The October Horse (64 page)

The faces were beginning to lighten; Trebonius was devising a new plan that had the merit of immediacy. Not one of the club members had been looking forward to doing the deed and confessing to it later, at the propitious moment, by producing a grisly trophy like Caesar's head. Some among them had already begun to wonder if all twenty-three would have the dedication and the courage to own up.

“We have to strike fast,” Trebonius went on. “There are sure to be backbenchers inside, but we'll be clustered around Caesar, and most won't realize what's going on until it's too late. And we will be right where we can make the most of our situation with oratory, caps of liberty, whatever. Everyone's first reaction will be shock, and shock paralyzes. By the time that Antonius gets his breath back, Decimus—I think we all agree that he's our best orator—will be in full spate. If he's nothing else, Antonius is a practical man. What's done will be done as far as he's concerned, Caesar's cousin or not. The House will take its attitude from him, not from Dolabella. Everyone knows there's bad blood between Caesar and Antonius. Truly, fellow members of our club, I am sure that Antonius will be prepared to listen, that he won't exact reprisals.”

Oh, Trebonius, Trebonius! What do you know that the rest of us don't? Decimus asked himself at the conclusion of this breathless but effective speech. You've struck a deal with our Antonius, haven't you? How clever of you! And how clever of Antonius! He gets what he wants without lifting a finger against Cousin Gaius.

“I still say kill Antonius too,” Cassius said stubbornly.

Decimus answered. “No, I don't think so. Trebonius is right. If we're unapologetic about our deed of liberation—an excellent word, Brutus, I think we should call ourselves the Liberators!—then Antonius has many reasons to accommodate us. For one thing, he'll lead the invasion of the Parthians.”

“Isn't that to take Caesar's place?” Cassius grumbled.

“It's a war, and Antonius likes making war. But take Caesar's place? He'll never do that, he's too lazy. The only strife will be between him and Dolabella over who's the senior consul,” said Staius Murcus. “But I do suggest that one of us runs off to get Cicero, who won't be there while Caesar's in the House, but will be only too happy to be there to look on his dead body.”

“There's a more important problem,” Decimus said, “namely, keeping Antonius, Dolabella and the other curule magistrates outside the curia itself while we do the deed. One of us will have to stay in Pompeius's garden. He has to be the one on best terms with Antonius, the one Antonius will be glad to linger with, talk to. If Antonius doesn't move to go inside, nor will any of the others, including Dolabella.” He drew a long breath. “I nominate Gaius Trebonius to stay in the garden.”

When Trebonius jumped, Decimus walked up to him, took his hand and clasped it strongly. “Those of us from the Gallic War know that you're not afraid to use a dagger, so no one will call you craven, my dear Gaius I think it has to be you who stays outside, even if that means you won't have the opportunity to strike a blow for liberty.”

Trebonius returned the grip. “I'm willing, on condition that every one of you votes me in, and that you, Decimus, strike an extra blow for me. Twenty-three men, twenty-three blows. That way, no one will ever know whose dagger actually killed Caesar.”

“I'll do that gladly,” said Decimus, eyes shining.

The vote was taken: Gaius Trebonius was unanimously elected the man who stayed outside to detain Marcus Antonius.

“Is there any need to meet again before the Ides?” Caecilius Buciolanus asked.

“None,” said Trebonius, smiling broadly. “What I do insist upon is that all of us congregate in the garden an hour after dawn. It doesn't matter if we huddle together and talk too earnestly to invite company, because as soon as the deed is done, everyone will know what we were talking about. We'll run through it then in greater detail. Caesar won't be on time. It's the Ides, don't forget, which means that Caesar will have to fill in for our nonexistent flamen Dialis and lead his sheep down the Sacra Via, then climb the steps to sacrifice it on the Arx. He'll also have unavoidable business, given that he leaves Rome so soon afterward—or would, if he were still alive.”

They laughed dutifully, save for Brutus and Cassius.

“I predict that we'll have some hours to discuss the deed before Caesar turns up,” Trebonius continued. “Decimus, it would be a good idea if you presented yourself at the Domus Publica at dawn, then go with him to Jupiter's ceremony and wherever else he chooses. As soon as he starts for the Campus Martius, send us a warning. Be open about it—tell him he's so late that it might be prudent to notify the senators that he's actually on his way.”

“In his high red boots.” Quintus Ligarius giggled.

