Fortune's Favorites (96 page)

“Short,” said Caesar, eyes dancing.

“Medium,” said Cicero firmly.

“You look well, and you've put on some much-needed weight.”

“I am well. And itching to be back in the courts. Though,” said Cicero thoughtfully, “I do not think I will match my skills against yours. Some titans should never clash. I fancy the likes of Hortensius and Gaius Cotta too.”

“I expected better of them,” said Caesar. “If the jury hadn't made up its mind before the trial began instead of paying attention to my case, they would have lost, you know. They were sloppy and clumsy.”

“I agree. Gaius Cotta is your uncle, is he not?”

“Yes. Not that it matters. He and I enjoy a clash.”

They stopped to buy a pasty from a vendor who had been selling his famous savory snacks for years outside the State House of the flamen Dialis.

“I believe,” said Cicero, wolfing his pasty down (he liked his food), “that there is still considerable legal doubt about your erstwhile flaminate. Aren't you tempted to use it and move into that commodious and very nice house behind Gavius's stall there? I understand you live in an apartment in the Subura. Not the right address for an advocate with your style, Caesar!”

Caesar shuddered, threw the remainder of his turnover in the direction of a begging bird. “Not if I lived in the meanest hovel on the Esquiline, Cicero, would I be tempted!” he declared.

“Well, I must say I'm glad to be on the Palatine these days,” Cicero said, starting on his second pasty. “My brother, Quintus, has the old family house on the Carinae,” he said grandly, just as if his family had owned it for generations rather than bought it when he had been a boy. He thought of something, and giggled. “Speaking of acquittals and the like, you heard what Quintus Calidius said after a jury of his peers convicted him in the Extortion Court, didn't you?”

“I'm afraid I missed it. Do enlighten me.”

“He said he wasn't surprised he lost, because the going rate to bribe a jury in these days of Sulla's all-senatorial courts is three hundred thousand sesterces, and he just couldn't lay his hands on that kind of cash.”

Caesar saw the funny side too, and laughed. “Then I must remember to stay out of the Extortion Court!”

“Especially when Lentulus Sura is foreman of the jury.”

As Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura had been the foreman of the elder Dolabella's jury, Caesar's brows rose. “That is handy to know, Cicero!”

“My dear fellow, there is absolutely nothing I can't tell you about our law courts!” said Cicero, waving one hand in a magnificent gesture. “If you have any questions, just ask me.”

“I will, be sure of it,” said Caesar. He shook hands with Cicero and walked off in the direction of the despised Subura.

Quintus Hortensius ducked out from behind a convenient column to join Cicero while he was still watching Caesar's tall form diminishing in the distance.

“He was very good,” said Hortensius. “Give him a few more years of experience, my dear Cicero, and you and I will have to look to our laurels.”

“Give him an honest jury, my dear Hortensius, and your laurels would have been off your head this morning.”

“Unkind!”

“It won't last, you know.”

“What?”

“Juries composed entirely of senators.”

“Nonsense! The Senate is back in control forever.”

“That is nonsense. There's a swell in the community to have their powers restored to the tribunes of the plebs. And when they have their old powers back, Quintus Hortensius, the juries will be made up of knights again.”

Hortensius shrugged. “It makes no difference to me, Cicero. Senators or knights, a bribe is a bribe-when necessary.”

“I do not bribe my juries,” said Cicero stiffly.

“I know you don't. Nor does he.” Hortensius flapped his hand in the direction of the Subura. “But it's an accepted custom, my dear fellow, an accepted custom!”

“A custom which can afford an advocate no satisfaction. When I win a case I like to know I won it on my merits, not on how much money my client gave me to dole out in bribes.”

“Then you're a fool and you won't last.”

Cicero's good-looking but not classically handsome face went stiff. The brown eyes flashed dangerously. “I'll outlast you, Hortensius! Never doubt it!”

“I am too strong to move.”

“That was what Antaeus said before Hercules lifted him off the ground. Ave, Quintus Hortensius.”

At the end of January in the following year, Cinnilla gave birth to Caesar's daughter, Julia, a frost-fair and delicate mite who pleased father and mother enormously.

“A son is a great expense, dearest wife,” said Caesar, “whereas a daughter is a political asset of infinite value when her lineage is patrician on both sides and she has a good dowry. One can never know how a son will turn out, but our Julia is perfect. Like her grandmother Aurelia, she will have her pick of dozens of suitors.”

