The Tribune's curse s-7

by John Maddox Roberts

  With brisk efficiency, the lictors lined us up by height, with the shortest on the left end of the line, the tallest on the right. I found myself standing next to Cato, and he was dressed in full legionary gear, including a shield slung across his back.

  “How far are you planning to carry it, Cato?” I asked.

  “What do you mean? The full three circuits, of course.”

  “You don’t have to, you know,” I said. “Only those under forty have to go the whole course.”

  “I was born when Valerius and Herennius were consuls,” he said stiffly.

  “The same year I was born?” I said, aghast. “Unbelievable!” Cato was one of those men who give the impression of being elderly from childhood. I had always taken him to be at least ten years my senior, and probably more.

  “Ah!” Cato said, ignoring me. “This is splendid! The gods will have to be pleased with this!”

  Dawn was creeping over the field, and at last I saw clearly what we had to carry. “Oh, no!”

  The priests and the temple slaves had indeed outdone themselves to honor the gods. The litter was the sort that is carried in triumphs, but this one was huge even by triumphal standards, with two support poles the size of ship’s masts. It was beautifully made of the finest woods and decorated with gold, draped heavily with such flowers as were available in November. And atop it, on a high platform, rested the sacrifices.

  The lustrum always takes the form known as suovetaurilia, in which three animals are sacrificed: a boar, a ram, and a bull. In the countryside near Rome there are sizable farms that do nothing except breed the exceptional animals required for the major ceremonies. The ram atop the float was not the wooly little creature you picture in hearing those awful pastoral poems, where lovesick shepherds tootle their pipes while mooning over some nymph named Phyllis or Phoebe. This one was the size of a small horse, with huge, curling horns and a haughty look on his face. The boar was the size of a common ox-a fierce-looking creature I wouldn’t want to meet if he were fully conscious. The bull was, I believe, the largest such creature I had ever seen, larger than the fighting animals bred in Spain. He was pure white and was, as required, an absolutely perfect specimen of the breed.

  All three creatures has been drugged so that there would be no unseemly bleating, squealing, or bellowing to disrupt the proceedings. Their legs had been doubled beneath them and bound with ropes entwined with fine, golden chains. Horns and tusks were gilded, and the beasts themselves had been heavily sprinkled with gold dust.

  “Gold,” I said, disgusted. “Just what we needed. More weight.”

  Pompey strode down the line, inspecting. Like most of us, he wore a plain military tunic and boots. He stopped before Cato.

  “Senator, all that ironmongery will not be necessary.”

  “Consul, I am quite prepared to carry out this ceremony in the ancient fashion, fully armed.”

  “Senator-”

  “I think it would be most pleasing to the gods if we all did so, in fact,” Cato maintained stoutly.

  “Senator!” Pompey snapped, out of patience. “We are losing time! If Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus,” here he poked a finger into his own chest, just in case Cato was in some doubt as to whom he meant, “twice consul, winner of more victories than any other general in Roman history, finds a military tunic the proper uniform for this ceremony, then a senator who has held no offices higher then quaestor and tribune should not find this beneath him!”

  “Yes, Consul!” Cato said, with a fine, military salute. While his slaves helped him out of his gear, Pompey addressed the rest of us.

  “The pacesetters will take the front position on each pole. These will be the praetor urbanus Titus Annius Milo and Lucius Cornelius Balbus, whom the Censors have just enrolled as a senator in recognition of his heroic military service. They are undoubtedly the two strongest men in this august, but usually out-of-shape, assembly.”

  This was the first I’d heard that Balbus was a senator. There was an ancient tradition that heroism could win a man a seat in the curia and a stripe on his tunic, but Sulla had instituted the law that a man had to be elected to at least the quaestorship to be enrolled. But Pompey usually got what he wanted. It was one more piece of evidence that Sulla’s constitution was crumbling and that we were heading back into the anarchic old days.

  The lictors positioned me on the left-hand pole, the one Milo captained. I noticed that Clodius was a few men behind me. I wished that he had been placed ahead of me, so that I could watch him suffer. It would have made up a bit for my own agony to come. Two other stalwarts took the rear positions, and we were all arranged.

  “Now, Senators,” Pompey said, “I want no one to try to run, no matter how late it gets. We’ll never make it that way. We can get this done on time if we keep to a legionary quick pace. You’ve all been drilled in that since you were boys. Rome will rest on your shoulders today. So, lift!” Again came the word, hurled like a deadly missile, and we all stooped, laid hold of the poles, and lifted the tremendous parade float onto our shoulders. Upon the walls the people sighed with satisfaction. The animals seemed not to notice, merely blinking with lordly equanimity.

  The flamines and other priests set out before us, some of them swinging censers in which incense burned. Atop the walls more incense smoked in braziers. We were burning enough that day to cause a serious shortage of incense throughout Roman territory.

  “By the left,” Milo said quietly, “quick step, march.” As one man, we all stepped off, left foot first.

