Caesar

by Colleen McCullough

  He was on the Via Appia heading in the direction of Rome by the time the sun came up, and he set a rattling pace; the truth was that Clodius so rarely traveled without Fulvia that her absence set his teeth on edge, made him snappy. He was also worried because she was unwell. Knowing him, his escort exchanged glances and made rueful faces at each other; Clodius minus Fulvia was hard to take.

  At the beginning of the third hour of daylight Clodius went through Bovillae at a canter, scattering various citizens going about their business, with scant regard for their welfare or the fate of the sheep, horses, mules, pigs and chickens in their husbandage; it was market day in Bovillae. Yet a mile beyond that buzzing town all vestige of habitation was gone, though there were but thirteen miles to go to the Servian Walls of Rome. The land on either side of the road belonged to the young knight Titus Sertius Callus, who had more than enough money to resist the many offers he had received for such lush pasturage; the fields were dotted with the beautiful horses he bred, but his luxurious villa lay so far off the road that there was no glimpse of it. The only building on the road was a small tavern.

  "Big party coming," said Schola, Clodius's friend for so many years that they had long forgotten how they met.

  "Huh," grunted Clodius, waving his hand in the air to signal everyone off the road itself.

  The entire party took to the grass verge, which was the custom when two groups met and one contained wheeled conveyances, the other not; the group approaching definitely had many wheeled conveyances.

  "It's Sampsiceramus moving his harem," said Gaius Clodius.

  "No, it isn't," said Pomponius as the oncoming cavalcade grew closer. "Ye Gods, it's a small army! Look at the cuirasses!"

  At which moment Clodius recognized the figure on the leading horse: Marcus Fustenus. "Cacat!" he exclaimed. "It's Milo!"

  Schola, Pomponius and the freedman Gaius Clodius flinched, faces losing color, but Clodius kicked his horse in the ribs and increased his pace.

  "Come on, let's move as quickly as we can," he said.

  The carpentum containing Fausta, Milo and Fufius Calenus was in the exact middle of the procession; Clodius nudged his horse onto the road and scowled into the carriage, then was past. A few paces further on he turned his head to see that Milo was craning out of the window, gazing back at him fiercely.

  It was a long gauntlet to run, but Clodius almost made it. The trouble developed when he drew level with the hundred-odd mounted and heavily armed men who brought up the tail of Milo's entourage. He had no difficulty getting through himself, but when his thirty slaves began to canter by, Milo's bodyguard swung sideways and put itself across the path of the slaves. Quite a few of Milo's men carried javelins, began to prick the flanks of Clodius's horses viciously; within moments several of the slaves were on the ground, while others dragged at their swords, milling about and shrieking curses. Clodius and Milo hated each other, but not as much as their men hated each other.

  "Keep going!" cried Schola when Clodius pulled on his reins. "Clodius, let it happen! We're past, so keep going!"

  "I can't leave my men!" Clodius came to a halt, then swung his horse around.

  The two last riders in Milo's train were his most trusted bully-boys, the ex-gladiators Birria and Eudamas. And the moment Clodius was facing them, about to ride back to his men, Birria lifted the javelin he carried, aimed it casually, and threw it.

  The leaflike head took Clodius high in the shoulder, with so much force behind it that Clodius shot into the air and crashed, knees first, onto the road. He lay on his back, blinking, both hands around the shaft of the spear; his three friends tumbled off their horses and came running.

  With great presence of mind Schola ripped a big square piece off his cloak and folded it into a pad. He nodded to Pomponius, who pulled the spear out in the same moment as Schola pushed his makeshift dressing down onto the wound, now pouring blood.

  The tavern was about two hundred paces away; while Schola held the pad in place, Pomponius and Gaius Clodius lifted Clodius to his feet, hooked their elbows beneath his armpits, and dragged him down the road at a run toward the tavern.

  Milo's party had come to a halt, and Milo, sword drawn, was standing outside the carriage, staring toward the tavern. The bodyguard had made short work of Clodius's slaves, eleven of whom lay dead; some crawled about badly injured, while those who could had fled across the fields. Fustenus hurried up from the front of the cavalcade.

  "They've taken him to that tavern," said Milo.

  Behind him the carpentum was the source of bloodcurdling noises: screams, gurgles, squeals, shrieks. Milo stuck his head through the window to see Calenus and the male servant battling with Fausta and her maid, throwing themselves everywhere. Good. Calenus had his work cut out controlling Fausta; he wouldn't be emerging to see what was going on.

