Marius' Mules XI

by S. J. A. Turney

  ‘Queen Cleopatra, daughter of Ptolemy Auletes, welcome to Alexandria at last,’ the consul said with a smile that appeared to contain genuine mirth. She felt a quiver of irritation that the man seemed to be laughing at her and in a way she had known she could since her earliest teen years, she switched on that part of her that exuded languid attraction. Few men could resist her when she did so, and it had bought her a great deal of power over the years. She knew there were more handsome women in the Ptolemaic court than her, and yet she knew how to make herself desirable with barely a move. Indeed, she felt an instant change in the atmosphere among the Romans.

  ‘This is Apollodorus of Sicilia,’ Salvius introduced her other companion, ‘the queen’s trusted man.’

  ‘Well met, Apollodorus, ’ Caesar replied, ‘ and you too, Salvius. Please, help yourselves to food and drink. I suspect you have not had an easy journey.’

  The queen eyed the other Romans, and Caesar noted her roving gaze.

  ‘Forgive me. This is the admiral Cassius Longinus,’ he said, indicating a tall, thin man with black neat hair and a serious expression. ‘This is Orfidius Bulla of the Twenty Seventh Legion,’ a shorter, stockier man with a scarred face and a shock of red hair . ‘Marcus Falerius Fronto, of the Sixth,’ a man of a similar age to Caesar, with a tired, veteran face, favouring a bad leg, she noted. ‘ Galronus of the Remi, my cavalry commander,’ a strange pale man who seemed oddly out of place among the others, though impressive all the same. ‘And Salvius Cursor.’

  Her eyebrows rose and she turned to Salvius Aper, who nodded. ‘My brother.’

  ‘My apologies for the manner of my arrival,’ she said. ‘I was somewhat inconvenienced by my brother.’

  Caesar chuckled , and she realised no w that there was no insult in his laughter , which made her relax a little more. ‘I fear your brother has little to do with your difficulties, Queen Cleopatra. It is the rodent Potheinus who infects this city and palace with suspic ion and keeps eyes and blades at every door, a nd it is Achillas who floods Aegyptus with soldiers seeking to apprehend you. I suspect your brother has had little to do with it other than complaining that he doesn’t like you very much.’

  ‘He is quite right to complain,’ the queen said flatly. ‘If the opportunity arises I shall not hesitate to open him up for the carrion feeders.’ She flattened her palm to display the small knife in it, and then tucked the blade back into its place at her belt. She saw disapproval in several Roman faces, especially Cassius’, but the one called Fronto nodded his approval, and Caesar simply arched an impressive eyebrow. Damn it, but she was finding it hard to take her eyes off the old man.

  ‘And here was I seeking to reconcile you both and settle once more into your joint rule , ’ Caesar said.

  ‘I doubt that would be possible now,’ the one called Fronto said, ‘even if they didn’t hate each other.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Caesar agreed. ‘I’m afraid that your daring and ingenious arrival might have be en sadly mis-timed, your Majesty.’

  ‘Oh? How so?’

  But her mind was already racing ahead. The fleet coming back to Alexandria. Ptolemy’s soldiers at every door and wall. She narrowed her eyes. ‘You are at war?’

  ‘Not quite yet,’ Fronto said, leaning on the table, ‘but it looks to be looming. We have less than four thousand men here, only four and a half thousand even with the palace guards, and that’s if they can be trusted. But we have just received word that far from standing down his army, Achillas has martialled them and drawn them together.’

  She shook her head. That was hard to believe. Or was it? Achillas was a clever man, and ambitious. Could it be that their little civil war had just gained a third player?

  Caesar nodded as if reading her thoughts. ‘Achillas marches on Alexandria and his forces outnumber us at least four to one. His ostensible reason is that he believes your brother to be in danger, held by us, though I think we can all safely discount that as genuine concern . If I send your brother back to his army, I rather suspect he will be dead in a ditch by nightfall with no witnesses, and the army will continue to march. I believe Achillas intends to take Alexandria for himself .’

  Cleopatra sighed. ‘I have a force that could bolster yours, but they are on the far side of Achillas’ army, and therefore of little use.’

  The one called Fronto nodded. ‘And we have two more legions coming, but they are at least ten days away and they will pass your army before they get here. The winds will not allow our fleet to leave in worthwhile numbers, so we are effectively trapped. I am very much afraid that we must fortify ourselves in Alexandria and prepare to repel Achillas’ army. We need to hold them off long enough for our support to arrive.’

  Damn it, the q ueen fumed. She had thought that with Caesar ’s aid she could force down Ptolemy, but she had not reckoned with Ptolemy being unimportant and Achillas taking the fore.

  There would be war. But at least she was in her palace. The Romans were known for siege warfare and they had good strategic minds, and Cleopatra knew both Alexandria and Achillas well. Together they would weather the storm. She looked up into Caesar’s eyes and felt that tingle again, her flesh prickling as she approached the map and leaned on it.

  ‘Then here is what we must do…’

  The end.

