Marius' Mules VI: Caesar's Vow

by S. J. A. Turney

  The Syrian who’d spoken stepped forward, his friend coming to join him. Their air of menace was palpable.

  ‘Get… out… of… my… way!’ Fronto growled at him slowly.

  ‘What… yo… business?’ Equally forcefully. The second Syrian, he noted, had his hand on the hilt of a slightly curved sword.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ Fronto jumped as the sudden voice behind his right ear almost made him soil himself. Recovering as best he could, shaking like a leaf, he saw Palmatus and Masgava step past him to confront the Syrians.

  ‘I jus’ ask he business.’

  Palmatus grinned unpleasantly. ‘Perhaps ‘he business’ is ‘he own’? Get out of the way, you sickening catamite.’

  Next to him, Masgava flexed something that made every muscle across the upper half of his body dance, even through a mail shirt, and Fronto almost laughed at the expression that passed across the Syrians’ faces. The second guard stepped back into place, and the first lingered only a moment - long enough to realise he was without support - and then saluted and stepped back.

  Fronto turned a smile on his friends.

  ‘Thank you. I was just on my way to see you two. Have you got everything ready?’

  ‘Getting there. We still need a lot of supplies and equipment and some spare horses. You’ve cleared it with the general, sir?’

  ‘Yes. We go as soon as we’re ready. Go back and get everyone assembled in my tent.’

  ‘And these catamites?’

  Fronto gave the second - less sure - Syrian a nasty look.

  ‘I once tore out a Gaul’s eyeball with my hand while he was trying to cut me to shreds. I’m not frightened of this knob.’

  Paying no further heed to the Syrians or his own men, he knocked on the wooden tent frame.

  ‘Antonius?’

  Silence.

  ‘Antonius?’

  Still silence. Fronto took a deep breath. If the man wasn’t here, his Syrians would not have been so vehement, would they? Reaching out, he pushed aside the door and stepped into the tent.

  As the leather flap fell back into place, returning the tent to its Stygian gloom, his eyes began to adjust slowly. His nose adjusted considerably faster.

  The smell of vomit filled the front room of the subdivided structure, having apparently been trapped within for some time. Fronto could feel his own gorge rising, but was determined not to make a big thing of it. If he walked out now, he would lose face to the Syrians outside.

  A bed. The room was a complete state, with clothing and armour scattered among the overturned tables and chairs, cushions and blankets. It looked as though the tent had been trashed by burglars, but for the shape under the blanket on the bed - which was clearly a human figure - and the rhythmic snoring.

  ‘Antonius!’ he yelled. Nothing moved. For a strange moment, Fronto worried the man might have been murdered. After all, stranger things had happened in the legions’ camps in Gaul. But in his experience the dead rarely snored, so he soon put away that thought.

  Carefully, he took a couple of steps into the room, avoiding a puddle of something yellow and viscous, which may or may not have been the source of the smell. He lifted his leg high over an upturned chair and consequently almost tripped over a fallen table obscured by a rumpled blanket. He had a momentary flashback of his room back in Rome when he’d been young - just old enough to take the toga virilis and just old enough to have acquired a drinking habit. He had always thought his mother had been over-critical of his untidiness. Now, looking at Antonius’ tent, he could perhaps finally see it through her eyes.

  ‘Antonius, you daft bugger. Get up.’

  With increasing care, slipping on occasional ‘things’, he approached the bed and peered down. A pale bare foot poked out from the bottom of the blanket. A surge of childish delight vanished as quickly as it came and instead of tickling the sole of the foot, he reached down and grasped the corner of the blanket, yanking it back and whipping it from the bed.

  He grinned like a sadist.

  His grin vanished.

  The two naked girls in the bed untwined slowly, like a flower opening for the sun. The pair, apparently exhausted, looked up at their torturer. There was no shame or panic about them. Just a sense of mild surprise. As Fronto stared, wondering whether it would be politic to look away, the two girls embraced, kissed briefly, and returned to their entwined sleep.

  Fronto felt the uncomfortable panic of a man confronted with a situation so unexpected he is completely wrong-footed.

