The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

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Twenty-one men now belonged to the Kill Caesar Club: Gaius Trebonius, Decimus Brutus, Staius Murcus, Tillius Cimber, Minucius Basilus, Decimus Turullius, Quintus Ligarius, Antistius Labeo, the brothers Servilius Casca, the brothers Caecilius, Popillius Liguriensis, Petronius, Pontius Aquila, Rubrius Ruga, Otacilius Naso, Caesennius Lento, Cassius Parmensis, Spurius Maelius, and Servius Sulpicius Galba. Apart from his loathing of Caesar, Spurius Maelius had given a peculiar, if logical, reason for joining the club. Four hundred years earlier, his ancestor, also named Spurius Maelius, had tried to make himself King of Rome; to kill Caesar was a way to remove the lingering odium from his family, which hadn't prospered since. The acquisition of Galba had delighted the club's founders, for he was patrician, an ex-praetor, and had enormous clout. During the early period of Caesar's Gallic War, Galba had conducted a campaign in the high Alps and bungled it so badly that Caesar quickly dispensed with his services; Galba was, besides, one of Caesar's cuckolds. Six of the members could claim some sort of distinction, but unfortunately the rest were, as Trebonius said despondently to Decimus Brutus, a pathetic bunch of would-bes and has-beens. "About the best one can say is that they've all been mighty close-lipped about it I haven't heard a whisper that the Kill Caesar Club exists." "Nor I," said Decimus Brutus. "If we could only get two more members with Galba's clout, I'd call the club big enough. Once it gets over twenty-three, the business would turn into a free-for-all worse than the fight for the October Horse's head." "The business bears some similarity to the October Horse," Trebonius said reflectively. "When you think about it, that's what we aim to do, isn't it? Kill the best war horse Rome owns." "I concede your point. Caesar's in a class all by himself, no one can hope to eclipse him. If hope existed, there would be no need to kill him. Though Antonius has grand delusions pah! We should kill Antonius as well, Trebonius." "I don't agree," Trebonius said. "If we want to live and prosper, we have to make it scream patriotism! Kill even one of Caesar's minions, and we stand as rebels and outlaws." "Dolabella will be there, and he's a man you can deal with," Decimus Brutus said. "Antonius is a wolfshead." Decimus Brutus's steward knocked on the study door. "Domine, Gaius Cassius is asking to see you." The two exchanged an uneasy glance. "Send him in, Bocchus." Cassius entered rather hesitantly, which seemed odd; he was ordinarily anything but hesitant. "I'm not intruding?" he asked, sniffing something in the air. "No, no," said Decimus Brutus, drawing up a third chair. "A little wine? Some refreshments?" Cassius sat with a thump, linked his hands and twisted them. "Thank you, I need nothing." A silence fell that was curiously difficult to break; when finally it did, it was Cassius who spoke. "What do you think of our dictator for life?" he asked. "That we've made a rod for our own backs," said Trebonius. "That we'll never be free again," said Decimus Brutus. "My sentiments exactly. And those of Marcus Brutus, though he doesn't believe there's a thing we can do about it." "Whereas you believe there is, Cassius?" Trebonius asked. "If I had my way, I'd kill him!" said Cassius. He lifted his amberish brown eyes to Trebonius's face and saw things in its dismal planes that made him catch his breath. "Yes, I'd kill this millstone around our necks." "Kill him how?" Decimus Brutus asked, as if puzzled. "I don't I don't I don't know," stammered Cassius. "It's a new thought, you understand. Until we all voted to make him the dictator for life, I suppose I had reconciled myself to a number of years of him, but he's indestructible! He'll still be attending meetings of the House when he's ninety his health is fantastic and that mind will never let go." As he spoke, Cassius's