Caesar (4 page)

Then when Julia on her bier came past the Regia into the open space of the lower Forum, everyone gasped, choked, began to scream. I've been less frightened at barbarian ululations on a battlefield than I was at those bloodcurdling screams. The crowd surged, rushed at the bier. No one could stop them. Ahenobarbus and some of the tribunes of the plebs tried, but they were shoved aside like leaves in a flood. The next thing, the people had carried the bier to the very center of the open space. They began piling up all kinds of things onto a pyre—their shoes, papers, bits of wood. The stuff kept coming from the back of the crowd overhead—I don't even know where they got it from. They burned her right there in the Forum Romanum, with Ahenobarbus having an apoplectic fit on the Senate steps and Servius aghast on the rostra, where the actors had fled to huddle like barbarian women when they know that the legions are going to cut them down. There were empty chariots and bolting horses all over Rome, and the chief mourners had gotten no further than Vesta, where we stood helpless. But that wasn't the end of it by any means. There were leaders of the Plebs in the crowd too, and they went to beard Ahenobarbus on the Senate steps. Julia, they said, was to have her ashes placed in a tomb on the Campus Martius, among the heroes. Cato was with Ahenobarbus. They defied this deputation. No, no! Women were never interred on the Campus Martius! Over their dead bodies would it happen! I really did think Ahenobarbus would have a stroke. But the crowd kept gathering until finally Ahenobarbus and Cato realized that it would be their dead bodies unless they yielded. They had to swear an oath. So my dear little girl is to have a tomb on the sward of the Campus Martius among the heroes. I haven't been able to control my grief enough to set it in train, but I will. The most magnificent tomb there, you have my word on it. The worst of it is that the Senate has forbidden funeral games in her honor. No one trusts the crowd to behave.

I have done my duty. I have told it all. Your mother took it very hard, Caesar. I remember I said she didn't look a day over forty-five. But now she looks her full seventy years. The Vestal Virgins are caring for her—your little wife Calpurnia is too. She'll miss Julia. They were good friends. Oh, here are the tears again. I have wept an ocean. My girl is gone forever. How can I bear it?

How can I bear it? The sheer shock left Caesar dry-eyed. Julia? How can I bear it? How can I bear it? My one chick, my perfect pearl. I am not long turned forty-six, and my daughter is dead in childbirth. That was how her mother died, trying to bear me a son. What circles the world goes in! Oh, Mater, how can I face you when the time comes for me to return to Rome? How can I face the condolences, the trial of strength which must come after the death of a beloved child? They will all want to commiserate, and they will all be sincere. But how can I bear it? To turn upon them a gaze wounded to the quick, show them my pain—I cannot do it. My pain is mine. It belongs to no one else. No one else should see it. I haven't set eyes on my child for five years, and now I will never set eyes on her again. I can hardly remember what she looked like. Except that she never gave me the slightest pain or heartache. Well, that's what they say. Only the good die young. Only the perfect are never marred by age or soured by a long life. Oh, Julia! How can I bear it?He got up from the curule chair, though he didn't feel the movement in his legs.

Sextilis still lay on the table. September still lay in his hand. Through the flap of the tent, out into the disciplined busyness of a camp on the edge of nowhere at the end of all things. His face was serene, and his eyes when they met those belonging to Aulus Hirtius, loitering purposefully just beyond the flagpole, were Caesar's eyes. Cool rather than cold. Omniscient, as Mandubracius had observed.

“Everything all right, Caesar?” Hirtius asked, straightening.

Caesar smiled pleasantly. “Yes, Hirtius, everything is all right.” He put his left hand up to shade his brow and looked toward the setting sun. “It's past dinnertime, and there's King Mandubracius to fete. We can't have these Britons thinking we're churlish hosts. Especially when we're serving them their food. Would you get things started? I'll be there soon.” He turned left to the open space of the camp forum adjoining his command tent, and there found a young legionary, obviously on punishment detail, raking the smoldering remains of a fire. When the soldier saw the General approaching he raked harder, vowed that never again would he be found at fault on parade. But he had never seen Caesar close up, so when the tall figure bore down on him, he paused for a moment to take a good look. Whereupon the General smiled!"

Don't put it out completely, lad; I need one live coal,“ Caesar said in the broad, slangy Latin of the ranker soldiers. ”What did you do to earn this job in such stinking hot weather?"

