Fortune's Favorites (33 page)

“Until Sulla succeeds in having you killed.”

“That's on the lap of the Great God, Mater, you know it is. I believe that Fortune has offered me this chance, and that I must take it. What I have to do is stay alive until after Sulla dies. Once he's dead, no one else will have the courage to kill the flamen Dialis, and the colleges will be forced to break my priestly chains. Mater, I do not believe Jupiter Optimus Maximus intends me as his special flamen! I believe he has other work for me. Work of better use to Rome.”

She argued no more. “Money. You'll need money, Caesar.” And she ran her hands through her hair, as she always did when she was trying to find mislaid funds. “You will need more than two talents of silver, because that's the price of a proscribed man. If you're discovered in hiding, you'll need to pay considerably more than two talents to make it worth an informer's while to let you go. Three talents ought to give you a purchase price plus enough to live on. Now can I find three talents without talking to bankers? Seventy-five thousand sesterces ... I have ten thousand in my room. And the rents are due, I can collect them tonight. When my tenants hear why I need it, they'll pay up. They love you, though why they should I don't know-you're very difficult and obstinate! Gaius Matius might know how to get more. And I imagine Lucius Decumius keeps his ill-gotten gains in jars under his bed....”

And off she went, still talking. Caesar sighed, got to his feet. Time to organize his flight. And he would have to talk to Cinnilla before he left, explain.

He sent the steward, Eutychus, to fetch Lucius Decumius, and summoned Burgundus.

Old Gaius Marius had bequeathed Burgundus to Caesar in his will; at the time Caesar had strongly suspected that he had done so as a last link in the chain of flamen Dialis with which he had bound Caesar hands and feet. If by any chance Caesar should not continue to be Jupiter's special priest, Burgundus was to kill him. But of course Caesar-who owned a great deal of charm-had soon made Burgundus his man, helped by the fact that his mother's gigantic Arvernian maidservant, Cardixa, had fastened her teeth into him. A German of the Cimbri, he had been eighteen when he was captured after the battle of Vercellae, and was now thirty-seven to Cardixa's forty-five. How much longer she could go on bearing a boy a year was one of the family jokes; their total at the moment was five. They had both been manumitted on the day Caesar put on his toga of manhood, but this formal rite of being freed had changed nothing save their citizen status, which was now Roman (though of course they had been enrolled in the urban tribe Suburana, and therefore owned worthless votes). Aurelia, who was both frugal and scrupulously fair, had always given Cardixa a reasonable wage, and thought Burgundus was worthy of good money too. They were believed to be saving this for their sons, as their living was provided for them.

“But you must take our savings now, Caesar,” Burgundus said in his thickly accented Latin. “You will need them.”

His master was tall for a Roman, two inches over six feet, but Burgundus was four inches taller and twice as wide. His fair face, homely by Roman standards because its nose was far too short and straight and its mouth too wide, looked its normal solemn self when he said this, but his light blue eyes betrayed his love-and his respect.

Caesar smiled at Burgundus, shook his head. “I thank you for the offer, but my mother will manage. If she doesn't- why, then I will accept, and pay you back with interest.”

Lucius Decumius came in accompanied by a swirl of snow; Caesar hastened to finish with Burgundus.

“Pack for both of us, Burgundus. Warm stuff. You can carry a club. I will carry my father's sword.” Oh, how good to be able to say that! I will carry my father's sword! There were worse things than being a fugitive from the Dictator's wrath.

“I knew that man meant trouble for us!” said Lucius Decumius grimly, though he didn't mention the time when Sulla had frightened him almost witless with a look. “I've sent my boys home for money, you'll have enough.” A glare buried itself in Burgundus's back. “Listen, Caesar, you can't go off in this sort of weather with only that big clod! The boys and I will come too.”

Expecting this, Caesar gave Lucius Decumius a look which silenced protest. “No, dad, I can't allow that. The more of us there are, the more likely I am to attract attention.”

“Attract attention?” Lucius Decumius gaped. “How can you not attract attention with that great dolt shambling along behind you? Leave him at home, take me instead, eh? No one ever sees old Lucius Decumius, he's a part of the plaster.”

