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“I used to be a soldier, Cassie. You know that. If you want comfort, I can give it, but . . .”
“But?”
Marco settled back against his chair, causing the plastic bands to groan. Not that he was fat. I’d guess his weight at between 250 and 260, although I might be off slightly, I didn’t know. But the composition I was pretty sure of.
Hugging Marco was like hugging a granite boulder.
“I was fifteen,” he told me. “New recruit, green as they come. But big. I grew up fast, which is why the army took me. They usually made you wait until you were sixteen before gaining the privilege of dying for the empire.” His mouth twitched. “Anyway, after four months of the hell they called training, I was put into a contubernium—a tent group of eight guys, kind of like a squad.”
I just looked at him. I didn’t know why he was telling me this.
“We slept together, cooked together, fought together. They were your squad, and you were almost treated like one person, which is how you were supposed to behave. But there was one guy—there’s always one guy.”
Marco sighed.
“His name was Decimus, ’cause he was the tenth child in his family, which was probably why they’d shuffled him off to war—one less mouth to feed. Or maybe because he was shit at everything. How he made it through training I’ll never know. But every day, it was the same thing: his feet hurt, he was too hot, the barley soup he’d had for dinner had given him the shits, he was too cold—you get the idea.”
I nodded dumbly.
“Anyway, we shoulda seen it coming, but we were young and dumb and more interested in impressing the local girls with our manly physiques than with what Decimus was up to. Until, one day, we woke up and he wasn’t there. I’d have just thought that he went out to take an early piss, but his pack was gone, too. He’d up and deserted in the middle of the night, which would have been bad enough, but we’d just got our marching orders and were headed off to war, so it made it look like cowardice.
“I don’t think it was; I think he just wanted to go home to mama. He was her youngest, and I kinda got the impression that she’d babied him—and well. He couldn’t take army life, or he didn’t want to take it, I don’t know. But we fucking panicked.”
“You panicked? Why? You didn’t leave—”
“Yeah, but I did. He was part of our squad, and we were one person, right? What one of you did, all of you did. You can damned well better believe we moved heaven and earth to find him. But we were only seven guys, and it was a big camp, plus there was the city nearby and a bunch of open land . . . he could have been anywhere.”
“So what happened?”
Marco shrugged. “What happened was that we finally had to tell the optio—like a sergeant—that he’d done a runner. He ordered a search, but before it really got started, here came Decimus, with a black eye and a split lip, being dragged between two of the biggest sailors you ever saw. He’d tried to get a ship back home, but they’d realized what was going on and dragged him back to us, hoping for a reward. He looked like a child between them, a really scared child.
“He should have been afraid.
“The punishment for desertion was death.”
“Death? But it was his first time!”
“Didn’t matter. Well, that’s not entirely true,” Marco corrected himself. “If he’d been one of the recruits from upper-class families, he might have gotten exile, if his old man greased the right palms. Or a nice, clean decapitation if he didn’t. But for us common sons of bitches it was either crucifixion, being burned alive, being beaten to death, being drowned in a sack, or being thrown to the beasts in the arena. As long as you ended up a corpse, the army wasn’t real particular about how.”
I swallowed. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“He ended up being sentenced to be beaten to death,” Marco said, ignoring me. And then grabbing my wrist when I tried to get up. “And those of us in his squad had to carry it out. It sucked; like I said, he wasn’t a bad kid, just soft and spoiled. None of us wanted to do it, but if we hadn’t, the same thing would have happened to us.”
I sat back down. “It’s not the same.”
“It’s exactly the same. We were at war. He signed up knowing the deal, the good and the bad. You made it to the end of service, you had a nice, fat payday waiting for you and some land. You rose in the ranks, made it to centurion, and you didn’t even have to wait for retirement. You could get married, buy a l
ittle farm, have—” Marco stopped, and his expression didn’t change, but there was tension in the air suddenly. “Have a life,” he finished harshly, after a moment. “But if you screwed it up, you knew the rules then, too. And so did she.”
“Lizzie didn’t sign up,” I rasped.
“Didn’t sign up for the court, maybe. She sure as hell signed up to betray it—and the rest of us!”
Couldn’t argue with that.
But that wasn’t the point.
“I’m upset about Lizzie’s death,” I told him. “But I expected it. She refused to give up the power, and she was too big of a threat as long as she had it. Not just because of herself but because of Jo, if she’s still out there. Another Pythian acolyte would have made a perfect replacement body, and I don’t know that Lizzie could have or would have fought her off.”
