The Grass Crown (75 page)

“Publius Vettius Scato of the Marsi,” said the leader, sliding off his horse.

“Sextus Pompeius, brother of the general, in temporary command during the general’s absence.”

Scato pulled a face. “that’s a pity. I came to see if I could treat with Gnaeus Pompeius.”

“He’ll be back, if you care to wait,” said Sextus Pompey.

“How long?”

“Anywhere between three and six days.”

“Can you feed my men and horses?”

“Certainly.”

It fell to Cicero, the only contubernalis left in the camp, to organize accommodation and provender for Scato and his troop; much to his surprise, the same men who had driven the Picentines into the mountains to freeze and starve now behaved toward the enemy in their midst with great hospitality, from Sextus Pompey down to the most insignificant noncombatant. I do not even begin to understand this phenomenon called war, thought Cicero as he watched Sextus Pompey and Scato walking together with what looked like great affection, or going off to hunt the wild pigs which winter had driven down in search of food. And when Pompey Strabo returned from his raiding expedition, he fell upon Scato’s neck as if Scato was his dearest friend.

The treating went on over a great feast; with wondering eyes Cicero witnessed the Pompeys as he imagined they behaved in the fastnesses of their great estates in northern Picenum—huge boars roasting on spits, platters heaped high, everyone seated on benches at tables rather than reclining, servants scurrying with more wine than water. To a Roman of the Latin heartlands like Cicero, the spectacle in the command tent was barbarian. Not so did the men of Arpinum hold a feast, even a Gaius Marius. Of course it didn’t occur to Cicero that an army camp giving a banquet for a hundred and more men could not run to couches or dainties.

“You won’t get inside Asculum in a hurry,” said Scato.

Pompey Strabo said nothing for a moment, too busy crunching through a slice of crisply bubbled pigskin; he finished, wiped his hands on his tunic, and grinned. “It makes no difference to me how long it takes,” he said. “Sooner or later Asculum Picentum will fall. And I’ll be there to make them wish they’d never laid a hand on a Roman praetor.”

“The provocation was great,” said Scato easily.

“Great or small makes no difference to me,” said Pompey Strabo. “Vidacilius got in, I hear. The Asculans will be pushed to feed yet more mouths.”

“There are no Vidacilian mouths to feed in Asculum,” said Scato in an odd voice.

Pompey Strabo looked up, face greasy with pig. “Oh?”

“Vidacilius went mad, as far as we can tell,” said Scato, a more delicate eater than his host.

Sensing a story, the whole tent fell silent to listen.

“He appeared before Asculum with twenty thousand men not long before Sextus Julius died,” said Scato, “apparently with the intention of acting in concert with the people inside the city. His idea was that when he attacked Sextus Julius, the Asculans were to issue out and fall on the Roman rear. A good plan. It might have worked. But when Vidacilius attacked, the Asculans did nothing. Sextus Julius opened his lines and let Vidacilius and his men through, which left Asculum with no choice except to open its gates and let Vidacilius in.”

“I didn’t think Sextus Julius had so much military skill,” said Pompey Strabo.

Scato shrugged. “Could have been an accident. I doubt it.”

“I take it the Asculans were not delighted at the prospect of feeding another twenty thousand mouths?”

“They were dancing with rage!” said Scato, grinning. “Vidacilius was not greeted with open arms, but with closed minds. So Vidacilius went to the forum, got up on the tribunal, and told the city just what he thought of people who didn’t obey orders. Had they done as he had asked, Sextus Julius Caesar’s army would be dead. And that is possibly true. Be that as it may, the Asculans were not prepared to admit it. The chief magistrate got onto the tribunal and told Vidacilius what he thought—didn’t he understand there wasn’t enough food to feed the army Vidacilius had brought inside?”

“I’m glad to know there’s such lack of concord between various sections of the enemy,” said Pompey Strabo.

