Caesar (77 page)

He waited then until the last of the echoing voices died away. No one made a sound, save for Pullo and Vorenus, weeping. Every eye was riveted on Caesar.“ How could you?” he cried then to the Ninth. “Oh, you have no idea how profoundly I have thanked all of our Gods that Quintus Cicero is not here today! But this isn't his legion—these men can't be the same men who held off fifty thousand Nervii for over thirty days, who all bore wounds, who all sickened, who all watched their food and baggage go up in flames—AND WHO SOLDIERED ON! No, these aren't the same men! These men are puling, avaricious, mean, unworthy! I won't call men like these my boys! I don't want them!”

Both hands went out. “How could you? How could you believe the men who whispered among you? What have I ever done to deserve this? When you were hungry, did I eat better? When you were cold, did I sleep warm? When you were afraid, did I deride you? When you needed me, wasn't I there? When I gave you my word, did I ever go back on it? What have I done? What have I done?” The hands shook, clenched. “Who are these men among you, that you believe them before you believe me? What laurels are on their brows that I have not worn? Are they the champions of Mars? Are they greater men than I? Have they served you better than I? Have they enriched you more than I? No, you haven't had your share of the triumphal spoils yet—nor has any other among my legions! But you've had much from me despite that—cash bonuses I found out of my own purse! I doubled your pay! Is your pay in arrears? No, it is not! Haven't I compensated you for the lack of booty a civil war forbids? What have I done?” The hands fell. “The answer is, Ninth, that I have done nothing to merit a mutiny, even were mutiny an accepted prerogative. But mutiny is not an accepted prerogative. Mutiny is high treason, were I the stingiest, crudest commander-in-chief in the entire history of Rome! You have spat on me. I do not dignify you by spitting back. I simply call you unworthy to be my boys!”

A voice rang out: Sextus Cloatius, tears streaming down his face. “Caesar, Caesar, don't!” he wailed, walking out of the front rank and up to the dais. “I can bear the discharge. I can bear the loss of money. I can bear being decimated if the lot falls on me. But I can't bear not to be one of your boys!”

Out they came, all of the ten men who had formed the Ninth's deputation, weeping, begging forgiveness, offering to die if only Caesar would call them his boys, accord them the old respect. The grief spread; the rankers sobbed and moaned. Genuine, heartfelt. They're such children! thought Caesar, listening. Swayed by fair words out of foul mouths. Gulled like Apulians in congress with charlatans. Children. Brave, hard, sometimes cruel. But not men in the true sense of that word. Children. He let them have their tears.“ Very well,” he said then, “I won't discharge you. I won't deem you all guilty of high treason. But there are terms. I want the one hundred and twenty ringleaders in this mutiny. They will all be discharged, they will all forfeit their citizenship. And I will decimate them, which means twelve of them will die in the traditional way. Produce them now.” Eighty of them constituted Carfulenus's entire century, the first of the Seventh Cohort; the other forty included Carfulenus's centurion friends. And Cloatius and Aponius. The lots to choose the twelve men who would die had been rigged; Sulpicius Rufus had made his own enquiries as to the true ringleaders. One of whom, the centurion Marcus Pusio, was not among the one hundred and twenty men the Ninth indicated.“ Is there any innocent man here?” asked Caesar.“ Yes!” cried a voice from the depths of the Ninth. “His centurion, Marcus Pusio, nominated him. But Pusio is guilty!”

“Step out, soldier,” said Caesar. The innocent man stepped out.“ Pusio, take his place.” Carfulenus, Pusio, Apicius and Scaptius drew death lots; the other eight doomed men were all rankers, but heavily implicated. The sentences were carried out immediately. In each decury of the nominated men, the nine whom the lots let live were given cudgels and ordered to beat the owner of the death lot until he was unrecognizable pulp.“ Good,” said Caesar when it was over. But it wasn't good. He could never again say that his troops were innocent of mutiny. “Rufus, have you a revised list of centurion seniority for me?”

“Yes, Caesar.”

“Then restructure your legion accordingly. I've lost over twenty of the Ninth's centurions today.”

“I'm glad we didn't have to lose the whole Ninth,” said Gaius Fabius, sighing. “What an awful business!”

“One really bad man,” said Trebonius, sad face sadder. “If it hadn't been for Carfulenus, I doubt it would have happened.”

“Perhaps so,” said Caesar, voice hard, “but it did happen. I will never forgive the Ninth.”

