The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  They burst into the Pontifex Maximus’s reception room, the first room inside, to find Quinctilia and Cornelia Merula pacing about; Calpurnia sat limply on a bench with Junia supporting her. When the men entered, all the women ran to them.

  “Where is he?” Lucius Caesar demanded.

  “No one knows, Chief Augur,” said Quinctilia, a fat, jolly woman who was Chief Vestal. “It’s just that the whole Forum is saying that he’s been murdered.”

  “Did he come home from the meeting at the Curia Pompeia?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Has anyone of authority been here?”

  “No, no one.”

  “Piso, hold the fortress,” Lucius Caesar commanded. “I’m off to the Curia Pompeia to see if anyone’s still there.”

  “Take some lictors with you!” Piso shouted.

  “No, Trogus and some of his sons will do.”

  Lucius moved at the double through the Velabrum—run, trot, walk, run, trot, walk—with Gaius Julius Trogus and three of his sons. People were clustered in groups everywhere, some wringing their hands, some weeping, but no one he barked a question at knew anything more than that Caesar was dead, Caesar had been murdered. Past the Circus Flaminius, out to the theater, into the hundred-pillared colonnade; clutching at a stitch in his side, Lucius paused to get his breath back. No one, but there were many signs that a large number of men had left in a hurry.

  “Stay here,” he said curtly to Trogus, walked up the steps and into the Curia Pompeia.

  He smelled it before he saw it: unmistakable to a soldier, the smell of old, congealing blood. The ivory chair was in small pieces around the purple-and-white marble floor, a folding table had come to rest against the bottom tier on the right side—they had attacked from the left, then—there were scrolls scattered for many feet around, and a body lay on the bare curule dais, absolutely still. When he bent over it he could see that Caesar had been dead for some hours, but he peeled the fold of toga gently away from the head, gasped, choked. The left side of the face was a ruin of blood and flesh, white bone glistening, the eye a runny mess. Oh, Caesar!

  “Trogus!” he screamed.

  Trogus came running, started to wail like a child.

  “There’s no time for that, man! Send two of your sons to the Forum Holitorium and commandeer a hand cart. Go on, man, do it! Cry afterward.”

  He heard two of the young men run off; when Trogus and his remaining lad came into the chamber, Lucius waved them away.

  “Wait outside,” he said, and slumped on to the edge of the curule dais where he could see his beloved cousin, so still, in such a welter of blood. To have produced so much of it, the wound that killed him must have been among the last.

  “Oh, Gaius, that it should have come to this! What will we do? How can the world go on without you? It would be easier to lose our gods.” The tears began to pour down his face; he wept for the years, the memories, the joy, the pride, the sheer waste of this luminous, peerless Roman. Caesar reduced all others to insignificance. Which was why they had killed him, of course.

  But when Trogus came to say that the barrow had arrived, Lucius Caesar arose dry-eyed.

  “Bring it in,” he said.

  It came, an unpainted old wooden cart perched on two wheels, its flat tray very narrow but long enough to take a body, two handles at one end to push it. Lucius absently plucked a few scraps of leaf out of it, brushed some particles of soil away with his hands, made sure that the wrecked face was covered.

  “Pick him up gently, lads, lie him on it.”

  He hadn’t begun to stiffen yet; now that he was lying on his back, one arm and hand refused to stay by his side, insisted upon flopping off the barrow. Lucius shrugged himself out of his purple-bordered toga and spread it over Caesar, tucked it in all around. Let the arm and hand dangle free; they would tell the world what kind of burden the old hand cart carried.

  “Let’s take him home.”

  Trebonius ran after Antony frantically, shouting at him to calm down, help deal with the situation, call the House into session. But Antony, who could move like the wind despite his size, tore through the Forum with his lictors and kept on going.

  Angry and frustrated, Trebonius gave up trying to catch him. Striving to collect himself, he instructed his stool slave to return to the Curia Pompeia and find out what was going on there, then come to report to him at Cicero’s house; that done, he ascended the Palatine and asked to see Cicero.

  Who wasn’t in, but was expected back at any moment. Trebonius sat down in the atrium, accepted wine and water from the steward, and prepared to wait. His stool slave came first, to inform him that the Curia Pompeia was deserted, and that the Liberators had fled en masse to seek asylum in Jupiter Optimus Maximus’s.