“Don’t assume I’m telling you this for any other reason than to demonstrate to you how determined Asculum is to hold out,” said Scato, no edge to his voice. “You’re bound to hear about it, and I’d rather you heard the real story.”

“So what happened? A fight in the forum?”

“Correct. Vidacilius, it became clear, was quite mad. He called the townspeople secret Roman sympathizers and had his soldiers kill a number of them. Then the Asculans found their weapons and retaliated. Luckily most of Vidacilius’s troops saw for themselves that he was insane, and left the forum. As soon as darkness fell the gates were opened and over nineteen thousand men sneaked away between the Roman lines—Sextus Julius had died, and his men were more interested in mourning him than keeping watch.”

“Huh!” said Pompey Strabo. “Go on.”

“Vidacilius took over the forum. He had brought a great deal of food with him, and that he now took and prepared a great feast from it. Perhaps seven or eight hundred men were left to him to help him eat it. He also had a massive funeral pyre built. When the feast was at its height he drank a cup of poison, climbed to the top of the pyre, and had it set alight. While his men roistered, he burned! They tell me it was appalling.”

“Mad as a Gallic headhunter,” said Pompey Strabo.

“Indeed,” said Scato.

“So the city fights on, is what you’re saying.”

“It will fight until every last Asculan is dead.”

“One thing I can promise you, Publius Vettius—if there are any Asculans left alive when I take Asculum Picentum, they’ll wish they were dead,” said Pompey Strabo. He threw down his bone, wiped his hands on his tunic again. “You know what they call me, don’t you?” he asked in polite tones.

“I don’t think I do.”

“Carnifex. The Butcher. Now I happen to be proud of that name, Publius Vettius,” said Pompey Strabo. “I’ve had more than my share of nicknames during my lifetime. The Strabo is self-explanatory, of course. But when I was just a bit older than my son is now, I was serving as a contubernalis with Lucius Cinna, Publius Lupus, my cousin Lucius Lucilius, and my good friend Gnaeus Octavius Ruso here. We were with Carbo on that terrible expedition against the Germans in Noricum. And I wasn’t very well liked by my fellow cadets. All except Gnaeus Octavius Ruso here, I add. If he hadn’t liked me, he wouldn’t be with me as one of my senior legates today! Anyway, my fellow cadets tacked another nickname onto the Strabo. Menoeces. We’d visited my home on the way to Noricum, you see, and they found out that my mother’s cook was cross-eyed. His name was Menoeces. And that witty bastard Lucilius—no family feeling, my mother was his aunt!—called me Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo Menoeces, implying that my father was the cook.” He sighed, a deadly little sound. “I wore that one for years. But nowadays they call me Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo Carnifex. It has a better ring. Strabo the Butcher.”

Scato looked bored rather than afraid. “Well, what’s in a name?” he asked. “I’m not called Scato because I was born on top of a nice spring of water, you know. They used to say I gushed.”

Pompey Strabo grinned, but briefly. “And what brings you to see me, Publius Vettius the Gusher?”

“Terms.”

“Tired of fighting?”

“Candidly, yes. I’m not unwilling to fight on—and I will fight on if I have to!—but I think Italia is finished. If Rome were a foreign enemy I wouldn’t be here. But I’m a Marsic Italian, and Rome has been in Italy as long as the Marsi. I think it’s time both sides salvaged what they can out of this mess, Gnaeus Pompeius. The lex Julia de civitate Latinis et sociis danda makes a big difference. Although it doesn’t extend to those in arms against Rome, I note that there’s nothing in the lex Plautia Papiria to prevent my applying for the Roman citizenship if I cease hostilities and present myself in person to a praetor in Rome. The same holds true for my men.”

“What terms are you asking, Publius Vettius?”

