The madman dropped to his knees with a splash. “Pontifex Maximus! At last! You will hear the truth of what I say.”
The high priest wore a toga distinctive for its many folds gathered and tucked in a loop just above his waist; the cowl that would have covered his head at ceremonies was pushed back to reveal a bald crown fringed with white hair. He stroked his long white beard and looked down his nose at the man in the impluvium. “Marcus Caedicius! How far you’ve fallen in the world—and I don’t just mean to your knees.”
“Pontifex Maximus, do you know this man?” said Postumia.
“I do. Caedicius used to be a respectable plebeian, a fuller who washed and dyed wool; observe the dark stains behind his fingernails. But some time ago he gave up his shop and became a vagrant. He frequents a particular spot in the street above the Temple of Vesta. Have you not seen him pacing this way and that, muttering to himself? Well, Caecidius, what is this nonsense? What can you be thinking, forcing your way into this sacred dwelling and terrifying the holy virgins! What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Oh, Pontifex Maximus, you must listen to me!”
“I am listening, you fool. Speak!”
“I heard a voice. I was in the street, alone—there wasn’t another mortal in sight, I swear—and a voice spoke to me, as clearly and distinctly as I’m speaking to you now. A voice from nowhere!” Caedicius wrung his hands and chewed his lower lip.
“By Hercules, man, spit it out! Do you think I have nothing better to do? What did this voice say?”
“It said: ‘The Gauls are coming!’ That’s what it said, as clearly as you hear me now: ‘The Gauls are coming!’”
The Pontifex Maximus wrinkled his brow. “The Gauls?”
One of his subordinates drew alongside him. “A tribe of savages who come from a land far to the north, Pontifex Maximus, beyond a great mountain range called the Alps. Some years ago, they discovered a pass across the Alps. Some of them moved into Italy and founded a city called Mediolanum. Poets say it was a craving for wine that drew the Gauls to Italy; in their native land they have nothing like it. Their language is said to be a combination of grunts, very uncouth and grating to the ear.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of these Gauls,” said the Pontifex Maximus. “Why should they come here, Marcus Caedicius, and why should we care?”
Caedicius splashed his hands in the shallow water, close to weeping. “The Gauls are coming! Do you not understand? Their arrival shall be terrible, the most terrible thing that has ever happened! Doom! Death! Destruction! Warn the magistrates! Flee at once, and take the Vestals with you! Pray to the gods for our salvation!”
For quite some time, a rotund little priest in the retinue behind the Pontifex Maximus had been searching through a scroll, rotating the cylinders with both hands and scanning the text. The man gave a sudden jerk, which caught Pinaria’s attention.
Foslia also noticed. She gripped Pinaria’s arm and whispered into her ear. “Do you realize what that priest is holding? It’s one of the Sibylline Books!”
“Surely not,” whispered Pinaria. “Aren’t they kept on the Capitoline, in a vault beneath the Temple of Jupiter?”
“Of course; that’s where the priests study the Greek verses, translate them into Latin, and debate their meaning. That roly-poly little fellow must be one of the priests, and that must be one of the Sibylline Books!”
“I never thought that I should ever actually see one,” said Pinaria, feeling a tremor of dread. The arcane verses were consulted only in times of dire crisis.
The priest gave another jerk and uttered a cry of excitement. “Pontifex Maximus, I’ve found something! I knew I had seen the reference before; at last I’ve located it. The Sibyl herself foresaw this moment. She wrote a verse to guide us.”
“What does it say? Read the oracle aloud.”
The little priest looked up from the scroll. He stared wide-eyed at Marcus Caecidius for a long moment, blinked and cleared his throat, and read:
A man kneels on water and does not sink.
He speaks to the wise to make them think.
From his warning they must not shrink.
The little priest lowered the scroll. Everyone in the room gazed at the man who knelt in the shallow water, who claimed to have heard a warning from a disembodied voice that proclaimed, “The Gauls are coming!”
Not long after Caedicius delivered his warning, word arrived that a vast army of Gauls had swept down from the north and was laying siege to the city of Clusium, located on a tributary of the Tiber, a hundred miles upriver from Roma.
