The King's Gambit by John Maddox Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

with a squint and a hanging lower lip.
    Puffing and sweating, I went to the javelin range and took a weapon from the rack. Casting the javelin was the only martial exercise in which I excelled, and it behooved me to be good at something, since service with the legions was a requirement for anyone running for office.
    Standing at the stone marker, I cast at the nearest target. The javelin spun properly, arched upward prettily and plunged downward, skewering the target dead center. I worked my way out to more distant targets, trotting out onto the field from time to time to gather up my javelins. After one such trip, I glanced up to admire the full splendor of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, looming above the ominous crag of the Tarpeian Rock. It was then that I noticed someone was watching me.
    Below the temple, below the rock, below the tumbling vista of tenements and palaces, right at the edge of the field, stood a veiled lady, attended by a serving-girl. The day was cloudy, but the lady wore a wide hat of plaited straw. She was being careful of her complexion or her identity or both. Since she stood near the javelin-rack, I would have to approach her, a not-unpleasant prospect except for my disheveled and sweaty condition.
    "Good day, my lady," I said as I began to replace the javelins. Except for a few runners around the periphery of the field, the Campus Martius was almost deserted. It was always thronged in the spring.
    "Greeting," she said formally. "I was admiring your skill. So few wellborn men bother with martial exercise anymore, it is good to see someone keeping up the tradition."
    Were I a vain man, I would have been flattered to know that she could discern my innate nobility even though I was dressed in my tunic with no mark of rank. However, even in my young and innocent days I was not stupid.
    "Have we met, my lady? I confess, your veils defeat me."
    She swept the veil aside, smiling. Her face was definitely that of a highborn Roman lady, with the slightly tilted eyes that spoke of Etruscan ancestry. The tilted eyes bore the only cosmetics she used. Indeed, she needed none. She was, I think, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. So she seemed to me that day, anyway.
    "We have, Decius Caecilius." She continued to smile, provocatively.
    I took up the game. "But surely I would remember. You are not the sort of lady I forget easily."
    "And yet I was quite taken with you at the time. It was at the house of your kinsman, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer, at the time of my betrothal."
    "Claudia!" I said. "You must forgive me. You were only twelve then, and not half so beautiful as you are now." I tried to remember what year that had been. She had to be nineteen or twenty by now. There was some speculation within the family as to why the marriage had not yet taken place.
    "You haven't changed. But then, you have. That was before you left for Spain, and you've acquired a scar since then. It's very becoming."
    "There are others," I told her, "but not so dignified." I noticed that the serving-girl was studying me coolly, without the downcast-eyed modesty expected of domestic slaves. She was a wiry creature of about sixteen, and I thought she looked more like an acrobat than a lady's maid.
    "You intrigue me," Claudia said.
    "Wonderful. No one has ever called me intriguing before. I assure you, there is nobody I would rather intrigue." Smitten young men speak like that.
    "Yes, it intrigues me that you would rather serve Rome through the plodding routine of office instead of dashing military glory." I couldn't tell whether her tone was gently mocking or seriously mocking. "Plodding but relatively safe. Military shortcuts to power and authority shorten one's life."
    "But nothing is safe in Rome these days," she said, quite seriously. "And our illustrious Consul Pompey has done rather well out of his military adventures."
    "Spared himself some of the drudgery of office, at any rate," I agreed. Early in his