The Grass Crown (78 page)

“I must journey to Tibur with my friend Gaius Julius here,” said Marius, getting to his feet.

“You can’t!” gasped Julia.

“Indeed I can. Now calm yourself, wife, and tell Strophantes to send to Aurelia and ask for Lucius Decumius. He can look after me during the journey, and save the boy’s energy.” As he spoke Marius held on to Young Caesar’s shoulder tightly—not as if he needed support, more as if he was signaling the boy to silence.

“Let Lucius Decumius take you alone, Gaius Marius,” said Julia. “Gaius Julius should go home to his mother.”

“Yes, you’re right,” said Marius. “Home you go, Young Caesar.”

Young Caesar spoke up. “My mother placed me at your side to use, Gaius Marius,” he said sternly. “If I were to desert you in this, my mother would be very angry.”

Marius would have insisted; it was Julia, knowing Aurelia, who backed down. “He is right, Gaius Marius. Take him.”

Thus it was that one long summer hour later a four-mule gig carried Gaius Marius, Young Caesar, and Lucius Decumius out of Rome through the Esquiline Gate. A good driver, Lucius Decumius kept his team to a brisk trot, a pace the mules could sustain all the way to Tibur without becoming exhausted.

Squeezed between Marius and Decumius, a delighted Young Caesar watched the countryside pass by until darkness fell, never called upon before to take a journey in such urgent circumstances, but secretly harboring a passion for swift travel.

Though they were nine years apart in age, Young Caesar knew his first cousin well, for he carried many more memories out of infancy and early childhood with him than other children, and he had no cause to love or like Young Marius. Not that Young Marius had ever mistreated him, or even derided him. No, it was the others whom Young Marius had mistreated and derided had turned Young Caesar against him. During the perpetual rivalry between Young Marius and Young Sulla, it was always the younger boy he had felt was in the right. And Young Marius had worn two faces for Cornelia Sulla—the charming one when she was present, the spiteful one when she was not—nor did he confine his mockery of her to his cousins, he aired it to his friends as well. Therefore the prospect of Young Marius’s disgrace did not worry Young Caesar on a personal level at all. But because of Gaius Marius and Aunt Julia it worried him sick.

When darkness came down the road was lit by a half-moon overhead, though Lucius Decumius cut the mules back to a walk. The boy promptly fell asleep with his head pillowed in Marius’s lap, his body disposed in that limp abandonment seen only in children and animals.

“Well, Lucius Decumius, we had better talk,” said Mar-ius.

“Good idea,” said Lucius Decumius cheerfully.

“My son is in grave trouble.”

“Tch, tch!” said Lucius Decumius, clicking his tongue. “Now we can’t possibly have that, Gaius Marius.”

“He’s charged with the murder of Cato the Consul.”

“From what I’ve heard about Cato the Consul, they ought to award Young Marius the Grass Crown for saving an army.”

Marius shook with laughter. “I couldn’t agree more. If I can believe my wife, such indeed are the circumstances. That fool Cato engineered a defeat for himself! I imagine his two legates were dead by then, and I can only assume that his tribunes were off carrying messages around the field—the wrong messages, probably. Certainly the only staff Cato the Consul had with him were cadets. And it was left to my son the cadet to advise the general that he must retreat. Cato said no, and called Young Marius the son of an Italian traitor. Whereupon—according to another cadet—Young Marius put two feet of good Roman sword into the consul’s backhand ordered the retreat.”

“Oh, well done, Gaius Marius!”

“So I think—in one way. In another, I’m sorry that he did it while Cato’s back was turned. But I know my son. Temper, not lack of a sense of honor. I wasn’t home enough when he was little to drub the temper out of him. Besides, he was too smart to show me his temper. Or show his mother.”

“How many witnesses, Gaius Marius?”

“Only the one, as far as I can gather. But I won’t know until I see Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who is now in command. Naturally Young Marius must answer charges. If the witness sticks to his story, then my son will face flogging and beheading. To kill the consul is not merely murder. It’s sacrilege too.”

“Tch, tch,” said Lucius Decumius, and said no more.

