Rubicon

by Steven Saylor

  ‘Tiro, we must get inside the walls, quickly.’

  ‘Indulge me, Gordianus. Today is Liberalia, you know!’

  ‘I should like to indulge you by sitting you down on one of those giant phalli the priests of Dionysus carry.’

  Fortex yelped at the idea. Tiro hooted. He was in high spirits, almost giddy. Why not? He had carried off his charade with spectacular success. He had slipped through Antony’s hands unscathed, slipped in and out of Caesar’s tent undetected, and had even garnered valuable information from the lips of the imperator himself. Now he was skimming a last bit of intelligence, observing the numbers and dispositions of Caesar’s troops and siege machines.

  After some morning cloudiness, the sky had cleared. An offshore wind was rising. It was a perfect day for sailing. At any moment Pompey might begin his retreat. The transport ships might be loading at that very moment. ‘What will be the use of all this information you’re gathering, Tiro, if we wait too long to get into Brundisium? Pompey may leave without you – or he may become trapped, for lack of what you might have told him.’

  ‘You’re right, Gordianus, we must be getting on. But first, something to quiet the rumbling in my belly. Who knows what sort of rations Pompey’s troops have been reduced to inside the city? I suggest we eat at Caesar’s expense, and slip into Brundisium with full stomachs.’

  ‘Where’s the mess tent, then?’ I grumbled.

  ‘Three up and two over.’ Tiro had memorized the layout of the camp.

  We were given steaming millet porridge sweetened with a dollop of honey. I even found a few raisins in my portion. Fortex grumbled at the lack of any meat.

  ‘Meto tells me that a soldier fights best with grain in his belly,’ I said. ‘Too much beef bloats a man, makes him sluggish, turns his bowels to mud. Once, in Gaul, Caesar’s troops ran out of gram. For days on end they had nothing to eat but cattle requisitioned from the natives. They hated it, to the point of becoming mutinous. They demanded their porridge!’

  ‘Your son must be a remarkable person,’ said Tiro.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Meto was born a slave, wasn’t he?’

  ‘So were you, Tiro.’

  ‘Yes, but I was educated and groomed to be Cicero’s companion from early on. I had the life of a scribe. There’s room for a slave to prove himself in that kind of position, to show off his natural talents and rise in the world. But Meto was born a slave to Marcus Crassus, wasn’t he? A bad man to have for a master. Crassus may have been the richest man in the world, but he never knew the true value of anything.’

  I nodded. ‘Meto wasn’t even in Crassus’s household, properly speaking. He was an errand boy in one of Crassus’s villas on the coast, in Baiae. That’s where I first met him, during the slave revolt of Spartacus. There had been a murder, presumably by some runaway slaves. Crassus intended to kill every slave in the household in retribution, including Meto. Imagine, slaughtering an innocent child in the arena!’

  ‘Roman justice is sometimes hard,’ agreed Tiro.

  ‘Crassus wasn’t entirely pleased with the way things turned out. When it was all over, he sent Meto off to an estate in Sicily. Do you know what Meto was doing, when I finally tracked him down? He was a scarecrow. It was terrible for him. Endless days in the hot sun, the buzz of insects in the gram, the hungry crows always coming back, the foreman beating him if any of the crop was eaten. He had nightmares about it for years afterwards. Perhaps he still does.’

  ‘I should think by now he’s seen enough horrors as a soldier to drive out that nightmare and replace it with others,’ observed Tiro. ‘What made him want to become a soldier?’

  ‘Catilna.’ I saw Tiro wrinkle his nose at the mention of the radical insurgent who had been Cicero’s enemy. ‘When he was sixteen, he fell in love with Catilna, or the idea of Catilna, and ran off to fight for him. I was there, too, at the battle of Pistoria, when Catilna’s dreams ended. Meto and I survived, by the favour of the gods. That taste of battle was more than enough to satisfy any curiosity I ever had about warfare and slaughter, but Meto wanted more. He needed another leader to follow, more battles to fight. It has something to do with being born a slave, I think. I freed him. I made him my son, and never treated him as anything less than my own flesh and blood. But he never quite felt a sense of birthright, a sureness of belonging. The night before his toga day, when he was sixteen . . .’

