamplight.
To a man kneeling by a pool, alone, in the dark, while a white fish circled and circled and could not find its way in.