The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra Read online

  Startled, Caesar looked to the source of the noise in time to see a granite flag in the center of the floor rise above the level of its neighbors.

  “Help me,” Cha’em said, abandoning the ankh, which remained protruding from the base of the wall.

  Caesar knelt and lifted the flag clear of those around it, stared down into darkness. There was a pattern to the floor that enabled the pair of them to lift other, smaller flags around the middle one; they rested on two sides, the other two without any support, and when they were removed the hole in the floor was big enough for quite large objects to be passed through it.

  “Help me,” Cha’em said again, taking hold of a bronze rod with a flaring top in which the center flag had engaged.

  It screwed free to permit of no impediment below, a rod some five feet in length. With an agile wriggle, Cha’em inserted himself into the hole, fiddled about and produced two torches. “Now,” he said, emerging, “we go to the sacred fire and kindle them, for the vaults have no source of light whatsoever.”

  “Is there air enough for them to burn?” Caesar asked as they made their way to the fire in the Holy of Holies, a tiny room in which stood a seated statue of Rameses.

  “As long as the flags are up, yes, provided we do not go too far. Were this designed to remove treasure, I would have other priests with me, and rig up a bellows to force air inside.”

  Torches burning sluggishly, they descended into the bowels of the earth beneath Ptah’s sanctuary, down a flight of steps and into an antechamber which led into a maze of tunnels with small rooms opening off them—rooms filled with gold sows, chests of gems and pearls of every color and kind, rooms redolent with barks, spices, incenses, rooms of laserpicium and balsam, rooms stacked with elephant tusks, rooms of porphyry, alabaster, rock crystal, malachite, lapis lazuli, rooms of ebony wood, of citrus wood, of electrum, of gold coins. But no statues or paintings or what Caesar would have called works of art.

  Caesar returned to the ordinary world with mind reeling; inside the vaults lay so much wealth that even the seventy treasure fortresses of Mithridates the Great paled into insignificance. It is true, what Marcus Crassus always said: that we of the western world have no idea of how much treasure Orientals accumulate, for we do not value it for its own sake. Of itself it is useless, which is why it lies here. Were it mine, I would melt the metals down and sell the jewels to fund a more prosperous economy. Whereas Marcus Crassus would have prowled, just looking at it, and crooned. No doubt it started as a nest egg, and hatched into a monster necessitating supreme guile to safeguard it.

  Back in the corridor, they screwed the rod into its base five feet below and released the trip that had jacked the center slab upward; they then replaced the surrounding flags, and eased the center one into place, flush with the floor again. Caesar gazed up and down the paving, couldn’t see the entrance no matter how hard he looked. An experimental stamp of his foot produced no hollow sound, for the flags were four inches thick.

  “If one looks closely at the cartouche,” he said as Cha’em replaced the ankh and scepter on Ptah’s staff, “one would see that it has been tampered with.”

  “Not tomorrow,” Cha’em said tranquilly. “It will be plastered, painted and aged to look exactly like the hundred others.”

  Once when a very young man, Caesar had been captured by pirates, who were secure enough in the anonymity of their Lycian cove to let him remain on deck as they sailed; but he had beaten them, counted the coves and returned to capture them after he was released on payment of a ransom. Just as with the treasure vaults. He had counted the cartouches between Ptah’s sanctuary and the one that sprang free of the wall when pressed. It is one thing, he thought, following Cha’em into the daylight, not to know a secret, but quite another to be privy to the secret. To find the treasure vaults, robbers would have to tear the whole of the temple apart; but Caesar had had the opportunity to do a simple exercise in counting. Not that he had any intention of plundering what would one day belong to his son; only that a thinking man will always seize his chances.

  5

  At the end of May they were back in Alexandria to find the rubble entirely cleared away, and new houses going up everywhere. Mithridates of Pergamum had shifted himself to a comfortable palace with his wife, Berenice, and their daughter, Laodice, and Rufrius was busy building a garrison for the wintering troops to the east of the city near the hippodrome racetrack, thinking it prudent to quarter his legions adjacent to the Jews and Metics.

  Caesar was full of advice and reminders.

