A Viper in the Fire

By Brixen S. Cole

History gives birth to twin nightmares.

Two lost souls, a war veteran and a war refuge tormented by their past, find each other in the depths of suffering and despair. Over the course of actual recorded history they aid each others search for vengeance and ultimately redemption.

This novel is the first of two books that follows ancient Roman history. Beginning at the final battle of the Roman Civil War and ending with the assassination of the first real global dictator. Only the deaths of the key figures from the past have been re-imagined in gruesome detail.

The timeline is actuate and undisputed. The manner in which the deaths occur are fact, but at whose hands will always remain a mystery even for the most learned historians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504900492

Brixen S. Cole

Brixen S. Cole is a pseudonym. He lives alone in Chicago, Illinois.

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© 2015 Brixen S. Cole. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/17/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0062-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0049-2 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

I The Call to Sacrifice

II Revenge is a Confession of Pain

III Tools of My Agony

IV Conquerable by No Enemy

V No One Except Death Will Part Us

VI War is a Sport Reserved for the Elite

VII The Accursed Weep of Gold

VIII Cowards Die Many Times Before Their Actual Death

IX The Lull Before the Storm

X Eventually, All Things Savage Flock to Rome

Glossary of Ancient Roman Terms and Language

Bibliography

TIMELINE

CHAPTER ONE

SUPPLICUM

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I

I watch as the great gold god Sol Invictus slowly drips beneath the horizon. Through one eye, I witness Orion the hunter rise and roll in the night sky as twin crows hop and peck at my right hand. The black birds spear newly hatched maggots as they burrow into my rotten wrist.

The world around me sinks into abysmal blackness.

I have been nailed to this cross for two full days now. My right eye has become completely clotted shut with blood and an amalgam of sweat and crow shit. I am the only one left alive. My last comrade passed away a day and a half ago.

Lucky him.

The earth is silent, except for the incessant buzzing of flies swarming around my seeping wounds, laying eggs.

From on top of this high vantage point I can see thirty-thousand rotting corpses. My fellow defenders of the now dead republic. The trampled hillsides are dotted with my brothers. We hang on wooden planks, like scarecrows in a winter field surrounded by horror.

Pompey the Great, our spineless general, fled east with his personal guards and left us all to suffer with no hope of reinforcements or rescue.

I pray for death as the sun rises on the third day.

Dear god of gods, let me down from here. Let me die on the ground. You, my Lord of Lords, are so rich and beautiful and I am poor and ugly. You, my master, are perfect and eternal and I am but a hollowed rotten husk pinned to these boards. Just let the nails loosen a little so that I might die in the mud, like a soldier.

Please, god. Please, I pray over and over and over.

My hollow prayers go unanswered. No mercy from a single fucking god, no mercy from my roman brothers. No mercy from the cold night or searing day.

The newly hatched insects keep warm by sleeping in my gaping lesions causing a constant sibilation under my red raw skin. My world goes black even in the noon sun.

I feel I have crossed over into insanity. Driven mad by my bastard brethren pigs, and their shoddy work. I have been executed by mindless morons. If only they would have killed me correctly my suffering would be complete by now.

On the third day I abandon each and everyone of my gods just as they have abandoned me. I instead pray to demons, dark forces and shadows. Death would be a welcomed joy now. My invocation changes from rescue and salvation to vengeance and damnation. My cries are to a deaf and dumb god and a pantheon of fraud. I give my being to the master of all death and greed, Lord Dis Pater. I beg that if I ever find Caesar, Pompey and his traitorous men in the afterlife, that he grant me a different form of retribution everyday until the sun explodes. Dis Pater, like them all, immediately proves his uselessness. The last of my faith drips down my cross like so many pints of my blood.

I can remember when I was a boy my father would tell me stories about fighting under General Crassus. He and his best defended the gates of Rome from the wretched horde of subhuman slime. This legend begins with the ungrateful slaves and gladiators taking up arms. These troglodytes dared to rebel against their mother and stab at the nurturing breast of Rome herself.

My old man would boast, that he alone crucified the great Spartacus. That his hands killed the legend. Three nails for the last of the great gladiators, three nails for the last of the great freedom fighters. My father would say that he could tell it was him, because in defiance he was the only man that did not make a single sound as the nails ripped through him.

Five hundred men named Spartacus were crucified that day. My father probably just crucified a corpse.

Later in life, as a grown man and a father, I now see these stories were merely fabricated exaggerations of an old man vying for his son’s attention. No god or man could endure this horror in total silence.

I do not believe in either anymore.

If there is a supreme deity he is a comedian, for I have been commanded to crucify eighteen men in my military career. It is such a physically underwhelming task to crucify another human being. Constructing the actual cross is more labor intensive. The long nails move swiftly through the flesh. Three swings of the hammer and your work is done. When a soldier is commanded to crucify another man, the subordinate’s mind shifts before bringing down the hammer. You don’t just crucify the man, you crucify any outstanding transgression in your life as well. It becomes cathartic, almost enjoyable. I would pray to Jupiter or Apollo.

