A Mist of Prophecies rsr-9

by Steven Saylor

  At this there were scattered cries from those in the line-some mocking and jeering at Caelius, but others raising voices in agreement. A few men at the back of the line, unable to hear, gave up their places to come see what was going on. Word quickly spread that Caelius was staging some sort of political demonstration, and the crowd rapidly grew as men arrived from all over the Forum. Trebonius, meanwhile, went on about his business, pretending to ignore Caelius.

  "Citizens of Rome," Caelius continued, "think back and remember the situation just a little over a year ago, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and drove out the smug, self-satisfied scoundrels who were running the state for their own advancement. Did you not feel, as I did, a rush of excitement, a thrill of anticipation when we were suddenly confronted by all the glorious possibilities of a bright future-possibilities that had been unthinkable only a day, even an hour before Caesar took that first step across the Rubicon? All at once, in the blink of an eye, anything could happen! How often in the course of a man's lifetime does such a prospect of boundless hope open before him? The world would be remade! Rome would be reborn! Honest men would finally triumph, and the scoundrels among us would be sent scampering off, their tails between their legs.

  "Instead-well, you know the bitter truth as well as I do, or else you wouldn't be here today, begging for crumbs from the magistrate in charge of the city. Nothing has changed-except for the worse. The scoundrels have triumphed once again! Is this what men fought and died for-the rights of rich landlords and moneylenders to grind the rest of us beneath their heels? Why has Caesar not put a stop to this shameless situation? Citizens, think of your own circumstances exactly a year ago and tell me: are you better off today? If your answer is yes, then you must be a landlord or a banker, because everyone else is worse off, far worse! Our wrists have been slashed, and the blood drinkers are sucking us dry-and though I hate to say it, it was Caesar himself who put the knives in their hands!"

  A few men in the crowd, most of them conspicuously wealthy, booed and jeered along with their entourages of secretaries and bodyguards. But these catcalls were drowned out by angry shouts of agreement that rose up from others. Some of those supporting Caelius may have been hirelings-seeding a crowd with vocal supporters was one of the first lessons he'd learned from Cicero-but the discontent he was tapping into ran deep, and the majority of the listeners were with him.

  Trebonius was still ignoring the situation, trying to carry on his business, but even the litigants with whom he was dealing were giving him only one ear as they bent the other to hear what Caelius was saying.

  "Citizens of Rome, Caesar did us all a great service when he crossed the Rubicon. By that bold action, he set in motion a revolution that will remake the state. I myself proudly joined the cause. I did my part on the battlefield, fighting with Caesar in Spain. Now the military struggle continues in a new arena where we have every expectation of success. But while we wait for news of the final victory, we cannot remain idle. We must continue to move ahead here in Rome. We must accomplish in his absence what Caesar, for whatever reasons, failed to accomplish while he was here. We must enact new legislation that will give genuine relief to those who truly need it!"

  There was a fresh outburst from the crowd. "It's already been done! Shut up and go home!" shouted one of Caelius's critics. "Hooray! Hooray for Caelius!" shouted a rough fellow who had the look of an agitator-for-hire. The crowd grew so noisy that even Caelius had a hard time speaking above the hubbub. Trebonius gave up on trying to counsel the two litigants before him and sat back in his ornate chair of state, his arms tightly crossed, a scowl on his face.

  "Toward that end," Caelius shouted, raising his voice to clarion pitch to make himself heard, "toward that end, I shall begin by proposing a new law to stop all debt payments for a period of no less than six years. I repeat, I will ask the Senate to impose a six year moratorium on all existing debts, with no interest to be accrued in the meantime! Those who have been crushed to their knees by debt will finally be given a chance to get back on their feet. And if the wealthy moneylenders complain that they'll starve, then let them eat the wax tablets on which those loans were recorded!"

  There was a huge response from the crowd. Caelius, his face flushed with excitement-for I think the crowd had grown even larger and more enthusiastic than he'd expected-managed to make himself heard above the roar. "In anticipation of the passage of this law, I have set up my tribunal here today. I shall take up my post in my chair of state, and my clerks shall record the names and circumstances of all citizens who are currently in debt, so that their relief can be expedited immediately when the law goes into effect. Please form a line beginning on my right." And with that he sat down on his chair of state, looking quite pleased with himself.