  Stupefied, Trebonius put his head in his hands and tried to work out what had gone wrong. Why had they sought asylum when they ought to be on the rostra proclaiming their deed?

  “My dear Trebonius, what is it?” boomed Cicero’s golden voice some time later, alarmed at nothing more than the sight of Gaius Trebonius with his head in his hands; he had been playing marriage counselor with Quintus’s wife, Pomponia, and had heard no rumors.

  “In private,” said Trebonius, rising.

  “Well?” asked Cicero, shutting the door quickly.

  “A group of senators killed Caesar in the Curia Pompeia four hours ago,” Trebonius said calmly. “I wasn’t one of them, but I was their commanding officer.”

  The aging, shrunken face lit up like the Alexandrian Pharos; Cicero whooped, clapped his hands together in wild applause, then wrung Trebonius’s hand ecstatically. “Trebonius! Oh, what wonderful, wonderful news! Where are they? On the rostra? Still in the Curia Pompeia talking?”

  Trebonius wrenched his hand away. “Hah! I should hope!” he snarled savagely. “No, they’re not at the Curia Pompeia! No, they’re not on the rostra! First that dolt Antonius panicked and ran for the Carinae, I imagine, as he certainly didn’t stop in the Forum! He was supposed to spearhead the campaign to extol Caesar’s elimination, not scuttle home as if the Furies chased him!”

  “Antonius was a part of it?” Cicero breathed incredulously.

  Remembering to whom he was speaking, Trebonius tried to mend this fence at least. “No, no, of course not! But I knew he wasn’t very fond of Caesar, so I thought I could talk him into seeing the sense in smoothing the killing over once it was a fact, that’s all. When he wouldn’t stop running, I came to find you, which was what I planned to do anyway. Thinking that you’d lend us your support.”

  “Gladly, gladly!”

  “It’s too late!” Trebonius cried despairingly. “Do you know what they did? They panicked! Panicked! Men like Decimus Brutus and Tillius Cimber panicked! My trusty band of tyrannicides came charging out of the Curia Pompeia and fled to Jupiter Optimus Maximus’s, where they’re cowering like whipped dogs! Leaving four hundred pedarii to fly in all directions screaming that Caesar was dead, murdered, then presumably rush home to lock themselves in. The ordinary folk are down in the Forum milling about, and there’s no one in authority to tell them anything.”

  “Decimus Brutus? No, he’d never panic!” Cicero whispered.

  “I tell you, he panicked! They all did! Cassius—Galba—Staius Murcus—Basilus—Quintus Ligarius—there are twenty-two men up there on the Capitol praying to Jupiter’s statue and shitting themselves in fear! It all went for nothing, Cicero,” Trebonius said grimly. “I thought that bringing them up to the mark would be the hard part—I never even took into account what might happen afterward! Panic! The scheme’s in ruins, no one can retrieve our position now. They did the deed, yes, but they didn’t hold their ground. Fools, fools!” Trebonius groaned.

  Cicero squared his shoulders and patted Trebonius’s. “It may not be too late,” he said briskly. “I’m off to the Capitol at once, but I suggest you round up some of Decimus Brutus’s troupe of gladiators—they’re in Rome for some ancestor’s funeral games—or
at least that’s what he told me the other day. With this in the wind, perhaps he brought them in as bodyguards for after.” He extended a hand to Trebonius. “Come, my dear fellow, cheer up! You go and find them some protection, and I’ll get them down to the rostra.” He whooped again, chuckled with glee. “Caesar is dead! Oh, what a gift for liberty! They must be extolled, they must be praised to the skies!”

  It was late afternoon when Cicero walked into the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, his beloved freedman Tiro in his wake.

  “Congratulations!” he roared. “Fellow senators, what a feat! What a victory for the Republic!”

  That huge voice had them jumping, squawking, scrambling into the corners of the cella. Eyes adjusting to the gloom, Cicero told them over in astonishment. Marcus Brutus? Ye gods! How had they managed to talk him into this? But how terrified they were! Killing Caesar had utterly unmanned them, even Cassius, even Decimus Brutus, even that wolfshead Minucius Basilus.