  In the beginning, the weight seemed quite tolerable, but I knew that would change. Soon the older senators would start dropping out. Then fatigue would take its inexorable toll. And even among the younger senators, for years many had performed no exertion more strenuous than crawling from the cold bath to the hot. They would not last either. I wanted no part of Cato’s foolish nostalgia, but it seemed even to me that we were growing too soft. Unlike Cato and his ilk I did not blame this on foreign influence, but upon our increasing reliance on slaves to do everything for us.

  The wall built centuries before by Servius Tullius had once marked out the boundaries of Rome. The City had long since spilled out of its confines, onto the Campus Martius and even across the river into the new Trans-Tiber district, and Sulla had even extended the span of the sacred pomerium, but these changes were too recent to make much of an impression. To all Romans of that day, the Servian Wall, following the line of the old pomerium, still defined the City.

  Much building now lay outside the old wall, but it was surrounded by a span of sacred open ground on which nothing could be built and in which the dead could not be buried. This open ground formed our processional way. It was relatively level, going around the bases of the hills, and it was grassy, for no trees or shrubs were allowed to grow upon it. The old wall was still one of the military defenses of Rome, and you don’t just give your enemy effective cover.

  We started out northeast along the base of the Capitol, circling the city to the right. All around us the temple musicians played their double flutes, striving mightily to drown any sound that might disturb the ceremony or be interpreted as an evil omen. Before we had made a half-circuit, I was sweating despite the crisp breeze. Others were in far worse condition. I heard gasping from the older men and from those less well-conditioned.

  Between the Colline Gate and the Esquiline Gate, all the elderly senators stepped away from the litter. The weight on our shoulders grew fractionally heavier. When we reached the embankment where the river runs along the base of the wall, the middle-aged men were dropping out fast.

  About an hour before noon we reached our starting point. Four hours for the first circuit. Here Pompey left us, red faced and puffing.

  “Keep it up, men,” he gasped. “At this pace, we’ll finish before sundown handily.”

  But there was more to it than time and pace. For the second circuit, we had perhaps half as many men to shoulder the burden. Granted it had been the weaker half tha
t had left, but the willing backs of even old men had been a great help. By noon my shoulder was aching, and the sweat streamed off me by the bucketful. At least, to cheer myself up, I could always look back at Clodius, who was wheezing like a punctured bellows.

  From atop the walls whole troops of little girls showered us with flower petals. They must have raided every garden and flower box in the City, and most of the petals were rather withered at that time of year, but we appreciated the gesture. All along our route, lesser priests and temple slaves dipped olive branches into jars of sacred, perfumed water and splashed it over us liberally, like the Circus attendants who dash water on the smoking chariot axles during the races. This we truly needed and appreciated, although ritual law demanded that we drink nothing during the ceremony.

  We completed the second circuit of the wall by mid-afternoon, and some of us were in serious condition. My shoulder, neck, and back felt like molten bronze, and spots swam through my field of vision. My right arm was all but numb, my knees were shaky, and my feet were bleeding despite the hard marching I had been doing in Gaul. I was in better shape than 90 percent of those who were left. Clodius was in a near-coma, but still gamely on his feet. I no longer took delight in his discomfiture. Cato was hanging on stoutly to his Stoic demeanor, but I could see the signs of deathly fatigue in him. Milo and Balbus seemed not to be distressed, but neither was an ordinary mortal. Many of my colleagues would clearly not make it for another quarter-circuit, and I was having waking nightmares about the drugs wearing off and those huge animals setting up a struggle, rocking the litter.

  “Good, men, good!” Pompey said as we set out on the third and final circuit of the walls. “Just one more little march, and it’s done! We will be here, ready for the sacrifice, when you return.”

  “He’s assuming a lot,” wheezed somebody as we set off again.

  “That’s Pompey,” said someone else in a phlegm-clogged voice, “always the optimist.”

  “Save your breath,” Milo cautioned.

  “Right,” Balbus said in his faintly accented Latin. “Now comes the hard part.”

  And hard it was. Almost immediately, men dropped in their tracks, causing those behind to stumble and the float to lurch. Now I had another terror to add to the others. If the litter toppled, which way would it fall? The men on the wrong side would have a ton of wood and livestock fall upon them. But then, I thought, maybe that was what the gods wanted. A few squashed senators would make an impressive and, certainly, a unique sacrifice.

  Somewhere near the Appian Aqueduct I decided that my right shoulder was now permanently six inches lower than my left. I was half-blind, but I looked around me anyway, and I saw the final, hard core of the Senate soldiering grimly on. Not many were friends of mine, but all were men whose reputations for toughness would not let them give up short of their final breath. I saw tunics stained with vomit and others stained with blood from lacerated shoulders. Blood poured in a steady stream from Clodius’s nostrils, drenching his tunic and running down his thighs. I didn’t dare look down at myself for fear of what I might see.

  I heard a gentle grunt that didn’t sound much like anything a human might perform. Then a lowing sound, followed by a quizzical baa. I looked up in pure horror.

  “Hercules help us!” I said, forgetting that because of the curse he didn’t hear. “They’re waking up!”

  “Steady, back there,” Balbus said. “Not much farther to go now. They’ll stay quiet.” I saw that the back of his tunic, and Milo’s, were soaked with sweat. They were human after all.