  "Stay there," said Milo curtly to Calenus, who didn't have the freedom to look up. "Clodius. There's a fight. He started it; now I suppose we'll have to finish it." He stepped back and nodded to Fustenus, Birria and Eudamas. "Come on."

  * * *

  The moment the fracas on the road began, the proprietor of the little tavern sent his wife, his children and his three slaves running out the back door into the fields. So when Pomponius and Gaius Clodius the freedman hauled Clodius through the door, the proprietor was alone, eyes starting from his head in fright.

  "Quick, a bed!" said Schola.

  The innkeeper pointed one shaking finger toward a side room, where the three men lay Clodius on a board frame cushioned by a rough straw mattress. The pad was bright scarlet and dripping; Schola looked at it, then at the innkeeper.

  "Find me some cloths!" he snapped, doing further damage to his cloak and replacing the pad.

  Clodius's eyes were open; he was panting. "Winged," he said, trying to laugh. "I'll live, Schola, but there's a better chance of it if you and the others go back to Bovillae for help. I'll be all right here in the meantime."

  "Clodius, I daren't!" said Schola in a whisper. "Milo has halted. They'll kill you!"

  "They wouldn't dare!" gasped Clodius. "Go! Go!"

  "I'll stay with you. Two are enough."

  "All three of you!" ground Clodius between his teeth. "I mean it, Schola! Go!"

  "Landlord," said Schola, "hold this hard on the wound. We'll be back as soon as we can." He gave up his place to the petrified tavern owner, and within moments came the sound of hooves.

  His head was swimming; Clodius closed his eyes, tried not to think of the pain or the blood. "What's your name, man?" he asked without opening his eyes.

  "Asicius."

  "Well, Asicius, just make sure there's firm pressure on the pad and keep Publius Clodius company."

  "Publius Clodius?" quavered Asicius.

  "The one and only." Clodius sighed, lifted his lids and grinned. "What a pickle! Fancy meeting Milo."

  Shadows loomed in the door.

  "Yes, fancy meeting Milo," said Milo, walking in with Birria, Eudamas and Fustenus behind him.

  Clodius looked at him scornfully, fearlessly. "If you kill me, Milo, you'll live in exile for the rest of your days."

  "I don't think so, Clodius. You might say I'm on a promise from Pompeius." He pushed Asicius the innkeeper sprawling and leaned over to look at the wound, not bleeding as rapidly. "Well, you won't die of that," he said, and jerked his head at Fustenus. "Pick him up and take him outside."

  "What about him?" asked Fustenus of the whimpering Asicius.

  "Kill him."

  One swift chop down the center of Asicius's head and it was done; Birria and Eudamas lifted Clodius off the bed as if he weighed nothing and dragged him out to fling him in the middle of the Via Appia.

  "Take his clothes off," said Milo, sneering. "I want to see if rumor is right."

  Sword sharper than a razor, Fustenus sliced Clodius's riding tunic up the center from hem to neckline; the loincloth followed.

  "Will you look at that?" asked Milo, roaring with laughter. "He is
circumcised!" He flipped Clodius's penis with the tip of his sword, drawing a single drop of precious blood. "Stand him up."

  Birria and Eudamas obeyed, each with an upper arm so firmly in his grip that Clodius stood, head lolling a little, feet almost clear of the ground. But he didn't see Milo, he didn't see Birria or Eudamas or Fustenus; all of his vision was filled by a humble little shrine standing on the opposite side of the road from the tavern. A cairn of pretty stones dry-laid into the shape of a short square column, and at its navel one big single red stone into which were carved the labia and gaping slit of a woman's vulva. Bona Dea ... a shrine to the Good Goddess here beside the Via Appia, thirteen unlucky miles from Rome. Its base littered with bunches of flowers, a saucer of milk, a few eggs.

  "Bona Dea!" croaked Clodius. "Bona Dea, Bona Dea!"

  Her sacred snake poked his wicked head out of the roomy slit in Bona Dea's vulva, his cold black eyes fixed upon Publius Clodius, who had profaned Bona Dea's mysteries. His tongue flickered in and out, his eyes never blinked. When Fustenus stuck his sword through Clodius's belly until it screeched off the bone of his spine and came leaping out of his back, Clodius saw nothing, felt nothing. Nor when Birria skewered him with another javelin, nor when Eudamas let his intestines tumble down upon the blood-soaked road. Until sight and life quit him in the same instant, Clodius and Bona Dea's snake stared into each other's souls.