  So he settled to talk them out of their panic, only to find that nothing he said could persuade them to emerge from the temple, declaim upon the rostra. Finally he sent Tiro to buy wine, and when it came he dished it out in the rude clay beakers the vendor had supplied, watched them drink it so thirstily that it was gone in a trice.

  When Trebonius walked in he was still trying to jolly them. “The gladiators are outside,” Trebonius said briefly, then snorted in disgust. “As I feared, Antonius ran home and has bolted himself in. So has Dolabella and every member of the Senate who knows.” He turned on the Liberators in exasperated anger. “Why did you panic?” he demanded. “Why aren’t you down there on the rostra? People are gathering like flies on a carcass, but there’s no one to tell them what’s happened.”

  “He looked so awful!” Brutus moaned, rocking back and forth. “How could anyone so alive be dead? Awful, awful!”

  “Come,” said Cicero suddenly, pulled Brutus to his feet and crossed to where Cassius sat, head between his knees. Cassius too was hauled up. “The three of us are going down to the rostra, and I’ll hear no arguments. Someone has to speak to the people, and, since we lack Antonius or Dolabella, yours are the two best-known faces. Move! Come on, move!”

  One hand in Cassius’s, the other in Brutus’s, Cicero dragged the pair out of the temple and propelled them down the Clivus Capitolinus, thrust them up on to the rostra. A crowd gathered, not a huge one; its mood was docile, bewildered, aimless. As he looked at it, Brutus regained sufficient composure to understand that Cicero was right, that something had to be said. His cap of liberty on his dark curls, his toga long gone, he stepped to the front of the rostra.

  “Fellow Romans,” he said in a small voice, “it is true that Caesar is dead. That he should continue to live had become intolerable to all men who love freedom. So some of us, including me, decided to free Rome from Caesar’s dictatorial tyranny.” He held his dagger aloft in his bloody hand, its makeshift bandage emphasizing the redness. A moan went up, but the crowd, growing rapidly as word spread that someone was speaking from the rostra, made no move, evinced no rage.

  “Caesar couldn’t be let strip land off men who have held it for centuries just to settle his veterans in Italy,” Brutus said in the same small voice. “We, the Liberators, who killed Caesar Dictator, the King of Rome, understand that Rome’s soldiers must have land to retire on, and we love Rome’s soldiers just as much as Caesar did, but we love Rome’s landowners too, and what were we to do, I ask you? Caesar leaned too much one way, so Caesar had to go. Rome is more than merely veterans, though we, who have liberated Rome from Caesar, love Rome’s veterans—”

  He wandered and meandered, all about veteran soldiers and their land, which meant very little to this urban crowd, and told them virtually nothing about why or how Caesar had died. No one who tried to decipher what Brutus was saying was sure who these Liberators were, or who had freed whom from what. Cicero stood listening with a leaden heart. He couldn’t speak until Brutus finished anyway, but the longer Brutus dribbled on, the less he wanted to speak at all. Phrases like “committing verbal suicide” danced through his mind; the trouble was that this wasn’t his arena, he needed the resonance of a good hall to bounce his voice around—and he needed to look at intelligent faces, not masses.

  Run down, Brutus stopped very suddenly. The crowd remained still and silent.

  A scream shattered that silence, ripping from the direction of the Velabrum, then was followed by another, closer, from the shadows the Basilica Julia’s bulk cast on the Vicus Iugarius. Another scream, another. On the rostra, Brutus saw what was coming through a widening gap in the throng—a vegetable cart pushed by two very tall, strong young men who looked like Gauls. On it lay something covered in a purple-bordered toga, and off one side of the barrow hung a limply flopping hand and lower arm, white as chalk. Behind the two Gauls pushing this burden walked two more, and in their wake, Lucius Julius Caesar in a tunic.

  Brutus began to shriek, terrible sounds of horror and pain. Then, before Cicero could restrain him, he was running, Cassius too, off the rostra, back up the hill of the Capitol to the temple. Not knowing what else to do, Cicero followed them.

  “He’s in the Forum! He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead! I’ve seen him!” Brutus howled as he reached the cella, fell on the floor and began to weep like one demented. Not in much better case, Cassius crawled to his corner and sobbed. The next thing all of them were crying, moaning.

