That they had refused at all, that they’d instead done their best to contain Antony’s army without engaging it, was in complete accordance with Juba’s designs. “Choke him from a distance,” he’d said in one of their early councils, summing up his plan. And, despite the angry insistence of the generals, Octavian had agreed, correctly surmising that defection would further ravage Antony’s numbers as hunger and the disease that inevitably followed close quarters took their toll. Thus, the longer they waited, the more they swayed even the advantage of sheer numbers on land to their side.
It was a good plan. And there was no doubt it was working. What had begun as a trickle of men crossing the lines from Antony’s camp to Octavian’s had, in the past week, turned into a nearly constant flow. The defectors were often near to starving, and at times already succumbing to the illnesses that bred in the bad air of the surrounded Roman-Egyptian camp.
Scuttling his vulgar drawing to keep the praetorians from seeing it, Juba peered up and out over the perfect lines of tents in the encampment toward Antony’s forces. Antony’s main base was across the gulf of Ambracia at Actium, but after he’d built his bridge across the gulf’s opening he’d established an advance camp not a mile distant from their own. Looking out across the dark distance between them, Juba saw fewer watchfires on Antony’s side: yet one more sign of the flagging morale among his men. And one more sign, too, that it wouldn’t be long before the generals would again call for battle. Antony is weak, they’d say. Attack now, while there’s still honor to be had!
Juba frowned, returned to drawing shapes in the dirt. Battle was the last thing he wanted. And not just because he thought it tactically prudent to keep their forces out of the fray: more than once Octavian had made it clear that, if it came to a fight, Juba could be made to use the Trident. Octavian hadn’t managed to use it himself, but after their tests—Juba shuddered despite the warmth of the flickering fire—it was clear that Juba could use it effectively in a fight, whether sinking ships or maybe even freezing a line of men in their tracks.
Not that they wanted to use the Trident exclusively. It could detract from Octavian’s glory, after all. And Juba, despite his practice, could only manage so much use of it before his strength gave out.
And then there was the issue of the stone, the black stone so carefully embedded in the head of the Trident between the winding snakes along the shaft. Though he’d managed little research on the Trident before they left for this campaign—by the gods, he missed his books!—the strange stone was the obvious source of the object’s power. What it was, or how it worked, he didn’t know, but it was the stone that somehow generated the Trident’s power to move water. And using it—again, through means he did not yet understand—was draining that power. The stone had physically shrunk through its many uses in Juba’s hands. Not much, but enough to worry both adopted sons of the divine Caesar: Octavian because he viewed the Trident as a secret weapon in his fight to unify the Mediterranean under Rome’s control, and Juba because he viewed the Trident as his one secret weapon in his fight to avenge his father and his homeland—and not incidentally, as his one chance to stay alive.
As for Juba’s own, more personal plans, they were not going well. He didn’t have to look any farther than to the two praetorians across the fire to see that. He was, for all intents and purposes, under Octavian’s control, his every move watched. The Trident was under lock and key in Octavian’s tent. And Laenas, whom he’d dispatched to Alexandria to procure the Scrolls, which would lead to an even greater source of power—the Ark of the god of the Jews—had disappeared without a word. He could only be presumed dead, and any opportunity to send another man had long since disappeared, too.
Feeling a restless tiredness, Juba stood and tossed his stick into the fire. Though young, he’d increasingly felt a kind of weariness in his legs, something he’d begun noticing more and more since his return to Rome from Numidia. That this coincided with his increased usage of the Trident—of the black stone—had not been lost on his mind, hard though he tried not to think about it: whenever he did, he imagined leeches, grown fat on blood. The only thing that seemed to help was movement, so without direction he left the tent and began to walk, stretching his legs despite the uncertain looks of the other men in the camp. He didn’t have to look behind him to know that at least one of the praetorians had stood, too, and was following.
He’d left the main camp and was halfway down the road toward the busy harbor that Octavian’s admiral, Agrippa, had constructed along the coastline beaches, when a messenger arrived, panting. Though the young man appeared to be close to Juba’s own age, and Juba held no formal rank or command, he nevertheless bowed deep and stammered out apologies for disturbing him on his walk. Only then did he pass along the word that Octavian—“the Lord Caesar, Son of the God”—had requested his immediate presence in council.
Juba looked toward the sea with longing, then nodded, turned, and began to trudge back to the camp, wondering what was so important that it couldn’t wait until morning.
* * *
Even at this late hour, Octavian’s spacious tent was a hive of activity, with a nearly constant flow of messengers bringing in reports and taking out dispatches. It truly was the headquarters for the campaign: all activity in the army spread out from this one central location, just as the actions of a body grew out from the mind. So when Juba entered the tent to find a flurry of comings and goings, of snapped salutes and creased papers, with the indefatigable Octavian explaining three different things to four or five attentive men at once, his first thought was that nothing was out of the ordinary. Even the pockets of higher-ranking generals scattered through the space, focused on their engagement of myriad duties as they carried out the administration of the tens of thousands of men at their disposal, seemed no different than they had on any of the dozens of times Juba had been in the Imperator’s tent. Why, he wondered, had he been summoned?
It was only then, as he looked around the room for an explanation, that he found the obvious cause of his summons: a man standing at rigid attention not far from the tent’s flaps. He wore the full battle dress of a general, as if he intended to take the field immediately: his armor flashed in the lamplight, and his horsehair helm was tucked perfectly in the crook of his arm. Only the inevitable splashes of mud on his greaves marred the perfection of his presentation. He might well, Juba imagined, be standing before the people of Rome in a Triumph—except that there was, Juba noticed as he took the measure of the man, a hollowness to his eyes. A man standing not in triumph, Juba decided, but defeat.
Octavian at last noticed Juba’s entrance, and after a few final dispatches he ordered the tent cleared for council. In less than a minute, the only men remaining in the tent—and they were all men, of course, a fact that Juba knew was a point of pride for Octavian’s soldiers as they looked across the lines toward Antony and his Egyptian queen—were Octavian, five of his highest-ranking commanders, the brilliantly dressed general Juba didn’t recognize, and Juba himself, who tried to ignore the heated glares that three of Octavian’s commanders shot in his direction. Bad enough that he was allowed to be present, but clearly Octavian had held up the council until his arrival.
There was no throne as such in the tent: Octavian preferred to sit at a simple chair—not so simple as the stool in Juba’s tent, but simple nonetheless—that was positioned behind the central map table. The chairs of his commanders stood along the sides of the table, so that their war councils had, to Juba’s eye, the appearance of a small dinner gathering. Octavian had been standing off to the side of the room when Juba had entered, and he let out his breath now in a long, tired sigh that seemed too dramatic to be real. Then he walked over to stand behind his place at the table, the rest of the men following suit. Juba’s place was, as ever, just to Octavian’s left. He walked to the spot without looking at the other generals and stood along with them in silence, waiting for Octavian’s next move. Juba hoped it was an order to sit down.