“Didn't get the strap on my helmet fixed, General.” Caesar bent, a little scroll in his right hand, and held its corner against a smoking chunk of wood still faintly glowing. It caught; Caesar straightened and kept his fingers on the paper until the flames licked round them. Only when it disintegrated to airy black flakes did he let it go.“ Never neglect your gear, soldier; it's all that stands between you and a Cassi spear.” He turned to walk back to the command tent, but threw over his shoulder, laughing, “No, not quite all, soldier! There are your valor and your Roman mind. They're what really win for you. However, a helmet firmly on your noddle does keep that Roman mind intact!”

Fire forgotten, the young legionary stared after the General with his jaw dropped. What a man! He'd talked as if to a person! So soft-spoken. And had all the jargon right. But he'd never served in the ranks, surely! How did he know? Grinning, the soldier finished raking furiously, then stamped on the ashes. The General knew, just as he knew the name of every centurion in his army. He was Caesar.

To a Briton, the main stronghold of Cassivellaunus and his tribe of Cassi was impregnable; it stood on a steep but gently rounded hill, and was encircled by great bulwarks of earth reinforced with logs. The Romans hadn't been able to find it because it stood in the midst of many miles of dense forest, but with Mandubracius and Trinobellunus as guides, Caesar's march to it was direct and swift.

He was clever, Cassivellaunus. After that first pitched battle—lost when the Aedui cavalry overcame their terror of the chariots and discovered they were easier to deal with than German horsemen—the King of the Cassi had adopted true Fabian tactics. He had dismissed his infantry and shadowed the Roman column with four thousand chariots, striking suddenly during some forest leg of the Roman march, chariots erupting from between the trees through spaces barely wide enough to permit their passage, and always attacking Caesar's foot soldiers, who hadn't been able to come to terms with their fear of these archaic weapons of war. They were frightening, that was inarguable. The warrior stood to the right of his driver, one spear at the ready in his right hand and several more clenched in his left hand, his sword in a scabbard fixed to the short wicker wall by his right side, and he fought almost naked, curlicued from bare head to bare feet with woad. When his spears were gone he drew his sword and ran forward, nimble and fast as a tumbler, on the pole between the pair of little horses which drew the car, while the driver lashed the team into the midst of the Roman soldiers. The warrior then leaped from his superior height on the pole in among the flailing hooves, laying about him with impunity as the soldiers backed away to avoid the plunging horses.

But by the time Caesar took that last march to the Cassi stronghold, his dour and stoic troops were utterly fed up with Britannia, chariots and short rations. Not to mention the terrible heat. They were used to heat; they could march fifteen hundred miles in heat with no more than an occasional day off to rest, each man carrying his thirty-pound load on a forked stick balanced across his left shoulder, and under the weight of his knee-length chain mail shirt, which he cinched on his hips with his sword and dagger belt to ease its twenty pounds off his shoulders. What they were not used to was the saturation-point humidity; it had snailed them during this second expedition, so much so that Caesar had needed to revise his estimates of how far the men could go during a day's foot slogging. In ordinary Italian or Spanish heat, upward of thirty miles a day. In Britannic heat, twenty-five miles a day.

This day, however, was easier. With the Trinobantes and a small detachment of foot left behind to hold his field camp, his men could march free of impedimenta, helmets on their heads, pila in their own hands instead of on each octet's mule. As they entered the forest, they were ready. Caesar's orders had been specific: don't give an inch of ground, take the horses on your shields and have your pila aimed to plug the drivers straight through their blue-painted chests, then go for the warriors with your swords, boys.

To keep their spirits up, Caesar marched in the middle of the column himself. Mostly he could be found walking, preferring to mount his charger with the toes only when he required additional height to scan the distance. But he usually walked surrounded by his staff of legates and tribunes. Not today. Today he strode along beside Asicius, a junior centurion of the Tenth, joking with those ahead and behind who could hear.

The chariot attack, when it came, was upon the rear of the four-mile-long Roman column, just far enough in front of the Aedui rearguard to make it impossible for the cavalry to go forward; the road was narrow, the chariots everywhere. But this time the legionaries charged forward with their shields deflecting the horses, launched a volley of javelins at the drivers, then went for the warriors. They were fed up with Britannia, but they were not prepared to go back to Gaul without cutting down a few Cassi charioteers. And a Gallic longsword was no match for the short, upward-thrusting gladius of a Roman legionary when the enemy was at close quarters. The chariots drew off between the trees in disorder and did not appear again. After that, the stronghold was easy.

“Like snitching a rattle off a baby!” said Asicius cheerfully to his general before they went into action.

