The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  “I have a premonition.”

  “You and every other man going into battle!”

  “I agree that it may be a fancy, but what if it isn’t? I don’t want my darling Scribonia to fall captive to Caesar, she has no money and no relatives on Caesar’s side.” Gnaeus’s blue eyes held a desperate and convinced sincerity that Sextus had seen before, in his father’s eyes when he had spoken of fleeing to far-off Serica. “Somehow, Sextus, I don’t have any premonition about you. Whether we win or lose the fight with Caesar, you’ll live and escape. Please, I beg of you, take Scribonia with you! Have our father’s grandchildren by her, for I haven’t managed to. Say you will! Promise!”

  Not wanting Gnaeus to see his tears, Sextus embraced him, a convulsion of love and sorrow. “I promise, Ny-Ny.”

  “Good. Now let’s see what Labienus has to say.”

  The war council agreed that the army should leave the vicinity of Corduba and move south to lure Caesar farther away from his bases and his supplies. To Gnaeus Pompey, the profoundest shock came from Labienus, who refused to take field command.

  “I don’t have Caesar’s luck,” he said simply. “It’s taken me two battles to see it, but I do now. Every time the strategy has been left up to me, we go down. So now it’s your turn, Gnaeus Pompeius. I’ll command the cavalry and do whatever you order.”

  Pompey the Great’s elder son stared at the greying Labienus in horror; if this battered, aging eagle of a man could say that, what was going to happen? Well, he knew what was going to happen. Labienus might blame it on Caesar’s luck, but Gnaeus Pompey thought it was more Caesar’s ability.

  An assumption confirmed five days into March, when the battle came on near a town called Soricaria. Gnaeus Pompey discovered that he didn’t have his father’s skills or instincts when it came to war on land. He and his infantry went down badly, but the engagement wasn’t decisive despite the Republican losses. Gnaeus Pompey drew off to lick his wounds, his confidence further eroded when a slave reported to him that his Spanish tribunes and soldiers were sneaking away. Not sure if it was the right thing to do, he had the would-be deserters detained overnight; in the morning, shrugging his shoulders, he let them go. If men weren’t willing to fight, why keep them?

  “There are too few of us dedicated to the cause,” he said to Sextus, eyes shining with tears. “There’s no one on the face of the globe has the genius to beat Caesar, and I’m tired.” His hand went out, gave Sextus a small paper. “This arrived from Caesar at dawn. I haven’t shown it to Labienus or Attius Varus yet, but I must.”

  To Gnaeus Pompeius, Titus Labienus, the legates and men of the Republican army: Caesar’s clemency is no more. Let this communication serve notice of that fact upon you. There will be no more pardons, even for men who have never been pardoned. The Spanish levies will be considered equally culpable and will suffer accordingly, as will all the towns that have assisted the Republican cause. Any men of an age to fight who are found in any towns will be executed without trial.

  “Caesar’s terribly angry!” said Sextus in a whisper. “Oh, Gnaeus, I feel as if we’ve kicked a hornet’s nest like a toy ball! Why is he so angry? Why?”

  “I have no idea,” said Gnaeus, and went to show the note to Labienus and Attius Varus.

  Labienus knew. Brow glistening with sweat, he looked at the two Pompeys out of stony black eyes. “He’s reached the end of his tether. The last time he did that was at Uxellodunum, where he amputated the hands of four thousand Gauls and sent them to beg from one end of Gaul to the other.”

  “Ye gods, why?” asked Sextus, appalled.

  “To show Gaul that if it continued to resist, there would be no more mercy. Eight years, he thought, was enough mercy. You’re of an age to remember Caesar’s temper, Gnaeus. When he reaches the end of his tether, he breaks it. Nothing can break him.”

  “What should I do?” asked Gnaeus.

  “Read it out to the army just before we fight.” Labienus squared his shoulders. “Tomorrow we look for the right place to give battle. We fight to the death, and I for one will make it the hardest battle of Caesar’s unparalleled career.”

  They found their ground near the town of Munda, on the road from Astigi to the coast at Calpe, the Pillar of Hercules on the Spanish side of the straits. A low mountain pass, Munda offered the Republicans excellent downhill terrain; for Caesar, who ran up the battle flag joyously when he arrived, an uphill fight. It was Caesar’s plan to hold his position with infantry until his huge cavalry force, massed on his left wing, could roll up the Republican right and come around behind the whole Republican army. Not easy with uphill terrain and an enemy served formal notice that there would be no quarter during battle, no clemency after battle.

