A Pillar of Iron: A Novel of Ancient Rome

by Taylor Caldwell

  M. Tullius could see the sun-glare through his lashes. He did not answer. The white wooden walls of his bedroom reflected the glare, which, all at once, appeared too intense to him. “He is sleeping, Master,” said the physician, apologetically.

  “Eheu! What is that stench?” asked the old father. He was lean and tall and irascible and cultivated an old-fashioned beard which he believed gave him a resemblance to Cincinnatus.

  “Vulture’s grease,” said the physician. “Very expensive but efficacious.”

  “It would arouse a man from the dead,” said the old father in his dogmatic tones.

  “It cost two sesterces,” said the physician, winking at him. He was a freedman, and as a physician, then, he was also a citizen of Rome and could take advantages.

  The old father smiled sourly. “Two sesterces,” he repeated. “That should make the Lady Helvia count the coppers in her purse.” He breathed deeply and loudly. “Frugality is a virtue, but the gods frown on greed. I thought I was master in the art of making three sesterces grow where two grew before, but by Pollux! the Lady Helvia should have been a banker! How is my son, eh?”

  “Recovering, Master.”

  The old father leaned against the bed. “I have a theory,” said the old father. “My son retreats to his bed when the Lady Helvia becomes too dominant—and she with child! What do you think of my theory, Phelon?”

  The physician smiled discreetly. He glanced down at his presumably sleeping patient. “There are gentle natures,” he offered. “And retreat is often a way of securing victory.”

  “I heard,” said the old father, “that the Lady Helvia has suddenly taken to her bed. Is the child due?”

  “At any day,” said the physician, alerted. “I will go to see her at once.”

  He hurried from the room, his linen garments swirling about him. The old father bent over the bed. “Marcus,” he said, “I know you are not sleeping, and your wife is about to give birth. Do not try to delude me with that affectation of sleep. You never snored in your life.”

  M. Tullius groaned faintly. He could do nothing but open his eyes. His father’s eyes, small and black and vivid, were dancing on him. “Who says she is about to give birth?” he asked.

  “There was a scurrying in the women’s quarters, and pots of hot water, and the midwife in an apron,” said the old father. He scratched his hairy cheek. “But as this is the first child no doubt it will be some time before it is born.”

  “Not with Helvia,” said M. Tullius. “She does all things with dispatch.”

  “I find her a woman of many virtues,” said the old father, who was a widower and thankful for it. “Still, she is subject to the laws of nature.”

  “Not Helvia,” said M. Tullius. “The laws of nature are subservient to her.”

  The old father chuckled at the resignation in his son’s voice. “So are we all, Marcus. Even I. Your mother was a sweet and bending soul. I did not appreciate her.”

  “So you are afraid of Helvia, also,” said M. Tullius. He coughed loosely.

  “Afraid of women! Nonsense. But they create difficulties, which a wise man avoids. You have excellent color. How long do you believe you can hide in your bed?”

  “Unfortunately, not for long, and not after Helvia sends for me, Father.”

  The old father meditated. “There is virtue in taking to bed,” he remarked. “I am considering it, myself. But Helvia will not be deceived. Two men in bed would arouse her suspicions. You will name the child after us, certainly, if it is a boy.”

  M. Tullius had had another name in mind, but he sighed. He opened his eyes widely now and saw the drift of snow against the window. The woolen drapery over the window blew in a short, sharp wind, and M. Tullius shivered.

  “I am truly sick,” he said, hopefully. “There is an inflammation of the lungs.”

  “The gods have said, and the Greeks also, that when a man wishes to evade his duties he can summon any illness to assist him,” said the old father, He picked up his son’s wrist and felt the pulse, and then threw the hand from him. “Vulture’s grease!” he exclaimed. “It must be miraculous. You have a fine pulse. Ah, here is the midwife.”

  M. Tullius shrank under his coverlets and closed his eyes. The midwife bowed and said, “The Lady Helvia is about to give birth, Masters.”

  “So soon?” said the old father.

  “Very soon, Master. She took to her bed an hour ago, by the waterclock which is not yet frozen, and has had one pain. The physician is with her. The birth is imminent.”

