Caesar's Women Page 7

  "Sweet," he said, and moved down to mons veneris. "Plump, sweet and juicy," he said, laughing.

  How could he laugh? But laugh he did; then as her eyes widened at the sight of his erection, he gathered her against him and kissed her mouth at last. Not like Brutus, who had stuck his tongue in so far and so wetly it had revolted her. Not like Silanus, whose kisses were reverent to the point of chasteness. This was perfect, something to revel in, join in, linger at. One hand stroked her back from buttocks to shoulders; the fingers of the other gently explored between the lips of her vulva and set her to shivering and shuddering. Oh, the luxury of it! The absolute glory of not caring what kind of impression she was making, whether she was being too forward or too backward, what he was thinking of her! Servilia didn't care, didn't care, didn't care. This was for herself. So she rolled on top of him and put both her hands around his erection to guide it home, then sat on it and ground her hips until she screamed her ecstasy aloud, as transfixed and pinioned as a woodland creature on a huntsman's spear. Then she fell forward and lay against his chest as limp and finished as that woodland creature killed.

  Not that he was finished with her. The lovemaking continued for what seemed hours, though she had no idea when he attained his own orgasm or whether there were several or just the one, for he made no sound and remained erect until suddenly he ceased.

  "It really is very big," she said, lifting his penis and letting it drop against his belly.

  "It really is very sticky," he said, uncoiled lithely and disappeared from the room.

  When he returned her sight had come back sufficiently to perceive that he was hairless like the statue of a god, and put together with the care of a Praxiteles Apollo.

  "You are so beautiful," she said, staring.

  "Think it if you must, but don't say it" was his answer.

  "How can you like me when you have no hair yourself?"

  "Because you're sweet and plump and juicy, and that line of black down ravishes me." He sat upon the edge of the bed and gave her a smile that made her heart beat faster. "Besides which, you enjoyed yourself. That's at least half the fun of it as far as I'm concerned."

  "Is it time to go?" she asked, sensitive to the fact that he made no move to lie down again.

  "Yes, it's time to go." He laughed. "I wonder if technically this counts as incest? Our children are engaged to be married."

  But she lacked his sense of the ridiculous, and frowned. "Of course not!"

  "A joke, Servilia, a joke," he said gently, and got up. "I hope what you wore doesn't crease. Everything is still on the floor in the other room."

  While she dressed, he began filling his bath from the cistern by dipping a leather bucket into it and tossing the water out from the bucket into the bath tirelessly. Nor did he stop when she came to watch.

  "When can we meet again?" she asked.

  "Not too often, otherwise it will pall, and I'd rather it didn't," he said, still ladling water.

  Though she was not aware of it, this was one of his tests; if the recipient of his lovemaking proceeded with tears or many protestations to show him how much she cared, his interest waned.

  "I agree with you," she said.

  The bucket stopped in mid-progress; Caesar gazed at her, arrested. "Do you really?"

  "Absolutely," she said, making sure her amber earrings were properly hooked into place. “Do you have any other women?"

  "Not at the moment, but it can change any day." This was the second test, more rigorous than the first.

  "Yes, you do have a reputation to maintain, I can see that."

  "Can you really?"

  "Of course." Though her sense of humor was vestigial, she smiled a little and said, "I understand what they all say about you now, you see. I'll be stiff and sore for days."

  "Then let's meet again the day after the Popular Assembly elections. I'm standing for curator of the Via Appia."

  "And my brother Caepio for quaestor. Silanus of course will stand for praetor in the Centuries before that."

  "And your other brother, Cato, will no doubt be elected a tribune of the soldiers."

  Her face squeezed in, mouth hard, eyes like stone. "Cato is not my brother, he's my half brother," she said.

  “They say that of Caepio too. Same mare, same stallion."

  She drew a breath, looked at Caesar levelly. "I am aware of what they say, and I believe it to be true. But Caepio bears my own family's name, and since he does, I acknowledge him."

  "That's very sensible of you," said Caesar, and returned to emptying his bucket.

