The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  Therefore, Marcus Cato, though it pains me to do it, I must ask that you return all your ships to me at once. They are desperately needed, and I’m afraid that unwounded troops must take precedence over your own, wounded men. As soon as I can, I will send you another fleet large enough to get your fellows to Africa Province, though I warn you that you must sail far out to sea. The great bite in the African coast between Cyrenaica and our province is not navigable—no charts, and waters choked with hazards.

  I wish you well, and have made an offering that you and your wounded, having suffered so much, do reach us.

  No ships. Nor, Cato knew, could they possibly return before Auster made it impossible for them to return.

  “Be my fate as it may, Titus Labienus, I must insist that you send your ships to Gnaeus Pompeius as well,” Cato brayed loudly.

  “I will not!”

  Cato turned to Afranius. “Lucius Afranius, as a consular you outrank us. Next comes Marcus Petreius, then me. Titus Labienus, though you have been a propraetor under Caesar, you were never an elected praetor. Therefore the decision does not rest with you. Lucius Afranius, what do you say?”

  Afranius was Pompey the Great’s man to the core; Labienus mattered only in that he was a fellow Picentine and a client of Pompey’s. “If Magnus’s son requires our ships, Marcus Cato, then he must have them.”

  “So here we sit in Arsinoë with nine thousand infantry and a thousand horse. Since you’re so devoted to the mos maiorum, Cato, what do you suggest we do?” Labienus asked, very angry.

  Well aware that Labienus knew that he was too loathed by the troops to appeal to them as a Caesar might have, Cato relaxed. The worst was over.

  “I suggest,” he said calmly, “that we walk.”

  No one had the wind to reply, though Sextus Pompey’s eyes lit up, sparkled.

  “Between reading Gnaeus Pompeius’s letter and seeking this council,” Cato said, “I made a few enquiries of the locals. If there is nothing else a Roman soldier can do, he can march. It seems the distance from Arsinoë to Hadrumetum, the first big town in Africa Province, is somewhat less than the fifteen hundred miles between Capua and Further Spain. About fourteen hundred miles. I estimate that resistance in Africa Province will not fully coalesce until May of next year. Here in Cyrenaica we have all heard that Caesar is in Alexandria and mired down in a war there, and that King Pharnaces of Cimmeria is running rampant in Asia Minor. Gnaeus Calvinus is marching to contain him, with two legions of Publius Sestius’s and little else. I am sure you know Caesar in the field better than any of us, Labienus, so do you really think that, once he has tidied up Alexandria, he will go west when he leaves?”

  “No,” said Labienus. “He’ll march to extricate Calvinus and give Pharnaces such a walloping that he’ll flee back to Cimmeria with his tail between his legs.”

  “Good, we agree,” Cato said, quite pleasantly. “Therefore, my fellow curule magistrates and senators, I will go to our troops and ask for a democratic decision as to whether we march the fourteen hundred miles to Hadrumetum.”

  “No need for that, Afranius can decide,” Labienus said, and spat his mouthful of wine on to the floor.

  “No one can make this decision except those we are going to ask to take this journey!” Cato yelled, at his most aggressive. “Do you really want ten thousand unwilling, resentful men, Titus Labienus? Do you? Well, I do not! Rome’s soldiers are citizens! They have a vote in our elections, no matter how worthless that vote might be if they are poor. But many of them are not poor, as Caesar well knew when he sent them on furlough to Rome to vote for him or his preferred candidates. These men of ours are tried-and-true veterans who have accumulated wealth from sharing in booty—they matter politically as well as militarily! Besides, they lent every sestertius in their legion banks to help fund the Republic’s war against Caesar, so they are our creditors too. Therefore I will go to them and ask.”

  Accompanied by Labienus, Afranius, Petreius and Sextus Pompey, Cato went to the huge camp on Arsinoë’s fringe, had the troops assembled in the square to one side of the general stores, and explained the situation. “Think about it overnight, and have an answer for me at dawn tomorrow!” he shouted.

  At dawn they had their answer ready, and a representative to deliver it: Lucius Gratidius.

  “We will march, Marcus Cato, but on one condition.”

  “What condition?”