  “Don’t be stingy, Cleopatra! Spend your money to feed your people, and don’t pass on the cost to the poor! Why do you think Rome has so little trouble with its proletariat? Don’t charge admission to the chariot racing, and think of a few spectacles you can put on in the agora free of charge. Bring companies of Greek actors to stage Aristophanes, Menander, the more cheerful playwrights—the common people don’t like tragedies because they tend to live tragedies. They prefer to laugh and forget their troubles for an afternoon. Put in many more public fountains, and build some ordinary bathhouses. In Rome, a frolic in a bathhouse costs a quarter of a sestertius—people leave in a good mood as well as clean. Keep those wretched birds under control during summer! Hire a few men and women to wash the streets, and put in decent public latrines anywhere there’s a running drain to carry the sewage away. Since Alexandria and Egypt are riddled with bureaucracies, institute citizen rolls that count heads as well as nobility, and establish a grain list that entitles the poor to one medimnus of wheat a month, plus a ration of barley so they can brew beer. The money you receive as income has to be distributed, not kept to molder—if you hoard it, you cause the economy to crash. Alexandria has been tamed, but it’s up to you to keep it tamed.”

  And on, and on, and on. The laws she should pass, the bylaws and ordinances, the institution of a public auditing system. Reform Egypt’s banks, owned and controlled by Pharaoh through a creaking bureaucracy that wouldn’t do, just would not do!

  “Spend more money on education, encourage pedagogues to set up schools in public places and markets, subsidize their fees so more children can learn. You need bookkeepers, scribes—and when more books come in, put them straight into the museum! Public servants are a lazy lot, so police their activities more stringently—and don’t offer them tenure for life.”

  Cleopatra listened dutifully, felt a little like a rag doll that nodded its head every time it was jiggled. Now into her eighth month, she dragged herself around, couldn’t stay far from a chamber pot, had to endure Caesar’s son beating and battering her from inside while Caesar beat and battered her mind. Willing to endure anything except the thought that very soon he would be leaving, that she would have to live without him.

  Finally came their last night, the Nones of June. At dawn Caesar, the 3,200 men of the Sixth Legion and the German cavalry would march for Syria on the first leg of a thousand-mile journey.

  She tried hard to make it a pleasant night, understanding that, though he did love her in his way, no woman could ever replace Rome in Caesar’s heart, or mean quite as much to him as the Tenth or the Sixth. Well, they’ve been through more together. They are entwined among the very fibers of his being. But I too would die for him—I would, I would! He is the father I didn’t have, the husband of my heart, the perfect man. Who else in this whole world can equal him? Not even Alexander the Great, who was an adventuring conqueror, uninterested in the mundanities of good government or the empty bellies of the poor. Babylon holds no lure for Caesar. Caesar would never replace Rome with Alexandria. Oh, I wish he would! With Caesar by my side, Egypt would rule the world, not Rome.

  They could kiss and cuddle, but lovemaking was impossible. Though a man as controlled as Caesar isn’t put out by that. I like the way he strokes me, so rhythmic and firm, yet the skin of his palm is smooth. After he goes, I will be able to imagine those hands, so beautiful. His son will be just like him.

  “After Asia, will it be
Rome?” she asked.

  “Yes, but not for very long. I have to fight a campaign in Africa Province and finish the Republicans for good,” he said, and sighed. “Oh, that Magnus had lived! Things might have turned out very differently.”

  She experienced one of her peculiar insights. “That’s not so, Caesar. Had Magnus lived, had he reached an accommodation with you, nothing would have been different. There are too many others who will never bend the knee to you.”

  For a moment he said nothing, then laughed. “You’re right, my love, absolutely right. It’s Cato keeps them going.”

  “Sooner or later you’ll be permanently in Rome.”

  “One of these days, perhaps. I have to fight the Parthians and get Crassus’s Eagles back fairly soon, however.”

  “But I must see you again! I must! I had thought that as soon as your wars against the Republicans were over, you would settle to rule Rome. Then I could come to Rome to be with you.”

