The Grass Crown (74 page)

“I see none of you believes it will come either. It will, gentlemen, I promise you it will!” And off went Scaurus toward the Clivus Argentarius.

He found Julia with her sister-in-law Aurelia. So lovely, so quintessentially Roman did both women look, that he was moved to kiss their hands, an unusual homage from Scaurus.

“Not feeling well, Marcus Aemilius?” asked Julia with a smile and a glance at Aurelia.

“Feeling very tired, Julia, but never too tired to appreciate beauty.” Scaurus inclined his head toward the study door. “And how is the Great Man today?”

“In a more cheerful mood, thanks to Aurelia,” said the Great Man’s wife.

“Oh?”

“He’s been given a companion.”

“Oh?”

“My son, Young Caesar,” said Aurelia.

“A boy?”

Julia laughed as she led the way to the study. “At not quite eleven years of age, I suppose he is a boy. But in every other way, Marcus Aemilius, Young Caesar is at least as old as you. Gaius Marius is beginning to improve dramatically. However, he’s bored. The paralysis makes it difficult for him to get about, yet he loathes being bedridden.” She opened the door and said, “Here is Marcus Aemilius come to call, husband.”

Marius was lying on a couch beneath a window opening on to the peristyle-garden, his useless left side propped up upon pillows, and the couch turned so that his right side was nearest to the room. On a stool at his feet sat Aurelia’s son—or so, at least, Scaurus assumed, for he had never met the boy.

A true Caesar, he thought, having just left the company of three of them. Tall, fair, handsome. This one, rising to his feet, had a look of Aurelia as well.

“Princeps Senatus, this is Gaius Julius,” said Julia.

“Sit down, lad,” said Scaurus, leaning across to grasp Marius by the right hand. “And how goes it, Gaius Marius?”

“Slowly,” said Marius, his speech still clumsy. “As you see, the women have given me a watch-dog. My own Cerberus.”

“A watch-pup, more like.” Scaurus sat down on the chair Young Caesar positioned for him before returning to the stool. “And what precisely are your duties, young man?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Young Caesar without evidence of shyness. “My mother only brought me today.”

“I think the women think I need someone to read to me,” said Marius. “What do you think, Young Caesar?”

“I’d rather talk to Gaius Marius than read to him,” said Young Caesar, unabashed. “Uncle Marius doesn’t write books, but I’ve often wished he did. I want to hear all about the Germans.”

“He asks good questions’,” said Marius, starting to flounder as he tried to move.

The boy was up at once, slipping his entire arm under Marius’s right arm, and giving his uncle sufficient impetus to complete his change of position. It was done without fuss or fluster, and it indicated a remarkable degree of strength for one so young.

“Better!” panted Marius, now able to look more comfortably into Scaurus’s face. “I’m going to do well with my watch-pup.”

Scaurus stayed for an hour, more fascinated with Young Caesar than with Marius’s malady. Though the boy didn’t put himself forward, he answered the questions put to him with an adult grace and dignity, and listened eagerly while Marius and Scaurus discussed the incursions of Mithridates into Bithynia and Cappadocia.

“You’re well read for a ten-year-old, Young Caesar,” Scaurus said when he rose to go. “Do you know a boy named Marcus Tullius Cicero, by any chance?”

“Only by repute, Princeps Senatus. They say he will be the finest advocate Rome has ever produced.”

“Perhaps so. Perhaps not,” said Scaurus, walking to the door. “For the moment Marcus Cicero is confined to duties military. I shall see you in two or three days, Gaius Marius. Since you can’t come to the Senate to hear me speak, I shall try my speech out on you here—and on Young Caesar.”

Scaurus set out to walk home to the Palatine, feeling very tired, and more distressed by Marius’s condition than he cared to admit to himself: Nearly six months, and still the Great Man had not got any further than a couch in his tablinum. Perhaps the stimulus of the boy—a good idea, that!—would prod him on. But Scaurus doubted that his old friend and enemy would ever improve sufficiently to attend meetings of the Senate.

The long tramp up the Vestal Steps quite exhausted him; he was obliged to stop on the Clivus Victoriae and rest before plodding the last paces home. Mind preoccupied with the difficulties he knew he was going to have in impressing the Conscript Fathers with the urgency of matters in Asia Minor, he tapped on his street door, and was admitted by his wife rather than his porter.

