Love & Pain

Bellona

2349

Romulus found me.

I might have been seven or eight years old. (The man who was responsible for my birth wasn't overly concerned about the number of years I had existed as his daughter and I don't remember celebrating my day of birth while living in that small village.)

Nova Roma needed land and people to work the land and my village was simply another small blip on a map that drew the attention of some military commander. Romulus, as he was wont to do upon occasion, led the small tactical unit tasked with annexing my village, which was why he happened upon me. All of seven years old, standing on my tiptoes and painting over the graffiti with homemade pigment. Not to erase the evidence of the treasonous words, but to correct the grammatical error.

In anticipation of the annexation, which really, to be fair, was more of an invasion, someone wrote Morte ut Romulus! on one of the few intact walls remaining in the village. In the middle of the chaos and fear erupting around me, I remained vigilant with my self-appointed task. When Romulus told others the story, he swore that my tongue stuck out of the corner of my mouth. He also swore that it was Mars himself who directed him to take a closer look at me.

I turned to look at him and then informed him, Romulus the first king of Nova Roma, that the author used the prepositional phrase, and while technically it might be acceptable, it makes for a lazy translation and really should be in the dative. Mors Romulo!

I supposedly then paused and asked him if perhaps it should be mortem since really, the subject and verb were understood instead of written. I don't remember being quite so pedantic.

After he laughed at my precociousness, he brought me to the village center. Romulus stood me in front of the bloody corpse of the man who had been my father while his soldiers slaughtered the entire village around me. I stood silently in a field of red stained dirt and tried not to stare at the body at my feet. I was seven. I didn't understand how an infant could resist the annexation, but they did—at least according to the soldiers around me.

Once the screams subsided and the soldiers couldn't find any more villagers to kill, Romulus dropped me in front of a young Decanus, Martius Calliditas. He was maybe ten years older than me and he resented being assigned the role of babysitter. Martius wrapped his hand around the back of my neck and made me march with him. Because of the difference in our heights and his desire for comfort, I spent most of the time slightly hunched forward. For my part, I might have accidentally on purpose smashed the soles of my shoes against his ankle until we happened upon an unhappy compromise—I kept up with him, I said nothing, and he didn't feel a need to guide me.

Each night, I silently cried myself to sleep. Martius stayed close enough to be a constant reminder that I couldn't run away. Every morning when I woke up, during that horrible march back to Nova Roma, I expected to be punished for my crying. I should have been punished, but Martius never reported my crying, he kept my tears a secret.

When we finally made it back to the city of Nova Roma, Romulus announced to his advisers and then the residents of his territory that he named me his daughter. With that announcement, I stopped being the child of a man in a village so small it had no name and became Bellona, daughter of Romulus, first King of Nova Roma. I accompanied him everywhere, even on military campaigns where free women were never included. But I wasn't just a free woman, I was the daughter of the first King of Nova Roma.

2360

Eleven years after Romulus found me and Martius was still very much my babysitter, he just didn't mind it as much. We ran together every day, a habit started from when I was a little girl and had more energy than sense. I begged Martius to allow me run around the camp when my adopted father was on a campaign or the barracks when we were at home. He finally relented under one condition—the moment I could no longer keep up with him was the moment I would stop asking him to go running.