A Mist of Prophecies rsr-9

by Steven Saylor

  "He's not entirely blind, then-but perhaps he's deaf," suggested Caelius. "Shall we find out? Help me, citizens! Call out his name with me. Like this: 'Trebonius, open your eyes! Trebonius, open your eyes!' "

  The crowd enthusiastically took up the chant, raising their voices until the words rang through the Forum, creating a noise like thunder as they echoed off the stone walls of temples and shrines. Such a noise would carry all the way to my house atop the Palatine Hill. I imagined Bethesda and Diana going about their business in the kitchen or the garden and wondered what they would make of it: "Trebonius, open your eyes! Trebonius, open your eyes! Trebonius, open your eyes!"

  I looked at the object of this refrain and saw him shift nervously in his chair of state, as if the ivory inlays beneath his buttocks had grown hot to the touch. Even though the words themselves were not directly threatening, it must have been unnerving for Trebonius to hear his name cried aloud by so many hostile voices in unison. As Caelius had said, he was more experienced as a military man than a politician, more accustomed to orderly chains of command than to the volatile dynamics of the Roman mob.

  At last Caelius raised his arms. The chanting gradually dwindled to silence.

  "Citizens-I think he heard you!" cried Caelius. The response was a tremendous roar of shouting and applause. I looked about and realized that the crowd had grown considerably larger. The chant had served not just to send a message to Trebonius, but as a clarion call to summon others from all over the Forum and the surrounding hills.

  Caelius raised his hands for silence. The crowd quieted at once. "Trebonius, Trebonius, Trebonius!" he said, rolling his eyes and feigning utter exasperation. "In you we find that three goods make a single bad!" The crowd, always appreciative of a terrible pun, especially at the expense of a man's name, roared with laughter. Caelius was now pitching his voice to carry as far as possible, and the object of the joke, hearing it clearly, rose red-faced to his feet, clenching his fists at his sides.

  "But, citizens," Caelius continued, "I did not come here today to speak ill of my fellow magistrate. He is merely an obedient soldier following orders. Nor did I come today to rail against the sycophants in the Senate, who are too concerned with pleasing their absent master-and enriching themselves-to give a thought to your suffering. No, I came here today for the purpose of delivering good news! Yes, good news, if you can believe it, because in the midst of the gloom that hangs over us, there is a ray of hope. I have been thinking about the six-year moratorium on debt collection that I have proposed to the Senate-and that the Senate so far has willfully ignored-and I have decided it does not go far enough. No, not nearly far enough! The good people of Rome must have even more relief from the crushing burdens imposed upon them, not just by the moneylenders, but by the landlords, those wealthy tenement owners to whom a man must hand over his lifeblood just to keep a roof over his head.

  "Today, citizens, I am putting forward a new proposal. Beginning retroactively from the month of Januarius, all landlords will remit a full year's rent to every tenant! What does this mean? It means that all rents paid since Januarius will be refunded to you, and all rent due for the rest of the year will be forgiven. It means that the renters of Rome shall finally have some money in their pockets-returned to them by rich landlords who won't miss it! It means that you shall have the security of knowing that you cannot be evicted, that you shall have a roof over your head in the uncertain months ahead.

  "The moneylenders and the landlords and their minions"-he shot a look at Trebonius-"will tell you that such a measure will utterly destroy the economy of Rome. Don't believe them! They're only looking out for their own narrow interests. A sound economy is based on confidence and mutual trust, and this proposal, as radical as it may sound, is the only possible way to restore the Roman people's confidence in the future and their bond of trust with the property-owning classes. You, the common citizens of Rome, have endured a great deal due to the upheavals of the last year. You have borne the brunt of the suffering. You have suffered enough! We must all make sacrifices-not just the common people of Rome, but also the wealthy who look down from their lofty perches and think only of how to make themselves more wealthy. Let them feel the pinch for a change!"

  This prompted a roar of approval from the crowd. Some resumed the chant of "Trebonius, open your eyes!" The mood seemed more boisterous than angry. Merely by voicing such a radical proposal, no matter how unlikely the chance that it would become a reality, Caelius had given them hope and raised their spirits.

