“Ah, Flosculus! In good time. Sit yourself down and take out your tablets. I am in a mood to behave with extraordinary generosity to all sorts of people, including that splendid fellow Lucius Licinius Murena, my governor of Asia Province. Yes, I have decided to forgive him all his aggressions against King Mithridates and his transgressions against me when he disobeyed my orders. I think I may need the unworthy Murena, so write and tell him that I have decided he is to come home as soon as possible and celebrate a triumph. You will also write to whichever Flaccus it is in Gaul-across-the-Alps, and order him to come home at once so as to celebrate a triumph. Make sure to instruct each man to have at least two legions with him....”
He was launched, and the secretary labored to keep up. All recollection of Aurelia and that uncomfortable interview had vanished; Sulla didn’t even remember that Rome had a recalcitrant flamen Dialis. Another and far more dangerous young man had to be dealt with in a way almost too subtle—almost, but not quite. For Kid Butcher was very clever when it came to himself.
*
The weather in Nersae had, as Ria predicted, set into real winter amid days of clear blue skies and low temperatures; but the Via Salaria to Rome was open, as was the road from Reate to Nersae, and the way over the ridge into the Aternus River valley.
None of which mattered to Caesar, who had slowly worsened day by day. In the earlier, more lucid phase of his illness he had tried to get up and leave, only to discover that the moment he stood upright he was assailed by an uncontrollable wave of faintness which felled him like a child learning to walk. On the seventh day he developed a sleepy tendency which gradually sank to a light coma.
And then at Ria’s front door there arrived Lucius Cornelius Phagites, accompanied by the stranger who had seen Caesar and Burgundus in the accommodation house at Trebula. Caught without Burgundus (whom she had ordered to cut wood), Ria was powerless to prevent the men entering.
“You’re the mother of Quintus Sertorius, and this fellow asleep in bed here is Gaius Julius Caesar, the flamen Dialis,” said Phagites in great satisfaction.
“He’s not asleep. He can’t be woken,” said Ria.
“He’s asleep.”
“There is a difference. I can’t wake him, nor can anyone else. He’s got the ague without a pattern, and that means he is going to die.”
Not good news for Phagites, aware that the price on Caesar’s head was not payable if that head was not attached to its owner’s breathing body.
Like the rest of Sulla’s minions who were also his freed—men, Lucius Cornelius Phagites had few scruples and less ethics. A slender Greek in his early forties—and one of those who had sold himself into slavery as preferable to eking out a living in his devastated homeland—Phagites had attached himself to Sulla like a leech, and had been rewarded by being appointed one of the chiefs of the proscription gangs; at the time he arrived to take custody of Caesar he had made a total of fourteen talents from killing men on the lists. Presentation of this one to Sulla still alive would have brought that total to sixteen talents, and he didn’t like the feeling that he was being cheated.
He did not, however, enlighten Ria as to the nature of his commission, but paid his informer as he stood beside Caesar’s bed and then made sure the man departed. Dead was no good for his income in Rome—but perhaps the boy had some money with him. If he was clever enough, thought Phagites, he might be able to prise that money out of the old woman by pitching her a tale.
“Oh well,” he said, taking out his huge knife, “I can cut off his head anyway. Then I’ll get my two talents.”
“You’d better beware, citocacia!” shrilled Ria, standing up to him fiercely. “There’s a man coming back soon who’ll kill you before you can jump if you touch his master!”
“Oh, the German hulk? Then I tell you what, mother, you go and get him. I’ll just sit here on the edge of the bed and keep the young master company.” And he sat down beside the inanimate figure in the bed with his knife pressed against Caesar’s defenseless throat.
The moment Ria had gone scuttling out into the icy world crying for Burgundus, Phagites walked to the front door and opened it; outside in the lane there waited his henchmen, the members of his decury of ten.
“The German giant’s here. We’ll kill him if we must, but some of us will have broken bones before we do, so no fighting him unless we can’t avoid it. The boy is dying, he’s no use to us,” Phagites explained. “What I’m going to try to do is get whatever money there is out of them. But the moment I do, I’ll need you to protect me from the German. Understood?”
