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

  How I hate Caesar! Hated him long before I was old enough to enter the Senate—his airs and graces, his beauty, his golden oratory, his brilliant legislation, his habit of cuckolding his political enemies, his unparalleled military skill, his utter contempt for the mos maiorum, his genius for destruction, his unassailably noble patrician birth. How we fought him in the Forum and the Senate, we who called outselves the boni, the good men! Catulus, Ahenobarbus, Metellus Scipio, Bibulus and I. Catulus is dead, Bibulus is dead—where are Ahenobarbus and that monumental idiot, Metellus Scipio? Am I the only one of the boni left?

  When the perpetual rains of this coast suddenly began to fall, Cato returned to the general’s house, to find it empty save for Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion. Two faces he could greet with genuine gladness.

  Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion had been Cato’s pair of tame philosophers for more years than any of them could remember; he boarded and paid them for their company. None but a fellow Stoic could have endured Cato’s hospitality for more than a day or two, for this great-grandson of the immortal Cato the Censor prided himself on the simplicity of his tastes; the rest of his world just called him stingy. Which judgement did not upset Cato in the least. He was immune to criticism and the good opinion of others. However, Cato’s was a household as much addicted to wine as to Stoicism. If the wine he and his tame philosophers drank was cheap and nasty, the supply of it was bottomless, and if Cato paid no more than five thousand sesterces for a slave, he could say with truth that he got as much work out of the man—he would have no women in his house—as he would have from one who cost fifty times that.

  Because Romans, even those lowly enough to belong to the Head Count, liked to live as comfortably as possible, Cato’s peculiar devotion to austerity had set him apart as an admired—even treasured—eccentric; this, combined with his quite appalling tenacity and incorruptible integrity, had elevated him to hero status. No matter how unpalatable a duty might be, Cato would perform it with heart and soul. His harsh and unmelodic voice, his brilliance at the filibuster and harangue, his blind determination to bring Caesar down, had all contributed to his legend. Nothing could intimidate him, and no one could reason with him.

  Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion would not have dreamed of trying to reason with him; few loved him, but they did.

  “Are we housing Titus Labienus?” Cato asked, going to the wine table and pouring himself a full beaker, unwatered.

  “No,” said Statyllus, smiling faintly. “He’s usurped Lentulus Crus’s old domicile, and scrounged an amphora of the best Falernian from the quartermaster to drown his sorrows.”

  “I wish him well of anywhere except here,” Cato said, standing while his servant removed the leather gear from him, then sitting with a sigh. “I suppose the news of our defeat has spread?”

  “Everywhere,” Athenodorus Cordylion said, rheumy old eyes wet with tears. “Oh, Marcus Cato, how can we live in a world that Caesar will rule as a tyrant?”

  “That world is not yet a foregone conclusion. It won’t be over until I for one am dead and burned.” Cato drank deeply, stretched out his long, well-muscled legs. “I imagine there are survivors of Pharsalus who feel the same—Titus Labienus, most definitely. If Caesar is still in the mood to issue pardons, I doubt he’ll get one. Issue pardons! As if Caesar were our king. While all and sundry marvel at his clemency, sing his praises as a merciful man! Pah! Caesar is another Sulla—ancestors back to the very beginning, royal for seven centuries. More royal—Sulla never claimed to be descended from Venus and Mars. If he isn’t stopped, Caesar will crown himself King of Rome. He’s always had the blood. Now he has the power. What he doesn’t have are Sulla’s vices, and it was only Sulla’s vices prevented him from tying the diadem around his head.”

  “Then we must offer to the gods that Pharsalus is not our last battle,” Statyllus said, replenishing Cato’s beaker from a new flagon. “Oh, if only we knew more about what happened! Who lives, who died, who was captured, who escaped—”

  “This tastes suspiciously good,” Cato interrupted, frowning.

  “I thought—given this dreadful news, you understand—that just this once we wouldn’t infringe our convictions if we followed Labienus’s example,” Athenodorus Cordylion said apologetically.

  “To indulge oneself like a sybarite is not a right act, no matter how dreadful the news!” Cato snapped.

  “I disagree,” said a honeyed voice from the doorway.

  “Oh. Marcus Cicero,” Cato said flatly, face unwelcoming.