  “I told you,” said M. Tullius, miserably. “Helvia defies the laws of nature. She should have been in labor at least eight hours.”

  “A sturdy wench,” said the old father. He flung back the coverlets in spite of his son’s cowering. “A woman,” said the old father, “wishes the presence of her husband when she gives birth, and especially a lady of Helvia’s ancestry, which is impeccable. Marcus, arise.”

  M. Tullius tried to rescue the blankets but his father threw them on the stone floor. “Your presence, Father,” said the young man, “will be much more sustaining to Helvia than mine.”

  “Arise,” said the old father. He looked at the slaves. “Bring a fur cloak at once.”

  A fur cloak was brought with unseemly alacrity and was wrapped over M. Tullius’ narrow frame. His coughs, now violent, did not convince his father, who seized his arm sturdily and marched him from the room into a stone hall that blew with bright cold wind. The Nones of Janus! What a time to be born! M. Tullius thought with longing of warm islands in the Bay of Naples, where the sun was benign even now and flowers clambered over brick and wall and the people sang. But the old father believed there was virtue in being wretched, and in this he resembled his daughter-in-law.

  It is not, thought M. Tullius, weakly trying to keep up with the strides of his father through the bitter bright halls, that I do not love Helvia, though she chose me and I had nothing to say concerning it. But she is a formidable girl. It may be that I am a poor Roman; it remains that I prefer sweet voices and music and books and tranquillity, though I admire the military. At a distance. A long distance. There must be Greek blood in me, from some far time.

  They passed an open space between the halls and M. Tullius could see the snow-strewn gardens, the strong white sunlight, the distant Volscian Hills standing in white fire like Jupiter, himself. Even in Rome, northeast of Arpinum, it would be warmer than this; the multitude would heat the air, and the tall buildings would soften the winds or oppose them. There was also shelter every few steps in doorways, and heated litters. But here in the countryside there was no shelter from the winter, which had been unusually severe this year. The old father liked to dress himself in fur and leather and ride over the country, surrounded by grooms, and hunt deer, and come back abominably rosy and hearty and exuding frost, stamping his feet and thumping his chest. The very thought was enough to make M. Tullius cough again and cling to his fur cloak. Helvia was, unfortunately, very rugged also, and thought fresh air salubrious, whereas any physician with a modicum of wisdom knew that fresh air could be fatal under certain circumstances. Only yesterday she had snared two rabbits herself, in the snow, and she weighty with child. M. Tullius found himself heartily disliking healthy people who liked winters. The old father was not really old; he ought, thought M. Tullius, to have married Helvia, himself. Then they could not only plow through the snow together but compare genealogies and eat rabbit stewed in garlic sauce and drink the sour Roman wine in happy company.

  M. Tullius thought of the years he had spent in the army; he had been proud of those years until today. Now he shivered. Hearty people irritated him; they usually expired, very suddenly, with a small ailment that lesser people would simply have dosed with a cup of hot herbs. —They had arrived at the door of the women’s quarters. There was no attendant except for a very old woman with a mustache and with thick shawls over her shoulders. She was a favorite of the Lady Helvia’s, for she had been the young wife’s
nurse in her childhood. She shuffled up from her stool in the piercing cold of the hall and glared at the masculine intruders, who were always intimidated by her, even the old father who had a bull’s voice on most occasions.

  “Were you waiting until the child was robed in the regilla?” she asked caustically. “Or, perchance, the toga?”

  M. Tullius said, “Is the child born? No? How then is it possible, Lira, to know if the child will wear a puerile robe or a regilla?” He tried to smile at the old woman whom he privately called Hecate.

  Lira muttered some obscenity under her breath while father and son tried not to glance at each other. The old woman then wheezed her way ahead of them to a farther door. “A time of travail,” she said in a rusty, mourning voice. “But who is at hand but slaves when my child is suffering?”

  M. Tullius and the old father could not conceive of Helvia needing any soothing or assistance at all, for she was a redoubtable girl, but M. Tullius said anxiously, “The physician is with her, and I hear no commotion!”

