“Why did you climb down without telling me?” she said reproachfully, peering down at him. “You might have been hurt.”
He was too out of breath to do more than feebly wave his fist at her.
“I don’t care if Jupiter himself wants to see me,” Antony said. “First I’m going to eat half a cow – yes, sweetness, you shall have the other half – and then I’m going to have a bath, and then I’ll consider receiving visitors. If any of them are willing to come to me.” He smiled pleasantly, and leaned back against Vincitatus’s foreleg and patted one of her talons. The legionary looked uncertain, and backed even further away.
One thing to say for a battlefield, the slaves were cheap and a sight more cowed, and even if they were untrained and mostly useless, it didn’t take that much skill to carry and fill a bath. Antony scrubbed under deluges of cold water and then sank with relief into the deep trough they’d found somewhere. “I could sleep for a week,” he said, letting his eyes close.
“Mm,” Vincitatus said drowsily, and belched behind him, sound like a thundercloud. She’d gorged on two cavalry horses.
“You there, more wine,” Antony said, vaguely snapping his fingers into the air.
“Allow me,” a cool patrician voice said, and Antony opened his eyes and sat up when he saw the general’s cloak.
“No, no.” The man pushed him back down gently with a hand on his shoulder. “You look entirely too comfortable to be disturbed.” The general was sitting on a chair his slaves had brought him, by the side of the tub; he poured wine for both of them, and waved the slaves off. “Now, then. I admired your very dramatic entrance, but it lacked something in the way of introduction.”
Antony took the wine cup and raised it. “Marcus Antonius, at your command.”
“Mm,” the general said. He was not very well favored: a narrow face, skinny neck, hairline in full retreat and headed for a rout. At least he had a good voice. “Grandson of the consul?”
“You have me,” Antony said.
“Caius Julius, called Caesar,” the general said, and tilted his head. Then he added thoughtfully, “So we are cousins of a sort, on your mother’s side.”
“Oh, yes, warm family relations all around,” Antony said, raising his eyebrows, aside from how Caesar’s uncle had put that consul grandfather to death in the last round of civil war but one.
But Caesar met his dismissive look with an amused curl of his own mouth that said plainly he knew how absurd it was. “Why not?”
Antony gave a bark of laughter. “Why not, indeed,” he said. “I had a letter for you, I believe, but unfortunately I left it in Rome. They’ve shipped us out to . . .” he waved a hand, “be of some use to you.”
“Oh, you will be,” Caesar said softly. “Tell me, have you ever thought of putting archers on her back?”