The Grass Crown (117 page)

“I thank you again, Uncle,” Young Caesar said.

They were passing the rostra. Marius stopped to throw his arm toward the dozens of grisly trophies ringing the speaker’s platform around. “Look at that!” he cried happily. “Isn’t that a sight?”

“Yes,” said Caesar. “It certainly is.”

The son strode out at a great pace; hardly conscious, thought the father, that anyone strode alongside him. Turning his head to look back, the father noted that Lucius Decumius was following at a discreet distance. Young Caesar hadn’t needed to come alone to that frightful place; for all Caesar himself disliked Lucius Decumius, it was a comfort to know he was there.

“How long has he been consul?” the boy suddenly demanded. “A whole four days? Oh, it seems like an eternity! I have never seen my mother cry before. Dead men everywhere—children sobbing—half of the Esquiline burning—heads fencing the rostra round—blood everywhere—his Bardyaei as he calls them hard put to choose between pinching at women’s breasts and guzzling wine! What a glorious seventh consulship is this! Homer must be wandering the ditch along the edge of the Elysian Fields craving a huge drink of blood so he can hymn the deeds of Gaius Marius’s seventh consulship! Well, Rome can certainly spare Homer the blood!”

How did one answer a diatribe like that? Never home, having no real understanding of his son, Caesar didn’t know, so said nothing.

When the boy erupted into his own home, his father trying to keep up with him, he stood in the middle of the reception room and bellowed, “Mother!”

Caesar heard the clatter of a reed pen being dropped, then she came hurrying out of her workroom, face terrified. Of her normal beauty there was scarcely a relic left; she was thin, there were black crescents beneath her eyes, her face was puffy, her lips bitten to shreds.

Her attention was focused on Young Caesar; as soon as she saw him apparently unharmed her whole body sagged. Then she saw who was with him, and her knees gave way. “Gaius Julius!”

He caught her before she could fall, holding her very closely.

“Oh, I am so glad you’re back!” she said into the horsey folds of his riding cloak. “It is a nightmare!”

“When you’ve quite finished!” snapped Young Caesar.

His parents turned to look at him.

“I have something to tell you, Mother,” he said, not concerned with anything save his own monumental trouble.

“What is it?” she asked distractedly, still recovering from the double shock of seeing her son unharmed and her husband home.

“Do you know what he’s done to me?”

“Who? Your father?”

Young Caesar dismissed his father with a lavish gesture. “No, not him! No! He just fell in with it, and I expected that. I mean dear, kind, thoughtful Uncle Gaius Marius!”

“What has Gaius Marius done?” she asked calmly, quaking inside.

“He’s appointed me flamen Dialis! I am to marry the seven-year-old daughter of Lucius Cinna at dawn tomorrow, and then be inaugurated as flamen Dialis straight afterward,” said Young Caesar through clenched teeth.

Aurelia gasped, could find no words to say; her immediate reaction was of profound relief, so afraid had she been when the summons came that Gaius Marius wanted Young Caesar in the lower Forum. All the time he had been away she had worked upon the same column of figures in her ledger without arriving at the same total twice, her mind filled with visions of what she had only heard described and her son must now see—the heads on the rostra, the dead bodies. The crazy old man.

Young Caesar grew tired of waiting for an answer, and launched into his own answer. “I am never to go to war and rival him there. I am never to stand for the consulship and rival him there. I am never to have the opportunity to be called the Fourth Founder of Rome. Instead, I am to spend the rest of my days muttering prayers in a language none of us understands anymore—sweeping out the temple—making myself available to every Lucius Tiddlypuss in need of having his house purified—wearing ridiculous clothes!” Square of palm and long of finger, beautiful in a masculine way, the hands were lifted to grope at the air, clench upon it impotently. “That old man has stripped me of my birthright, all to safeguard his own wretched status in the history books!”

Neither of them had much insight into how Young Caesar’s mind worked, nor had either of them been privileged to listen to his dreams for his own future; as they stood listening to this passionate speech, both of them searched for a way to make Young Caesar understand that what had happened, what had been decided, was now inevitable. He must be made to see that the best thing he could do in the circumstances was to accept his fate with a good grace.

His father chose to be stern, disapproving. “Don’t be so ridiculous!” he said.

