The Tribune's Curse (11 page)

Between the Colline Gate and the Esquiline Gate, all the elderly senators stepped away from the litter. The weight on our shoulders grew fractionally heavier. When we reached the embankment where the river runs along the base of the wall, the middle-aged men were dropping out fast.

About an hour before noon we reached our starting point. Four hours for the first circuit. Here Pompey left us, red faced and puffing.

“Keep it up, men,” he gasped. “At this pace, we’ll finish before sundown handily.”

But there was more to it than time and pace. For the second circuit, we had perhaps half as many men to shoulder the burden. Granted it had been the weaker half that had left, but the willing backs of even old men had been a great help. By noon my shoulder was aching, and the sweat streamed off me by the bucketful. At least, to cheer myself up, I could always look back at Clodius, who was wheezing like a punctured bellows.

From atop the walls whole troops of little girls showered us with flower petals. They must have raided every garden and flower box in the City, and most of the petals were rather withered at that time of year, but we appreciated the gesture. All along our route, lesser priests and temple slaves dipped olive branches into jars of sacred, perfumed water and splashed it over us liberally, like the Circus attendants who dash water on the smoking chariot axles during the races. This we truly needed and appreciated, although ritual law demanded that we drink nothing during the ceremony.

We completed the second circuit of the wall by mid-afternoon, and some of us were in serious condition. My shoulder, neck, and back felt like molten bronze, and spots swam through my field of vision. My right arm was all but numb, my knees were shaky, and my feet were bleeding despite the hard marching I had
been doing in Gaul. I was in better shape than 90 percent of those who were left. Clodius was in a near-coma, but still gamely on his feet. I no longer took delight in his discomfiture. Cato was hanging on stoutly to his Stoic demeanor, but I could see the signs of deathly fatigue in him. Milo and Balbus seemed not to be distressed, but neither was an ordinary mortal. Many of my colleagues would clearly not make it for another quarter-circuit, and I was having waking nightmares about the drugs wearing off and those huge animals setting up a struggle, rocking the litter.

“Good, men, good!” Pompey said as we set out on the third and final circuit of the walls. “Just one more little march, and it’s done! We will be here, ready for the sacrifice, when you return.”

“He’s assuming a lot,” wheezed somebody as we set off again.

“That’s Pompey,” said someone else in a phlegm-clogged voice, “always the optimist.”

“Save your breath,” Milo cautioned.

“Right,” Balbus said in his faintly accented Latin. “Now comes the hard part.”

And hard it was. Almost immediately, men dropped in their tracks, causing those behind to stumble and the float to lurch. Now I had another terror to add to the others. If the litter toppled, which way would it fall? The men on the wrong side would have a ton of wood and livestock fall upon them. But then, I thought, maybe that was what the gods wanted. A few squashed senators would make an impressive and, certainly, a unique sacrifice.

Somewhere near the Appian Aqueduct I decided that my right shoulder was now permanently six inches lower than my left. I was half-blind, but I looked around me anyway, and I saw the final, hard core of the Senate soldiering grimly on. Not many were friends of mine, but all were men whose reputations for toughness would not let them give up short of their final breath. I saw tunics stained with vomit and others stained with blood from lacerated shoulders. Blood poured in a steady stream from Clodius’s nostrils,
drenching his tunic and running down his thighs. I didn’t dare look down at myself for fear of what I might see.

I heard a gentle grunt that didn’t sound much like anything a human might perform. Then a lowing sound, followed by a quizzical baa. I looked up in pure horror.

“Hercules help us!” I said, forgetting that because of the curse he didn’t hear. “They’re waking up!”

“Steady, back there,” Balbus said. “Not much farther to go now. They’ll stay quiet.” I saw that the back of his tunic, and Milo’s, were soaked with sweat. They were human after all.

But the beasts began to shift, and the litter rocked, and when that happened, we lost step. Each time, it took us longer to get back in step again. This was looking bad.

“How far is it to the river?” I gasped, sweat obscuring what little vision I had left.

“We passed the embankment awhile ago,” Cato growled out. “Are you blind, Metellus?”