“Safe conduct for my army through Roman lines, both here and before Asculum Picentum. Between Asculum and Interocrea we will disband, throw our armor and weapons into the Avens. From Interocrea I will need a safe conduct for myself and my men all the way to Rome and the praetor’s tribunal. I also ask that you give me a letter for the praetor, confirming my story and giving your approval for my own enfranchisement and that of every man with me.”

Silence fell. Watching from a far corner, Cicero and Pompey looked from one man’s face to the other’s.

“My father won’t agree,” whispered Pompey.

“Why not?”

“He fancies a big battle.”

And is it truly on such whims and fancies that the fate of peoples and nations depend? wondered Cicero.

“I see why you’re asking, Publius Vettius,” Pompey Strabo said finally, “but I cannot agree. Too much Roman blood has been shed by your sword and the swords of your men. If you want to get through our lines to present yourselves to the praetors in Rome, you’ll have to fight every inch of the way.”

Scato got up, slapping hands on thighs. “Well, it was worth a try,” he said. “I thank you for your hospitality, Gnaeus Pompeius, but it’s high time I went back to my army.”

The Marsic troop left in the dark; no sooner had they ridden out of earshot than Pompey Strabo sounded his trumpets. The camp fell into an ordered activity.

“They’ll attack tomorrow, probably on two fronts,” said Pompey, shaving the crystal-colored hairs off one forearm with his sword. “It will be a good battle.”

“What shall I do?” asked Cicero miserably.

Pompey sheathed his weapon and prepared to lie down on his camp bed; the other cadets had been posted to pre-battle duties elsewhere, so they were alone.

“Put on your mail-shirt and your helmet, your sword and your dagger, and stack your shield and spear outside the command tent,” said Pompey cheerfully. “If the Marsi break through, Marcus Tullius, you’ll have to fight the last-ditch stand!”

The Marsi did not break through. Cicero heard the cries and thunder of far-off battle, but saw nothing until Pompey Strabo rode in with his son. Both were disheveled and bloodstained, but both were smiling broadly.

“Scato’s legate Fraucus is dead,” said Pompey to Cicero. “We rolled the Marsi up—and a force of Picentes too. Scato got away with a few of his men, but we’ve cut off all access to the roads. If they want to go home to Marruvium they’ll have to do it the hard way—across the mountains without food or shelter.”

Cicero swallowed. “Letting men die of cold and hunger seems to be one of your father’s specialties,” he said, quite heroically, he thought, knees trembling.

“Turns you sick, doesn’t it, poor Marcus Tullius?” Pompey asked, laughing, then patted Cicero affectionately on the back. “War is war, that’s all. They’d do the same to us, you know. You can’t help it if it turns you sick. that’s your nature. Maybe if a man is as intelligent as you are, he loses his appetite for war. Lucky for me! I wouldn’t like to pit myself against a warlike man as intelligent as you are. It’s as well for Rome that there are a lot more men like my father and me than there are like you. Rome got where she is by fighting. But someone has to run things in the Forum—and that, Marcus Tullius, is your arena.”

It was an arena quite as stormy as any theater of war that spring, for Aulus Sempronius Asellio ran foul of the moneylenders. The finances of Rome, both .public and private, were in a worse condition even than during the second Punic war, when Hannibal had occupied Italy and isolated Rome. Money was hiding throughout the business community, the Treasury was virtually empty, and little was coming in. Even the parts of Campania still in Roman hands were too chaotic to permit the orderly collecting of rents; the quaestors were finding it hard to make anyone pay customs duties and port dues, while one of the two biggest ports, Brundisium, was completely cut off; the Italians were now nonpaying insurgents; pleading King Mithridates as an excuse, Asia Province was proving dilatory in returning its contracted incomes to Rome; Bithynia was paying nothing at all; and the incomes from Africa and Sicily were eaten up in extra purchases of wheat before they left Africa or Sicily. To make matters worse, Rome was actually in debt to one of her own provinces, Italian Gaul, from which area most of her weapons and armaments were coming. The one-in-eight plated silver denarius issue of Marcus Livius Drusus had given everyone an extreme mistrust of coined money, and too many sesterces were minted in an attempt to get around this difficulty. Borrowing was rife among those of middle and upper income, and the lending interest rate was higher than in history.