His mother followed suit because this was how she always handled the boy—duty, obedience, humility, self-effacement—all the Roman virtues he did not possess. So she too said, “Don’t be ridiculous!” But she added, “Do you seriously think you could ever rival Gaius Marius? No man can!”

“Rival Gaius Marius?” asked their son, rearing back. “I will outstrip him in brilliance as the sun does the moon!”

“If that is how you see this great privilege, Gaius Junior,” she said, “then Gaius Marius was right to give you this task. It is an anchor you badly need. Your position in Rome is assured.”

“I don’t want an assured position!” cried the boy. “I want to fight for my position! I want my position to be the consequence of my own efforts! What satisfaction is there in a position older than Rome herself, a position visited upon me by someone who dowers me with it to save his own reputation?”

Caesar looked forbidding.” You are ungrateful,” he said.

“Oh, Father! How can you be so obtuse? It isn’t I at fault, it’s Gaius Marius! I am what I have always been! Not ungrateful! In giving me this burden I shall have to find a way to rid myself of, Gaius Marius has done not one thing to earn gratitude from me! His motives are as impure as they are selfish.”

“Will you stop overrating your own importance?” cried Aurelia in despairing tones. “My son, I have been telling you since you were so small I had to carry you that your ideas are too grand, your ambitions too overweening!”

“What does that matter?” asked the boy, his tones more despairing still. “Mother, I am the only one who can make that judgment! And it is one I can make only at the end of my life—not before it has begun! Now it cannot begin at all!”

Caesar thought it time to try a different tack. “Gaius Junior, we have no choice in the matter,” he said. “You’ve been in the Forum, you know what’s happened. If Lucius Cinna, who is the senior consul, thinks it prudent to agree to whatever Gaius Marius says, I cannot stand against him! I have not only to think about you, but to think about your mother and the girls. Gaius Marius is not his old self. His mind is diseased. But he has the power.”

“Yes, I see that,” said Young Caesar, calming a little. “In that one respect I have no desire to surpass him—or even to emulate him. I will never cause blood to flow in the streets of Rome.”

As insensitive as she was practical, Aurelia deemed the crisis over. She nodded. “There, that’s better, my son. Like it or not, you are going to be flamen Dialis.”

Lips hard, eyes bleak, Young Caesar looked from his mother’s haggardly beautiful face to his father’s tiredly handsome one and saw no true sympathy; worse by far, he thought he saw no true understanding. What he didn’t realize was that he himself lacked understanding of his parents’ predicament.

“May I please go?” he asked.

“Provided you avoid any Bardyaei and don’t go further than Lucius Decumius’s,” Aurelia said.

“I’m only going to find Gaius Matius.”

He walked off to the door which led into the garden at the bottom of the insula’s light-well, taller than his mother now and slim rather than thin, with shoulders seeming too broad for his width.

“Poor boy,” said Caesar, who did understand some of it.

“He’s permanently anchored now,” said Aurelia tightly. “I fear for him, Gaius Julius. He has no brakes.”

Gaius Matius was the son of the knight Gaius Matius, and was almost exactly the same age as Young Caesar; they had been born on opposite sides of the courtyard separating the apartments of their parents, and had grown up together. Their futures had always been different, just as their childish hopes were, but they knew each other as well as brothers did, and liked each other very much more than brothers usually did.

A smaller child than Young Caesar, Gaius Matius was fairish in coloring, with hazel eyes; he had a pleasantly good-looking face and a gentle mouth, and was his father’s son in every way—he was already attracted to commerce and commercial law, and most happy that his manhood would be spent in them; he also loved to garden, and had eight green fingers and two green thumbs.

Digging happily in “his” corner of the courtyard, he saw his friend come through the door and knew immediately that something serious was wrong. So he put his trowel down and got to his feet, flicking soil from his tunic because his mother didn’t like his bringing dirt inside, then ruining the effect by wiping his grubby paws on its front.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked placidly.

