The Judgment of Caesar (24 page)

He dropped to his knees, clutching himself and convulsing. “A curse on you, Caesar! May you die as Pompey died, cut to shreds and covered in blood!” He fell onto his side and drew his knees to his chest. Even as he gave a final twitch, the king stepped forward and gave him a hard kick that sent him rolling off the dais. Limp and lifeless, the eunuch’s body fell heavily to the floor.

I looked at Caesar, who stared at the dead body with eyes wide and unblinking. His face was like wax; the eunuch’s curse had unnerved him. At last he shuddered and shook off the spell. He looked at me and flashed a rueful smile. “So, Gordianus, it seems you’re mistaken. The queen’s companions are innocent. The blame for what happened on Antirrhodus falls on your son, after all.”

I shook my head. “No, Consul, there must be another explanation—” “Silence! The king has rid himself of a traitor who managed to climb very high in his esteem. I shall follow the king’s example. I shall rid myself of the traitor in my midst. Meto will be executed tomorrow.”

I staggered back, as stunned as if Caesar had struck me. Light-headed, I looked at Cleopatra. The queen was smiling.

CHAPTER XXV

“It was good of Caesar to allow us this final visit,” said Meto. He sat on his cot, staring at the dank stones of the opposite wall. From the high, barred window came the sounds of a hot summer morning: the creaking of anchored ships, the cry of hungry gulls, the shouts of Caesar’s sailors making sure that nothing was amiss. Achillas had nominal control over most of the city, including the island of Pharos with its lighthouse, as well as the smaller Eunostos Harbor south of the Pharos causeway, but Caesar’s control of the great harbor remained unchallenged.

“Good of him?” I shook my head, which was full of cobwebs. I had spent a miserable, sleepless night, struggling in vain to think of some way to save my son. “ ‘It was good of Caesar to allow us this final visit.’ Loyal Meto! Faithful to Caesar to the very last, even as Caesar prepares to put an end to you.”

“What else can he do, Papa? Someone tried to poison him on Antirrhodus. Not me; but every bit of evidence points to me. He can’t let such an act go unpunished.”

“But what point is there in punishing an innocent man—and a man as unfailingly loyal as you? When I think of the sacrifices you’ve made for that man, the terrible risks you’ve taken—”

“All done of my own volition. I chose to serve Caesar. He allowed me the privilege. Don’t forget that I began life as a slave, Papa. I never forget.”

“When I adopted you, all that changed.”

“No, Papa. The past never vanishes, not entirely. You made me your son, and a citizen; you changed the course of my life completely, and for that I’m more grateful than you can know. Caesar took me into his confidence, gave me a role to play in his grand scheme, and even gave me a kind of love—and for that, too, I’m grateful. My life has been richer than I could ever have dreamed when I was a boy—all the richer because I had no right and no reason to expect that such wonders awaited me. I never took them for granted! But you disowned me—”

“Meto, forgive me! It was the worst mistake I ever made. If I could undo that moment, I would.”

He shrugged. “You did what you felt you had to do. And now Caesar will do what he must. Perhaps he truly believes I tried to poison him; either that, or the alternative is simply unacceptable to him—that the queen, for her own reasons, incriminated me. He must act; and if he must make a choice between Cleopatra and me, then he chooses Cleopatra; and who am I to object? I’m merely a slave who had the good fortune to rise beyond his station; she is the queen of Egypt and the heir of the Ptolemies and, if one believes the Egyptians, a goddess as well. Her destiny is written in the stars; in the great scheme of things, my fate matters not at all.”

“No, Meto! I don’t accept such a notion. Your life matters as much as anyone else’s. I’ve spent my life stepping through the mess made by these so-called great men and women. They’re no better than criminals and madmen, but because they perpetrate their crimes on such a grand scale, the rest of us are expected to bow before them in awe. ‘The gods love me,’ they say, to excuse their crimes and draw men to their cause; but if the gods so love them, then why do they die so horribly? Look at what happened to Pompey, gutted like a fish on the shores of Egypt. Look at the horrible ends that awaited Milo, Clodius, Marcus Caelius, Catilina, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Curio—the list goes on and on. Mark my words, the same fate will befall Cleopatra, and yes, even your beloved Caesar.”