“I can't see much prospect for the good dowry,” said the mother, who had not had an easy time of it during labor, but was now recovering well.

“Don't worry, Cinnilla my lovely! By the time Julia is old enough to marry, the dowry will be there.”

Aurelia was in her element, having taken charge of the baby and fallen head-over-heels in love with this grandchild. She had four others by now, Lia's two sons by their different fathers and Ju-Ju's daughter and son, but none of them lived in her house. Nor were they the progeny of her son, the light of her life.

“She will keep her blue eyes, they're very pale,” said Aurelia, delighted baby Julia had thrown to her father's side, “and her hair has no more color than ice.”

“I'm glad you can see hair,” said Caesar gravely. “To me she looks absolutely bald-and that, since she's a Caesar and therefore supposed to have a thick head of hair, is not welcome.”

“Rubbish! Of course she has hair! Wait until she's one year old, my son, and then you'll see that she has a thick head of hair. It will never darken much. She'll be silver rather than gold, the precious little thing.”

“She looks as homely as poor Gnaea to me.”

“Caesar, Caesar! She's newborn! And she's going to look very like you.”

“What a fate,” said Caesar, and departed.

He proceeded to the city's most prestigious inn, on the corner of the Forum Romanum and the Clivus Orbius; he had received a message that his clients who had commissioned him to prosecute the elder Dolabella were back in Rome, and anxious to see him.

“We have another case for you,” said the leader of the Greek visitors, Iphicrates of Thessalonica.

“I'm flattered,” said Caesar, frowning. “But who is there you could be interested in prosecuting? Appius Claudius Pulcher hasn't been governor long enough to bring a case against him, surely, even if you could persuade the Senate to consent to trying a governor still in office.”

“This is an odd task which has nothing to do with Macedonian governors,” said Iphicrates. “We want you to prosecute Gaius Antonius Hybrida for atrocities he committed while he was a prefect of cavalry under Sulla ten years ago.”

“Ye gods! After all this time, why?”

“We do not expect to win, Caesar. That is not the object of our mission. Simply, our experiences under the elder of the two Dolabellae has brought home to us forcibly that there are some Romans put over us who are little better than animals. And we think it high time that the city of Rome was made aware of this. Petitions are useless. No one bothers to read them, least of all the Senate. Charges of treason or extortion are rarefied businesses in courts only the upper classes of Rome bother to attend. What we want is to attract the attention of the knights, and even of the lower classes. So we thought of a trial in the Murder Court, a juicy arena all classes attend. And when we cast around for a suitable subject, the name of Gaius Antonius Hybrida leaped to every mind immediately.”

“What did he do?” Caesar asked.

“He was the prefect of cavalry in charge of the districts of Thespiae, Eleusis and Orchomenus during the time when Sulla or some of his army lived in Boeotia. But he did very little soldiering. Instead he found delight in terrible pleasures-torture, maiming, rape of women and men, boys and girls, murder.”

“Hybrida?”

“Yes, Hybrida.”

“Well, I always knew he was a typical Antonian-drunk more than sober, incapable of keeping any money in his purse, avid for women and food in enormous excess.” An expression of distaste appeared on Caesar's face. “But torture? Even for an Antonian, that's not usual. I'd believe it quicker of an Ahenobarbus!”

“Our evidence is absolutely unassailable, Caesar.”

“I suppose he must get it from his mother. She wasn't a Roman, though I always heard she was a decent enough woman. An Apulian. But the Apulians are not barbarians, and what you describe is pure barbarism. Even Gaius Verres didn't go so far!”

“Our evidence is absolutely unassailable,” said Iphicrates again. He looked a little sly. “Now perhaps you understand our plight: who in Rome's highest circles will believe us unless all of Rome is talking, and all of Rome sees our evidence with its own eyes?”

“You have victims for witnesses?”

“Dozens of them if necessary. People of unimpeachable virtue and standing. Some without eyes, some without ears, some without tongues, some without hands-or feet-or legs-or genitals-or wombs-or arms-or skin-or noses- or combinations of these. The man was a beast. So were his cronies, though they do not matter, as they were not of the high nobility.”

Caesar looked sick. “His victims lived, then.”

