The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra Page 35

  “Two days ago the consuls Quintus Fufius Calenus and Publius Vatinius entered office,” Caesar said. “It is a great relief to see Rome in the care of her proper senior magistrates, the two consuls and eight praetors. The courts will be able to function, the comitia to meet in the prescribed manner.” His tone changed, became even calmer and more matter-of-fact. “I’ve summoned this session to inform you, conscript fathers, that two mutinous legions, the Tenth and the Twelfth, are at this moment marching to Rome in—according to my Master of the Horse—a mood for murder.”

  No one stirred, no one murmured, though the shock was so palpable that the air seemed to vibrate.

  “A mood for murder. My murder, apparently. In light of this, I wish to diminish my importance to Rome. Were the Dictator to be slain by his own troops, our country might well despair. Our beloved Rome might once again fill up with ex-gladiators and other ruffians. Business might slump drastically. Public works, so necessary for full employment and building contractors, might come to a halt, particularly those that I am personally paying for. Rome’s games and festivals might not occur. Jupiter Optimus Maximus might show his displeasure by sending a thunderbolt to demolish his temple. Vulcan might visit Rome with an earthquake. Juno Sospita might vent her wrath on Rome’s unborn babies. The Treasury might empty overnight. Father Tiber might flood and backwash the sewage onto the streets. For the murder of the Dictator is a cataclysmic event. Cata-clys-mic.”

  They were all sitting with their mouths open.

  “However,” he went on blandly, “the murder of a privatus is of little public moment. Therefore, conscript fathers of Rome’s old and hallowed Senate, I hereby lay down my imperium maius and the dictatorship. Rome has two duly elected consuls who have been sworn in with the prescribed rituals, and no priest or augur found any flaws. Very gladly I hand Rome to them.”

  He turned to his lictors, standing against the closed doors, and bowed. “Fabius, Cornelius, all you others, I thank you most sincerely for your care of the Dictator’s person, and assure you that if and when I am once more elected to public office, I will call upon your services.” He walked between the senators and handed Fabius a clinking bag. “A small donative, Fabius, to be divided among yourselves in the customary proportions. Now go back to the College of Lictors.”

  Fabius nodded and opened the door, his face impassive. The twenty-four lictors filed out.

  The silence was so profound that the sudden fluttering of a bird in the rafters made everyone jump.

  “On my way here,” Caesar said, “I procured a lex curiata confirming the fact that I have laid down my dictatorial powers.”

  Antony had listened in disbelief, not understanding exactly what Caesar was doing, let alone why he was doing it. For a while, in fact, he had fancied that Caesar was playing a joke.

  “What do you mean, you’ve laid down your dictatorship?” he asked, voice cracking. “You can’t do that with two mutinous legions on their way to Rome! You’re needed!”

  “No, Marcus Antonius, I am not needed. Rome has consuls and praetors in office. They are now responsible for Rome’s welfare.”

  “That’s rubbish! This is an emergency!”

  Neither Calenus nor Vatinius had said a word; they exchanged a glance that mutually agreed on continued silence. Something more was going on than a simple abdication of power, and both men knew Caesar very well, as friend, fellow politician, and military commander. This had to do with Marcus Antonius: no one was deaf or blind, everyone knew Antonius had been a naughty boy with the legions. Therefore let Caesar play the act to its end. A decision men like Lucius Caesar, Philippus and Lucius Piso had also reached.

  “Naturally,” Caesar said, addressing the House, not Antony, “I don’t expect the consuls to do my dirty work. I shall meet the two mutinous legions on the Campus Martius and discover why they are bent not only on my destruction, but on their own. But I will meet them as a privatus. As no more important than they.” His voice rose. “Let all of it rest upon what happens there!”

  “You can’t resign!” Antony gasped.

  “I have already resigned, lex curiata and all.”

  Whole body numb, having difficulty breathing, Antony lurched toward Caesar. “You’ve gone mad!” he managed to say. “Raving mad! In which case, the answer’s obvious—in the absence of the Dictator’s sanity, as his Master of the Horse, I declare myself the Dictator!”

