Claterna, April 483 AD
They saw Claterna from a distance, a small town surrounded by a low wall of red bricks that had lost some parts to age. Not an important town. Not a rich town. A town that existed because the road passed through it and because people needed a place to stop before continuing north.
But today, this small town became the center of Romulus Augustus's world.
He spurred his horse faster than what was safe on the muddy spring ground. Gisela stayed beside him, letting her horse match his speed without command. Behind them, a hundred cavalrymen followed in a formation that began to fall apart due to the unplanned speed. And among that party, silent in their respective saddles, twelve soldiers from the Eleven who recognized the names in that delegation and who had been waiting with increasingly heavy hearts since the news arrived.
The townspeople who saw the large party arriving at a gallop from the south scrambled to get off the road. Children were pulled into houses.
Merchants moved their carts aside. The gate guards who were supposed to inspect anyone entering stepped aside with better common sense than usual.
The leader of the town of Claterna, a middle-aged man named Cornelius whose face still bore the marks of days of sleeplessness since the victims arrived, was already waiting in front of the gates with his two aides.
He bowed deeply as Romulus stopped his horse.
"Your Majesty, we have been awaiting the arrival of..."
Romulus did not listen to him. He dismounted before the beast completely stopped moving, his feet touching the muddy ground and immediately moving forward. His travel-soaked cloak dragged on the ground. His eyes did not look at Cornelius. His eyes looked into the town.
"Where is he?" said Romulus. Not a greeting. Not a diplomatic question.
A demand that came from a very deep place and that had no time for etiquette. "Where is Spurius?"
Cornelius stuttered for a moment, unaccustomed to an emperor ignoring the welcoming protocol. Then he recovered himself.
"Follow me, Your Majesty. I will show you the way."
They walked quickly through the narrow streets of Claterna. Cornelius spoke as he walked, his words tumbling out in a rush as if he knew that the time to give his report was very limited.
"He arrived five days ago at dawn, falling from his horse in front of the gates. We have pulled the arrow from his right thigh but the wound was deep and he had already lost a lot of blood, Your Majesty. A great deal of blood. He has not regained consciousness since we treated him. Still asleep until this moment, his fever rising and falling since yesterday."
Romulus walked faster.
"And the others?" asked Gisela from behind him. "The rest of the delegation?"
Cornelius's face changed. Slightly. Enough to be seen by someone paying attention.
"We retrieved their bodies from the attack site two days after the victim arrived here. Thirteen people. We have buried them properly in the cemetery on the western edge of town, Your Majesty. We don't have a record of all their names, but we made sure every body received proper ground."
Romulus did not answer. He kept walking.
Cornelius pointed to a building at the end of the street. The largest house in Claterna, usually used as a resting place for important guests. Now hurriedly converted into a treatment room by people who had never treated an official as high as a Praefectus Praetorio before and who were doing the best they could.
The room was dim. One small window on the eastern side let the afternoon light enter in a thin line that cut through the air smelling of herbal medicines and old bandages.
In the corner of the room, an old woman who appeared to be the local nurse sat on a wooden chair, her eyes sleepy before jerking awake upon seeing who entered. At the end of the room, on a mattress made of straw covered in the cleanest linen Claterna could find, someone lay.
His back rose and fell with a shallow rhythm of breath. His leg was tightly bandaged up to the thigh, brown-red stains of dried blood seeping through several layers of cloth. Beside the mattress, hanging on a special wooden stand made in a hurry, was the armor of the Praefectus Praetorio. The golden eagle crest. The wide shoulder guards. The dark red cloak with golden borders still stained with blood that had not been entirely cleaned.
Romulus walked in. His steps were fast. Crossing the room. Approaching the mattress.
Five steps from the mattress, something in his chest began to shift.
Three steps. His eyes began to narrow.
One step. He stopped.
The hair on the head of the lying figure was too dark. Too thick. The body beneath the thin blanket was too young. The hand resting on the side of the mattress was too firm, skin too strong for someone whose age surpassed sixty. Romulus leaned forward. Looking at the lying face.
Not Spurius.
Decius.
