Caesar's Women (25 page)

“The Cilician legions,” said Lucullus slowly.

“Them too. My doing.” Clodius bounced up and down on his toes. “You won't want me after this, so I'll go. By the time I get to Tarsus, my brother-in-law Rex ought to be there.”

“You're going nowhere except back to mess with your Fimbriani minions,” said Lucullus, and smiled dourly. “I am your commander, and I hold a proconsular imperium to fight Mithridates and Tigranes. I do not give you leave to go, and without it you cannot go. You will remain with me until the sight of you makes me vomit.”

Not the answer Clodius wanted, or had expected. He threw Lucullus a furious glare, and stormed out.

The winds and snow began even as Lucullus turned west, for the campaigning season was over. He had used up his time of grace getting as far as Ararat, not more than two hundred miles from Tigranocerta as a bird would have flown. When he touched the course of the Arsanias, the biggest of the northern tributaries of the Euphrates, he found the grain already harvested and the sparse populace fled to hide in their troglodyte houses dug out of tufa rock, together with every morsel of any kind of food. Defeated by his own troops Lucullus may have been, but adversity was something he had come to know well, and he was not about to stop here where Mithridates and Tigranes could find him all too easily when spring arrived.

He headed for Tigranocerta, where there were supplies and friends, but if the Fimbriani had expected to winter there, they were soon disillusioned. The city was quiet and seemed contented under the man he had left there to govern, Lucius Fannius. Having picked up grain and other foodstuffs, Lucullus marched south to besiege the city of Nisibis, situated on the river Mygdonius, and in drier, flatter country.

Nisibis fell on a black and rainy night in November, yielding much plunder as well as a wealth of good living. Ecstatic, the Fimbriani settled down with Clodius as their mascot, their good-luck charm, to spend a delightful winter beneath the snow line. And when Lucius Fannius materialized not a month later to inform his commander that Tigranocerta was once more in the hands of King Tigranes, the Fimbriani carried an ivy-decked Clodius shoulder-high around the Nisibis marketplace, attributing their good fortune to him; here they were safe, spared a siege at Tigranocerta.

In April, with winter nearing its end and the prospect of a new campaign against Tigranes some comfort, Lucullus learned that he had been stripped of everything save an empty title, commander in the war against the two kings. The knights had used the Plebeian Assembly to take away his last provinces, Bithynia and Pontus, and then deprived him of all four of his legions. The Fimbriani were to go home at last, and Manius Acilius Glabrio, the new governor of Bithynia-Pontus, was to have the Cilician troops. The commander in the war against the two kings had no army with which to continue his fight. All he had was his imperium.

Whereupon Lucullus resolved to keep the news of their fully honorable discharge from the Fimbriani. What they didn't know couldn't bother them. But of course the Fimbriani knew they were free to go home; Clodius had intercepted the official letters and discovered their contents before they reached Lucullus. Hard on the heels of the letter from Rome came letters from Pontus informing him that King Mithridates had invaded. Glabrio wouldn't inherit the Cilician legions after all; they had been annihilated at Zela.

When orders went out to march for Pontus, Clodius came to see Lucullus. “The army refuses to move out of Nisibis,” he announced.

“The army will march for Pontus, Publius Clodius, to rescue those of its compatriots left alive,” said Lucullus.

“Ah, but it isn't your army to command anymore!” crowed the jubilant Clodius. “The Fimbriani have finished their service under the eagles, they're free to go home as soon as you produce their discharge papers. Which you'll do right here in Nisibis. That way, you can't cheat them when the spoils of Nisibis are divided.”

At which moment Lucullus understood everything. His breath hissed, he bared his teeth and advanced on Clodius with murder in his eyes. Clodius dodged behind a table, and made sure he was closer to the door than Lucullus.

“Don't you lay a finger on me!” he shouted. “Touch me and they'll lynch you!”

Lucullus stopped. “Do they love you so much?” he asked, hardly able to believe that even ignoramuses like Silius and the rest of the Fimbriani centurions could be so gullible.

“They love me to death. I am the Soldiers' Friend.”

“You're a trollop, Clodius, you'd sell yourself to the lowest scum on the face of this globe if that meant you'd be loved,” said Lucullus, his contempt naked.