The city fathers conferred. The prophecy of Caedicius and the words of the Sibyl were debated. It was decided that a delegation should be sent to Clusium to observe the Gauls at first hand. If they were as numerous as rumor asserted, and as menacing as Caedicius believed, then the envoys should attempt to use diplomacy—promises, pacts, or threats—to turn the Gauls back from Clusium, or at the very least to dissuade them from moving further south and setting their sights on Roma.
The Roman ambassadors were three brothers of the distinguished Fabius family. The Gauls received them courteously, for they had heard of Roma and knew the city was a force to be reckoned with. But when the Fabii asked what injury the Clusians had done to the Gauls that they should attack their city, and if making war unjustly was not an offense to the gods, the chieftain of the Gauls merely laughed at them. Brennus was a big-jawed man with a bristling red beard and a shaggy red mane, so massive and ruggedly muscled that he seemed to have been hewn from a block of granite. The Gauls were very nearly a race of giants, and Brennus towered over the Roman ambassadors. Even though he spoke with a kind of rough humor, it seemed to the Romans that he was belittling them.
“How have the Clusians offended us?” Brennus asked. “By having too much, while we have too little! By being so few, while we number so many! As for offending the gods, yours may be different from ours, but the law of nature is the same everywhere: The weak submit to the strong. So it is among gods, beasts, and men alike. From everything I’ve heard about you, you Romans are no different. Haven’t you done your share of taking what belongs to others, making free men into slaves simply because you’re stronger than they are and because it suits you? I thought so! So don’t ask us to pity the Clusians. Instead, maybe we should pity the people you’ve conquered and oppressed. Maybe we should go about setting them free and restoring their goods. How would you like that, Romans? What do you say? Ha!”
Brennus laughed in their faces. The Fabii were greatly insulted, but kept their mouths shut.
The matter might have ended there, but Quintus Fabius, the youngest and most hotheaded of the brothers, was determined to draw some Gallic blood. All races, including the Gauls, recognized the divinely protected status of envoys; it was universally agreed that ambassadors must be afforded hospitality and must not be harmed, and in return must not take up arms against their hosts. Quintus Fabius violated this sacred law. The next day, putting on the armor of a Clusian, he joined the forces of the besieged city and rode into battle against the Gauls. Picking out a Gaul of particularly large stature, he rode straight toward the man and killed him with a single blow of his sword. Wanting a trophy, Quintus Fabius jumped from his horse and set about stripping the dead man of his armor, and in doing so his Clusian helmet fell from his head. Brennus, fighting nearby, saw his face and recognized him at once.
The Gallic chief was outraged. Had he been able to confront Quintus Fabius there on the battlefield, the death of one or the other might have ended the matter, but the press of the battle carried the two men apart, and both ended the day unscathed.
The Fabii headed back to Roma. Brennus, an impulsive, prideful man, brooded all night. In the morning, he announced that the siege of Clusium was ended. For grossly insulting him—first by suggesting that he had offended the gods, then by flagrantly breaking divine law to take up arms against him—the Romans must be punished. Brennus declared that the entire force of the G
auls—more than 40,000 fighting men—would march south at once.
In Roma, the Pontifex Maximus called for the punishment of Quintus Fabius, saying that all guilt should rest on one man so as to exonerate the rest of the citizens and spare them from divine retribution. But popular opinion applauded Quintus Fabius for his recklessness. The people scoffed at retribution from either gods or Gauls; had not Quintus proved how easily a Gaul could be killed, no matter how gigantic, and had not the gods seen him safely home? Election time was at hand, and rather than punishing Quintus Fabius, the people elected him and his brothers military tribunes. Brennus, hearing this, grew even more enraged. His speeches whipped the Gauls into a frenzy. The vast horde rushed down the valley of the Tiber and rapidly drew nearer to Roma.