  “That you are in the command tent, Marcus Cato. In a battle we will gladly take orders from our generals, our legates, our tribunes, but on a march through country no one knows, with no roads and no settlements, only one man can prevail—you,” said Lucius Gratidius sturdily.

  The five noblemen stared at Gratidius in astonishment, even Cato: an answer no one had expected.

  “If the consular Lucius Afranius agrees that your request is in keeping with the mos maiorum, I will lead you,” said Cato.

  “I agree,” Afranius said hollowly; Cato’s comment about the fact that Pompey the Great was debtor to his own army had hit Afranius (and Petreius) hard; he had lent Pompey a fortune.

  * * *

  “At least,” said Sextus to the housebound Cato the next day, “you administered such a kick to Labienus’s arse that he got off it. Did he ever!”

  “What are you talking about, Sextus?”

  “He spent the night loading his cavalry and horses aboard a hundred of his ships, then sailed at dawn for Africa Province with the money, all the wheat Arsinoë would sell him, and his thumb to his nose.” Sextus grinned. “Afranius and Petreius went as well.”

  A huge gladness invaded Cato, who actually forgot himself enough to grin back. “Oh, what a relief! Though I’m concerned for your brother, left a hundred ships short.”

  “I’m concerned for him too, Cato, but not concerned enough to want the fellatores marching with us—Labienus and his precious horses! You don’t need a thousand horses on this expedition, they drink water by the amphora and they’re fussy eaters.” Sextus gave a sigh. “It’s his taking all the money will hurt us most.”

  “No,” Cato said serenely, “he didn’t take all the money. I still have the two hundred talents your dear stepmother gave me. I just forgot to mention their existence to Labienus. Fear not, Sextus, we’ll be able to buy what we need to survive.”

  “No wheat,” Sextus said gloomily. “He cleaned Arsinoë out of the early harvest, and with the grain fleets hovering, we won’t get any of the late harvest.”

  “Given the amount of water we’ll have to carry, Sextus, we can’t carry wheat as well. No, this expedition’s food will be on the hoof, you might say. Sheep, goats and oxen.”

  “Oh, no!” Sextus cried. “Meat? Nothing but meat?”

  “Nothing but meat and whatever edible greens we can find,” Cato said firmly. “I dare-say Afranius and Petreius decided to risk the sea because they suddenly wondered if, with Cato in the command tent, they’d be allowed to ride while others walked.”

  “I take it that no one is going to ride?”

  “No one. Tempted at that news to hurry after Labienus?”

  “Not I! Notice, by the way, that he took no Roman troops with him. The cavalry is Gallic, they’re not citizens.”

  “Well,” said Cato, rising to his feet, “having made my notes, it’s time to start organizing the march. It is now the beginning of November, and I estimate that preparations will take two months. Which means we’ll start out in early January.”

  “The beginning of autumn by the seasons. Still awfully hot.”

  “I am told that the coast is endurable, and we must stick to the coast or get hopelessly lost.”

  “Two months’ preparation seems excessive.”

  “Logistics demand it. For one thing, I have to commission the weaving of ten thousand shady hats. Imagine what life would be like if Sulla had not made the shady hat famous! Its value in the sun of these latitudes is inestimable. Detest Sulla though all good men must, I have him to thank for that piece of common sense.
The men must march as comfortably as possible, which means we take all our mules and those Labienus left behind. A mule can find forage wherever a plant can grow, and the local people have assured me that there will be forage along the coast. So the men will have pack animals for their gear. One thing about a march into uninhabited terra incognita, Sextus, is that mail shirts, shields and helmets need not be worn, and we need not build a camp every night. The few natives there are will not dare to attack a column of ten thousand men.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Sextus Pompey devoutly, “because I can’t imagine Caesar letting the men march unarmed.”

  “Caesar is a military man, I am not. My guide is instinct.”

  Yielding up ten talents of Cornelia Metella’s gift enabled the men to eat bread during those two months of preparation, sop it in good olive oil; enquiries produced bacon, and Cato still had a great deal of chickpea. His own thousand men were superbly fit, thanks to almost a month of rowing, but between their wounds and inertia, the later arrivals were weaker. Cato sent for all his centurions and issued orders: every man intending to march had to submit himself to a rigorous program of drill and exercise, and if, when January arrived, he was not fit, he would be left in Arsinoë to fend for himself.