Having a good business head, Aulus Sempronius Asellio decided that the best way to improve matters was to act to relieve debt. His technique was attractive and legal; he invoked an ancient statute which forbade charging a fee for lending money. In other words, said Asellio, it was illegal to levy interest on loans. That the antique law had been ignored for centuries and that usury was a thriving business among a large group of knight-financiers was just too bad. The fact was, announced Asellio, that far more knight-financiers were in the business of borrowing money than lending it. Until their distress was relieved, no one in Rome could begin to recover. The number of unrepaid loans was escalating daily, debtors were at their wits’ end, and—as the bankruptcy courts were closed along with all the other courts—creditors were resorting to violent means in order to collect their debts.

Before Asellio could enforce his revival of that old law, the moneylenders heard of his intention and petitioned him to reopen the bankruptcy courts.

“Tat?” he cried. “What? Here is Rome devastated by the most serious crisis since Hannibal, and the men I see in front of my tribunal are actually petitioning me to make matters worse? As far as I’m concerned, you are a small number of repellently avaricious men, and so I take leave to tell you! Go away! If you don’t, you’ll get a court reopened, all right! A court specially convened to prosecute you for lending money with interest!”

From this stand Asellio refused to be budged. If he could do no more for Rome’s debtors than to insist that interest was illegal, he was nonetheless lightening the burden of debt enormously, and in a perfectly legal way. Let the capital be repaid, by all means. But not the interest. The Sempronii, Asellio’s family, had a tradition of protecting the distressed; burning to follow in his family’s tradition, Asellio espoused his mission with all the fervor of a fanatic, dismissing his enemies as impotent in the face of the law.

What he failed to take into account was that not all his enemies were knights. There were also senators in the money lending business, despite the fact that membership in the Senate forbade any purely commercial activity—especially one as unspeakably sordid as usury. Included among the senatorial moneylenders was Lucius Cassius, a tribune of the plebs. At the outbreak of war he had gone into the business because his senatorial census income was barely enough; but as Rome’s chances of winning deteriorated, Cassius found himself with everything he had lent outstanding, no payments coming in, and the prospect of scrutiny by the new censors looming ever closer. Though Lucius Cassius was by no means the biggest moneylender in the Senate, he was the youngest, he was desperate to the point of panic, and by nature he was a rather lawless individual. Cassius acted, not only on his own behalf; he engaged himself to act for all the usurers.

Asellio was an augur. As he was also the urban praetor, he inspected the omens on behalf of the city regularly from the podium of the temple of Castor and Pollux. A few days after his confrontation with the moneylenders he was already taking the auspices when he noticed that the crowd in the Forum below him was much larger than the usual gathering to witness an augury.

As he lifted a bowl to pour out a libation, someone threw a stone at him. It struck him just above the left brow, spinning him around, and the bowl flew from his hands to bounce down the temple steps in a series of ringing clatters, sacred water splashing everywhere. Then came more stones, storms of them; crouching low and pulling his particolored toga further over his head, Asellio ran down the steps and headed instinctively for the temple of Vesta. But the good elements in the crowd fled the moment they realized what was afoot, and the irate moneylenders who were his assailants positioned themselves between Asellio and sanctuary at Vesta’s holy hearth.

There was only one way left for him to go, through the narrow passage called the Clivus Vestae and up the Vestal Steps onto the Via Nova, scant feet above the floor of the Forum. With the usurers in full cry after him, Asellio ran for his life into the Via Nova, a street of taverns serving Forum Romanum and Palatine both. Screaming for help, he burst into the establishment belonging to Publius Cloatius.