“Caesar, they're not all bad!” said Fabius, perturbed.“ No, they're simply children. Yet why do people expect that children must be forgiven? They're not animals, they're members of the gens humana. Therefore they ought to be able to think for themselves. I will never forgive the Ninth. As they will discover when this civil war is over and I do discharge them. They won't get land in Italia or Italian Gaul. They can go to a colony near Narbo.” He nodded dismissal. Fabius and Trebonius walked to their own quarters together, very quiet at first. Finally, from Fabius: “Trebonius, is it my imagination, or is Caesar changing?”

“Hardening, you mean?”

“I'm not sure that's the right word. Perhaps ... yes, more conscious of his specialness. Does that make sense?”

“Definitely.”

“Why?”

“Oh, the march of events,” said Trebonius. “They'd have broken a lesser man. What's held him together is that he's never doubted himself. But the mutiny of the Ninth has fractured something in him. He never dreamed of it. He didn't think it could ever, ever happen to him. In many ways, I think a worse Rubicon for Caesar than that piddling river.”

“He still believes in himself.”

“He'll still believe in himself while he's dying,” said Gaius Trebonius. “It's just that today tarnished his idea of himself. Caesar wants perfection. Nothing must diminish him.”

“He asks with increasing frequency why no one will believe he can win this war,” said Fabius, frowning.“ Because he's getting angrier at the foolishness of other people. Imagine, Fabius, what it must be like to know that there is no one in your league! Caesar knows. He can do anything! He's proven it too many times to enumerate. All he really wants is to be acknowledged for what he is. Yet it doesn't happen. He gets opposition, not recognition. This is a war to prove to other people what you and I—and Caesar—already know. He's turned fifty, and he's still battling for what he considers his due. Little wonder, I think, that he's growing thin-skinned.”

At the beginning of November the eight legions gathered at Placentia marched for Brundisium, with almost two months to complete that five-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey; once they reached the Adriatic coast they were to proceed down its length, rather than cross the Apennines to skirt the vicinity of Rome. The pace was set at twenty miles a day, which meant that every second or third day was one of rest. To Caesar's legions, a glorious holiday, especially at this autumnal time of year. From Ariminum, which welcomed him just as enthusiastically at the end of this year as it had at its beginning, Caesar turned to take the Via Flaminia to Rome. Up and over the lovely mountains of the homeland, their little fortified towns sitting atop this crag and that, the grass richly yellowed for nutritious grazing, the great forests of fir, larch, pitch-pine and pine stretching to the heights of the peaks, enough building timber for centuries to come. The careful husbanding which saw virtue in pure beauty, the natural affinity all Italians seemed to have for visual harmony. For Caesar, a kind of healing, that journey, taken at something less than his usual headlong pace; he stopped in every town of any size to enquire how things were, what was needed, where Rome's omissions lay. Speaking to the duumvirs of the smallest municipia as if they mattered to him quite as much as the Senate of Rome. Truth was, he reflected, they mattered more. Like all great cities, Rome was to some extent an artificial growth; as with all such excrescences, it sucked vitality unto itself, and often at the expense of the less numerous and less powerful places doomed to feed it. The cuckoo in the Italian nest. Owning the numbers, Rome owned the clout. Owning the numbers, its politicians favored it. Owning the numbers, it overshadowed all else. Which it did, he had to admit, approaching it from the north; that other visit at the beginning of April had been a dim and nightmarish business, so much so that he hadn't noticed the city herself. Not as he did now, looking at the seven hills asprawl with orange-tiled roofs, glitters of gold from gilded temple eaves, tall cypresses, umbelliferous pines, arched aqueducts, the deep blue and strongly flowing width of Father Tiber with the grassy plains of Martius and Vaticanus on either bank. They came out to meet him in thousands upon thousands, faces beaming, hands throwing flowers like a heady carpet for Toes to walk upon—would he have entered riding any but Toes? They cheered him, they blew him kisses, they held up their babies and small children for him to smile at, they shouted love and encouragement. And he, clad in his finest silver armor, his Civic Crown of oak leaves upon his head, rode at a slow walk behind the twenty-four crimson-clad lictors who belonged to the Dictator and carried the axes in their bundles of rods. Smiling, waving, vindicated at last. Weep, Pompeius! Weep, Cato! Weep, Bibulus! Never once for any of you, this ecstasy. What matters the Senate, what matters the Eighteen? These people are Rome, and these people still love me. They outnumber you as the stars do a cluster of lanterns. And they belong to me. He rode into the city through the Fontinalis Gate alongside the Arx of the Capitol and down the Hill of the Bankers to the fire-blackened ruins of the Basilica Porcia, the Curia Hostilia and the Senate offices; good then to find that Paullus had used that huge bribe to better effect than he had his consulship by finishing the Basilica Aemilia. And his own Basilica Julia on the opposite side of the lower Forum, where the Basilicae Opimia and Sempronia had been, was growing from nothing. It would cast the Basilica Aemilia in the shade. So would the Curia Julia, the new home of the Senate, once he had seen the architects and commenced. Yes, he would put that temple pediment on the Domus Publica, make it more appealing from the Sacra Via, and clothe its facade all the way around with marble. But his first visit was to the Regia, tiny temple of the Pontifex Maximus; there he entered alone, saw to his satisfaction that the hallowed place was clean and free from vermin, its altar unstained, its twin laurel trees thriving. A brief prayer to Ops, then it was out and across to his home, the Domus Publica. Not a formal occasion; he went in through his own entrance and closed its door upon the sighing, satiated crowd. As Dictator he could wear armor within the pomerium, have his lictors bear the axes; when he disappeared within the Domus Publica they nodded genially to the people and walked to their own College behind the inn on the corner of the Clivus Orbius. But the formalities were not over for Caesar, who had not set foot inside the Domus Publica on that hasty visit in April; he had now as Pontifex Maximus to greet his charges, the Vestal Virgins. Who waited for him in the great temple common to both sides of that divided house. Oh, where had the time gone? The Chief Vestal had been little more than a child when he had departed for Gaul—how Mater had railed at her liking for food! Quinctilia, now twenty-two and Chief Vestal. No thinner, but, he saw now with relief, a jolly young woman whose good sense and practical disposition shone out of her round, homely face. Beside her, Junia, not much younger, quite pretty. And there was his blackbird, Cornelia Merula, a tall and fine young lady of eighteen. Behind them, three little girls, all new since his time here. The three adult Vestals were clad in full regalia, white robes, white veils perched upon the mandatory seven sausages of wool, their bulla medallions upon their breasts. For the children, white robes but no veils; they wore wreaths of flowers instead.“ Welcome, Caesar,” said Quinctilia, smiling.“ How good it is to be home!” he said, longing to embrace her, knowing he could not. “Junia and Cornelia, grown up too!”

