The Triumph of Caesar (30 page)

"You're not Hieronymus. You're a daemon, an evil spirit come to taunt me."

"No, Gordianus, I
am
Hieronymus—or at least, I'm the sum of all you ever knew about Hieronymus. All we can know of another human being is the image before our eyes and the voice in our ears. What you see and hear now, beside you, is as much as you ever knew of Hieronymus, as real as the man himself. Here I am!"

"Crazy Greek! You confuse me with philosophy!"

"Simpleminded Roman! Always so literal, so mired in facts and figures!"

"Tell me who killed you. Say it plainly!"

He sighed. "First of all, accept the proposition that Calpurnia is right. Someone
is
plotting to kill her husband. I figured out who that person was, and I discerned the motive as well. And because of what I deduced, I was killed."

I was distracted by the lowing of the ox. Uncle Gnaeus was about to cut the creature's throat. Facing the crowd, he raised the knife for all to see. The blade glittered in the sunlight, looking huge and very sharp. He struck the blow: metal sliced into flesh. The ox thrashed its bound limbs. Scarlet poured from the wound. Camilli rushed forward with their libation bowls to catch the spouting blood.

"Have you considered the suspicious behavior of Agapios, the door slave at the building where I lived?" said Hieronymus, watching the slaughter without emotion. He had never been squeamish.

"What do you mean?"

"Really, Gordianus! When a fellow that young flirts with a fellow your age, it can only be because he has an ulterior motive."

"Not necessarily. The vagaries of human nature—"

"Are reducible to the narrow parameters of self-interest. Young Agapios is a spy. In addition to his regular duties, he also kept an eye on me. He was always stopping me on the stairs to chat, especially when I'd come home a little drunk after a party. Who knows what information he got out of me? I suspect he also looked through my journal occasionally, despite my efforts to hide it."

"A spy for his mistress, you mean?" I looked sidelong at Calpurnia, who was watching her uncle perform the sacrifice. What sort of madwoman set a spy to watch her own spy?

Hieronymus shook his head. "Agapios is the property of Calpurnia, but he didn't report to her. He reported to Uncle Gnaeus. That's why the old priest was so angry when he found that Agapios had given you the key to my rooms without his knowledge."

The sacrifice was proceeding. Wielding the huge knife, his hands smeared with blood, Gnaeus Calpurnius was carving the ox, removing one organ after another. The camilli gathered around him with their libation bowls to receive the kidneys, the heart, the liver, and the rest. One at a time, with prayers and chants, these were offered to Venus, then placed upon a pyre. The organs popped and sizzled, transformed by the flames into divine sustenance for the goddess.

"I found your journal, Hieronymus. By now, I must have read every word of it, and so has Diana. We discovered nothing!"

"Untrue. You found the key! Don't you remember? 'To any seeker who finds these words and would unlock the truth, I shall leave a key—' "

"Yes, yes, I remember. 'Look all around! The truth is not found in the words, but the words may be found in the truth.' But where was this key? I never found it."

"The words themselves were the key. Where did you find them?"

"In your journal, of course!" I snapped, exasperated.

"But where did you find the journal? What was
all around
it?"

"The pages were inside a scroll."

"And what was that scroll?"

I tried to remember. I shook my head.

"Think, Gordianus! I was with you even then. I spoke inside your head. What did I say?"

I remembered now. I had found the journal because I saw my copy of Manius Calpurnius's
Life of King Numa
among the books on Hieronymus's shelf. I was peeved that he had taken it without my permission, so I reached for it, and inside it I found the pages of his private journal. I had sensed that Hieronymus was watching. I had imagined his voice in my head:
How predictable you are, Gordianus! You saw your precious copy of
Numa
and felt compelled to check at once that I hadn't damaged it
—
you did exactly as I intended! You found my private notes, intended for my eyes only, while I lived. But now that I'm dead, I wanted you to find my journal, Gordianus, tucked inside your precious
Numa. . . .

The sight of the
Numa
had lured me to find the journal. But the
Numa
itself was the key—the truth within which the words were found. Its author was a Calpurnius, one of Numa's descendants, like Caesar's wife and her uncle. No one cared more about the legacy of Numa than Uncle Gnaeus, and Numa had left no greater legacy than his calendar, which was meant to fix for all time the sacred days and the manner of reckoning them. . . .

