The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra Page 17

  Quintus Cicero laughed. “Following in his dear old dad’s footsteps, eh? Has Caesar moved to contain him?”

  “No, Caesar’s still heading south. It’s that traitorous cur Calvinus has to contend with the son of Mithridates the Great. These oriental kings! Hydra-headed. Chop one off, and two more sprout from the stump. So I dare-say Pharnaces means it’s war as usual from one end of Anatolia to the other.”

  “Which gives Caesar plenty to do at the eastern end of Our Sea,” Cato said with huge satisfaction. “We’ll have sufficient time to grow strong again in Africa Province.”

  “You realize, Cato, that Labienus is trying to steal a march on you, and on my father, and on anyone else who might lay claim to the high command in Africa?” Gnaeus Pompey asked. “Why else is he so anxious to get there?” He pounded his fist against the palm of his other hand, anguished. “Oh, I wish I knew where my father is! I know him, Cato, I know how depressed he can get!”

  “He’ll turn up, have no fear,” Cato said, leaning to clasp the Admiral’s brawny arm with unusual demonstrativeness. “As for me, I have no desire to occupy the command tent.” He jerked his head toward Cicero. “There sits my superior, Gnaeus Pompeius. Marcus Cicero is a consular, so when I leave for Africa, it will be under his authority.”

  Cicero emitted a squeak of outrage and leaped to his feet. “No, no, no, no! I’ve told you before, my answer is no! Go where you want and do what you want, Cato—appoint one of your philosopher toadies—or a baboon—or that painted whore who pesters you so—to the command tent, but don’t appoint me! My mind is made up, I’m going home!”

  Which brought Cato to tower at his full imposing height, looking down that even more imposing nose at Cicero as if he suddenly spied some noisome insect. “By virtue of your rank and your own windbag prating, Marcus Tullius Cicero, you are first and foremost the Republic’s servant! What you want and what you do are two quite different horses! Not once in your lordly life have you genuinely done your duty! Especially when that duty requires you to pick up a sword! You’re a Forum creature whose deeds don’t begin to rival your words!”

  “How dare you!” Cicero gasped, face mottling. “How dare you, Marcus Porcius Cato, you sanctimonious, self-righteous, pigheaded monster! It was you and no one else who brought us to this, it was you and no one else who—who forced Pompeius Magnus into civil war! When I came to him with Caesar’s very reasonable and fair offer of terms, it was you who threw such a colossal tantrum that you literally terrified the life out of him! You screeched, screamed and howled until Magnus was a shivering heap of jelly—you had the man groveling and crawling to you more abjectly than Lucullus groveled and crawled to Caesar! No, Cato, I don’t blame Caesar for this civil war, I blame you!”

  Gnaeus Pompey was out of his chair too, white with rage. “What do you mean, Cicero, you ancestorless nobody from the back hills of Samnium? My father intimidated to jelly? My father groveling and crawling? Take that back, or I’ll ram it between your rotting teeth with my fist!”

  “No, I will not recant!” Cicero roared, beside himself. “I was there! I saw what happened! Your father, Gnaeus Pompeius, is a spoiled baby who toyed with Caesar and the idea of civil war to inflate his own opinion of himself, who never believed for one moment that Caesar would cross the Rubicon with one paltry legion! Who never believed that there are men with that kind of brazen courage! Who never believed in anything except his own—his own myth! A myth, son of Magnus, that started when your father blackmailed Sulla into giving him the co-command, and ended a month ago on a battlefield called Pharsalus! Much though it pains me to have to admit it, your father, son of Magnus, isn’t Caesar’s bootlace when it comes to war or politics!”

  The stupefaction that had paralyzed Gnaeus Pompey almost audibly snapped; he launched himself at Cicero with a bellow, hands out to throttle him.

  Neither of the Quintuses moved, too enthralled to care what Gnaeus Pompey did to the family tyrant. It was Cato who stepped in front of Pompey the Great’s mortally insulted son and grasped both his wrists. The tussle between them was brief; Cato forced Gnaeus Pompey’s arms down effortlessly and whipped them behind his back.

  “That is enough!” he snapped, eyes blazing. “Gnaeus Pompeius, go back to caring for your fleets. Marcus Cicero, if you refuse to be the Republic’s loyal servant, go back to Italy!”

