The October Horse (42 page)

“Yes,” said Simmias.

“Death is the separation of Soul and body. To be dead is the end result of this separation.”

Yes, yes, yes, it must be so! What I am is more than mere body, what I am contains the white fire of my Soul, and when my body is dead, my Soul is free. Socrates, Socrates, reassure me! Give me the strength and purpose to do what I must do!

“To enjoy pure knowledge, we must shed our bodies.... The Soul is made in the image of God, and is immortal, and has intelligence, and is uniform, and cannot change. She is immutable. Whereas the body is made in the image of humankind. It is mortal. It has no intelligence, it has many shapes, and it disintegrates. Can you deny this?”

“No.”

“So if what I say is true, then the body must decay, but the Soul cannot.”

Yes, yes, Socrates is right, she is immortal! She will not dissolve when my body dies!

Enormously relieved, Cato put the book in his lap and looked at the wall, his eyes seeking his sword. At first he thought what he saw was the aftereffect of the wine, then his mortal eyes, so filled with false visions, acknowledged the truth: his sword had gone. He transferred the book to his side table and rose to strike a copper gong with a muted hammer. The sound thrummed away into the darkness, torn by lightning, enhanced by thunder.

A servant came.

“Where is Prognanthes?” Cato asked.

“The storm, domine, the storm. His children are crying.”

“My sword is gone. Fetch me my sword at once.”

The servant bowed and vanished. Some time later, Cato struck the gong again. “My sword is gone. Fetch it at once.”

This time the man looked afraid, nodded and hurried off.

Cato picked up the Phaedo and continued to read it to its end, but the words didn't impinge. He struck the gong a third time.

“Yes, domine?”

“Send every servant to the atrium, including Prognanthes.”

He met them there and looked angrily at his steward. “Where is my sword, Prognanthes?”

“Domine, we have searched and searched, but it cannot be found.”

Cato moved so fast that no one actually saw him stride across the room to punch Prognanthes, just heard the crack! of Cato's fist against the steward's massive jaw. He fell unconscious, but no servant went to help him, just stood shivering, staring at Cato.

Young Cato and Statyllus erupted into the room.

“Father, please, please!” Young Cato wept, throwing his arms about his father.

Who shook him off as if he stank. “Am I a madman, Marcus, that you deny me my protection against Caesar? Do you deem me incompetent, that you dare to take my sword? I don't need it to take my own life, if that's what's worrying you—taking my own life is simple. All I have to do is hold my breath or dash my head against a wall. My sword is my right! Bring me my sword!”

The son fled, sobbing wildly, while four of the servants took hold of the inanimate Prognanthes and carried him away. Only two of the lowliest slaves remained.

“Bring me my sword,” he said to them.

The noise of its coming preceded it, for the rain had died to a gentle murmur; the storm was passing out to sea. A toddling child brought it in, both hands around its ivory eagle hilt, the tip of the blade making a scraping sound as the little fellow dragged it doggedly behind him across the floor. Cato bent and picked it up, tested its point and edges; still razor sharp.

“I am my own man again,” he said, and returned to his room.

Now he could reread the Phaedo and make sense of it. Help me, Socrates! Show me that my fear is needless!

“Those who love knowledge are aware that their Souls are no more than attached to their bodies as with glue or pins. Whereas those who do not love knowledge are unaware that each pleasure, each pain is a kind of nail fastening the Soul to the body like a rivet, so that she emulates the body, and believes that all her truths arise from the body ... Is there an opposite to life?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Death.”

“And what do we call the thing that owns no death?”

“Immortal.”

“Does the Soul own death?”

“No.”

“Then the Soul is immortal?”

“Yes.”

“The Soul cannot perish when the body dies, for the Soul does not admit of death as a part of herself.”

There it is, manifest, the truth of all truths.

•      •      •

Cato rolled and tied the Phaedo, kissed it, then lay down upon his bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep while the storm muttered and grumbled into a profound calm.

In the middle of the night his right hand woke him, stabbing, throbbing; he gazed at it in dismay, then struck the gong.

“Send for the physician Cleanthes,” he told the servant, “and summon Butas here to see me.”

His agent came with suspicious celerity; Cato eyed him with irony, realizing that at least a third of Utica knew that its prefect had demanded his sword. “Butas, go down to the harbor and make sure that those trying to board vessels are all right.”

Butas went; outside he paused to whisper to Statyllus. “He can't be thinking of suicide, he's too concerned with the present. You imagine things.”

So the household cheered up, and Statyllus, who had been on the point of fetching Lucius Gratidius, changed his mind. Cato wouldn't thank him for sending a centurion to plead with him!

