Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar

by Colleen McCullough

  “What have you decided, Gaius Julius?” she asked.

  “To accept young Brutus’s offer.”

  That pleased her; she smiled broadly for the first time in his acquaintance with her, and revealed that the right corner of her mouth was definitely less strong than the left. “Excellent!” she said, and sighed through a smaller, shyer smile.

  “Your son means a great deal to you.”

  “He means everything to me,” she said simply.

  There was a sheet of paper on his desk; he glanced down at it. “I’ve drawn up a proper legal agreement to the betrothal of your son and my daughter,” he said, “but if you prefer, we can keep the matter more informal for a while, at least until Brutus is further into his manhood. He may change his mind.”

  “He won’t, and I won’t,” answered Servilia. “Let us conclude the business here and now.”

  “If you wish, but I should warn you that once an agreement is signed, both parties and their guardians at law are fully liable at law for breach-of-promise suits and compensation equal to the amount of the dowry.”

  “What is Julia’s dowry?” Servilia asked.

  “I’ve put it down at one hundred talents.”

  That provoked a gasp. “You don’t have a hundred talents to dower her, Caesar!”

  “At the moment, no. But Julia won’t reach marriageable age until after I’m consul, for I have no intention of allowing her to marry before her eighteenth birthday. By the time that day arrives, I will have the hundred talents for her dowry.”

  “I believe you will,” said Servilia slowly. “However, it means that should my son change his mind, he’ll be a hundred talents poorer.”

  “Not so sure of his constancy now?’’ asked Caesar, grinning.

  “Quite as sure,” she said. “Let us conclude the business.”

  “Are you empowered to sign on Brutus’s behalf, Servilia? It did not escape me that yesterday you called Silanus the boy’s paterfamilias.”

  She wet her lips. “I am Brutus’s legal guardian, Caesar, not Silanus. Yesterday I was concerned that you should think no worse of me for approaching you myself rather than sending my husband. We live in Silanus’s house, of which he is indeed the paterfamilias. But Uncle Mamercus was the executor of my late husband’s will, and of my own very large dowry. Before I married Silanus, Uncle Mamercus and I tidied up my affairs, which included my late husband’s estates. Silanus was happy to agree that I should retain control of what is mine, and act as Brutus’s guardian. The arrangement has worked well, and Silanus doesn’t interfere.”

  “Never?” asked Caesar, eyes twinkling.

  “Well, only once,” Servilia admitted. “He insisted I should send Brutus to school rather than keep him at home to be tutored privately. I saw the force of his argument, and agreed to try it. Much to my surprise, school turned out to be good for Brutus. He has a natural tendency toward what he calls intellectualism, and his own pedagogue inside his own house would have reinforced it.”

  “Yes, one’s own pedagogue does tend to do that,” said Caesar gravely. “He’s still at school, of course.”

  “Until the end of the year. Next year he’ll go to the Forum and a grammaticus. Under the care of Uncle Mamercus.”

  “A splendid choice and a splendid future. Mamercus is a relation of mine too. Might I hope that you allow me to participate in Brutus’s rhetorical education? After all, I am destined to be his father-in-law,” said Caesar, getting up.

  “That would delight me,” said Servilia, conscious of a vast and unsettling disappointment. Nothing was going to happen! Her instincts had been terribly, dreadfully, horribly wrong!

  He went round behind her chair, she thought to assist her departure, but somehow her legs refused to work; she had to continue to sit like a statue and feel ghastly.

  “Do you know,” came his voice—or a voice, so different and throaty was it—”that you have the most delicious little ridge of hair as far down your backbone as I can see? But no one tends it properly, it’s rumpled and lies every which way. That is a shame, I thought so yesterday.”

  He touched the nape of her neck just below the great coil of her hair, and she thought at first it was his fingertips, sleek and languorous. But his head was immediately behind hers, and both his hands came round to cup her breasts. His breath cooled her neck like a breeze on wet skin, and it was then she understood what he was doing. Licking that growth of superfluous hair she hated so much, that her mother had despised and derided until the day she died. Licking it first on one side and then the other, always toward the ridge of her spine, working slowly down, down. And all Servilia could do was to sit a prey to sensations she had not imagined existed, burned and drenched in a storm of feeling.

  Married though she had been for eighteen years to two very different men, in all her life she had never known anything like this fiery and piercing explosion of the senses reaching outward from the focus of his tongue, diving inward to invade breasts and belly and core. At some stage she did manage to get up, not to help him untie the girdle below her breasts nor to ease the layers of her clothing off her shoulders and eventually to the floor—those he did for himself—but to stand while he followed the line of hair with his tongue until it dwindled to invisibility where the crease of her buttocks began. And if he produced a knife and plunged it to the hilt in my heart, she thought, I could not move an inch to stop him, would not even want to stop him. Nothing mattered save the ongoing gratification of a side of herself she had never dreamed she owned.

  His own clothing, both toga and tunic, remained in place until he reached the end of his tongue’s voyage, when she felt him step back from her, but could not turn to face him because if she let go the back of the chair she would fall.

  “Oh, that’s better,” she heard him say. “That’s how it must be, always. Perfect.”

  He came back to her and turned her round, pulling her arms to circle his waist, and she felt his skin at last, put up her face for the kiss he had not yet given her. But instead he lifted her up and carried her to the bedroom, set her down effortlessly on the sheets he had already turned down in readiness. Her eyes were closed, she could only sense him looming over her, but they opened when he put his nose to her navel and inhaled deeply.

  “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.<
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  “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 inhabitants 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.”