Of course he knew why he had been asked along on this journey to sort out a hideous confusion. What fascinated him was that Gaius Marius had sent for him. Gaius Marius! The straightest, the most honorable man Lucius Decumius knew. What had Lucius Sulla said years ago? That even when he took a crooked path, Gaius Marius trod it straightly. Yet tonight it looked very much as if Gaius Marius had elected to walk a crooked path crookedly. Not in character. There were other ways. Ways he would have thought Gaius Marius would at least try first.

Then Lucius Decumius shrugged. Gaius Marius was a father, after all. Only had one chick. Very precious. Not a bad boy either, once one got beneath the cocksure arrogance. It must be hard to be the son of a Great Man. Especially for one who didn’t have the sinews. Oh, he was brave enough. Had a mind too. But he’d never be a truly Great Man. That needed a hard life. Harder than the one Young Marius had experienced. Such a lovely mother! Now if he’d had a mother like Young Caesar’s mother—it might be different. She’d made absolutely sure Young Caesar had a hard life. Never allowed him a whisker of latitude. Nor was there much money in that family.

Flat until now, the land began suddenly to rise steeply, and the tired mules wanted to halt. Lucius Decumius touched them with his whip, called them a few frightful names and forced them onward, his wrists steel.

Fifteen years ago Lucius Decumius had appointed himself the protector of Young Caesar’s mother, Aurelia. At about the same time he had also found himself an additional source of income. By birth he was a true Roman, by tribe a member of urban Palatina, by census a member of the Fourth Class, and by profession the caretaker of a crossroads college located within Aurelia’s apartment building. A smallish man of indeterminate coloring and anonymous features, his unprepossessing exterior and lack of erudition hid an unshakable faith in his own intelligence and strength of mind; he ran his sodality like a general.

Officially sanctioned by the urban praetor, the duties of the college involved care of the crossroads outside its premises, from sweeping and cleaning the area, through making sure the shrine to the Lares of the Crossroads was duly honored and the huge fountain supplying water to the district flowed constantly into a pristine basin, to supervising the festivities of the annual Compitalia. Membership in the college ran the full gamut of the local male residents, from Second Class to Head Count among the Romans, and from foreigners like Jews and Syrians to Greek freedmen and slaves; the Second and Third Classes, however, made no contribution to the college beyond donatives generous enough to avoid attendance. Those who patronized the surprisingly clean premises of the college were workingmen who spent their day off sitting talking and drinking cheap wine. Every workingman—free or slave—had each eighth day off work, though not all on the same day; a man’s day off was the eighth day after he had commenced his job. Thus the men inside the college on any particular day would be a different lot from those present on other days. Whenever Lucius Decumius announced there was something to be done, every man present would down his wine and obey the orders of the college caretaker.

The brotherhood under the aegis of Lucius Decumius had activities quite divorced from care of the crossroads. When Aurelia’s uncle and stepfather, Marcus Aurelius Cotta, had bought her an insula as a means of fruitfully investing her dowry, that redoubtable young woman had soon discovered that she housed a group of men who preyed upon the local shopkeepers and businessfolk by selling them protection from vandalism and violence. She had soon put a stop to that—or rather, Lucius Decumius and his brothers had shifted their protection agency further afield to areas where Aurelia neither knew the victims nor traversed the neighborhood.

At about the same time as Aurelia had acquired her insula, Lucius Decumius had found an avocation which suited his nature as much as it did his purse: he became an assassin. Though his deeds were rumored rather than recounted, those who knew him believed implicitly that he had been responsible for many political and commercial deaths, foreign and domestic. That no one ever bothered him—let alone apprehended him—was due to his skill and daring. There was never any evidence. Yet the nature of this lucrative avocation was common knowledge in the Subura; as Lucius Decumius said himself, if no one knew you were an assassin no one ever offered you any jobs. Some deeds he disclaimed, and again he was implicitly believed. The murder of Asellio, he had been heard to say, was the work of a bungling amateur who had put Rome in peril by killing an augur in the midst of his duties and while wearing his sacerdotal regalia. And though it was his considered opinion that Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle had been poisoned, Lucius Decumius announced to all and sundry that poison was a woman’s tool, beneath his notice.