One man had the proven ability to unify the Roman forces and lead them to victory, even in the face of overwhelming odds, but that man was in exile: Camillus. Nightly, the Vestals prayed for his return, even as they saw omens everywhere that foretold disaster. But Camillus was not recalled from exile, and no dictator was appointed to deal with the emergency; instead, the Fabii and the three other military tribunes saw fit to split the command between themselves. Though they managed to muster an army to match the Gauls in numbers, the vast majority of these soldiers were raw recruits. Many had never held a sword or cast a spear; full of bravado like their leaders, they were unruly, undisciplined, and overconfident. On the eve of battle, still at odds with the priesthood that had demanded the punishment of Quintus Fabius, the commanders neglected to take the auspices or make sacrifices to the gods. Roma was to face Brennus without Camillus, without a sufficiently trained army, and without the favor of the gods.
The battle took place on the summer solstice. The longest day of the year became the most miserable day in the history of Roma.
The Roman forces were advancing upriver beside the Tiber, poorly massed and in disarray thanks to conflicting instructions from their commanders. As they approached the confluence where the river Allia ran through a steep ravine to join with the Tiber, about ten miles upriver from the city, they heard a noise like a multitude of animals braying. The noise grew louder and nearer, until the Romans began to realize it must be a marching song sung by the Gauls in their uncouth language. The scouts had given no warning, and it seemed impossible that the Gauls could have come so far so quickly. A tremor of fear ran through the front ranks. In the next instant, they came face to face with the enemy.
The Romans panicked, broke ranks, and ran. Thousands were pushed into the river and drowned. Thousands more fled into the narrow ravine; those who were not trampled by their own men were slaughtered by the Gauls. Those who survived the battle did so only because Brennus, amazed at the ease of his victory, suspected a trap. He kept his men from advancing as quickly as they might have, which allowed the Romans who threw down their weapons and cast off their armor to outrun their pursuers, saving themselves while shedding every vestige of their dignity. Because it was closer, most fled to Veii, not to Roma. Only a handful made it back to the city with news of the disaster.
The Roman army was destroyed. Its remnants were disarmed and scattered. Elated by their good fortune but exhausted from so much slaughter, the Gauls rested that night. The next day they stripped booty from the fallen dead; so many Romans had been killed that the process took all day.
The next morning the Gauls pressed on toward Roma. When they arrived, at nightfall, they beheld a city with open gates and not a single sentry on the walls. All was silent and still. So eerie was the sight that Brennus camped outside the walls that night, again fearing a trap. He waited until morning to venture into the defenseless city.
Alone in the Temple of Vesta, Pinaria slept. Not even the goddess was present, for the sacred fire of Vesta was gone. Only ashes remained in the hearth.
The previous day, while the others made ready to flee, racing about the House of the Vestals in a panic, Pinaria had been overcome by a desire to spend a few more moments, however fleeting, in Vesta’s temple. She had meant to steal quickly to the temple and just as quickly back again, but the masses of people in the street thwarted her intentions. By the thousands, Roma’s citizens were abandoning her. Some fled on foot with nothing more than the clothes they wore. Some pushed carts loaded high with belongings. Some hitched donkeys to wagons and attempted to take all their possessions with them.
As Pinaria threaded her way through the throng, others, seeing her holy vestments, tried to make way for her, but in many places the crowd was simply too thick. Pinaria was jostled this way and that. The heat of the midsummer day was stifling and oppressive. People moaned in misery. A woman screamed and cried out that her child had fallen and was being trampled underfoot. Pinaria turned to look, but the crowd carried her forward against her will.
At last she reached the temple. She broke away from the crowd and rushed up the empty steps. The doors stood open. There was no one inside. Pinaria closed the doors behind her and took a deep breath.
Why had she come? Vesta was no longer here; wherever the hearthfire was, that was the place where the goddess might be found, and the eternal flame had been transferred to a portable brazier to be transported away from Roma, to a place of safety. The Pontifex Maximus and the Virgo Maxima had overseen the grim ceremony while the Vestals looked on and wept; as long as Vesta’s hearthfire could be preserved, there remained a chance, however slender, that the city of Roma might endure.
The circular sanctum was dark and empty. The chamber was surprisingly quiet; the heavy doors muffled the hubbub of the crowd outside. As she stood alone in the Temple of Vesta, a sense of calm descended on Pinaria.
