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Antony didn’t bother to open his eyes when the commander came in. “Be so kind as to hand me the pitcher, will you?” he called over his shoulder. He and his company had just slaughtered six hundred Gauls for the man, it was the least he could do.
“How charmingly relaxed you appear,” the commander said—amused, which was odd; Antony couldn’t recall amusing anyone in years, at least not anyone trying to hold his leash. Maddening or murdering, certainly, but none of them had found him at all entertaining. Dull dogs, every one. He opened his eyes and glanced over: Caesar had seated himself in a chair across from the tub and was regarding him with—yes, amusement, and also open pleasure, as if Antony were on display for him. “Give General Antony the pitcher, Posca, will you? He must be fatigued after his exertions this morning.”
Halfway to being irritated, Antony paused. “Since when am I a general?”
“Since I received the report of your exertions this morning,” Caesar said equably. “Or shortly thereafter: I spent a little time reviewing the reports of your former commanders. They were most intriguing. I have never before encountered a man who could drive nine different generals to profanity in their formal reports and yet manage to avoid execution. You must either be a truly exceptional soldier, or a very lucky buffoon. Perhaps both. We shall see which predominates.”
He stood up. He was in the middle of an army camp in the godforsaken north, wearing armor, but he somehow managed to convey the quality of being draped in a full toga and standing in the Senate. “You will take command of the first and second cohorts of the Fourteenth and take Arctorium for me.”
“With two cohorts!” Antony said, gawking.
“I trust in your ingenuity,” Julius said. “Fail and I will have you executed.”
“What?”
Julius raised an eyebrow. “Did you think I was joking? If there is greatness in you, we shall find it. If not, you are a dangerous fool, and I have an ample supply of fools. I need no more of them, even gifted ones. Good luck.”
He walked out of the tent without another word. His Greek slave handed Antony the pitcher of wine and said, “In case you’re wondering, yes, he means it. Also, our latest reports are that Arctorium will be reinforced by a thousand men from the Martel tribe in a week’s time. Did you want anything else, General?”
“Oh, fuck me,” Antony said.
#
His sentiments didn’t alter when they got near Arctorium and he looked over the place with a handful of his advance scouts. The palisade was the thickness of three massive logs, all sharpened to stabbing points, and bristling with shaggy barbarians the size of bears. Roughly as furry, too. “Fuck,” Antony said comprehensively, and turned round to lie flat on the slope, staring up at the unfeeling sky. Then he sat up and went back to camp, and demanded, “Where’s that pack of Gauls we caught two days ago? How many of them are still alive?” There were eighteen of them still kicking. “Strip them to the skin, and cut off their beards and hair while you’re at it,” Antony said, and then he got on one of the supply wagons and shouted, “I need seventeen brutal fucking bastards who are ready to ride up front with me for first pick and double shares of the whores and gold. Well? Who’s got the stones and wants to be able to say he rode up Pluto’s fucking arse to make himself a rich man?”
They tied on the shaved-off beards and hair, and covered their armor with the Gauls’ leather and furs, strapped on axes and got on their horses. “Give us half a mile’s head start, and don’t stint on the arrows once you’re in sight of the walls. And you listen to me,” Antony added in a hiss to his first centurion, “if you haven’t cut down two laggards before we reach the gate, you’ve done it wrong.”
They rode out of the trees for the gate flat-out, beating their horses. Men started to gather atop the wall, and ten minutes later the two cohorts came pouring out after them, and the arrows started flying. One of the men behind Antony screamed and went down, and then another, but the gates were swinging open for them, the men atop it beckoning them in, shouting encouragement. They pulled up their horses in a solid pack in the middle of the gateway, and Antony swung his axe down and killed one of the Gauls burying it in his skull. He roared, “Keep those fucking gates open or we’re all dead men!” and started laying around himself with his sword, stabbing men in the neck and the face, keeping his horse blocking the way.
The Gauls were charging them from every side. One of them gutted his horse out from under him, and Antony jumped free just in time, but praise Juno, the thing went down in the way of the gate, and he stood around it back to back with three of his men and they held off the horde, fighting desperately, until the cohorts were there thundering through the gates and into the city.
After a first round of looting, Antony rounded everyone up and had the first spears of his two cohorts each pick a champion to wrestle in front of the men for which one got to fuck and drink themselves stupid the first night, and which the second. The first cohort’s man won, to groans from the second that went muted after Antony called down, “Right, fellows, off you go, but keep south of the watchtower, leave some of the women for your brothers to have first, fair’s fair.”
He helped his officers chivvy the men along up onto the walls and their watch posts, made sure the gates were shut and the prisoners securely penned and promised the guards he’d get them all an extra skin of wine tomorrow if they stayed sober on watch. “And if you whoresons get drunk and they escape and slit all our throats, I’ll find you in Hades and gut you all a second time over,” he added, and they all laughed and saluted him.
And then, because a man’s pleasures ought to match his pains, Antony got his scribe and told him to take a message. “To Gaius of the Julii, called Caesar, from Marcus Antonius, greetings. Took Arctorium this afternoon. Was there anything else?”