When the physician Cleanthes arrived, Cato held out his right hand. “I've broken it,” he said. “Splint it so I can use it.”

While Cleanthes worked at an impossible task, Butas returned to inform Cato that the weather had played havoc with the ships, and that many refugees were in a state of confusion.

“Oh, poor things!” said Cato. “Come back at dawn and let me know more, Butas.”

Cleanthes coughed delicately. “I have done the best I can, domine, but may I remain in your house a while longer? I am told that the steward Prognanthes is still unconscious.”

“Oh, him! His jaw is like his name—a rocky shelf. He broke my hand, a wretched nuisance. Yes, go and tend him if you must.”

He was awake when Butas reported at dawn that the situation on the waterfront had settled down. As the agent left, Cato lay down on his bed.

“Close the door, Butas,” he said.

The moment the door shut, he took the sword from where he had propped it against the end of his narrow bed and attempted to maneuver it into the traditional position, drive it upward under his rib cage into his chest just to the left of the sternum. But the broken hand refused to obey, even when he tore the splint off it. In the end he simply plunged the blade into his belly as high as he could, and sawed from side to side to enlarge the rent in his abdomen wall. As he groaned and hacked, determined to succeed, to liberate his pure and unsullied Soul, his traitorous body suddenly snatched control from his will, jerked massively; Cato fell off the bed and sent an abacus flying into the gong with a clatter and a huge, sonorous boom.

The household came running from all directions, Cato's son in the lead, to find Cato on the floor in a spreading lake of blood, entrails strewn around him in steaming heaps. The grey eyes were wide open, unseeing.

Young Cato was howling hysterically, but Statyllus, too far into shock to weep, saw Cato's eyes blink.

“He's alive! He's still alive! Cleanthes, he's alive!”

The physician was already kneeling beside Cato; he glared up at Statyllus. “Help me, you idiot!” he barked.

Together they gathered up Cato's bowels and put them back inside his abdomen, Cleanthes cursing and pushing, shaking the mass until it settled and he could draw the edges of the wound together comfortably. Then he took his curved needle and some clean linen thread and sewed the awful gash tightly, each stitch separate but in close proximity; dozens of them.

“He's so strong he might live,” he said, standing back to review his handiwork. “It all depends how much blood he's lost. We must thank Asklepios that he's unconscious.”

•      •      •

Cato came up out of a peaceful place into a terrible agony. A hideous wail of pain erupted, neither shriek nor groan; his eyes opened to see many people crowded around him, his son's face repulsive with tears and snot, Staryllus emitting whimpers, the physician Cleanthes turning with wet hands from a bowl of water, and clusters of slaves, a crying babe, keening women.

“You will live, Marcus Cato!” Cleanthes cried triumphantly. “We have saved you!”

The cloud cleared from Cato's eyes. They traveled downward to the bloody linen towel across his middle. His left hand moved, twitched, pulled the towel away to see the Tyrian purple, distended expanse of his belly gashed from side to side in a ragged tear, now neatly sewn up with crimson embroidery.

“My Soul!” he screamed, shuddered, and screwed up every part of himself that had always fought, fought, fought, no matter what the odds; both hands went to the stitches, ripped and tore with frenzied strength until the wound was gaping open, then he began to pull the shiny, pearly intestines out, fling them away.

No one moved to stop him. Paralyzed, his son and his friend and his physician watched him destroy himself piece by piece, his mouth gaping silently. Suddenly he spasmed hugely. The grey eyes, still open, took on the look of death, irises fled before the expanding black pupils; finally came a faint gold sheen, death's ultimate patina. Cato's Soul was gone.

•      •      •

The city of Utica burned him the next day on a huge pyre of frankincense, myrrh, nard, cinnamon and Jericho balsam, his body wrapped in Tyrian purple and cloth-of-gold.

He would have hated it, Marcus Porcius Cato, the enemy of all ostentation.

He had done as much as he could, given the shortness of the time at his disposal to prepare for death; there were letters for his poor devastated son, for Statyllus, and for Caesar, gifts of money for Lucius Gratidius and Prognanthes the steward, still inanimate. But he left no word for Marcia, his wife.

•      •      •

When Caesar rode into the main square mounted on Toes, his scarlet paludamentum carefully draped across the handsome chestnut horse's haunches, the ashes had been collected from the pyre, but the pyre itself still sat, a blackened, aromatic heap, in the midst of a silently watching populace.

“What is this?” Caesar asked, skin crawling.

“The pyre of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis!” shrilled the voice of Statyllus.