Back inside he went, and was sitting with his knife held to Caesar’s throat when Ria returned with Burgundus. A growl came rumbling up from Burgundus’s chest, but he made no move toward the bed, just stood in the doorway clenching and unclenching his massive hands.
“Oh, good!” said Phagites in the most friendly way, and without fear. “Now I tell you what, old woman. If you’ve got enough money, I might be prepared to leave this young fellow here with his head still on his shoulders. I’ve got nine handy henchmen in the lane outside, so I can go ahead and cut this lovely young neck and be out in the lane quicker than your German could get as far as this bed. Is that clear?’’
“Not to him, it isn’t, if you’re trying to tell Burgundus. He speaks not one word of Greek.”
“What an animal! Then I’ll negotiate through you, mother, if that’s all right. Got any money?”
She stood for a short while with her eyes closed, debating what was the best thing to do. And being as practical as her son, she decided to deal with Phagites first, get rid of him. Caesar would die before Burgundus could reach the bed—and then Burgundus would die—and she too would die. So she opened her eyes and pointed to the book buckets stacked in the corner.
“There. Three talents,” she said.
Phagites moved his soft brown eyes to the book buckets, and whistled. “Three talents! Oh, very nice!”
“Take it and go. Let the boy die peacefully.”
“Oh, I will, mother, I will!” He put his fingers between his lips, blew piercingly.
His men came tumbling in with swords drawn expecting to have to kill Burgundus, only to find the scene a static one and their quarry one dozen buckets of books.
“Ye gods, what weighty subjects!” said Phagites when the books proved difficult to lift. “He’s a very intelligent young fellow, our flamen Dialis.”
Three trips, and the book buckets were gone. On the third time his men entered the room Phagites got up from the bed and inserted himself quickly among them. “Bye—bye!” he said, and vanished. There was a sound of activity from the lane, then the rattle of shod hooves on the cobblestones, and after that, silence.
“You should have let me kill them,’’ said Burgundus.
“I would have, except that your master would have been the first to die,” said the old woman, sighing. “Well, they won’t be back until they’ve spent it, but they’ll be back. You’re going to have to take Caesar over the mountains.”
“He’ll die!” said Burgundus, beginning to weep.
“So he may. But if he stays here he will surely die.”
Caesar’s coma was a peaceful one, undisturbed by delirium or restlessness; he looked, Ria thought, very thin and wasted, and there were fever sores around his mouth, but even in this strange sleeping state he would drink whenever it was offered to him, and he had not yet been lying immobile for long enough to start the noises which indicated his chest was clogging up.
“It’s a pity we had to give up the money, because I don’t have a sled, and that’s how you’ll have to move him. I know of a man who would sell me one, but I don’t have any money now that Quintus Sertorius is proscribed. I wouldn’t even have this house except that it was my dowry.”
Burgundus listened to this impassively, then revealed that he could think. “Sell his horse,” he said, and began to weep. “Oh, it will break his heart! But there’s nothing else.”
“Good boy, Burgundus!” said Ria briskly. “We’ll be able to sell the horse easily. Not for what it’s worth, but for enough to buy the sled, some oxen, and payment to Priscus and Gratidia for your lodging—even at the rate you eat.”
It was done, and done quickly. Bucephalus was led off down the lane by its delighted new owner, who couldn’t believe his luck at getting an animal like this for nine thousand sesterces, and wasn’t about to linger in case old Ria changed her mind.
The sled—which was actually a wagon complete with wheels over which polished planks with upcurving ends had been fixed—cost four thousand sesterces and the two oxen which pulled it a further thousand each, though the owner indicated that he would be willing to buy the equipage back in the summer for four thousand sesterces complete, leaving him with a profit of two thousand.
“You may get it back before then,” said Ria grimly.
She and Burgundus did their best to make Caesar comfortable in the sled, piling him round with wraps.