  Whereupon Servilia, assured that she looked passable if not as unruffled as she had some hours before, took her departure.

  Caesar entered the bath, his face thoughtful. That was an unusual woman. A plague upon seductive feathers of black down! Such a silly thing to bring about his downfall. Down fall. A good pun, if inadvertent. He wasn't sure he liked her any better now they were lovers, yet he knew he was not about to give her her congé. For one thing, she was a rarity in other ways than in character. Women of his own class who could behave between the sheets without inhibition were as scarce as cowards in a Crassus army. Even his darling Cinnilla had preserved modesty and decorum. Well, that was the way they were brought up, poor things. And, since he had fallen into the habit of being honest with himself, he had to admit that he would make no move to have Julia brought up in any other way. Oh, there were trollops among his own class, women who were as famous for their sexual tricks as any whore from the late great Colubra to the ageing Praecia. But when Caesar wanted an uninhibited sexual frolic, he preferred to seek it among the honest and open, earthy and decent women of the Subura. Until today and Servilia. Who would ever have guessed it? She wouldn't gossip about her fling, either. He rolled over in the bath and reached for his pumice stone; no use working with a strigilis in cold water, a man needed to sweat in order to scrape.

  "And how much," he asked the drab little bit of pumice, "do I tell my mother about this? Odd! She's so detached I usually find no difficulty in talking to her about women. But I think I shall don the solid-purple toga of a censor when I mention Servilia."

  The elections were held on time that year, the Centuriate to return consuls and praetors first, then the full gamut of patricians and plebeians in the Popular Assembly to return the more minor magistrates, and finally the tribes in the Plebeian Assembly, which restricted its activities to the election of plebeian aediles and tribunes of the plebs.

  Though it was Quinctilis by the calendar and therefore ought to have been high summer, the seasons were dragging behind because Metellus Pius Pontifex Maximus had not been prone to insert those extra twenty days each second February for many years. Perhaps not so surprising then that Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus—Pompey the Great—was moved to visit Rome to behold the due process of electoral law in the Plebeian Assembly, since the weather was springish and halcyon.

  Despite his claim that he was the First Man in Rome, Pompey detested the city, and preferred to live upon his absolutely vast estates in northern Picenum. There he was a virtual king; in Rome he was uncomfortably aware that most of the Senate detested him even more than he did Rome. Among the knights who ran Rome's business world he was extremely popular and had a large following, but that fact couldn't soothe his sensitive and vulnerable image of himself when certain senatorial members of the boni and other aristocratic cliques made it clear that they thought him no more than a presumptuous upstart, a non-Roman interloper.

  His ancestry was mediocre, but by no means nonexistent, for his grandfather had been a member of the Senate and married into an impeccably Roman family, the Lucilii, and his father had been the famous Pompey Strabo, consul, victorious general of the Italian War, protector of the conservative elements in the Senate when Rome had been threatened by Marius and Cinna. But Marius and Cinna had won, and Pompey Strabo died of disease in camp outside the city. Blaming Pompey Strabo for the epidemic of enteric fever which had ravaged besieged Rome, the inhabitan
ts of the Quirinal and Viminal had dragged his naked body through the streets tied behind an ass. To the young Pompey, an outrage he had never forgiven.

  His chance had come when Sulla returned from exile and invaded the Italian Peninsula; only twenty-two years old, Pompey had enlisted three legions of his dead father's veterans and marched them to join Sulla in Campania. Well aware that Pompey had blackmailed him into a joint command, the crafty Sulla had used him for some of his more dubious enterprises as he maneuvered toward the dictatorship, then held it. Even after Sulla retired and died, he looked after this ambitious, cocksure sprig by introducing a law which allowed a man not in the Senate to be given command of Rome's armies. For Pompey had taken against the Senate, and refused to belong to it. There had followed the six years of Pompey's war against the rebel Quintus Sertorius in Spain, six years during which Pompey was obliged to reassess his military ability; he had gone to Spain utterly confident that he would beat Sertorius in no time flat, only to find himself pitted against one of the best generals in the history of Rome. In the end he simply wore Sertorius down. So the Pompey who returned to Italia was a much changed person: cunning, unscrupulous, bent on showing the Senate (which had kept him shockingly short of money and reinforcements in Spain) that he, who did not belong to it, could grind its face in the dust.