"And what about my notations regarding celestial movements?" said Hieronymus. "Didn't you connect those to my interest in the calendar?"

"Yes, but where did you learn all that?"

"From Uncle Gnaeus, of course. It was when I saw how he ranted against Caesar's intention to change the calendar that I first became suspicious of him. After that, my continuing curiosity about the calendar made
him
suspicious of
me
."

"But I asked Uncle Gnaeus whether he instructed you about astronomy, and he denied it. He said he wouldn't waste his effort on his niece's foreign-born minion."

Hieronymus snorted. "And you believed him? That man would gladly lecture anyone who asked about the calendar—slave, freedman, foreigner, or even female—for hours on end!" He shook his head ruefully. "You used to appreciate a puzzle, Gordianus—the more baffling, the better. What's become of your powers of deduction? Gone to Hades, along with your powers of observation, I suppose."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"What a fuss Calpurnia made over you earlier. How did she put it? 'Others see but are blind, but when you see the truth, you know it!' Yet earlier today, at the triumph, it was what you did
not
see that mattered. But at the time, you took no notice, and now it's completely slipped your mind."

"What are you talking about?"

"Who was not in the procession who should have been?"

I shrugged. "Marc Antony?"

"Please, you can do better than that!"

I thought. Cicero and Brutus had been among the senators. Gaius Octavius had ridden with the troops, as intended. And amid the priests—

"By Hercules! Uncle Gnaeus didn't march with the other priests today. I saw the priests, and he wasn't among them. You're right; I took no notice of that. I saw, but I did not observe! It's only now, thinking back, that I realize he wasn't there."

"And where might he have been?"

"At the house of Porsenna, murdering the haruspex!"

Up at the altar, Uncle Gnaeus, having completed his dismemberment of the ox, was wiping the blade with a piece of wool, staining the cloth bright red and making the knife ready for its next victim. His clothing daubed with blood and viscera, Uncle Gnaeus left the altar and stepped into the tent, where the camilli would wash his hands and dress him in new, spotless vestments.

Hieronymus nodded. "That's the very knife he used to kill Porsenna, earlier today—the same knife he used to kill me, when I went to report to Calpurnia that night. In fact, I still wasn't quite ready to share my suspicions of Uncle Gnaeus with her, but he saw the signs and knew I was drawing close. He was lying in wait for me, in the darkness. The old man is stronger than he looks. He knows how to use that blade, and he knows exactly where a man's heart is located."

I averted my eyes from Hieronymus. "Your murder I understand. But why Porsenna?"

"We can conjecture that the two of them were in league from the start, each working upon Calpurnia to gain her trust and to garner her intimate knowledge of Caesar's intentions. Uncle Gnaeus believed that the Etruscan soothsayer was on his side, a fellow proponent of old-fashioned religion and a defender of the old calendar. Porsenna's job was to fill Calpurnia's head with false suspicions, to deflect her attention from the real threat: her own uncle. But Porsenna was playing his own game. What if, at the very last moment—today—the haruspex revealed what Uncle Gnaeus was up to and saved Caesar's life, thus proving his powers of divination and his devotion to the dictator? Calpurnia would fall even more deeply under his spell; he might win even Caesar's trust. What soothsayer doesn't lust after that kind of power and influence?"

I nodded. "But Uncle Gnaeus grew suspicious of his partner. . . ."

"Yes. Porsenna was the one person remaining who could ruin his plans. So Uncle Gnaeus decided to put an end to him. During the triumph, he slipped away from the procession and murdered the haruspex in his home, then hurried here, in time for the ceremony."

I frowned. "The one person who could ruin his plans? What about me?"

"Uncle Gnaeus considered killing you. He very nearly did."

"When?"

"Two days ago, in the public latrine, during the Asian Triumph. Did you think it was a coincidence that he happened to join you? He was marching by in the procession and spotted you in the crowd. When he saw you slip into the latrine, he followed you. You thought he was fiddling with his robes, attempting to relieve himself—when in fact he was reaching for his knife, deciding whether or not to kill you."

"Why didn't he?"