  I caught myself. Why I was speaking so candidly? The mood of an army camp on the brink of battle has a way of loosening a man’s tongue. ‘On the eve of his toga day, Meto had the nightmare – the scarecrow nightmare. I told him that was all in the past. He knew that, but he didn’t feel it. Becoming my son, becoming a citizen – it all felt unreal to him. In his heart, he was still a frightened, helpless slaveboy. It wasn’t until he went off to Gaul and found favour with Caesar that he seemed finally to put his beginnings behind him. He found the place where he belonged, and the leader he was looking for. And yet, now –’ I stopped myself from going farther. ‘I don’t pretend to understand him, Tiro, not completely. But I am his father, as surely as if he came from my seed.’

  ‘You love him very much,’ said Tiro quietly.

  ‘More than anything else. Too much, perhaps.’

  XIX

  ‘I’m not a swimmer,’ I said.

  After eating, we had returned to the lookout post on the hill north of the city. Tiro, Fortex, and I sat on horseback, surveying the view. It was much as I had seen it the day before, except that the harbour was now crowded with moored transport ships, and the harbour entrance had been pinched a bit tighter, thanks to new rafts hastily added to the end of each breakwater. Tiro had said he wanted a final look at the lie of the land and the disposition of Caesar’s forces, but I was beginning to suspect that he had no idea of what to do next and was searching for a way to get inside the city walls.

  Lacking the wings of Daedalus, this could be done in only two ways: by land or by water. Entry by land would require getting past the front line of Caesar’s heavily manned trenches, traversing the no-man’s land before the city wall, and then penetrating or scaling the wall itself. We could hardly do any of this in secret. Long before we crossed the front line, the attackers would order us to stop or be killed as defectors. Even if we crossed the no-man’s land alive, the defenders might fire upon us long before we could explain ourselves, and they could hardly be expected to open the gates or let down ladders even if they wanted to help us.

  That left the possibility of approaching Brundisium by water. The city wall that fronted the harbour was shorter and less heavily guarded than the landward wall, but scarcely less formidable to three men without wings. Outside this wall, a narrow road ran along the waterfront and gave access to the port situated at the tip of the peninsula, but the entire length of this road had been covered with a veritable thicket of spikes and caltrops to make passage impossible and discourage even small boats from landing. There was only one point of possible ingress: the port itself, where gates in the walls opened onto a wide boardwalk and several large quays projected into the water. The gates to the port were open and there seemed to be a great deal of activity on the quays, but as yet there was no sign that the ships moored there were being readied for departure.

  ‘What did you say, Gordianus?’ mumbled Tiro, gazing intently at the prospect.

  ‘I said, I’m not a swimmer. I’ve always been a city boy, you know. Born and raised in Rome.’

  Tiro blinked. ‘People swim in the Tiber all the time. Upstream from the Cloaca Maxima, anyway.’

  ‘No, Tiro. People splash in the Tiber, and float across on planks, and in dry years they wade across. That’s not the same as swimming across a harbour with arrows falling around you.’

  ‘Who said anything about swimming?’ said Tiro. ‘Do you see those little fishermen’s huts down there, on our side of the channel? Just a stone’s throw away, facing the city across the harbour?’

  I nodded. The huts were
few and spaced well apart. I hadn’t even noticed them in the twilight of the previous day, distracted by the battle at the harbour entrance.

  ‘The huts looked abandoned,’ said Tiro. ‘No signs of life. The fishermen have all retreated inside the city walls. But they left their boats behind. They’re only skiffs, too small to be of any use to Caesar, so they’ve just been left there, pulled up on the sandy beach. I can see five or six of them from here. We have our choice. I have my eye on that one with the white sail. Less visible than, say, the one with the orange sail.’

  ‘Do you know anything about sailing a vessel like that?’

  ‘You might be surprised by the things I know, Gordianus.’

  ‘Once we’re out in the harbour, what then?’

  ‘We sail directly for the quay. The channel can’t be more than a quarter of a mile across.’

  ‘What if the current’s against us? What if Caesar’s men come after us?’

  ‘Then Fortex shall have to row harder,’ said Tiro.