Dear Jove, let this shit pit of a man suffer for his crimes and for all my crimes.

My salvation came not from the gods, but from the men I hung on roods.

A perfect sacrifice.

I’ve been reborn eighteen times. My sins wiped clean again and again. Now that I am on other end of the hammer, the pointy side of the nail, it is a different view than what I was expecting. I was expecting far more dignity and even a silent thank you from my executioners.

When the first nail was pounded through my left hand it was so quick and unexpected it barely registered, not even a bee sting. The second nail hit bone. Internally shattering several metacarpals in my right hand. Splinters of jagged bone exploded outward from my hand. Instinctively I tried in vain to rip away from the wood only tearing the wound even more setting my whole arm on fire with pain. I groaned so long and so loud I fantasized about Caesar looking over and cringing. Then they hammered my feet. One nail two holes. Quick and easy. The third nail slipped past into the wood and missed anything of consequence, but my right arm might as well be stuffed with white hot coals. An unquenchable burn exploding from my shoulder to my finger tips.

The old scared decurion that supervised my death stood over me and cleared his bleeding nostrils, shooting ribbons of clear and red snot into my dented roman helmet. He then gently placed it on my head, like a mother sending his son off to war for the first time, or his last.

As he leaned down he whispered a lullaby from the cradle of Rome’s birth. The words drifted into my left ear like a song. A fairy tail from my childhood.

Poor dear Remus, you picked the wrong wall. So perish every one that shall hereafter leap over Caesar’s new wall.

A brother killing his twin.

We Romans have been killing our brothers from the beginning. When Romulus spilled his twin brother Remus’ blood he gave birth to our people, our city, our civilization.

A thousand years later it happens again only magnified exponentially.

I black out again momentarily seeing my dead family in the distant ether, only to be shocked back to consciousness as three centurions hoist my cross like a mast on a ship, but I am the sail. Dripping off. Slipping and ripping off. Pulled down by my weight millimeter by millimeter. My wounds gush to Earth like a spring flood.

The pain is indefinable.

I was conscripted by Pompey for this civil war to protect mother Rome’s freedom from the tyrant, General Gaius Julius Caesar. This is my reward.

The Roman Republic is now his Empire. The death rattles of my fellow soldiers have been turned into the new born cries of Caesar’s Supremacy.

As the sunlight grew on that first morning I watched Ophiuchus in the early dawn catch snakes in the sky. He and his serpents writhed with me. Now four days and four nights later, forever sleepless, I hopefully watch my last sunrise. My wounds have stop bleeding and my feet are clotted to my wooden stand. I am so thirsty.

I know now, I must be dead. I convince myself that I must have died in battle and this is my hell. My final punishment. I am to be stranded motionless on a cross for all eternity. Prometheus had his vulture, Sisyphus had his rock and I have this cross. I expected at least some welcoming spirit to lead me into the afterlife. That is what all the priests told me anyway. I was promised a guide, goddammit! So many wasted hours praying to nothing. Paying priests for nothing. I am a fool. All those stories and fables are just out right lies now.

I scream at the sun, now at it’s zenith. Hot and merciless, it just watches.

Somebody needs to tell me I am dead!

My family? My friends? My father? A demon wrapped in black cloth? I would even take a talking crow at this point.

Alas, nothing, no escort.

The noon day sun is engulfed in a thunder storm and it begins to rain. The cold drizzle gives way to a steady down pour. The blood washes away from my eyes and my limbs. Pink and red pools puddle in the mud beneath me reflecting the iron clouds.

I sip on the cold water through my cracked lips and involuntarily drink through my nostrils choking on the salty water tinted with my grime. I finally begin to weep, but not from sadness or pain, but from pure exhaustion. I am grateful the rain camouflages my tears.

I am not dead. How can I still not be dead?

These stupid fucking bastards, have they never crucified anyone before? I should’ve been dead days ago. I should’ve bled to death by now. It finally dawns on me that I am going to starve pinned to this cross.

I scan the gray horizon for my father one last time, and see nothing.

The next morning Sol Invictus explodes upward past the horizon, and I languish my fifth sunrise and no doubt a sunset to follow. These last days in the month of Martius have become unbearably hot. I have never felt the sun this angry before. By noon my bronze helmet burns and sinks into my skull. My sweat stings like scorpion venom as it spills into my eyes blinding me for hours at a time.

When I can see I squint at the horizon, the wavy vapor from the heat dances on the corpses. Thirty-thousand rotting corpses. The rats have been gorging them selves on the maggots living in the bloated bodies for days. But now, the snakes wiggle and snap through the piles of dented armor choking down the squirming dirty fur balls.

From off in the distance the bray of a jackass arouses me. I can see a misty shadow meandering through the twisted carnage of the battlefield.

The figure walks a few steps, stops and then jabs at the ground with a y shaped staff. The phantom stoops and places it’s quarry in a thick