  “The physician!” shouted Lira, with her hand on the door and turning to fix a direful eye on the two gentlemen. “Of what use is a man except to cause a lady agony? That physician and his smells and his big hands! In my day no man approached a lady in her travails; it is disgusting. Commotion! My lady is of great and gentle blood; she is not one to scream like a wench in the hay.”

  “Open the door, slave!” said the old father, recovering some of his courage.

  “I am no slave!” Lira exclaimed, in as loud a voice. “My lady freed me on her marriage. Her marriage!” she repeated, in a spitting tone.

  The old father became as purple as ripe grapes, and he raised his clenched fist, which his son caught deftly, shaking his head.

  “Am I not master in my own house?” roared old M. Tullius Cicero. “Is this the new Rome that gutter filth dares lift its eyes to the Master?”

  “Hah,” said Lira, and pushed open the door to her lady’s chamber. But she stood in the doorway for another baleful moment. She shook her finger at the old father. “It is a great and noble occasion for this family of the vetch—Cicero. The child will be a boy and there have been portents.” She nodded her ancient head and her eyes glowed on them with triumphant malice. “I have seen them myself. When my lady’s pain came there was a flash in the sky like lightning, and a cloud shaped like a mighty hand holding a scroll of wisdom.* The child will be known in history, and but for him the name of Cicero would die in dust.”

  She saw something in the old father’s eye that made her shuffle aside hastily, and the two men entered a room hardly warmer than the hall, for there was but a brazier of small proportions in it and only an ember, or two. The stone of the floor struck even through M. Tullius’ thick leather shoes, and cold appeared to blast from the plastered white walls. Helvia was never chilly, being always in the most robust of health. Three young female slaves were standing near the window and aimlessly rearranging the blue wool curtains, and the midwife was dropping a handful of wood chips on the little brazier. The room was stark, modestly furnished, and dominated by a plain wooden bed. In the bed, with her account books all about her, sat Helvia, a pillow at her back. Lira rushed to her side, murmurously, but Helvia saw her visitors and frowned. Her pen had stopped at an entry in a very large and very heavy book. The physician stood at the head of the bed and looked helpless.

  “Helvia,” said M. Tullius. He understood, vaguely, that it was the part of the husband to leap to his wife’s side on these momentous occasions, take her hand, reassure her, and offer up a prayer in her behalf. Helvia frowned. “There is a difference of three sesterces,” she said, in her hearty young voice.

  “Oh, gods,” muttered the old father. He looked at the small statue of Juno before which three votive lights were burning.

  “Your bookkeeper is either illiterate or a thief, Marcus,” said Helvia to her husband. She suddenly yawned, showing a healthy pink cavern and a set of admirable white teeth, large and glistening. M. Tullius approached her timidly.

  “I rose from my sick bed, my love,” he said, “to be with you at this hour.”

  Helvia appeared puzzled. “I am not sick,” she said. Her great belly swelled under her blankets. “But, do you not have a cough, Marcus?”

  “I rose from my sick bed,” M. Tullius repeated, feeling absurd. Helvia shrugged. “You are always in a sick bed,” she said heartlessly. “I cannot understand this, for the air is very healthful here. If, Marcus, you would but ride daily or walk in the freshness of the winter, you would not resemble a shade. Even Phelon agrees with me.”

  The votive lights flickered in a strong and icy breeze and M. Tullius saw that one window stood open, and he coughed loudly. He approached the bed and sat on the plain wooden chair beside it. Helvia looked at him with a sudden fondness, reached out a capable hand, felt his brow, demanded to see his tongue, and dismissed his sickness at once. “It is nonsense,” she said firmly. “But what is that vile odor?”

  “Vulture’s grease,” said her young husband. “On a plaster, for my chest.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Carrion,” she said. “I thought I recognized the stench.”

  “Vulture’s grease,” said Phelon. “It is very efficacious, lady. It relieved the lung congestion almost immediately.”

  Helvia’s gaze became intent. “And, without doubt, very expensive. How much?” she demanded of the physician.

