He had once stood tall, taller than any man. But now as he laid about his in eternal sleep, his complexion pale, his skin cold beneath the heaped furs, where was all that greatness and austerity?
Once he had led armies, issued edicts, and dragged a crumbling empire back from the lip of its own grave to the edge of ancient glory. Three years of brutal civil war had very nearly torn Romelia into pieces, and yet his reign had delivered three decades of hard-won prosperity afterward.
None could claim such a thing. None but him. Gratios the Restorer. Gratios the WarMonger.
When he first took the throne, the empire was already tipping. The treasury stood empty and two rival armies led by his own brothers were closing on the capital, each one hungry for the whole of it.
He had been the weakest of the three claimants by every measure that could be counted. Outhorsed, outmanned and outgold and yet he prevailed regardless, not by skill alone but by fortune and by the simple reason that he had always been better at than either of them.
He had held the capital for four months while his brothers, the stronger men, locked themselves into a bitter stalemate outside it. Neither dared march on the city while the other still drew breath, the city was starving by the end of the third and more than once threats from inside risked to bring about his father's end.
He had put down two revolts with easy enough hand on the hilt of a sword.
By the end of it, there were so many heads mounted on a pike and made sport of crows on the gates of the city, that people could have mistook it for a forest.
And so as the emperor made sport of his people, his brother settled it between themselves on the fields beyond Romelia, and Cracchus, the elder, came away the victor over Eauron.
The triumph lasted less than a season.
Eauron's nobles, seeing their liege dead in the mud, turned to Gratios within the week fearing the reprisal of the eldest, who was all but known for his mercifulness. They pledged him their loyalty, lured by the promise of lands to be stripped from Cracchus's own supporters and handed to them instead.
When Gratios finally moved on the capital, Cracchus found himself encircled, and not merely by his rival's army. Mercenaries bankrolled by the very houses that had bled for Eauron closed the ring behind him.
Seeing the shape of it, Cracchus ordered the retreat, to withold for winter and move again by spring.
His own allies called that cowardice, and they were not entirely wrong in that assumption.
They had bled for him. Many had emptied their coffers to the floor funding his war. And now he was riding away and leaving their fiefs standing open to whatever retribution Gratios cared to arrange. That was not the bargain any of them had struck.
Within a month a quarter of his nobles had turned. They delivered his severed head to Gratios personally, hoping that the gift might purchase them a future.
Gratios welcomed their surrender warmly with a feast. He accepted their gold, and their offerings.
Then by the time the fruit arrived he executed them one by one , confiscated their treasuries down to the plate, and sent each man's head home to his heir.
Most of those heirs were second sons or uncle, the firstborns having ridden to war alongside their fathers and died in it or near it. To keep this crop of newly minted nobles obedient, Gratios took the surviving elder brothers as hostages, and the implication required no explaining to anybody.
Step out of line, and your brother takes your seat.
Fear, debt and ambition did the rest, and they did it for thirty years.
Now that same man, who had survived war and betrayal and every court in the empire, lay lifeless in front of his family.
Tibianus stood at a distance and watched in silence.
Gratios had been strong and wise and ruthless when ruthlessness was called for, and honourable whenever honour happened to serve, which was rarely. He had been a pillar holding up a roof that would have come down without him.
And now he was gone.
Should I be weeping?
The thought drifted through him like a stray feather on a still day.
Gratios was his father. They had scarcely exchanged a hundred sentences across his whole life. There had been no tenderness in any of them, no hand on the shoulder, no guidance offered. Tibianus had never once understood why he, a bastard, had been permitted inside these walls at all.
It had certainly not been love. That much he was sure of.
But neither did he hate the man.
If anything he had always looked on him from a distance, reverently, the way one looks at a statue in a square. A mighty ruler. A powerful emperor. A figure to be admired rather than a father to be mourned.
And now, standing before the body, Tibianus felt nothing at all.
No grief. No anger. Not even relief, which he had half expected and would have understood.
He simply stared, and waited to feel something, and nothing came.
A few paces ahead, his younger brother Mesha knelt at the bedside, his small frame shaking. Tears ran down his cheeks in silent endless rivers, and his sobs came muffled in the heavy hush of the chamber.
The nobles had withdrawn and left the family to mourn alone.
But Tibianus could not mourn a man he had never been permitted to know.
And amid all that sorrow, he found his eyes drawn to the empress, standing a short distance from the bed.
Her face was composed. A measured sadness sat upon her features, carefully arranged and entirely still. Not a tear anywhere on it or microexpression of misery.
That's strange, he thought.