“Most of them lived, that is true. Antonius, you see, thought that what he did was an art. And the art lay in inflicting the most pain and dismemberment without death ensuing. Antonius's greatest joy was to ride back into one of his towns months later to see that his victims still lived.”

“Well, it will be awkward for me, but I will certainly take the case,” said Caesar sternly.

“Awkward? How, awkward?”

“His elder brother, Marcus, is married to my first cousin once removed-the daughter of Lucius Caesar, who was consul and later murdered by Gaius Marius. There are three little boys–Hybrida's nephews–who are my first cousins twice removed. It is not considered good form to prosecute members of one's own family, Iphicrates.”

“But is the actual relationship one which extends to Gaius Antonius Hybrida? Your cousin is not married to him.”

“True, and it is for that reason I will take the case. But many will disapprove. The blood does link in Julia's three sons.”

It was Lucius Decumius he chose to talk to, rather than to Gaius Matius or someone else closer to his rank.

“You hear everything, dad. But have you heard of this?”

Having been dowered with a physical apparatus incapable of looking older when he was younger and younger when he was older, Lucius Decumius remained ever the same; Caesar was hard put to calculate his age, which he guessed at around sixty.

“A bit, not much. His slaves don't last beyond six months, yet you never sees them buried. I always gets suspicious when I never sees them buried. Usually means all sorts of nasty antics.”

“Nothing is more despicable than cruelty to a slave!”

“Well, you'd think so, Caesar. You got the world's best mother, you been brought up right.”

“It should not have to do with how one is brought up!” said Caesar angrily. “It surely has to do with one's innate nature. I can understand such atrocities when they're perpetrated by barbarians-their customs, traditions and gods ask things of them which we Romans outlawed centuries ago. To think of a Roman nobleman-one of the Antonii!-taking pleasure in inflicting such suffering-oh, dad, I find it hard to believe!”

But Lucius Decumius merely looked wise. “It's all around you, Caesar, and you knows it is. Maybe not quite so horrible, but that's mostly because people is afraid of getting caught. You just consider for a moment! This Antonius Hybrida, he's a Roman nobleman just like you say. The courts protects him and his own sort protects him. What's he got to be afraid of, once he starts? All what stops most people starting, Caesar, is the fear of getting caught. Getting caught means punishment. And the higher a man is, the further he's got to fall. But just sometimes you finds a man with the clout to be whatever he wants to be who goes ahead and is what he wants to be. Like Antonius Hybrida. Not many like him in any place. Not many! But there's always some, Caesar. Always some.”

“Yes, you're right. Of course you're right.” The eyelids fell tiredly, blocked out Caesar's thoughts. “What you're saying is that such men must be brought to book. Punished.”

“Unless you wants a lot more of the same. Let one off and two more gets daring.”

“So I must bring him to book. That won't be easy.”

“It won't be easy.”

“Aside from dark rumors of disappearing slaves, what else do you know about him, dad?”

“Not much, except that he's hated. Tradesmen hates him. So do ordinary people. When he pinches a sweet little girl as he walks down the street, he pinches too hard, makes her cry.”

“And where does my cousin Julia fit into all this?”

“Ask your mother, Caesar, not me!”

“I can't ask my mother, Lucius Decumius!”

Lucius Decumius thought about that, and nodded. “No, you can't, right enough.” He paused to ponder. “Well, that Julia's a silly woman-not one of your smarter Julias for sure! Her Antonius is a bit of a lad, if you follows me, but not cruel. Thoughtless. Don't know when to give his boys a good kick up the arse, little beggars.”

“You mean his boys run wild?”

“As a forest boar.”

“Let me see.... Marcus, Gaius, Lucius. Oh, I wish I knew more about family matters! I don't listen to the women talking, is the trouble. My mother could tell me in an instant. ... But she's too clever, dad, she'd want to know why I'm interested, and then she'd try to persuade me not to take the case. After which we'd quarrel. Far better that when she does learn I'm taking the case, it's an accomplished fact.” He sighed, looked rueful. “I think I'd better hear more about Hybrida's brother's boys, dad.”

Lucius Decumius screwed up his eyes, pursed his lips. “I sees them about the Subura-shouldn't be scampering in the Subura with no pedagogue or servant, but they does. Steal food from the shops, more to torment than because they wants it.”