The face of Decius, Spurius's trusted Decurion who for seven years had stood as a loyal shadow A face younger, harder than Spurius's, with a wider jaw and a nose that had already been broken once in his military career. A face that was now pale and sweating from fever but could not be mistaken by the eyes of anyone who knew him.
This is not Spurius.
Romulus pulled himself straight. Turned to Gisela standing behind him. Then to Vitus in the doorway.
Then to Cornelius standing to the side with an uncomprehending expression.
"This is not Spurius," said Romulus. His voice sounded foreign to his own ears. Like the voice of someone speaking from underwater. "This is Decius."
The silence that fell in the room had a different weight from an ordinary silence.
Behind Romulus, from among the soldiers crowding the doorway, a sound was heard. Not a shout. Not a cry. The sound of a breath stopping midway, the breath of someone who had just understood something they did not want to understand.One of the Eleven. Then another. Whispers spread among them like fire in a dry field.
"This is Decius," repeated Romulus, and this time his voice sounded louder, sharper, but also more fragile than before. "He is wearing Spurius's armor. But this is not Spurius."
Gisela stepped closer. Looking at the lying face. Her eyes moved quickly trying to confirm what Romulus had said. Then her eyes moved to the armor hanging on the wooden stand. The golden eagle. The red cloak. The armor that everyone thought was the identity of the person.
"Vitus," said Romulus. His voice was now very calm. Very flat. A calmness more terrifying than any anger. "Where is that cemetery?"
Vitus looked at Romulus. Beneath his layer of professionalism, something moved that he could not entirely hide. He swallowed hard.
"Cornelius," said Vitus to the town leader, his voice flat, "where is the cemetery where the delegation's bodies are buried?"
"On the western edge of town, Magister. About a five-minute walk."
Romulus was already walking out of the room.
The clouds had been gathering since the afternoon but only as they walked toward the cemetery on the western edge of Claterna did the first drops begin to fall.
One two. Slowly. An indecisive drizzle, rain that had not yet decided whether to truly fall or not.
The cemetery was simple. Thirteen mounds of earth that had begun to compact over the passing days since the burial, the soil darker than its surroundings. There were no tombstones. Only crosses made from small wooden sticks planted by Cornelius and his men as markers, with small red cloths tied to the top of each. The evening wind moved those cloths with a motion that looked almost like a plea.
Thirteen mounds. Thirteen people buried in foreign soil.
"Dig," said Romulus.
Cornelius looked at him in horror.
"Your Majesty, they are already..."
"Dig," repeated Romulus. There was no anger in his voice. No plea. Only an undeniable certainty. "One by one. Start from the first."
The soldiers took hoes from the hands of the Claterna men carrying gardening tools. They started digging. No one protested anymore.
The soldiers from the Eleven did not join in the digging. They stood in a small group slightly behind Romulus, shoulders that were usually straight now slightly hunched, eyes that were usually cold and professional now looking at those mounds with expressions they never showed on the battlefield. Decius was their leader, and he was alive and lying feverish inside the town. But Spurius was the man who gave Decius orders. Spurius was the foundation of the foundation of the emperor's guards. And the name not found on the mattress was now perhaps lying in one of the mounds before them.
The drizzle grew heavier. Not a heavy downpour but enough to make the soil heavier and the clothes colder and the afternoon light dimmer into a gray that swallowed colors from everything.
The first mound was opened. A soldier. A face that had begun to rot after five days beneath the damp spring earth, the air escaping from the open mound making some men step back one pace. Not Spurius.
Romulus looked at it for one second. Then turned his face away.
"The next one."
The second mound. Lucius, the old senator. Romulus recognized his face. Not the one he was looking for. He let the soldiers cover it back respectfully before moving on.
The drizzle turned into actual rain. Slow but consistent. Water began to pool in the depressions of the earth, creating small brown puddles from the water mixing with the dug mud.
The third mound. Another soldier. The fourth mound. Severinus, the young deacon who fell with the parchment in his hand. Romulus stood near this fourth mound a little longer. Severinus who was barely in his twenties Severinus who spoke fluently and who never hurt anyone in his short life.
The fifth mound. A soldier. The sixth mound. Another soldier.
The rain fell harder. Water flowed from wet hairs. Clothes clung to skin. The hoes grew heavier because the earth they lifted became wetter and heavier. No one moved to seek shelter. No one spoke except for the sound of hoes striking the earth and the sound of water falling on every surface.