  The line of litigants waiting to see Trebonius evaporated in the rush to join the line to see Caelius. Why should any debtor waste his time haggling with the city praetor, when Caelius's legislation, if enacted, would supersede whatever settlement Trebonius decreed?

  "What a pack of fools," grumbled one-armed Canininus in my ear. "There's not a chance in Hades the Senate will pass Caelius's legislation. If Caesar had wanted such a thing, he'd have enacted it himself. And if Caesar doesn't want it, the Senate won't even consider it. Caelius is just stirring up trouble."

  "But why?" I said. "What's the point of setting off a riot?" For in fact a near riot had ensued. Angry cries and insults filled the air. Shoving matches and fistfights broke out. Snarling bodyguards formed cordons around their wealthy patrons, who rushed to escape the rabble. At a sign from Trebonius, glowering down at the chaotic scene from his chair of state, armed guards set about trying to restore order, though it was hard to know where to begin. The crowd was like a boiling caldron, bubbling over everywhere at once.

  What was Caelius up to? Canininus was right; as long as the Senate was in the palm of Caesar's hand, Caelius had no hopes of enacting his own radical programs. Nor, as the praetor overseeing foreign residents, did he have any legitimate business to involve himself with debt settlements. Was he simply trying to make Trebonius's job harder, out of spite? Or did Caelius have a definite agenda in mind and a goal toward which he was moving?

  Hieronymus and I, fearing the madness of the mob, made our way to the edge of the crowd. I acquired a couple of bruises from flying elbows, but otherwise emerged unscathed. At last we found a quiet place to catch our breaths, beside the Temple of Castor and Pollux. That was when I saw Cassandra for the second time.

  The narrow platform that projected perpendicularly from the porch of the temple, flanking the steps, was just above our heads. I happened to look up, and saw her standing alone on the platform. She was watching the seething crowd beyond us and took no notice of the two of us below her.

  Hieronymus saw the expression on my face and followed my gaze. "Beautiful!" he whispered. The word escaped from his lips as involuntarily as a breath.

  And she was beautiful, especially when seen from that low angle-the vantage point of a suppliant looking up at a goddess on a high pedestal. To be sure, there was nothing remotely divine or regal about her threadbare blue tunica or her unkempt hair, but in her bearing there was a certain rare dignity that would command the immediate attention and respect of any man. In me it commanded more than that. I gazed up at her and felt my heart skip a beat. A vaguely remembered sensation from my youth, at once thrilling and painful, shot through me, and I suddenly felt like a man a third my age. I rebuked myself for such foolishness. I was an old, married man. She was a beggar, and a madwoman to boot.

  She happened to look down and saw us staring up at her. That was the first time I looked into her eyes and saw that they were blue. Her face was blank, without expression-the face of Athena as molded by the Greek sculptors, I thought-and that in itself seemed odd, considering that she was watching a riot. I thought of a bird watching the activities of humans below her, apathetic to their violence against one another.

  She gave a jerk. I thought that we
had frightened her somehow, and that she was about to bolt. Instead, her eyes rolled back, and her knees buckled under her. She swayed, lost her footing, and tumbled forward.

  To say that Cassandra quite literally fell into my arms would be true but misleading, lending the moment a romantic flair in no way evident at the time. In fact, when I saw that she was about to fall, I felt a quiver of panic-not for her, but for myself. When a man of my years sees a woman falling toward him from a considerable height, he thinks not of heroism but of his own frail bones. Still, I suspect that the instinct to catch a falling woman is strong in any man, no matter what his years. Hieronymus reacted just as I did, and it was into both our arms that she tumbled.

  The moment was painfully awkward. Hieronymus and I essentially collided, and an instant later Cassandra fell onto us, and all three of us very nearly collapsed to the ground in a heap. If we had been actors in a comedy by Plautus, the staging could not have been more hilarious. By some miracle of balance and counterbalance, Hieronymus and I both stayed on our feet. Together we managed to lower our dazed cargo to her own unsteady feet, supporting her arms to keep her upright.