They smiled, nodded.“ And who are the little ones?”

“Licinia Terentia, daughter of Marcus Varro Lucullus.” Yes, she had that look—long face, grey eyes, brown hair.“ Claudia, daughter of the Censor's eldest son.” Dark and pretty, very Claudian.“ Caecilia Metella, of the Caprarian Metelli.” A stormy one, fierce and proud.“ Fabia, Arruntia and Popillia, all gone!” he marveled. “I have been away too long.”

“We have kept Vesta's hearth burning,” said Quinctilia.“ And Rome is safe because of you.” Smiling, he dismissed them and turned then to enter his own half of the great house. An ordeal without Aurelia. It was indeed a reunion full of tears, but these were tears that had to be shed. They had all come to see him who belonged to the days in the Subura—Eutychus, Cardixa and Burgundus. How old they were! Seventies? Eighties? Did it matter? They were so glad to see him! Oh, all those sons of Cardixa and Burgundus! Some of them were grizzled! But no one was allowed to remove the scarlet cloak, the cuirass and the skirt of pteryges save Burgundus; Caesar had to fight to remove the sash of his imperium himself. Then finally he was free to find his wife, who had not come to him. That was her nature, to wait. Patient as Penelope weaving her shroud. He found her in Aurelia's old sitting room, though it bore no sign of his mother anymore. Barefoot, he moved as quietly as one of her cats; she didn't see him. Sitting in a chair with fat orange Felix in her lap. Had he ever realized she was lovely? It didn't seem so, from this distance. Dark hair, long and graceful neck, fine cheekbones, beautiful breasts.“ Calpurnia,” he said. She turned at once, dark eyes wide. “Domine,” she said.“ Caesar, not domine.” He bent to kiss her, the perfectly correct salutation for a wife of scant months not seen for many years: affectionate, appreciative, promising more. He sat down in a chair close to her, where he could see her face. Smiling, he pushed a strand of hair off her brow; the dozing cat, sensing a foreign presence, opened one yellow eye and rolled onto its back, all four feet in the air.“ He likes you,” she said, surprise in her voice.“ So he should. I rescued him from a watery grave.”