  Still weeping, Cicero found a chair from which he could see Cato, mopped his eyes with a crisp, clean, large handkerchief—an indispensable tool for a courtroom genius—and accepted a cup from Statyllus.

  I know, thought Cato with detachment, that his impassioned grief is genuine, yet it offends me almost to nausea. Aman must conquer all his emotions before he is truly free.

  “What did you manage to learn from Titus Labienus?” he rapped, so harshly that Cicero jumped. “Where are the others? Who died at Pharsalus?”

  “Just Ahenobarbus,” Cicero answered.

  Ahenobarbus! Cousin, brother-in-law, indefatigable boni confrere. I shall never see that determined countenance again. How he railed about his baldness, convinced his shiny dome had set the electors against him whenever he ran for a priesthood…

  Cicero was rattling on. “It seems Pompeius Magnus escaped, along with everybody else. According to Labienus, that happens in a rout. The conflicts which see men die on the field are those fought to a finish. Whereas our army caved in upon itself. Once Caesar shattered Labienus’s cavalry charge by arming his spare cohorts of foot with siege spears, it was all over. Pompeius left the field. The other leaders followed, while the troops either dropped their weapons and cried quarter, or ran away.”

  “Your son?” Cato asked, feeling the obligation.

  “I understand that he acquitted himself splendidly, but was not harmed,” Cicero said, transparently glad.

  “And your brother, Quintus, his son?”

  Anger and exasperation distorted Cicero’s very pleasant face. “Neither fought at Pharsalus—brother Quintus always said that he wouldn’t fight for Caesar, but that he respected the man too much to fight against him either.” A shrug. “That is the worst of civil war. It divides families.”

  “No news of Marcus Favonius?” Cato asked, keeping his tones suitably hard.

  “None.”

  Cato grunted, seemed to dismiss the matter.

  “What are we going to do?” Cicero asked rather pathetically.

  “Strictly speaking, Marcus Cicero, that is your decision to make,” Cato said. “You are the only consular here. I have been praetor, but not consul. Therefore you outrank me.”

  “Nonsense!” Cicero cried. “Pompeius left you in charge, not me! You’re the one living in the general’s house.”

  “My commission was specific and limited. The Law prescribes that executive decisions be taken by the most senior man.”

  “Well, I absolutely refuse to take them!”

  The fine grey eyes studied Cicero’s mutinous, fearful face—why will he always end a sheep, a mouse? Cato sighed. “Very well, I will make the executive decisions. But only on the condition that you vouch for my actions when I am called to account by the Senate and People of Rome.”

  “What Senate?” Cicero asked bitterly. “Caesar’s puppets in Rome, or the several hundred at present flying in all directions from Pharsalus?”

  “Rome’s true Republican government, which will rally somewhere and keep on opposing Caesar the monarch.”

  “You’ll never give up, will you?”

  “Not while I still breathe.”

  “Nor will I, but not in your way, Cato. I’m not a soldier, I lack the sinew. I’m thinking of returning to Italy and starting to organize civilian resistance to Caesar.”

  Cato leaped to his feet, fists clenched. “Don’t you dare!” he roared. “To return to Italy is to abase yourse
lf to Caesar!”

  “Pax, pax, I’m sorry I said it!” Cicero bleated. “But what are we going to do?”

  “We pack up and take the wounded to Corcyra, of course. We have ships here, but if we delay, the Dyrrachians will burn them,” Cato said. “Once we reach haven with Gnaeus Pompeius, we’ll get news of the others and determine our final destination.”

  “Eight thousand sick men plus all our stores and supplies? We don’t have nearly enough ships!” Cicero gasped.

  “If,” Cato said a little derisively, “Gaius Caesar could jam twenty thousand soldiers, five thousand noncombatants and slaves, all his mules, wagons, equipment and artillery into less than three hundred battered, leaky ships and cross ocean water between Britannia and Gaul, then there is no reason why I can’t put a quarter of that number aboard a hundred good stout transports and sail close to shore in placid waters.”

  “Oh! Oh, yes, yes! You’re quite right, Cato.” Cicero rose to his feet, handed his beaker to Statyllus with trembling fingers. “I must start my own packing. When do you sail?”

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  The Corcyra that Cato remembered from a previous visit had vanished, at least along its coasts. An exquisite island, the gem of the Adriatic, hilly and lush, a place of dreamy inlets and translucent, glowing seas.