  He lifted himself on one elbow to look down at her. “Oh, Cleopatra, will you never learn? First of all, no sovereign can be away from their realm for months at a time, so you can’t come to Rome. And secondly, it’s your duty as a sovereign to rule.”

  “You’re a sovereign, but you’re away for ages at a time,” she said mutinously.

  “I am not a sovereign! Rome has consuls, praetors, an array of magistrates. A dictator is a temporary measure, no more. The moment I as the Dictator set Rome on her feet properly, I will step down. Just as Sulla did. It’s not my constitutional prerogative to rule Rome. Were it, I wouldn’t be away from Rome. Just as you can’t absent yourself from Egypt.”

  “Oh, let’s not quarrel on our last night!” she cried, her hand clasping his forearm urgently.

  But to herself she was thinking, I am Pharaoh, I am God on earth. I can do whatever I want to do, nothing constrains me. I have Uncle Mithridates and four Roman legions. So when you have vanquished the Republicans and take up residence in Rome, Caesar, I will come to you.

  Not rule Rome?

  Of course you will!

  II

  The March of Cato’s

  Ten Thousand

  From SEXTILIS (AUGUST) of 48 B.C.

  until MAY of 47 B.C.

  1

  Labienus brought the news of Pompey the Great’s defeat at Pharsalus to Cato and Cicero; riding hard, he reached the Adriatic coast of Macedonia three days after the battle, his tenth horse on its last legs. Though he was alone and still in his dowdy, workmanlike war gear, the sentries at the camp gates did not need a second glance to recognize that dark, un-Roman countenance; Pompey’s commander of cavalry was known—and feared—by every ranker soldier.

  Assured that Cato was in the general’s quarters, Labienus slid from his exhausted animal’s back and strode off up the Via Principalis toward the scarlet flag stretched rigid in a stiff sea breeze, hoping against hope that Cato would be on his own. Now was not the moment to suffer Cicero’s histrionics.

  But that was not to be. The Great Advocate was within, his perfectly chosen, formally phrased Latin issuing out of the open door just as if it were a jury he addressed, rather than the dour, unimpressionable Cato. Who, Labienus saw in the instant that he crossed the threshold, was confronting Cicero with an expression that said his patience was being sorely tried.

  Startled at this abrupt invasion, Cato and Cicero both jumped, mouths open to speak; Labienus’s face silenced them.

  “He trounced us in less than an hour,” Labienus said curtly as he went straight to the wine table. Thirst made him drink the beaker’s contents at a gulp, then he grimaced, shuddered. “Why is it, Cato, that you never have any decent wine?”

  It was Cicero who did the squawking, the horrified trumpeting, the agitated flapping. “Oh, this is shocking, terrible!” he cried, tears beginning to course down his face. “What am I doing here? Why did I ever come on this hideous, ill-fated expedition? By rights I should have stayed in Italy, if not in Rome—there I might have been of some use—here, I am an impediment!” And more, and more. Nothing was known that could stem the spate of this wordsmith’s verbosity.

  Whereas Cato stood for many moments without a thing to say, conscious only of a numbness creeping through his jaws. The impossible had happened: Caesar was victorious. But how could that be? How? How could the wrong side have proven itself right?

  Neither man’s reaction surprised Labienus, who knew them too well and liked them too little; dismissing Cicero as a nothing, he focused his attention on Cato, the most obdurate of all Caesar’s countless enemies. Clearly Cato had never dreamed that his own side—the Republicans, they called themselves—could be beaten by a man who had contravened every tenet of Rome’s unwritten constitution, who had committed the sacrilege of marching on his own country. Now Cato was the bull struck by the sacrificial hammer, down on his knees without knowing how he had gotten there.

  “He trounced us in less than an hour?” Cato finally said.

  “Yes. Though he was heavily outnumbered, had no reserves and only a thousand horse, he trounced us. I’ve never known such an important battle to take so little time. Its name? Pharsalus.”

  And that, Labienus vowed to himself, is all you’re going to hear about Pharsalus from me. I generaled for Caesar from the first to the last year of his exploits in Long-haired Gaul, and I was sure I could beat him. I had become convinced that without me, he couldn’t have begun to conquer. But Pharsalus showed me that whatever he used to give me to do was given in the certainty that a skilled subordinate could not fail. He always reserved the strategy for himself, just turned Trebonius, Decimus Brutus, Fabius and the rest of us into tactical instruments of his strategic will.

