The Singing Sword: The Dream of Eagles, Volume 2 by Jack Whyte

Author:Jack Whyte [Whyte, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2002-05-17T06:00:00+00:00

Later that same afternoon, Caius came to visit me and we talked for hours, mainly about everything that had happened over the previous weeks and my illness. Naturally enough, the talk soon got around to Stilicho, and I wanted to know everything about him, too.

“How did you find him?” I asked Caius. “Was it difficult to gain an audience?”

He grinned. “No,” he said, “quite the contrary. He sent for me as soon as he received my first communication.”

“And?”

“He made me welcome.”

“Is that all you’re going to tell me? He made you welcome? How? What did he say to you? What did you say to him?”

Caius affected boredom, drawing his palms languidly down his face. “Well, if you really want to know, I suppose I shall just have to try to remember.” He drew his brows together. “But there’s no time for that now. He wants to talk to you this afternoon. He has a meeting with his senior officers that is going on right now, and he wants us to meet with him afterwards.”

“Meet with him? Where?”

“In his quarters. Where else?”

I felt my eyebrows rise high on my forehead. “Who else will be there?”

“I don’t know. Picus, I suppose. Yourself, and me. Perhaps a few others. It is not a formal occasion. You’ll like him—Stilicho, I mean.”

“I like him now. I loved him when he handed down his verdict yesterday.”

Caius smiled. “So did I, I have to admit.”

I felt my eyes widening. “You mean it surprised you? You didn’t really know what his judgment would be?”

Again the smile. “No, I confess I did not, although I suspected what it would be and would, in fact, have wagered on it. But I did not really know it for a certainty.”

I said nothing as Caius went on to tell me about his first meeting with Stilicho, when he had broached the subject of my presence in Londinium and the crimes with which Seneca was charging me. He had received the unmistakable impression, he said, that Stilicho was none too fond of Seneca, although the Regent had said nothing overt on that subject. When he had eventually gone on to tell Stilicho of my true identity, Caius had been astounded to find that Stilicho knew me well by reputation, thanks to Picus, who was, it turned out, Stilicho’s closest ally and confidant. Caius had warmed to Stilicho immediately on meeting him, and the attraction had been mutual, primed as it had been by Picus’s closeness to the Regent and the mutual respect the two had for each other. Caius had outlined my case in great detail and Stilicho had taken it upon himself to assign his two most trusted assistants to the gathering of information and evidence in preparation for my trial. It was Stilicho who had insisted on maintaining the subterfuge that kept Seneca unaware of my true relationship to the rest of my “accusers.” Caius had suspected that Stilicho intended to make Seneca sweat, but he had not thought fit to voice his thought on the matter.

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