Then the seventh mound.
The earth was lifted. One layer. Two layers. Three.
The covering cloth was pulled back.
And Romulus recognized that face.
A face full of wrinkles from decades of a life that was never easy. Hair that was completely white, now dry with remaining strands clinging to a pale forehead. Hands folded stiffly on the chest, hands that were once strong and that for forty years had held swords and parchment scrolls and the shoulder of a young emperor that shook when nervous.
Spurius Maecenas.
Lying in the soil of Claterna, thirteen mounds away from the town gates, beneath the rain falling unapologetically from a sky that cared nothing for emperors or generals or an old man who departed with a smile on his lips.
Romulus stood.
He stood with a body as straight and rigid as a stone pillar. His eyes stared at Spurius's face and did not blink. His hands at his sides, unmoving. His jaw was locked. Every muscle in his face was so tight, every expression extinguished, everything churning inside was held behind a wall he had built and strengthened and trusted over the past seven years.
An emperor does not fall. An emperor does not break. An emperor stands.
Gisela saw everything.
She saw the way Romulus's hands slowly clenched at his sides. The way his nostrils flared slightly and narrowed with a breathing rhythm too regular to be natural. The way his eyes, shedding nothing, possessed a depth different from usual. Not a calm depth. A depth swallowing something massive.
She knew what was happening behind that wall.
She had stood behind the same wall.
Gisela stepped forward.
She said nothing. No words were enough. She just raised her hand and placed it on Romulus's shoulder. Slowly and feeling so light. A touch that asked for nothing except acknowledging presence.
The wall crumbled.
Romulus's knees touched the ground before he realized he was falling.
The sound of knees striking the mud was loud amidst the sound of the rain. He did not try to stand up again. He was just there, on his knees, within five feet of Spurius's body, with the rain soaking everything and with something in his chest shattering like pottery dropped from a height.
Then he started moving.
Not standing up. But crawling.
Hands and knees on the muddy ground, he moved forward toward Spurius with the speed of a child just learning to crawl. Slowly. Every movement felt like fighting an unseen river current. Every advancing knee left a small depression in the muddy ground. Every placed hand left a palm print filling with water. His breath was ragged, broken, caught in a throat beginning to close. The first tear fell and immediately mixed with the rainwater on his cheek so that nothing could tell them apart anymore.
There was no sound in the cemetery other than the rain and the ragged breathing of an emperor crawling in the mud toward the man closer to him than his own biological father.
The rain pounded his back without pause, and that usually straight back was not straight now, curving downward like a tree battered too long by wind from one direction.
He arrived.
Romulus raised his face and looked at Spurius's face up close, closer than he had ever seen it even when the two stood face to face. The face he had known longer than the face of anyone still alive. Every wrinkle he memorized, every line whose origin he knew, eyes now shut tight but that used to always look at him with a mix of worry and pride and affection never spoken in words.
Romulus raised his hand. His muddy hand, his trembling hand, the hand that had learned to hold a sword from the man now lying in this earth. He stroked Spurius's cheek.
Cold. Stiff. It no longer felt like human skin but more like something resembling human skin.
Romulus closed his eyes for a second. Behind his eyelids, he saw this same face in various memories he had stored without knowing he was storing them. Spurius lifting him from the mud beneath the Ravenna walls that night. Spurius bringing books from the library and placing them on his desk silently without being asked. Spurius standing in the corner of every meeting with folded arms and eyes observing everything. Spurius calling his name not as an emperor but as a boy, in rooms quiet enough to allow that truth to come out.
And the first cry came out not with a sound. With a shake of the shoulders. Then the second was louder. The third filled his entire throat and came out as something that was not words and not a scream but something in between.
Romulus embraced the body.
He embraced it like a drowning man embracing the only floating object in the ocean. Caring nothing for the smell that had emerged from five days underground. Caring nothing for the mud clinging to his face and clothes and hands. Caring nothing for the rain falling harder on his back.
The sound of his crying was heard throughout the Claterna cemetery and perhaps beyond its walls.