No help was forthcoming. While two men held Cloatius and two more his assistant, the rest of the crowd picked Asellio up bodily and stretched him out across a table in much the same way as an augur’s acolytes dealt with the sacrificial victim. Someone cut his throat with such gusto that the knife scraped on the column of bones behind it, and there across the table Asellio died in a fountain of blood, while Publius Cloatius wept and vowed, shrieking, that he knew no one in that crowd, no one!

Nor, it appeared, did anyone else in Rome. Appalled by the sacrilegious aspects of the deed as much as by the murder itself, the Senate offered a reward of ten thousand denarii for information leading to the apprehension of the assassins, publicly deploring the killing of an augur clad in full regalia and in the midst of an official ceremony. When not a whisper surfaced during the ensuing eight days, the Senate added more incentives to its reward—pardon for an accomplice, manumission for a slave of either sex, promotion to a rural tribe for a freedman or freedwoman. Still not a whisper.

“What can you expect?” asked Gaius Marius of Young Caesar as they shuffled round the peristyle-garden. “The moneylenders covered it up, of course.”

“So Lucius Decumius says.”

Marius stopped. “How much congress do you have with that arch-villain, Young Caesar?” he demanded.

“A lot, Gaius Marius. He’s a thousand paces deep in all sorts of information.”

“Not fit for your ears, most of it, I’ll bet.”

Young Caesar grinned. “My ears grew, along with the rest of me, in the Subura. I doubt there’s much can mortify them.”

“Cheeky!” The massive right hand came out in a gentle cuff to the boy’s head.

“This garden is too small for us, Gaius Marius. If you want to get any real use back in your left side, we’re going to have to walk farther and faster.” It was said with firmness and authority, in a tone which brooked no argument.

He got it anyway. “I am not permitting Rome to see me like this!” roared Gaius Marius.

Young Caesar deliberately relinquished his grasp of Marius’s left arm and let the Great Man totter unsupported. When the prospect of a fall seemed inevitable, the boy moved back and propped Marius up with deceptive ease. It never failed to amaze Marius how much strength that slight frame contained, nor had it failed to register upon Marius that Young Caesar used his strength with an uncanny instinct as to where and how it would prove of maximum effect.

“Gaius Marius, I stopped calling you Uncle when I came to you after your stroke because I thought your stroke put us on much the same level. Your dignitas is diminished, mine is enhanced. We are equals. But in some things I am definitely your superior,” said the boy fearlessly. “As a favor to my mother—and because I thought I could be of help to a great man—I gave up my free time to keep you company and get you walking again. You declined to lie on your couch and have me read to you, and the mine of stories you had to tell me are all told. I know every flower and every shrub and every weed in this whole garden! And I say to you straight, it has outlived its purpose. Tomorrow we’re going out the door into the Clivus Argentarius. I don’t care whether we go up it and onto the Campus Martius, or whether we go down it through the Porta Fontinalis. But tomorrow we go out!”

Fierce brown eyes glared down into rather chilly blue ones; no matter how Marius disciplined himself to ignore it, Young Caesar’s eyes always reminded him of Sulla’s. Like encountering some huge cat on a hunting expedition, and discovering that the orbs which ought to be yellow were instead a pale blue ringed round with midnight. Such cats were considered visitors from the Underworld; perhaps too were such men?

The duel of gazes continued unabated.

“I won’t go,” said Marius.

“You will go.”

“The gods rot you, Young Caesar! I cannot give in to a boy! Haven’t you some more diplomatic way of putting things?”

Pure amusement flooded into those unsettling eyes, gave them a life and attractiveness quite alien to Sulla’s. “When dealing with you, Gaius Marius, there is no such thing as diplomacy,” said Young Caesar. “Diplomatic language is the prerogative of diplomats. You are not a diplomat, which is a mercy. One always knows where one stands with Gaius Marius. And that I like as much as I like you.”

“You’re not going to take no for an answer, are you, boy?” Marius asked, feeling his will crumble. First the steel, then the fur mitten. What a technique!