  “You can’t declare yourself anything, Antonius,” said Lucius Caesar from his stool. “The Dictator has resigned. The moment that happens, the office of Master of the Horse ceases to exist. You’re a privatus too.”

  “No! No, no, no!” Antony roared, fists clenched. “As Master of the Horse, and in the absence of the Dictator’s sanity, I am now the Dictator!”

  “Sit down, Antonius,” said Fufius Calenus. “You’re out of order. You’re not the Master of the Horse, you’re a privatus.”

  What had happened? Where had it all gone? Clutching the last vestige of his composure, Antony finally looked into Caesar’s eyes, and saw contempt, derision, a certain enjoyment.

  “Remove yourself, Antonius,” Caesar whispered, took Antony’s right arm and escorted him to the open doors, the babble of sixty voices behind them.

  Once outside he dropped Antony’s arm as if to touch it was an offense. “Did you think you fooled me, cousin?” he asked. “You don’t have the intelligence. I know enough now to understand that you’re utterly untrustworthy, that you cannot be relied on, that you are indeed what your uncle always calls you, a wolfshead. Our political and professional relationship is ended, and our blood kinship has become a mortification. An embarrassment. Get out of my sight, Antonius, and stay out of it! You’re a mere privatus, and a privatus you’ll remain.”

  Antony turned on his heel, laughing, trying to pretend he was in control again. “One day you’ll need me, Cousin Gaius!”

  “If I do, Antonius, I will use you. But always in the sure knowledge that you’re not to be trusted an inch. So don’t get too puffed up again. You’re not a thinking man’s anus.”

  A single lictor, dressed in a plain white toga and without the axe in his fasces, directed the Tenth and Twelfth around the city outside its walls to the Campus Martius; they had come up from the south, the Campus Martius lay north.

  Caesar met them absolutely alone, mounted on his famous war horse with the toes, clad in his habitual plain steel armor and the scarlet paludamentum of the General. He wore the oak-leaf crown on his head to remind them that he was a decorated war hero, a front-line soldier of rare bravery. The very sight of him was enough to turn their knees to jelly.

  They had sobered up on the long march from Campania, for the taverns along the Via Latina had bolted their doors, they had no money and Marcus Antonius’s pledge wasn’t good for a drink in this part of the country. Word that Caesar wasn’t the dictator anymore and that Marcus Antonius had therefore lost his job came when they were still well short of Rome, a dampener. And somehow, as the miles passed by under their hobnailed caligae, their grievances seemed to dwindle, their memories of Caesar their friend and fellow soldier to blossom. So when they set eyes on him sitting Toes without a vestige of fear, all they could think was how they loved him. Always had, always would.

  “What are you doing here, Quirites?” he asked coldly.

  A huge gasp went up, spreading ever wider as his words were passed back. Quirites? Caesar was calling them ordinary civilian citizens? But they weren’t ordinary civilians, they were his boys! He always called them his boys! They were his soldiers!

  “You’re not soldiers,” he said scornfully, reproached by a hundred voices. “Even Pharnaces would hesitate to call you that! You’re drunks and incompetents, pathetic fools! You’ve rioted! Looted! Burned! Wrecked! Stoned Publius Sulla, one of your commanders at Pharsalus! Stoned three senators, two of them to death! If my mouth wasn’t dry as ashes, Quirites, I’d spit on you! Spit on the lot of you!”

  They were beginning to moan, some
of them to weep.

  “No!” screamed a man from the ranks. “No, it’s a mistake! A misunderstanding! Caesar, we thought you’d forgotten us!”

  “Better to forget you than have to remember mutiny! Better you were all dead than present here as declared mutineers!”

  The biting voice went on to inform them that Caesar had all of Rome to care for, that he had trusted them to wait for him because he had thought they knew him.

  “But we love you!” someone cried. “You love us!”

  “Love? Love? Love?” Caesar roared. “Caesar can’t love mutineers! You’re the professional soldiers of the Senate and People of Rome, their servants, their only defense against their enemies! And you’ve just proved that you’re not professionals! You’re rabble! Not fit to clean vomit off the streets! You’ve mutinied, and you know what that means! You’ve forfeited your share of the booty to be distributed after I celebrate my triumphs, you’ve forfeited your land upon discharge, you’ve forfeited any additional bonuses! You’re Head Count Quirites!”

