Caesar's Women Page 21

  Whereupon Lucullus resolved to keep the news of their fully honorable discharge from the Fimbriani. What they didn't know couldn't bother them. But of course the Fimbriani knew they were free to go home; Clodius had intercepted the official letters and discovered their contents before they reached Lucullus. Hard on the heels of the letter from Rome came letters from Pontus informing him that King Mithridates had invaded. Glabrio wouldn't inherit the Cilician legions after all; they had been annihilated at Zela.

  When orders went out to march for Pontus, Clodius came to see Lucullus. "The army refuses to move out of Nisibis," he announced.

  "The army will march for Pontus, Publius Clodius, to rescue those of its compatriots left alive," said Lucullus.

  "Ah, but it isn't your army to command anymore!" crowed the jubilant Clodius. "The Fimbriani have finished their service under the eagles, they're free to go home as soon as you produce their discharge papers. Which you'll do right here in Nisibis. That way, you can't cheat them when the spoils of Nisibis are divided."

  At which moment Lucullus understood everything. His breath hissed, he bared his teeth and advanced on Clodius with murder in his eyes. Clodius dodged behind a table, and made sure he was closer to the door than Lucullus.

  "Don't you lay a finger on me!" he shouted. "Touch me and they'll lynch you!"

  Lucullus stopped. "Do they love you so much?" he asked, hardly able to believe that even ignoramuses like Silius and the rest of the Fimbriani centurions could be so gullible.

  "They love me to death. I am the Soldiers' Friend."

  "You're a trollop, Clodius, you'd sell yourself to the lowest scum on the face of this globe if that meant you'd be loved," said Lucullus, his contempt naked.

  Why exactly it occurred to him at that moment, and in the midst of so much anger, Clodius never afterward understood. But it popped into his head, and he said it gleefully, spitefully: "I'm a trollop? Not as big a trollop as your wife, Lucullus! My darling little sister Clodilla, whom I love as much as I hate you! But she is a trollop, Lucullus. I think that's why I love her so desperately. Thought you had her first, didn't you, all of fifteen years old when she married you? Lucullus the pederast, despoiler of the little girls and little boys! Thought you got to Clodilla first, eh? Well, you didn't!" screamed Clodius, so carried away that foam gathered at the corners of his mouth.

  Lucullus was grey. "What do you mean?" he whispered.

  "I mean that I had her first, high and mighty Lucius Licinius Lucullus! I had her first, and long before you! I had Clodia first too. We used to sleep together, but we did more than just sleep! We played a lot, Lucullus, and the play grew greater as I grew greater! I had them both, I had them hundreds of times, I paddled my fingers inside them and then I paddled something else inside them! I sucked on them, I nibbled at them, I did things you can't imagine with them! And guess what?" he asked, laughing. "Clodilla deems you a poor substitute for her little brother!"

  There was a chair beside the table separating Clodius from Clodilla's husband; Lucullus seemed suddenly to lose all the life in him and fell against it, into it. He gagged audibly.

  "I dismiss you from my service, Soldiers' Friend, because the time has come to vomit. I curse you! Go to Rex in Cilicia!"

  After a tearful parting from Silius and Cornificius, Clodius went. Of course the Fimbriani centurions loaded their Friend down with gifts, some of them very precious, all useful. He jogged off on the back of an exquisite small horse, his retinue of servants equally well mounted, and with several dozen mules bearing the booty. Thinking himself headed in a direction minus danger, he declined Silius's offer of an escort.

  All went well until he crossed the Euphrates at Zeugma, his destination Cilicia Pedia and then Tarsus. But between him and Cilicia Pedia's flat and fertile river plains lay the Amanus Mountains, a piddling coastal range after the massifs Clodius had recently struggled across; he regarded them with contempt. Until a band of Arab brigands waylaid him down a dry gulch and filched all his gifts, his bags of money, his exquisite small horses. Clodius finished his journey alone and on the back of a mule, though the Arabs (who thought him terrifically funny) had given him enough coins to complete his journey to Tarsus.

  Where he found his brother-in-law Rex had not yet arrived! Clodius usurped a suite in the governor's palace and sat down to review his hate list: Catilina, Cicero, Fabia, Lucullus—and now Arabs. The Arabs would pay too.