He had fallen in love with Aurelia on first meeting—not in a romantic or fleshly way, he insisted—more the instinctive recognition of a kindred spirit, as determined and courageous and intelligent as he was himself. Aurelia became his to cherish and protect. As her children came along they too were gathered under Lucius Decumius’s vulturine wing. He idolized Young Caesar, loving him, if the truth were known, far more than he did his own two sons, both almost men now and already being trained in the ways of the crossroads college. For years he had guarded the boy, spent hours in his company, filled him with an oddly honest appraisal of the boy’s world and its people, shown him how the protection agency worked, and how a good assassin worked. There was nothing about Lucius Decumius that Young Caesar did not know. And nothing Young Caesar did not understand; the behavior appropriate for a patrician Roman nobleman was not at all appropriate for a Roman of the Fourth Class who was the caretaker of a crossroads college. Each to his own. But that did not negate their being friends. Or loving each other.

“We’re villains, us Roman lowly,” Lucius Decumius had explained to Young Caesar. “Can’t not be if we’re to eat and drink well, have three or four nice slaves and one of them with a cunnus worth lifting a skirt for. Even if we was clever in business—which we mostly isn’t—where would we find the capital, I asks you? No, a man cuts his tunic to suit its cloth, I always says, and that’s that.” He laid his right forefinger against the side of his nose and grinned to display dirty teeth. “But not a word, Gaius Julius! Not a word to anyone! Especially your dear mother.”

The secrets were kept and were to go on being kept, including from Aurelia. Young Caesar’s education was broader by far than she remotely suspected.

By midnight the gig and its sweating mules had reached the army camp just beyond the small village of Tibur. Gaius Marius roused the ex-praetor Lucius Cornelius Cinna from his bed without the slightest compunction.

They knew each other only slightly, for there were almost thirty years of age between them, but Cinna was known from his speeches in the House to be an admirer of Marius’s. He had been a good praetor urbanus—the first of Rome’s wartime governors because of the absence of both consuls—but the confrontation with Italia had ruined his chances of swelling his private fortune during a term governing one of the provinces.

Now two years later he found himself without the means to dower either of his daughters, and was even in some doubt as to whether he could assure his son’s senatorial career beyond the back benches. A letter from the Senate promoting him to the full command in the Marsic theater following upon the death of Cato the Consul had no power to thrill him; all it really meant was a great deal of work shoring up a structure rendered shaky by a man who had been as incompetent as he was arrogant. Oh, where was that fruitful province?

A stocky man with a weatherbeaten face and a maloccluded jaw, his looks had not prevented his making a notable marriage to an heiress, Annia from a rich plebeian family which had been consular for two hundred years. Cinna and Annia had three children—a girl now fifteen, a boy of seven, and a second girl, aged five. Though not a beauty, Annia was nevertheless a striking woman, red-haired and green-eyed; the older daughter had inherited her coloring, whereas the two younger children were as dark as their father. None of this had been important until Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus had visited Cinna and asked for the hand of the older daughter on behalf of his older son, Gnaeus.

“We like red-haired wives, we Domitii Ahenobarbi,” the Pontifex Maximus had said bluntly. “Your girl, Cornelia Cinna, fulfills all the criteria I want in my son’s wife—she’s the right age, she’s a patrician, and she’s red-haired. Originally I had my eye on Lucius Sulla’s girl. But she’s to marry Quintus Pompeius Rufus’s son, which is a shame. However, your girl will do just as well. Same gens—and, I imagine, a bigger dowry?”

Cinna had swallowed, offered up a silent prayer to Juno Sospita and to Ops, and put his faith in his future as the governor of a fruitful province. “By the time my daughter is old enough to marry, Gnaeus Domitius, she will be dowered with fifty talents. I cannot make it more. Is that satisfactory?”

“Oh, quite!” said Ahenobarbus. “Gnaeus is my principal heir, so your girl will be doing very well indeed. I believe I am among the five or six richest men in Rome, and I have thousands of clients. Could we go ahead and conduct the betrothal ceremony?”

All this had happened the year before Cinna was praetor, and at a time when he could be pardoned for assuming he would find the money to dower his older daughter at the time she would be given in marriage to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus Junior. If Annia’s fortune were not so wretchedly tied up matters would have been easier, but Annia’s father kept control of her money, and at her death it could not pass to her children.