I shrugged, thinking that I could always find her in her booth. Then I trudged back home, where I found two notes waiting for me.
One was from my father, informing me that the following morning the Senate would go to Pompey's camp to give him formal permission for his triumph. I was to dress properly for the occasion.
The other was from Julia. It read: I have important information. Meet me tomorrow evening at sunset en the portico of the Temple of Castor.
Chapter IX
It was a fine morning, and we assembled in the Forum dressed in our best togas. It was not an official holiday, but there was a holiday spirit in the air, as there always is when routine is broken. Hortalus got up on the Rostra and proclaimed our mission, and the crowd cheered, praising the Senate's wisdom.
Of course, Pompey had known for days of the Senate's decision, but his flunkies had insisted that we revive the ancient custom of the entire Senate trooping in a body to the victorious general's camp to give him the good news personally. Since they had adequate historical precedent to cite, there was no way the rest of us could get out of it.
As we went down the Via Sacra to the city gate, we all kept good, impassive senatorial faces, but there was plenty of grumbling all around. I did a bit of it myself.
"It had better be the triumph to top all triumphs," somebody groused near me, "since he's putting us to all this trouble."
"Just like Pompey," said somebody else. "Not enough to get his triumph; he has to see the whole Senate come out to him to kiss his glorious backside." This was all to the good, to my way of thinking. In those days the Senate still had a great deal of pride and was an assemblage of peers. We did not like anyone who puffed himself up and gave himself kingly airs. A triumphator received semi-divine honors for a day, and that was thought to be enough for any man.
Pompey's lackeys had been petitioning the Senate to grant him the right to wear his triumphal regalia at all public functions, a piece of abject toadying that horrified all right-thinking Romans. Unfortunately, right-thinking Romans were getting fewer all the time.
Pompey's camp was laid out identically to a legionary camp, but without the customary fortifications. That would have been an intolerable provocation. His soldiers were still under arms, but they showed the lax discipline Pompey allowed between campaigns. Few bothered to wear armor or bear shields, and those detailed to guard the treasure merely belted on their swords and leaned on their spears, most of them passing the time with dice and knucklebones. There were some flaming faces as we made our way to his praetorium. Many felt mortally insulted that Pompey had not bothered to have his men turn out for an inspection parade to honor a visit by the massed Senate.
At the praetorium we found Pompey enthroned on a dais. We walked down the via praetoria between the ranks of his honor guard. These indeed were finely turned out, their mail newly cleaned and oiled, the sun flashing from the polished bronze of their helmets. Their cloaks and their horsehair crests were new and colorful. The damage had been done, though, when the Senate had seen the slovenly louts standing guard. I remembered what Cicero had said about Pompey, that he was a political imbecile. A man who neglected to flatter the most august body of men in the world had little future in Roman politics.
"Just like calling on the King of Kings, isn't it?" I turned to see Crassus standing close to me. "Look at him. That dais must be fifteen feet high, and that curule chair is ivory, unless my eyes deceive me."
Indeed, Pompey looked more like a king than a soldier, for all his gold-plated armor and scarlet cloak. His curule chair was draped with leopard skins, and his feet rested on a footstool cleverly wrought from the crowns of monarchs he had conquered.
"He certainly doesn't mind rubbing it in," I concurred. Behind him stood the eagle-bearers of his legions, their heads and shoulders draped with lion pelts above their old-fashioned scale shirts, and beside him stood some odd-looking men whose long, pointed beards echoed the shape of their tall caps. They were draped in rough brown cloaks. I asked Crassus about them.
"Those are the Etruscan soothsayers I told you about. He claims they bring him good fortune."
These were hard-faced, fanatical-looking men. But then, I thought, men who spent their days cutting open sacrificial animals and delving among their viscera for omens had not chosen the pleasantest of professions.
We stopped before the dais and stood there looking noble while Pompey tried to look regal. Hortalus stepped forward and spoke sonorously.
"Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus, we, the Senate of Rome, in exercise of our ancient right, do hereby grant you the honor of a triumph!" His grandiloquence was somewhat marred by the trumpeting of an elephant nearby.
Pompey stood. "Honorable conscript fathers," he began; then several more elephants blasted away. He waited for them to quiet down, then went on. "I accept this honor, to the glory of the gods of Rome and the ancestors of my house."
"What ancestors?" said some wag. "That flute-player four generations ago?" This raised some guffaws. Like many others, his family had been raised to prominence by Sulla. They had amounted to nothing before that.
" Io triumphe!" shouted the honor guard, drowning out all the sly remarks being passed at Pompey's expense.
I heard Crassus say, in a low voice, "What an opportunity!" Something in his tone made me uneasy.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I mean, here we are, the whole Senate. And there he is, and all around us are his armed troops. He could massacre the lot of us right now and not a thing we could do about it."
"It would certainly be the crowning achievement of an extraordinary career," I said. I spoke flippantly, but the sweat began to spring out on my scalp. Surely, I thought, not even Pompey would be so bold. I would not feel safe until I was back within the walls of Rome. It taught me something else: that Crassus might very well seize such an opportunity, should it ever come his way. I determined that, should he ever be encamped outside the city awaiting a triumph, and should the Senate be summoned to go deliver him the good news, I would beg off on account of a sudden illness.
"The augurs," Hortalus went on when the soldiers were quiet, "will take the omens and determine the will of the gods concerning a propitious day for the triumph."
"No need," Pompey said. He gestured toward his Etruscans. "My haruspices have already worked their art, and they have proclaimed the third day from today to be most pleasing to the gods."
I could see that Hortalus was furious, but he was a man of great experience and knew that he would cut a ridiculous figure trying to argue points of ritual in such a setting, where Pompey had arranged things to emphasize his own majesty. There was no dignified way to argue with such high-handedness, so Hortalus acceded gracefully.
"So shall it be proclaimed in the Forum," he said. Now Pompey rose. "I give you all freedom of my camp, and I invite you to partake of some refreshment with me."
And so we ended up being Pompey's guests for lunch. He had laid out tables under an immense tent-roof, which also sheltered some of the more fragile items destined to grace his triumph: paintings and other works of art, fine furnishings, fabrics, brocades, even models of the besieged cities and forts carved from ivory and shell. The food wasn't bad either. I got pleasantly tipsy since I saw no good reason not to. Happily stuffed, I got up from the table and wandered among the treasures, admiring as always our wonderful Roman talent for acquiring other people's property. Pompey had acquired a good many of the people as well. In one tent were enemy princes and nobles, tastefully fettered in golden chains. Another vast marquee sheltered some of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.
"Scandalous," clucked another senatorial inspector. It was Cato, naturally. "A triumph should not be made into a brothel."
"I don't know," I said. "These look like good stock. Who wants to be surrounded by ugly slaves?"
"Nonsense!" he retorted. "Within ten years half of them will be freed, living in the slums and spawning babies to be a further burden on the state."
There was some justice to that. Reluctantly, I left the entrance of the tent. Several Senators were crowding in behind me.
"Come on," I said, "let's go see the elephants." Grumbling, Cato accompanied me. I disliked Cato greatly, but he was fun to have around on such occasions. He had no sense of humor whatever, and that made it easy to insult him without his noticing.
In a nearby field we found score upon score of the immense beasts, with their drivers putting them through their paces. Some were being trained to carry various trophies in procession. Others had platforms erected on their backs, bearing images of the gods. Still others carried small forts, and these were manned with slaves dressed to resemble the enemies Pompey had conquered.
There was another compound, heavily guarded, which held captive warriors. These were fierce men, too dangerous to leave at home and unsuitable for ordinary slave work. Most of them were destined for the arena, where a few of them might win their freedom at the whim of the crowd. Besides the legionaries, wooden towers at intervals around this compound were manned by expert Cretan archers with arrows fitted to their strings.