  Historical note

  I’m going to begin at the end, here. I’m going to explain my decision to end this on something of a cliff-hanger, which I have been refusing to do throughout the series. Hopefully it won’t have irritated you, but I have good reasons. I had pondered, when planning the book, where to cut off the story. Clearly I was going to be telling the tale of Caesar’s second year of civil war, focusing on Dyrrachium and Pharsalus. The natural cut off seems to be in the aftermath of Pharsalus with Pompey on the run and Caesar once more victorious, and I expect that’s what the reader has been anticipating. But I had several reasons for moving on a few chapters and taking us to Egypt.

  The notion was born when I got to the end of my first read of this year’s work in Caesar’s own campaign diaries. In that, he talks of both Dyrrachium and Pharsalus, but also takes us to Egypt and shows us the first moves in the war there, including some serious combat in Alexandria (no further spoilers). The very last line of Caesar’s c ivil Wars, which deals with this year’s events, is “ This was the beginning of the Alexandrian war. ” And so, in the spirit of Caesar, I agreed. Let us finish book 11 with the feeling that the Alexandrian w ar has begun, perhaps in the same spirit as George Lucas’ second Star Wars prequel with Yoda saying ‘begun, the clone wars have.’

  But that is only the trigger. The reason it appealed. The reason finishing this on a tense note rather than in the pleasing downtime largely revolves around Pompey. Had I finished book 11 after Pharsalus, there would be the thread of Pompey hanging around , and yet he could not be the focus of the next book, disappearing as he does from history with a brief squeak off-stage. And I felt that beginning the next book with a short couple of chapters leading to Pompey’s rather disappointing end would hardly be an exciting build - up for book 12. No, I think Pompey had to go in book 11.

  Linked to that is the tale of Salvius Cursor. His inclusion a year ago in Spain and Massilia is no accident. In Plutarch’s life of Pompey, he names three assassins of Pompey on the b oat in Egypt: Septimius, Achillas, and Salvius. Of this Salvius, nothing else appears to be known. I won’t go into the details of my reasoning, but Salvius and his brother are instruments of my will, and I didn’t want to end book 11 without a little closure for our favourite tribune.

  I wrote the first chapter of MM11 and decided almost straight away that I needed some kind of disconnected prologue to create perspective beyond the two warring parties. Cleopatra loomed in my plans, and I just could not resist having her and her brother make a brief appearance. Having done that, I realised that one of those all-time great historical moments fell at the end of this year’s events: Cleopatra being snuck into the palace in a mat. Somehow, I just h
ad to frame the book with her.

  And finally, With the Gallic wars, when I was writing them there is generally a simple cut-off at the end of each year. Though some important events occur over the winter, in military events, the campaigning season generally stops in autumn and I followed suit with each volume. Now we are in the complex c ivil, Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars and the events of Rome in the l ast years of Caesar’s life, things tend to snowball and become constant. Those periods of winter downtime are not as convenient as they once were, and it’s becoming difficult not to end a book on a cliff-hanger. So that’s my reasoning. Hopefully you won’t have long to wait until book 12.

  I will come back to Cleo in due course.

  Firstly: Dyrrachium. From the point of view of a fiction writer, I have to say that Dyrrachium is a royal pain in the butt. Though the sequence of events is laid out in Caesar’s own writing, and the terrain and locations are still there to be seen, the whole thing is something of a jumbled mess. There are so many things that happen and decisions that are made that do not bear too much scrutiny, or the reader begins to question the wisdom. There is a lot of running around, arguing, faffing, posturing and the like. When the fighting does happen it tends to be sporadic and happen all over the place at the same time. Much of the siege is quite irritating to study, I have to say, and there are elements of farce in there, with the two sides fighting to enclose one another in an ever-lengthening wall, officers mistaking one rampart for another and attacking the wrong place and so on. Really, Dyrrachium was a mess . But one with some diamond scenes in it, I’ll admit.

  My main concern with Dyrrachium was going to be the big push at the end, where it all goes wrong. In accounts, Caesar’s army flees. He tries to stop them doing so and the standard bearers throw their standards at him and run past in the panic. Caesar’s own withdrawal from the battlefield is not recorded, and I did it the way I did simply because it had more fictional impact than simply having him saddle up in desperation and ride off in the wake of his fleeing army.

  Pharsalus was a much nicer proposition. Where Dyrrachium was a mess of toing and froing and arguing and pushing and shoving that lasted months, Pharsalus was a nice clean battle that lasted hours. Even if you include the earlier cavalry engagement(s) that I had Galronus involved in, it was days rather than months. A pitched battle is much easier to relate, I have to say. And the very nature of the battle and how it unfolded gave me my perfect viewpoints: Salvius presenting the clash of the legions, Galronus the pivotal turning of the battle with the cavalry, and Fronto the surprise hammer blow that crushes Pompey’s plan.