  The two sides met shortly after dawn, and what fell out was a grim, interminably long, bloody engagement of the most basic kind. There were no opportunities for brilliant or innovative tactics at Munda, perhaps the most straightforward battle Caesar had ever fought. It was also the one he came closest to losing, for the Republicans refused to yield ground and wouldn’t permit Caesar to deploy his cavalry. Munda was a slugging match, toe-to-toe, with Caesar, fighting uphill with four fewer legions of foot, severely disadvantaged. Gnaeus Pompey’s troops had taken Caesar’s message to heart and fought doggedly, desperately.

  Eight hours later and Munda was still not decided. Sitting Toes atop a good observation mound, Caesar saw his front line begin to waver and break; he was down off Toes in an instant, took his shield, drew his sword and pushed his way through the ranks to the front line, where the Tenth wasn’t holding.

  “Come on, you mutinous cunni, they’re mere children!” he shrieked, laying about him. “If you can’t do better than this, then it’s the last day of life for you and me both, because I’ll die alongside you!” The Tenth responded, closed ranks, and struggled on with Caesar in their midst.

  Thus, with sunset imminent and no decision in sight, it was Quintus Pedius on the observation mound. Caesar-trained, he saw the cavalry’s chance and ordered it to charge Gnaeus Pompey’s right, a young tribune named Salvidienus Rufus in the lead. The Gauls, strengthened by a thousand Germans, followed Salvidienus, crashed into Labienus’s horse, rolled the flank up, and fell on Gnaeus Pompey’s rear.

  As darkness fell, the bodies of 30,000 Republicans and their Spanish allies littered the field. Of Caesar’s Tenth Legion, hardly a man survived. They had finally expiated mutiny. Titus Labienus and Publius Attius Varus fell in battle, quite deliberately, whereas the two Pompeys got away.

  Gnaeus fled to Hispalis and tried to find shelter there, but Caesennius Lento, a minor legate of Caesar’s, pursued him, killed him, cut off his head and nailed it up in the marketplace. Gaius Didius, mopping up, found it and sent it to Caesar, who he knew would not be pleased at this barbarity; Caesennius Lento was going to experience a rapid fall from Caesar’s favor for this deed.

  Almost blinded by fatigue, Sextus scrambled on to a riderless horse and instinctively headed for Corduba, where Gnaeus had left Scribonia. Obliged to slink from place to place because the Spanish were heartily ruing their choice of the Republicans, Sextus had ridden over a hundred circuitous miles before he saw Corduba in the distance; it was the second night after Munda.

  The noise of a party trotting down the road sent him into a grove of trees, from which he peered into the moonlit expanse as the men passed him by. There, high on a spear, he saw the head of his brother, glaucous eyes rolled upward at the sky, mouth drawn into a grimace of pain. Ny-Ny, Ny-Ny!

  Gnaeus’s premonition had been a true one. My father, now my brother. Both headless. Is decapitation to be my fate too? If so, then I swear by Sol Indiges, Tellus and Liber Pater that I will outlive Caesar and be a merciless enemy to his successors. For the Republic will never return, I know it in my bones. My father was right to think of fleeing to Serica, but it is too late for that. I am going to remain in the world of Our Sea—but on it. Gnaeus still has his fleets in the Baleares. Picus, our own P
icentine deity, preserve his fleets for me!

  Outside the gates of Corduba he found Gnaeus Pompeius Philip, the same freedman retainer who had burned his father’s body on the beach at Pelusium, and left Cornelia Metella’s service to be with the two sons in Spain. Armed with a lamp, walking up and down, too elderly to attract any notice.

  “Philip!” Sextus whispered.

  The freedman fell upon his shoulder and wept. “Domine, they have killed your brother!”

  “Yes, I know. I saw him. Philip, I promised Gnaeus that I would take care of Scribonia. Have they detained her yet?”

  “No, domine. I have hidden her.”

  “Can you smuggle her out to me? With a little food? I’ll try to find a second horse.”

  “There is a conduit through the walls, domine. I will bring her within an hour.” Philip turned and vanished.

