Not squeezing. Just about her throat. "Never say that again, woman," he said softly. "It's what my father says!" she managed, mouth dry. The hands tightened ever so slightly. "Your father didn't like Cinna much. But he doesn't mind Carbo in the least, which is why it would give me great pleasure to kill him. But it won't give me any pleasure to kill you. I don't kill women. Keep your tongue behind your teeth, Antistia. Cinna's death had nothing to do with me, it was a simple accident." "I want to go to my father and mother in Rome!" Pompey released her, gave her a shove. "The answer is no. Now leave me alone!" He was gone, calling for the steward; in the distance she could hear him telling that abominable man that she was not to be allowed to leave the precincts of the Pompey fortress once he was off to his war. Trembling, Antistia returned slowly to the bedroom she had shared with Pompey for two and a half years as his first wife a temporary expedient. Not good enough to bear his children. Why hadn't she guessed that, when she had wondered many times why he always withdrew, always left a slimy puddle for her to clean off her belly? The tears were beginning to gather. Soon they would fall, and once they did she would not be able to stop them for hours. Disillusionment before love has lost its keenest edge is terrible. There came another of those chilling barbarian whoops, and faintly Pompey's voice: "I'm off to war, I'm off to war! Sulla has landed in Italy, and it's war!"

2

Dawn had scarcely broken when Pompey, clad in glittering silver armor and flanked by his eighteen year old brother and by Varro, led a little party of clerks and scribes into the marketplace of Auximum. There he planted his father's standard in the middle of its open space and waited with ill concealed impatience until his secretariat had assembled itself behind a series of trestle tables, sheets of paper at the ready, reed pens sharpened, cakes of ink dissolved in heavy stone wells.