Gods' Gaze

5.

Lucius Ignatius Bucero felt his breakfast crawling up his gullet like fireworms.

Seething with a large crowd under the scorching sun, he craned his neck. Beads of sweat rolled off his brow, stinging his tired eyes. A few rows of men ahead, before an arched screen wall facing the front of the Imperial Fountain that centered the forum, the delegate in carnal livery was about to announce the five candidates selected for practicing law in Volos. Five out of hundreds. Bucero had tried and flunked five times. This was his last chance.

Standing on tiptoes as he craned his neck, he tried to gain a better look at the delegate. He saw only men's napes of various complexions, glistening with sweat, jitters shared in their breaths.

The lucky five. The golden men. Fate didn't take long to befall as the delegate blared out the glorious names of the chosen ones.

Bucero felt his heart clench; his brow furrowed, lips hanging apart. When the crowds started to ebb from all sides, he found it impossible to turn away. Edging against the men as if a trout swimming upstream, he needed to see for himself the names in thick ink on the large hanging of papyrus now nailed to the screen wall.

Among all the ius and nus, he found no Lucius. He pinched his lips, unable to think or move.

"Go home, you bloody twat!" bawled a Praetor's guard. "Your name won't pop out by you staring!"

Others laughed, tilting into one another, their hands clapping their thighs.

Bucero bobbed his head, gesturing a bow at the guards before taking his leave. Wildered of his place in the world, he plodded on the rutted road rolling south downhill.

Once a young man when he took the exam for the first time five years ago, he, too, had dreamed about the possibility of success. Giggling at himself when he was too tired to think of anything else, he wondered if he could be the hero who voiced for the people. Or, would he succumb to corruption, hatching plots through whispers? Such possibility in flux had enticed and stirred him. But he was not so young a man anymore, and his possibility – or rather the lack of it – now became a certainty by default. He would have to go back to his village, southeast of Volos, and to his plebeian fate as a peasant. No more anxiety as he no longer had the luxury to wonder, as anxiety is the dizziness of the what if.

Bucero felt his gorge rise. Grasping his knees, he hunched over a gutter and retched up a thin stream of vomit.

A man bumped him on the hip, making him lurch a step.

"Sorry," Bucero mumbled.

He was sorry that he had again failed, and sorry still that he couldn't even fail again. As for which killed him more, he had yet to decide.