“What use is prophecy?” she said aloud, though there was no one to hear.
Marcus Caedicius had warned the magistrates and the priests about the Gauls, yet his warning had done no good. Despite their efforts to prevent the coming of the Gauls—indeed, because of those very efforts!—the Gauls were now marching on Roma, with nothing to stop them. The prophecy of Caedicius had proved no more useful than the prophecies of the Trojan princess Cassandra, who foresaw her city’s doom and yet could do nothing to prevent it. Was the fate of Troy to become the fate of Roma?
Pinaria shuddered and shut her eyes. She suddenly felt very weary. She knelt on the floor and leaned against the empty hearth.
She had not meant to fall asleep. Indeed, she would have thought it impossible to do so, considering the overwrought state of both the city and herself. Somnus, the god of sleep, overwhelmed her, accompanied by his son Morpheus, the shaper of dreams.
Pinaria woke. She did so suddenly, with a jarring sense of dislocation in time and space.
Where was she? Blinking, she realized that she was in the Temple of Vesta. She felt a stab of panic. Had she fallen asleep while tending the sacred flame? She looked at the hearth. It was cold and dark, the fire extinguished! Her heart raced and she felt lightheaded, then she remembered: The Gauls were coming. The flame had been removed so that it could be carried to safety.
She sensed that many hours had passed since she entered the temple. The murmur of the crowd no longer penetrated the heavy doors; no sound at all came from outside. It was not nighttime; bright sunlight leaked in from the narrow gap beneath the doors.
Pinaria opened the doors and shielded her eyes, dazzled by bright morning light. The hand of Somnus must have been very heavy upon her, to make her sleep from one day’s light until the next.
Morpheus had visited her as well, for now she remembered a dream that had haunted her sleep. Foslia was in the dream, nattering on and on, showing off her erudition. Everything she said irritated Pinaria and made her more distressed…
“Romulus walked on foot for his triumphs. Do you suppose Brennus will ride a quadriga through Roma, like Camillus? I wonder if Brennus is as handsome…”
There was more, though in the dream Pinaria protested and tried to stop her ears.
“The Trojan women were taken as slaves. Do you suppose we Vestals will become s
laves? I don’t imagine the Gauls will allow us to remain virgins for long…”
And though Pinaria howled in protest, still Foslia continued, determined to show off her irrefutable religious logic.
“No city is conquered unless its people have offended the gods. Killing or enslaving the inhabitants of a conquered city pleases the gods. Now the Gauls have conquered Roma. What do you think that means, Pinaria? What does it say about Roma?”
What a terrible nightmare! Pinaria shivered, despite the warmth of the day. As she descended the steps and looked around her, what she saw was as disquieting as the dream, and just as strange.
The street was littered with castoff items, all the things that people had thought they could carry while they fled but had abandoned when panic or common sense overcame them: pieces of pottery, sacks full of clothing, boxes stuffed with trinkets and mementos, toys made of wood or straw, even chairs and small tripod tables. Forsaken wagons and handcarts had been knocked on their sides, with their contents strewn beside them.
Not a single person was to be seen, nor the sound of a single voice to be heard. Pinaria had lived her whole life in the city; she was used to its teeming energy, its loud, brash crowds. To see the city without people was bizarre. Roma was like an empty shell. It was like a tomb without a body.
Even the gods were gone. Before fleeing, the Romans had stripped their temples of every sacred object. The hearthfire of Vesta, statues of the gods, sacred talismans of the kings, the Sibylline Books—all been taken away for safekeeping or buried in secret places throughout the city. Only Somnus and Morpheus remained; perhaps they hovered over her still, for Pinaria felt as though she were walking through the strange, unreal landscape of a nightmare.
She wandered about the Forum, sometimes startled by the echo of her footsteps in the empty public spaces. Rounding a corner, she drew a sharp breath. She was not alone, after all. On a backless chair before the entrance to his official residence sat the Pontifex Maximus. He heard her gasp, gave a start and turned his head, as surprised to see her as she was to see him.
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