voice grew stronger; the two pairs of light eyes staring intently at him were echoing everything his roiling thoughts had been turning over. He understood that he was among friends, and visibly relaxed. "Am I the only one?" he asked. "By no means," said Trebonius. "In fact, join the club." "Club?" "The Kill Caesar Club. We called it that because, if its existence became known, we could explain it away as a joke name for a group of men who don't like Caesar, and have clubbed together to kill him politically," Trebonius said. "So far it contains twenty-one members. Are you interested in joining?" Cassius made up his mind with the same speed he had at that meeting along the Bilechas River when he had decided to abandon Marcus Crassus to his fate and gallop for Syria. "Count me in," he said, and sat back. "Now I'd appreciate some wine." Nothing loath, the two founders proceeded to acquaint Cassius with the club, its duration, its aims, why they had resolved to kill the October Horse. Cassius listened eagerly until he was told the names of the members. "A paltry lot," he said flatly. "You're right," said Decimus, "but they lend us one important thing bulk. It could be a political alliance there were never many boni, for example. At least they're all senators, and there are too many to indicate a feel-in-the-dark conspiracy. Conspiracy is the one word we don't want attached to our club." Trebonius took over. "Your participation is a bonus we had despaired of earning, Cassius, because you have real clout. But even a Cassius and a patrician Sulpicius Galba may not be enough to imbue the deed with the the heroism it must have. I mean, we're tyrannicides, not murderers! That's how we must look when the deed is done when it's over. We have to be able to march down to the rostra and declare to the whole of Rome that we've lifted the curse of tyranny from our beloved homeland, that we have no apologies to make and expect no retaliations. Men who free their homeland from a tyrant should be lauded. Rome's rid herself of tyrants before, and the men who did it have passed down as Rome's greatest men ever. Brutus, who banished the last king and executed his own sons when they tried to bring the monarchy back! Servilius Ahala, who killed Spurius Maelius when he tried to make himself King of Rome " "Brutus!" Cassius cried, interrupting. "Brutus! Now that Cato is dead, we have to have Brutus in the club! The direct descendant of the first Brutus, and, through his mother, the heir of Servilius Ahala as well! If we can persuade Brutus to join us, we're free and clear no one would dream of prosecuting us." Decimus Brutus stiffened, eyes flashing cold fire. "I am a direct descendant of the first Brutus too do you think we haven't already thought of that?" he demanded. "Yes, but you're not connected to Servilius Ahala," Trebonius said. "Marcus Brutus outranks you, Decimus, and there's no use getting angry about it. He's the richest man in Rome, so his clout is colossal, he's a Brutus and a patrician Servilius Cassius, we have to have him! Then we'll have two Brutuses, we can't fail!" "All right, I see that," Decimus said, anger dying. "Yet can we get him, Cassius? I admit I don't know him very well, but what I do know of him suggests he wouldn't be a party to tyrannicide. He's so docile, so tame, so anemic." "You're correct, he's those and more," Cassius said gloomily. "His mother rules him " He stopped, brightening. "Until, that is, he married Porcia. Oh, the fights! There's no doubt that Brutus has more gumption since he married Porcia. And the Dictator Perpetuus decree horrified him. I'll work on him, persuade him that it's his moral and ethical duty as a Junius Brutus and a Servilius Ahala to rid Rome of her present tyrant." "Do we dare approach him?" Decimus Brutus asked warily. "He might run straight to Caesar." Cassius looked astonished. "Brutus? No, never! Even if he decides not to join us, I'd stake my life on his silence." "You will be," said Decimus Brutus. "You will be."