Caesar mounted an attack simultaneously on opposite sides of the ramparts, which the legionaries took in their stride while the Aedui, whooping, rode up and over. The Cassi scattered in all directions, though many of them died. Caesar owned their citadel. Together with a great deal of food, enough to pay the Trinobantes back and feed his own men until they quit Britannia forever. But perhaps the greatest Cassi loss was their chariots, gathered inside unharnessed. The elated legionaries chopped them into small pieces and burned them on a great bonfire, while the Trinobantes who had come along made off joyously with the horses. Of other booty there was practically none; Britannia was not rich in gold or silver, and there were certainly no pearls. The plate was Arvernian pottery and the drinking vessels were made of horn.

Time to return to Gaul of the Long-hairs. The equinox was drawing near (the seasons were, as usual, well behind the calendar) and the battered Roman ships would not sustain the onslaught of those frightful equinoctial gales. Food supply secured, the Trinobantes left behind in possession of most of the Cassi lands and animals, Caesar put two of his four legions in front of the miles-long baggage train and two behind, then marched for his beach.

“What do you intend to do about Cassivellaunus?” asked Gaius Trebonius, plodding alongside the General; if the General walked, even his chief legate couldn't ride, worse luck.

“He'll be back to try again,” said Caesar tranquilly. “I'll leave on time, but not without his submission and that treaty.”

“You mean he'll try again on the march?”

“I doubt that. He lost too many men when his stronghold fell. Including a thousand chariot warriors. Plus all his chariots.”

“The Trinobantes were quick to make off with the horses. They've profited mightily.”

“That's why they helped us. Down today, up tomorrow.” He seemed the same, thought Trebonius, who loved him and worried about him. But he wasn't. What had that letter contained, the one he burned? They had all noticed a subtle difference; then Hirtius had told them of Pompey's letters. No one would have dared to read any correspondence Caesar elected not to hand over to Hirtius or Faberius, yet Caesar had gone to the trouble of burning Pompey's letter. As if burning his boats. Why?

Nor was that all. Caesar hadn't shaved. Highly significant in a man whose horror of body lice was so great that he plucked every hair of armpits, chest and groin, a man who would shave in the midst of total turmoil. You could see the scant hair on his head rise at the mere mention of vermin; he drove his servants mad by demanding that everything he wore be freshly laundered, no matter what the circumstances were. He wouldn't spend one night on an earthen floor because so often the earth contained fleas, for which reason in his personal baggage there were always sections of wooden flooring for his command tent. What fun his enemies in Rome had had with that item of information! The plain unvarnished wood had become marble and mosaic on some of those destructive tongues. Yet he would pick up a huge spider and laugh at its antics as it ran around his hand, something the most decorated centurion in the Tenth would have fainted at the thought of doing. They were, he would explain, clean creatures, respectable housekeepers. Cockroaches, on the other hand, would see him on top of a table, nor could he bear to soil the sole of his boot by crushing one. They were filthy creatures, he would say, shuddering.

Yet here he was, three days on the road, eleven days since that letter, and he had not shaved. Someone close to him was dead. He was in mourning. Who? Yes, they'd find out when they got back to Portus Itius, but what his silence said was that he would have no conversation about it, nor have it mentioned in his presence even after it became general knowledge. He and Hirtius both thought it must be Julia. Trebonius reminded himself to take that idiot Sabinus to one side and threaten him with circumcision if he offered the General his condolences—what had ever possessed the man to ask Caesar why he wasn't shaving?

“Quintus Laberius,” Caesar had answered briefly.

No, it wasn't Quintus Laberius. It had to be Julia. Or perhaps his legendary mother, Aurelia. Though why would Pompey have been the one to write the news of that?

Quintus Cicero—who was, much to everyone's relief, a far less irksome fellow than his puffed-up-with-importance brother, the Great Advocate—thought it was Julia too.

“Only how is he going to hold Pompeius Magnus if it is?” Quintus Cicero had asked in the legates' mess tent over yet one more dinner to which Caesar hadn't come.

Trebonius (whose forebears were not even as illustrious as Quintus Cicero's) was a member of the Senate and therefore well acquainted with political alliances—including those cemented by a marriage—so he had understood Quintus Cicero's question at once. Caesar needed Pompey the Great, who was the First Man in Rome. The war in Gaul was far from over; Caesar thought that it might even take the full five years of his second command to finish the job. But there were so many senatorial wolves howling for his carcass that he perpetually walked a tightrope above a pit of fire. Trebonius, who loved him and worried about him, found it difficult to believe that any man could inspire the kind of hatred Caesar seemed to generate. That sanctimonious fart Cato had made a whole career out of trying to bring Caesar down, not to mention Caesar's colleague in his consulship, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, and that boar Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, and the great aristocrat Metellus Scipio, thick as a wooden temple beam.