At the doors of Ceres they all shook hands solemnly, looked into each other's eyes, then melted into the darkness.

•      •      •

“Gaius, I wish that you'd recall your lictors,” Lucius Caesar said to his cousin, encountering him leaving the Treasury. “And don't you dare ignore me to dictate a letter! This mania for work is becoming ridiculous.”

“I would love to be able to take an hour off, Lucius, but it is quite impossible,” Caesar said, banishing the secretary to walk in his rear. “There are a hundred and fifty-three separate pieces of agrarian legislation, thanks to our lack of public land and the cantankerousness of every latifundium owner my commission's buying from—there are almost as many colonies on foreign land as that, all of which have to be individually legislated—in my function as censor, I have innumerable state contracts to let—every day thirty or forty petitions come in from citizens of this town or that, all with serious grievances—and that is but the surface of my work mountain. My senators and magistrates are either too lazy, too haughty or too disinterested in the machinery of government to act as deputies, and so far I haven't had the time to create the bureaucratic departments which will have to come in before I can step down as dictator.”

“I'm here and willing to help, but you don't ask me,” Lucius said a little stiffly.

Caesar smiled, squeezed his arm. “You're a venerable, not so young consular, and your services to me in Gaul alone must excuse you from the plod of paperwork. No, it's high time that the backbenchers were given something more to do than merely sit mum during infrequent meetings of the House and spend the rest of their days touting for juicy criminal lawsuits that benefit them but not Rome.”

Lucius looked mollified, consented to walk with Caesar as they passed between the Well of Juturna and the little round aedes of Vesta, heading a huge crowd of Caesar's clients, who were a part of a great man's burden. One that Lucius Caesar was glad to see now that his cousin refused to be escorted by lictors.

Though stalls and booths had largely been banished from the Forum Romanum save for the impermanent barrows vending snacks to Forum frequenters, there were no laws on the tablets to prevent people from usurping a tiny spot of Forum ground, thereon to pursue an activity usually to do with the occult. Romans were a superstitious lot, loved astrologers, fortune-tellers and eastern magi, a number of whom dotted the margins of the area. Cross any of a dozen palms with a silver coin and you could find out what the morrow held, or why your business venture had failed, or what kind of future your newborn son could hope for.

Old Spurinna enjoyed an unparalleled reputation among these soothsayers. His place was adjacent to the public entrance to the Vestal Virgin side of the Domus Publica, the door through which any Roman citizen desirous of depositing his or her will with the Vestals might enter and lodge it. An excellent site for one in the soothsaying business, for men and women with death on their minds and wills in their hands were always tempted to pause, give old Spurinna a denarius, and learn how much longer they had to live. His appearance inspired confidence in his mystical gift, for he was skinny, dirty, unkempt, seamed of face.

As the two Caesars passed by him without noticing him—he had been a fixture there for decades—Spurinna got to his feet.

“Caesar!” he cried.

Both Caesars stopped, both looked at him.

“Which Caesar?” Lucius asked, grinning.

“There is only one Caesar, Chief Augur! His name will come to mean the man who rules Rome,” Spurinna shrilled, dark irises ringed with the white halo that heralded the approach of death. “ 'Caesar' means 'king'!”

“Oh, no, not again.” Caesar sighed. “Who's paying you to say that, Spurinna? Marcus Antonius?”

“It isn't what I want to say, Caesar, and no one paid me.”

“Then what do you want to say?”

“Beware the Ides of March!”

Caesar fumbled in the purse attached to his belt, flipped a gold coin that Spurinna caught deftly. “What's going to happen on the Ides of March, old man?”

“Your life will be imperiled!”

“I thank you for the warning,” Caesar said, and walked on.

“He's usually uncannily right,” Lucius said with a shiver. “Caesar, please recall your lictors!”

“And let all of Rome know that I pay attention to rumors and ancient visionaries? Admit I am afraid? Never,” said Caesar.

•      •      •

Caught in the web of his own making, Cicero had no choice but to sit in the spectators' bleachers while legislation, policy making and senatorial decrees went on without him. All he had to do was walk into the curia, have his slave unfold his stool, and put his bottom on it among the most senior consulars of the front benches. But pride, stubbornness and his detestation of Caesar Rex forbade it. Worse still, he was feeling the full force of Caesar's enmity since the publication of his “Cato,” and Atticus too was unpopular with Caesar. No matter how they tried, or through whom, the migrant poor of Rome's seediest areas kept on flooding into the colony outside Buthrotum.