“Now make sure you turn him over every so often! Otherwise his bones will come through his flesh—he hasn’t enough of it left, poor young man. In this weather your food will stay fresh far longer, that’s a help, and you must try to give him milk from my ewe as well as water,” she lectured crabbily. “Oh, I wish I could come with you! But I’m too old.”
She stood looking over the white and rolling meadow behind her house until Burgundus and the sled finally disappeared; the ewe she had donated in the hope that Caesar would gain sufficient sustenance to survive. Then, when she could see them no more, she went into her house and prepared to offer up one of her doves to his family’s goddess, Venus, and a dozen eggs to Tellus and Sol Indiges, who were the mother and father of all Italian things.
*
The journey to Priscus and Gratidia took eight days, for the oxen were painfully slow. A bonus for Caesar, who was hardly disturbed by the motion of his peculiar conveyance as it slid along the frozen surface of the snow very smoothly, thanks to many applications of beeswax to its runners. They climbed from the valley of the Himella where Nersae lay beside that swift stream along a road which traversed the steep ascent back and forth, each turn seeing them a little higher, and then on the other side did the same thing as they descended to the Aternus valley.
The odd thing was that Caesar began to improve almost as soon as he began to chill a little after that warm house. He drank some milk (Burgundus’s hands were so big that he found it agony milking the ewe, luckily an old and patient animal) each time Burgundus turned him, and even chewed slowly upon a piece of hard cheese the German gave him to suck. But the languor persisted, and he couldn’t speak. They encountered no one along the way so there was no possibility of shelter at night, but the hard freeze continued, giving them days of cloudless blue skies and nights of a heaven whitened by stars in cloudy tangles.
The coma lifted; the sleepiness which had preceded it came back, and gradually that too lifted. In one way, reasoned the slow alien mind of Burgundus, that seemed to be an improvement. But Caesar looked as if some awful underworld creature had drained him of all his blood, and could hardly lift his hand. He did speak once, having noticed a terrible omission.
“Where is Bucephalus?” he asked. “I can’t see Bucephalus!”
“We had to leave Bucephalus behind in Nersae, Caesar. You can see for yourself what this road is like. Bucephalus couldn’t have managed. But you mustn’t worry. He’s safe with Ria.” There. That seemed better to Burgundus than the truth, especially when he saw that Caesar believed him.
Priscus and Gratidia lived on a small farm some miles from Amiternum. They were about Ria’s age, and had little money; both the sons who would have contributed to a greater prosperity had been killed during the Italian War, and there were no girls. So when they had read Ria’s letter and Burgundus handed them the three thousand sesterces which were all now remaining, they took in the fugitives gladly.
“Only if his fever goes up I’m nursing him outside,” said Burgundus, “because as soon as he left Ria’s house and got a bit cold, he started to get better.” He indicated the sled and oxen. “You can have this too. If Caesar lives, he won’t want it.”
Would Caesar live? The three who looked after him had no idea, for the days passed and he changed but little. Sometimes the wind blew and it snowed for what seemed like forever, then the weather would break and snap colder again, but Caesar seemed not to notice. The fever had diminished and the coma with it, yet marked improvement never came, nor did he cease to have that bloodless look.
Toward the end of April a thaw set in and promised to turn into spring. It had been, so those in that part of Italy said, the hardest winter in living memory. For Caesar, it was to be the hardest of his life.
“I think,” said Gratidia, who was a cousin of Ria’s, “that Caesar will die after all unless he can be moved to a place like Rome, where there are doctors and medicines and foods that we in the mountains cannot hope to produce. His blood has no life in it. That’s why he gets no better. I do not know how to remedy him, and you forbid me to fetch someone from Amiternum to see him. So it is high time, Burgundus, that you rode to Rome to tell his mother.”
Without a word the German walked out of the house and began to saddle the Nesaean horse; Gratidia had scarcely the time to press a parcel of food on him before he was away.
*
“I wondered why I hadn’t heard a word,” said Aurelia, white—faced. She bit her lip, began to worry at it with her teeth, as if the stimulus of some tiny pain would help her think. “I must thank you more than I can say, Burgundus. Without you, my son would certainly be dead. And we must get him back to Rome before he does die. Now go and see Cardixa. She and your boys have missed you very much.”