"Here, at least," Cato proclaimed, "Pompey hasn't let his men get too slack, even though he's had to employ those Cretan hirelings."
"He doesn't have much choice," I said. "Romans are swordsmen and spearmen, not archers."
"Did you see those idle louts as we entered the camp?" Cato all but hissed. "I cannot believe that those were Roman soldiers. I have heard of how slack his legions are, but I never guessed the extent of their indiscipline."
"All the more reason," I said, "that we should prevent him from ever getting command of Roman soldiers again."
Cato nodded. "You are right. In the future, I shall apply myself to blocking his attempts at further military commands." He mused for a while. "And those foreign soothsayers! What he did was an affront to the gods of our ancestors! I suppose it's what you might expect from a man whose father was killed by lightning." I did not argue with this.
As I walked back toward the camp entrance I passed the praetorium and heard voices speaking in a strange language. I thought it probably the conversation of Asiatic slaves and was about to pass on when some half-forgotten familiarity in the sound of the language stopped me. Slowly, I stepped nearer the great tent.
Just within one of the entrances I saw the soothsayers huddled. Theirs was the voices I had heard. I suppose I must have heard Etruscan spoken before, probably in the form of prayers or chants. It was a dying language, but was still spoken in some of the more remote parts of Tuscia. One of the men looked up and caught sight of me. He said something and they all fell silent and glared at me.
I had no idea why they thought I was eavesdropping on their conversation, since nobody on Earth except Etruscans could understand their incomprehensible gibberish. Ill-mannered foreigners. If Pompey was cultivating such as these, he was welcome to them.
With a few other Senators as companions, I walked back to the city. None of them were Pompey's supporters, so I was not constrained in my speech. Everyone agreed that Pompey's arrogance had grown intolerable. Nobody, however, had any good propositions as to what to do about it. After listening to a number of futile suggestions, I decided that our best course was probably that put forth by Cicero: Let time, the absence of promising wars and Pompey's own political ineptitude bring him down.
I had one major apprehension about this policy, though. I feared that Pompey's downfall would probably come about because he would be replaced by men more unscrupulous than he.
It was barely midafternoon when I reached the Forum. There were several hours left before sunset, when I would meet Julia at the Temple of Castor. I wondered what she might have discovered, but that was not the foremost thing on my mind. I was more excited just to be meeting Julia again. Too many women had inserted themselves into my life in recent days: Clodia, Fulvia, even Purpurea. In the company of these mysterious and dangerous women, Julia seemed positively wholesome, even if she was Caesar's niece.
The Forum is always a good place to idle, so I idled. I talked to friends and acquaintances, and got braced by more publicani than I had known to exist. Most of these were angling for public contracts out in the provinces, because virtually all the builders in Rome were going to be engaged for the next couple of years on Pompey's new theater. Not only was the theater itself to be immense, but it was to be but the centerpiece of a veritable minor forum out on the Campus Martius. It would have galleries and gardens, a new voting-compound for the popular assemblies and a Senate house. It seemed that there was a sort of public-works rivalry between Pompey and Lucullus, and the city was doing well out of it. Lucullus, though, gave better parties.
As I ambled around the periphery of the Forum, I came upon one of those crowds that assemble wherever something ghastly has happened. With a sinking heart, I went to investigate. I could already see that they were gathered before a booth, one decorated with fortuneteller's symbols. I pushed my way through the gawkers and into the booth. Inside I found a man in a purple-bordered toga dictating to a pair of secretaries who stood with styluses and wax tablets poised.
All three were gazing down at the body of Purpurea, which was decorated with the now-familiar wounds on throat and brow. Her face was stretched into a mask of terror as exaggerated as those worn on the stage. Unlike the other victims, she had known what was coming.
