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

  His fantasies were rich and fabulous; true of many men, but the difference between Antony and other men lay in the fact that Antony actually lived his fantasies in the real world. He saw himself as Hercules, as the new Dionysus, as Sampsiceramus the legendary eastern potentate, and he contrived to look and act like a combination of all three.

  Though his riotously luxurious mode of living dominated his thoughts, he was neither stupid like his brother Gaius nor quite an oaf; inside Mark Antony was a shrewd streak of self-serving cunning which, when needed, had extricated him from many a precarious predicament, and he knew how to make his staggering masculinity work for him with other men, especially Caesar Dictator, who was his second cousin. Added to this, he possessed his family’s ability to orate—oh, not in Cicero’s or Caesar’s class, but very definitely superior to most of the Senate. He did not lack courage or bravery, and he could think on a battlefield. What he lacked most was a sense of morality, of ethical behavior, of respect for life and human beings, yet he could be outrageously generous and tremendously good company. Antony was a bull at a gate, a creature of impulse and the flesh. What he wanted out of the noble life he had been born into was two-headed: on the one hand, he wanted to be the First Man in Rome; on the other hand, he wanted palaces, bonhomie, sex, food, wine, comedy and perpetual entertainments.

  Since returning to Italy with Caesar’s legions almost a year ago, he had been indulging himself in all these areas. As the Dictator’s Master of the Horse, he was constitutionally the most powerful of all men in the Dictator’s absence, and had been using that power in ways he knew very well Caesar would deplore. But he had also been living like an eastern potentate, and spending a great deal more money than he had. Nor had he cared about what a more prudent man would have understood right from the beginning—that the day would come when he would be called to account for his activities. To Antony, sufficient against the day. Except that now the day had arrived.

  Politic, he decided, to leave his friends behind in Pompey’s villa at Herculaneum. No point in upsetting Cousin Gaius more than necessary. Men like Lucius Gellius Poplicola, Quintus Pompeius Rufus the Younger and Lucius Varius Cotyla were known to Cousin Gaius, but not liked by Cousin Gaius.

  His first stop in Rome was not the Domus Publica, or even Pompey’s enormous mansion on the Carinae, now his abode; he went at once to Curio’s house on the Palatine, parked his Germans in the garden attached to Hortensius’s house, and strolled in asking to see the lady Fulvia.

  She was the granddaughter of Gaius Sempronius Gracchus through her mother, Sempronia, who had married Marcus Fulvius Bambalio, an appropriate alliance considering that the Fulvii had been Gaius Gracchus’s most ardent supporters, and had crashed too. Sempronia had taken her grandmother’s huge fortune with her, despite the fact that women were forbidden to be major heirs under the lex Voconia. But Sempronia’s grandmother was Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi, powerful enough to procure a decree from the Senate waiving the lex Voconia. When Fulvius and Sempronia died, another senatorial waiver had allowed Fulvia to inherit from both her parents. She was the wealthiest woman in Rome. Not for Fulvia, the usual fate of heiresses! She chose her own husband, Publius Clodius the patrician rebel, founder of the Clodius Club. Why had she chosen Clodius? Because she was in love with her grandfather’s demagogic image, and saw in Clodius great demagogic potential. Her faith was not misplaced. Nor was she a stay-at-home Roman wife. Even swollen in late pregnancy, she could be found in the Forum screaming encouragement at Clodius, kissing him obscenely, generally behaving like a harlot. In private life she was a full member of the Clodius Club, knew Dolabella, Poplicola, Antony—and Curio.

  When Clodius was murdered she was heartbroken, but her old friend Atticus persuaded her to live for her children, and in time the terrible wound healed over a little. Three years into her widowhood she married Curio, another brilliant demagogue. By him she had a naughty little red-haired son, but their life together was cut tragically short when Curio died in battle.

  At the time that Antony strolled through her door she was thirty-seven years old, the mother of five children—four by Clodius, one by Curio—and looked no more than twenty-five.

  Not that Antony had much chance to assess her with his keen connoisseur’s eye; she appeared in the atrium doorway, shrieked, and launched herself at him so enthusiastically that she bounced off his cuirass with a clang and fell on the floor laughing and crying together.