  “I give up,” said Cicero to Trebonius, who looked exhausted. “I’m going to get them some food and decent wine. You stay here, Trebonius. Sooner or later they have to come to their senses, but not before morning, I think. I’ll send blankets too—it’s cold in here.” At the doorway he tilted his head, stared at Trebonius dolefully. “Hear that? Mourning, not jubilation. It seems that those in the Forum would rather have Caesar than liberty.”

  They took Caesar to the Pontifex Maximus’s bathroom first; Hapd’efan’e, who had returned from Calvinus’s, hung on to his physician’s composure and peeled the tattered toga off, the tunic beneath it; no togate man wore a loincloth. While Trogus took off the high red boots of the Alban kings, Hapd’efan’e began to wash away the blood, Lucius Caesar watching. He was a beautifully made man, Caesar, even at fifty-five, his skin always white where the sun hadn’t weathered it, but utterly white now, for all his blood had poured away.

  “Twenty-three wounds,” said Hapd’efan’e, “but if he had had immediate attention, none would have killed him except that one, there.” He pointed to the most professionally administered blow, not very large, but right over the heart. “He died the moment it fell, I don’t have to open his chest to know that the blade went right inside the heart. Two of his assailants had something very personal to say—there”—pointing to the face—“and there.” He pointed to the genitals. “They knew him much better than the others. His beauty and his virility offended them.”

  “Can you mend him well enough to display his body?” Lucius asked, wondering which two had hated Caesar so personally, for as yet he had no idea who the assassins were.

  “I am trained in mummification, lord Lucius. I know that is not necessary for a people who cremate, but even his face will be whole again when I have finished,” said Hapd’efan’e. He hesitated, his very dark, slightly sloed eyes staring at Lucius painfully. “Pharaoh—does she know?” he asked.

  “Oh, Jupiter! Probably not,” said Lucius, and sighed. “Yes, Hapd’efan’e, I’ll go and see her now. Caesar would want that.”

  “His poor women,” said Hapd’efan’e, and went on working.

  So Lucius Caesar, wrapped in one of his cousin’s togas, set out with two of Trogus’s mourning sons to see Cleopatra. He didn’t bother boating across the river, he took the Pons Aemilia and the Via Aurelia, not sorry for the solitude of the long walk. Gaius, Gaius, Gaius…You were tired, so tired. I’ve seen it descending upon you like a dense fog a little at a time, ever since they forced you to cross the Rubicon. That was never what
you wanted. All you wanted was your due. The men who denied you that were small, petty, mean-spirited, devoid of a particle of common sense. Their emotions drove them, not their intellects. That’s why they could never understand you. A man with your kind of detachment is an indictment of irrational stupidity. Oh, but I will miss you!

  Somehow Cleopatra knew; she met him clad in black.

  “Caesar is dead,” she said very steadily, her chin up, those remarkable eyes tearless.

  “Did you hear the rumor, even out here?”

  “No. Pu’em-re saw it when he spilled the sands and sifted them. He did that after we found Amun-Ra turned on his pedestal to the west, and Osiris broken into pieces on the ground.”

  “An earth tremor on this side of the river. There was none in the city that I know of,” Lucius said.

  “Gods move the earth when they die, Lucius. I mourn him in my body, but not in my soul, for he is not dead. He has gone into the west, from whence he came. Caesar will be a God, even in Rome. Pu’em-re saw it in the sands, saw his temple in the Forum. Divus Julius. He was murdered, wasn’t he?” she asked.

  “Yes, by little men who couldn’t bear to be eclipsed.”

  “Because they thought he wanted to be a king. But they did not know him, did they? A terrible deed, Lucius. Because they murdered him, the whole world will take a different course onward. It is one thing to murder a man, quite another to murder a God on earth. They will pay for their crime, but all the peoples of the world will pay far more. They tampered with the Will of Amun-Ra, who is Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Zeus. They played the God game.”

  “How will you tell his son?”

  “Honestly. He is Pharaoh. Once we return to Egypt, I will put my brother down like the jackal he is, and raise Caesarion to the throne beside me. One day he will inherit Caesar’s world.”

  “But he can’t be Caesar’s heir,” Lucius said gently.

  The yellow eyes widened, looked scornful. “Oh, Caesar’s heir must be a Roman, I know that. But it is Caesarion who is Caesar’s blood son, who will inherit all that Caesar was.”