  Pompey had proceeded to do so, with the connivance of two other men—Marcus Crassus, victor against Spartacus, and none other than Caesar. With the twenty-nine-year-old Caesar pulling their strings, Pompey and Crassus used the existence of their two armies to force the Senate into allowing them to stand for the consulship. No man had ever been elected to this most senior of all magistracies before he had been at the very least a member of the Senate, but Pompey became senior consul, Crassus his colleague. Thus this extraordinary, underaged man from Picenum attained his objective in the most unconstitutional way, though it had been Caesar, six years his junior, who showed him how to do it.

  To compound the Senate's misery, the joint consulship of Pompey the Great and Marcus Crassus had been a triumph, a year of feasts, circuses, merriment and prosperity. And when it was over, both men declined to take provinces; instead, they retired into private life. The only significant law they had passed restored full powers to the tribunes of the plebs, whom Sulla had legislated into virtual impotence.

  Now Pompey was in town to see next year's tribunes of the plebs elected, and that intrigued Caesar, who encountered him and his multitudes of clients at the corner of the Sacra Via and the Clivus Orbius, just entering the lower Forum.

  "I didn't expect to see you in Rome," said Caesar as they joined forces. He surveyed Pompey from head to foot openly, and grinned. "You're looking well, and very fit besides," he said. "Keeping your figure into middle age, I see."

  "Middle age?" asked Pompey indignantly. "Just because I've already been consul doesn't mean I'm in my dotage! I won't turn thirty-eight until the end of September!"

  "Whereas I," said Caesar smugly, "have very recently turned thirty-two—at which age, Pompeius Magnus, you were not consul either."

  "Oh, you're pulling my leg," said Pompey, calming down. "You're like Cicero, you'll joke your way onto the pyre."

  "That witty I wish I was. But you haven't answered my serious question, Magnus. What are you doing in Rome for no better reason than to see the tribunes of the plebs elected? I wouldn't have thought you'd need to employ tribunes of the plebs these days."

  “A man always needs a tribune of the plebs or two, Caesar."

  "Does he now? What are you up to, Magnus?"

  The vivid blue eyes opened wide, and the glance Pompey gave Caesar was guileless. "I'm not up to anything."

  "Oh! Look!" cried Caesar, pointing at the sky. "Did you see it, Magnus?"

  "See what?" asked Pompey, scanning the clouds.

  "That bright pink pig flying like an eagle."

  "You don't believe me."

  "Correct, I don't believe you. Why not make a clean breast of it? I'm not your enemy, as you well know. In fact, I've been of enormous help to you in the past, and there's no reason why I oughtn't help your career along in the future. I'm not a bad orator, you have to admit that."

  "Well..." began Pompey, then fell silent.

  "Well what?"

  Pompey stopped, glanced behind at the crowd of clients who followed in their wake, shook his head, and detoured slightly to lean against one of the pretty marble columns which propped up the arcade outside the Basilica Aemilia's main chamber. Understanding that this was Pompey's way of avoiding eavesdroppers, Caesar ranged himself alongside the Great Man to listen while the horde of clients remained, eyes glistening and dying of curiosity, too far away to hear a word.

  “What if one of them can read our lips?'' asked Caesar.

  "You're joking again!"

  “Not really. But we could always turn our backs on them and pretend we're pissing into Aemilia's front passage."

  That was too much; Pompey cried with laughter. However, when he sobered, noted Caesar, he did turn sufficiently away from their audience to present his profile to it, and moved his lips as furtively as a Forum vendor of pornography.

  "As a matter of fact," muttered Pompey, "I do have one good fellow among the candidates this year."

  "Aulus Gabinius?"

  "How did you guess that?"

