Caesar's Women (85 page)

His turn to frown. “I'm not quite sure. Though I am very glad I wasn't there to hear him—I might have killed him, which wouldn't have been beneficial to my career at all. Ought I, for instance, to blow him lots of kisses and shift the suspicion from my shoulders to his? Crassus thinks him inclined that way.”

“No,” she said firmly. “Ignore it and him. There are more feminine corpses—well, metaphorically speaking!— strewn in your wake than there were behind Adonis. You have intrigued with no man, nor have your enemies been able to pluck a man's name out of the air for all their trying. They can do no better than poor old King Nicomedes. It remains the only allegation very nearly twenty-five years later. Time alone renders it thin, Caesar, if you consider it coolly. I realize that your temper is wearing down, but I beg you to hold it in whenever this subject arises. Ignore, ignore, ignore.”

“Yes, you're right.” He sighed. “Sulla used to say that no man ever had a harder road to the consulship nor a harder time of it when he finally was consul. But I fear I might eclipse him.”

“That's good! He stood above all the rest, and he still does.”

“Pompeius would hate to be hated the way men hate Sulla, but on thinking about it, Mater, I would rather be hated than sink into obscurity. One never knows what the future will bring. All one can do is be prepared for the worst.”

“And act,” said Aurelia.

“Always that. Is dinner ready? I'm still replacing whatever it was I used up rowing.”

“I came to tell you dinner was ready, actually.” She got up. “I like your Balbus. A terrific aristocrat, am I right?”

“Like me, he can trace his ancestry back a thousand years. Punic. His real name is astonishing—Kinahu Hadasht Byblos.”

“Three names? Yes, he's a nobleman.”

They walked out into the corridor and turned toward the door of the dining room.

“No troubles among the Vestals?” he asked.

“None at all.”

“And my little blackbird?”

“Blooming.”

At which moment Julia came from the direction of the stairs, and Caesar had the tranquillity of mind to see her properly. Oh, she had grown up so much in his absence! So beautiful! Or was that judgement a father's natural prejudice?

It really wasn't. Julia had inherited Caesar's bones, which he had inherited from Aurelia. She was still so fair that her skin shone transparent and her rich crop of hair had almost no color, a combination which endowed her with an exquisite fragility reflected in huge blue eyes set in faint violet shadows. As tall as the average man, her body was perhaps too slender and her breasts too small for masculine taste, but distance now showed her father that she did have her own allure, and would ravish many men. Would I have wanted her, had I not been her sire? I'm not sure about wanting, but I think I would have loved her. She is a true Julia, she will make her men happy.

“You'll be seventeen in January,” he said, having put her chair opposite his own, and Aurelia's opposite Balbus, who occupied the locus consularis on their couch. “How's Brutus?”

She answered with complete composure, though her face, he noted, did not light up at mention of her betrothed's name. “He's well, tata.”

“Making a name for himself in the Forum?”

“More in publishing circles. His epitomes are prized.” She smiled. “Actually I think he likes business best, so it's a shame his rank will be senatorial.”

“With Marcus Crassus as an example? The Senate won't restrict him if he's shrewd.”

“He's shrewd.” Julia drew a deep breath. “He would do much better in public life if only his mother left him alone.”

Caesar's smile held no trace of anger. “I agree with you wholeheartedly, daughter. I keep telling her not to make a rabbit of him, but, alas, Servilia is Servilia.”

The name caught Aurelia's attention. “I knew there was something else I had to tell you, Caesar. Servilia wishes to see you.”

But it was Brutus he saw first; he arrived to visit Julia just as the four of them came out of the dining room.

Oh, dear! Time certainly hadn't improved poor Brutus. As hangdog as ever, he shook Caesar's hand limply and looked everywhere but into Caesar's eyes, a characteristic which had always irritated Caesar, who deemed it shifty. That awful acne actually seemed worse, though at twenty-three it should surely have been starting to clear up. If he hadn't been so dark the stubble spread untidily over his cheeks and chin and jawline might not have looked so villainous; no wonder he preferred to scribble rather than orate. Were it not for all that money and an impeccable family tree, who could ever have taken him seriously?