It was Dolabella who first told him that there was a rumor going about that Caesar was to be assassinated.

“Who? When?” he asked eagerly.

“That's just it, no one really knows. It's a typical rumor—'they say' and 'I heard that' and 'there's a feeling in the air'—no substance that I've managed to find. I know you can't stand him, but I'm Caesar's man through and through,” Dolabella declared, “so I'm looking hard and listening harder. If anything happened to him, I'd be all to pieces. Antonius would run rampant.”

“No whisper of names, even a name?” Cicero asked.

“None.”

“I'll pop around to see Brutus,” Cicero said, and shooed his ex-son-in-law out.

“Have you heard any stories that someone is plotting to assassinate Caesar?” Cicero demanded as soon as a goblet of wine-and-water was put into his hand.

“Oh, that business!” Brutus said, sounding slightly angry.

“So there is something to it?” Cicero asked eagerly.

“No, there's absolutely nothing to it, that's what irritates me. As far as I know, it started because that madman Matinius daubed graffiti all over Rome instructing me to kill Caesar.”

“Oh, the graffiti! I didn't see them myself, but I heard. Is that all? How disappointing.”

“Yes, isn't it?” asked Brutus.

“Dictator Perpetuus. You'd think there were some men in Rome with enough gumption to rid us of this Caesar.”

The dark eyes, sterner than of yore, held Cicero's with some irony in their depths. “Why don't you rid us of this Caesar?”

“I? ” Cicero gasped, clutching dramatically at his chest. “My dear Brutus, it's not my style. My assassinations are done with a pen and a voice. To each his own.”

“Staying out of the Senate has silenced your pen and voice, Cicero, that's the trouble. There's no one left in that body to aim a verbal dagger at Caesar. You were our only hope.”

“Enter the House with that man in a dictator's chair? I'd rather die!” Cicero declared in ringing tones.

A small, uncomfortable silence fell, broken by Brutus.

“Are you in Rome until the Ides?” he asked.

“Definitely.” Cicero coughed delicately. “Is Porcia well?”

“Not very, no.”

“Then I trust your mother is?”

“Oh, she's indestructible, but she isn't here at the moment. Tertulla is with child, and Mama thought some country air might benefit her, so they've gone to Tusculum,” said Brutus.

Cicero departed, convinced he was being palmed off, though why or because of what escaped him.

In the Forum he encountered Mark Antony deep in conversation with Gaius Trebonius. For a moment he thought they were going to ignore him, then Trebonius started, smiled.

“Cicero, how good to see you! In Rome for a while, I hope?”

Antony being Antony simply grunted something, gave Trebonius a casual flip of his hand, and walked off toward the Carinae.

“I detest that man!” Cicero exclaimed.

“Oh, he's more bark than bite,” Trebonius said comfortably. “His whole trouble is his size. It must be very hard to think of oneself as an ordinary man when one is so—well endowed.”

A notorious prude, Cicero flushed. “Disgraceful!” he cried. “Absolutely disgraceful!”

“The Lupercalia, you mean?”

“Of course the Lupercalia! Exposing himself!”

Trebonius shrugged. “That's Antonius.”

“And offering Caesar a diadem?”

“I think that was a put up job between the pair of them. It enabled Caesar to engrave his public repudiation of the diadem on a bronze tablet which, I am reliably informed, will be attached to his new rostra. In Latin and in Greek.”

Cicero spotted Atticus emerging from the Argiletum, farewelled Trebonius and hurried off.

It's done, thought Trebonius, glad to be rid of a nosy gossip like Cicero. Antonius knows when and where.

•      •      •

On the thirteenth day of March, Caesar finally managed to find the time to visit Cleopatra, who welcomed him with open arms, kisses, feverish endearments. As tired as he was, that wretched traitor in his groin insisted upon immediate gratification, so they retired to Cleopatra's bed and made love until well into the afternoon. Then Caesarion had to have his play with tata, who enjoyed the little fellow more each time he saw him. His Gallic son by Rhiannon, vanished without a trace, had also looked very like his father, but Caesar remembered him as a rather limited child who had not been able to name the fifty men inside his toy Trojan horse. Caesar had commissioned another for this boy, discovering in delight that he could identify every one of them after a single lesson. It boded well for his future, it meant he wasn't stupid.