"Good day, Senator," said the man in the toga praetexta. He was perhaps forty years old, with a serious face and reddish hair. "I am Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, curule aedile. This woman was murdered sometime this morning. Did you know her, or were you just curious to see what the fuss was about?"
I told him my name and enough of my lineage to let him know who I was. "I have questioned her in recent days concerning an investigation I am engaged upon."
"Under whose auspices?" he asked sharply.
"Metellus Celer," I said.
"He has no authority, but we both know he'll be one of next year's Consuls, and I'll be out of office then, so I won't dispute his right to appoint you."
"How was she discovered?" I asked.
"Several people entered this booth this morning but left thinking she was not here. A man who keeps a sausage-stand nearby came in to see if she had any garlic among her herbs, and he saw her foot sticking out from behind a pile of baskets. Whoever killed her covered the body."
"Is anything known about her?" I asked.
"Nothing but her name and occupation," Domitius said.
"I don't suppose she had a license to practice her trade here?"
"How could she?" he said. "It's illegal." He caught my reproving look. "All right, I know it's our duty to expel them from the Forums and markets, but the office of aedile was assigned when Rome was about one-tenth the size it is now. We have to test weights and measures, guard against usury and counterfeiting, put on the public games, keep all the public works in repair, clean and pave the streets-" He threw up his hands. "I could devote my whole year just to inspecting the wineshops and whorehouses, another of our duties, and never get to all of them!"
"The burdens of office are great," I agreed. "Any idea whether she was freeborn? If she was a freedwoman her former master may want to claim the body for burial."
"I intend to find out. One of my secretaries will go from here to the Archives."
"When you find out, could you send me word? I didn't get to finish questioning her, and there is a great deal I would like to know. I would esteem it a great personal favor."
He had been bored with the onerousness of office, but this brightened him. This meant he would be able to call on me for a favor someday, and that was not a small thing when the parties had names like Domitius and Metellus.
"I shall be most glad to, Senator."
"Thank you. My house is in the Subura. Your messenger can ask anyone there where to find me." I took my leave and went outside. I checked to make sure that my caestus was handy and my dagger was loose in its sheath. The way things were progressing,
it couldn't be long before the man with the knife and the hammer came for me.
The Temple of Castor is the most beautiful in Rome. It had been built over four hundred years before, in gratitude for our victory at Lake Regillus. Actually, its full name was the Temple of Castor and Pollux, but nobody bothers with poor old Pollux, who, like Remus, is the forgotten brother of the Twins.
I found Julia standing atop the steps, between two of the tall, slender columns. She wore a belted gown of pale saffron and a shawl of darker yellow. Her only jewelry was a string of gold and amber beads. She was as different from Clodia as it was possible for a woman to be, and that was the highest praise I could think of. She smiled as I came up the steps toward her. She had wonderful teeth.
"You're early," she said. "The sun isn't quite down."
"I was anxious to see you again." I looked around the portico, which seemed to be deserted. "No grandmothers lurking in the shadows?"
"We're safe," she said. "I'm supposed to be visiting an aunt in the House of the Vestals."
"I have an aunt there myself," I said inanely.
"Actually, I went there," she said. "I wouldn't lie about it. I just didn't stay as long as I hinted I might."
"That's nothing to anger the gods," I assured her. "Before I forget-when you said that Fulvia was at Caesar's house on the night of the Mysteries, did you mean the younger one, the one who is betrothed to Clodius?"
"Yes, that's the one. The elder Fulvia left the city in disgrace last year. I met Fulvia that night, before the unmarried women had to withdraw. She's a beautiful creature. I've heard rumors about her, but I would not believe them. Nobody that young can be that bad."
"Oh, yes, they can," I affirmed. "Some people are bad from birth. Age merely confers experience and discretion upon their youthful promise. I met her yesterday, and I couldn't have picked a better match for Clodius. With luck, they'll kill each other, but I tremble for the fate of Rome, should they produce children who live."
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