He was, however, obviously as deeply in love with Julia as he had been years ago. Kind, gentle, faithful, affectionate. His eyes as they rested on her were filled with warmth, and he held her hand as if it might break. No need to worry that her virtue had ever been subjected to siege! Brutus would wait until they were married. In fact, it occurred to Caesar now that Brutus would wait until they were married—that he had had no sort of sexual experience at all. In which case marriage might do much for him in all sorts of ways, including the skin and the spirit. Poor, poor Brutus. Fortune had not been kind to him when she gave him that harpy Servilia as mother. A reflection which led him to wonder how Julia would cope with Servilia as her mother-in-law. Would his daughter be another the harpy rended tooth and claw, cowed into perpetual obedience?

* * *

He met his harpy the next day toward evening in his rooms on the Vicus Patricii. Forty-five years old, though she didn't look it. The voluptuous figure hadn't spread, nor the wonderful breasts sagged; in fact, she looked magnificent.

Expecting a frenzy, instead she offered him a slow and erotic languorousness he found irresistible, a tangled web of the senses she wove in tortuous patterns which reduced him to a helpless ecstasy. When he had first known her, he had been able to sustain an erection for hours without succumbing to orgasm, but she had, he admitted, finally beaten him. The longer he knew her, the less able he was to resist her sexual spell. Which meant that his only defense was to conceal these facts from her. Never yield vital information to Servilia! She would chew on it until she sucked it dry.

“I hear that since you crossed the pomerium and declared your candidacy, the boni have declared an all-out war,” she said as they lay together in the bath.

“You surely didn't expect anything else?”

“No, of course not. But the death of Catulus has released a brake. Bibulus and Cato are a terrible combination in that they have two assets they can now use without fear of criticism or disapproval—one is the ability to rationalize any atrocious action into virtue, and the other is a complete lack of foresight. Catulus was a vile man because he had a smallness of nature his father never had—that came of owning a Domitia for mother. His father's mother was a Popillia, much better stock. Yet Catulus did have some idea of what being a Roman nobleman is, and he could upon occasion see the outcome of certain boni tactics. So I warn you, Caesar, his death is a disaster for you.”

“Magnus said something like that about Catulus too. I'm not asking for guidance, Servilia, but I am interested in your opinion. What would you have me do to counter the boni?”

“I think the time has come to admit that you can't win without some very strong allies, Caesar. Until now it's been a lone battle. From now it must be battle united with other forces. Your camp has been too small. Enlarge it.”

“With what? Or perhaps that ought to be, with whom?”

“Marcus Crassus needs you to salvage his clout among the publicani, and Atticus is not fool enough to glue himself to Cicero blindly. He has a soft spot for Cicero, but a softer spot by far for his commercial activities. Money he doesn't need, but power he craves. Lucky perhaps that political power has never intrigued him, otherwise you'd have some competition. Gaius Oppius is the greatest of all Roman bankers. You already have Balbus, the greatest banker of them all, in your camp. Entice Oppius to your side as well. Brutus is definitely yours, thanks to Julia.”

She lay with those gorgeous breasts floating gently on the surface of the water, her thick black hair pulled up in unplanned loops to keep it dry, and those big black eyes staring into the layers of her own mind, absolutely inward.

“And what about Pompeius Magnus?” he asked idly.

She stiffened; the eyes suddenly focused on him, “No, Caesar, no! Not the Picentine butcher! He doesn't understand how Rome works, he never did and he never will. There's a mine of natural ability there, a massive force for good or ill. But he isn't a Roman! Were he a Roman, he would never have done what he did to the Senate before he became consul. He has no subtle streak, no inner conviction of invincibility. Pompeius thinks rules and laws were meant to be broken for his personal benefit. Yet he hungers for approval and he is perpetually torn by conflicting desires. He wants to be the First Man in Rome for the rest of his life, but he really has no idea of the right way to do that.”

“It's true that he didn't handle his divorce of Mucia Tertia very wisely.”

“That,” she said, “I put down to Mucia Tertia. One forgets who she is. Scaevola's daughter, Crassus Orator's loved niece. Only a Picentine oaf like Pompeius would have locked her up in a fortress two hundred miles from Rome for years on end. So when she cuckolded him, she did it with a peasant like Labienus. She would much rather have had you.”

“That I've always known.'*

“So too her brothers. That's why they believed her.”

“Ah! I thought as much.”