The scribe got it down and looked up at him expectantly. Antony made a shooing motion. “You have it, go on, send it along.” The man went off with a highly satisfying dubious expression.
Caesar rode in with the rest of the army a week later. He dismounted at the end of the assembled ranks and walked along them, with a few words for a handful of the veterans in the first rank, until he came up to Antony, who put his hands behind his back and smirked at him as offensively as he could manage.
Caesar only smiled at him, a thin controlled line of intense satisfaction, and took him by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks. He turned to the cohorts and said in his clear thunder of an orator’s voice that carried all the way to the walls, “You may cheer your general.”
Antony stood there with a strange tight clench upon his chest as two thousand men roared, “An-to-ny! An-to-ny! An-to-ny!” and beat their swords against their shields, a fearsome clamor, and then Caesar turned to him, gripped him by the joining of the neck and shoulder and said, “Come. I have much work for you,” still with that ferocious eagle’s glint of satisfaction in his eyes, and led him away into the command post—Antony’s command post, which somehow despite all his best laid plans had become Caesar’s command post the instant he set foot in it. That slave of his had come round the back and rearranged everything somehow and moved the braziers, and by the time Caesar positioned himself behind the table there were half a dozen maps laid out, and four more generals filing in.
The pack of them spent the next half-hour arguing tediously over the approaches to Brunta, until Antony lost his patience and said aloud, “Jupiter’s teeth, save me from this endless prattle.”
General Cuvian glared at him savagely—he’d been Antony’s own last commander; not so high and mighty now, was the old cock. “If you have an alternative to offer, General Antony, perhaps you would share it, instead of merely plumbing the depths of the wine sack.”
“By all means,” Antony said. “Fuck Brunta. It’s a walled camp, not a city. There’s nothing in the place but a horde of Gauls with axes the size of your mother’s arse. What man wants to swing his sword for that? Let’s take the road up to Segura instead and loot every village and town on the way.”
“And if this were the pack of brigands and thieves you evidently aspire to command, and not the army of Rome, your suggestion would have enormous merit,” Cuvian snapped. “Sir,” he said, turning to Caesar—who abruptly held up a hand for silence. He hadn’t said much himself during the debate, only listening with those dark eyes fixed upon the map.
Now he looked at Antony. “And what of Brunta after?”
“You mean having it on your flank when you march on Dervina?” Antony said coolly. The other generals all twitched and traded glances.
Caesar didn’t bat an eye. “Just so.”
“What of it? Those bastards turtled up in Brunta will come out on their own if we send enough women screaming in their direction about legionnaires rutting and drinking in their houses and burning their fields. And if they don’t, we’ll gather every haystack on the way, circle back with a single cohort, and burn the place to the ground with all of them still in it.”
Caesar regarded him for a moment, and then said, “So let it be done. We march on Segura tomorrow. General Antony, you will take the left flank, in case they do indeed come out of Brunta on their own. And now, good night.”
The other generals all instantly bowed and left. Antony opened his mouth to argue—two cohorts to take the brunt of an attack from four thousand enraged Gauls?—but Caesar had already seated himself in a camp chair and picked up a book, paying him not the slightest attention, and Antony had the sudden maddening certainty that he could do anything short of beating him over the head with a chair and get no response whatsoever, so instead he shut it again and walked out.
“I walked myself right into that one, didn’t I?” he said to Posca, outside the pavilion.
“Mm, yes,” the slave agreed. “If it is any consolation, if you hadn’t, he would have pushed you into it instead. Caesar has plans for you.”
“Plans for me?”
Posca shrugged. “He likes you.”
“What the fuck does he do to men he doesn’t like?” Antony demanded.
“He certainly doesn’t give them two cohorts to command,” Posca said. “What do you want, flowers?”
“Fuck you and me,” Antony said, and stalked off.
#
The fucking horde out of Brunta hit them in a howling mass three weeks later, all but frothing at the mouth for Roman blood. There wasn’t any clever trick to try on them: they just had to hunker down into testudo formation with the ruins of a stone wall at their backs and hang on with steady grim fighting, being whittled down little by little and, Antony hoped, making them pay dearly for every inch. He took turns in the ranks with the men, partly to encourage them and partly because damned if he wasn’t going to send as many Gaullish bastards to hell as he could before they cut him down.
When the horns blew from the east two days later, and Caesar came over the hill with the entire rest of the legion, Antony laughed out loud and got up and roared, “Come on, you bastards, before they get here and take all the credit of it,” and led a charge that smashed through the already-turning Gauls. By the time Caesar reached him, there wasn’t much left for the others to do after all.
Caesar was smiling slightly again as they met on the field—neat as a pin and not incommoded in the least, the damned bastard. “Well done,” he said, and Antony bared his teeth out of his filthy, sweat-and-mud-grimed face and said, “About fucking time you got here,” trying not to care, but Caesar only smiled a little more widely and swept his arm to take in the battlefield covered with corpses and muck and said, “But you’ve been having such a splendid time,” so blandly that Antony snorted a laugh before he could help himself.
