scotoussa

This will be between them now for ever, like the memory of a blow. Caesar would have been well within his rights to strike him on sight for his surrender, instead of kiss him; a summary scourging might have hurt less than this ostentatious display of clemency. Scourgings are far nicer in rhetoric than reality, however, and Brutus chastises himself for holding such a vain idea in mind. He has scarcely ever been beaten, even as a schoolboy, and he does not yet possess the skill of bearing pain quietly. The thought of losing what remains of his dignity is too much to bear

This man would believe himself within his rights to have his guests punished as traitors — or if not he would find some way to justify the action; his regime is yet new and no other man enforces its bounds. Many miles away the republic lies dead and there are yet men who do not know it — can they feel it, he wonders, like the turning of the seasons or the coming of the rain?

Caesar’s stylus pricks away steadily at his tablet, but Brutus can feel eyes on him.

“You’re a quiet one tonight,” Caesar says, in Greek. “You must be exhausted. I’ll put out the light.”

“Don’t,” he says, and then amending, “not on my behalf. I’m only thinking of some scrolls I left behind me in Pompey’s camp. I’m sure they’re gone now — burned up, most likely. Only a damned fool tries to write a book in a military camp.”

“You were drafting the narrative of your triumph,” Caesar says, smiling faintly.

“I was copying out a history.” His embarrassment must be evident; Brutus straightens, laying down his wine-red tunic across his lap. On his own body Caesar’s clothes hang differently; he lacks the breadth of frame to allow them a martial grandeur, and on Brutus their excess speaks of luxury.

“It’s fitting that you be somber, on the brink as you are of both victory and defeat. But you have no need to grieve. You are on the winning side, now.”

“It’s not that, believe me,” Brutus lies. “Nothing so grim as that. It’s only that I don’t think your Mark Antony likes me.”

This much is not a lie — when they’d sat down at table together, the laughter had ebbed away in an instant, and when it had returned it had rung false and contrived, like a mime-show for their guests’ benefit. Antony had fairly locked eyes with him and then spat the stone from an olive onto his plate with all the good manners of a stableboy. All of Antony’s thick-necked swagger has solidified into a sharp conceit; no doubt he will have a few choice words for this newcomer in the midst of Caesar’s camp, once the flush of victory has run pale.

“Antony? Why shouldn’t he like you? The two of you have known each other for many years now, you must be more than passingly familiar to the man.” Caesar frowns, pushing back in his camp chair and crossing his powerful legs.

“He is not easy with me — nor would I expect him to be, under the circumstances,” Brutus strains to add. “But I couldn’t help but notice that he declined to share his quarters with me.”

He’d made his excuses, but he refused. The thought of a direct insult from Mark Antony is too ridiculous to bear much thinking of. It cannot be envy that directs Antony’s subtle hardness his way — envy of whom is too much to ask, and snubbing him like a schoolboy is not the answer in any case to complex matters of war.

“If I’d known you found his hesitance insulting, I would have insisted. In the matter of your reconciliation my word is final.”

“It doesn’t matter. Forget I said anything.”

“Very well, then. Antony is a difficult bedfellow at the best of times; I’ve heard from his men that he snores.”

Caesar has prepared a place for him in his own tent; he kits him out with fresh horses and fine clothes and a basin to wash in, he has leaned back in his great chair and watched Brutus towel away the shame from his face, watching him with that maddeningly languid expression of neutrality as the salt and sweat of his defection washed away.

“That may be,” Brutus says, suddenly bashful.

“This business with Pompey is behind us. I know the decision could not have been easy, to stand behind the man responsible for your father’s death. You do not change your mind lightly.”

If Caesar’s aim is to make him squirm, he could hardly have struck the mark any closer than by invoking his father. In some men’s mouths this Brutus is still the lesser to his father’s greater, and whichever way he might have turned in this civil fray there would be much to mock him for. It is kinder to praise his staunch principles and respect for the father than to openly speak of Servilia’s part in his choice of factions. For all his faults and virtues, no one can say he’s taken after his mother.

“You praise me too roundly. I did only what honor demanded.”

“You’ve grown to be a fine man. I would be honored if you would come to bed with me.”

“Oh,” Brutus says. “I’m perfectly comfortable where I am, you needn’t worry.”

“Let me be clearer: I want to couple with you.”

Brutus laughs in surprise. “I— I’m afraid I don’t understand—”

Caesar’s face in the lamplight is coolly unreadable; he has the profile of a great man, fit to be rendered in gold, and a calm inexpressive mouth. “When I was your age, I used to go to bed with many of my friends. I found it restful. You’re a young man; you might even find you enjoy yourself.”

“Am I such a friend to you?”

In an instant all is clear; all his comfort and tenuous ease has withered on the vine. Caesar means to shock him, or else bring him to heel.

“You’re unwilling, I understand that now. Would you prefer some more suitable partner? I can have one obtained for you.”

All the laughter has gone from him now; he is frightfully cold, and quarrelsome, and a frisson runs over his skin, sheer dread or horrible anticipation. “It isn’t that I’m unwilling, I swear it isn’t.”

“What, then?”

Caesar rises. He is a grand man even in his tent, undressed for bed, and in maturity he has the broad body of some proud beast in the wild, not one of the sorry creatures trotted out in the arena. If not for good breeding, war would make him coarse, but instead war has refined him; this savage campaign has fashioned him into his truest self, sleek and terrible. He has been washed in Roman blood, and risen up like Jupiter’s eagle.

“Why, think how it would look.”

“No one will know. I can guarantee you that. I would never make such an offer if I were not in a position to ensure total discretion.”