“Congratulate me, Pustula!” said Young Caesar in ringing tones. “I am the new flamen Dialisl”

“Oh, dear,” said Matius, whom Young Caesar had called Pimple since early childhood because he was always much smaller. He squatted down again, resumed his digging. “That is a shame, Pavo,” he said, putting just enough sympathy into his voice. He had called Young Caesar a peacock for as long as he had been called a pimple; their mothers had taken them and their sisters on a picnic treat out to the Pincian hill, where peacocks strutted and fanned out their tails to complement the froth of almond blossoms and the carpet of narcissus. Just so did the toddler Caesar strut, just so did he plume himself. And Pavo the peacock it had been ever since.

Young Caesar squatted beside Gaius Matius and concentrated upon keeping his tears at bay, for he was losing his anger and discovering grief instead. “I was going to win the Grass Crown even younger than Quintus Sertorius,” he said now. “I was going to be the greatest general in the history of the world—greater even than Alexander! I was going to be consul more times than Gaius Marius. My dignitas was going to be enormous!”

“You’ll have great dignitas as flamen Dialis.”

“Not for myself, I won’t. People respect the position, not the holder of it.”

Matius sighed, put his trowel down again. “Let’s go and see Lucius Decumius,” he said.

That being exactly the right suggestion, Young Caesar rose with alacrity. “Yes, let’s,” he said.

They emerged into the Subura Minor through the Matius apartment and walked up the side of the building to the big crossroads junction between the Subura Minor and the Vicus Patricius. Here in the apex of Aurelia’s triangular insula was located the premises of the local crossroads college, and here inside the crossroads college had Lucius Decumius reigned for over twenty years.

He was there, of course. Since New Year’s Day he hadn’t gone anywhere unless to guard Aurelia or her children.

“Well, if it isn’t the peacock and the pimple!” he said cheerfully from his table at the back. “A little wine in your water, eh?”

But neither Young Caesar nor Matius had a taste for wine, so they shook their heads and slid onto the bench opposite Lucius Decumius as he filled two cups with water.

“You look glum. I wondered what was going on with Gaius Marius. What’s the matter?” Lucius Decumius asked

Young Caesar, shrewd eyes filled with love.

“Gaius Marius has appointed me flamen Dialis.”

And at last the boy got the reaction he had wanted so badly; Lucius Decumius looked stunned, then angry.

“The vindictive old shit!”

“Yes, isn’t he?”

“When you looked after him all those months, Pavo, he got to know you too well. Give him this—he’s no fool, even if his head is cracked from the inside out.”

“What am I going to do, Lucius Decumius?”

For a long moment the caretaker of the crossroads college did not reply, chewing his lip thoughtfully. Then his bright gaze rested upon Young Caesar’s face, and he smiled. “You don’t know that now, Pavo, but you will!” he said chirpily. “What’s all this down in the dumps for? Nobody can plot and scheme better than you when you needs to. You’re farsighted about your future—but you isn’t afraid of your future! Why so frightened now? Shock, boy, that’s all. I knows you better than Gaius Marius do. And I thinks you’ll find a way around it. After all, Young Caesar, this is Rome, not Alexandria. There’s always a legal loophole in Rome.”

Gaius Matius Pustula sat listening, but said nothing. His father was in the business of drawing up contracts and deeds, so no one knew better than he how accurate that statement was. And yet… That was all very well for contracts and laws. Whereas the priesthood of Jupiter was beyond all legal loopholes because it was older even than the Twelve Tables, as Pavo Caesar was certainly intelligent and well-read enough to know.

So too did Lucius Decumius definitely know. But, more sensitive than Young Caesar’s parents, Lucius Decumius understood that it was vital to give Young Caesar hope. Otherwise he was just as likely to fall on the sword he was now forbidden to touch. As Gaius Marius surely knew, Young Caesar was not the type suited to holding a flaminate. The boy was inordinately superstitious, but religion bored him. To be so confined, to be so hedged around with rules and regulations, would kill him. Even if he had to kill himself to escape.

“I am to be married tomorrow morning before I am inaugurated,” said Young Caesar, pulling a face.

“What, to Cossutia?”

“No, not her. She’s not good enough to be flaminica Dialis, Lucius Decumius. I was only marrying her for her money. As flamen Dialis I have to marry a patrician. So they’re going to give me Lucius Cinna’s daughter. She’s seven.”

“Well, that don’t matter either then, do it? Better seven than eighteen, little peacock.”

“I suppose so.” The boy folded his lips together, nodded. “You are right, Lucius Decumius. I will find a way!”