“Just about.” Past the river? I tried to remember how far it was from the river to the gate, but I couldn’t, despite having walked the route a thousand times. Rome seemed like a totally strange place—a place I had never visited before. I had no more idea of its geography than that of Babylon. I wasn’t even sure that we were going in the right direction.

I had a sensation of floating. Gradually, a sense of pressure told me that I was lying on my back. My vision cleared enough to see that I was looking up at the clouds of late evening, tinged red on their westerly edges. I knew then that we had failed. And ritual law prescribed the procedure when a ceremony was not performed properly: you do it all over again, right from the first.

“Pity Pompey didn’t let us do this in full gear,” I remarked. “I’d like to fall on my sword.”

“Are you still alive, Metellus?” I’d have known that voice on the bank of the Styx.

“So I seem to be, Clodius. But I’m just not myself without lunch and my afternoon bath. How far did we get?”

“I don’t know,” he groaned. “I fell down awhile ago, and I haven’t been able to turn over.”

“On your feet,” said Milo. Something grabbed the front of my tunic, and I was hauled to my feet as easily as a doll of straw. I saw that Milo and Balbus and a few others were reviving the fallen and that the priests were leading the sacrificial beasts from the platform.

“We made it?” I asked.

“Of course we made it,” Milo said. “We’re Romans, aren’t we? But nobody attends a sacrifice on his back, so everyone stand up until it’s over. As long as you keep on your feet, we can continue, although a sorrier-looking lot I never saw.”

At last I looked down at myself, fighting off a wave of dizziness and nausea as I did so. I was covered with blood and less-reputable fluids, to which handfuls of flower petals adhered. My companions were in equally disheveled shape, and some of them far worse. But we had done something never attempted in living memory, and if the animals would just die without fuss, we could all go home and then brag about it for the rest of our lives.

A number of men staggered in while the final preparations were made. I later learned that only twenty of us made the entire three circuits, somehow carrying that tremendous weight for the last quarter-mile on our shoulders. Later, the Centuriate Assembly voted us special oak wreaths in honor of our feat. Those of Milo and Clodius were later burned on their funeral pyres, and I believe Cato had his with him when he died at Utica, many years later. My own still hangs among my achievements in the family atrium. I don’t know what happened to the other sixteen.

Just before the upper rim of the sun disappeared below the horizon, the priests finished their droning chant, and the flutes were stilled. The
rex sacrorum
nodded, the hammers swung, the
knives flashed, and the beautiful but weighty beasts fell with their blood gushing out onto the sacred soil.

The
rex sacrorum
raised his hands and intoned: “The gods are pleased. Rome is purified. All may return home now and sacrifice to their household gods. Worship of the immortals may resume.”

And that was that.

With an arm over Hermes’ shoulders, I lurched slowly toward home through a City that seemed much relieved. We weren’t out from under the curse yet, but progress had been made.

“Maybe we should stop off at the baths first,” I said, my chest sending pains through my body with every word.

“You need it,” Hermes said, “but they’ve been closed down since yesterday morning. I don’t expect to see them back in operation before tomorrow.”

“Right. I forgot.”

I vaguely remember people shouting congratulations at me and people offering me wine that I tried and immediately threw up. I had been in pitched battles far less strenuous than that day’s exertion.

To my great amazement, my father reached my door at the same time we did. I was amazed because for my father to call on me rather than the other way around was all but unheard-of.

“Well-done, my boy,” he said as he went in through the front gate. Coming from him, that was the equivalent of triumphing and winning at the Olympics on the same day.

Julia gasped at the sight of me and immediately had the slaves hustle me off to the tiny bathing room just off the kitchen. There I stripped off my unspeakable tunic, and Hermes sluiced me down with lukewarm water while I stood in the little stone tub.

Damp-haired and still unshaven, but washed, dressed in a clean tunic, and feeling far better, I went to join my family. I found Julia making a fuss over my father in the
triclinium
. I took a chair,
and Hermes began to knead my shoulder, which was already turning a lurid purple. Cassandra gave me a large cup of warm, honeyed water, and I found that, if I sipped at it slowly, I could keep it down.