Caesar’s tone remains conversational, and the two of them are alone, without even a slave to trim the lamp-wicks. Still, Brutus is reeling, and every word seems to drive itself into his ears like a brass nail. He would beg the man to speak lower, if his own voice did not seem to issue forth in near-hysterics.

“I would know! Even in private, I will not act so that men might say, if they only knew, ’look how this fellow Brutus bought his pardon, with his legs apart’.”

“No one will say any such thing,” Caesar says; in his voice there is no longer mere conviction, but icy resolve.

Perhaps in his mind’s eye he is picturing Brutus on his back, like a woman. Would he have him here, on this couch with its folding hinges and its brass panels, or would he ruin him on some other bed — on the very ground, spread with carpets? Driving between his legs, like an engine of war, the great victorious adulterer.

“If you only knew how people talk of you,” Brutus begins hotly, “what men say—”

But his face flushes. The dizzying array of fornications attributed to Caesar is no secret, but that does not justify recounting them in front of the man himself. This man has known Brutus’ mother — he has broken her now, in his renunciation of her, and her suffering has left her cold and hard as Alpine ice. Now he wishes to debauch her son, and for what? To what end? It cannot be a mad appetite for Brutus’ own beauty, for there is little of that to be found — if he meant to degrade him, he would have a dozen more public occasions to chasten a surrendered enemy. Caesar must have seen the weakness in his face, the weakness in him beneath the shell. He is ever the tactician; he seeks openings.

Caesar crosses the dusty rectangle of the tent’s interior; he leans against the back of the couch on which Brutus sits, and the proximity makes the freshly washed nape of Brutus’ neck prickle.

“It would serve me right if I did. I would never require of you anything incompatible with your honor. ”

Incompatible with honor. Brutus is trapped in a logician’s puzzle, one of those cruel scenarios designed to test lawyers and amuse orators. Honor should forbid him from sitting here with a flush rising up his neck listening to obscene and scandalous offers from a grasping, cold-hearted, adulterous old reptile who furthermore now holds the power of life and death over his person. Still less so should he desire such offers, or be enticed by the unseen cartography of desire and decency — what will Caesar permit? What will he himself invite, if he allows himself? He, Brutus of the Junii — he is a cornered animal now, fit to be tamed.

Caesar moves to wrap him in a blanket; the soft slubbed wool smells like horses and summer grasses, and of the warmth of the bygone day. Brutus shivers, and extends his hands in a pathetic gesture of acceptance.

“What am I to say to you now? What can I say?” Speaking low, Brutus cannot keep his voice from cracking. Only good fortune keeps his eyes from welling with angry tears.

“You might begin by saying you missed me.”

Caesar settles in beside him on the narrow couch, and Brutus raises his head, setting his jaw in a manner he hopes to be steely. His whole body is fearfully aware of its vulnerability; a thin trembling flame seems to course over his skin where both their limbs are in close association, tracing the boundary-lines of cloth against cloth and body against body. A terrible aching awareness is alive in him now, mingled fear and appetite that reason alone cannot conquer. He opens his mouth, but he cannot speak. Brutus is mute and near-dead and the man who has brought him to heel may make of him what he pleases.

Caesar moves to press his face to Brutus’ bare throat, and a surge of heat rises in him from his loins to his chest — it seethes beneath his skin like fire sweeping over paper. He shivers under Caesar’s kisses but does not make a sound. It seems a miracle that the knocking of his knees does not rouse the whole encampment, and that he does not cry out, like the Trojan boy in the eagle’s talons. Caesar breaks from their kiss just as Brutus gathers the courage to open his mouth.

“Do you know how pleased I am to see you? I had men searching for you on the field of battle. I feared I would find you dead.”

“One less upstart, I suppose.” When nervous, Brutus begins to quip. It is not an attractive quality.

The weight of another man against his own is not so unpleasant, and Caesar can only be a pleasanter bedfellow than snoring Cicero. Caesar’s hand spans his thigh beneath the tunic; the smell of ink is on him, and the smell of perfumed balm.

“Is that what you think of me? I would have been very sorry to lose you.”

Enfolded in Caesar’s arms, he would do well to tremble. This man is no father to him, no warm-hearted friend of the gens Junia — he would have been a captor to him, had Brutus not surrendered. He would have frowned to see him in chains but he would have left Brutus there regardless.

Brutus can scarcely remember his real father now, this man who Pompey slew — he does not remember his face, or the sound of his voice. The elder Brutus is as distant to him now as the faces of his far-flung ancestors carved in stone. The younger Brutus is older now than his father had ever been, and he had tolerated Pompey out of principle — he had thrown in his lot with the man who slew his father out of pure love of virtue, and now the citadel of his virtue must fall.

Beneath his tunic, he is aching with want and confusion, hungry as a virgin and humiliated. Caesar takes him in his hand, and Brutus shuts his eyes.

Afterward, Caesar’s hand is upon Brutus’ thigh, and Brutus’ head rests against Caesar’s shoulder. What must have he been like as a young man? It is impossible to imagine Caesar in the first flower of his beauty, as hard and smooth as polished marble.

Brutus does not know whether he loves this man or hates him — but whatever he feels it is with such violence that he feels sick. He would linger in Caesar’s arms and feel the steady rise of his breath, the wet heat of his spendings — he wears Caesar’s clothes, he sleeps beneath Caesar’s tent-flap, Caesar would give him practically anything if he were to ask for it but he weeps for burnt-up scrolls and the ashes of his own pride. Brutus does not know what he wants.