Fortune's Favorites (13 page)

“Doomed to stay home?” he asked, kissing her cheek again.

“One day I'll be big enough,” she said, showing dimples in her enchanting smile.

“Indeed you will! And then you'll be more important than Mater, because you'll be the mistress of the house.” He put the child down, smoothed his hand over her mass of waving black hair, and winked at Aurelia.

“I won't be the mistress of this house,” she said solemnly. “I'll be the flaminica Dialis, and mistress of a State house.”

“True,” he said lightly. “How could I have forgotten?”

Out into the driving snow he went, up past the shops which nestled in the outer wall of Aurelia's apartment house, to the rounded apex of that triangular building. Here was located what appeared to be a tavern, yet was not; it was the headquarters of the College of Crossroads Brethren who supervised the well-being and spiritual life of the crossroads outside its double doors, especially the towerlike shrine to the Lares and the big fountain, which now flowed sluggishly amid a tumble of ethereally blue icicles, so cold was this winter.

Lucius Decumius was in residence at his usual table in the back left-hand corner of the huge, clean room. Grizzled these days but face as unlined as ever, he had recently admitted his two sons to membership, and was training them in all the multifarious activities of his college. So they sat one on either side of him like the two lions which always flanked a statue of Magna Mater-grave, tawny, thick-maned, yellow-eyed, claws furled. Not that Lucius Decumius in any way resembled Magna Mater! He was little, skinny, and anonymous-looking; his sons took after their mother, who was a large Celtic lady from the Ager Gallicus. To no one unacquainted with him did he seem what he actually was-brave, tortuously subtle, amoral, enormously intelligent, loyal.

The three Decumii brightened when Caesar walked through the door, but only Lucius Decumius rose. Threading his way between the tables and benches, he reached Caesar, stood on tiptoe and kissed the young man on the lips more fondly than he did either of his sons. It was the kiss of a father, though it was given to someone whose only connection with him lay tangled amid the cords of his not inconsiderable heart.

“My boy!” he crowed, and took Caesar's hand.

“Hello, dad,” Caesar answered with a smile, lifted Lucius Decumius's fingers and pressed them against his cold cheek.

“Been sweeping out some dead man's house?” asked Lucius Decumius, in reference to Caesar's priestly regalia. “Nasty weather for dying! Have a cup of wine to warm you, eh?”

Caesar grimaced. He had never managed to cultivate a real liking for wine, try though Lucius Decumius and his brethren had to instill it in him. “No time, dad. I'm here to borrow a couple of the brethren. I have to take my mother and sisters to the house of Gaius Marius, and she doesn't trust me to do it on my own, of course.”

“Wise woman, your mother,” said Lucius Decumius with a look of wicked glee. He beckoned to his sons, who rose at once and came to join him. “Togs on, lads! We're going to take the ladies to the house of Gaius Marius.”

No resentment of their father's obvious preference for Gaius Julius Caesar colored the emotions of Lucius Decumius Junior or young Marcus Decumius; they simply nodded, clapped Caesar on the back in great affection, and went off to find their warmest clothing.

“Don't come, dad,” said Caesar. “Stay here out of the cold.”

But that didn't suit Lucius Decumius, who allowed his sons to dress him much as a doting mother might have dressed her toddling offspring. “Where's that oaf Burgundus?” he asked as they spilled out into the swirling snow.

Caesar chuckled. “No use to anyone at the moment! Mater sent him down to Bovillae with Cardixa. She might have started breeding late, but she's produced one baby giant every year since she first set eyes on Burgundus. This will be number four, as you well know.”

“You'll never be short of bodyguards when you're consul.”

Caesar shivered, but not from the cold. “I'll never be consul,” he said harshly, then lifted his shoulders and tried to be pleasant. “My mother says it's like feeding a tribe of Titans. Ye gods, they can eat!”

“Good people, but.”

“Yes, good people,” said Caesar.

By this time they had reached the outer door of Aurelia's apartment, and collected the womenfolk. Other aristocratic ladies might have elected to ride in litters, especially in such weather, but not the Julian ladies. They walked, their progress down the Fauces Suburae somewhat eased by the Decumius sons, who shuffled ahead to blaze a path through the accumulating snow.