  “Marcus, Marcus, Marcus! Oh, let me see you!” she said, his face between her hands, for he had followed her down. “You never seem to grow a single day older.”

  “Nor do you,” he said appreciatively.

  Yes, as desirable as ever. Seductively big breasts as firm as when she had been eighteeen, trim little waist—she was not one to conceal her sexual assets—no lines to mar that lovely clear-skinned face, with its black lashes and brows, its huge, dark-blue eyes. Her hair! Still that wonderful ice-brown. What a beauty! And all that money too.

  “Marry me,” he said. “I love you.”

  “And I love you, Antonius, but it’s too soon.” Her eyes filled with tears—not joy at Antony’s advent, but grief at Curio’s going. “Ask me again in a year.”

  “Three years between husbands as usual, eh?”

  “Yes, it seems so. But don’t make me a widow a third time, Marcus, I beg you! You constantly spoil for trouble, which is why I love you, but I want to grow old with someone I remember from my youth, and who is there left except you?” she asked.

  He helped her up, but was too experienced to try to embrace her. “Decimus Brutus,” he said, grinning. “Poplicola?”

  “Oh, Poplicola! A parasite,” she said scornfully. “If you marry me, you’ll have to drop Poplicola, I won’t receive him.”

  “No comment about Decimus?”

  “Decimus is a great man, but he’s—oh, I don’t know, I see a light of ineradicable unhappiness around him. And he’s too cold for me. Having Sempronia Tuditani for a mother ruined him, I think. She sucked cock better than anyone else in Rome, even the professionals.” Fulvia was not a mincer of words. “I confess I was pleased when she finally dieted herself to death. So was Decimus, I imagine. He never even wrote from Gaul.”

  “I hear Poplicola’s mother died too, speaking of fellatrices.”

  Fulvia pulled a face. “Last month. I had to hold her hand until it went stiff—ugh!”

  They walked through to the peristyle garden, for it was a wonderful summer’s day; she sat on the side of the fountain pool and played with the water, while Antony sat on a stone seat and watched her. By Hercules, she was a beauty! Next year…

  “You’re not popular with Caesar,” she said abruptly.

  Antony blew a derisive noise. “Who, old Cousin Gaius? I can handle him with one hand tied behind my back. I’m his pet.”

  “Don’t be too sure, Marcus. Well do I remember how he used to manipulate my darling Clodius! While ever Caesar was in Rome, there wasn’t one thing Clodius did that Caesar hadn’t planted in his mind first, from Cato’s trip to annex Cyprus to all those weird laws governing the religious colleges and religious law.” She sighed. “It was only after Caesar went to Gaul that my Clodius began to run amok. Caesar could control him. And he will insist on controlling you too.”

  “He’s family,” Antony said, unperturbed. “I may get a tongue-lashing, but it won’t be anything worse.”

  “You’d better offer to Hercules for that, Marcus.”

  From Fulvia’s he went to Pompey’s palace and his second wife, Antonia Hybrida. Oh, she wasn’t too bad, though she had the Antonian face, poor thing. What looked good on a man definitely didn’t on a woman. A strapping girl he had tired of very quickly, though not as quickly as he spent her considerable fortune. She had borne him a daughter, Antonia, now five years old, but the matching of first cousins had not been felicitous when it came to offspring. Little Antonia was mentally dull as well as dismally ugly and grossly fat. From somewhere he’d hav
e to find a gigantic dowry, or else marry the girl off to some foreign plutocrat who’d give half his fortune for the chance to acquire an Antonian bride.

  “You’re in the boiling soup,” said Antonia Hybrida when he found her in her sitting room.

  “I’ll emerge unscalded, Hibby.”

  “Not this time, Marcus. Caesar’s livid.”

  “Cacat!” he said violently, scowling, fist up.

  She flinched, shrank away. “No, please!” she cried. “I’ve done nothing—nothing!”

  “Oh, stop whining, you’re safe enough!” he snapped.

  “Caesar sent a message,” she said, recovering.

  “What?”

  “To report to him at the Domus Publica immediately. In a toga, not in armor.”

  “The Master of the Horse is armored all the time.”