They slavered after Pompey's hide too, but not with the strange and obsessive passion only Caesar seemed to fan in them. Why? Oh, they ought to go on campaign with the man, that would show them! You didn't doubt even in the darkest corner of your thoughts that things might go crashing when Caesar was in command. No matter how wrong they went, he could always find a way to go on. And a way to win.

“Why do they pick on him?” Trebonius had asked angrily.

“Simple,” Hirtius had answered, grinning. “He's the Alexandrian lighthouse to their little oakum wick poking out of the end of Priapus's mentula. They pick on Pompeius Magnus because he's the First Man in Rome, and they don't believe there ought to be one. But Pompeius is a Picentine descended from a woodpecker. Whereas Caesar is a Roman descended from Venus and Romulus. All Romans worship their aristocrats, but some Romans prefer 'em to be like Metellus Scipio. Every time Cato and Bibulus and the rest of that lot look at Caesar, they see someone who's better than they are in every possible way. Just like Sulla. Caesar's got the birth and the ability to swat them like flies. They just want to get in first and swat him.”

“He needs Pompeius,” Trebonius had said thoughtfully.

“If he's to retain his imperium and his provinces,” said Quintus Cicero, dipping his boring campaign bread into a dish of third-rate oil. “Ye Gods, I'll be glad to have some roast goose in Portus Itius!” he said then, closing the subject.

The roast goose looked imminent when the army reached its main camp behind that long, sandy beach. Unfortunately Cassivellaunus had other ideas. With what he had left of his own Cassi, he went the rounds of the Cantii and the Regni, the two tribes who lived south of the Tamesa, and marshaled another army. But attacking this camp was to break the Briton hand against a stone wall. The Briton horde, all on foot, bared naked chests to the defenders atop the fortifications and were picked off by javelins like so many targets lined up on a drill field. Nor had the Britons yet learned the lesson the Gauls had: when Caesar led his men out of the camp to fight hand to hand, the Britons stayed to be cut down. For they still adhered to their ancient traditions, which said that a man who left a field of defeat alive was an outcast. That tradition had cost the Belgae on the mainland fifty thousand wasted lives in one battle. Now the Belgae abandoned the field the moment defeat was imminent, and lived to fight again another day.

Cassivellaunus sued for peace, submitted, and signed the treaty Caesar demanded. Then handed over hostages. It was the end of November by the calendar, the beginning of autumn by the seasons.

The evacuation began, but after a personal inspection of each of some seven hundred ships, Caesar decided it would have to be in two parts.

“Something over half the fleet is in good condition,” he said to Hirtius, Trebonius, Sabinus, Quintus Cicero and Atrius. “We'll put all the cavalry, all the baggage animals save for the century mules, and two of the legions on board that half, and send it to Portus Itius first. Then the ships can come back empty and pick up me and the last three legions.” With him he kept Trebonius and Atrius; the other legates were ordered to sail with the first fleet.

“I'm pleased and flattered to be asked to stay,” Trebonius said, watching those three hundred and fifty ships pushed down into the water. These were the vessels Caesar had ordered specially built along the Liger River and then sent out into the open ocean to do battle with the two hundred and twenty solid-oak sailing ships of the Veneti, who thought the Roman vessels ludicrous with their oars and their flimsy pine hulls, their low prows and poops. Toy boats for sailing on a bathtub sea, easy meat. But it hadn't worked out that way at all.

While Caesar and his land army picnicked atop the towering cliffs to the north of the mouth of the Liger and watched the action like spectators in the Circus Maximus, Caesar's ships produced the fangs Decimus Brutus and his engineers had grown during that frantic winter building the fleet. The leather sails of the Veneti vessels were so heavy and stout that the main shrouds were chain rather than rope; knowing this, Decimus Brutus had equipped each of his more than three hundred ships with a long pole to which were fixed a barbed hook and a set of grapples. A Roman ship would row in close to a Veneti ship and maneuver alongside, whereupon its crew would tilt their pole, tangle it among the Veneti shrouds, then sprint away under oar power. Down came the Veneti sails and masts, leaving the vessel helpless in the water. Three Roman ships would then surround it like terriers a deer, board it, kill the crew and set fire to it. When the wind fell, Decimus Brutus's victory became complete. Only twenty Veneti ships had escaped.