The October Horse (57 page)

“Business?” Pansa asked, startled.

“Yes, but not provincial business, Pansa, so relax. Marcus Brutus—Gaius Cassius—I have praetorships going begging next year,” Caesar said. “Brutus, I'm offering you praetor urbanus. Cassius, I'm offering you praetor peregrinus. Will you accept?”

“Yes, please!” cried Brutus, lighting up.

“Yes, I accept,” said Cassius, less joyfully.

“I believe that urban praetor best suits your talents, Brutus, whereas foreign praetor suits Cassius better. With your love of meticulous work, you'll issue the right kind of edicta and stick to them,” said Caesar to Brutus. He turned then to Cassius. “As for you, Cassius, you've had a great deal of experience with non-citizens, you travel hard and fast, and you think on your feet. Therefore, foreign praetor.”

Ah! thought Cassius, lying back limply. It has been worth the trip. So Dolabella thinks to have Syria, does he?

Brutus was in a state of exaltation. Urban praetor! The top job! Oh, Porcia will understand, I know she will!

They look, thought Octavius, like cats in a lake of cream.

When Caesar left Placentia, he traveled alone; even Gaius Octavius was told that he would have to make his own way back to Rome. Thus the little clutch of gigs which galloped off down the Via Aemilia Scauri to the coast and the Via Aurelia of Etruria contained Caesar's secretaries, servants, and Hapd'efan'e.

Well into Sextilis already, which meant less than seven months before he departed for Syria and a decent war. That meant two lots of work: what still had to be done for Rome and Italy, as well as the myriad preparations that went into planning a five-year campaign involving fifteen legions of infantry and ten thousand German, Gallic and Galatian cavalry. Gaius Rabirius Postumus was acting as praefectus fabrum, and the trusty old muleteer, Publius Ventidius, was busy recruiting and training. This campaign would see no raw troops; luckily a year of retirement was about as much peace and quiet as any old legionary could stomach, so the re-enlistment ratio was very high. With Ventidius supervising, the re-enlisting veterans would be carefully culled and juggled so that the very best of them went into making six crack legions, while the rest were apportioned to make the other nine legions uniformly experienced. Artillery. A hundred pieces per legion, not counting the small stuff. Artificers and skilled noncombatants of all kinds ...

The time on the road passed swiftly, spent in dictating to shuffled arrays of secretaries, now about military matters, now about Rome, now about Italy, now about public works crying out to be done, from that canal through the Isthmus of Corinth to a new harbor at Ostia. Drain the Pomptine marshes, build more aqueducts into Rome, divert the Tiber so that the Campus Martius and the Campus Vaticanus were both on Rome's side of the river. Italy owned no Via Julia Caesaris, so one must be constructed between Rome and Firmum Picenum to open up the least accessible parts of the Apennines . . .

Get those wretched land commissioners off their arses so that those of his veterans being settled in Italy weren't kept around waiting years for their land. He had legislated to protect them from the depredations of greedy wives, confidence tricksters and gobbling landowners by forbidding them to sell their portions for twenty years. Something Brutus had said to him in Placentia had annoyed him, for Brutus knew so little of human nature (“submissive endurance” indeed!) that he actually believed Caesar had instituted the twenty-year prohibition to stop the soldiers selling their land to buy wine and whores. That's how Brutus thought the lower classes behaved. Brutus, who knew nothing of poverty, sickness or exile, yet could dismiss them as incapable of destroying happiness! The entire Palatine ought to grow up amid poverty, as Caesar had. Not desperately poor himself, as Sulla had been, but witness to the suffering poverty brought in its train, the lives it blighted . . .

Fascinating, that a year governing Italian Gaul had cured Brutus's pimples. Authority had freed him from his own miseries—and freed him from Servilia at last. So much so that upon his return he had divorced his Claudia and married Cato's daughter. Caesar knew as surely as if he had been present how that fire in Brutus's study had started . . .

It was time that Italian Gaul was made a part of Italy, ceased to be governed as a province. Every inhabitant was now a full citizen, so why was there an artificial barrier in existence? Why did Rome send it a governor, instead of governing it directly? Sicilians ought to be granted the full citizenship, though that would be bitterly opposed, even by his own creatures. Too many of Greek descent—but wasn't that equally true of Italy south of Rome? Smaller and darker ...

It wasn't right that Alexandria had a library of close to a million copies, while Rome had no public library at all. Varro! The perfect job for Marcus Terentius Varro, to collect multiple copies of all the books extant and put them under one roof...