“Are you a soothsayer now, Papa?” Meto laughed without mirth. “This simply brings us back to the same old argument between us, the breach that led you to disown me. You think I give too much blind devotion to a man like Caesar, that I willfully contribute to the mess, as you call it, that he leaves behind in his wake. And perhaps you’re right. I share your doubts. I share your resentment that the world should be as it is—so harsh and cruel and full of lies. But in the end, Papa, I’ve chosen to take part in that world, to embrace the way of the warrior and the spy; and for that I’ll now pay the price, just as Caesar will sooner or later pay a price, if what you say is true.” He lifted his eyes and scanned the wall. “But should you be giving voice to such seditious thoughts, Papa? It was you who warned me that we should speak discreetly, considering the porousness of these palace walls.”

“What does it matter now? Caesar’s made up his mind. He’s the king of Rome, in fact if not in name, and we are all at his mercy.”

“Do you suppose he’ll allow me a choice of deaths? I should like to fall upon my sword, like an honorable Roman. Or will he force me to drink from the amphora, to pay for the crime of poisoning it? The way he forced Pothinus to drink, and die, in front of all those people.”

I shuddered and fought back tears. “Caesar didn’t force him to drink—that was what made his death so terrible! If you could have seen Caesar last night, Meto, lounging up on that dais, dispensing justice willy-nilly like the most decadent Asian potentate. He told me he learned lessons about being a ruler from King Nicomedes, and now he feels disposed to pass on those lessons to young Ptolemy. What sort of example did he set with his treatment of Pothinus? The eunuch was no better than the rest of them, another ruthless schemer with a penchant for murder, but he was no worse, either; he may or may not have deserved a traitor’s death, but for Caesar to taunt him in that fashion, pressing him to gamble his own life on a whim to satisfy Caesar’s curiosity—the capriciousness of it sickened me. And Caesar knew there was something un-seemly about Pothinus’s death. You should have seen his face when the eunuch cursed him!”

“Caesar doesn’t believe in curses.”

“Not even a curse spoken by a dying man with his final breath?”

Meto shook his head. “Curse or no curse, once a man’s dead, there’s nothing left to fear from him. What was it Pothinus himself said to the king, when he was justifying their plot to murder Pompey? ‘Dead men don’t bite.’ ”

I nodded, then stiffened and let out a gasp as I felt a thrill run through me—exactly such a thrill of intuition as I had felt that day when I gazed at Apollodorus’s carved piece of driftwood bobbing on the waves. But now, instead of fleeing before I could grasp it, the insight erupted in my consciousness full-blown, inescapable, undeniable.

I turned and banged my fist on the locked door. “Jailer! Come at once!”

Meto rose from the cot. “Papa, you can’t leave now. Surely we have more to say—”

“And say it we shall, Meto, at some later date, because this is not our final meeting. Jailer! Let me out! I must be allowed to see Caesar at once!”

I found Caesar dressed not as consul, in his toga, but in the military garb of imperator, with his famous red cape billowing slightly in the sea breeze that swept through the high room from the terrace that faced the lighthouse. The room had the tense, hurried atmosphere of a commander’s tent on a field of battle; thus I remembered encountering Caesar in his camp outside Brundisium just before he drove Pompey from Italy, surrounded by his coterie of young lieutenants all buzzing with questions and reports and running this way and that.

At the sight of me, Caesar held up his hand to silence the officer who happened to have caught his attention a moment before. “Excuse me, officers, but I require a moment alone with this citizen.”

Every man in the room knew who I was—the father of the condemned Meto—and from some I received reproving stares, from others looks of sympathy. As a body they collected themselves, rolling up documents and maps, and withdrew to the antechamber. Even after the doors were shut, I could still hear the low roar of their urgent conversations.

I looked at Caesar. “Is there a crisis, Consul? Or should I say, Imperator?”

“A crisis of sorts. Achillas has moved certain of his forces forward and withdrawn others to various parts of the city, in apparent preparation for an attack on our position. It may be that news of Pothinus’s death has reached him, and this is his reaction; or perhaps an attack was planned all along. At any rate, we must be prepared for the worst.”

“Will Achillas attack without a direct order from King Ptolemy?”

“That remains to be seen. Even as you arrived, we were debating various ways to make the king’s will known to Achillas without endangering either the king or our own messengers. Achillas murdered a pair of envoys I dispatched to him earlier. The man’s no better than a brigand! He reminds me of the pirates who kidnapped me when I was young.”

“And we all know what happened to them.” The crucifixion of the pirates was a seminal chapter in the legend of Caesar’s career.

“Achillas murdered Pompey with his own sword. I should like nothing better than to see him meet the same fate as his accomplice, the late Pothinus.”