  “I’m just relaying the message.” Antonia Hybrida studied her husband, in a quandary; it might be months and months before she saw him again, even if he lived in this selfsame house. He had beaten her regularly when they were first married, but he had not broken her spirit, just broken her of her habit of torturing her slaves. “Marcus,” she said, “I would like another child.”

  “You can like all you want, Hibby, but you’re not getting another child. One mental defective is one too many.”

  “She was damaged in the birth process, not in the womb.”

  He walked to the big silver mirror Pompey the Great had once gazed into hoping to see the ghost of his dead Julia vanish into its depths, eyed himself with head to one side. Yes, impressive! A toga! No one knew better than Mark Antony that men of his physique didn’t look impressive in a toga. Togas were for the Caesars of Rome’s world—it took height and grace to wear one well. Not, mind you, he had to admit, that the old boy didn’t wear armor with panache too. He simply looks what he is, royal. The family dictator. That’s what we used to call him among ourselves when we were boys, Gaius, Lucius and I. Ran the lot of us, even Uncle Lucius. And now he’s running Rome. As dictator.

  “Don’t expect me for dinner,” he said, and clanked out.

  “You look like Plautus’s miles gloriosus in that ridiculous getup” was Caesar’s opening remark. Seated behind his desk, he didn’t rise, didn’t attempt any kind of physical contact.

  “The soldiers drink me up. They love to see their betters look their betters.”

  “Like you, their taste is in their arse, Antonius. I asked you to wear a toga. Armor’s not appropriate inside the pomerium.”

  “As Master of the Horse, I can wear armor inside the city.”

  “As Master of the Horse, you do as the Dictator says.”

  “Well, do I sit down or keep standing?” Antony demanded.

  “Sit.”

  “I’m sitting. What now?”

  “An explanation of events in the Forum, I think.”

  “Which events?”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Antonius.”

  “I just want the jawing over and done with.”

  “So you know why I summoned you—to give you, as you so succinctly put it, a jawing.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps I object to your choice of words, Antonius. I was thinking along the lines of castration.”

  “That’s not fair! What have I done, when it’s all boiled down?” Antony asked angrily. “Your bum-boy Vatia passed the Ultimate Decree and instructed me to deal with the violence. Well, I did just that! As I see it, I did the job properly. There hasn’t been a peep out of anyone since.”

  “You brought professional soldiers into the Forum Romanum, then you ordered them to use their swords to cut down men armed with wood. You slaughtered wholesale! Slaughtered Roman citizens in their own meeting place! Not even Sulla had the temerity to do that! Is it because you’ve been called upon to take your sword to fellow Romans on a battlefield that you turn the Forum Romanum into a battlefield? The Forum Romanum, Antonius! You slimed the stones where Romulus stood with citizen blood! The Forum of Romulus—of Curtius—of Horatius Cocles—of Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator—of Appius Claudius Caecus—of Scipio Africanus—of Scipio Aemilianus—of a thousand Romans more noble than you, more capable, more revered! You committed sacrilege!” Caesar said, biting off his words slowly and distinctly, his tones freezing, cutting.

  Antony leaped to his feet, fists clenched. “Oh, I hate it when you’re sarcastic! Don’t come the orator with me, Caesar! Just say what you want to say, and have done with it! Then I can get back to my job, which is trying to keep your legions calm! Because they’re not calm! They’re very, very unhappy!” he shouted, a little red light of cunning at the back of his eyes. That should sidetrack the old boy—very sensitive about his legions.

  It did not.

  “Sit down, you ignorant lump! Shut your insubordinate mouth, or I’ll cut your balls off here and now—and don’t think that I can’t! Fancy yourself a warrior, Antonius? Compared to me, you’re a tyro! Riding a pretty horse in the stage armor of the vainglorious soldier! You don’t stand and lay about in the front line, you never have! I could take your sword off you right now and chop you into cutlets!”

  The temper was loose; Antony drew in a huge breath, shaken to the marrow. Oh, why had he forgotten Caesar’s temper?