  Sextus used the time to prowl in search of horses; like most cities, Corduba was not equipped with much stabling within its walls, and he knew exactly where Corduban mounts were kept. When Philip returned with Scribonia and her maidservant, Sextus was ready.

  The poor, pretty little girl was rocked by grief and clung to him in a frenzy.

  “No, Scribonia, there’s no time for that! Nor can I take your maid. It’s you and I alone. Now dry your eyes. I’ve found you a gentle old horse, all you have to do is sit astride it and hang on. Come, be brave for Gnaeus’s sake.”

  Philip had brought him the kind of clothing a Spanish man would wear, and had made Scribonia wear something unremarkable. The two of them tried to put her on the horse, but she refused—oh, no, it was too immodest to sit astride anything! Women! So Sextus had to find her a donkey, which took time. Eventually he was able to kiss Philip goodbye, take the halter of Scribonia’s donkey, and ride off into the last of the darkness. Just as well Gnaeus’s wife was pretty; her mind was about the size of a pea.

  They hid by day and rode by night on local tracks, passed to the coast well above New Carthage, and headed into Nearer Spain, Pompey the Great’s old fief. Philip had given Sextus a bag of money, so when the food ran out they bought more from lonely farmhouses as they worked their way the hundreds of miles north, skirting around Caesar’s occupation forces. Once they crossed the Iberus River, Sextus sighed with relief; he knew exactly where he was going. To the Laccetani, among whom his father had kept his horses for years. He and Scribonia would be safe there until Caesar and his minions left the Spains. Then he would go to Maior, the big Balearic isle. Take command of Gnaeus’s fleets, and marry Scribonia.

  “I think we may safely conclude that Munda was the end of all Republican resistance,” Caesar said to Calvinus as they rode for Corduba. “Labienus dead at last. Still, it was a good battle. I would never ask for a better. I fought on the field among my men, and they’re the ones I remember.” He stretched, winced in pain. “However, I confess that at fifty-four, I feel it.” His voice grew colder. “Munda also solved my problem with the Tenth. What very few are left will be in no mood to dispute whereabouts I choose to settle them.”

  “Where will you settle them?” Calvinus asked.

  “Around Narbo.”

  “Word of Munda will reach Rome by the end of March,” Calvinus said with some pleasure. “When you return, you’ll find Rome has accepted the inevitable. The Senate will probably vote you in as dictator for life.”

  “They can vote me whatever they like,” Caesar said, sounding indifferent. “This time next year, I’ll be on my way to Syria.”

  “Syria?”

  “With Bassus occupying Apameia, Cornificius occupying Antioch, and Antistius Vetus on his way to govern and see what he can do to sort the mess out, the answer is obvious. The Parthians are bound to invade within two years. Therefore I must invade the Kingdom of the Parthians first. I have a desire to emulate Alexander the Great, conquer from Armenia to Bactria and Sogdiana, Gedrosia and Carmania to Mesopotamia, and throw India in for good measure,” said Caesar calmly. “The Parthians have learned to covet territory west of the Euphrates, therefore we must learn to covet territory east of the Euphrates.”

  “Ye gods, you’re talking a minimum of five years away!” gasped Calvinus. “Can you afford to leave Rome to her own devices for so long, Caesar? Look what happened when you disappeared in Egypt, and that was for a matter of months, not years. Caesar, you can’t expect Rome to thrive while you gad off conquering!”

  “I am not,” said Caesar through his teeth, “gadding off! I am surprised, Calvinus, that you haven’t yet grasped the fact that civil wars cost money—money Rome doesn’t have! Money that I must find in the Kingdom of the Parthians!”

  They entered Corduba without a fight; the city opened its gates and begged for mercy, some of Caesar’s famous clemency. It did not receive any. Caesar rounded up every man of military age within it and executed them on the spot, then ordered the city to pay a fine as big as the one levied on Utica.

  2

  A severe lung inflammation had struck Gaius Octavius the day before he was due to leave for Spain to serve as Caesar’s personal contubernalis, so it was not until midway through February that he was well enough to quit Rome, and then under strong protest from his mother. The calendar was in perfect step with the seasons for the first time in a hundred years, so setting forth in February meant snowy mountain passes and bitter winds.

  “You won’t get there alive!” Atia cried despairingly.

  “Yes, Mama, I will. What harm can I come to in a good mule carriage with hot bricks and plenty of rugs?”