Julia beamed at me proudly. “The whole City is buzzing with your praises,” she said. “Word reached the Temple of Vesta just moments after the sacrifice.”

“I have a summons to deliver,” Father interrupted, apparently thinking that I had already received more praise than a mere mortal could ever deserve. “While you were carrying out your duties, I was meeting with some of the sacerdotal authorities, and they wish to meet with you under conditions of utmost privacy. What they have to say to you must be heard by no others.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

“Of course you don’t understand!” he snapped. “Why should you? It is sufficient that they want to talk to you.”

“Do they wish to honor him in some way?” Julia asked innocently. She was anything but innocent.

“No, nothing like that. Your husband’s reputation as a snoop precedes him. They have an investigation for him to undertake.”

I thought I saw where this was leading. “Has anything been heard from Ateius?”

Father shook his head. “No, the villain’s vanished. It’s at times like this that we need a Dictator. The evil demagogue should be impaled on a hook and dragged down the Tiber steps. As it is, we’ll have to wait until he’s out of office, and then the best we can do is exile him.”

“I suppose they’ll want me to find him. As far as I know, he can be interrogated before a pontifical court, tribune or not. They have no
imperium
, but they can make it impossible for him ever to show his ugly face in Rome again. That’s not too far from being a death sentence.”

Again Father shook his head. “I don’t think it’s that. They
wouldn’t tell me, of course, but I think it is something far more serious than that.”

I began to get an uncomfortable sensation, the sort I had often felt just before the Gauls attacked. “More serious? What could be more serious than—”

“I don’t know, and I won’t speculate,” Father said. “Just meet with them. They’ll tell you.”

I sank back in my chair, groaning. “I hope they don’t want to meet too soon.”

“No, you’ll have plenty of time to recuperate,” he assured me. “Be at the Temple of Vesta at dawn.”

“Dawn!” I shouted, appalled. “By morning I’ll be unable to move! I’ll be lucky if I can get out of bed three days from now!”

“Nonsense,” he said, standing. “A few hours of sleep will set you up; no man needs more than that. Be there. Good evening to you.” With that he swept out in a cloud of
gravitas
.

“What am I going to do?” I moaned, covering my face with my hands.

“If I may make a suggestion,” Julia said, “you’d better get to bed right now.”

T
HE FIRST, GRAY LIGHT OF DAWN
found me on the steps of the beautiful little temple. True to their duty, Julia and my household staff had accomplished the formidable task of getting me out of bed and out the front gate while it was still dark. In the neighborhood Julia had found a masseur to loosen my limbs and a barber to make me presentable, and between poundings and scrapings Cassandra had forced me to down honeyed milk, fruit, and bread. With Hermes dogging my steps lest I collapse, the long walk to the Forum completed my awakening process so that, by the time I reached the temple, I was actually feeling rather human.

Metellus Scipio was there, along with the Censors, both of whom were
pontifices.
Soon we were joined by the
Flamen Quirinalis
, a kinsman of my wife’s named Sextus Julius Caesar, and the
rex sacrorum
. Cornelius Lentulus Niger, the
Flamen Martialis
, arrived, and we stood there uneasily for a while, no one wanting to breach the subject of the day. The
flamines
wore their robes of office and their peculiar headgear: the close-fitting white cap topped with a short spike of olive wood. Passersby on early errands blinked to see such an assemblage at that hour.

A young Vestal came to the doorway of the temple. “The
virgo maxima
requests that you come inside,” she said. With that we passed within. The most powerful, arrogant men in Rome would never enter this particular temple without invitation.

The small, circular temple was one of the least pretentious in the central part of the City, but it was the most revered by the citizenry, who held it in greater affection than the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter. Its proportions were perfect, and it was built of white marble, inside and out, every inch of it scrubbed to an immaculate gleam. Citizens rarely saw the interior, except during the Vestalia in June, when mothers of families brought food offerings. For the rest of us, it was enough just to know it was there.

We found the
virgo maxima
seated by the fire, which was tended day and night by the Vestals. It was the hearth and center and in many ways the most sacred spot in Rome. There were a number of chairs placed in the sanctuary, and at her gesture we sat.