How wonderful she was! thought Scaurus, looking with pure delight into her face. All those old troubles had faded long since, she was the woman of his heart. Thank you for that gift, Quintus Caecilius, he thought, fondly remembering his dead friend Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle. It had been Metellus Numidicus who had given him Caecilia Metella Dalmatica.

Scaurus reached out to touch her face, then tipped his head forward to rest it against her breast and pillowed his cheek against her smooth young skin. His eyes closed. He sighed.

“Marcus Aemilius?” she asked, suddenly taking all his weight, and staggering a little. “Marcus Aemilius?”

Her arms went round him and she screamed until the servants came running, took his limp body from her. “What is it? What is it?” she kept asking.

The steward answered her at last, rising from his knees beside the couch where Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus lay. “He is dead, domina. Marcus Aemilius is dead.”

At almost the same moment as the news of the death of Scaurus Princeps Senatus flew around the city came the news that Sextus Julius Caesar had died of a chest inflammation while besieging Asculum Picentum. Having digested the contents of the letter from Sextus Caesar’s legate, Gaius Baebius, Pompey Strabo made up his mind. As soon as the State funeral for Scaurus was over, he would proceed to Asculum Picentum himself.

It was extremely rare for the Senate to vote State funds for a funeral, but even in times as hard as these it was unthinkable that Scaurus not be given a State funeral. The whole of Rome had adored him, and the whole of Rome turned out to pay him their last respects. Nothing could ever be the same again without Marcus Aemilius’s bald pate reflecting the sun like a mirror, without Marcus Aemilius’s beautiful green eyes keeping a close watch on Rome’s highborn villains, without Marcus Aemilius’s wit and humor and courage. Long would he be missed.

To Marcus Tullius Cicero, the fact that he left a Rome draped in cypress branches was an omen; so too was he dead to all he held dear—Forum and books, law and rhetoric. His mother was busy arranging tenants for the house on the Carinae, her boxes already packed for her return to Arpinum, though she did no packing for Cicero and was not there when the time came for him to bid her farewell. He slipped out into the street and let himself be tossed into the saddle of the horse his father had sent from the country, as the family did not possess the honor of the Public Horse. His belongings were bestowed upon a mule; what didn’t fit had to be left behind. Pompey Strabo ran a thin army, didn’t tolerate baggage-hindered staff. That Cicero knew this was thanks to his new friend Pompey, whom he met outside the city on the Via Lata an hour later.

The weather was bitterly cold, the wind blustery, the icicles hanging from balconies and tree branches unmelted as Pompey Strabo’s small staff began their journey north into the teeth of winter. Some of the general’s army had been bivouacked upon the Campus Martius because they had marched in his triumph, and were already on the move ahead of his staff. The rest of Pompey Strabo’s six legions waited for him outside Veii, not far from Rome. Here they camped overnight, and Cicero found himself sharing a tent with the other cadets attached to the general’s staff, some eight young men aged from Pompey, the youngest at sixteen, through to Lucius Volumnius, the oldest at twenty-three. The day’s journey had been neither time nor place to become acquainted with the other cadets, so Cicero faced this ordeal when they pitched camp. He had no idea how to erect a tent, nor what was required of him, and hung back miserably until Pompey thrust a cord into his hand and told him to hold on to it without moving.

Looking back on that first evening in the cadets’ tent from the vantage point of age and distance years later, what amazed Cicero was how deftly and inconspicuously Pompey helped him, let it be known without actually saying so that Cicero was his protégé, not to be tormented because of appearance or physical incompetence. The general’s son was undeniably the tent boss—but not because he was the general’s son. Bookish or learned he was not, yet Pompey’s intelligence was remarkable, and his self-confidence without a single flaw; he was a natural autocrat, impatient of restraint, intolerant of fools. Which might have been why he had conceived a liking for Cicero, never a fool, and in no position to apply restraints.

“Your gear’s not adequate,” he said to Cicero, casting his eyes over the jumble of possessions Cicero had carted in from his mule.

“No one told me what to bring,” Cicero said, teeth chattering and face blue with cold.

“Haven’t you got a mother or a sister? They always know what to pack,” said Pompey.

“A mother, but no sister.” He couldn’t stop shivering. “My mother doesn’t like me.”

“Have you no breeches? No mittens? No double-layered woolen tunics? No thick socks? No woolen caps?”

“Only what’s here. I didn’t think. All that sort of thing is at home in Arpinum anyway.”

What seventeen-year-old boy ever does think of warm clothing? asked Cicero of himself all those years later, still able to feel the cheer that spread through him when Pompey, without asking anyone’s permission, made everyone donate Cicero something warm.