  They wept, pleaded, beseeched, begged to be forgiven. No, not Quirites, not ordinary civilian citizens! Never Quirites! They belonged to Romulus and Mars, not to Quirinus!

  The business took several hours, watched by half of Rome standing atop the Servian Walls and sitting on the roofs of the Capitol houses; the Senate, including the consuls, clustered a respectable distance from the privatus quelling a mutiny.

  “Oh, he’s a wonder!” sighed Vatinius to Calenus. “How did Antonius manage to delude himself that Caesar’s soldiers would touch a hair of his head, scarce though they are?”

  Calenus grinned. “I think Antonius was sure he’d replaced Caesar in their affections. You know what Antonius was like in Gaul, Pollio,” he said to that individual. “Always prating that he’d inherit Caesar’s legions when the old boy was past it. And for a year he’s been buying them drinks and letting them loaf, which he equates with bliss. Forgetting that these men have willingly marched through six feet of snow for days on end just to please Caesar, not to mention never let him down on a field of battle, no matter how hard the fight.”

  Pollio shrugged. “Antonius thought his moment had arrived,” he said, “but Caesar diddled him. I wondered why the old boy was so determined to hold rump of the year elections, and why he wouldn’t visit Campania to calm the men down. It was Antonius he was after, and he knew how far he’d have to go to get him. I feel sorry for Caesar, it’s a bitter affair whichever way you look at it. Though I hope he’s learned the real lesson in this.”

  “What real lesson?” Vatinius asked.

  “That even a Caesar can’t leave veteran troops idle for so long. Oh, yes, Antonius stirred them, but so did others. There are always malcontents and natural troublemakers in any army. Idleness gives them fertile soil to till,” said Pollio.

  “I’ll never forgive them!” Caesar said to Lucius Caesar, two red spots burning in his cheeks.

  Lucius shivered. “But you did forgive them.”

  “I acted prudently, for the sake of Rome. But I swear to you, Lucius, that every man in the Tenth and Twelfth will pay for this mutiny. First the Ninth, now two more. The Tenth! I took them from Pomptinus at Genava—they were always my boys! For the moment I need them, but their own activities have shown me what I have to do—have a trusted agent or two in their ranks to take down the names of the ringleaders in this sort of thing. A rot has set in—certain among them have come to believe that the soldiers of Rome have power of their own.”

  “At least now it’s over.”

  “Oh, no. There’s more to come,” Caesar said positively. “I may have drawn Antonius’s fangs, but there are still some snakes lurking in the legion grass.”

  “On the subject of Antonius, I hear that he has the money to pay his debts,” said Lucius, thought about that, then hastened to amend it. “At least some of his debts. He intends to bid for Pompeius’s palace on the Carinae.”

  Brows pleating, Caesar looked alert. “Tell me more.”

  “To begin with, he looted Pompeius’s premises wherever he went. For instance, that solid gold grapevine Magnus was gifted with by Aristobulus of the Jews turned up the other day in the Porticus Margaritaria. It sold for a fortune in less time than it took Curtius to put it on display. And Antonius has another source of revenue—Fulvia.”

  “Ye gods!” Caesar cried, revolted. “After Clodius and Curio, what can she see in a gross specimen like Antonius?”

  “A third demagogue. Fulvia falls in love with men who make trouble—and on that account, Antonius is very eligible. Take my word for it, Gaius, she’ll marry Antonius.”

  “Has he divorced Antonia Hybrida?”

  “No, but he will.”

  “Has Antonia Hybrida any money of her own?”

  “Hybrida managed to conceal the existence of a lot of the grave gold he found on Cephallenia, and it’s making his second exile most comfortable. Antonius spent her two-hundred-talent dowry, but I’m sure her father would be happy to settle another two hundred talents on her if you recall him from exile. I know he’s execrable, and I well remember your suit against him, but it’s a way of ensuring his daughter’s future. She won’t find a new husband. The child is such a sad case too.”

  “I’ll recall Hybrida as soon as I return from Africa. What’s one more, when I’m going to recall the Sullan exiles?”