  The breath was knocked out of me. A sharp pain shot up my spine. Spots swam before my eyes. None of this mattered when Cassandra fell swooning against me, one hand across her face and the other across her bosom.

  To observe the form of a beautiful woman at a distance is one thing. To abruptly feel a warm, solid, breathing body enclosed within your arms is another thing altogether. It was precisely for this, to experience such moments of human contact, that the gods made us. That was what I felt in that instant, even if I did not consciously realize it.

  Cassandra gradually came to her senses and drew back from me, but only slightly, still remaining in my embrace. Over her shoulder I saw Hieronymus looking rather envious of me. I looked in Cassandra's eyes and saw again that they were blue, but not quite the shade I had thought. There was a bit of green in them, or was that only a momentary trick of the light? Her eyes fascinated me.

  "Was I… did I… fall?" she asked. It seemed to me that her Latin carried a slight accent, but I couldn't place it.

  "You did. From up there." I nodded toward the platform.

  "And… you caught me?"

  "We caught you," said Hieronymus, crossing his arms petulantly. Cassandra glanced at him over her shoulder. She gently pulled herself from my embrace.

  "Are you all right?" I said. "Can you stand?"

  "Of course."

  "What happened? Did you faint?"

  "I'm perfectly all right now. I should go." She turned away.

  "Go where?" I reached for her arm, then stopped myself. Where she went was none of my business. Perhaps she thought so too, for she made no answer. Yet it seemed to me that there must be more to say. "What's your name?"

  "They call me Cassandra." She looked back at me. Her expression, briefly animated after she recovered from her daze, had become remote again-goddess like, birdlike, or simply the affectless face of a madwoman?

  "But that can't be your real name," I said. "You must have another."

  "Must I?" She looked confused for a moment, then turned and walked away with a slow, imperturbable stride, her head and shoulders erect, seemingly oblivious of the men who occasionally ran across her path in flight from the continuing melee before the tribunals of the rival magistrates.

  "What an extraordinary woman," said Hieronymus.

  I merely nodded.

  VI

  My interview with Terentia and the Vestal Fabia had yielded some new information about Cassandra, if not much. I decided next to consult Fulvia the twice-widowed; I had rendered her a service in the past by investigating the murder of her husband, Clodius-as partial payment she had given me Mopsus and Androcles-and I could expect at least a cordial welcome at her door. And so, after leaving Cicero's house and returning to my own for a frugal midday meal and a fitful nap during the hottest part of the day, I set out as the sun was lowering to the house of Rome's most famous widow.

  As before, I took Davus with me for protection. As we walked down the familiar streets of the Palatine, I was reminded of the days when Davus first entered my household as a slave, only shortly after I first met Fulvia as a stunned and grieving widow. It seemed a memory from another age. Could it actually have been only four years ago that Clodius was murdered on the Appian Way? Rome had been wracked with riots. Clodius's radical supporters had burned the Senate House. Pompey had been called upon to restore order and given almost dictatorial powers; he had exploited the situation to engineer a series of trials that banished many of his enemies from Rome, upsetting once and for all the precarious constitutional balance between his interests and those of Caesar. In retrospect, the murder of Clodius had been the temporal fulcrum between the moment when civil war seemed unthinkable and the moment when it became inevitable. The murder of Fulvia's first husband had been the beginning of the end of our tattered Republic.

  Her grief for Clodius had been deep and genuine. They had been true lovers, I think, as well as partners in a broader sense; for Fulvia, as a politician's wife, had always been the exact opposite of Cicero's Terentia. She was a woman with opinions, plans, projects, allies, and enemies. She plotted and schemed alongside her husband and served as his closest advisor. His death had robbed her not only of a husband and a father to their two children; it had robbed her of her role in the political sphere. Women can play no part in the Senate or the magistracies. Women cannot vote. By law they cannot even own property in their own names, although clever women find ways around such technicalities, just as women who care about the course of worldly events find ways to wield their influence, usually through their husbands. While Clodius lived, Fulvia had been one of the most powerful people in Rome, male or female. When he died, she was like a strong man suddenly paralyzed and stricken mute.