“I can hold a damned formation as well as any idiot who’s had a month’s training, in case you were wondering,” he said, trying to recapture his irritation.
“Yes, you are proving a truly remarkable find,” Caesar said, as if he wanted to twist the knife further. “Come. You must be tired. You shall bathe, and sleep in my pavilion tonight, and none of your men shall stand a watch.” He clapped Antony on the shoulder, and led him out of the field, and his own slaves attended Antony’s bath and got him into a bed of furs and clean rushes and sheets, and he fell into it naked and slept for nearly a day.
When he roused, Caesar was in the tent dictating letters to Posca. The day had warmed, and he’d thrown off the furs in his sleep, and Caesar had very clearly positioned his chair for the best view.
Antony propped himself up on an elbow to improve it, not bothering to pull a blanket over himself. After they finished, Antony demanded, “Are you looking to fuck me?”
Posca sighed faintly and went out of the tent shaking his head. Caesar made a small humming noise of consideration. “After Lutetia, I think.”
“What?” Antony said.
“Provided you continue to perform as you have been,” Caesar added.
“It’s not a reward!”
“Is it not? Then call it a distraction I do not care to indulge in at present. In either case, not until after Lutetia. Now, if you are rested, I think you should rejoin your men. Tell them I am pleased with them, and they shall see proof of it at our next opportunity for plunder.”
Antony went out speechless with fury. The bastard was going to make him wait for—He stopped and ground his teeth and didn’t say fuck me, because bloody fucking Caesar was going to.
#
It took them two more months to fight their way to Lutetia, the leash tightening with every damned battle. Caesar handed him more troops, set him impossible tasks and only nodded a little when Antony came back having done them, and for the last stretch gave him six cohorts and told him simply to secure all the western approaches, no more orders than that, as if he trusted Antony, as if he hadn’t the slightest doubt of him, and Antony didn’t know whether he wanted to fall down and kiss the hem of Caesar’s robe like a slave or carve him up the belly just to see him look surprised for once.
And every blasted day of it, Antony couldn’t stop thinking about Lutetia, of Caesar putting him face down on his bed and pushing his thick hard cock into him for a good thorough rutting, grunting for breath above him, slap of hot skin against his buttocks as he was rocked back and forth under the steady hammering strokes, being used like any whore, and when he thought about it too long he had to go out and get a woman and fuck himself blind for wanting it.
He rode into Lutetia over the bridge to the west after three days of fighting. Caesar had made it in that morning, and his headquarters was already established in a large handsome wooden building near the middle of the city. He was busy doling out rewards, sacks of gold and silver, grants of land and slaves, and while Antony paced the room seething, he kept at it for two fucking hours as if it were nothing to him, as if he would as easily spend the day doing paperwork as making Antony whore for him.
And then Caesar breathed out deeply and said, “Very well, Posca, I think the rest can wait. We are not to be disturbed until further notice.”
Posca made a snort through his nose as he gathered up the papers. “For how many days? Food? Water? Wine?”
“I shall have you beaten for insolence one of these days,” Caesar said. “Out,” and Posca went out muttering, and Antony turned almost blind with rage and found Caesar standing there before him, and Caesar put his hand round his cheek and said with horrifying, terrible tenderness, “My dear Antony,” his voice low and full of—of desire, of lust, surely only of— “My lion,” Caesar said, and kissed his mouth softly, and drew him over to the bed smiling.
And did then, in fact, mount him as thoroughly as any luscious mare, cock thrusting vigorously up between his buttocks while Antony braced against the wall gasping, but afterwards Caesar poured them wine and kissed him with unbearable open delight, and talked to him for hours, reclining in the bed with him, occasionally kissing him again and caressing him, and twice that afternoon drawing Antony’s hips in against his for a sweet mutual rutting, more kisses all the while.
“Sweet Juno, you’ve undone me,” Antony groaned later that night after Caesar had taken him again, on his knees bent over the side of the bed and clutching fistfuls of the furs. He crawled back up onto it and fell over gasping for breath.
“I should prefer to think I have made you,” Caesar said, warm and amused again, lying down beside him.
“Made me yours, perhaps,” Antony said, and laughed, breathless, at the glint that came into Caesar’s eye. “Yes, damn you, that’s what you’ve been after all along, isn’t it? Would you like me to say it again?”
“Do you know, I would,” Caesar said, his eyes gone hooded and dark, and Antony laughed again helplessly.
“Why the fuck not,” he said. “Yes, I’m yours. Bridled and broken to saddle and ready for you to ride wherever you wish. Conquered as thoroughly as any fresh province, ripe for pillage. Do as you like with me, use me and fuck me, I’ll be your soldier and your whore and your wife if you want me to—” the words spilling from him feverishly as Caesar pushed him down, wild savagery clenching his face, control cracking at last, and Antony arched up and stretched his thighs to open for him, moaning, so happy he could have wept.