“Inside Rome, yes,” Caesar said, smiling at Decumius with great affection, “but in Sabine country, dad, you'd stick out like dog's balls. Burgundus and I will manage. And if I know you're here to look after the women, I'll have a lot less to worry about while I'm away.”

As this was the truth, Lucius Decumius subsided, muttering.

“The proscriptions have made it more important than ever that someone be here to guard the women. Aunt Julia and Mucia Tertia have no one except us. I don't think they'll come to any harm up there on the Quirinal, everyone in Rome loves Aunt Julia. But Sulla doesn't, so you'll have to keep watch on them. My mother“-he shrugged-”my mother is herself, and that's as bad as it is good when it comes to dealing with Sulla. If things should change-if, for instance, Sulla should decide to proscribe me, and because of me, my mother-then I leave it to you to get my household out.” He grinned. “We've put too much money into feeding Cardixa's boys to see Sulla's State end up making a profit on them!”

“Nothing will happen to any of them, little Peacock.”

“Thanks, dad.” Caesar bethought himself of another matter. “I must ask you to hire us a couple of mules and get the horses from the stables.”

This was Caesar's secret, the one aspect of his life he kept from everyone save Burgundus and Lucius Decumius. As flamen Dialis he couldn't touch a horse, but from the time when old Gaius Marius had taught him to ride he had fallen in love with the sensation of speed, and with the feel of a horse's powerful body between his knees. Though he wasn't rich in any way except his precious land, he did have a certain amount of money which was his, and which his mother would not have dreamed of managing. It had come to him in his father's will, and it enabled him to buy whatever he needed without having to apply to Aurelia. So he had bought a horse. A very special horse.

In all ways but this one Caesar had found the strength and self-denial to obey the dictates of his flaminate; as he tended to be indifferent to what he ate the monotonous diet did not cost him a pang, though many a time he had longed to take his father's sword out of the trunk in which it reposed and swing it around his head. The one thing he had not been able to give up was his love of horses and riding. Why? Because of the association between two different living creatures and the perfection of the result. So he had bought a beautifully made chestnut gelding as fleet as Boreas and called it Bucephalus, after the legendary horse of Alexander the Great. This animal was the greatest joy in his life. Whenever he could sneak away he would walk to the Capena Gate, outside which Burgundus or Lucius Decumius waited with Bucephalus. And he would ride, streaking down the towpath along the Tiber without regard for life or limb, swerving around the patient oxen which drew the barges upriver-and then, when that ceased to be interesting, he would head off across the fields taking stone walls in his stride, he and his beloved Bucephalus as one. Many knew the horse, nobody knew the rider; for he trousered himself like a mad Galatian and wore a Median scarf wound round head and face.

The secret rides also endowed his life with an element of risk that he didn't yet understand he craved; he merely thought it tremendous fun to hoodwink Rome and imperil his flaminate. While he honored and respected the Great God whom he served, he knew that he had a unique relationship with Jupiter Best and Greatest; his ancestor Aeneas had been the love child of the goddess of love, Venus, and Venus's father was Jupiter Optimus Maximus. So Jupiter understood, Jupiter gave his sanction, Jupiter knew his earthly servant had a drop of divine ichor in his veins. In all else he obeyed the tenets of his flaminate to the best of his ability; but his price was Bucephalus, a communion with another living creature more precious to him by far than all the women in the Subura. On them, the sum was less than himself. On Bucephalus, the sum was more.

Not long after nightfall he was ready to leave. Lucius Decumius and his sons had trundled the seventy-six thousand sesterces Aurelia had managed to scrape up in a handcart to the Quirinal Gate, while two other loyal Brethren of the college had gone to the stables on the Campus Lanatarius where Caesar kept his horses and brought them the long way round, outside the Servian Walls.

“I do wish,” said Aurelia without displaying a sign of her terrible inward anxiety, “that you'd chosen to ride a less showy animal than that chestnut you gallop all over Latium.”

He gasped, choked, fell about laughing; when he could, he said, wiping his eyes, “I don't believe it! Mater, how long have you known about Bucephalus?”

“Is that what you call it?” She snorted. “My son, you have delusions of grandeur not in keeping with your priestly calling.” A spark of amusement glittered. “I've always known. I even know the disgracefully long price you paid for it-fifty thousand sesterces! You are an incorrigible spendthrift, Caesar, and I don't understand where you get that from. It is certainly not from me.”