  ‘Nice, aren’t they, Fronto?’

  He looked up in surprise to see Antonius pushing his way through a curtain that closed off part of the tent. The senior officer wore only a linen subligaculum, his hair wet as he rubbed his face with a rough white towel.

  Fronto searched for something intelligent to say, but came up short.

  ‘Your vomit or theirs?’

  ‘Bit of both, I expect. We were rather energetic, after black olives, Gallic fruit and a skinful of mulsum. Lucky you’re not knee deep in it, I think.’

  Fronto stared.

  ‘You can have one, if you like,’ Antonius went on conversationally as he dropped his linen loin cloth and began to rub himself dry. ‘They’re best together, but they’re quite good apart too. The one with the redder hair is Bissula, The other is Elica. Sisters by different fathers.’ He paused and frowned. ‘Might be the other way around,’ he admitted with a dismissive wave of the hand.’

  Fronto realised he was staring wide-eyed at the two girls and, reminding himself that he had a lovely wife carrying a child to term, turned to lock eyes with Antonius.

  ‘I worried that we had not spoken, but had left things with a rift. It would be a shame, seeing as how we seem to be so… oft matched in our views?’

  Antonius frowned for a moment as though dredging his memory, and then shrugged. ‘We argued? I don’t remember. Whatever it was, consider it forgotten.’

  Fronto’s turn to frown.

  ‘We had a conversation…’

  ‘I have a lot of them. Few are memorable. Come on.’

  Fronto blinked as the man strode past him and hastily threw on a tunic. ‘Where?’

  ‘I have somewhere to visit in town. You should come.’

  ‘Is it a bar, or a whorehouse?’

  ‘Neither, interestingly, although I may be tempted to sample both on my return journey.’ The officer bent to fasten his sandals, threw a hasty belt around his middle, cinching up his tunic, and stretched before walking to the door.

  ‘You forgot your underwear.’

  ‘No. I make it a rule only to bother every other day. Gets healthy air to the warmest parts and means I’m always ready.’

  Fronto shook his head. In his experience, not wearing underwear in Gaul was a sure way to acquire ‘blue balls syndrome’ but he was rapidly learning that Antonius was not like most men.’

  ‘So where are we going?’

  ‘Temple.’

  Fronto blinked again. ‘To whom?’ But Antonius was already out of the tent and moving.

  * * * * *

  ‘Tell me again why I’m traipsing through ankle-deep grot on a chilly day to visit a temple to some random hairy, hammer-wielding Gaulish God?’

  Fronto stumbled on a protruding stone. Samarobriva proper - rather than the enormous Roman camp that had become synonymous with the native settlement, sat on the opposite bank of the river, on what might pass for a hillock in this endless flat country. It was a disorganised place that had grown from an organised centre into a sprawling mess of Gallic houses and hovels, interspersed with what the locals probably considered civic amenities.

  Antonius strode purposeful and bright - certainly brighter than he had any right to, given the previous night’s activity.

  ‘Not a hammer, Marcus. A club.’

  ‘Semantics. Why are we here?’

  ‘I like to consult the auspices every now and then, especially when we’re about to do something that might have far-reaching ef
fects. Before Caesar summons the Gaulish assembly I’d like to know what the Gods have in mind. And before you disappear on your little errand, it might serve you well to know more, too.’

  Fronto frowned irritably. How Antonius had found out already that Caesar was summoning the assembly before word went out was concerning enough, but how he knew about Fronto’s plans was baffling. The man was a constant bag of mysteries. Amphora of mysteries, he corrected with a quiet smile.

  ‘The temple in question is apparently to some local God named Ogmios,’ Antonius shrugged, ‘but this Ogmios seems to be their name for Hercules, and Hercules is my family’s patron deity right back to the earliest times. It seems as though he’s almost demanding to be consulted, really.’

  ‘I don’t like temples,’ Fronto grumbled. ‘Temples and me have a bad history. And priests annoy me. And all the auspices ever tell you is that the goat died in surprise and that the priest’s going to eat well that night.’

  ‘Come on.’