  Thus, over her protests, the young man set off, discovering as he progressed that a journey at this time of year (provided he kept warm) did not provoke the asthma, as he had learned to call his malady. Caesar had sent Hapd’efan’e to see him, and he had been given a mine of sensible advice to follow. With snow on the roads, there was no dust or pollen in the air, the mule hair didn’t fly, and the cold was crisp rather than damp. He found to his pleasure that when the carriage became stuck in snow halfway through the Mons Genava Pass on the Via Domitia, he was able to take a shovel and help clear a way for it, and that he felt better for the exercise. The only respiratory distress he suffered came as he negotiated the causeway through the marshes at the mouth of the Rhodanus River, but that lasted a mere hundred miles. At the top of the pass through the coastal Pyrenees he paused to look at Pompey the Great’s trophies, growing battered and tattered by the weather, then descended into Nearer Spain of the Laccetani to find an early spring. Even so, he experienced no asthma attack; the spring was fairly wet and windless.

  At Castulo he learned that there had been a decisive battle at Munda and that Caesar was in Corduba, so to Corduba he went.

  He arrived on the twenty-third day of March to find the city a reeking mess of blood and the smoke from dozens of multiple funeral pyres, but luckily the governor’s palace sat in a citadel above the aftermath of what he assumed had been mass executions. Surprised at his own sinew, he found that he could view what he saw with equanimity; at least in that respect he didn’t seem to be less than other men, a fact that pleased him very much. Very conscious that his looks branded him a pretty weakling, he had been terrified that the sight and smell of slaughter would unman him.

  Inside the palace foyer sat a young man in military dress, apparently doing duty as a kind of reception or filtration unit; the sentries outside, observing the richness of Octavius’s small entourage and private carriage, had let him through unchallenged, but this youth was obviously not prepared to be so obliging.

  “Yes?” he barked, looking up from beneath bushy brows.

  Octavius stared at him wordlessly. Here was a soldier in the making! Exactly what Octavius himself yearned to be, yet never would be. As he rose to his feet he revealed that his height was up there with Caesar’s, that his shoulders were like twin hills and his neck as thick and corded as a bull’s. But all that was as nothing compared to his face, strikingly handsome yet absolutely manly; a thatch of fairish hair, bushy dark brows,
stern and deeply set hazel eyes, a fine nose, a strong firm mouth and chin. His bare arms were muscular, his hands the kind of big, well-shaped members that suggested he was capable of doing forceful or sensitive work with them.

  “Yes?” he asked again, more mildly, a trace of amusement in his eyes. An Alexander type, he was thinking of the stranger (“beauty” was not a word in his vocabulary for describing males), but very delicate and precious looking.

  “I beg your pardon,” the visitor said courteously, yet with a faint trace of kingliness. “I am to report to Gaius Julius Caesar. I am his contubernalis.”

  “What great aristocrat sent you?” the reception committee asked. ldquo;You’ll have a hard time of it once he sets eyes on you.”

  Octavius smiled, which removed the touch of royalty from his expression. “Oh, he already knows what I look like. He asked for me himself.”

  “Oh, family! Which one are you?”

  “My name is Gaius Octavius.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

  “What’s your name?” Octavius asked, very drawn to him.

  “Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Quintus Pedius’s contubernalis.”

  “Vipsanius?” Octavius asked, brows knitted. “What a peculiar nomen. Whereabouts do you come from?”

  “Samnite Apulia, but the name’s Messapian. I’m usually just called by my cognomen, Agrippa.”

  “‘Born feet first.’ You don’t look as if you limp.”

  “My feet are perfect. What’s your cognomen?”

  “I have none. I’m simply Octavius.”

  “Up the stairs, down the corridor to the left, third door.”

  “Will you watch my stuff until I can collect it?”

  The “stuff” was coming in; Agrippa eyed the new contubernalis ironically. He had enough “stuff” to be a senior legate. Which member of the family was he? Some sort of remote cousin-by-marriage, no doubt. Seemed nice enough—not conceited, yet in an odd way he had a high opinion of himself. A potential military man he was certainly not! If he reminded Agrippa of anyone, it was of the fellow in the story about Gaius Marius—a cousin-by-marriage of Marius’s who had been killed by a ranker soldier for making homosexual advances. Instead of executing the soldier, Marius had decorated him! Not that this young fellow quite suggested that.