The Grass Crown (119 page)

Dietary crisis aside, declaration of independence aside, it was a bitter meal. So much unsaid, so much which had to remain unsaid. For everybody’s sake. Perhaps Young Caesar’s candidness had saved the dinner; it drew the focus of everyone’s thoughts away from the atrocities of Gaius Marius, the madness of Gaius Marius.

“I’m glad today is over,” said Aurelia to Caesar as they went to their bedroom.

“I never want another such,” said Caesar with feeling.

Before she removed her clothes Aurelia sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at her husband. He seemed fatigued—but then, he always did. How old was he? Almost forty-five. The consulship was passing him by, and he was no Marius, no Sulla. Gazing at him now, Aurelia knew suddenly that he would never be consul. A great deal of the blame for that, she thought, must be laid at my feet. If he had a less busy and independent wife, he would have spent more time at home this last decade, and made more of a reputation for himself in the Forum. He’s not a fighter, my husband. And how can he go to a madman to ask for the funds to mount a serious campaign to be elected consul? He won’t do it. Not from fear. From pride. The money is sticky with blood now. No decent man would want to use it. And he is the most decent of men, my husband.

“Gaius Julius,” she said, “what can we do about our son and his flaminate? He hates it so!”

“Understandably. However,” he said with a sigh, “I will never be consul now. And that means he would have a very difficult time of it becoming consul himself. With this war in Italy, our money has dwindled. You may as well say I’ve lost the thousand iugera of land I bought in Lucania because it was so cheap. It’s too far from a town ever to be safe, I suspect. After Gaius Norbanus turned the Lucanians back from Sicily last year, the insurgents have gone to earth in places like my land. And Rome will not have the time, the men or the money to chase them out, even in our son’s lifetime. So all that remains is my original endowment, the six hundred iugera Gaius Marius bought for me near Bovillae. Enough for the back benches of the Senate, not the cursus honorum. You might say Gaius Marius took the land back again. His troops have ruined it in these last months while they roamed Latium.”

“I know,” said Aurelia sadly. “Our poor son will have to be content with his flaminate, won’t he?”

“I fear so.”

“He’s so convinced Gaius Marius did it on purpose!”

“Oh, I think he did,” said Caesar. “I was there in the Forum. He was—indecently pleased with himself.”

“Then my son has received scant thanks for all the time he gave Gaius Marius after his second stroke.”

“Gaius Marius has no gratitude left. What frightened me was the fear in Lucius Cinna. He told me that no one was safe, even Julia and Young Marius. After seeing Gaius Marius, I believe him.”

Caesar had removed his clothes, and Aurelia saw with faint alarm that he had lost weight; his ribs and hipbones were showing, his thighs were farther apart.

“Gaius Julius, are you well?” she asked abruptly.

He looked surprised. “I think so! A little tired, perhaps, but not ill. It’s probably that sojourn in Ariminum. After three years of Pompey Strabo’s marching up and down, there’s very little left to feed legions with anywhere in Umbria or Picenum. So we had short commons, Marcus Gratidianus and I, and if one cannot feed the men well, one cannot eat well oneself. I seemed to spend most of my time riding all over the place looking for supplies.”

“Then I shall feed you nothing but the very best food,” she said, one of her rare smiles lighting up her drawn face. “Oh, I wish I thought things were going to get better! But I have a horrible feeling they’re going to get worse.” She stood up and began to divest herself of her gown.

“I share your feeling, meum mel,” he said, sitting on his side of the bed and swinging his legs onto it. Sighing luxuriously, he tucked his hands behind his head on the pillow, and smiled. “However, while we live at all, this is one thing cannot be taken from us.”

She crawled in beside him and snuggled her face into his shoulder; his left arm came down and encircled her. “A very nice thing,” she said gruffly. “I love you, Gaius Julius.”

•        •        •

When the sixth day of Gaius Marius’s seventh consulship dawned, he had his tribune of the plebs Publius Popillius Laenas convene yet another Plebeian Assembly. Only Marius’s Bardyaei were present in the well of the Comitia to hear the proceedings. For almost two days they had been under orders to behave, had had to clean the city and disappear from sight. But Young Marius was gone to Etruria, and the rostra was bristling again with all those heads. Only three people stood on the rostra—Marius himself, Popillius Laenas, and a prisoner cast in chains.