  Suddenly the mood changed. The roar died down. The chanting stopped. There were cries of outrage, hisses, and catcalls from the outskirts of the crowd. I rose on tiptoes, trying to see over the heads that blocked my view. Suddenly I was lifted aloft; Davus had clutched me from behind and raised me up as if I weighed no more than a child. Such are the advantages of having a son-in-law with the strength of an ox.

  I saw a cordon of bodyguards flanking some important personage-one of the chief magistrates, apparently, because the retinue was headed by lictors, the ceremonial escorts of the superior magistrates. Each lictor bore over his shoulder a bundle of birch rods called fasces, which served as a sheath for an ornately decorated ax. The use of lictors and their ceremonial weapons supposedly dated back to the time when Rome was ruled by kings. Normally, within the city bounds, the lictors would have borne their fasces without axes-but these were not normal times, and I clearly saw the flash of highly polished iron ax heads above the bundled rods.

  I also caught a glimpse of the man whom the lictors surrounded and saw that his toga had a broad purple stripe. I counted twelve lictors, and knew that the newcomer could only be Caesar's fellow consul, Publius Servilius Isauricus. In Caesar's absence, Isauricus was the sole head of the state. Thus had Caesar observed the ancient tradition of electing two consuls, one to govern Rome while the other conducted military operations in the field, even though everyone knew that it was Caesar alone who determined the policies of the state. Isauricus was nothing more than a figurehead, a caretaker charged with enacting Caesar's will while Caesar was absent. He and Caesar were very old friends, and it was a sign of Caesar's complete faith in Isauricus that he had contrived to have him elected to serve alongside him as consul for the year.

  I remembered seeing Trebonius, before Caelius began his harangue, dispatch one of his clerks with a message; evidently Isauricus had come in response to Trebonius's alarm. Once again Caelius was threatening to spur the mob to a riot, and something would have to be done.

  The lictors pushed and shoved their way toward Caelius's tribunal. The churning, raucous crowd might have overwhelmed them by sheer numbers, but in the face of the disciplined lictors the crowd became confused and disorganized. The lictors had another advantage, for the first impulse of a Roman citizen, no matter how riled, is to show respect to anyone bearing fasces and to defer to any magistrate accompanied by lictors. Even in that disaffected crowd, a patriotic respect for Roman authority ran deep.

  The lictors reached the tribunal, where Caelius awaited them with hands on his hips. Isauricus emerged from the cordon of armed men and mounted the tribunal to stand before Caelius. His face was very nearly the same color as the purple stripe on his toga. Next to Caelius-a handsome man in his thirties, worked up by his speech to his highest pitch of charismatic radiance-Isauricus looked like a sputtering, hopelessly out-of-touch old grandfather in a comedy by Plautus. The weird theatricality of the moment was reinforced by the fact that the two of them stood on a platform not unlike a portable stage. All they needed were grotesque masks and a bit of back ground music to turn them into comic actors.

  Isauricus shook his finger at Caelius and spoke in an angry voice, keeping his pitch too low for the crowd to hear. Apparently I was not alone in imagining the two as actors, because a wiseacre in the crowd began to shout, "Speak up! We can't hear you! You're swallowing your lines!" Laughter rippled through the crowd, and someone started a new chant: "Isauricus, speak up! Isauricus, speak
up!"

  The consul abruptly looked out at the crowd, furious to hear his name shouted at him so rudely. Caelius, who had so far kept a sardonic smirk on his face, appeared to lose his temper in the same instant. The two commenced shouting at each other. Whatever they said was drowned out by the swelling roar of mingled yells and laughter from the crowd, but it was easy enough to imagine. Isauricus was telling Caelius that he had no legal authority to set up a tribunal in the first place, and that by interfering with a fellow magistrate in the commission of his duties he was coming very close to treason. Caelius was probably resorting to more personal insults; I could easily imagine him calling Isauricus a finger puppet with the hand of Caesar up his back side.

