30.

At the intersection between two cobbled boulevards, Marius Ectorius dispatched his men to a crowd of onlookers circling a cockpit. He sidled diagonally across the street and stooped over a stall. His many plaits fell to his shoulder. Shoveling a hand to a sack of beans, he haggled halfheartedly with the peddler and surveyed the surrounding streets out of the corner of his eyes. 

A sullen man with a prominent nose straddled by large green eyes left the crowd, tailed by a servant. Marius looked over his shoulder. A man in a clean white tunic turned north while tapping the crown of his head three times. He dropped the beans. They cackled, bouncing on the pile in a sack. 

"Eight denarii a kilo! My final offer!" cried the peddler behind him. "Seven?"

Marius dashed to a corner behind the cockpit, then into a straggle of huts on a slope. In the back of a rundown tavern, he found Xeator sitting in a chute of light behind a wonky table. He had one leg up on the bench, a wineskin dangling from his hand. 

"So?" he asked. 

"All good." Marius shrugged. 

"No harm done to the thespians, I take?"

"Chicken blood." 

"Good." Xeator tossed him the wineskin. 

He caught it backhanded and scowled as he gave it a shake. "Piss off!" he brayed, hurling it back to the blond man. "It's all gone!" 

Xeator laughed, throwing up his head. 

In the sound of his laughter rang a mystic nostalgia Marius couldn't put into words. Their years apart had sculpted the boy he knew into a man he might as well fear. But the sound of his laughing was tinctured still with the wildest dreams they once shared as boys. 

Beneath the coarse features and beyond the brusque manner, Marius Ectorius still romanticized the boyish charm, which was to be loved for who he was rather than what he could do with his prowess, military or otherwise. To become his own man would suffice for a heroic act. But as time elapsed and years stretched forward, he had grown into a man for a cause, a cause to avenge a past that had embalmed and buried the boyish charm to become his own man. The jarring logic beset him, yet he did not know how to fix it. 

"I don't get it," he said, stretching his elbows apart upon the rough-hewn table as he sat across from Xeator. "Why do you go to such lengths to spin a yarn?"

"To you, it's only a yarn. But to our Lorenzino, it'd have evinced what he has always wanted to believe," Xeator replied. "I need him to believe that he draws the conclusion all by himself. That it is him, and no one else, who is making his decisions." Sweeping the ash-blond locks away from his plump forehead, he looked out of the window. A barn swallow alighted the ledge. He crooked a forefinger, gliding the knuckle along its indigo feathers. 

"Cute, isn't it?" He winked at Marius over the shoulder. "But for the bird to be here today, to be cute, it must have deprived many others of their chance at life. Who knows, it might be the only hatchling that has fought off all its siblings to have survived. Life has only one sunny side, and that's at the top. Our Lorenzino must know this. To take residence at the sunny pinnacle, he must go to great lengths, risk everything, and sacrifice any life. So he can relish the freedom to be who he is and do what he'd like. Such is the will of life that has never changed, and ever will, despite all the changes. And if you ask me, the will of life is downright suicidal."

Marius scrunched up his face, feeling nonplussed. His shoulders were hunched, arms folding nervously on the table, like he was a boy again back at the lycee, counting on his luck that the master would not call on him to answer a question he couldn't explain. 

Xeator flicked a glance at him. "Any news from the north?" he asked, airily changing the subject. 

Glad at the question he could answer, Marius bobbed his head. "Cyprian has sent words that everything has gone as planned," then paused again, lowering his eyes in thought. 

"So, what's wrong?"

"I, erm," Marius stammered, glancing across the table. "I just don't understand. How did you know Domitian would bring the Exonian army to Julius' camp, or Julius would, you know …" His voice trailed off. 

"I didn't," Xeator crooned languidly. 

Marius shook his head in bewilderment. 

"How could I possibly know what exactly those high lords would do?" Xeator went forth and shrugged. "But as I've said, the will of life is suicidal. The Scipios, the Legidus, the Gaius, or the Uranus, all have so much they couldn't bear to lose. So much to die for. All I did was give a little nudge for them to go after another, then tweaked my plans according to how they reacted." 

The swallow skewed around on a talon and beat its wings. Xeator blinked at the sky as the bird flew away. Shafts of sunlight slanted through the mullions, whose shadows stripped his face, sharpening the contour. He rested his eyes with a faint smile that looked exhausted. 

"Well, I'd better get going." Hissing with a long sigh, he opened those eyes and got to his feet. "Need to be back at the quadrangle before Lorenzo sends his men for me."

"Be careful."

"Relax," He patted Marius on the shoulder, bearing the same exhausted smile. "Only one Turisian will come tonight." 

Frowning incredulously, Marius glanced up sideways while the other man headed out.