"You were very close to death, Gordianus—as close as you've ever been. You felt it brush against you; you shivered. But Gnaeus Calpurnius decided you were harmless. You knew nothing. Or rather, you knew all you needed to know, yet you still did not suspect him. He chose to let you live." Hieronymus looked at me sadly and shook his head.

"The accident that occurred during the first triumph, when the axle of Caesar's chariot broke—was Gnaeus Calpurnius responsible for that?"

"What do you think, Gordianus? Caesar himself suspected sabotage."

"As a priest, Uncle Gnaeus would have had access to the sacred chariot . . . but I can't imagine him crawling under the carriage and sawing through the axle."

"Perhaps not, but he could have suborned some mischievous young camillus to do so."

"But what was the point? Caesar was unharmed. Such an accident could hardly be counted on to kill him."

"Uncle Gnaeus's intent was not to harm Caesar but to turn the people against him. Uncle Gnaeus is a very religious man; he expected the crowd to be awed and shaken by such an ill omen. How frustrating it must have been for him that the incident actually lightened the mood of the spectators. He became more determined than ever to take matters into his own hands."

Hieronymus turned his gaze to the tent and smiled.

"But look!" he said. "There's Caesar now, stepping out of the tent and mounting the steps. Listen to the people cheer!"

Caesar still wore the gold-embroidered toga and the laurel crown of a triumphing general. He walked to the top of the temple steps, where he could be seen by the crowd. The cheering was thunderous. Caesar raised his hands. The tumult subsided.

He delivered a brief speech. I couldn't follow the words; they seemed muffled and garbled, as if my head were underwater. I heard only snatches—something about "Venus, my ancestress" and "the promise I made at Pharsalus" and "the dawn of a new world, a new age, even a new way of reckoning the days that are sacred to the gods."

From the tent, the placard inscribed with the new calendar was carried by priests to a place on the steps just below Caesar. The people of Rome beheld their dictator and his new calendar. The image conveyed an awesome truth: Caesar, the descendant of a goddess, was master not just of space but also of time. On the steps of the temple he had made, in front of the calendar he had decreed, his divine power was made manifest.

But even demigods are not immortal. And now, for the crime of sacrilege, for presuming to replace the ages-old calendar of Numa, Caesar would die, and the agent of the gods' wrath would be Gnaeus Calpurnius.

The old priest, attired in spotless vestments, stepped out of the tent and quickly mounted the steps. No one tried to stop him; he had been the priest in charge of the sacrifice, after all. Even Caesar, seeing his in-law approach, thought nothing of it.

Uncle Gnaeus pulled the sacred blade from his vestments and thrust with all his might. Caesar never even flinched.

It requires only a single blow to the heart to kill a man. Caesar could be made to die just as easily as all the men and women and children whom he himself had killed in a long life of killing—all the Gauls and Massilians and Egyptians and Romans and peoples of Asia; all the kings and princes and pharaohs; all the consuls and senators, officers and foot soldiers, struggling commoners and starving beggars. Every man dies, and Caesar, thanks to Uncle Gnaeus, was shown to be no exception.

Caesar might be forgiven for all the death and suffering he had inflicted on others; warfare is the way of the world, after all. But for what he had done to Numa's sacrosanct calendar—corrupting it with Egyptian sorcery and false religion—he could not be allowed to live.

Caesar staggered, lurched, and fell forward against the placard. The weight of his dying body broke the wooden frame and ripped the fabric down the middle. Caesar tumbled down the temple steps. Triumphant, Uncle Gnaeus raised the knife and slashed the bloody blade against the remains of the calendar, destroying the hated object in a religious frenzy, all the while crying out the name of his ancestor King Numa.

The spectators gasped, wailed, cheered, screamed. Calpurnia shrieked, ran to Caesar's lifeless body, and tore at her hair like a madwoman. Hieronymus, imperturbable, fixed me with his sardonic gaze.

"Gordianus, Gordianus! How is it that you failed to anticipate this event and prevent it? Even your daughter, turning the facts over and over in her mind, has come to realize the truth. I told you she was smart! Not knowing where you are, failing to find you in the crowd, she thinks to warn Caesar herself. Look, there she is, at the entrance to the tent!"