  Whatever Caelius said to Isauricus, it must have cut to the quick. The consul, overcome by a burst of fury, abruptly picked up Caelius's chair of state and lifted it over his head. It looked as if he intended to strike Caelius with it, and even headstrong Caelius quailed a bit, stepping back and raising his arms to protect himself. Instead, Isauricus slammed the chair down in front of him and seized the fasces from the nearest lictor. He extracted the ax from the bundled rods and raised it above his head.

  The crowd let out a collective gasp. Davus, unable to see because he still held me aloft, cried, "What is it, Father-in-Law? What's going on?"

  "By Hercules," I said, "I think we're about to see a murder!"

  Sunlight glinted on the upraised ax. The crowd fell silent except for a few scattered screams. My blood ran cold. The mob had rioted for days and had burned down the Senate House after Clodius was killed on the Appian Way. Now Caelius had taken up Clodius's mantle as champion of the downtrodden. What would they do if they saw him murdered in cold blood by the consul of Rome right before their eyes?

  Caelius staggered back, his mouth open in shock, his face as white as a Vestal's stola.

  Isauricus brought down the ax-not on Caelius, but on Caelius's chair of state. With a great crash, the seat was shattered. Isauricus raised the ax and brought it down again. There was another crash, and bits of wood went flying in all directions.

  For a brief instant a look of relief crossed Caelius's face. Only a moment before he had been staring into the mouth of Hades. Just as quickly, relief was replaced by utter outrage. In a heartbeat his face turned from bloodless white to deepest red. He cried out and rushed toward Isauricus, oblivious of the ax the consul wielded.

  At once, lictors swarmed onto the tribunal, unsheathing their axes and interposing themselves between the two magistrates. A moment later, to defend Caelius, men from the crowd jumped onto the tribunal. Isauricus and Caelius were separated, and Caelius was pulled from the tribunal into the crowd. His supporters wanted to protect him, but it seemed to me they were subjecting him to the risk of being trampled to death.

  "Enough, Davus!" I said. "I've seen enough. Set me down! We almost got caught in the last riot, and I don't want to make that mistake again."

  But it was too late. A vortex of humanity swirled all around us. Men screamed, shouted, laughed. Faces flashed before me: some jubilant, some angry, some terrified. The crowd spun me about until I grew dizzy. I looked for Davus but saw him nowhere. Hieronymus, too, had vanished, along with all the familiar chin-waggers. I gazed about, disoriented and confused, unable to spot a familiar landmark. I saw only a blur of strange faces and, beyond them, a confusion of walls and buildings. The crush of bodies squeezed the breath out of me, lifted me off my feet, carried me along against my will. I saw spots before my eyes-

  And then, out of nowhere, incongruous amid so much ugly chaos, I saw the face of the woman called Cassandra. In her eyes I saw no panic, but quite the opposite-a deep serenity, oblivious of the madness around us. Was that a sign of madness, to appear so calm amid such insanity?

  I lost consciousness.

  When I came to my senses, another face confronted me. For a moment I was confused because he looked so much like Cassandra-the same golden hair, the same blue eyes, the same incongruity of a young, handsome face burned by the sun, smudged with dirt, and surrounded by unkempt hair.

  I gave a start and uttered a cry. The young man looming over me gave a start in response and grunted. A figure standing behind him stepped into view. It was Cassandra.

  "Don't frighten him, Rupa. He's had a shock."

  I rose on my elbows. I was lying on a threadbare pallet in a tiny room with a dirt floor. The only light came from a narrow window set high in one wall, and from the doorway, where a ragged cloth that served as a curtain was pulled back to show a shadowy hallway beyond. From the hallway came a smell compounded of boiled cabbage, urine, and unwashed humanity. From the window came the sounds of a couple arguing, a baby crying, and a dog barking. There was also a peculiar, persistent, not entirely unpleasant sound of metal clinking and clanging against metal somewhere in the distance.

  I had been inside enough such buildings over the years to know exactly the sort of place in which I found myself. It was one of the ruder tenements in the city, probably located somewhere in the Subura, where the most wretched of Rome's citizens live tightly packed into close quarters, at the mercy of unscrupulous landlords and each other.