  Somewhere along the way between the Rubicon and Pharsalus I lost sight of that, so when I led my six thousand horse against Caesar’s mere thousand Germans at Pharsalus, I deemed the battle already won. A battle I engineered because the great Pompeius Magnus was too worn down by the strife inside his own command tent to think of anything beyond self-pity. I wanted battle, his couch generals wanted battle, but Pompeius Magnus wanted Fabian warfare—starve the enemy, harry the enemy, but never fight the enemy. Well, he was right, we were wrong.

  How many pitched battles has Caesar fought in? Very often, literally fought in, shield and sword among his front-line troops? Near enough to fifty. There is nothing he hasn’t seen, nothing he hasn’t done. What I do by inspiring fear—nay, terror!—in my soldiers, he does by making his soldiers love him better than they love their own lives.

  A surge of bitterness drove him to crack his hand against the almost empty wine flagon, send it flying with a clang. “Did all the good wine go east to Thessaly?” he demanded. “Is there no drop worth drinking in this benighted place?”

  Cato came to life. “I neither know nor care!” he barked. “If you want to swill nectar, Titus Labienus, go somewhere else! And,” he added, with a sweep of his hand toward Cicero, who was still carrying on, “take him with you!”

  Without waiting to see how they took this, Cato walked out his front door and made for the snakepath leading to the top of Petra hill.

  * * *

  Not months, but scant days. How many days, eighteen? Yes, it is only eighteen days since Pompeius Magnus led our massive army east to fresh ground in Thessaly. He didn’t want me with him—does he think I don’t know how my criticisms irk him? So he elected to take my dear Marcus Favonius with him in my stead, leave me behind here in Dyrrachium to care for the wounded.

  Marcus Favonius, best of my friends—where is he? If he were alive, he would have returned to me with Titus Labienus.

  Labienus! The butcher to end all butchers, a barbarian in Roman skin, a savage who took slavering pleasure in torturing fellow Romans simply because they had soldiered for Caesar rather than Pompeius. And Pompeius, who had the hubris to nickname himself “Magnus”—“Great”—never even made a token protest when Labienus tortured the seven hundred captured men of Caesar’s Ninth Legion. Men whom Labienus k
new well from Long-haired Gaul. That is the nucleus of it, that is why we lost the critical confrontation at Pharsalus. The right cause has been pursued by the wrong people.

  Pompeius Magnus is Great no longer, and our beloved Republic has entered its death throes. In less than one hour.

  The view from the heights of Petra hill was beautiful; a wine-dark sea beneath a softly misty sky and its watery sun, lush verdant hills that soared in the distance toward the high peaks of Candavia, the small terra-cotta city of Dyrrachium and its stout wooden bridge to the mainland. Peaceful. Serene. Even the miles upon miles upon miles of forbidding fortifications, bristling with towers and duplicating themselves beyond a scorched no-man’s-land, were settling into the landscape as if they had always been there. Relics of a titanic siege struggle that had gone on for months until suddenly, in the space of a night, Caesar had vanished and Pompeius had deluded himself he was the victor.

  Cato stood on Petra’s pinnacle and looked south. There, a hundred miles away on Corcyra Island, was Gnaeus Pompeius, his huge naval base, his hundreds of ships, his thousands of sailors, oarsmen and marines. Odd, that Pompeius Magnus’s elder son should have a talent for making war upon the sea.

  The wind whipped at the stiff leather straps of his kilt and sleeves, tore his long and greying auburn hair to fluttering ribbons, plastered his beard against his chest. It was a year and a half since he had left Italy, and in all that time he had neither shaved nor cut his hair; Cato was in mourning for the crumbled mos maiorum, which was the way Roman things had always been and the way Roman things should always be, forever and ever. But the mos maiorum had been steadily eroded by a series of political demagogues and military marshals for almost a hundred years, culminating in Gaius Julius Caesar, the worst one of all.