Around him, soldiers who had witnessed war and death and cruelty without looking down, now bowed their heads. The soldiers from the Eleven stood closest, and among them not a single eye was dry. Some crouched, one knee to the muddy ground, in a motion not ordered by anyone but coming from a place deeper than military discipline. They did not look away. They did not pretend not to see. They stood there, in the same rain, bearing the same grief, for the same man who had been the foundation of their world for years.
Cornelius and his men stepped far back with bowed heads, feeling that they were witnessing something too private to be seen but that they could not ignore.
Vitus stood at the edge of the cemetery, his back partially facing the event. One or two of his officers followed him silently, moving to the far side of the seventh grave and leaving the place for somewhere not important to know at this moment.
Romulus cried.
Not crying like he had ever cried before. Not a restrained cry in a dark library or a cry hidden under a pillow on nights after nightmares. This was a cry that cared not who saw it. A cry coming from his most unprotected part, a part that seven years of learning and growing and hardening had never been able to completely wrap.
His hand struck the muddy ground beside the body. Not with an exploding anger. With the exhaustion of someone who understood that there was nothing he could do to change any of this and who could not stop trying despite understanding that. Every strike was words he could not say. Every strike was a decision he wanted to take back. Every strike was a name that could no longer be called and answered.
I'm the one who sent you, the thought surfaced and sank within a much larger wave. I'm the one who decided. I'm the one who agreed. I'm the one who said yes even though my heart said no. And now you are here and I'm here and no words are enough to change any of that.
He remembered Spurius's final smile at the Ravenna gates. An old smile full of wrinkles but which still held a warmth that could not be imitated by any younger smile. And the final words.
Always.
That was his last word. Always. And he did not return.
Romulus never cried like this when Orestes, his biological father, died in the mud of Placentia. Back then he was too small to fully understand. Back then there were too many things happening too fast. Back then Spurius was still there to help him stand back up.
Now there was no Spurius.
And that was the heaviest thing he had ever felt in his twenty-two years of life.
The rain did not stop. The sky did not care. And on the muddy ground of Claterna, the Emperor of Rome cried like a little child who had lost the only person who made him feel safe in this world.
Almost an hour under the rain.
Gisela did not move from where she stood. She watched Romulus closely with dry eyes but understanding every second of what was happening. She let that time pass. Because there are sorrows that cannot be cut short. There are processes that must be completed. And cutting that process short before its time is the same as closing a wound before it is cleaned.
Finally the sound of crying stopped. Not because his sorrow was gone. But because the human body has its limits. Romulus lay on the muddy ground beside Spurius's body, shoulders that used to be straight now having no strength to be straight anymore, his eyes still open but no longer crying because there was nothing left to let out.
Gisela walked closer. Knelt beside Romulus. Checked his pale and wet and exhausted face in a brief and professional manner, the manner of someone who knows bodies and knows when a body has reached its limit.
She turned to the guards from the Eleven standing closest.
"Lift him," said Gisela. Her voice was not loud but possessed an authority that needed no volume. "He needs to get inside and be dry and warm."
Two soldiers from the Eleven moved, each taking one of Romulus's arms and lifting him up carefully. Romulus let himself be lifted. His feet stood but his body was still limp, still needing support.
As they supported him to stand, his eyes found Spurius once more.
And something changed in those eyes.
Not the sorrow disappearing. But something growing behind that sorrow. Like a fire igniting beneath ashes. Like iron heated until red inside a furnace that cannot be seen from the outside.
"Upon my own life," said Romulus. His voice broke in several places but his words were unwavering. "I will kill Nepos. I will go to war for you. Upon every day you gave me, I promise."
He raised his head. His eyes swept the cemetery, swept the soldiers still kneeling in the mud, swept the Claterna faces watching from a safe distance.
"Where is Vitus?" he shouted. His voice was still ragged from crying but now there was something in it that cut through the air. "Tell Vitus! Tell everyone! Tell all of Rome that their emperor is calling them and their swords!"
The guards supporting him tightened their grip because Romulus's body began to shake again.
"I'm the emperor! I'm calling them to war! I will kill Nepos! I will kill Julius Nepos!"
The voice echoed among the low walls of Claterna. Echoed over the wet mounds of earth. Echoed over the bowed faces and eyes that dared not look back.