The eyes were so cold they looked eerie, inhuman; without any change of expression Caesar slid from the horse to the paving stones, his cloak falling behind him gracefully. To Utica, he looked every inch the conqueror.

“His house?” he asked Statyllus.

Statyllus turned and led the way.

“Is his son here?” Caesar asked, Calvinus entering behind him.

“Yes, Caesar, but very upset by his father's death.”

“Suicide, of course. Tell me about it.”

“What is there to tell?” Statyllus asked, shrugging. “You know Marcus Cato, Caesar. He would not submit to any tyrant, even a clement one.” A fumble inside the sleeve of his black tunic produced a slender scroll. “He left this for you.”

Caesar took it, examined the seal, a cap of liberty with the words M PORC CATO around it. Not a reference to his own fight against what he saw as tyranny, but a reference to his great-grandmother, the daughter of a slave.

I refuse to owe my life to a tyrant, a man who flouts the Law by pardoning other men, just as if the Law gave him the right to be their master. The Law does not.

Dying to read it, Calvinus despaired that he would ever get the chance. Then the strong, tapering fingers crushed the note, threw it away. Caesar looked down at his fingers as if at a stranger's, drew a breath that was neither sigh nor growl.

“I grudge you your death, Cato, just as you grudged me your life,” he said harshly.

Young Cato shuffled out, supported by two servants.

“Could you not persuade your father to wait, at least to see me, talk to me?”

“You know Cato a great deal better than I do, Caesar,” the young man said. “He died as he lived—very hard.”

“What do you plan to do now that your father's dead? You know that all his property is confiscate.”

“Ask you for a pardon and make a living somehow. I am not my father.”

“You're pardoned, just as he would have been.”

“May I ask a favor, Caesar?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Statyllus. May he travel to Italy with me? My father left him the money to go to Marcus Brutus, who will take him in.”

“Marcus Brutus is in Italian Gaul. Statyllus may join him.”

And that was the end of it. Caesar swung on his heel and walked out, Calvinus behind him—after he'd retrieved the note. A valuable archive.

Outside, Caesar threw off the mood as if it had never been. “Well, I could expect nothing else from Cato,” he said to Calvinus. “Always the worst of my enemies, always out to foil me.”

“An absolute fanatic, Caesar. From the day of his birth, I suspect. He never understood the difference between life and philosophy.”

Caesar laughed. “The difference? No, my dear Calvinus, not the difference. Cato never understood life. Philosophy was his way of dealing with something he didn't have the ability to grasp. Philosophy was his manual of behavior. That he chose to be a Stoic reflected his nature—purification through self-denial.”

“Poor Marcia! A cruel blow.”

“The cruel blow was in loving Cato, who refused to be loved.”

Among the Republican high command, only Titus Labienus, the two Pompeys and governor Attius Varus reached Spain.

Publius Sittius was back in action for Kings Bocchus and Bogud of the Mauretanias; the moment he received word of Caesar's victory at Thapsus, he sent out his trusty fleet to sweep the seas and himself invaded Numidia by land.

Metellus Scipio and Lucius Manlius Torquatus sailed aboard a group of ships that elected to hug the African coast; Gnaeus and Sextus Pompey, in Gnaeus's original fleet, decided to strike across open water and revictual in the Balearic Isles. Labienus sailed with them, not trusting Metellus Scipio's judgement, and loathing the man besides.

Publius Sittius's fleet encountered the Africa-hugging ships and attacked with such enthusiasm that capture was inevitable. Like Cato, Metellus Scipio and Torquatus chose suicide over a pardon from Caesar.

In hopeless disarray, the Numidian army of light armed horse was no match for the invading Sittius, who swept them up before him and advanced inexorably through Juba's kingdom.

Marcus Petreius and King Juba had gone to Juba's capital of Cirta, only to find its gates locked and the populace too afraid of Caesar's vengeance to let them inside. The two men sought shelter in a villa Juba kept not far from Cirta, and there agreed to fight a duel to the death as the most honorable way left. The outcome was a foregone conclusion: Juba was much younger and stronger than Petreius, who had grown old and grizzled in Pompey the Great's service. Petreius died in the duel, but when Juba tried to inflict the death stroke upon himself, he found that his arms were too short. A slave held his sword, and Juba ran on it.

The most distressing tragedy of all was Lucius Caesar's son, who was captured and released on his own cognizance to stay in a villa on the outskirts of Utica until Caesar had time to deal with him. It was staffed by some of Caesar's own servants, and in its grounds were a few cages of wild animals found among Metellus Scipio's abandoned baggage; Caesar took them to use in the games he planned to celebrate in his dead Julia's honor, for a vindictive Senate had denied her funeral games. Cato and Ahenobarbus.