  "Give me your horse, Birria," said Milo, and mounted; the cavalcade was already some distance down the Via Appia in the direction of Bovillae. Eudamas and Birria perched precariously on one horse; the four men rode to catch it up.

  Satisfied, the sacred snake withdrew his head and returned to his rest, snuggled within Bona Dea's vulva.

  When Asicius's family and slaves returned from the fields they found Asicius dead, looked out the door to where the naked body of Publius Clodius lay, and fled again.

  Many, many travelers passed along the Via Appia, and many passed during that eighteenth day of January. Eleven of Clodius's slaves were dead, eleven more moaned in agony and died slowly; no one stopped to succor them. When Schola, Pomponius and the freedman Gaius Clodius came back with several residents of Bovillae and a cart, they looked down on Clodius and wept.

  "We're dead men too," said Schola after they had found the body of the innkeeper. "Milo will not rest until there are no witnesses left alive."

  "Then we're not staying here!" said the owner of the cart, turned the vehicle and clattered off.

  Moments later they were all gone. Clodius still lay in the road, his glazed eyes fixed on the shrine of Bona Dea, a lake of congealing blood and a heap of spilled guts around him.

  Not until the middle of the afternoon did anyone pay the slaughter more than a horrified look before hurrying on. But then came an ambling litter, in it the very old Roman senator Sextus Teidius. Displeased when it halted amid a hubbub among his bearers, he poked his head between the curtains and looked straight at the face of Publius Clodius. Out he scrambled, his crutch propped beneath his arm; for Sextus Teidius had but one leg, having lost the other fighting in the army of Sulla against King Mithridates.

  "Put the poor fellow in my litter and run with him to his house in Rome as quickly as you can," he instructed his bearers, then beckoned to his manservant. "Xenophon, help me walk back to Bovillae. They must know of it! Now I understand why they acted so oddly when we passed through."

  And so, about an hour before nightfall, Sextus Teidius's blown bearers brought his litter through the Capena Gate and up the slope of the Clivus Palatinus to where Clodius's new house stood, looking across the Vallis Murcia and the Circus Maximus to the Tiber and the Janiculum beyond.

  Fulvia came running, hair streaming behind her, too shocked to scream or weep; she parted the curtains of the litter and looked down on the ruins of Publius Clodius, his bowels thrust roughly back inside the great gash in his belly, his skin as white as Parian marble, no clothes to dignify his death, his penis on full display. "Clodius! Clodius!" she shrieked, went on shrieking.

  They put him on a makeshift bier in the peristyle garden without covering his nakedness, while the Clodius Club assembled. Curio, Antony, Plancus Bursa, Pompeius Rufus, Decimus Brutus, Poplicola and Sextus Cloelius.

  "Milo," growled Mark Antony.

  "We don't know that," said Curio, who stood with one hand on Fulvia's hunched shoulder as she sat on a bench and stared at Clodius without moving.

  "We do know that!" said a new voice.

  Titus Pomponius Atticus went straight to Fulvia and sank down on the bench beside her. "My poor girl," he said tenderly. "I've sent for your I mother; she'll be here soon."

  "How do you know?" asked Plancus Bursa, looking wary.

  "From my cousin Pomponius, who was with Clodius today," said Atticus. "Thirty-four of them encountered Milo and a bodyguard which outnumbered them five to one on the Via Appia." He indicated Clodius's body with one hand. "This is the result, though my cousin didn't see it. Just Birria throwing a spear. That's the shoulder wound, which wouldn't have killed him. When Clodius insisted that Pomponius, Schola and Gaius Clodius go to Bovillae for help, he was resting safely in a tavern. By the time they got back—Bovillae was behaving very strangely, wanted nothing to do with it—it was too late. Clodius was dead in the road, the innkeeper dead in his tavern. They panicked. Inexcusable, but that's what happened. I don't know where the other two are, but my cousin Pomponius got as far as Aricia, then left them to come to me. They all believe that Milo will have them killed too, of course."

  "Didn't anyone see it?" demanded Antony, wiping his eyes. "Oh, a dozen times a month I could have murdered Clodius myself, but I loved him!"

  "It doesn't seem that anyone saw it," said Atticus. "It happened on that deserted stretch of road alongside Sertius Callus's horse farm." He took Fulvia's nerveless hand and began to chafe it gently. "Dear girl, it's so cold out here. Come inside and wait for Mama."