  A series of Pompeian admirals culminating in Gnaeus Pompey had remodeled Corcyra; every cove contained transport ships or war galleys, every small village had turned into a temporary town to service the demands of camps on their peripheries, the once pellucid sea was awash with human and animal excreta and stank worse than the mud flats of Egyptian Pelusium. To compound this lack of hygiene, Gnaeus Pompey had established his main base on the narrow straits facing the coast of the mainland. His reason: that this area yielded the best catches as Caesar tried to ferry troops and supplies from Brundisium to Macedonia. But the currents in the straits did not suck the filth away; rather, it accumulated.

  Cato seemed not to notice the stench, whereas Cicero railed about it constantly, his handkerchief muffling his green face and affronted nostrils. In the end he removed himself to a decayed villa atop a hill where he could walk in a lovely orchard and pick fruits from the trees, almost forget the misery of homesickness. Cicero uprooted from Italy was at best a shadow of himself.

  The sudden appearance of Cicero’s younger brother, Quintus, and his son, Cicero’s nephew Quintus Junior, only served to swell his woes. Unwilling to fight for either side, the pair had skulked from place to place all over Greece and Macedonia, then, upon Pompey the Great’s defeat at Pharsalus, they had headed for Dyrrachium and Cicero. To find the camp deserted, and a general feeling in the neighborhood that the Republicans had sailed for Corcyra. Off they went to Corcyra.

  “Now you know,” Quintus snarled at his big brother, “why I wouldn’t ally myself with that overrated fool, Pompeius Magnus. He’s not fit to tie Caesar’s bootlaces.”

  “What is the world coming to,” Cicero riposted, “when the affairs of state are decided upon a battlefield? Nor, in the long run, can they be. Sooner or later Caesar has to return to Rome and pick up the reins of government—and I intend to be in Rome to make it impossible for him to govern.”

  Quintus Junior snorted. “Gerrae, Uncle Marcus! If you set foot on Italian soil, you’ll be arrested.”

  “That, nephew, is where you’re wrong,” Cicero said with lofty scorn. “I happen to have a letter from Publius Dolabella begging me to return to Italy! He says that my presence will be welcome—that Caesar is anxious to have consulars of my standing in the Senate. He insists upon healthy opposition.”

  “How nice to have a foot in both camps!” Quintus Senior sneered. “One of Caesar’s chief minions your son-in-law! Though I hear that Dolabella isn’t being a good husband to Tullia.”

  “All the more reason for me to go home.”

  “What about me, Marcus? Why should you, who openly opposed Caesar, be permitted to go home free and clear? My son and I—who have not opposed Caesar!—will have to find him and secure pardons because everyone thinks we fought at Pharsalus. And what are we going to do for money?”

  Conscious that his face was reddening, Cicero tried to look indifferent. “That is surely your own business, Quintus.”

  “Cacat! You owe me millions, Marcus, millions! Not to mention the millions you owe Caesar! Cough some of it up right this moment, or I swear I’ll slice you up the front from guts to gizzard!” Quintus yelled.

  As he was not wearing his sword or dagger, an empty threat; but the exchange set the tenor of their reunion, which exacerbated Cicero’s rudderlessness, worry for his daughter, Tullia, and indignation at the heartless conduct of his wife, Terentia, a termagant. Possessed of an independent fortune she had refused to share with the spendthrift Cicero, Terentia was up to every trick in the money book, from shifting the boundary stones of her land to declaring the most productive tracts sacred sites, thereby avoiding taxes. Activities Cicero had lived with for so long that he took them for granted. What he couldn’t forgive her was the way she was treating poor Tullia, who had good cause to complain about her husband, Publius Cornelius Dolabella. But not as far as Terentia was concerned! If Cicero didn’t know for a fact that Terentia had no feelings beyond satisfaction at making a profit, he would have said she was in love with Dolabella herself. Siding with him against her own flesh and blood! Tullia was ill, had been ever since she lost her child. My baby, my sweetheart!

  Though, of course, Cicero didn’t dare voice much of all that in his letters to Dolabella; he needed Dolabella!

  Toward the middle of September (the very beginning of summer by the seasons that year), the Admiral of Corcyra called a small council in his headquarters.

