"What is history but a fable agreed upon?"

Napoleon

The next time Matterson visited he did not mention their previous conversation. Instead, he stood in the cage and started speaking as if picking up the threads of a chat just recently dropped.

"Have you looked at the gardens outside, Trials?" he asked. "Beautiful, aren't they?"

Indeed they were. Trials had stared out that window for a significant amount of his time in the room, searching for signs of his location, of his captors, of rescue. All he had seen was the swaying of brightly coloured flowers in the breeze, and the mocking stillness of marble statues locked permanently in contemplation. He'd come to hate those statues, pretentious symbols of wealth and influence.

"You can still find ruins of the old villas that stood here long ago, the foundations of them dotted around the grounds, especially after inclement weather when the soil is moved. The remains of a house that stood here in the times of the empire named for this city. I spent much of my childhood digging around for them, until I realised I could learn so much more from the books in this room than from such old remnants."

"So this was your room, your house?" asked Trials.

"As I'm sure you had already surmised. You always had good observational skills, in the immediate term."

Trials was determined not to be distracted by this obvious hint that Matterson knew more about him than he should.

"What's with the bars? Were they here when you lived in this room? Someone kept you locked up? Is that why you..."

"No, Jake," interrupted Matterson, "the cage wasn't built to hold me in, I had it built to keep people out."

Trials didn't know what to make of that, and refused to be led off track.

"You don't sound Italian to me," he continued, challenging Matterson to explain.

"I can sound however I want," Matterson replied, and as he spoke his face took on a nuance Trials hadn't seen before.

His features were now soft and rounded, where they had been cold and hard. Somehow his hairline pulled back slightly, revealing a broad forehead and making him somehow comical. Even the cold dead light behind his eyes receded, though it was still there, empty and chill, if you looked for it.

When he spoke again his voice was smaller, weaker, less sure of itself.

"If I w-w-want to, I can be the one in need of help, the one no-one respects and therefore doesn't think about."

Now the lines of his features returned, harder than before, his jaw jutting out and brow turned down. His mouth opened and out of it came... something. A language Trials couldn't identify, though it reminded him of Spanish with some strange pronunciations.

"Basque," said Matterson. Trials' ignorance must have shown. "A fascinating language, and one of the places I first learnt how ideas could become powerful enough to unite, to control. No-one thinks about ETA these days..."

Not true, thought Trials, who had spent some time studying the group, though obviously not learning Basque well enough to identify it spoken at what appeared to be a fluent level.

"...but they are a perfect example of how a truly disparate set of people and communities can be drawn in by a simple shared commonality. But I digress..."

His features returned to what Trials thought of as normal, though now he knew there was no way to be sure.

"The city outside was once the hub of the longest-lasting empire to ever have existed. Indeed, you could say it never really ended, though the bodies of power that once led it are long since faded. Its effects live on all around us. All you have to do is look at the architecture of the world's great cities to see that, at the hubs of power. Their systems of law lived on through the Continental System, through the Napoleonic Code, lived on through to today. Indeed, so much of theirs is at the base of our ideas of the social contract that we don't even acknowledge it, taking their ways as something natural. It was the Romans who propagated Christianity, you know. Sublime, they were, and brutal. Civilised and cruel. All united under a single concept, the concept of the Republic. Even after the Republic had been gone for a century or more, still they clung to the idea."

Trials let out a long, deep sigh of exasperation.

"Are you really going to lecture me about ancient history, Matterson?" he said exasperatedly.

"You think any of it is ancient?" Matterson scoffed. "This is why I can manipulate others so easily, where most cannot. It never changed! That is what I learnt here, sitting in this room, forced to read and study these books, to analyse and debate, to support and repudiate. The ideas changed, yes, but the need for those ideas to be right... that never did."

Matterson's arms dropped to his sides. He clearly felt he had delivered some earth-shattering revelation, clearly expected some reaction from Trials.

Trials did not move. He was resolved to give nothing away to this maniac.

Matterson's nostrils flared and the dead thing behind his eyes flashed with fire.

"Ha. That is why I am telling you this, of course. Because you will never see what I see. You never could. So I shall say only this..."

Matterson stood taller, staring unblinkingly down at Trials.

"From Caesar to Napoleon, Khan to Stalin, the greatest men of history knew that only through the control of the fates of others could you control the fate of yourself."

"So you want to be the new Caesar do you?" spat Trials.

Matterson laughed mockingly.

"The new Caesar? No, Trials, I have no such dreams. I don't want power, that would be too easy. I have a wager, you see, a point to prove. You'll see soon enough."

He turned and walked away.