  But a woman as intelligent, wealthy, and ambitious as Fulvia-who was also a striking woman, if not beautiful-did not have to endure the helplessness of widowhood for long. To a certain kind of man, her combination of qualities must have been almost maddeningly attractive. When she consented to marry Gaius Curio, many people thought that she had found the perfect match. He had been a part of her circle for many years, one of that coterie of ambitious, bright young men with voracious appetites and endless schemes to remake the world in their own image, men like Dolabella, Clodius, Caelius, and Marc Antony. Some said that Fulvia actually would have preferred Antony, had he been available and not already married to his cousin Antonia, and that Fulvia had settled on Antony's boyhood friend (some said lover) Curio as the next best thing; but most agreed that Curio was in fact the better choice because he was more malleable and less inclined to debauchery than Antony.

  Like Antony, Curio early on allied himself with Caesar and never wavered in his devotion or relented in proselytizing on Caesar's behalf. Indeed, it was largely Curio's influence that had brought Marcus Caelius into the fold. On the eve of the war, Caelius and Curio had ridden out together to be by Caesar's side when he crossed the Rubicon. But while Caelius had ultimately been relegated to a minor praetorship in Rome, Curio had been given command of four legions. When Caesar headed for Spain, he dispatched Curio to take on the Pompeian forces led by Cato in Sicily. Cato, disorganized and unready like the rest of the Pompeians, abandoned the island without a fight. Curio, flush from an easy conquest, left two of his legions in Sicily and with his other two pressed on to Africa-and that was where Curio's troubles began.

  Some said his conquest of Sicily had been too easy, that it led to overconfidence and rash judgment. Some said it was Curio's youth and lack of military experience that led him into King Juba's trap. Others said it was simply bad luck.

  Curio's African campaign began well enough. First, he set about taking the rich seaport of Utica, which was held by the Pompeian commander Varus. A small band of Numidian soldiers dispatched by King Juba attempted to come to the city's aid, but Curio drove them off. He baited Varus to meet
in battle outside the city. There Curio made his first mistake, which only by a stroke of good luck proved not to be fatal. He sent his foot soldiers into a steep ravine where they might easily have been ambushed; but in the meantime his cavalry managed to sweep away the enemy's left wing, and Varus's men-sent fleeing back to the city-missed an easy opportunity to destroy their enemy. Such a near miss might have given Curio pause, but instead it emboldened him. He prepared to lay siege to Utica.

  In the meantime, King Juba had mustered his army and was marching to relieve Utica. Juba had close ties to Pompey, having been a patron of Pompey's father. And he had cause to hate Curio, who in recent years had proposed that Rome should annex Numidia by force.

  Curio received news of Juba's approach. Alarmed, he sent to Sicily for his other two legions. But deserters from Juba's army told him that only a small body of Numidians were advancing. Curio sent out his cavalry, who skirmished with Juba's vanguard. From the intelligence he received, Curio thought that this vanguard was the whole Numidian force. Thinking to destroy it so that he could get on with the siege, he hurried out with his legions to do battle. The season was blisteringly hot; the march over burning sands. The Romans blundered into the entire Numidian army. They were surrounded and slaughtered.

  A handful of Curio's men managed to escape. Curio, too, might have fled and saved himself, but he refused to desert his men. A survivor, bringing news of the disaster to Caesar shortly after Caesar's return from Spain, reported Curio's last words: "I've lost the army Caesar entrusted to me. How could I face him?"

  Curio fought until the Numidians killed him. They cut off his head and sent the trophy to King Juba. Fulvia was once again a widow.

  Pondering her situation, imagining her mood, I felt some hesitation as I approached her house. The structure itself presented a daunting aspect-the giant, fortress like monstrosity that Clodius had erected on the Palatine, the opulent headquarters from which he had directed the street gangs under his command. Steep terraces overgrown with roses and glimmering with many-colored marble veneers flanked the huge forecourt that had served as a rallying place for Clodius to address his supporters. The iron gate stood open, and as Davus and I strode across the forecourt, gravel crunching under our feet, I gazed ahead at the flight of steps leading up to the broad porch and saw a black wreath upon the massive bronze door. Nine months into her widowhood, Fulvia was still in mourning for Curio.