  Antonius led him to the door of a large hut. A standing stone with a flattened surface stood to either side of the door. One was carved with curious designs and the other held a relief of someone who bore a passing resemblance to Hercules, or would have done if Hercules had had some sort of strange hat, one hairy leg and one bald one and a pronounced paunch that leaned to one side.

  ‘This is pointless.’

  But Antonius had already stepped inside. Fronto followed in hesitantly, shuddering as he passed across the threshold.

  ‘Will Caesar approve of you consorting with druids?’ he grunted.

  ‘They say he is not a druid, but a seer or something. The druids all left the area when the legions settled the first winter. A ‘Uidluia’ they call him, apparently.’

  Fronto paused for a moment as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom. Images of a young girl with a harp singing her last, suicidal song swam through his mind and he shuddered yet again. Temples: always bad news.

  The room was surprisingly bare, resembling more an ordinary house than anything religious. The seer-poet sat on a chair formed from a single piece of carved stone facing the doorway and behind a brazier of dull bronze with handles shaped like twisting vines. A low orange glow emanated from the bowl, and tendrils of smoke rose towards the small hole in the room’s roof. A table near the man’s hand held a collection of oddments, including - Fronto noticed - animal parts and a set of sharp knives.

  ‘Good day, priest,’ Antonius said jovially as he strode across towards the man. Fronto shuffled slightly to the side, trying to stay comfortably distant. The Uidluia was dressed much the same as any ordinary Gaul, rather than the almost uniform robes of the druids. He was of indeterminate age and with a hook nose and sharp eyes that glittered in the firelight.

  ‘Ogmios does not speak for Romans.’

  ‘But you speak for Ogmios, and you speak surprisingly good Latin,’ Antonius smiled. ‘Your Ogmios, as you call him, is the patron of my family. I will make plentiful offerings for your help.’

  The man made a noncommittal, throaty noise.

  ‘We seek augury. I on the Gaulish assembly being called, my friend on a journey he is about to undertake. Will you read for us?’

  ‘Silver,’ the man said. Antonius smiled and reached to the purse at his belt, removing three denarii and placing them on the table next to a wicked-looking jagged knife. The man lifted the coins, examined them, seemed to find them satisfactory and nodded.

  Gesturing Antonius to the side, the bearded seer lifted a charm of some sort of pale stone - so thin as to be almost like smoky glass - enclosed in a ring of bronze. With his other hand he grasped a handful of something powdery and grey from a bowl on the table and cast it into the brazier. The fire leapt into life, burning first green and then fading through yellow to orange once more. The smoke rising from it increased and the seer held up his charm, putting it to one eye while squeezing the other shut.

  Fronto rolled his own eyes. It would be virtually impossible to see through the stone, and with the smoke as well, he might as well stare into a brick. Yet the man seemed to angle things so that he peered through his charm and the smoke at the white rectangle of the doorway.

  ‘Two wolves fail to eat with the pack. The bull will spoil the pickings for all.’

  ‘Typical rubbish.’ Fronto snapped, earning a hard look from Antonius.

  ‘And who are the wolves and the bull?’ the officer said quietly.

  The seer appeared not to have heard him, for his eyes narrowed. ‘But the bull will not find the snake, for the snake slithers into burrows.’

  ‘Someone has been listening to too many animal stories,’ muttered Fronto.

  ‘Will you kindly shut up and listen?’ Antonius snapped.

  ‘Well, when he tells you that the horse gets humped by the hedgepig, what are you going to divine from that?’

  ‘Quiet!’

  Fronto lapsed into silence, glowering at them.

  ‘While the bull does not find the snake, the eagle will bring death to the serpent.’

  Fronto grunted as the seer turned at this last to stare pointedly at him. ‘Don’t look at me, you old fruit. I’m no snake, and I only serve the eagle.’

  ‘Fronto, do be quiet.’ Antonius sighed.

  ‘It’s all guesswork and deceptive vagaries.’

  ‘I will argue the authenticity of omens with you another time, Marcus, but right now I want to try and pick apart those phrases, in case they are of use.

  ‘The final thread snaps!’ the Gaul suddenly barked.