“Don’t whine, you’ve got enough,” Pompey said to the others. “Marcus Tullius may be an idiot in some respects, but he’s also cleverer than the rest of us put together. And he’s my friend. Just thank your lucky stars you’ve all got mothers and sisters who know what to pack. Volumnius, you don’t need six pairs of socks, you never change them anyway! And hand over those mittens, Titus Pompeius. Aebutius, a tunic. Teideius, a tunic. Fundilius, a cap. Maianius, you’ve got so much you can give up one of everything. So can I, easily.”

The army struggled into the mountains through blizzards and feet of snow, a warmer Cicero tagging along helplessly, ignorant of what might happen if they encountered the enemy, or what he ought to do. As it happened, the encounter when it came was accidental and unexpected; they had just crossed the frozen river at Fulginum when Pompey Strabo’s army became entangled with four raggle-taggle legions of Picentes coming over the ranges from southern Picenum, apparently en route to stir up trouble in Etruria. The engagement was a debacle. It did not involve Cicero personally because he was traveling in the rear with the baggage train, Young Pompey having decided he ought to keep an eye on the bulkier cadet possessions. This, Cicero was well aware, freed Pompey from concern about his welfare and whereabouts as they marched through enemy country.

“Marvelous!” said Pompey as he cleaned his sword in the cadet tent that night. “We slaughtered them! When they wanted to surrender, my father laughed. So we drove them into the peaks without their baggage train—such as it was. If they don’t die of the cold, they’ll soon starve.” He held the blade up to the lamplight to make sure every part of it gleamed.

“Couldn’t we have taken them prisoner?” asked Cicero.

“With my father in the general’s tent?” Pompey laughed. “He doesn’t believe in letting enemy live.”

Since he was not without courage, Cicero persisted. “But they’re Italians, not a foreign enemy. Mightn’t we need them for our legions later, after this war is over?”

Pompey thought this over. “I agree we might, Marcus Tullius. But it’s too late to worry about this lot now! My father was annoyed with them—and when he is annoyed he gives no quarter to anyone.” The blue eyes stared into Cicero’s brown ones. “I shall be the same.”

It was months before Cicero ceased to dream of them, those Picentine farm workers, subsiding frozen into the snow, or scrabbling feverishly under oaks for acorns, all the food the mountains offered; just one more nightmarish aspect of war to one who found he loathed war.

By the time that Pompey Strabo reached the Adriatic at Fanum Fortunae, Cicero had learned ways of making himself useful, and had even grown used to wearing a mail-shirt and a sword. In the cadet tent he kept house, did the cooking and cleaning up, and in the general’s tent he took over the literate chores which Pompey Strabo’s Picentine clerks and secretaries found beyond their limited talents—reports to the Senate, letters to the Senate, accounts of battles and skirmishes. When Pompey Strabo perused Cicero’s first effort, a letter to the urban praetor Asellio, he glared at the skinny lad with those eerie eyes of his trying to say something.

“Not bad, Marcus Tullius. Maybe there’s some reason for my son’s attachment to you. Couldn’t see what it was—but he’s always right, you know. that’s why I let him have his way.”

“Thank you, Gnaeus Pompeius.”

The general swept a hand through the air, indicating a cluttered desk. “See what you can make of that, boy.”

They came finally to rest some miles outside Asculum Picentum; since the dead Sextus Caesar’s army was still lying before the city, Pompey Strabo decided to put himself down farther away.

Quite often the general and his son would march out to raid, taking however many troops they thought necessary, and staying away for some days. At such times the general would leave his younger brother, Sextus Pompey, in charge of the base, with Cicero left behind to supervise the ongoing paperwork. These periods of relative freedom should have been a joy to Cicero, but they were not. Young Pompey wasn’t there to shield him, and Sextus Pompey despised him to the point of casual abuse—cuffs across the ear, boots up the backside, a foot to trip him up as he hurried about.

While the ground was still frozen hard and the spring thaw still a promise, the general and his son took a small force toward the coast in search of enemy troop movements. Shortly after dawn the next day as Cicero stood outside the command tent rubbing his sore buttocks, a troop of Marsic cavalry rode into the camp as if they owned it. So calm and confident was their demeanor that no one ran to arms; the only Roman response came from Pompey Strabo’s brother Sextus, who strolled forward and lifted a casual hand in greeting as the troop halted outside the command tent.