  "He hails from Picenum, and he was one of your personal staff in Spain. Besides, he's a good friend of mine. We were junior military tribunes together at the siege of Mitylene." Caesar pulled a wry face. "Gabinius didn't like Bibulus either, and the years haven't made him any fonder of the boni."

  "Gabinius is the best of good fellows," said Pompey.

  "And remarkably capable."

  "That too."

  "What's he going to legislate for you? Strip Lucullus's command off him and hand it to you on a golden salver?"

  "No, no!" snapped Pompey. "It's too soon for that! First I need a short campaign to warm my muscles up."

  "The pirates," said Caesar instantly.

  "Right this time! The pirates it is."

  Caesar bent his right knee to tuck its leg against his column and looked as if nothing more was going on than a nice chat about old times. "I applaud you, Magnus. That's not only very clever, it's also very necessary."

  "You're not impressed with Metellus Little Goat in Crete?"

  "The man's a pigheaded fool, and venal into the bargain. He wasn't brother-in-law to Verres for nothing—in more ways than one. With three good legions, he barely managed to win a land battle against twenty-four thousand motley and untrained Cretans who were led by sailors rather than soldiers."

  "Terrible," said Pompey, shaking his head gloomily. "I ask you, Caesar, what's the point in fighting land battles when the pirates operate at sea? All very well to say that it's their land bases you need to eradicate, but unless you catch them at sea you can't destroy their livelihood— their ships. Modern naval warfare isn't like Troy, you can't burn their ships drawn up on the shore. While most of them are holding you off, the rest form skeleton crews and row the fleet elsewhere."

  "Yes," said Caesar, nodding, "that's where everyone has made his mistake so far, from both Antonii to Vatia Isauricus. Burning villages and sacking towns. The task needs a man with a true talent for organization."

  "Exactly!" cried Pompey. "And I am that man, I promise you! If my self-inflicted inertia of the last couple of years has been good for nothing else, it has given me time to think. In Spain I just lowered my horns and charged blindly into the fray. What I ought to have done was work out how to win the war before I set one foot out of Mutina. I should have investigated everything beforehand, not merely how to blaze a new route across the Alps. Then I would have known how many legions I needed, how many horse troopers, how much money in my war chest—and I would have learned to understand my enemy. Quintus Sertorius was a brilliant tactician. But, Caesar, you don't win wars on tactics. Strategy is the thing, strategy!"

  "So you've been doing your homew
ork on the pirates, Magnus?"

  "Indeed I have. Exhaustively. Every single aspect, from the largest to the smallest. Maps, spies, ships, money, men. I know how to do the job," said Pompey, displaying a different kind of confidence than he used to own. Spain had been Kid Butcher's last campaign. In future he would be no butcher of any sort.

  Thus Caesar watched the ten tribunes of the plebs elected with great interest. Aulus Gabinius was a certainty, and indeed came in at the top of the poll, which meant he would be president of the new College of Tribunes of the Plebs which would enter office on the tenth day of this coming December.

  Because the tribunes of the plebs enacted most new laws and were traditionally the only legislators who liked to see change, every powerful faction in the Senate needed to "own" at least one tribune of the plebs. Including the boni, who used their men to block all new legislation; the most powerful weapon a tribune of the plebs had was the veto, which he could exercise against his fellows, against all other magistrates, and even against the Senate. That meant the tribunes of the plebs who belonged to the boni would not enact new laws, they would veto them. And of course the boni succeeded in having three men elected— Globulus, Trebellius and Otho. None was a brilliant man, but then a boni tribune of the plebs didn't need to be brilliant; he simply needed to be able to articulate the word "Veto!"

  Pompey had two excellent men in the new College to pursue his ends. Aulus Gabinius might be relatively ancestorless and a poor man, but he would go far; Caesar had known that as far back as the siege of Mitylene. Naturally Pompey's other man was also from Picenum: a Gaius Cornelius who was not a patrician any more than he was a member of the venerable gens Cornelia. Perhaps he was not as tied to Pompey as Gabinius was, but he certainly would not veto any plebiscite Gabinius might propose to the Plebs.