  Fortex rubbed his jaw.

  ‘And you may have to swim,’ added Tiro.

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  We were halfway down the hillside, our horses picking their own path through the bramble, when a voice called out from the ridge behind us.

  ‘You can’t go down there! It’s off-limits!’

  It was the centurion in charge of the lookout. Tiro turned and waved. He held a hand to his ear, flashed a stupid grin and shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t make out what the man was saying. ‘Ride on,’ he whispered. ‘Look straight ahead. Ignore him. Head directly for the skiff. Faster!’

  We urged our mounts down the hillside and reached the narrow beach. Behind us, I heard the galloping footfall of a horse.

  ‘How many?’ said Tiro, keeping his eyes ahead.

  Fortex glanced over his shoulder. ‘Just the one.’

  ‘Good. He thinks we’re harmless, then. We’ll allow him to go on thinking that as long as possible. You know what to do, Fortex.’

  At the strip of beach between the hut and the skiff we dismounted. The centurion was closing on us. I drew close to Tiro.

  ‘What do you mean to do to him?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Does it have to be like this?’

  ‘We made a bargain, Gordianus. You took me into Caesar’s tent, and I’m to get you into Brundisium. Do you want to come along or not? This is war. Did you think there’d be no bloodshed? Just be glad it’s not your blood about to be spilled.’

  ‘It’s murder, Tiro. As surely as the death of that wagon driver was murder.’

  ‘Murder is a legal term, Gordianus. It doesn’t apply to slaves, and it has no meaning on a battlefield.’

  ‘Perhaps we can simply knock him unconscious . . . drag him into the hut . . .’

  Tiro made a face. ‘You muddied your mind reading those Greek novels while we sat out the storm in the mountains. All hairbreadth escapes and happy endings! This is the real world, Gordianus. There’s only one sure way to get rid of this fellow. Fortex will see to it. It’s what he’s trained for. Now smile; we have company.’

  The centurion rode up. He dismounted and walked towards us. There was a spring in his step; the short, brisk ride had exhilarated him. His smile was a little disdainful, but not hostile. I was only an ignorant civilian after all, a sheep that needed herding, not a wolf. He addressed me and ignored the others. ‘No civilians are allowed along the shoreline.’

  I held up the copper disc. ‘But Caesar himself gave –’

  ‘The imperator has issued explicit orders regarding the shoreline. No exceptions.’ He raised his voice, apparently thinking I might be a little deaf.

  ‘I . . . only wanted to have a look at this quaint fisherman’s hut.’

  The centurion shook his head and smirked a bit. I was like a doddering grandfather who had to be indulged, but only to a point. He took no notice of Fortex, who circled behind him.

  Blood pounded in my ears. In a matter of seconds it would be done. The young centurion, all flushed and smugly smiling, would be gripped from behind. Fortex would slit his throat – a flash of steel, a spurt of blood. His eyes would widen in shock and then go blind. A living man would become a corpse while I watched.

  Beyond the centurion’s shoulder, I had only a partial view of Fortex, but from his movements I could see that he was stealthily drawing his dagger. Tiro stood off to one side, playing the dutiful, retiring slave, holding his breath.

  I reached for the centurion’s shoulder and drew him towards me. Fortex, uncertain, held back.

  ‘Do you have a grandfather?’ I said.

  ‘Two,’ said the centurion.

  ‘I thought so.’ I walked him away from the skiff, away from Fortex, and towards the hut. ‘Is one of them a little deaf? A bit doddering?’

  ‘Both of them, actually.’ He grinned crookedly. I had made him think of home, far away.

  I nodded. ‘Well, young man, I’m neither doddering nor deaf. I can hear you perfectly well. My eyes are good, too. The reason I rode down here was because I saw someone go into this hut.’

  He frowned. The hut was crudely built, with a thatched roof. The thin door hung on rusty hinges. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely. I saw a man in rags skulking down here on the beach, behaving suspiciously. I saw him go into this hut. I thought I should come to investigate.’

  ‘You should have called me at once.’ The centurion rolled his eyes, exasperated.

  ‘But I know how busy you must be. It hardly seemed worth bothering you. Probably it’s the owner of the hut, come back to fetch something.’