“This man,” shouted Marius, “tried to procure my death! When I—old and infirm!—was fleeing from Italy, the town of Minturnae gave me solace. Until a troop of hired assassins forced the magistrates of Minturnae to order my execution. Do you see my good friend Burgundus? It was Burgundus deputed to strangle me as I lay in a cell beneath the Minturnaean capitol! All alone and covered in mud. Naked! I, Gaius Marius! The greatest man in the history of Rome! The greatest man Rome will ever produce! A greater man than Alexander of Macedon! Great, great, great!” He ran down, looked bewildered, sought for memory, then grinned. “Burgundus refused to strangle me. And, taking their example from a simple German slave, the whole town of Minturnae refused to see me killed. But before the hired assassins—a paltry lot, they wouldn’t even do the deed themselves!—left Minturnae, I asked their leader who had hired them. ’Sextus Lucilius,’ he said.”

Marius grinned again, spread his feet and stamped them in what apparently he fancied was a little dance. “When I became consul for the seventh time—what other man has been consul of Rome seven times?—it pleased me to allow Sextus Lucilius to think no one knew he hired those men. For five days he was foolish enough to remain in Rome, deeming himself safe. But this morning before it was light and he was out of his bed, I sent my lictors to arrest him. The charge is treason. He tried to procure the death of Gaius Marius!”

No trial was ever shorter, no vote was ever taken more cavalierly; without counsel, without witnesses, without due form and procedure, the Bardyaei in the well of the Comitia pronounced Sextus Lucilius guilty of treason. Then they voted to have him cast down from the Tarpeian Rock.

“Burgundus, I give the task of casting this man from the rock to you,” said Marius to his hulking servant.

“I will do so gladly, Gaius Marius,” rumbled Burgundus.

The whole assemblage then moved to a better place from which to view the execution; Marius himself, however, remained on the rostra with Popillius Laenas, its height affording it a superb outlook toward the Velabrum. Sextus Lucilius, who had said nothing in his defense nor allowed any expression on his face save contempt, went to his death gallantly. When Burgundus, a great golden glitter in the distance, led Lucilius to the end of the Tarpeian overhang, he didn’t wait to be picked up and tossed away; instead, he leaped of his own accord and almost brought the German down as well, for Burgundus had not let go of his chains.

This defiant independence and the risk to Burgundus angered Marius terribly; dark red in the face, he choked and spluttered, began to roar his outrage at the dismayed Popillius Laenas.

The weak little light still illuminating his mind was snuffed out in a torrent of blood. Gaius Marius fell to the floor of the rostra as if poleaxed, lictors clustering about him, Popillius Laenas calling frantically for a stretcher or a litter. And all those heads of old rivals, old enemies, ringed Marius’s inert body round, teeth beginning to show in the skull’s grin because the birds had feasted.

Cinna, Carbo, Marcus Gratidianus, Magius, and Vergilius came down from the Senate steps at a run, displacing the lictors as they gathered about the fallen form of Gaius Marius.

“He’s still breathing,” said his adopted nephew, Gratidianus.

“Too bad,” said Carbo under his breath.

“Get him home,” said Cinna.

By this time the members of Marius’s slave bodyguard had learned of the disaster and had crowded round the base of the rostra, all weeping, some wailing outlandishly.

Cinna turned to his own chief lictor. “Send to the Campus Martius and summon Quintus Sertorius here to me urgently,” he said. “You may tell him what has happened.”

While Marius’s lictors carried him off on a stretcher and the Bardyaei followed up the hill, still wailing, Cinna, Carbo, Marius Gratidianus, Magius, Vergilius and Popillius Laenas came down off the rostra and waited at its base for Quintus Sertorius; they sat on the top tier of the Comitia well, trying to regain their senses.

“I can’t believe he’s still alive!” said Cinna in wonder.

“I think he’d get up and walk if someone stuck two feet of good Roman sword under his ribs,” said Vergilius, scowling.

“What do you intend to do, Lucius Cinna?” asked Marius’s adopted nephew, who agreed with everyone’s attitude but could not admit it, and so preferred to change the subject.

“I’m not sure,” said Cinna, frowning. “that’s why I’m waiting for Quintus Sertorius. I value his counsel.”

An hour later Sertorius arrived.

“It’s the best thing could have happened,” he said to all of them, but particularly to Marius Gratidianus. “Don’t feel disloyal, Marcus Marius. You’re adopted, you have less Marian blood in you than I do. But, Marian though my mother is, I can say it without fear or guilt. His exile drove him mad. He is not the Gaius Marius we used to know.”