Perhaps the aura of suspicion surrounding this only member of the Julii Caesares who had sided with the Republicans had eaten into his core, or perhaps some innate mental instability had always been there; whatever the reason, Lucius Caesar Junior was soon joined by a group of Republican legionaries, took over the villa, and tortured Caesar's servants to death. Having no more human victims, Lucius Caesar Junior then tortured the animals to death. When the legionaries decamped, Lucius Caesar Junior did not. A horrified tribune sent to check on him found him wandering the villa covered in blood, mumbling and raving alternately. Like Ajax after the fall of Troy, he seemed to think the beasts were his enemies.

Caesar decided that he would have to stand trial, deeming it absolutely necessary that his cousin's only son be dealt with publicly, and trusting that the military court would see for itself that Lucius Caesar Junior was hopelessly demented. Pending trial, he was left locked inside the villa under guard.

Oh, shades of Publius Vettius! When some soldiers came to put Lucius Caesar Junior into chains and bring him to Utica for the court-martial, they discovered him dead—but not by his own hand. Who had sneaked in and murdered him remained a mystery, but not even the most insignificant member of Caesar's staff thought Caesar implicated. Many were the rumors about Caesar Dictator, yet that particular calumny was never put forward. After conducting the funeral as Pontifex Maximus, Caesar sent Lucius's son's ashes home to him with as much explanation as he thought Lucius could bear.

•      •      •

Utica was pardoned too, but Caesar reminded the Three Hundred that during his first consulship thirteen years ago he had passed a lex Julia which had greatly benefited the city.

“The fine is levied at two hundred million sesterces, to be paid in six-monthly installments over a period of three years. Not to me, citizens of Utica. Directly to the Treasury of Rome.”

A huge fine! Eight thousand talents of silver. Since Utica could not deny that it had aided the Republicans and had lauded, adored and gladly harbored Cato, Caesar's most obdurate enemy, the Three Hundred accepted its fate meekly. What could they do about it, especially when the money had to be paid directly to the Roman Treasury? This was one tyrant not out to enrich himself.

Republican owners of wheat latifundia in the Bagradas and Catada valleys suffered too; Caesar auctioned their properties at once, thus ensuring that those who continued to farm wheat on a large scale in Africa Province were very definitely his clients. An action he regarded as vital for Rome's welfare—who knew what the future might hold?

From Africa Province he proceeded to Numidia, where he put up all Juba's personal property for auction before dismantling the kingdom of Numidia completely. The eastern portion, which was the most fertile, was incorporated into the African province as Africa Nova; Publius Sittius received a fine strip of territory on Africa Nova's western boundary as his personal fief—provided that he held it for the Rome of Caesar and Caesar's heir. Bogud and Bocchus received the western end of Numidia, but Caesar left it up to the two kings to sort out the boundaries between themselves.

•      •      •

On the last day of May he quit Africa for Sardinia, leaving Gaius Sallustius Crispus behind to govern the Roman provinces.

That hundred-and-fifty-mile voyage took twenty-seven days; the seas were mountainous, his ship leaked, had to put into every tiny isle On the way, was blown far to the east, then blown far to the west. Exasperating, not because Caesar was prone to seasickness—he was not— but because the ship moved too much for him to read, write, or even think lucidly.

Harbor made at last, he raised Republican Sardinia's tithe to one-eighth, and levied a special fine of ten million sesterces on the town of Sulcis for actively abetting the Republicans.

Two days into Quinctilis and he was ready to sail for Ostia or Puteoli, whichever port the winds and weather made feasible; then the equinoctial gales began to roar as if what had plagued his ship on the way to Sardinia had been but a gentle zephyr. Caesar looked at Carales harbor and condescended to heed his captain's plea not to sail. The gales blew for three nundinae without let, but at least sitting on dry land he could read and write, catch up on the mountain of correspondence.

Time for thought didn't come until finally he set sail for Ostia; the wind was blowing from the southwest, so Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber it would be.

•      •      •

The war will go on, unless Gaius Trebonius in Further Spain can capture Labienus and the two Pompeii before they have time to organize fresh resistance. A better man than Trebonius does not exist, but the pity of it is that when he arrived in his province he found it in no mood to co-operate after the predatory governorship of Quintus Cassius. That is the trouble, Caesar. You cannot do everything yourself, and for every Gaius Trebonius, there is a Quintus Cassius. For every Calvinus, there is an Antonius.

Spain is on the lap of the gods, there's no point in wasting time fretting about Spain at the moment. Think rather, that so far the war has gone all Caesar's way, and that Africa confirms Pharsalus in the world's eyes. So many dead! So much talent and ability wasted on battlefields.