“However, Scaurus suits her well enough.”

“So you think I should stay away from Pompeius.”

“A thousand times, yes! He can't play the game because he doesn't know the rules.”

“Sulla controlled him.”

“And he controlled Sulla. Never forget that, Caesar.”

“You're right, he did. Still and all, Sulla needed him.''

“More fool Sulla,” said Servilia scornfully.

When Lucius Flavius took Pompey's land bill back to the Plebs any chance of its passing died. Celer was there in the Comitia to torment and harangue; so bitter was the confrontation with poor Flavius that he ended in invoking his right to conduct business unobstructed, and hied Celer off to the Lautumiae. From his cell Celer convoked a meeting of the Senate; then when Flavius barred its door with his own body, Celer ordered the wall pulled down and personally supervised its demolition. Nothing prevented his leaving the cell, the Lautumiae being what it was, but the senior consul preferred to show Lucius Flavius up by ostentatiously conducting his consular and senatorial business from that cell. Frustrated and very angry, Pompey had no choice other than to call his tribune of the plebs to order. With the result that Flavius authorized Celer's release, and went no more to meetings of the Plebeian Assembly. The land bill was impossible to promulgate.

In the meantime canvassing for the curule elections proceeded at a hectic pace, public interest stimulated enormously by the return of Caesar. Somehow when Caesar wasn't in Rome everything tended to be boring, whereas the presence of Caesar guaranteed that fur would fly. Young Curio was up on the rostra or Castor's platform every time one or the other became vacant, and seemed to have decided to replace Metellus Nepos as Caesar's most personal critic (Nepos had departed for Further Spain). The tale of King Nicomedes was retold with many witty embellishments—though, said Cicero to Pompey in complete exasperation, “It's young Curio I'd call effeminate. He was certainly Catilina's cub, if not something more to Catilina than that.”

“I thought he belonged to Publius Clodius?” asked Pompey, who always found it difficult to keep track of the intricacies involved in political and social alliances.

Cicero could not suppress a shiver at mention of that name. “He belongs to himself first,” he said.

“Are you doing your best to help Lucceius's candidacy?”

“Naturally!” Cicero said haughtily.

As indeed he was, though not without constant awkward chance encounters during escort duty in the Forum.

Thanks to Terentia, Publius Clodius had become a very bitter and dangerous enemy. Why was it that women made life so hard? If she had only left him alone, Cicero might have avoided testifying against Clodius when his trial for sacrilege finally came on a twelvemonth ago. For Clodius announced that at the time of the Bona Dea he had been in Interamna, and produced some respectable witnesses to confirm this. But Terentia knew better.

“He came around to see you on the day of the Bona Dea,” she said sternly, “to tell you that he was going to western Sicily as quaestor, and wanted to do well. It was the day of Bona Dea, I know it was! You told me he'd come to ask for a few tips.”

“My dear, you're mistaken!” Cicero had managed to gasp. “The provinces weren't even assigned until three months after that!”

“Rubbish, Cicero! You know as well as I do that the lots are fixed. Clodius knew where he was going! It's that trollop Clodia, isn't it? You won't testify because of her.”

“I won't testify because I have an instinct that this is one sleeping beast I ought not to arouse, Terentia. Clodius has never cared overmuch for me since I helped to defend Fabia thirteen years ago! I disliked him then. I now find him detestable. But he's old enough to be in the Senate, and he's a patrician Claudius. His senior brother Appius is a great friend of mine and Nigidius Figulus's. Amicitia must be preserved.”

“You're having an affair with his sister Clodia, and that's why you refuse to do your duty,” said Terentia, looking mulish.

“I am not having an affair with Clodia! She's disgracing herself with that poet fellow, Catullus.”

“Women,” said Terentia with awful logic, “are not like men, husband. They don't have just so many arrows in their quivers to shoot. They can lie on their backs and accept an arsenal.”

Cicero gave in and testified, thereby breaking Clodius's alibi. And though Fulvia's money bought the jury (which acquitted him by thirty-one to twenty-five votes), Clodius had neither forgiven nor forgotten. Added to which, when Clodius immediately afterward assumed his seat in the Senate and tried to be witty at Cicero's expense, Cicero's unruly tongue had covered him in glory and Clodius in ridicule—yet one more grudge Clodius harbored.