  The young man called Rupa looked at me not unkindly, then rose from the pallet and stood. He was a big fellow-as big as Davus, which meant he was big enough to have carried me from the Forum to the Subura over his back. That must have been what happened, for there was no injury to my tunic or my flesh to indicate I had been dragged.

  Cassandra stepped forward. "I suppose you'll want to know where you are," she said.

  "In the Subura, I imagine. Not far from the Street of Copper Pots."

  She raised an eyebrow. "I thought you were unconscious while Rupa carried you here."

  "I was. I don't remember a thing since I fainted in the Forum. But I know the smell of an apartment in a Subura tenement, and I suspect that persistent clanking from outside is the sound of copper pots hung up for sale striking against one another. The sound they make is slightly different from the sound made by vessels of iron or brass or bronze. Given the angle of the light from that window and the distance of the sound, I'd say that we're about two blocks to the north of the Street of Copper Pots. Since we're on the ground floor of the tenement-"

  "How do you know that?'

  "Because the floor is of made of packed dirt. Yet there's a tiny bit of blue sky visible through that window, above the roof of the yellow building next door; therefore, the yellow building can't be more than two stories tall. Rather short for a tenement in the Subura. I think I know the one. Are we in the red building next to it, the one where there's always a barking dog chained next to the entry?"

  "Exactly!" She smiled. "And I was thinking you'd wake up and be completely disoriented, like a…"

  "Like an old man who lost consciousness merely from being spun about a bit? No, my wits are back, or at least such wits as I have left."

  She smiled. "I like you," she said, without showing the least awareness of how such a smile and such words, coming from such a beautiful young woman, could suddenly light up the whole world for a man.

  Rupa wrinkled his brow and made a signal to her with one hand.

  "Rupa says he likes you, too." Her smile wavered. "You see, Rupa is-"

  "Mute? Yes, I gathered that. For many years my elder son, Eco, was unable to speak-" I caught myself. Since I had disowned Meto at Massilia, I no longer had an elder and a younger son. Eco was my only son. And Meto-for me, Meto no longer existed…

  Cassandra saw the expression on my face. She frowned. "You've lost a child," she said.

  I raised an eyebrow, surprised.

  She shrugged. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. But it's true, isn't it?"

  I cleared my throat. "Yes, in a way. I've lost a son. Or misplaced him…"

  She saw that I cared to say no more and changed the subject. "Are you hungry?"

  I was, in fact, but I had no intention of taking food from anyone who clearly had as little to spare
as Cassandra and her companion. I shook my head. "I should go. My family will be wondering what's become of me." I stood up, feeling unsteady.

  "Are you sure you're well enough?"

  "When a man reaches my years, he learns to accommodate small complaints, rather as a rich man learns to accommodate unwanted relatives. It's only a bit of light-headedness. Nothing, I should think, compared to the spells from which you suffer."

  She lowered her eyes. "You're talking about that day I fell into your arms. I wasn't sure you'd remember."

  "It's not every day a beautiful young woman falls into my arms. Nor am I likely to forget the previous time I saw you."

  "A previous time?"

  "You were in front of the Temple of Vesta. You did more than faint on that occasion."

  "Did I?" She wrinkled her brow. "I suppose I must have. They told me about it later. I don't really remember."

  "Have you always suffered such episodes?"

  She looked elsewhere. "I'd rather not talk about it."

  "Forgive me. I had no right to ask. It's only because…"

  "What?"

  I shrugged. "You fell into my arms. Now I've fallen into your arms… more or less. It's enough to make a fellow think the gods must want the two of us to meet."

  She raised an eyebrow.

  "I'm only joking! You mustn't blame an old fellow for flirting a bit." I glanced at Rupa, who seemed amused. In that moment I suspected he was not her lover. What then? A servant, relative, friend?

  She smiled. "You were kind enough to catch me that day. Today in the Forum, when I saw you in distress, I wanted to return the favor."

  "Good. That makes us even, then. But I haven't introduced myself, have I? My name is Gordianus."

  She nodded. "They call me Cassandra."

  "Yes, I know. Don't look surprised. You're not entirely unknown in the Forum. People tend to notice a person… such as you. I don't suppose Cassandra is your real name?"

  "As real as any other."