  The dioiketes of Arsinoë, one Socrates, was a great help, a treasure house of good advice. Scholarly and fair-minded, his imagination had soared the moment Cato told him what he intended to do.

  “Oh, Marcus Cato, a new anabasis!” he squawked.

  “I am no Xenophon, Socrates, and my ten thousand men are good Roman citizen soldiers, not Greek mercenaries prepared to fight for the Persian enemy,” Cato said, trying these days to moderate his voice and not offend people he needed. Thus he hoped that his tones were not indicative of the horror he felt at being likened to that other, very famous march of ten thousand men almost four hundred years ago. “Besides, my march will fade from the annals of history. I do not have Xenophon’s compulsion to explain away treachery in writing because no treachery exists. Therefore I will write no commentary of my march of the ten thousand.”

  “Nonetheless, it is a very Spartan thing you do.”

  “It is a very sensible thing I do” was Cato’s answer.

  To Socrates he confided his greatest worry—that the men, raised on an Italian diet of starches, oils, greens and fruits, with the sole meat for a poor man a bit of bacon for flavoring, would not be able to tolerate a diet consisting of meat.

  “But you must surely know of laserpicium,” said Socrates.

  “Yes, I know of it.” What was visible of Cato’s face between the hair and the beard screwed itself up in revulsion. “The kind of digestive men like my father-in-law pay a fortune for. It is said to help a man’s stomach recover from a surfeit of”—he drew a breath, looked amazed—”meat! A surfeit of meat! Socrates, Socrates, I must have laserpicium, but how can I afford enough of it to dose ten thousand men every single day for months?”

  Socrates laughed until the tears ran down his face. “Where you are going, Marcus Cato, is a wilderness of silphium, a scrubby little bush that your mules, goats and oxen will feast on. From silphium a people called the Psylli extract laserpicium. They live on the western edge of Cyrenaica, and have a tiny port town, Philaenorum. Were a surfeit of meat a dietary custom around Your Sea, the Psylli would be a great deal richer than they are. It is the canny merchants who visit Philaenorum who make the big profits, not the Psylli.”

  “Do any of them speak Greek?”

  “Oh, yes. They have to, else they’d get nothing for their laserpicium.”

  The next day Cato was off to Philaenorum on a horse, with Sextus Pompey galloping to catch him up.

  “Go back and be useful in the camp,” Cato said sternly.

  “You may order everyone around as much as you like, Cato,” Sextus caroled, “but I am my father’s son, and dying of curiosity. So when Socrates said that you were off to buy whole talents of laserpicium from people called Psylli, I decided that you needed better company than Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion.”

  “Athenodorus is ill,” Cato said shortly. “Though I’ve had to forbid anyone to ride, I’m afraid I must relax that rule for Athenodorus. He can’t walk, and Statyllus is his nursemaid.”

  Philaenorum turned out to be two hundred miles south, but the countryside was populated enough to procure a meal and a bed each night, and Cato found himself glad of Sextus’s cheerful, irreverent company. However, he thought as they rode the last fifty miles, I see a hint of what we must contend with. Though there is grazing for stock, it is a barren wasteland.

  “The one grace,” said Nasamones, leader of the Psylli, “is the presence of groundwater. Which is why silphium grows so well. Grasses don’t because their root systems can’t burrow deeply enough to find a drink—silphium has a little taproot. Only when you cross the salt pans and marshes between Charax and Leptis Major will you need all the water you can carry. There is more salt desert between Sabrata and Thapsus, but that is a shorter distance and there is a Roman road for the last part of the way.”

  “So there are settlements?” Cato asked, brightening.

  “Between here and Leptis Major, six hundred miles to the west, only Charax.”

  “How far is Charax?”

  “Around two hundred miles, but there are wells and oases on the shore, and the people are my own Psylli.”

  “Do you think,” Cato asked diffidently, “that I could hire fifty Psylli to accompany us all the way to Thapsus? Then, if we encounter people who have no Greek, we will be able to parley. I want no tribes afraid that we are invading their lands.”