  Going on for thirty-two now, Gnaeus Pompey looked very much like his fabled father, though his hair was a darker shade of gold, his eyes were more grey than blue, and his nose was more Roman than Pompey the Great’s despised snub. Command sat upon him easily; as he had his father’s gift for organization, the task of manipulating a dozen separate fleets and many thousands of their servitors suited his talents. What he lacked were Pompey the Great’s overweening conceit and inferiority complex; Gnaeus Pompey’s mother, Mucia Tertia, was a high aristocrat with famous ancestors, so the dark thoughts of obscure Picentine origins which had so plagued poor Pompey the Great never crossed his son’s mind.

  Only eight men were present: Gnaeus Pompey, Cato, all three Cicerones, Titus Labienus, Lucius Afranius and Marcus Petreius.

  Afranius and Petreius had generaled for Pompey the Great for many years, had even run both the Spains for him until Caesar had thrown them out last year. Grizzled they might be, but they were Military Men to the core, and old soldiers never die. Arriving in Dyrrachium just before the exodus to Corcyra, naturally they tagged along, delighted to see Labienus, a fellow Picentine.

  They had brought more news—new which cheered Cato immensely, but cast Cicero down: resistance to Caesar was going to reform in Roman Africa Province, still held by a Republican governor. Juba, King of neighboring Numidia, was openly on the Republican side, so all the survivors of Pharsalus were trying to head for Africa Province with as many troops as they could find.

  “What of your father?” Cicero asked Gnaeus Pompey hollowly as he seated himself between his brother and his nephew. Oh, the horror of having to traipse off to Africa Province when all he yearned to do was go home!

  “I’ve sent a letter to half a hundred different places around the eastern end of Our Sea,” Gnaeus Pompey said quietly, “but so far I’ve heard nothing. I’ll try again soon. There is a report that he was in Lesbos briefly to meet my stepmother and young Sextus, but if so, my letter there must have missed him. I have not heard from Cornelia Metella or Sextus either.”

  “What do you yourself intend to do, Gnaeus Pompeius?” asked Labienus, baring his big yellow teeth in the snarl as unconscious and habitual as a facial tic.

  Ah, that’s interesting, the silent Cato thought, ey
es going from one face to the other. Pompeius’s son dislikes this savage quite as much as I do.

  “I shall remain here until the Etesian winds arrive with the Dog Star—at least another month,” Gnaeus Pompey answered, “then I’ll move all my fleets and personnel to Sicily, Melite, Gaudos, the Vulcaniae Isles. Anywhere I can gain a toehold and make it difficult for Caesar to feed Italy and Rome. If Italy and Rome starve for lack of grain, it will be that much harder for Caesar to inflict his will on them.”

  “Good!” Labienus exclaimed, and sat back contentedly. “I’m for Africa with Afranius and Petreius. Tomorrow.”

  Gnaeus Pompey raised his brows. “A ship I can donate you, Labienus, but why the hurry? Stay longer and take some of Cato’s recovering wounded with you. I have sufficient transports.”

  “No,” Labienus said, rising with a nod to Afranius and Petreius. “I’ll go to Cythera and Crete first to see what I can pick up there by way of refugee troops—in your donated ship. If I find men to transport, I’ll commandeer more ships and press crews if I have to, though the soldiers can row. Save your own resources for Sicily.”

  The next moment he was gone, Afranius and Petreius in his wake like two big, amiable, elderly hounds.

  “So much for Labienus,” said Cicero through his teeth. “I can’t say I’ll miss him.”

  Nor I, Cato wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he addressed Gnaeus Pompey. “So what of the eight thousand men I brought from Dyrrachium? A thousand at least are fit to sail for Africa at once, but the rest need more time to heal. None of them wants to give up the struggle, but I can’t leave them here if you go.”

  “Well, it seems our new Great Man is more interested in Asia Minor than he is in the Adriatic.” Lip lifted in contempt, Gnaeus Pompey snorted. “Kissing the ground at Ilium in honor of his ancestor Aeneas, if you please! Remitting Trojan taxes! Looking for the tomb of Hector!” Suddenly he grinned. “Not that leisure has lasted long. A courier came today and informed me that King Pharnaces has come down from Cimmeria to invade Pontus.”