  There is, of course, no record in Caesar’s diary of a man sneaking into the enemy camp and learning everything he can. I’m sure there was a great tradition during Roman civil wars of spies in each other’s camp. It was portrayed beautifully in Asterix the Legionary, in fact, with the secret agent codenamed H 2 SO 4 . And I don’t care how secure the generals made their camps, with the watchword ‘Venus V enetrix’ for Caesar and ‘Hercules Invictus’ for Pompey, covering their entire force, security must be laughable. It is the Roman military equivalent of using your date of birth as your password, or setting your PIN to 1234.

  But to me, there has to have been intelligence reach Caesar’s camp about Pompey’s plan. There is simply no credible reason for Caesar to have put in that fourth line behind the cavalry (niftily explained earlier with the new mixed cavalry/infantry move that is recorded in his diary) unless he knew precisely what Pompey was planning. And Pompey and Caesar each in a matching position on the field, facing one another with their best legions? That was no accident. So someone apprised Caesar of Pompey’s plan for a cavalry sweep to flank him. I had it be Galronus. And why not?

  I somewhat curtailed the long, drawn-out aftermath with the starving legions on the hill, and I somewhat embellished Ahenobarbus’ death scene (did you know he was the emperor Nero’s great grandfather by the way? So he probably deserved a gruesome death for that alone . His grandson appears in my Caligula novel, and he is a dirtbag too!) But in accounts, Ahenobarbus was caught and killed by cavalry while trying to flee the hill in the aftermath of Pharsalus, so I only amped up the detail a little. Ahenobarbus is not the only larger than life character who gets screen time in MM11, though. Labienus is back. I had him back in around books 2-4 I think, being a very reasonable man and a sympathiser of the human plight, despite also being a very capable commander. I had wondered years ago how I would feel about portraying him after he turned against Caesar. Back in MM10 I didn’t have to, for he was an absentee villain. But at Dyrrachium and Pharsalus he was a principle charac ter, and I decided the only way he could possibly have gone was to be bitter and adamant in his opposition.

  Fronto has been far removed from his loved ones now, too. I am to some extent missing the familial connection at the moment, but it is simply not possible to bring the rest of the familia into this period of the action. Fighting brutally across Greece, Asia, Egypt and Africa is not conducive to creating scenes of family harmony. But they will be back. We are engaged in a huge circle here, that will eventually bring us back .

  If you’re reading this book, by the way, with a copy of Caesar’s diary to hand and wondering at how many strange events I have simply plucked out of the air and are not recounted there, particularly towards the end, that is because I have , in previous volumes, stayed largely true to Caesar’s own writings and eschewed too many external viewpoints. This is the story of his campaigns as he told them, in essence. But with the complications toward s the end of this year and the simple boredom of telling the tale of Caesar racing around the eastern med, staying always a few days or more behind Pompey, I wanted to add something to make it a little more interesting. Thus I lifted more scenes from other biogra phers. The crossing of the Hellespont, for instance, is from Appian, though the flag escapade was my own addition. I do find it hard to give credence entirely to the notion that Cassius, in command of a sizeable portion of Pompey’s flee t , simply saw Caesar in a boat with a bunch of other skiffs and immediately surrendered.

  Similarly, my events in the final two chapters are informed considerably more by a few paragraphs of Plutarch than Caesar’s own (at this point quite convoluted) account. I chose to put aside Caesar’s heroic fights and assign them to the next book. We’d done enough battle here already. But it is Plutarch who relates the arrival of Cleopatra at Alexandria. He says ‘ as it was impossible to escape notice otherwise, she stretched herself at full length inside a bed-sack, while Apollodorus tied the bed-sack up with a cord and carried it indoors to Caesar .’ I changed this to a grain sack and added Salvius, as I couldn’t see any realism in vigilant guards happening to let an itinerant Sicilian with a bed-roll into the palace complex. Given the grain issues, that seemed far more appropriate.

  And so we have lost Pompey, but we have gained Cleopatra and Ptolemy (and their sister Arsinoe and brother, er…. Ptolemy.) Begun the Alexandrian war has (he says in his best Yoda accent.) And beyond that other exotic wars in exotic locations. And while their account might have been the work of different writers (including almost certainly Hirtius), they are all part of the c ivil Wars, for now the survivors of Pharsalus wait with Attius in Africa.

  This particular episode of the story, though, will conclude with Marius’ Mules XII next year.

  Until then, vale and thanks for reading.

  Simon Turney, June 2018

  If you enjoyed Marius’ Mules XI, please do leave a review online, and also checkout another great book that was also released this month:

  Legionary: Empire of Shades

  By Gordon Doherty

  381 AD: The Gothic War draws to a brutal climax, and the victor's name will be written in blood... The great struggle between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Gothic Horde rumbles into its fifth year. It seems that there can be no end to the conflict, for although the Goths are masters of the land, they cannot topple the last of the imperial cities. But heralds bring news that might chang
e it all: Emperor Gratian readies to lead his Western legions into the fray, to turn matters on their head, to crush the horde and save the East! The men of the XI Claudia legion long for their homeland’s salvation, but Tribunus Pavo knows these hopes drip with danger. For he and his soldiers are Gratian’s quarry as much as any Goth. The road ahead will be fraught with broken oaths, enemy blades... and tides of blood.