  “The price of hire will be expensive,” said Nasamones.

  “Two silver talents?”

  “For that much, Marcus Cato, you may have us all!”

  “No, fifty of you will be enough. Just men, please.”

  “Impossible!” Nasamones shot back, smiling. “Extracting laserpicium from silphium is women’s work, and that is what you must do—extract it as you march. The dose is a small spoonful per day per man, you’d never be able to carry half enough. Though I’ll throw in ten Psylli men free of charge to keep the women in order and deal with snakebites and scorpion stings.”

  Sextus Pompey went ashen, gulped in terror. “Snakes?” He shuddered. “Scorpions?”

  “In great numbers,” Nasamones said, as if snakes and scorpions were just everyday nuisances. “We treat the bites by cutting into them deeply and sucking the poison out, but it is easier said than done, so I advise you to use my men, they are experts. If the bite is properly treated, few men die—only women, children, and the aged or infirm.”

  Right, thought Cato grimly, I will have to keep sufficient mules free of cargo to bear men who are bitten. But my thanks, gracious Fortuna, for the Psylli!

  “And don’t you dare,” he said savagely to Sextus on the way back to Arsinoë, “say one word about snakes or scorpions to a single soul! If you do, I’ll send you in chains to King Ptolemy.”

  The hats were woven, Arsinoë and the surrounding countryside denuded of its donkeys. For, Cato discovered from Socrates and Nasamones, mules would drink too much, eat too much. Asses, smaller and hardier, were the burden beasts of choice. Luckily no farmer or merchant minded trading his asses for mules; these were Roman army mules, bred from the finest stock. Cato acquired 4,000 asses in return for his 3,000 mules. For the wagons he took oxen, but it turned out that sheep were impossible to buy. In the end he was forced to settle for 2,000 cattle and 1,000 goats.

  This is not a march, it is an emigration, he thought dourly; how Labienus, safe in Utica by now, must be laughing! But I will show him! If I die in the effort, I will get my Ten Thousand to Africa Province fit to fight! For ten thousand there were; Cato took his noncombatants with him as well. No Roman general asked his troops to march, build, fight and care for themselves. Each century held a hundred men, but only eighty of them were soldiers; the other twenty were noncombatant servants who ground the grai
n, baked the bread, handed out water on the march, cared for the century’s beasts and wagon, did the laundry and cleaning. They were not slaves, but Roman citizens who were deemed unsuitable soldier material—mentally dull yokels who received a tiny share of the booty as well as the same wages and rations as the soldiers.

  While the Cyrenaican women labored over the hats, Cyrenaican men were put to making water skins; earthenware amphorae, with their pointed bottoms and a shape designed for setting in a frame or a thick bed of sawdust, were too cumbersome to strap on panniers astride a donkey’s back.

  “No wine?” asked Sextus, dismayed.

  “No, not a drop of wine,” Cato answered. “The men will be drinking water, and so will we. Athenodorus will have to go without his little invalid fortification.”

  Two days into January the gigantic migration commenced its walk, cheered by the entire population of Arsinoë. Not a neat military column on the march, rather a wandering mass of animals and tunic-clad men with big straw hats on their heads moving among the animals to keep them more or less in one enormous group as Cato headed south for Philaenorum and the Psylli. Though the sun blazed down at lingering summer heat, the pace, Cato soon learned, would not enervate his men. Ten miles a day, set by the animals.

  But though Marcus Porcius Cato had never generaled troops or been thought of by noble Rome, perpetually exasperated by his stubbornness and single-mindedness, as a person with any common sense whatsoever, Cato turned out to be the ideal commander of a migration. Eyes everywhere, he observed and adapted to mistakes no one, even Caesar, could have foreseen. At dawn on the second day his centurions were instructed to make sure every man’s caligae were laced ruthlessly tight around his ankles; they were walking over unpaved land full of small potholes, often concealed, and if a man sprained an ankle or tore a ligament, he became a burden. By the end of the first nundinum, not yet halfway to Philaenorum, Cato had worked out a system whereby each century took charge of a certain number of asses, cattle and goats, designated its own property; if it ate too well or drank too much, it could not filch stock or water from another, more prudent century.