Why exactly it occurred to him at that moment, and in the midst of so much anger, Clodius never afterward understood. But it popped into his head, and he said it gleefully, spitefully: “I'm a trollop? Not as big a trollop as your wife, Lucullus! My darling little sister Clodilla, whom I love as much as I hate you! But she is a trollop, Lucullus. I think that's why I love her so desperately. Thought you had her first, didn't you, all of fifteen years old when she married you? Lucullus the pederast, despoiler of the little girls and little boys! Thought you got to Clodilla first, eh? Well, you didn't!” screamed Clodius, so carried away that foam gathered at the corners of his mouth.

Lucullus was grey. “What do you mean?” he whispered.

“I mean that I had her first, high and mighty Lucius Licinius Lucullus! I had her first, and long before you! I had Clodia first too. We used to sleep together, but we did more than just sleep! We played a lot, Lucullus, and the play grew greater as I grew greater! I had them both, I had them hundreds of times, I paddled my fingers inside them and then I paddled something else inside them! I sucked on them, I nibbled at them, I did things you can't imagine with them! And guess what?” he asked, laughing. “Clodilla deems you a poor substitute for her little brother!”

There was a chair beside the table separating Clodius from Clodilla's husband; Lucullus seemed suddenly to lose all the life in him and fell against it, into it. He gagged audibly.

“I dismiss you from my service, Soldiers' Friend, because the time has come to vomit. I curse you! Go to Rex in Cilicia!”

After a tearful parting from Silius and Cornificius, Clodius went. Of course the Fimbriani centurions loaded their Friend down with gifts, some of them very precious, all useful. He jogged off on the back of an exquisite small horse, his retinue of servants equally well mounted, and with several dozen mules bearing the booty. Thinking himself headed in a direction minus danger, he declined Silius's offer of an escort.

All went well until he crossed the Euphrates at Zeugma, his destination Cilicia Pedia and then Tarsus. But between him and Cilicia Pedia's flat and fertile river plains lay the Amanus Mountains, a piddling coastal range after the massifs Clodius had recently struggled across; he regarded them with contempt. Until a band of Arab brigands waylaid him down a dry gulch and filched all his gifts, his bags of money, his exquisite small horses. Clodius finished his journey alone and on the back of a mule, though the Arabs (who thought him terrifically funny) had given him enough coins to complete his journey to Tarsus.

Where he found his brother-in-law Rex had not yet arrived! Clodius usurped a suite in the governor's palace and sat down to review his hate list: Catilina, Cicero, Fabia, Lucullus—and now Arabs. The Arabs would pay too.

It was the end of Quinctilis before Quintus Marcius Rex and his three new legions arrived in Tarsus. He had traveled with Glabrio to the Hellespont, then elected to march down through Anatolia rather than sail a coast notorious for pirates. In Lycaonia, he was able to tell an avid Clodius, he had received a plea of help from none other than Lucullus, who had managed to get the Fimbriani moving after the Soldiers' Friend departed, and set off for Pontus. At Talaura, well on his way, Lucullus was attacked by a son-in-law of Tigranes named Mithradates, and learned that the two kings were rapidly bearing down on him.

“And would you believe he had the temerity to send to me for help?” asked Rex.

“He's your brother-in-law too,” said Clodius mischievously.

“He's persona non grata in Rome, so naturally I refused. He had also sent to Glabrio for help, I believe, but I imagine he was refused in that quarter as well. The last I heard, he was in retreat and intending to return to Nisibis.”

“He never got there,” said Clodius, better informed about the end of Lucullus's march than about events in Talaura. “When he reached the crossing at Samosata, the Fimbriani baulked. The last we've heard in Tarsus is that he's now marching for Cappadocia, and from there he intends to go to Pergamum.”

Of course Clodius had discovered from reading Lucullus's mail that Pompey the Great was the recipient of an unlimited imperium to clear the pirates from the Middle Sea, so he left the subject of Lucullus and proceeded to the subject of Pompey.

“And what do you have to do to help the obnoxious Pompeius Magnus sweep up his pirates?” he asked.

Quintus Marcius Rex sniffed. “Nothing, it appears. Cilician waters are under the command of our mutual brother-in-law Celer's brother, your cousin Nepos, barely old enough to be in the Senate. I am to govern my province and keep out of the way.”

“Hoity-toity!” gasped Clodius, seeing more mischief.

“Absolutely,” said Rex stiffly.

“I haven't seen Nepos in Tarsus.”