  It was the end of Quinctilis before Quintus Marcius Rex and his three new legions arrived in Tarsus. He had traveled with Glabrio to the Hellespont, then elected to march down through Anatolia rather than sail a coast notorious for pirates. In Lycaonia, he was able to tell an avid Clodius, he had received a plea of help from none other than Lucullus, who had managed to get the Fimbriani moving after the Soldiers' Friend departed, and set off for Pontus. At Talaura, well on his way, Lucullus was attacked by a son-in-law of Tigranes named Mithradates, and learned that the two kings were rapidly bearing down on him.

  “And would you believe he had the temerity to send to me for help?" asked Rex.

  "He's your brother-in-law too," said Clodius mischievously.

  "He's persona non grata in Rome, so naturally I refused. He had also sent to Glabrio for help, I believe, but I imagine he was refused in that quarter as well. The last I heard, he was in retreat and intending to return to Nisibis."

  "He never got there," said Clodius, better informed about the end of Lucullus's march than about events in Talaura. “When he reached the crossing at Samosata, the Fimbriani baulked. The last we've heard in Tarsus is that he's now marching for Cappadocia, and from there he intends to go to Pergamum."

  Of course Clodius had discovered from reading Lucullus's mail that Pompey the Great was the recipient of an unlimited imperium to clear the pirates from the Middle Sea, so he left the subject of Lucullus and proceeded to the subject of Pompey.

  "And what do you have to do to help the obnoxious Pompeius Magnus sweep up his pirates?" he asked.

  Quintus Marcius Rex sniffed. "Nothing, it appears. Cilician waters are under the command of our mutual brother-in-law Celer's brother, your cousin Nepos, barely old enough to be in the Senate. I am to govern my province and keep out of the way."

  "Hoity-toity!" gasped Clodius, seeing more mischief.

  "Absolutely," said Rex stiffly.

  "I haven't seen Nepos in Tarsus."

  "You will. In time. The fleets are ready for him. Cilicia is the ultimate destination of Pompeius's campaign, it seems."

  "Then I think," said Clodius, "that we ought to do a little good work in Cilician waters before Nepos gets here, don't you?"

  "How?" asked Claudia's husband, who knew Clodius, but still lived in ignorance of Clodius's ability to wreak havoc. What flaws he saw in Clodius, Rex dismissed as youthful folly.

  “I could take out a neat little fleet and go to war on the pirates in your name," said Clodius.

  "Well..."

  "Oh, go on!"

  "I can't see any harm in it," said Rex, wavering.

  "Let me, please!"

  "All right then. But don't annoy anyone except pirates!"

  "I won't, I promise I won't," said Clodius, who was seeing in his mind's eye enough pirate booty to replace what he had lost to those wretched Arab brigands in the Amanus.

  Within a market interval of eight days, Clodius the admiral set sail at the head of a flotilla rather than a fleet, some ten well-manned and properly decked biremes which neither Rex nor Clodius thought Metellus Nepos would miss when he turned up in Tarsus.

  What Clodius didn't take into account was the fact that Pompey's broom had been sweeping so energetically that the waters off Cyprus and Cilicia Tracheia (which was the rugged western end of that province, wherein so many pirates had their land bases) swarmed with refugee pirate fleets of far larger size than ten biremes. He hadn't been at sea for five days when one such fleet hove in sight, surrounded his flotilla, and captured it. Together with Publius Clodius, a very short-liv
ed admiral.

  And off he was hied to a base in Cyprus that was not very far from Paphos, its capital and the seat of its regent, that Ptolemy known as the Cyprian. Of course Clodius had heard the story of Caesar and his pirates, and at the time had thought it brilliant. Well, if Caesar could do that sort of thing, so too could Publius Clodius! He began by informing his captors in a lordly voice that his ransom was to be set at ten talents rather than the two talents custom and pirate scales said was the right ransom for a young nobleman like Clodius. And the pirates, who knew more of the Caesar story than Clodius did, solemnly agreed to ask for a ransom of ten talents.

  "Who is to ransom me?" asked Clodius grandly.

  "In these waters, Ptolemy the Cyprian" was the answer.