He hugged her, kissed her wide and uncreased brow. “Well, Mater, I promise that no one but you will ever keep my accounts. I'd still like to know how you found out about Bucephalus.”

“I have many sources of information,” she said, smiling. “One cannot but, after twenty-three years in the Subura.” Her smile dying, she looked up at him searchingly. “You haven't seen little Cinnilla yet, and she's fretting. She knows something is amiss, even though I sent her to her room.”

A sigh, a frown, a look of appeal. “What do I tell her, Mater? How much, if anything?”

“Tell her the truth, Caesar. She's twelve.”

Cinnilla occupied what used to be Cardixa's room, under the stairs which ascended to the upper storeys on the Vicus Patricius side of the building; Cardixa now lived with Burgundus and their sons in a special room it had amused Caesar to design and build with his own hands above the servants' quarters.

When Caesar entered on the echo of his knock, his wife was at her loom diligently weaving a drab-colored and rather hairy piece of cloth destined to form a part of her wardrobe as flaminica Dialis, and for some reason the sight of it, so unappealing and unflattering, smote at Caesar's heart.

“Oh, it isn't fair!” he cried, swept her off her stool into his arms and sat with her on his lap in the one place available, her little bed.

He thought her exquisitely beautiful, though he was too young himself to find her burgeoning womanhood attractive in itself; he liked females considerably older than he was. But to those who have been surrounded all their lives by tall, slender, fair people, a slightly plump mite of night-dark coloring held an irresistible fascination. His feelings about her were confused, for she had lived inside his house for five years as his sister, yet he had always known she was his wife, and that when Aurelia gave her permission he would take her out of this room and into his bed. There was nothing moral in this confusion, which might almost have been called a matter of logistics; one moment she was his sister, the next moment she would be his wife. Of course all the eastern kings did it- married their sisters-but he had heard that the family nurseries of the Ptolemies and the Mithridatidae resounded with the noises of war, that brothers fought sisters like animals. Whereas he had never fought with Cinnilla, any more than he had ever fought with his real sisters; Aurelia would not have let that kind of attitude develop.

“Are you going away, Caesar?” asked Cinnilla.

There was a strand of hair drifting across her brow; he smoothed it back into place and continued to stroke her head as if she were a pet, rhythmic, soothing, sensuous. Her eyes closed, she settled into the crook of his arm.

“Now, now, don't go to sleep!” he said sharply, giving her a shake. “I know it's past your bedtime, but I have to talk to you. I'm going away, that's true.”

“What is the matter these days? Is it all to do with the proscriptions? Aurelia says my brother has fled to Spain.”

“It has a little to do with the proscriptions, Cinnilla, but only because they stem from Sulla too. I have to go away because Sulla says there is a doubt about my priesthood.”

She smiled, her full top lip creasing to reveal a fold of its inside surface, a characteristic all who knew Cinnilla agreed was enchanting. “That should make you happy. You'd much rather not be the flamen Dialis.”

“Oh, I'm still the flamen Dialis,” said Caesar with a sigh. “According to the priests, it's you who are wrong.” He shifted her, made her sit upright on the edge of his knees so he could look into her face. “You know your family's present situation, but what you may not have realized is that when your father was pronounced sacer–an outcast–he ceased to be a Roman citizen.”

“Well, I do understand why Sulla can take away all of our property, but my father died a long time before ever Sulla came back,” said Cinnilla, who was not very clever, and needed to have things explained. “How can he have lost his citizenship?”

“Because Sulla's laws of proscription automatically take away a man's citizenship, and because some men were already dead when Sulla put their names on his proscription lists. Young Marius-your father-the praetors Carrinas and Damasippus-and lots of others-were dead when they were proscribed. But that fact didn't stop their losing their citizen rights.”

“I don't think that's very fair.”

“I agree, Cinnilla.” He ploughed on, hoping that he had been dowered with the gift of simplifying. “Your brother was of age when your father was proscribed, so he retains his Roman status. He just can't inherit any of the family property or money, nor stand as a curule magistrate. However, with you, it's quite different.”