Emperor: The Gates of Rome E#1 Read Free

He hit the ground almost flat and sobbed as his torn and tortured muscles twitched and jumped.
He tried to ease Marcus to the ground, but the weight was too much for him and the thump made him wince.
As Marcus landed, he opened his eyes at the fresh pain.
"My hand," he whispered, his voice cracking.
"Broken, I'd say. Don't move it. We have to get out of here in case Suetonius comes back or my father tries to find us. It's nearly dark. Can you stand?"
"I can, I think, though my legs feel weak. That Tonius is a bastard," Marcus muttered. He did not try to open his swollen jaw, but spoke through fat and broken lips.
Gaius nodded grimly. "True—we have a score to settle there, I think."
Marcus smiled and winced at the sting of opening cuts. "Not until we've healed a bit, though, eh? I'm not up to taking him on at the moment."
Propping each other up, the two boys staggered home in the darkness, walking a mile over the cornfields, past the slave quarters for the field workers and up to the main buildings. As expected, the oil lamps were still lit, lining the walls of the main house.
"Tubruk will be waiting for us; he never sleeps," Gaius muttered as they passed under the pillars of the outer gate.
A voice from the shadows made them both jump.
"A good thing too. I would have hated to miss this spectacle. You are lucky your father is not here; he'd have taken the skin off your backs for returning to the villa looking like this. What was it this time?"
Tubruk stepped into the yellow light of the lamps and leaned forward. He was a powerfully built ex-gladiator, who'd bought the position of overseer to the small estate outside Rome and never looked back. Gaius's father said he was one in a thousand for organizing talent. The slaves worked well under him, some from fear and some from liking. He sniffed at the two young boys.
"Fall in the river, did we? Smells like it."
They nodded happily at this explanation.
"Mind you, you didn't pick up those stick marks from a river bottom, did you? Suetonius, was it? I should have kicked his backside for him years ago, when he was young enough for it to make a difference. Well?"
"No, Tubruk, we had an argument and fought each other. No one else was involved and even if there had been, we would want to handle it ourselves, you see?"
Tubruk grinned at this from such a small boy. He was forty-five years of age, with hair that had gone gray in his thirties. He had been a legionary in Africa in the Third Cyrenaica legion, and had fought nearly a hundred battles as a gladiator, collecting a mass of scars on his body. He put out his great spade of a hand and rubbed his square fingers through Gaius's hair.
"I do see, little wolf. You are your father's son. You cannot handle everything yet, though; you are just a little lad, and Suetonius—or whoever—is shaping into a fine young warrior, so I hear. Mind yourselves, his father is too powerful to be an enemy in the Senate."
Gaius drew himself up to his full height and spoke as formally as he knew how, trying to assert his position. "It is luck, then, that this Suetonius is in no way attached to ourselves," he replied.
Tubruk nodded as if he had accepted the point, trying not to grin.
Gaius continued more confidently: "Send Lucius to me to look at our wounds. My nose is broken and almost certainly Marcus's hand is the same."
Tubruk watched them totter into the main house and resumed his post in the darkness, guarding the gate on first watch, as he did each night. It would be full summer soon and the days would be almost too hot to bear. It was good to be alive with the sky so clear and honest work ahead.

The following morning was an agony of protest from muscles, cuts, and joints; the two days after that were worse. Marcus had succumbed to a fever that the physician said entered his head through the broken bone of his hand, which swelled to astonishing proportions as it was strapped and splinted. For days he was hot and had to be kept in darkness, while