The Last King: Rome's Greatest Enemy by Michael Curtis Ford

Author:Michael Curtis Ford [Ford, Michael Curtis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312275396
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2007-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

FROM ALL TO NAUGHT

Honor is gone, loyalty feeble and pale.

Sin prevails over virtue, lawlessness over law,

and lost is the common cause of mortals to dissuade the

gods from reaching them in their jealousy.

—EURIPIDES

I

IN THE FIFTY-EIGHTH year of life, most men of privilege are, if not dead, at least long passed into retirement, spending their time tending their estates and raising bountiful harvests of grapes and grandchildren. Father did neither. Indeed, except for the fact that records showed he had now been governing Pontus for a full thirty-seven years, one would almost have thought he was two decades younger than he was, that he had somehow discovered a spring of youth. Far from having settled from his enormous height, becoming stooped and stiff with years, Father still held his back as straight as a soldier’s. His muscles had lost nothing of their hardness, nor his shoulders and back their tautness and strength. His hair was still the long, flowing chestnut mane as before, and his speed and agility were unsurpassed even by the professional wrestlers who traveled from city to city. His skill at horsemanship and archery remained legendary, and as an orator he was second to none, capable of both debating fine points of philosophy and haranguing troops in the field, not to mention telling raunchy jokes in every language of Asia, the true test of one’s fluency in a tongue. Only his hands gave sign that he was human rather than god, for they were not the hands of a divinity, nor even of a king, but rather those of a common soldier—the knuckles scarred with cuts and scrapes, palms rough and hard as cured oak from handling weapons and tools. Calluses covered the thick, meaty slabs of his palms, with dirt worked deep into the cracks, impossible to wash out. His hands were a road map of the travels, victories, and losses in his life.

The man was ageless, rendered immortal from the effect of Papias’ daily antidotes. And the old herbalist himself also remained hale and spry, perpetually a hundred and five years of age, or so it seemed to me, though hearty as a man many decades younger. He took his responsibilities as seriously as the life-and-death power he held in his hands, as seriously as I took my own position, which had expanded suddenly and enormously—for Father had promoted me, even at my young age, to the rank of full field general, in recognition of my performance at the battle of the River Halys five years before. I now commanded all the Pontic cavalry, the most powerful force in the army.

In that fifty-eighth year of his life the kingdom, too, was prosperous, after emerging from its second war with Rome; the plunder that had been stolen by Murena had been recovered, and the original terms of the Treaty of Dardanus had been ratified anew, and this time formalized by the Roman Senate. My half brother, Prince Machares, was proving to be an effective, though unwarlike, ruler over the distant kingdom of Bosporus.

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