Wasn't the screaming hers?
Has she stopped now that there is no one left in the room worth screaming for?Do truly ten years of marriage and a son brought so little on their back to be mourned?
What a miserable life then.
Her reaction seemed somewhat muted compared to the overwhelming grief of his younger half-brother.
But then he checked himself. Who was he to judge? A bastard, not truly part of the royal family, he stood on the fringes, observing from a distance, his own emotions held tightly in check.
Was he the one crying perhaps?
HIs vision flickered back to the corpse.
The emperor was laying still on the ornate bed, his once-vibrant brown hair now streaked with silver, cascading over his shoulders and mingling with his long beard that covered his chin. He seemed so old and tired. His skin, once bronzed from years of command and rule, now appeared white as snow, he once projected sternity, yet he now he only showed peace.
His eyes, closed in eternal rest, were now hidden behind shuttered lids. His mouth, typically firm and commanding, was now quiet and still, giving no hint of the words that once shaped empires and inspired loyalty.
He was the emperor , he was dead and now a new one was to arise.
The empress, amid the crying of her own son, turned and addressed Petrinus, head of the guard.
He was a tall man with rich red side-whiskers running from the crown of his head down to the edge of his chin, unbroken, like a fire that had caught and spread. His face was long and pinched in the manner of a horse, and his nose hooked out of it like an eagle's beak that had been borrowed from a larger bird entirely.
Not a pleasant thing to look upon, perhaps. A man of considerable worth regardless.
He had served the emperor and his family faithfully for five years, and carried a long list of achievements behind him from his time among the clibanarii, which had lifted him by degrees from a saddle on the frontier all the way to the halls of the Eternal City.
No small climb for a third-born son with almost nothing waiting to be inherited, and nobody at court had ever let him forget which of those two facts they found more remarkable.
He was also the empress' nephew.
"Where are the men who brought the body?"
"Under guard, Majesty." Petrinus bowed, his voice carrying a coolness that matched the stiffness of his back. Something flickered behind his eyes as he straightened, and Tibianus caught it and misliked it immediately.
The empress's brow furrowed. "Are they ours?"
Petrinus shook his head.
''Arlanians?''
Petrinus nodded.
"Cut their heads off and set them on pikes. Let the flies and crows have them" The words came out cutting, and carried roughly the emotion of a woman ordering a window closed. "Announce the emperor's death to the whole city. Have the bells rung and the heralds sing of our vengeance. It may buy us some love among the commons, and we shall want it."
"Shall I call the priests, Majesty, and begin preparing the funeral?"
"Priests have no place here for the rest of the day. They are not to be let in on our mourning. As a matter of fact there won't be place for the rest of the week" The cool voice paused as she registered that there was one more person standing in the chamber. "The same way bastards are not."
Her eyes did not deign to turn toward him. He was afforded the attention one gives a beetle on a path, when one has decided the boot is not worth dirtying.
Seems she has recovered quickly, Tibianus mused.
He bowed to the room and tugged lightly at Claria's sleeve to take him out of it. He wanted to be alone, and he had no doubt whatever that his stepmother and his half-brother wanted precisely the same thing from him.
He wanted his room, and the window, and the sky. It was such a beautiful day. By every rule he had ever been taught, it was supposed to be a gloomy one.
But why should it be?
Fuck them. Fuck the emperor who never once troubled himself to meet his own spawn. Fuck his wife and his sons and fuck the church that was waiting with a knife and a cassock for another wood to throw in the fire.
I did not choose to be born. It was the protector chosen by the gods who spilled his seed into my mother, so why is it I who must eat the shit of it?
He knew the answer perfectly well. He was a bastard, and his father had been the emperor, and those two facts had been quietly arguing over the shape of his life since the day he drew breath.
Emperors were supposed to keep concubines. His mother had likely been one of them, whoever she was, perhaps a whore, or perhaps wife of another man that had the sin of looking ravishing enough when the emperor's party chanced to pass through there.
His father had been the true emperor, and now that he was cold, a new one would rise in his place.
And the head of one small bastard would end on a pike, or bowed over a prayer book in some mountain monastery for forty years. Just a slower sort of pike to rot on.
Bastards were cursed from birth. Everyone knew that.
Bastards brought ill luck into a house. That was known too.
Bastards were shifty and disloyal by their very making, and that was acknowledged in every court and every tavern in the empire.
And yet this bastard liked to lie on his back and look at the sky, and liked poetry, and dreamed of long arms he could not name.
Nobody had ever thought to write that part down.
Not even the gods when they cursed him to breath at his birth.