It would not do to approach Sulla again by herself, she knew. If that avenue hadn’t worked before the New Year, it would never work now, four months into the New Year. The proscriptions still raged—but with less point these days, it seemed, and the laws were beginning to come; great laws or terrible laws, depending upon whom one spoke to. Sulla was fully occupied.
When Aurelia had learned that Sulla had sent for Marcus Pupius Piso Frugi several days after their interview, and learned too that he had ordered Piso Frugi to divorce Annia because she was Cinna’s widow, she had dared to hope for Caesar. But though Piso Frugi had obeyed, had divorced Annia with alacrity, nothing further happened. Ria had written to tell her that the money had been swallowed by one who was named for the size of what he could swallow, and that Caesar and Burgundus were gone; but Ria had not mentioned Caesar’s illness, and Aurelia had allowed herself to think all must be well if she heard nothing at all.
“I will go to see Dalmatica,” she decided. “Perhaps another woman can show me how to approach Sulla.”
Of Sulla’s wife, who had arrived from Brundisium in December of last year, Rome had seen very little. Some whispered that she was ill, others that Sulla had no time for a private life, and neglected her; though no one whispered that he had replaced her with anyone else. So Aurelia wrote her a short note asking for an interview, preferably at a time when Sulla himself would not be at home. This latter request, she was careful to explain, was only because she did not wish to irritate the Dictator. She also asked if it was possible for Cornelia Sulla to be there, as she wished to pay her respects to someone she had once known very well; perhaps Cornelia Sulla would be able to advise her in her trouble too. For, she ended, what she wished to discuss was a trouble.
Sulla was now living in his rebuilt house overlooking the Circus Maximus; ushered into a place which reeked of fresh, limey plaster and all kinds of paints and had that vulgar look only time erases, Aurelia was conducted through a vast atrium to an even vaster peristyle garden, and finally to Dalmatica’s own quarters, which were as large as Aurelia’s whole apartment. The two women had met but had never become friends; Aurelia did not move in the Palatine circle to which belonged the wives of Rome’s greatest men, for she was t
he busy landlady of a Suburan insula, and not interested in tittle—tattle over sweet watered wine and little cakes.
Nor, to do her justice, had Dalmatica belonged to that circle. For too many years she had been locked up by her then husband, Scaurus Princeps Senatus, and in consequence had lost her youthful appetite for tittle—tattle over sweet watered wine and little cakes. There had come the exile in Greece—an idyll with Sulla in Ephesus, Smyrna and Pergamum—the twins—and Sulla’s awful illness. Too much worry, unhappiness, homesickness, pain. Never again would Caecilia Metella Dalmatica find it in her to cultivate an interest in shopping, comedic actors, petty feuds, scandal and idleness. Besides which, her return to Rome had been something in the nature of a triumph when she found a Sulla who had missed her into loving her more than ever.
However, Sulla did not confide in her, so she knew nothing of the fate of the flamen Dialis; indeed, she didn’t know Aurelia was the mother of the flamen Dialis. And Cornelia Sulla only knew that Aurelia had been a part of her childhood, a link to the vague memory of a mother who had drunk too much before she killed herself, and to the vivid memory of her beloved stepmother, Aelia. Her first marriage—to the son of Sulla’s colleague in his consulship—had ended in tragedy when her husband died during Forum riots at the time of Sulpicius’s tribunate of the plebs—and her second marriage—to Drusus’s younger brother, Mamercus—had brought her great contentment.
Each of the women was pleased at how the others looked, and as each was held one of Rome’s great beauties, it was fair to deduce that they all felt they had weathered the corroding storms of time better than most. At forty-two, Aurelia was the oldest; Dalmatica was thirty-seven, and Cornelia Sulla a mere twenty-six.
“You have more of a look of your father these days,” said Aurelia to Cornelia Sulla.
The eyes too blue and sparkling to be Sulla’s filled with mirth, and their owner burst out laughing. “Oh, don’t say that, Aurelia! My skin is perfect, and I do not wear a wig!”
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