“What should we do, Quintus Sertorius?” asked Cinna.

Sertorius looked astonished. “About what? You are the consul, Lucius Cinna! It’s up to you to say, not to me.”

Flushing scarlet, Cinna waved his hand. “About the duties of the consul, Quintus Sertorius, I am in no doubt!” he snapped. “What I called you here for was to ask you how best we can rid ourselves of the Bardyaei.”

“Oh, I see,” said Sertorius slowly. He was still wearing a bandage about his left eye, but the discharge seemed to have dried up, and he looked comfortable enough with his handicap.

“Until the Bardyaei are disbanded, Rome still belongs to Marius,” said Cinna. “The thing is, I doubt they’ll want to be disbanded. They’ve had a taste of terrorizing a great city. Why should they stop because Gaius Marius is incapacitated?”

“They can be stopped,” said Sertorius, smiling nastily. “I can kill them.”

Carbo looked overjoyed. “Good!” he said. “I’ll go and fetch whatever men are left across the river.”

“No, no!” cried Cinna, horrified. “Another battle in the streets of Rome? We don’t dare after the past six days!”

“I know what to do!” said Sertorius, impatient at these silly interruptions. “Lucius Cinna, tomorrow at dawn you must summon the leaders of the Bardyaei to you here at the rostra. You must tell them that even in extremis Gaius Marius thought of them, and gave you the money to pay them. That will mean you must be seen to enter Gaius Marius’s house today, and stay there long enough to make it look as if you could have talked to him.”

“Why do I need to go to his house?” asked Cinna, shrinking at the thought.

“Because the Bardyaei will spend the whole of today and tonight in the street outside Gaius Marius’s door, waiting for news.”

“Yes, of course they will,” said Cinna. “I’m sorry, Quintus Sertorius, I’m not thinking very well. What then?”

“Tell the leaders that you have arranged for the whole of the Bardyaei to receive their pay at the Villa Publica on the Campus Martius at the second hour of day,” said Sertorius, showing his teeth. “I’ll be waiting with my men. And that will truly be the end of Gaius Marius’s reign of terror.”

When Gaius Marius was carried into his house Julia looked down at him with terrible grief, infinite compassion. He lay with eyes closed, breathing stertorously.

“It is the end,” she said to his lictors. “Go home, good servants of the People. I will see to him now.”

She bathed him herself, shaved a six-day stubble from his cheeks and chin, clothed him in a fresh white tunic with the help of Strophantes, and had him put into his bed. She didn’t weep.

“Send for my son and for the whole family,” she said to the steward when Marius was ready. “He will not die for some time, but he will die.” Sitting in a chair beside the Great Man’s bed, she gave Strophantes further instructions against the background horror of that snoring, bubbling respiration—the guest chambers were to be readied, sufficient food was to be prepared, the house must look its best. And Strophantes should send for the best undertaker. “I do not know a single name!” she said, finding that strange. “In all the time I have been married to Gaius Marius, the only death in this house was that of our little second son, and Grandfather Caesar was still alive, so he looked after things.”

“Perhaps he will recover, domina,” said the weeping steward, grown middle-aged in Gaius Marius’s service.

Julia shook her head. “No, Strophantes, he will not.”

Her brother Gaius Julius Caesar, his wife, Aurelia, their son, Young Caesar, and their daughters Lia and Ju-ju arrived at noon; having much further to travel, Young Marius did not arrive until after nightfall. Claudia, the widow of Julia’s other brother, declined to come, but sent her young son—another Sextus Caesar—to represent his branch of the family. Marius’s brother, Marcus, had been dead for some years, but his adopted son, Gratidianus, was present. As was Quintus Mucius Scaevola Pontifex Maximus and his second wife, a second Licinia; his daughter, Mucia Tertia, was of course already in Marius’s house.

Of visitors there were many, but not nearly as many as there would have been a month earlier. Catulus Caesar, Lucius Caesar, Antonius Orator, Caesar Strabo, Crassus the censor—their tongues could no longer speak, their eyes no longer see. Lucius Cinna came to call several times, the first time tendering the apologies of Quintus Sertorius.

“He can’t leave his legion at the moment.”

Julia glanced at him shrewdly, but said only, “Tell dear Quintus Sertorius that I understand completely—and agree with him.”