You Too Child

On the day of my death, I brought it on myself.
He had taken me in Thrace, his men saying it was because I reminded him of noble far away Portia. I was thought beautiful, and I could read and write, no peasant for his delicate hands. He even cavilled at calling me a slave, and gave me many books to read, doubtless for conversation after he had done what he wanted to do. But there was only one conversation. He could speak only of his own great tragedy, the killing of his father-not-father, the cut of his honour, the ruin besetting him.
Not that he was so very ruined. He was rich beyond the dreams of despots after his armies plundered our lands, my home turned to a ravens banquet while his lap grew abundant as the mines of Hades. He would sit me upon his knee, gaze earnestly at me and tell his story from various points of beginning and tangent and ending. Then he would pause, as if waiting for me to speak. But I said nothing until he grew impatient.
'Do you think I brought you here for your silence?' He cried out, and at once my tongue tested his honesty though I kept my face sweet and unfathoming as a child.
'Have you brought me here for my words, great lord?'
His hand strayed to his side.
'I think you mock me, woman of the Greeks.'
Then I fell to my knees, softened the expression of my eyes as I lifted them to his face. He could not kill a tyrant without the help of many men; time had not tainted him enough to harm a slave woman yet, least of all one he had just slept with, one who looked like Portia.
But yes, my heart exulted, yes I did laugh at him with his boy face and mournful eyes and body like the body of any other soldier. Wine and mercy worked on him, and we returned to his favourite subject, the last words of Caesar.
'In Greek he spoke,' Brutus repeated, 'kai su teknon!'
'You too child,' more gratuitous murmuring from me but it was appreciated.
'Yes. "You too child", to me, to my breaking heart!'
He liked to dwell upon those words. They were the focus in all his tellings and retellings, that moment of pain and betrayal. He spoke, he spoke, and while he spoke I realised that there comes a time when it is easier to die than to carry on listening. I was young and comely though harmed, I might yet live... only not if I had to hear his lamentation one more time.
'My lord,' I said, pouring him a deep cup, 'I have a thought as to Caesar's words and their meaning as my people would understand them.'
'Thracian Greek!' He laughed, 'charming! Go on then, my little oracle' wagging his wine-softened head portentously.
I stood straight before him, pitcher in hand.
'"You too child" may not mean you have joined them in betraying me. That is a very Roman translation.' I kept my voice light and cheerful. 'To a Thracian, it would mean that as happens to me so happens to you. Your Caesar was not reproaching you. He was cursing you.'
And with that, I threw the pitcher of wine all over him, and stabbed him with a fruit knife. Alas, I have no gift for such things and while I cut him across the chest, he suddenly found sobriety, reached for his well-practiced sword and swept it through my neck as I tried to run.
'I always knew you were a filthy witch,' were his last words to me.

He hung my head on a tree at the top of the highest hill, where I could watch him win the first battle of Philippi and lose the second; watch him learn of Portia's death and push the same sword that smote me deep into his own belly; watched even as, just a little later, Octavian dismissed noble wishes that Brutus' body be sent home to his mother and instead cut off his head, throwing it into the sea where it was devoured by fishes, just as mine was devoured by birds.
You too, child, sing the ravens, you too.