“You will. In time. The fleets are ready for him. Cilicia is the ultimate destination of Pompeius's campaign, it seems.”

“Then I think,” said Clodius, “that we ought to do a little good work in Cilician waters before Nepos gets here, don't you?”

“How?” asked Claudia's husband, who knew Clodius, but still lived in ignorance of Clodius's ability to wreak havoc. What flaws he saw in Clodius, Rex dismissed as youthful folly.

“I could take out a neat little fleet and go to war on the pirates in your name,” said Clodius.

“Well…”

“Oh, go on!”

“I can't see any harm in it,” said Rex, wavering.

“Let me, please!”

“All right then. But don't annoy anyone except pirates!”

“I won't, I promise I won't,” said Clodius, who was seeing in his mind's eye enough pirate booty to replace what he had lost to those wretched Arab brigands in the Amanus.

Within a market interval of eight days, Clodius the admiral set sail at the head of a flotilla rather than a fleet, some ten well-manned and properly decked biremes which neither Rex nor Clodius thought Metellus Nepos would miss when he turned up in Tarsus.

What Clodius didn't take into account was the fact that Pompey's broom had been sweeping so energetically that the waters off Cyprus and Cilicia Tracheia (which was the rugged western end of that province, wherein so many pirates had their land bases) swarmed with refugee pirate fleets of far larger size than ten biremes. He hadn't been at sea for five days when one such fleet hove in sight, surrounded his flotilla, and captured it. Together with Publius Clodius, a very short-lived admiral.

And off he was hied to a base in Cyprus that was not very far from Paphos, its capital and the seat of its regent, that Ptolemy known as the Cyprian. Of course Clodius had heard the story of Caesar and his pirates, and at the time had thought it brilliant. Well, if Caesar could do that sort of thing, so too could Publius Clodius! He began by informing his captors in a lordly voice that his ransom was to be set at ten talents rather than the two talents custom and pirate scales said was the right ransom for a young nobleman like Clodius. And the pirates, who knew more of the Caesar story than Clodius did, solemnly agreed to ask for a ransom of ten talents.

“Who is to ransom me?” asked Clodius grandly.

“In these waters, Ptolemy the Cyprian” was the answer.

He tried to play Caesar's role around the pirate base, but he lacked Caesar's physical impressiveness; his loud boasts and threats somehow came out ludicrously, and while he knew Caesar's captors had also laughed, he was quite acute enough to divine that this lot absolutely refused to believe him even after the revenge Caesar had taken. So he abandoned that tack, and began instead to do what none did better: he went to work to win the humble folk to his side, create trouble at home. And no doubt he would have succeeded—had the pirate chieftains, all ten of them, not heard what was going on. Their response was to throw him into a cell and leave him with no audience beyond the rats which tried to steal his bread and water.

He had been captured early in Sextilis, and wound up in that cell not sixteen days later. And in that cell he lived with his ratty companions for three months. When finally he was released it was because the Pompeian broom was so imminent that the settlement had no alternative than to disband. And he also discovered that Ptolemy the Cyprian, on hearing what ransom Clodius thought himself worth, had laughed merrily and sent a mere two talents— which was all, said Ptolemy the Cyprian, Publius Clodius was really worth. And all he was prepared to pay.

Under ordinary circumstances the pirates would have killed Clodius, but Pompey and Metellus Nepos were too near to risk a death sentence: word had got out that capture did not mean an automatic crucifixion, that Pompey preferred to be clement. So Publius Clodius was simply abandoned when the fleet and its horde of hangers-on departed. Several days later one of Metellus Nepos's fleets swept past; Publius Clodius was rescued, returned to Tarsus and Quintus Marcius Rex.

The first thing he did once he'd had a bath and a good meal was to review his hate list: Catilina, Cicero, Fabia, Lucullus, Arabs, and now Ptolemy the Cyprian. Sooner or later they'd all bite the dust—nor did it matter when, how long he would have to wait. Revenge was such a delicious prospect that the when of it hardly mattered. The only important thing to Clodius was that it should happen. Would happen.

He found Quintus Marcius Rex in an ill humor, but not at his, Clodius's, failure. To Rex, the failure was his own. Pompey and Metellus Nepos had utterly eclipsed him, had commandeered his fleets and left him to twiddle his thumbs in Tarsus. Now they were mopping up rather than sweeping; the pirate war was over and all the pickings had gone elsewhere.