  "I have to stay with Clodius," she whispered. "He's dead, Atticus! How can that be?" She began to rock. "He's dead! How can that be? How am I going to tell the children?"

  Atticus's fine dark eyes met Curio's above her head. "Let your mama deal with things, Fulvia. Come inside."

  Curio took her, and she went without resisting. Fulvia, who ran madly toward everything, who screamed in the Forum like a man, who fought strenuously for everything she believed in! Fulvia, whom no one had ever before seen go tamely anywhere. In the doorway her knees buckled; Atticus moved swiftly to help Curio, then together they bore her into the house.

  Sextus Cloelius, who ran Clodius's street gangs these days after serving a stern apprenticeship under Decimus Brutus, was not a nobleman. Though the others knew him, he didn't attend meetings of the Clodius Club. Now, perhaps because the others were shocked into inertia, he took command.

  "I suggest we carry Clodius's body just as it is down to the Forum and put it on the rostra," Cloelius said harshly. "All of Rome should see exactly what Milo did to a man who outshone him the way the sun does the moon."

  "But it's dark!" said Poplicola foolishly.

  "Not in the Forum. The word's spreading, the torches are lit, Clodius's people are gathering. And I say they're entitled to see what Milo did to their champion!"

  "You're right," said Antony suddenly, and threw off his toga. "Come on, two of you pick up the foot of the bier. I'll carry the head."

  Decimus Brutus was weeping inconsolably, so Poplicola and Pompeius Rufus abandoned their togas to obey Antony.

  "What's the matter with you, Bursa?" asked Antony when the bier tipped dangerously. "Can't you see Poplicola's too small to match Rufus? Take his place, man!"

  Plancus Bursa cleared his throat. "Well, actually I was going to return home. The wife's in a terrible state."

  Antony frowned, then peeled his lips back from his small and perfect teeth. "What's a wife when Clodius is dead? Under the cat's foot, Bursa? Take Poplicola's place or I'll turn you into a replica of Clodius!"

  Bursa did as
he was told.

  The word was indeed spreading; outside in the lane a small crowd had gathered, armed with spitting torches. When the massive figure of Antony appeared holding both poles projecting from the front of the bier, a murmur went up which changed to a sighing moan as the crowd saw Clodius.

  "See him?" shouted Cloelius. "See what Milo did?"

  A growl began, grew as the three members of the Clodius Club carried their burden to the Clivus Victoriae and paused at the top of the Vestal Steps. A natural athlete, Antony simply turned round, lifted his end of the bier high above his head, and went down the steps backward without looking or stumbling. Below in the Forum a sea of torches waited, men and women moaning and weeping as the magnificent Antony, red-brown curls alive in the flickering light, bore Clodius aloft until he reached the bottom of the steps.

  Across the lower Forum to the well of the Comitia and the rostra grafted into its side; there Antony, Bursa and Pompeius Rufus set the bier's short legs upon the surface of the rostra.

  Cloelius had stopped in the forefront of the crowd, and now mounted the rostra with his arm thrown about the shoulders of a very old, small man who wept desolately.

  "You all know who this is, don't you?" Cloelius demanded in a great voice. "You all know Lucius Decumius! Publius Clodius's loyalest follower, his friend for years, his helper, his conduit to every man who goes, good citizen that he is, to serve in his crossroads college!" Cloelius put his hand beneath Lucius Decumius's chin, lifted the seamed face so that the light struck his rivers of tears to silver-gilt. "See how Lucius Decumius mourns?"

  [Caesar 145.jpg]

  He turned to point a finger at the bulk of the Curia Hostilia, the Senate House, on whose steps a small group of senators had assembled: Cicero, smiling in absolute joy; Cato, Bibulus and Ahenobarbus, sober but not grief stricken; Manlius Torquatus, Lucius Caesar, the stroke-crippled Lucius Cotta, looking troubled.

  "See them?" shrieked Cloelius. "See the traitors to Rome and to you? Look at the great Marcus Tullius Cicero, smiling! Well, we all know that he had nothing to lose by Milo's doing murder!" He swung aside for a moment; when he turned back, Cicero had gone. "Oh, thinks he might be next, does he? No man deserves death more than the great Cicero who executed Roman citizens without trial and was sent into exile for it by this poor, mangled man I show you here tonight! Everything that Publius Clodius did or tried to do, the Senate opposed! Who do they think they are, the men who people that rotting body? Our betters, that's who they think they are! Better than me! Better than Lucius Decumius! Better even than Publius Clodius, who was one of them!"