"Somtow Sucharitkul - Aquila" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sucharitkul Somtom)

going to be a general and have a legion all to myself. Father could
afford, after all, the kind of bribery that would get me some
minor foothold in the establishment, and I'd go from there. "Are
they as fierce as the Britons?"
"Fiercer. Wilder," said Nikias, and then added (keeping an
eye out for my father) "but I'm not going to tell you a thing about
them until after you've memorized all the aorist and second aorist
forms of these contracted verbs. See, when alpha, epsilon or
omicron stems come into conjunction with the conjugatory
endings—"
"Bloody Greek grammar," my father grumbled as we pulled
into the estate.
"He's just jealous," Nikias whispered in my ear, "and besides
the Emperor only invites him to those parties so that wily
Petronius can make fun of him when they have those
poetry-improvising sessions, and your blessed father, who can't
tell a hexameter from a hole in the ground, has to get up and
warble to the lyre—I hear Petronius is writing him into his new
novel, and the in-group at the palace is just in stitches—"
Perhaps I've painted too genial a picture of those days But
alas, they were all too short. My father lost favor with the
Emperor, got accused by the Empress Poppaea of some tom
foolery, and was permitted to commit suicide. Despite the law,
which is quite firm on the fact that descendants of traitors who
honorably run on their swords may inherit as though the
escutcheon had never been blighted, the Emperor somehow
managed to confiscate the estate.
It was Nikias, that slimy Greek as Father used to call him,
who saved my hide. He had a cousin, a eunuch, who was high up
in the palace bureaucracy, who had become a millionaire simply
by accepting one out of every three bribes that came his way,
regardless of whether he followed up on the request to which the
bribe was attached; and so our truncated family came to live at
court.
Meanwhile I grew tall. Nero and a few other emperors
expired in various unpleasant ways. Terra Nova was all the rage
for a while, and several modern cities with all the
amenities—baths, arenas, circuses—were built, mostly along the
eastern shore of that huge land mass, and procurators sent to
govern the thriving colonies of settlers and Romanized natives.
The legions pushed westward into what is now the province of
Lacotia. Some of our horses escaped and began to breed in the
wild; the Terra Novans, in only a few years, became by all
accounts the most adept of horsemen.
Frankly, I changed a great deal after Father's death, which
taught me a salutary lesson about the human condition. I
determined to become a fine Roman; to become, in fact, the very
man my father had thought himself to be. I boned up on my
Caesar and on all those battles; I studied Xenophon and all the
Greek military historians; went off with the legion and got myself