•      •      •

The problem he didn't share with his secretaries through the medium of dictation was the fate of Rome in his absence. It had plagued him from the moment the situation in Syria had informed him that, if the world of Our Sea was to remain Occidental, the Kingdom of the Parthians would have to be eliminated. The fact that he knew he was the only man capable of invading and crushing the Parthian empire was not evidence of overweening conceit, but simple knowledge of himself—of his will, abilities, genius. The truth was not conceit.

If Caesar did not conquer the Parthians, they would remain a threat that one day would invade the western world. Few political men were gifted with foresight, but Caesar had it in huge measure; the coming centuries unfolded within his mind, and he cared more about them than he did about the centuries already written down in the history books. The Parthians were warlike, a disparate collection of remotely related peoples united by a king and a central government. Rather like Rome, really, save that Rome had no king. But should one man with one idea unite the peoples of that vast empire into a whole that thought the same way, then all other civilizations would be overrun. Only Caesar could prevent that happening, for no one else owned the vision to see what was coming.

The trouble was that Rome wasn't an indissoluble whole, so Rome in his absence was a ghastly problem. He had decided that the only way to prevent the disintegration of what he had thus far achieved was to give the heart of his universe a system of checks and balances aimed at preventing another man from doing what he had done. Sulla had tried by establishing a new constitution, but it had toppled within fifteen years because it wasn't new, it was an attempt to revert to the past.

Caesar's solution was more complex. The res publica was in much better condition now than it had been when he had taken up his first dictatorship. The laws were settling into place, and they were good laws, even if some of the First Class didn't think so. Business had recovered so well that no one agitated for a general cancellation of debts anymore; his solution of Rome's financial woes had benefited both debtors and creditors, was hailed by both sides as brilliant. The courts were functioning properly for the first time in decades, juries were no difficulty, privilege was harder to defend, the Assemblies were finally coming to understand their role in Rome's government, and the Senate was less liable to be dominated by a tiny group like the boni.

The real heart of the problem didn't lie in any group; if Caesar had failed anywhere, it was in the fact that he had done what he did virtually single-handedly. As an autocrat. And there were other men who believed that they could do the same. In keeping the dictatorship for so long, Caesar had created a changed climate, and he knew it very well. Nor had he found a solution, save to continue as Dictator for the rest of his life, and hope that after he died, Rome would have learned enough to move onward rather than backward. But onward to what? That, he didn't know. All he could do was demonstrate the excellence of his changes, and trust that those who followed him would see their excellence clearly enough to preserve them.

Which didn't solve the problem of his five-year absence. At first he had thought that the best way was to take Marcus Antonius with him. Antonius was an instinctive abuser of power. But he had made trouble with the legions, had wanted control of the army in order to make himself the First Man in Rome, if not Dictator. Therefore to take Antonius with him was to run the risk of massive troop mutinies the moment the going got hard. His expedition might turn out to be Lucullus and Clodius in eastern Anatolia all over again. No, Antonius would have to be left behind, which meant giving him the consulship, followed by a proconsular command that saw him the general of his own army far enough away from Italy to keep his thoughts away from Italy.

Only how to control Antonius the consul? First, by keeping his dictatorship, thus leaving whatever forces remaining in Italy under the control of a Master of the Horse. Who would never again be Marcus Antonius. Lepidus would do nicely, save that Lepidus would insist on going to govern a province. Calvinus would have to replace him as Master of the Horse. Secondly, make sure that Antonius was the junior consul. Caesar himself would be the senior consul until he left for the East; after that, the senior consul would have to be a man who didn't like Antonius—a man who would take great pleasure in keeping Antonius in his place until he went to his proconsular command in Macedonia. There was really only one candidate for this job: Publius Cornelius Dolabella.

Nor would there be any experienced legions in Italy or Italian Gaul. Caesar would garrison the provinces with the professional legions he didn't take with him, confine military presence within the semi-circle of the Alps to recruitment and training. Sextus Pompeius was abroad in Spain and Carrinas was contending with him, but Sextus wouldn't submit tamely. Alone as he was, he didn't present a major threat, but nonetheless it was necessary to put strong governors in the Spains and the Gauls. Men he could trust, men who didn't like Marcus Antonius.

•      •      •

The time flew so fast that he arrived at his villa outside Lanuvium before he had concluded his deliberations. For one more task still had to be done, a task he didn't dare postpone any longer: the making of his will. Which was why he had elected to bypass Rome, only twenty miles away. He needed isolation to wrestle with the matter.