“You’re right, I will not take no for an answer.”

“Well then, sit me down over there, boy. If we are to go out tomorrow, I’m going to need a rest now.” A rumble came up through his throat. “How about we go outside with me in a litter, all the way to the Via Recta? Then I could hop out and we could walk to your heart’s content.”

“When we get as far as the Via Recta, Gaius Marius, it will be as the result of our own efforts.”

For a while they sat in silence, Young Caesar keeping himself perfectly still; it had not taken him long to realize that Marius detested fidgeting, and when he had said so to his mother, she had simply observed that if such was the case, learning not to fidget would be very good training. He might have discovered how to get the best of Gaius Marius, but he couldn’t get the best of his mother!

What had been required of him was, of course, not what any lad of ten wanted to do, or liked doing. Every single day after lessons with Marcus Antonius Gnipho finished, he had to abandon all his ideas of wandering off with his friend Gaius Matius from the other ground-floor apartment, and go instead to Marius’s house to keep him company. There was no time left for himself because his mother refused to allow him to skip a day, an hour, a moment.

“It is your duty,” she would say upon the rare occasions when he would beg to be permitted to go with Gaius Matius to the Campus Martius to witness some very special event—the choosing of the war-horses to run in the October race, or a team of gladiators hired for a funeral on the following day strutting through their paces.

“But I will never not have duty of some kind!” he would say. “Is there to be no moment when I can forget it?”

And she would answer, “No, Gaius Julius. Duty is with you in every moment of your life, in every breath you draw, and duty cannot be ignored to pander to yourself.”

So off he would go to the house of Gaius Marius, no falter in his step, no slowing of his pace, remembering to smile and say hello to this one and that as he hurried through the busy Suburan streets, forcing himself to go a little faster as he passed by the bookshops of the Argiletum in case he succumbed to the lure of going inside. All the product of his mother’s cool yet remorseless teaching—never dawdle, never look as if you have time to spare, never indulge yourself even when it comes to books, always smile and say hello to anyone who knows you, and many who don’t.

Sometimes before he knocked on Gaius Marius’s door he would run up the steps of the Fontinalis tower and stand atop it to gaze down on the Campus Martius, longing to be there with the other boys—to cut and thrust and parry with a wooden sword, to pound some idiot bully’s head into the grass, to steal radishes from the fields along the Via Recta, to be a part of the rough-and-tumble. But then—long before his eyes could grow tired of the scene—he would turn away, lope down the tower steps and be at Gaius Marius’s door before anyone could realize he was a few moments late.

He loved his Aunt Julia, who usually answered the door to him in person; she always had a special smile for him, and a kiss too. How wonderful to be kissed! His mother did not approve of the habit, she said it had a corrupting influence, it was too Greek to be moral. Luckily his Aunt Julia didn’t feel the same. When she leaned forward to plant that kiss upon his lips—she never, never turned her head aside to aim for cheek or chin—he would lower his lids and breathe in as deeply as he could, just to catch every last morsel of her essence in his nostrils. For years after she had passed from the world, the aging Gaius Julius Caesar would scent a faint tendril of her perfume stealing off some woman’s skin, and the tears would spring to his eyes before he could control them.

She always gave him the day’s report then and there: “He’s very cross today,” or, “He’s had a visit from a friend and it’s put him in an excellent mood,” or, “He thinks the paralysis is becoming worse, so he’s very down.”

The routine was that she fed him his dinner in the midafternoon, sending him off to snatch a respite from his duties with Gaius Marius while she fed Gaius Marius his dinner herself. He would curl up on the couch in her workroom and read a book as he ate—something he would never have been allowed to do at home—and bury himself in the doings of heroes, or the verses of a poet. Words enchanted him. They could make his heart soar or stumble or gallop; there were times when, as with Homer, they painted for him a world more real than the one he lived in.