  “How dare you be insolent to me? How dare you forget who exactly you are? You, Antonius, are my creature—I made you, and I can unmake you! If it were not for our blood ties, I’d have passed you over in favor of a dozen more efficient and intelligent men! Was it too much to ask that you comport yourself with a meed of discretion, of simple common sense? Obviously I asked too much! You’re a butcher as well as a fool, and your conduct has made my task in Rome infinitely harder—I have inherited the mantle of your butchery! From the moment I crossed the Rubicon, my policy toward all Romans has been clemency, but what do you call this massacre? No, Caesar can’t trust his Master of the Horse to behave like a civilized, educated, genuine Roman! What do you think Cato will make of this massacre when he hears of it? Or Cicero? You’re an incubus suffocating my clemency, and I do not thank you for it!”

  The Master of the Horse held up his hands in abject surrender. “Pax, pax, pax! I was in error! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  “Remorse is after the event, Antonius. There were at least half a hundred ways to deal with violence in the Forum without doing more than breaking one or two heads. Why didn’t you arm the Tenth with shields and staves, as Gaius Marius did when he took on Saturninus’s far vaster crowds? Hasn’t it occurred to you that in ordering the Tenth to kill, you transferred a share of your guilt to their spirits? How am I to explain matters to them, let alone to the civilian populace?” The eyes were glacial, but they also bore revulsion. “I will never forget or forgive your action. What’s more, it tells me that you enjoy wielding power in ways that might prove dangerous not only to the state, but to me.”

  “Am I fired?” Antony asked, beginning to ease his bottom out of the chair. “Are you done?”

  “No, you are not fired, and no, I am not done. Put your arse back on the seat,” Caesar said, still with that dislike. “What happened to the silver in the Treasury?”

  “Oh, that!”

  “Yes, that.”

  “I took it to pay the legions, but I haven’t gotten around to coining it yet,” Antony said, shrugging.

  “Then is it at Juno Moneta’s?”

  “Um—no.”

  “Where is it?”

  “At my house. I thought it was safer.”

  “Your house. You mean Pompeius Magnus’s house?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so.”

  “What gave you to understand that you could move there?”

  “I needed a bigger house, and Magnus’s was vacant.”

  “I can see why you’d pick it—your taste is as vulgar as Magnus’s was. But kindly move back to your own house, Antonius. As soon as I have the leisure, Magnus’s house will be put up for auction to the highest bidder, as will the rest of his property,” said C
aesar. “The property of those who remain unpardoned after I deal with the resistance in Africa Province will be garnished by the state, though some can be dealt with sooner. But it will not be sold to benefit my own men, or my hirelings. I’ll have no Chrysogonus in my service. If I find one, it won’t take Cicero and a court case to bring about his—or her—downfall. Be very careful that you do not try to steal from Rome. Put the silver back in the Treasury, where it belongs. You may go.” He let Antony get to the door, then spoke again. “By the way, how much back pay are my legions owed?”

  Antony looked quite blank. “I don’t know, Caesar.”

  “You don’t know, but you took the silver. All the silver. As Master of the Horse, I suggest that you tell the legion paymasters to present their books directly to me here in Rome. My instructions to you when you took them back to Italy were to pay them once they were in camp. Have they not been paid at all since they returned?”

  “I don’t know,” said Antony again, and escaped.

  “Why didn’t you fire him on the spot, Gaius?” Antony’s uncle asked his cousin over dinner.

  “I would have liked to, very much. However, Lucius, it isn’t as simple as it looks, is it?”

  Lucius Caesar’s eyes stilled, then went pensive. “Explain.”

  “My mistake was in trusting Antonius in the first place, but to dismiss him out of hand would be an even bigger mistake,” said Caesar, munching on a stick of celery. “Think about it. For close to twelve months Antonius has had the run of Italy and sole command of the veteran legions. With whom he’s spent by far the major part of his time, especially since last March. I haven’t seen the legions, and he’s been mighty careful not to let any of my other representatives in Italy see them. There’s evidence that they haven’t been paid, so by now they’re owed two years’ money. Antonius pretended ignorance of the entire matter, yet eighteen thousand talents of silver were withdrawn from the Treasury and taken to Magnus’s house. Apparently to go to Juno Moneta’s for coining, though it hasn’t.”