The Forum Romanum was utterly deserted, and looked odd bled of its vividly colored columns and walls and roofs and statues; everything was marble-white, seemed sunk in a deep and dreamless sleep. And the imposing statue of Gaius Marius near the rostra had a bank of snow perched on either bushy eyebrow, masking the normally fierce glare of his dark eyes.

Up the Hill of the Bankers they toiled, through the vast portals of the Fontinalis Gate, and so to the door of Gaius Marius's house. As its peristyle garden lay at the back of the mansion, they entered straight into the foyer, and there peeled off outer garments (save for Caesar, doomed to wear his regalia). Lucius Decumius and his sons were taken away by the steward, Strophantes, to sample some excellent food and wine, while Caesar and the women entered the atrium.

Had the weather been less unnaturally cold, they might have remained there, since it was well past dinnertime, but the open rectangle of the compluvium in the roof was acting like a vortex, and the pool below it was a twinkling crust of rapidly melting snowflakes.

Young Marius appeared then to welcome them and usher them through into the dining room, which would be warmer, he said. He looked, thought Caesar warily, almost afire with happiness, and the emotion suited him. As tall as Caesar (who was his first cousin), he was more heavily built, fair of hair and grey of eye, handsome, impressive. Physically far more attractive than his father, he yet lacked that vital something which had made of Gaius Marius one of the Roman immortals. Many generations would go by, Caesar reflected, before every schoolchild ceased to learn about the exploits of Gaius Marius. Such would not be the lot of his son, Young Marius.

This was a house Caesar loathed visiting; too much had happened to him here. While other boys of his age had been heedlessly frittering away their time playing on the Campus Martius, he had been required to report here every day to act as nurse/companion to the aged and vindictive Gaius Marius. And though he had swept strenuously with his sacred broom after Marius died here, that malign presence still lingered. Or so Caesar thought. Once he had admired and loved Gaius Marius. But then Gaius Marius had appointed him the special priest of Jupiter, and in that one stroke had rendered it impossible for Caesar ever to rival him. No iron, no weapons, no sight of death-no military career for the flamen Dialis! An automatic membership in the Senate without the right to stand for election as a magistrate-no political career for the flamen Dialis! It was Caesar's fate to be honored without earning that honor, revered without earning that reverence. The flamen Dialis was a creature belonging to the State, housed and paid and fed by the State, a prisoner of the mos maiorum, the established practices of custom and tradition.

But of course Caesar's revulsion could never endure past the moment in which he set eyes upon his Aunt Julia. His father's sister, the widow of Gaius Marius. And, differently from his mother, the person in the world he loved the most. Indeed, he loved her more than he did his mother, if love could be classified as a simple rush of sheer emotion. His mother was permanently grafted to his intellect because she was adversary, adherent, critic, companion, equal. Whereas Aunt Julia enfolded him in her arms and kissed him on the lips, beamed at him with her soft grey eyes innocent of the faintest condemnation. Life for him without either one was unthinkable.

Julia and Aurelia elected to sit side by side on the same couch, ill at ease because they were women, and women did not recline on couches. Forbidden by custom to lie comfortably, they perched on the edge with their feet dangling clear of the floor and their backs unsupported.

“Can't you give the women chairs?” asked Caesar of Young Marius as he shoved bolsters behind his mother and his aunt.

“Thank you, nephew, we'll manage now you've propped us up,” said Julia, always the peacemaker. “I don't think the house has enough chairs for all of us! This is a conference of women.”

An inalienable truth, acknowledged Caesar ruefully. The male element of this family was reduced to two men: Young Marius and Caesar. Both only sons of dead fathers.

Of women, there were more. Had Rome been present to see Julia and Aurelia side by side, Rome would have enjoyed the spectacle of two of her most beautiful women encompassed in one glance. Though both were tall and slim, Julia owned the innate grace of the Caesars, whereas Aurelia moved with brisk, no-nonsense economy. One, Julia, had softly waving blonde hair and widely opened grey eyes, and might have posed for the statue of Cloelia in the upper Forum Romanum. The other, Aurelia, had ice-brown hair and a quality of beauty which had, in her youth, caused her to be likened to Helen of Troy. Dark brows and lashes, a pair of deeply set eyes many of the men who had tried to marry her had insisted were purple, and the profile of a Greek goddess.

Julia was now forty-five years old to Aurelia's forty. Both had been widowed in distressing though very different circumstances.