  “Yes, go!” Pompey the Great’s son cried, and slumped into his chair to massage feeling back into his hands. Ye gods, who would ever have thought Cato so strong? “Pack your belongings, you and your kindred, and may I never see any of your faces again! A pinnace will be waiting at dawn tomorrow to take you to Patrae, from whence you can return to Italy, or take a trip to Hades to pat Cereberus’s heads! Go! Get out of my sight!”

  Head up, two scarlet spots in his cheeks, Cicero cuddled the massive folds of toga draped over his left shoulder and stalked out, his nephew by his side. Quintus Senior delayed a little to turn in the doorway.

  “I shit on both your pricks,” he said with grave dignity.

  Which struck Gnaeus Pompey as exquisitely funny; he dropped his head into his hands and howled with mirth.

  “I see nothing to laugh about,” Cato said, inspecting the wine table. The last few moments had been thirsty work.

  “You wouldn’t, Cato,” Gnaeus Pompey said when he was able. “By definition, a Stoic has no sense of humor.”

  “That is true,” Cato agreed, sitting down again to nurse a goblet—no beakers or cups for Gnaeus Pompey—of excellent Samian wine. “However, Gnaeus Pompeius, we have not yet arrived at a conclusion about either me or the wounded.”

  “How many of your eight thousand do you really think will ever be fit to fight again?”

  “At least seven thousand. Can you supply me with enough transports to get the thousand best of them across to Africa in four days’ time?”

  Gnaeus Pompey wrinkled his brow. “Wait until the Etesian winds come, Cato, they’ll blow you straight to our Roman province. If you start before them, you’ll be at the mercy of Auster—or Libotonus—or Zephyrus—or any other wind that Aeolus fancies letting out of his bag for a stretch and a canter.”

  “No, I must leave as soon as maybe, and ask that you send the rest of my men on before you shift traps yourself. Your work is vital, but it is different from mine. My task is to preserve the very brave soldiers your father placed in my care. For they are brave. If they were not, their wounds would be nonexistent.”

  “As you wish,” said Gnaeus Pompey with a sigh. “There is a difficulty about those you want me to send on later—I’m going to need the transports back for my own use. If the Etesian winds are late, I can’t guarantee that they’ll reach Africa Province.” He shrugged. “In fact, all of you could land anywhere.”

  “That is my worry,” Cato said with all his usual sturdy resolution, but somewhat less of his usual shout.

  Four days later fifty of the transports Cato had used to move his men, equipment and supplies from Dyrrachium were loaded and ready to go: 1,200 recovered soldiers formed into two cohorts, 250 noncombatant assistants, 250 pack mules, 450 wagon mules, 120 wagons, a month’s supply of wheat, chickpea, bacon and oil, plus grindstones, ovens, utensils, spare clothing and arms—and, a gift from Gnaeus Pompey that traveled on Cato’s own ship, a thousand talents of silver coins.

  “Take it, I have plenty more,” Gnaeus Pompey said cheerfully. “Compliments of Caesar! And,” he went on, handing over a bundle of small rolls of paper, each tied and sealed, “these came from Dyrrachium for you. News of home.”

  Fingers trembling a little, Cato told the letters over, then tucked them inside the armhole of his light leather cuirass.

  “Aren’t you going to read them now?”

  The grey eyes looked very stern, yet clouded, and the generous curve of Cato’s mouth was drawn up as if with pain. “No,” he said, at his loudest and most truculent, “I shall read them later, when I have the time.”

  Though it took all day to get the f
ifty transports out of an inadequate harbor, Gnaeus Pompey remained on the little wooden pier until the last ships went hull down over the horizon, until all that was left of them were hair-thin masts, black prickles against the opalescent skies of early evening.

  Then he turned and trudged back to his headquarters; life would be more peaceful, certainly, but somehow when Cato was no longer a part of things, an emptiness entered. How Cato had awed him in his youth! How much his pedagogues and rhetors had harped on the different styles of the three greatest orators in the Senate: Caesar, Cicero and Cato. Names he had grown up with, men he could never forget; his father, the First Man in Rome, never a good orator, but a master at getting his own way. Now all of them were scattered while the same patterns went on aweaving, one life strand entwined with another until Atropos took pity and snipped this thread, that thread.

