Fortune's Favorites by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online

underneath.
    “That's absolute rubbish!”
    “It is not, Magnus. It is not! I don't know why everyone looks down on me, but everyone does.”
    “Well, of course they do!” he said, surprised at her denseness.
    Her eyes widened. “Of course they look down on me? What do you mean, of course?”
    He shrugged. “My mother was a Lucilia. So was my grandmother. And what are you?”
    “That is a very good question. What am I?”
    He could see she was angry, and it angered him. Women! Here he was with his first big war on his hands, and this creature of no significance was determined to stage her own drama! Did women have no sense at all? “You're my first wife,” he said.
    “First wife?”
    “A temporary measure.”
    “Oh, I see!” She looked thoughtful. “A temporary measure. The judge's daughter, I suppose you mean.”
    “Well, you've always known that.”
    “But it was a long time ago, I thought it had passed, I thought you loved me. My family is senatorial, I'm not inappropriate.”
    “For an ordinary man, no. But you're not good enough for me.”
    “Oh, Magnus, where do you get your conceit from? Is that why you have never once finished yourself inside me? Because I'm not good enough to bear your children?”
    “Yes!” he shouted, starting to leave the room.
    She followed him with her little lamp, too angry now to care who heard. “I was good enough to get you off when Cinna was after your money!”
    “We've already established that,” he said, hurrying.
    “How convenient for you then, that Cinna is dead!”
    “Convenient for Rome and all good Romans.”
    “You had Cinna murdered!”
    The words echoed down the stone corridor that was big enough to allow the passage of an army; Pompey stopped.
    “Cinna died in a drunken brawl with some reluctant recruits.”
    “In Ancona-your town, Magnus! Your town! And right after you had been there to see him!” she cried.
    One moment she was standing in possession of herself, the next she was pinned against the wall with Pompey's hands about her throat. Not squeezing. Just about her throat.
    “Never say that again, woman,” he said softly.
    “It's what my father says!” she managed, mouth dry.
    The hands tightened ever so slightly. “Your father didn't like Cinna much. But he doesn't mind Carbo in the least, which is why it would give me great pleasure to kill him. But it won't give me any pleasure to kill you. I don't kill women. Keep your tongue behind your teeth, Antistia. Cinna's death had nothing to do with me, it was a simple accident.”
    “I want to go to my father and mother in Rome!”
    Pompey released her, gave her a shove. “The answer is no. Now leave me alone!”
    He was gone, calling for the steward; in the distance she could hear him telling that abominable man that she was not to be allowed to leave the precincts of the Pompey fortress once he was off to his war. Trembling, Antistia returned slowly to the bedroom she had shared with Pompey for two and a half years as his first wife-a temporary expedient. Not good enough to bear his children. Why hadn't she guessed that, when she had wondered many times why he always withdrew, always left a slimy puddle for her to clean off her belly?
    The tears were beginning to gather. Soon they would fall, and once they did she would not be able to stop them for hours. Disillusionment before love has lost its keenest edge is terrible.
    There came another of those chilling barbarian whoops, and faintly Pompey's voice: “I'm off to war, I'm off to war! Sulla has landed in Italy, and it's war!”

Fortunes's Favorites
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    Dawn had scarcely broken when Pompey, clad in glittering silver armor and flanked by his eighteen-year-old brother and by Varro, led a little party of clerks and scribes into the marketplace of Auximum. There he planted his father's standard in the middle of its open space and waited with ill-concealed impatience until his secretariat had assembled itself behind a series of trestle