  He tried to play Caesar's role around the pirate base, but he lacked Caesar's physical impressiveness; his loud boasts and threats somehow came out ludicrously, and while he knew Caesar's captors had also laughed, he was quite acute enough to divine that this lot absolutely refused to believe him even after the revenge Caesar had taken. So he abandoned that tack, and began instead to do what none did better: he went to work to win the humble folk to his side, create trouble at home. And no doubt he would have succeeded—had the pirate chieftains, all ten of them, not heard what was going on. Their response was to throw him into a cell and leave him with no audience beyond the rats which tried to steal his bread and water.

  He had been captured early in Sextilis, and wound up in that cell not sixteen days later. And in that cell he lived with his ratty companions for three months. When finally he was released it was because the Pompeian broom was so imminent that the settlement had no alternative than to disband. And he also discovered that Ptolemy the Cyprian, on hearing what ransom Clodius thought himself worth, had laughed merrily and sent a mere two talents— which was all, said Ptolemy the Cyprian, Publius Clodius was really worth. And all he was prepared to pay.

  Under ordinary circumstances the pirates would have killed Clodius, but Pompey and Metellus Nepos were too near to risk a death sentence: word had got out that capture did not mean an automatic crucifixion, that Pompey preferred to be clement. So Publius Clodius was simply abandoned when the fleet and its horde of hangers-on departed. Several days later one of Metellus Nepos's fleets swept past; Publius Clodius was rescued, returned to Tarsus and Quintus Marcius Rex.

  The first thing he did once he'd had a bath and a good meal was to review his hate list: Catilina, Cicero, Fabia, Lucullus, Arabs, and now Ptolemy the Cyprian. Sooner or later they'd all bite the dust—nor did it matter when, how long he would have to wait. Revenge was such a delicious prospect that the when of it hardly mattered. The only important thing to Clodius was that it should happen. Would happen.

  He found Quintus Marcius Rex in an ill humor, but not at his, Clodius's, failure. To Rex, the failure was his own. Pompey and Metellus Nepos had utterly eclipsed him, had commandeered his fleets and left him to twiddle his thumbs in Tarsus. Now they were mopping up rather than sweeping; the pirate war was over and all the pickings had gone elsewhere.

  "I understand," said Rex savagely to Clodius, "that after he's made a grand tour of Asia Province he is to come here to Cilicia and 'tour the dispositions,' was how he put it."

  "Pompeius or Metellus Nepos?" asked Clodius, bewildered.

  "Pompeius, of course! And as his imperium outranks mine even in my own province, I'll have to follow him around with a sponge in one hand and a chamber pot in the other!"

  "What a prospect," said Clodius clinically.

  "It's a prospect I cannot abide!" snarled Rex. “Therefore Pompeius will not find me in Cilicia. Now that Tigranes is incapable of holding anywhere southwest of the Euphrates, I am going to invade Syria. It pleased Lucullus to set up a Lucullan puppet on the Syrian throne— Antiochus Asiaticus, he calls himself! Well, we shall see what we shall see. Syria belongs in the domain of the governor of Cilicia, so I shall make it my domain."

  "May I come with you?" asked Clodius eagerly.

  "I don't see why not." The governor smiled. "After all, Appius Claudius created a furor while he kicked his heels in Antioch waiting for Tigranes to give him an audience. I imagine that the advent of his little brother will be most welcome."

  It wasn't until Quintus Marcius Rex arrived in Antioch that Clodius began to see one revenge was at hand. "Invasion" was the term Rex had employed, but of fighting there was none; Lucullus's puppet Antiochus Asiaticus fled, leaving Rex—King—to do his own kingmaking by installing one Philippus on the throne. Syria was in turmoil, not least because Lucullus had released many, many thousands of Greeks, all of whom had flocked home. But some came home to discover that their businesses and houses had been taken over by the Arabs whom Tigranes had winkled out of the desert, and to whom he had bequeathed the vacancies created by the Greeks he had kidnapped to Hellenize his Median Armenia. To Rex it mattered little who owned what in Antioch, in Zeugma, in Samosata, in Damascus. But to his brother-in-law Clodius it came to matter greatly. Arabs, he hated Arabs!

  To work went Clodius, on the one hand by whispering in Rex's ear about the perfidies of the Arabs who had usurped Greek jobs and Greek houses, and on the other hand by visiting every single discontented and dispossessed Greek man of influence he could find. In Antioch, in Zeugma, in Samosata, in Damascus. Not an Arab ought to remain in civilized Syria, he declared. Let them go back to the desert and the desert trade routes, where they belonged!