  ‘A looter, more likely.’ The centurion drew his sword. He walked up to the door and pulled it open with such force that the top hinge broke. ‘You, inside, come out!’ He took a step closer, peering into the darkness. I followed behind, pulling my dagger from its scabbard. With one hand I knocked his helmet forward, over his eyes. With the other I raised the dagger and struck him hard with the pommel at the base of his skull. He fell in a heap at my feet.

  I sheathed my dagger. ‘Make yourself useful, Fortex. Pull him inside the hut. And don’t harm him!’

  I stepped back and scanned the ridge. ‘I don’t think anyone up there could have seen that, do you, Tiro? The hut shielded me from view. Besides, they’re all too busy watching the city and the harbour entrance. I’ve managed to buy us a little time, but before long they’ll miss him, or start wondering about our horses on the beach. What are you waiting for? Pull the skiff into the water and let’s get going!’

  Tiro looked chagrined. ‘Gordianus, I –’

  ‘You should read more Greek novels, Tiro, and less of that insipid poetry Cicero produces.’

  Within moments we were in the skiff and away from the beach. Tiro unfurled the white sail. Fortex pulled hard at the oars. I sat in the prow, shivering. I had wet my feet getting into the boat. The water was colder than I expected.

  I watched the shoreline. The centurion suddenly appeared at the doorway of the hut, looking dazed and rubbing the back of his head. I waved to him and returned the smug smile he had given me earlier. He staggered out of the hut, shook his fist, and yelled something I couldn’t make out.

  Fortex laughed. ‘I should like to have cut his throat. I’ve never killed a centurion. Ah well, perhaps another time.’

  The wind was with us. So was the current. We skimmed across the smooth water. The shoreline receded and the walls of the city loomed higher. Our course was a bit ragged – Tiro was not quite the sailor he made himself out to be – but despite some zigzagging we kept heading in the general direction of the port. It seemed almost absurdly easy, considering how daunting the task of getting into Brundisium had appeared to me the previous night.

  The other skiff was upon us so quickly that it seemed to materialize from thin air. Tiro was busy with the sail. Fortex was rowing with strong, steady strokes. It was I who saw the skiff first, but not until it was almost within ar
rowshot of us. It was a long sleek boat, larger than ours, with two rowers and two archers, both of whom already held their bows aloft with arrows notched, aimed in our direction.

  I looked to see where the skiff had come from, and noticed a strip of shoreline directly across from the port. A considerable contingent of soldiers was gathered there, along with a few small boats. Another skiff was heading out to join the first in pursuing us.

  I nudged Tiro and pointed. Just as he turned to look, one of the bowmen released an arrow. We both flinched, but the arrow fell well short, into the water. It was a test shot to gauge the wind and measure the distance. The second bowman released a shot that came substantially closer. Meanwhile, with two rowers to our one, the skiff steadily gained on us.

  ‘By Hercules, Tiro, can’t you keep to a straight course?’ I shouted. ‘If you keep zigzagging back and forth, they’re bound to catch us before we reach the quay!’

  Tiro made no answer. Perversely, it seemed to me, he veered off course, heading directly towards the city wall, instead of continuing at a more oblique angle towards the port. The skiff gained on us rapidly. I heard a noise like a hornet’s buzz and ducked. An arrow flew over my head and tore into the sail, where it snagged and caught, the shaft flapping against the taut canvas. We were at their mercy, with no way to defend ourselves. I gazed at the cold water, bracing myself for the moment we would have to abandon the boat, debating whether drowning was preferable to death by arrows.

  Suddenly I heard shouting above our heads and looked up to see soldiers manning the harbour wall. I saw the strategy of Tiro’s navigation, to bring us close enough to the wall to put our pursuers in range of arrows from the city’s defenders. The fact that we were pursued by Caesar’s men was enough to bring Pompey’s soldiers to our defence.

  With a whoosh like carrion birds taking flight, a hail of arrows descended from the wall. Some fell closer to us than to the pursuing skiff. The water was dotted with little vertical splashes. None of the arrows struck a target, but the point was made. Caesar’s men stopped closing in on us.