  “Is Verres coming home?” Lucius asked.

  “Never!” Caesar said vehemently. “Never, never, never!”

  The chastened legions were paid and shipped out of Neapolis and Puteoli gradually, destined for a primary camp around Lilybaeum in western Sicily, thence to Africa Province later.

  No one, least of all the two consuls, asked any questions as to why—or how, legally—a privatus was calmly functioning as commander-in-chief of the forces intended to crush the Republicans in Africa Province. All would be made clear in time. As it was. At the end of November, Caesar held elections for next year’s crop of magistrates, and graciously assented to pleas that he stand for the consulship. When asked if he had any preferences as to whom among his adherents he would like as fellow consul, he indicated that he would quite like his old friend and colleague, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.

  “I hope you understand your place, Lepidus,” he said to that worthy after they had declared themselves consular candidates amid a cheering crowd at Vatinius’s electoral booth.

  “Oh, I think so,” Lepidus said contentedly, not at all put out by Caesar’s bluntness. The promised consulship had been a while coming, but it was going to be his on New Year’s Day, no doubt about that.

  “Tell me, then.”

  “I am to hold Rome and Italy for you in your absence—keep both at peace—carry on with your program of legislation—make sure I don’t insult the knights or depress business—continue to adlect senators according to your criteria—and watch Marcus Antonius like a hawk. Also watch Antonius’s intimates, from Poplicola to the newest, Lucius Tillius Cimber,” said Lepidus.

  “What a splendid fellow you are, Lepidus!”

  “Do you want to be dictator again, Caesar?”

  “I would prefer not, but it may become necessary. If it does become necessary, would you be prepared to act as my Master of the Horse?” Caesar asked.

  “Of course. Better me than some of the others. I never have had the knack of getting cozy with the troops.”

  4

  Brutus came home early in December, after Caesar had left for Campania to finish embarking his army. His mother looked him up and down sourly.

  “You haven’t improved” was her verbal conclusion.

  “I think I have, actually,” said Brutus, making no attempt to sit down. “The last two years have been highly educational.”

  “I hear you dropped your sword at Pharsalus and hid.”

  “If I had continued to hold it, I would have endangered my health. Does all of Rome know this story?”

  “My, Brutus, you almost snapped at me! Whom do you
mean by ‘all of Rome’?”

  “I mean, all of Rome.”

  “And Porcia in particular?”

  “She’s your niece, Mama. Why do you hate her so?”

  “Because, like her father, she’s the descendant of a slave.”

  “And a Tusculan peasant, you forgot to add.”

  “I hear you’re to be a pontifex.”

  “Oh, Caesar came visiting, did he? Is the affair on again?”

  “Don’t be crass, Brutus!”

  So Caesar hadn’t renewed the affair, thought Brutus, escaping. From his mother’s sitting room he went to his wife’s. A daughter of Appius Claudius Pulcher, she had become his bride seven years ago, shortly after Julia’s death, but had had little joy in the union. Brutus had managed to consummate the marriage, but with no pleasure, a worse factor than no love to poor Claudia. Nor had he entered her bed often enough to generate the children she yearned for. A good-natured young woman, and not ill looking, she had many friends and spent as much time as she could away from this unhappy house. When forced to be in it, she kept to her own apartment and her loom. Luckily she had no desire to administer the establishment, though technically it was her duty as the Master’s wife to do so; Servilia was mistress, always.

  Brutus pecked Claudia on the cheek, smiled at her absently and went to find his two tame philosophers, Strato of Epirus and Volumnius. Two welcoming faces at last! They had been with him in Cilicia, but he had sent them home when he joined Pompey; it might please Uncle Cato to drag his tame philosophers to a war, but Brutus wasn’t made of such stern stuff, nor were Volumnius and Strato of Epirus. Brutus was an Academic, not a Stoic.

  “The consul Calenus wants to see you,” said Volumnius.

  “Whatever for, I wonder?”

  “Marcus Brutus, sit down!” said Calenus, looking glad to see him. “I was beginning to worry that you wouldn’t return in time.”

  “In time for what, Quintus Calenus?”