  But the beasts began to shift, and the litter rocked, and when that happened, we lost step. Each time, it took us longer to get back in step again. This was looking bad.

  “How far is it to the river?” I gasped, sweat obscuring what little vision I had left.

  “We passed the embankment awhile ago,” Cato growled out. “Are you blind, Metellus?”

  “Just about.” Past the river? I tried to remember how far it was from the river to the gate, but I couldn’t, despite having walked the route a thousand times. Rome seemed like a totally strange place-a place I had never visited before. I had no more idea of its geography than that of Babylon. I wasn’t even sure that we were going in the right direction.

  I had a sensation of floating. Gradually, a sense of pressure told me that I was lying on my back. My vision cleared enough to see that I was looking up at the clouds of late evening, tinged red on their westerly edges. I knew then that we had failed. And ritual law prescribed the procedure when a ceremony was not performed properly: you do it all over again, right from the first.

  “Pity Pompey didn’t let us do this in full gear,” I remarked. “I’d like to fall on my sword.”

  “Are you still alive, Metellus?” I’d have known that voice on the bank of the Styx.

  “So I seem to be, Clodius. But I’m just not myself without lunch and my afternoon bath. How far did we get?”

  “I don’t know,” he groaned. “I fell down awhile ago, and I haven’t been able to turn over.”

  “On your feet,” said Milo. Something grabbed the front of my tunic, and I was hauled to my feet as easily as a doll of straw. I saw that Milo and Balbus and a few others were reviving the fallen and that the priests were leading the sacrificial beasts from the platform.

  “We made it?” I asked.

  “Of course we made it,” Milo said. “We’re Romans, aren’t we? But nobody attends a sacrifice on his back, so everyone stand up until it’s over. As long as you keep on your feet, we can continue, although a sorrier-looking lot I never saw.”

  At last I looked down at myself, fighting off a wave of dizziness and nausea as I did so. I was covered with blood and less-reputable fluids, to which handfuls of flower petals adhered. My companions were in equally disheveled shape, and some of them far worse. But we had done something never attempted in living memory, and if the animals would just die without fuss, we could all go home and then brag about it for the rest of our lives.

  A number of men staggered in while the final preparations were made. I later learned that only twenty of us made the entire three circuits, somehow carrying that tremendous weight for the last quarter-mile on our shoulders. Later, the Centuriate Assembly voted us special oak wreaths in honor of our feat. Those of Milo and Clodius were later burned on their funeral pyres, and I believe Cato had his with him when he died at Utica, many years later. My own still hangs among my achievements in the family atrium. I don’t know what happened to the other sixteen.

  Just before the upper rim of the sun disappeared below the horizon, the priests finished their droning chant, and the flutes were stilled. The rex sacrorum nodded, the hammers swung, the knives flashed, and the beautiful but weighty beasts fell with their blood gushing out onto the sacred soil.

  The rex sacrorum raised his hands and intoned: “The gods are pleased. Rome is purified. All may return home now and sacrifice to their household gods. Worship of the immortals may resume.”

  And that was that.

  With an arm over Hermes’ shoulders, I lurched slowly toward home through a City that seemed much relieved. We weren’t out from under the curse yet, but progress had been made.

  “Maybe we should stop off at the baths first,” I said, my chest sending pains through my body with every word.

  “You need it,” Hermes said, “but they’ve been closed down since yesterday morning. I don’t expect to see them back in operation before tomorrow.”

  “Right. I forgot.”

  I vaguely remember people shouting congratulations at me and people offering me wine that I tried and immediately threw up. I had been in pitched battles far less strenuous than that day’s exertion.

  To my great amazement, my father reached my door at the same time we did. I was amazed because for my father to call on me rather than the other way around was all but unheard-of.

  “Well-done, my boy,” he said as he went in through the front gate. Coming from him, that was t
he equivalent of triumphing and winning at the Olympics on the same day.

  Julia gasped at the sight of me and immediately had the slaves hustle me off to the tiny bathing room just off the kitchen. There I stripped off my unspeakable tunic, and Hermes sluiced me down with lukewarm water while I stood in the little stone tub.

  Damp-haired and still unshaven, but washed, dressed in a clean tunic, and feeling far better, I went to join my family. I found Julia making a fuss over my father in the triclinium. I took a chair, and Hermes began to knead my shoulder, which was already turning a lurid purple. Cassandra gave me a large cup of warm, honeyed water, and I found that, if I sipped at it slowly, I could keep it down.

  Julia beamed at me proudly. “The whole City is buzzing with your praises,” she said. “Word reached the Temple of Vesta just moments after the sacrifice.”

  “I have a summons to deliver,” Father interrupted, apparently thinking that I had already received more praise than a mere mortal could ever deserve. “While you were carrying out your duties, I was meeting with some of the sacerdotal authorities, and they wish to meet with you under conditions of utmost privacy. What they have to say to you must be heard by no others.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t understand!” he snapped. “Why should you? It is sufficient that they want to talk to you.”

  “Do they wish to honor him in some way?” Julia asked innocently. She was anything but innocent.

  “No, nothing like that. Your husband’s reputation as a snoop precedes him. They have an investigation for him to undertake.”