  Lucius Scribonius Libo was waiting; Gnaeus Pompey stifled a sigh. A good man who had been Admiral after Bibulus died, then had yielded gracefully to Pompey the Great’s son. As was fitting. The only reason this scion of the wrong branch of the Scribonius family had risen so high so quickly lay in the fact that Gnaeus Pompey had taken one look at his dimpled, ravishingly pretty daughter, divorced his boring Claudia, and married her. A match Pompey the Great had abhorred, deplored. But that was Father, himself obsessed with marrying only the most august aristocrats, and determined that his sons should do the same. Well, Sextus was still too young for marriage, and Gnaeus had tried for the sake of harmony until he’d set eyes on the seventeen-year-old Scribonia. Love, Pompey the Great’s elder son reflected as he greeted his father-in-law, could destroy the best-laid plans.

  They dined together, discussed the coming move to Sicily and environs, the potential resistance in Africa Province—and the possible whereabouts of Pompey the Great.

  “Today’s courier reported a rumor that he’s taken Cornelia Metella and Sextus away from Lesbos, and is island-hopping down the Aegean,” his elder son said.

  “Then,” said Scribonius Libo, preparing to depart, “I think it’s time that you wrote again.”

  So when he had gone Gnaeus Pompey sat down resolutely at his desk, drew a blank double sheet of Fannian paper toward him, and picked up his reed pen, dipped it in the inkwell.

  We are still alive and kicking, and we still own the seas. Please, I beg you, my beloved father, gather what ships you can and come either to me or to Africa.

  But before Pompey the Great’s brief reply could reach him, he learned of his father’s death on the mud flats of Egyptian Pelusium at the hands of a torpid boy king and his palace cabal.

  Of course. Of course. As cruel, as unethical as Orientals are, they killed him thinking to curry favor with Caesar. Not for one moment would it have occurred to them that Caesar hungered to spare him. Oh, Father! This way is better! This way, you are not beholden to Caesar for the gift of continued life.

  When he was sure he could work without unmanning himself in front of his subordinates, Gnaeus Pompey sent 6,500 more of Cato’s wounded to Africa, offering to the Lares Permarini, to Neptune and to Spes that they and Cato would find each other on that two-thousand-mile coast between the Nile Delta and Africa Province. Then he began the onerous task of removing himself, his fleets and men into bases around Sicily.

  Its few natives unsure whether they were glad or sorry to see the Romans go, Corcyra slowly lost its scars and returned to its sweet oblivion. Slowly.

  2

  Cato had decided to use his soldiers and noncombatants as oarsmen; if he didn’t push them too hard, splendid exercise for convalescents, he thought. Zephyrus was blowing fitfully from the west, so sails were useless, but the weather was tranquil and the sea flat calm, as always under that gentle breeze. Hate Caesar with implacable intensity he might, but he had pored over those crisp, impersonal commentaries Caesar himself had written about his war in Gaul of the Long-hairs, and not allowed his feelings to blind him to the many practical facts they contained. Most important, that the General had shared in the sufferings and the deprivations of his ranker soldiers—walked when they walked, lived on a few scraps of ghastly beef when they did, never held himself aloof from their company on the long marches and during the terrible times when they huddled behind their fortifications and could see no other fate than to be captured and burned alive in wicker cages. Politically and ideologically Cato had made great capital out of those same commentaries, but though his inwardly turned passions drove him to deride and dismiss Caesar’s every action, a part of his mind absorbed the lessons.

  As a child Cato had found it agony to learn; he didn’t even have his half sister Servilia’s ability to remember what he had been taught and told, let alone possess anything approaching Caesar’s legendary memory. It was rote, rote, rote for Cato, while Servilia sneered contempt and his adored half brother Caepio sheltered him from her viciousness. That Cato had survived a hideous childhood as the youngest of that tempestuous, divided brood of orphans was purely due to Caepio. Caepio, of whom it had been said that he was not his father’s child, but the love child of his mother, Livia Drusa, and Cato’s father, whom she later married; that Caepio’s height, red hair and hugely beaked nose were pure Porcius Cato; that therefore Caepio was Cato’s full, not half, brother, despite the august patrician name of Servilius Caepio he bore, and the vast fortune he had inherited as a Servilius Caepio. A fortune founded on fifteen thousand talents of gold stolen from Rome: the fabulous Gold of Tolosa.

