“How can I ever marry him,” she demanded, “if he remains King of the Grove?”
The young Emperor laughed merrily.
“Don’t you worry about that, either,” he said. “I told you I’d do anything for you and I meant it. I told you I’d do anything for Almo, and I meant that too. But, as things are, doing what you want and what is good for him will be doing just what I most want myself. I have a frightfully poor memory. Barely seven years ago my Father triumphed after what was thought a complete, decisive and crushing victory over Avidius Cassius and a huge confederation of nomadic tribes. Cassius was certainly abolished; he was buried. But after scarcely five years the desert nomads were as active as ever and they have grown so pertinacious and cocky that something must be done. I don’t want to go myself, and I feel no confidence in my ability to accomplish anything if I went. I have been on the rack to decide whom to send. I can’t afford to send some bungler who’d mismanage and let the sand-hills devour a half a dozen of my best legions.
“My councillors and I have found no promising candidate. All the while I have been cudgelling my brains trying to remember something Father told me. I distinctly recalled that he said that he had in view the very paragon of a commander to dispatch against Avidius, but that some occurrence made it impossible to send him and he had to go himself. I couldn’t for the life of me recollect what had happened to hinder the man going or what the man’s name was. Since it was a verbal communication from Father I had no memorandum and no one else had ever known it.
“Now I remember that Almo was the man and that his infatuation with the life of a gladiator was what prevented.
“Do you see what I mean? I shall not have to go to Syria and I’ll send the very best man for that job who can be found on earth. If anybody knows what I’m doing they’ll say that Almo is a lunatic and I am another to send him. But nobody will ever know and if everybody knows, what do I care. Father knew a good man when he saw one. I’ll take his word for it that Almo proved himself the greatest genius for desert fighting that the Republic has produced in a hundred years. And I’ll follow my own intuition that a swashbuckler whose own thoughts prompted him to challenge the King of the Grove as a cure for tedium, who had the nerve to carry out the idea and the skill to win a hundred and six fights in ten months must be a good all-round man and a real man clear through. I take it that being put in supreme command of a great expedition will brush the cobwebs from Almo’s brain and restore him to himself. Do you follow my idea?”
“I cannot conjecture,” Brinnaria replied, “how you expect to carry it out.”
“Simple enough,” said Commodus. “I’m not the man my Father was, not by a great deal. I am a natural all-round athlete, but I was never born to be an Emperor. All the same, when I buckle down to my job, I’m not such a bad hand at it. If I have a talk with Almo I’ll swing him my way without half trying.”
“But,” Brinnaria interposed, “even you, even as Emperor and Chief Pontiff, cannot free a man who has become King of the Grove. There is no record of any form of exauguration for a Priest of Diana of the Underworld. There would be an outcry. Once King of the Grove a man must live out his life as King of the Grove.”
Commodus grinned a school-boy grin.