And what about the Phaedo, eh? It took time to get the story out of Statyllus, but a hint that perhaps Caesar would renege on his promise to let Statyllus go to Brutus soon had the whole of that unspeakable suicide laid bare for Caesar's inspection. Oh, immensely cheering to learn that the tempered, indestructible steel of Cato's persona was so totally fractured underneath. When the time came to die, he feared to die. Had first to convince himself that he would live forever by reading the Phaedo. How fascinating. It is some of the most beautiful, poetic Greek ever written, but the man who wrote it was speaking at second hand, and neither he nor Socrates, the supreme philosopher, was valid in logic, in reason, in common sense. Phaedo, Phaedrus and the rest are full of sophistry, sometimes downright dishonest, and commit the same old philosophical crime: they arrive at conclusions that suit them and please them, rather than at the truth. As for Stoicism, what philosophy is narrower, what other code of spiritual conduct can breed the ultimate fanatic so successfully?

What it boils down to is that Cato couldn't do the deed without first knowing that he would enjoy a life thereafter. And sought confirmation in the Phaedo. This comforts Caesar, who craves no life hereafter. What can death be, except an eternal sleep? The only immortality a man can ever have is to live on in the memories and stories of the gens humana for time immemorial. A fate sure to happen for Caesar, but a fate that Caesar will exert every effort to make sure does not happen for Cato. Without Cato, there would have been no civil war. It is for that I cannot ever forgive him. It is for that Caesar cannot forgive him.

Ah, but Caesar's life grows lonelier, even with the death of Cato. Bibulus, Ahenobarbus, Lentulus Crus, Lentulus Spinther, Afranius, Petreius, Pompeius Magnus, Curio. Rome has become a city of widows, and Caesar has no real competition. How can Caesar excel without opposition to drive him? Though not, though never, opposition from his legions.

Caesar's legions. Ninth, Tenth, Twelfth, Fourteenth, their standards loaded down with honors, their share of booty sufficient to give the rankers Third Class status in the Centuries, their centurions Second Class status. Yet they mutinied. Why? Because they were idle, poorly supervised and prey to the mischief men like Avienus cannot resist making. Because some men within them have given them the notion that they can dictate terms of service to their generals. Their mutiny is not forgiven—but, more important, it is not forgotten. No man from a mutinous legion will ever get land in Italy, or a full share of the booty after Caesar triumphs.

After Caesar triumphs. Caesar has waited fourteen years to triumph, cheated out of his Spanish one when he came back from Further Spain as praetor. The Senate forced him to cross the pomerium into the city to declare his candidacy for the consulship, so he lost his imperium and his triumph. But this year he will triumph, so splendidly that Sulla's and Pompeius Magnus's triumphs will seem mean, small. This year. Yes, this year. There will be time, for this year Caesar will put the calendar to rights at last, tie the seasons to the months in a proper 365-day year, with an extra day every four years to keep both in perfect step. If Caesar does no more for Rome than that, his name will live on long after he himself is dead.

That is all that immortality can ever be. Oh, Cato, with your longing for an immortal soul, your fear of dying! What is there to be afraid of, in dying?

•      •      •

The ship heeled, quivered; the wind was changing, getting up, swinging around to the southeast. He could almost smell Egypt of Nilus on its breath—the sweet, slightly fetid stench of inundation-soaked black soil, the alien blossoms in alien gardens, the fragrance of Cleopatra's skin.

Cleopatra. Caesar does miss her, though he thought he would not. What will the little fellow look like? She says in her letters, like Caesar, but Caesar will see him more dispassionately. A son for Caesar, but not a Roman son. Who will be Caesar's Roman son, the son he adopts in his will? Wherever Caesar's life is going, it is time and more than time that he made his will. Yet how can a man poise the balance between an untried, unknown sixteen-year-old and a man of thirty-seven?

Pray there is time to poise the balance.

The Senate has voted Caesar the dictatorship for ten years, with the powers of a censor for three years and the right to let his preferences be known when the candidates apply for election as magistrates. A good letter to receive before leaving Africa.

A voice whispers: where are you going, Gaius Julius Caesar? And why does it seem to matter so little? Is it that you have done all that you wanted to do, though not in the way and with the constitutional sanction you yearned for? No sense in ruing what has been done and cannot be undone. No, it cannot be undone, even for a million gold crowns studded with rubies or emeralds or ocean pearls the size of pebbles.

But without rivals, victory is hollow. Without rivals, how can Caesar shine?

The sting in winning is to be left the only one alive on the field.