  “Two sesterces,” Phelon admitted.

  Helvia reached for an account book, and neatly inscribed the two sesterces therein. M. Tullius, the kindest of young men, was exasperated.

  “Is it true that you have come to labor, Helvia?” he asked.

  “I had a pain an hour ago,” said Helvia, abstractedly. She closed the book, shut her eyes and thought. “Those three sesterces! I shall never rest in peace until I discover the error—or the theft.”

  “My bookkeeper is a man of the highest integrity,” said the old father. “If it matters so much to you, Helvia, I will give you the three sesterces myself.”

  “That would not satisfy my accounts,” said the girl. She opened her eyes and frowned. She had beautiful eyes, large and changeful of color, so that in one light they appeared bluish and in another olive, and yet in clearer light they appeared a deep, golden-gray. They stood in thickets of thick black lashes which could sweep her cheek. She had a perfectly round face, faintly olive in tint, as smooth as silk and flushed like a ripe pear. Her brows appeared plucked, so sharply dark and straight they were. Her forehead was somewhat low, which the old father in moments of vexation against her would remark augured a poor intelligence. Her nose was just slightly aquiline, with good clear nostrils, and she had a large mouth as full and guileless as that of a child, and a dimpled plump chin and a short neck that went at once into dimpled shoulders. Her black hair was so thick and curly that it fell only to her shoulders and refused to grow longer, merely increasing in riotous profusion and shining like new coal. She came of the noble Helvius family, yet no one would have been startled to find her in the kitchen or in the barns, and often enough she was there indeed, watching her domestic thieves. Her big bosom pushed against her shift, and her short arms were dimpled yet muscular, and her hands were broad and strong. She was all health and vitality and vividness, and though she had patrician blood it was not evident.

  When she did not annoy or bully him the old father considered her an excellent matron and his son very lucky. He was usually afraid of her, young though she was, and just come to womanhood, being only sixteen years old.

  “Are you not cold, my love?” asked M. Tullius, hoping for a larger fire in the brazier. His wife opened her eyes wide at him. “I am not cold,” she said, in her firm voice. “More illness is caused by too much heat than by freshness.” She eyed him closely. “Are you cold in all that fur and leather?”

  “Very cold,” he said.

  She sighed, caught up one of her blankets and threw it over his knees maternally. “We shall be warmer,” s
he said, and ordered a slave to throw another handful of chips on the brazier.

  “If we could but close the window,” said M. Tullius, huddling gratefully under the warm blanket. “I have a cough.”

  “You also have a smell,” said Helvia. Her young face was contorted for a moment, and the physician bent over her solicitously. “It is nothing; it is gone,” she assured him, impatiently. Then she flushed deeply and looked embarrassed. “I fear the child is here,” she said.

  The old father hastily left the room. Old Lira began a crooning; the female slaves knelt before the statue of Juno. The physician thrust his hand under the blankets. M. Tullius fainted quietly. The physician was very excited. “The head!” he cried.

  With no more effort than that, or confusion, the child was born, a boy, on the third day of January, in the Latin year of 648, to Marcus Tullius Cicero and his young wife, Helvia, and in his turn he was named Marcus Tullius Cicero also.

  “The child is the mirror of you, my lady,” said Lira to her mistress four days later. Helvia was at her table with her account books again, but the physician at least kept her to her room for the prescribed time.

  Helvia looked critically at the babe in Lira’s arms; he was swaddled in folds of white wool.

  “Nonsense,” she said, touching the thin little cheek with one finger, then chucking the child under his small and sensitive chin. “He is the mirror of my husband. He has a distinguished appearance, does he not? I will grant you, however, that he has my eyes.” She opened her bodice and put the child to her breast, and over his head and her protecting arms she considered the books again. “Ten more linen sheets,” she said, severely. “We shall be bankrupt.”

  “The child does not resemble his father in the least,” said Lira, obstinately. “He has your noble father’s expression, Lady. There is the aura of greatness about him. Am I ever mistaken? Did I not tell you the very day he would be born? And is there anyone like me who can read omens so exactly?”