  Sometimes when the wine didn’t work and the daimons of the night refused to be banished, Cato would recall that evening when some minion of Uncle Drusus’s enemies had thrust a small but wicked knife into Uncle Drusus’s groin and twisted it until the damage within could not be repaired. A measure of how deadly the mixture of politics and love could become. The screams of agony that went on and on and on, the lake of blood on the priceless mosaic floor, the exquisite succor that the two-year-old Cato had felt enfolded within the five-year-old Caepio’s embrace as all six children had witnessed Drusus’s awful, lingering death. A night never to be forgotten.

  After his tutor finally managed to teach him to read, Cato had found his code of living in the copious works of his great-grandfather Cato the Censor, a pitiless ethic of stifled emotions, unbending principles and frugality; Caepio had tolerated it in his baby brother, but never subscribed to it himself. Though Cato, who didn’t perceive the feelings of others, had not properly understood Caepio’s misgivings about a code of living which did not permit its practitioner the mercy of an occasional failure.

  They could not be separated, even served their war training together. Cato never envisioned an existence without Caepio, his stout defender against Servilia as she heaped scorn on his auburn head because he was a descendant of Cato the Censor’s disgraceful second marriage to the daughter of his own slave. Of course she was aware of Caepio’s true parentage, but as he bore her own father’s name, she focused all her malice on Cato.

  Whose progeny he actually was had never worried Caepio, Cato thought as he leaned on the ship’s rail to watch the myriad twinkling lights of his fleet throw dissolving gold ribbons across the black still waters. Servilia. A monstrous child, a monstrous woman. More polluted even than our mother was. Women are despicable. The moment some haughty beautiful fellow with impeccable ancestors and tomcat appeal strolls into view, they scramble to open their legs to him. Like my first wife, Attilia, who opened her legs to Caesar. Like Servilia, who opened her legs to Caesar, still does. Like the two Domitias, the wives of Bibulus, who opened their legs to Caesar. Like half of female Rome, who opened their legs to Caesar. Caesar! Always Caesar.

  His mind strayed then to his nephew, Brutus. Servilia’s only son. Undeniably the son of her husband at the time, Marcus Junius Brutus, whom Pompeius Magnus had had the gall to execute for treason. The fatherless Brutus had mooned for years over Caesar’s daughter, Julia, even managed to become engaged to her. That had pleased Servilia! If her son was married to his daughter, she could keep C
aesar in the family, didn’t need to work so hard to hide her affair with Caesar from her second husband, Silanus. Silanus had died too, but of despair, not Pompeius Magnus’s sword.

  Servilia always said that I couldn’t win Brutus to my side, but I did. I did! The first horror for him was the day that he found out his mother had been Caesar’s mistress for five years; the second was the day Caesar broke his engagement to Julia and married the girl to Pompeius Magnus, almost old enough to be her grandfather—and Brutus’s father’s executioner. Pure political expediency, but it had bound Pompeius Magnus to Caesar until Julia died. And the bleeding Brutus—how soft he is!—turned from his mother to me. It is a right act to inflict punishment upon the immoral, and the worst punishment I could have found for Servilia was to take her precious son away.

  Where is Brutus now? A lukewarm Republican at best, always torn between his Republican duty and his besetting sin, money. Neither a Croesus nor a Midas—too Roman, of course. Too steeped in interest rates, brokerage fees, sleeping partnerships and all the furtive commercial activities of a Roman senator, disbarred by tradition from naked moneymaking, but too avaricious to resist the temptation.

  Brutus had inherited the Servilius Caepio fortune founded in the Gold of Tolosa. Cato ground his teeth, grasped the rail with both hands until his knuckles glistened white. For Caepio, beloved Caepio, had died. Died alone on his way to Asia Province, waiting in vain for me to hold his hand and help him cross the River. I arrived an hour too late. Oh, life, life! Mine has never been the same since I gazed on Caepio’s dead face, and howled, and moaned, and yammered like one demented. I was demented. I am still—oh, still demented. The pain! Caepio was thirty to my twenty-seven; soon I will be forty-six. Yet Caepio’s death seems like yesterday, my grief as fresh now as it was then.