  It was a very successful campaign. Soon murdered Arabs began to appear in gutters from Antioch to Damascus, or floated down the broad Euphrates with their outlandish garb billowing about them. When a deputation of Arabs came to see Rex in Antioch, he rebuffed them curtly; Clodius's whispering campaign had succeeded.

  "Blame King Tigranes," Rex said. "Syria has been inhabited by Greeks in all its fertile and settled parts for six hundred years. Before that, the people were Phoenician. You're Skenites from east of the Euphrates, you don't belong on the shores of Our Sea. King Tigranes has gone forever. In future Syria will be in the domain of Rome."

  "We know," said the leader of this delegation, a young Skenite Arab who called himself Abgarus; what Rex failed to understand was that this was the hereditary title of the Skenite King. "All we ask is that Syria's new master should accord us what has become ours. We did not ask to be sent here, or to be toll collectors along the Euphrates, or inhabit Damascus. We too have been uprooted, and ours was a crueler fate than the Greeks'."

  Quintus Marcius Rex looked haughty. "I fail to see how."

  “Great governor, the Greeks went from one kindness to another. They were honored and paid well in Tigranocerta, in Nisibis, in Amida, in Singara, everywhere. But we came from a land so hard and harsh, so stung by sand and barren that the only way we could keep warm at night was between the bodies of our sheep or before the smoky fire given off by a wheel of dried dung. And all that happened twenty years ago. Now we have seen grass growing, we have consumed fine wheaten bread every day, we have drunk clear water, we have bathed in luxury, we have slept in beds and we have learned to speak Greek. To send us back to the desert is a needless cruelty. There is prosperity enough for all to share here in Syria! Let us stay, that is all we ask. And let those Greeks who persecute us know that you, great governor, will not condone a barbarity unworthy of any man who calls himself Greek," said Abgarus with simple dignity.

  "I really can't do anything to help you," said Rex, unmoved. "I'm not issuing orders to ship all of you back to the desert, but I will have peace in Syria. I suggest you find the worst of the Greek troublemakers and sit down with them to parley."

  Abgarus and his fellow delegates took part of that advice, though Abgarus himself never forgot Roman duplicity, Roman connivance at the murder of his people. Rather than seek out the Greek ringleaders, the Skenite Arabs first of all organized themselves into well-protected groups, and then set about discovering the ultimate source of growing discontent among the Greeks. For it was bruited about that the real culprit was
not Greek, but Roman.

  Learning a name, Publius Clodius, they then found out that this young man was the brother-in-law of the governor, came from one of Rome's oldest and most august families, and was a cousin by marriage of the conqueror of the pirates, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Therefore he could not be killed. Secrecy was possible in the desert wastes, but not in Antioch; someone would sniff the plot out and tell.

  "We will not kill him," said Abgarus. "We will teach him a severe lesson."

  Further enquiries revealed that Publius Clodius was a very strange Roman nobleman indeed. He lived, it turned out, in an ordinary house among the slums of Antioch, and he frequented the kind of places Roman noblemen usually avoided. But that of course made him accessible. Abgarus pounced.

  Bound, gagged and blindfolded, Publius Clodius was carried to a room without windows, a room without murals or decorations or differences from half a million such rooms in Antioch. Nor was Publius Clodius allowed to see beyond a glimpse as the cloth over his eyes was removed along with his gag, for a sack was slipped over his head and secured around his throat. Bare walls, brown hands, they were all he managed to take in before a less complete blindness descended; he could distinguish vague shapes moving through the rough weave of the bag, but nothing more.

  His heart tripped faster than the heart of a bird; the sweat rolled off him; his breath came short and shallow and gasping. Never in all his life had Clodius been so terrified, so sure he was going to die. But at whose hands? What had he done?

  The voice when it came spoke Greek with an accent he now recognized as Arabic; Clodius knew then that he would indeed die.

  "Publius Clodius of the great Claudius Pulcher family," said the voice, "we would dearly love to kill you, but we realize that is not possible. Unless, that is, after we free you, you seek vengeance for what will be done here tonight. If you do try to seek vengeance, we will understand that we have nothing to lose by killing you, and I swear by all our gods that we will kill you. Be wise, then, and quit Syria after we free you. Quit Syria, and never come back as long as you live."