"I will kill him. I will burn Milan. I will..."
"Romulus."
One word from Gisela that was quiet and not a command. Nor a plea. His name. Only his name.
Romulus stopped talking. Looked at Gisela. In his eyes a mix of anger and sorrow and exhaustion that could not be separated from one another.
Gisela stepped forward and spoke only for his ears.
"Take him inside," said Gisela to the guards. "Now."
They took him inside. Romulus did not resist. He let himself be led, but his eyes kept looking back, toward Spurius, until the door of the Claterna building closed between them and he could not see anymore.
Inside, his voice was still heard, growing quieter with every step he moved away:
"I will kill Nepos... I will go to war... I will..."
Then the voice stopped.
Exhaustion, finally, defeated everything.
Gisela remained in the cemetery.
The rain kept falling. Not growing heavier, nor stopping. A patient rain. A rain in no hurry. A rain that felt like nature itself had decided to cry today but did not want to make a fuss about it.
The soldiers from the Eleven did not go inside with Romulus. They remained in the cemetery, standing around the seventh mound in a loose but clear circle. Some of them were still crying silently. Some stared at the ground. Some stared at Spurius's face with expressions that needed no words to be understood by anyone who had ever lost someone more than just a superior.
Cornelius and his men stepped far back, giving room for something that was not their right to witness closely.
Gisela stared at Spurius.
The man who for years had watched her with a suspicion that never entirely faded but slowly changed into something closer to reluctant respect. The man who once told Romulus about her true identity, and who when Romulus accepted it, did not say a single word about how difficult that decision was but who since that day never again looked at Gisela like a threat.
The man who once said to her, one afternoon in the palace corridor when they passed each other and no one else heard; Guard him. You are the only person who can guard him in ways I cannot. And who walked away before Gisela had time to answer whether she was willing.
The man who in the days leading up to his departure wrote in his journal; If this is indeed my final journey, I leave in peace.
Gisela did not cry. She never cried easily. But in her chest there was something heavy and unmoving, like a stone that could not be lifted and could not be thrown away.
She crouched beside Spurius's body. Knees on the wet ground. The rain soaked her hair and clothes but she did not feel it.
Spurius was one of the few people she respected. Even fewer whom she might have cared for in a way she never spoke and would never speak now because that person was no longer there to hear it.
She sat quietly by his side for a few minutes. Not praying. Not saying beautiful parting words. Just sitting. Because presence is sometimes more honest than words, and Spurius, a man who spent his life saying what needed to be said without extra words, would probably appreciate that.
Then Gisela leaned forward.
Slowly, she kissed Spurius's forehead.
A cold and stiff touch. But also a touch that finalized something. A small closure for something very large.
"Farewell, old guard," whispered Gisela. Her voice did not tremble. Not because she did not feel it. But because Spurius would not want trembling. "You did your duty well enough."
She stood up. Looked at the Eleven who were still standing around the mound in the rain.
"Wrap him," said Gisela quietly. One sentence carrying the weight of a command and respect at once. "Respectfully. And take him inside."
One of the Eleven looked up.
"Where to?"
"To Ravenna," answered Gisela. "We will not bury him in foreign soil. Spurius Maecenas is buried in Ravenna. In the city he guarded his whole life."
No one argued. The Eleven moved in a silence full of respect, taking off their cloaks to wrap Spurius's body with hands that usually held swords but that now moved with a gentleness those hands should not have possessed but apparently did.
Gisela turned around and walked into the building.
Inside, Romulus needed her. Not for comforting words that would never be enough. Not for answers that did not exist. Only for presence. Only for someone to sit beside him and let him be exhausted without having to stand.
Spurius had once been that person for him. Now it was Gisela's turn.
Behind her, in the small Claterna cemetery, the rain kept falling on the twelve abandoned mounds and the one mound now opened and whose contents were being wrapped by the hands of the Eleven that did not tremble even though the hearts behind them could no longer be called whole.
And in the sky above Claterna, thick gray and merciless clouds kept pouring their water onto the earth that did not ask but merely received, as always, as the earth always receives whatever falls upon it from above.
Even tears that could no longer be distinguished from the rain.
And beneath that rain, the fate of Rome had been decided by the rolling dice of destiny.