The Caesars had always owned estates in Latium, but this villa he had bought from Fulvia after she began selling property to pay Antony's debts. She had inherited it from Publius Clodius, an architectural marvel left uncompleted because his murder had occurred as he returned from visiting its construction site. Fulvia had hated it ever after, refused to do any further work on it. But Caesar, its new owner, had finished it. It lay in the Alban Hills some way out of Lanuvium and well off the Via Appia, and was suspended over a cliff on hundred-foot-high piers. From its loggia the view was breathtaking, for it looked out over rugged country to the Latin plain and the dreamy reaches of the Tuscan Sea, saw wonderful sunsets every time Aetna or the Vulcaniae Isles erupted and poured smoke into the air, a frequent occurrence. Varro, an expert on natural phenomena, insisted that some huge cataclysm was brewing in Italy's chain of volcanoes, for the Fields of Fire behind Puteoli and Neapolis were becoming more violent.

•      •      •

Who, who, who? Who would be Caesar's heir?

Oddly, he had abandoned all ideas of Antonius the moment he saw that familiar figure waiting in the courtyard of the governor's palace in Narbo. Though his remorseless physical excesses had never had the power to destroy Antonius's body, with its barrel chest, huge shoulders and arms, its flat belly, bulging thighs and calves, when Caesar laid eyes on him illuminated by a westering sun, he saw terrible signs of inner decay, of moral erosion and impoverished emotions. Too much high living, yes, but also too much worry over debts, too much brute ambition allied to too little common sense.

Quintus Pedius, excellent man though he was, would always remain a Campanian knight, and that blood was throwing true; his sons were in his mode, neither looked nor behaved like Julians, for all that their mother was a patrician Valeria Messala. Nor was young Lucius Pinarius promising. The Pinarii, once powerful patricians, had foundered long ago. His sister Julia Major had married Pinarius's grandfather, a wastrel who died soon after; fed up with women choosing poor husbands, Caesar had married her to Quintus Pedius's father, to whom she had objected at first, then discovered how nice it was to be a rich old man's darling. His younger sister, Julia Minor, hadn't been allowed to pick her own husband. Caesar the youthful paterfamilias had found her a very wealthy Latin knight from Aricia, Marcus Atius Balbus, by whom she had had a son and a daughter, that Atia who first married Gaius Octavius from Velitrae in the Latin heartlands, then the eminent Philippus. Atia's brother had died without issue.

The choice finally came down to Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus or Gaius Octavius.

Decimus Brutus was in his prime, and had never put a foot wrong. Generaled brilliantly in Long-haired Gaul on land and on sea, and had been a distinguished praetor in the murder court. The one thing Caesar condemned in him was his ruthlessness after the Bellovaci rose while he was governing Long-haired Gaul, but he had accepted Decimus's explanation that the Bellovaci alone had conserved their strength until after Caesar was long gone, thinking that whoever governed would not have Caesar's strength of purpose.

Decimus would have to be given the consulship soon. Yet another he had no intention of taking east with him, for very different reasons than Antonius. He needed Decimus Brutus, whom he trusted implicitly, to keep an eye on Rome and Italy. After he had been consul he would go to govern Italian Gaul, the most strategic of all the provinces when it came to keeping an eye on Rome and Italy.

Gaius Octavius would turn eighteen in latish September, and he loved the lad dearly. But he was too young and too sick. A long talk with Hapd'efan'e hadn't allayed his fears about Octavius's asthma though he had hoped it would, given that there had been almost no asthma during those months in Spain, on the way home. That, said Hapd'efan'e, was because Octavius felt so secure in Caesar's vicinity. While ever Caesar was a part of Octavius's world, he would thrive, including on this expedition to the East.

But Caesar's heir would come into his inheritance after Caesar's death. Caesar's heir would be stripped of Caesar's presence. And death, thought Caesar, cannot be too far away, if Cathbad the Chief Druid was right. He had promised Caesar that Caesar would not live to be a crabbed old man, that he would die in his prime. Caesar has turned fifty-five and has perhaps ten years left of his prime ...

He closed his eyes and conjured up their faces.

Decimus Brutus, so blond that he looked bland. Yet on close examination the eyes were steely and intelligent, the mouth firm and strong, the facial planes those of a man to be reckoned with. What told against him was his mother's fellatrix blood. Yes, the Sempronii Tuditani were dissolute, and he had heard tales about Decimus Brutus.