“Pompey was killed with the king’s consent,” I said, “if not at his instigation. Will the king be punished, as well?”

“Don’t be absurd, Gordianus. Once certain baleful influences are removed, the king will truly be able to come into his own; I have no doubt that he and his sister will be among Rome’s strongest allies.” Even as he said this, I saw that some other, contrary thought was at work in his mind; but we had strayed from the purpose of my visit. Caesar abruptly became impatient with our conversation.

“You can see that I’m very busy, Gordianus; I’ve permitted you an audience only because of the urgency of your request, and because of your assurance that this meeting will bear fruit. I’ve sent for those you asked me to summon; they should be here at any moment. You say you know conclusively what occurred on Antirrhodus, and that Meto is completely innocent. You’d better be able to prove it.”

“Those you summoned know the truth, in bits and pieces. If they’ll only admit to what they know, then Caesar shall see the truth in full.”

The officer who was manning the door hurried to Caesar’s side and spoke in his ear.

“The first of those you asked me to summon is here,” said Caesar, then to the officer, “Show him in.”

A moment later the doors opened to admit a small, wiry fellow. His hair and his beard were not as neatly trimmed as when I had first seen him on Pompey’s ship. Captivity—first as the king’s prisoner, now as Caesar’s—did not agree with Pompey’s freedman Philip. He had become haggard and disheveled, and had a fretful look in his eye that made me worry that his mind might have become a bit unbalanced.

When he saw me, he frowned. The look in his eyes became even wilder.

“Do you remember me, Philip?” I said. “We gathered driftwood together to build a funeral pyre for your old master.”

“Of course I remember you. I remember everything about that accursed day. If only I could forget!” He lowered his eyes. “I see you’ve fallen into Caesar’s clutches, too.”

I recalled that he had assumed I was one of Pompey’s veterans, so grief-stricken at seeing the Great One struck down that I had leaped overboard and swum ashore, and for that reason he had trusted me. I saw no need to disabuse him of the notion.

“We are all in Caesar’s hands now,” I said, looking sidelong at Caesar. “Philip, I desperately need your assistance. As I helped you that day on the beach to give the Great One proper rites, will you now help me in return?”

“What do you need from me?”

I drew a deep breath. On the previous night I had felt certain of the scenario I put forth to Caesar to discount Meto’s role in the poisoning, and I had been proven utterly, woefully wrong. What if I were mistaken again? Perhaps intuition and judgment alike had deserted me. I saw the apprehensive expression on Caesar’s face, and knew that I suddenly looked as wild-eyed as Philip. I fought back the sudden fear and uncertainty that swept over me.

“Philip, you were there with the Great One at Pharsalus, were you not?”

“Yes.” He looked shiftily at Caesar, and I could sense the hatred and revulsion he felt for the man who had destroyed his beloved master.

Caesar interrupted. “I’ve already questioned this man about everything to do with Pharsalus, and with Pompey’s murder, and with all that occurred between.”

“Yes, Caesar, but I think there may be a matter that escaped your questioning. What was it you said about your interrogation of Philip, the night we dined together? That he was forthcoming about some things, reticent about others. I think I know one of the things he was reluctant to talk about.”

Caesar looked at me sharply, then at Philip. “Go on, Gordianus.”

“Philip, when Pompey’s forces were defeated at Pharsalus, it came as a great shock to him, did it not?”

“Yes.”

“But not a complete surprise, I think. He knew that Caesar was a formidable foe; Caesar had already driven him from Italy and crushed Pompey’s allies in Spain. Pompey must have had in his mind some idea that he might eventually face defeat. Yes?”

Philip looked at me warily, but finally nodded.

“At Pharsalus,” I said, “the battle began early in the day, with Caesar’s javelins attacking Pompey’s front line. The struggle was bloody and close-fought, but as the day wore on and the sun reached its zenith, Pompey’s men panicked and broke the line. Pompey’s infantry were encircled. His cavalry gave way and fled. Caesar’s cavalry hunted them down and slaughtered a great many, scattering the rest, while the main body of Caesar’s infantry converged on Pompey’s camp. The rumor goes that the Great One, confident of victory, had retired at midday to his pavilion to eat a meal—a very sumptuous meal, with silver plates and the very finest wine, worthy of a victory banquet. That was the scene Caesar encountered when he entered the camp and strode into Pompey’s pavilion, only to find that the Great One had fled moments before. So goes the tale as I heard it in Rome.