  ‘See?’ Fronto laughed. ‘He’s getting unhinged.’

  ‘In the baked sand, the Parthian shot takes the last.’

  Antonius frowned and leaned down to the man. ‘What in the name of Olympus do you know of the Parthians?’

  Fronto was staring at the two men. Antonius, of course, had served out in the east recently, and would likely have come into contact with the Parthians. This Gaul, though, should never even have heard of that eastern empire, let alone the ‘Parthian shot’. His blood suddenly chilled.

  ‘Socrates’ root.’

  Antonius’ head jerked round to Fronto. ‘What?’

  ‘Socrates’ root. Vulcan’s Fury. The arrival of the Son. The Parthian shot.’

  ‘Marcus, what are you babbling about?’

  Fronto took a couple of steps back and leaned against the wall.

  ‘Marcus, you’ve gone white as an aedile’s toga. What is it?’

  Fronto pulled himself together with some difficulty. The hairs were standing proud on the nape of his neck. ‘Nothing. I’ll tell you later. Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘But there could be more.’

  ‘You’ve got what you want. Two wolves won’t be attending the feast. Doesn’t take a druid to translate that. Come on.’

  Leaving Antonius to finish up with the priest, Fronto strode outside, where he stopped in the slightly damp, chilly air and took a number of deep breaths. The last part of Catullus’ prophecy! It had been so long since Julia’s death that he’d almost forgotten about it. Catullus, then Aurelia Cotta, and then Julia. Now the Parthian shot for the fourth. It was hard not to take a guess at that one.

  Antonius appeared from the doorway, a frown of curiosity creasing his brow.

  ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘Not right now. Now I need to get back to the camp and get ready to go hunt Ambiorix. I think great and terrible things are hovering on the horizon, Antonius, and we need to put our current problems to rest. They’ll pale into insignificance against what’s coming, I fear.’

  Antonius’ frown deepened as he watched the rattled soldier turn and almost jog back towards the camp.

  * * * * *

  Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome, commander of the eastern armies and invader of Parthia stood on the dais, his arms stretched tight and lashed to the wooden frame that kept him in position, head tilted back so that the sun seared his face. Only his legs had any real freedom of movement, and ev
en that minimal. The only relief he felt was that this restrictive position meant he could no longer see the head of his eldest son Publius dancing around atop a Parthian lance among their officers, a prize taken in the mid-phase of the dreadful, appalling, decisive battle.

  All he’d wanted was the military glory due to him. Pompey had stolen his credit for the Spartacus campaign, and Caesar was busy racking up the victories in Gaul. Wealth was important, but no man could control Rome without the respect of its people. Was he so disfavoured by the Gods that he must die out here, in the unforgiving sands, never seeing Rome again?

  Perhaps the enemy general Surena would ransom him back to Rome? He was, after all, famed for his extraordinary wealth. And though he would never recover from the sight of Publius’ severed head, at least he could be there for his younger son, currently out in Gaul with Caesar. He had to be worth the ransom. He could afford to buy the Parthian King of Kings a second empire!

  Something metal clamped around his head, digging painfully into his temples, holding his cranium in precise position with no fraction of movement. As he opened his mouth to shout in alarm, something else metal slipped in from either side and then opened like a vice, driving his jaws painfully apart.

  What had the cruel monster in mind?

  Crassus watched, immobile and totally helpless, as a large iron bowl at the end of a long staff appeared to one side, lifted above him. Thick steam poured from the top and the contents made unpleasant noises.

  Blop. Gurgle. Pop.

  His eyes widened in terror and his voice came out in a high-pitched, feminine shriek as he saw the pot of molten gold hover above his open mouth and begin to tip. The scream continued for a moment, before it drowned in the liquid metal that burned its way through him in scant moments.

  The corpse of the third master of Rome sagged in the frame.

  Chapter Nine

  Fronto performed a quick headcount and, noting eighteen occupants, nodded to Masgava to close the tent flap and tie it shut. The men of his singulares unit sat around on the various small stools and seats or on the thick rug on the floor, interest showing in their faces.