Gaius Marius had died of his third and most massive stroke, but only after launching and pursuing an orgy of murder no one in Rome would ever forget. All his enemies had died-and some of his friends-and the rostra had bristled with the heads as thickly as pins in a cushion. With this sorrow, Julia lived.

Aurelia's husband, loyal to Cinna after the death of Marius-as was only fitting in one whose son was married to Cinna's younger daughter-had gone to Etruria to recruit troops. One summer morning in Pisae he had bent over to lace up his boot, and died. A ruptured blood vessel in his brain was the conclusion reached at postmortem; he was burned on a pyre without a single member of his family present, and his ashes were then sent home to his wife. Who did not even know her husband was dead when Cinna's messenger came to present her with the funerary urn. How she felt, what she thought, no one knew. Even her son, made head of his family a month short of his fifteenth birthday. No tear had she shed that anyone had seen, and the look on her face had not changed. For she was Aurelia, fastened up inside herself, apparently more attached to her work as landlady of a busy insula than to any human being save for her son.

Young Marius had no sisters, but Caesar had two older than himself. Both of them looked like their Aunt Julia; there were strong echoes of Aurelia in Caesar's face, but not in either of his sisters'.

Julia Major, called Lia, was now twenty-one years old, and carried the faintest suggestion of something careworn in her expression. Not without reason. Her first husband, a penniless patrician by name of Lucius Pinarius, had been the love of her heart, so she had been allowed-albeit reluctantly-to marry him. A son had arrived less than a year later, and shortly after that happy event (which did not turn out to have the hoped-for sobering effect on Lucius Pinarius's character or behavior), Lucius Pinarius died in mysterious circumstances. Murder by a confederate was thought likely, but no proof could be found. So Lia, aged nineteen, found herself a widow in such an impoverished state that she had been obliged to return to live under her mother's roof. But between her marriage and her widowhood the identity of the paterfamilias had changed, and she now discovered that her young brother was not nearly as softhearted or malleable as her father had been.

She must marry again, said Caesar-but a man of his choosing, for, “It is clear to me,” he said to her dispassionately, “that, left to your own devices, you will pick another idiot.”

Quite how or where Caesar had found Quintus Pedius, no one knew (though some suspected a collaboration with Lucius Decumius, who might be a seedy little man of the Fourth Class, but who had remarkable contacts), but home he came with Quintus Pedius, and betrothed his widowed oldest sister to this stolid, upright Campanian knight of good but not noble family. He was not handsome. He was not dashing. At forty, he was not even very young. But he was colossally rich and almost pathetically grateful for the chance to marry a lovely and youthful woman of the most exalted patrician nobility. Lia had swallowed, looked at her fifteen-year-old brother, and graciously accepted; even at that age, Caesar could put something into his face and eyes that killed argument before it was born.

Luckily the marriage had turned out well. Lucius Pinarius might have been handsome and dashing and young, but as a husband he had been disappointing. Now Lia discovered that there were many compensations in being the darling of a rich man twice her age, and as time went on she grew very fond of her uninspiring second husband. She bore him a son, and was so settled into her delightfully luxurious life on her husband's estates outside Teanum Sidicinum that when Scipio Asiagenus and then Sulla had established camps in the neighborhood, she flatly refused to go home to her mother, who would, she knew, regulate her exercise, her diet, her sons and her life to suit her own austere ideas. Of course Aurelia had arrived in person (after, it seemed, an unexpected meeting with Sulla-a meeting about which she had said little beyond mentioning it), and Lia had been bundled to Rome. Without her sons, alas; Quintus Pedius had preferred to keep them with him in Teanum.

Julia Minor, called Ju-Ju, had been married in the early part of this year, not long after her eighteenth birthday. No chance that she would be allowed to pick someone unsuitable! Caesar did the picking, though she had railed against his highhanded usurpation of a task she felt herself fully able to perform. Of course he won. Home he came with another colossally rich suitor, this time of an old senatorial family, and himself a backbencher senator content to stay on the back benches. He hailed from Aricia, just down the Via Appia from the Caesar lands at Bovillae, and that fact made him Latin, which was one cut above mere Campanian. After setting eyes on Marcus Atius Balbus, Ju-Ju had married him without a murmur; compared to Quintus Pedius he was quite reasonable, being a mere thirty-seven, and actually handsome for such an advanced age.