* * *

When the Dictator Perpetuus convened the Centuries on the Campus Martius to "elect" Publius Cornelius Dolabella the senior consul in Caesar's absence, the voting went swiftly and smoothly; there was no reason why it should not, since there was only one candidate, but the vote of each Century still had to be counted, at least right through the First Class and as far into the Second Class as necessary to obtain a majority; the Centuries were very heavily weighted in favor of the First Class, so in an "election" like today's, no one from the Third, Fourth or Fifth Classes even bothered to turn up. Both Caesar and Mark Antony attended, Caesar as supervising magistrate, Antony in his function as augur. It took the junior consul an inordinately long time to complete his auspication; the first sheep was rejected as unclean, the second had too few teeth. Only when he came to the third did he decide it met his purposes, which were to inspect the victim's liver according to a strict protocol both written down and on display as a three-dimensional bronze model. There was no mystical element in Rome's auguries, hence no need to find mystical men to act as augurs. Impatient as always, Caesar ordered the voting to proceed while Antony fussed and probed. "What's the matter?" he asked, coming to Antony's side. "The liver. It looks terrible." Caesar looked, turned it over with a stylus, counted the lobes and verified their shapes. "It's perfect, Antonius. As Pontifex Maximus and a fellow augur, I declare the omens auspicious." Shrugging, Antony walked away as the augural acolytes began to clean up, and stood staring into the distance. A smile playing about his lips, Caesar went back to supervising. "Don't sulk, Antonius," he said. "It was a good try." About half the votes of the necessary ninety-seven Centuries had been registered when Antony suddenly jumped and squawked, then strode to the saepta side of the supervising tower, where he could see the long lines of white-clad figures filing to the baskets. "A fireball! The omens are inauspicious!" he bellowed in his stentorian voice. "As official augur on this occasion, I order the Centuries to go home!" It was brilliantly done. Caught unprepared, Caesar hadn't time to start enquiring who else had seen this evanescent meteor before the Centuries, full of men who would rather be elsewhere, began to leave in a hurry. Dolabella came running from his constant soliciting of the Centuries lined up to vote, his face purple with rage. "Cunnus!" he spat at the grinning Antony. "You go too far, Antonius," Caesar said, mouth thin. "I saw a fireball," Antony maintained stubbornly. "On my left, low on the horizon." "I presume that this is your way of informing me that there is no point in holding another election? That it too will fail?" "Caesar, I'm simply telling you what I saw." "You're an incontinent fool, Antonius. There are other ways," Caesar said, turned on his heel and walked down the tower steps. "Fight, you prick!" Dolabella yelled, shaping up. "Lictors, restrain him," Antony barked, following Caesar. Cicero scuttled up importantly, eyes sparkling. "That was so stupid, Marcus Antonius," he announced. "You acted illegally. You should have watched the skies as consul, not as augur. Augurs must be formally commissioned to watch the skies, consuls not." "Thank you, Cicero, for telling Antonius the correct way to screw up future elections!" Caesar snapped. "I would remind you that Publius Clodius made it illegal for consuls to watch the skies without commission too. Before you pontificate, look up the laws passed while you were in exile." Cicero sniffed and marched off, mortified. "I doubt," said Caesar to Antony, "that you'll have the gall to block Dolabella's appointment as suffect consul." "No, I won't do that," Antony said agreeably. "As a suffect consul, he can't outrank me." "Antonius, Antonius, your law is as bad as your arithmetic! Of course he can, if the consul he replaces is the senior consul. Why do you think I went to the trouble of having a suffect consul appointed for a few hours when Fabius Maximus, the senior consul, died on the last day of last December? Law is not only what is written on the tablets, it is also valid on uncontested precedents. And I set the precedent a little over a month ago. Neither you nor anybody else objected. You may think you caught me out today, but, as you now know, I am always one step ahead of you." Caesar smiled sweetly and went to join Lucius Caesar, glaring fiercely at Antony. "What can we do with my nephew?" Lucius asked in despair. "In my absence? Sit on him, Lucius. He's actually well contained, if you think about it. Dolabella's dislike for him won't diminish after today, will it? Calvinus as Master of the Horse, the Treasury completely in the hands of Balbus Major and Oppius yes, Antonius is well contained."

* * *

Quite aware that he was effectively muzzled, Antony stalked home in a towering rage. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right! The cunning old fox was master of every trick in the political and legal manuals, plus a few tricks he'd invented. Soon every last senator would be compelled to swear a mortal oath to uphold all of Caesar's laws and dictates in his absence. It would be administered under the open sky of the temple of Semo Sancus Dius Fidius, and as Pontifex Maximus the old boy had gotten around things like holding a stone in the hand to negate the oath Caesar had been around too long to be fooled by anything. Trebonius. I need to talk to Gaius Trebonius. Not Decimus Brutus, but Trebonius. Somewhere very private. He made contact after the Senate met to appoint Dolabella the suffect consul after Caesar stepped down. Suffect, but senior. "My horse has arrived from Spain. Want to take a walk out to the Campus Lanatarius and see him?" Antony asked jovially. "Certainly," said Trebonius. "When?" "There's no time like the present, Antonius." "Where's Decimus Brutus?" "Keeping Gaius Cassius company." "That's an odd friendship." "Not these days." They walked on in silence until they passed through the Capena Gate, heading for the area which contained Rome's stables, as well as the stockyards and slaughterhouses. The day was cold, a bitter wind blowing; inside the Servian Walls they hadn't felt it as much, but once beyond the city, their teeth began to chatter. "Here's a nice little tavern," said Antony. "Clemency can wait, I need wine and a warm fire." "Clemency?" "My new Public Horse. After all, I am the flamen of the new cult of Caesar's Clemency, Trebonius." "Oh, he was angry when we gave him the silver tablets!" "Don't remind me. The first time I ever met him, he kicked my arse so hard I couldn't sit down for a nundinum." The few occupants of the tavern looked at the newcomers and gaped; never in all the place's history had two men in purple-bordered togas walked through the door! The landlord rushed to escort them to his best table, evicting three merchants who were too awed to protest, then hunted for his best amphora of wine, put bowls of pickled onions and plump olives down for them to munch. "We'll be safe here, this lot's as Latin as Quirinus," said Trebonius in Greek. He sipped experimentally at his beaker of wine, looked surprised, and waved his approval at the beaming landlord. "What's on your mind, Antonius?" "Your little plot. Time's running out. How's it going?" "Well in one way, not so well in another. There are enough of us at twenty-two, but we lack a figurehead, which is a worry. There's no point in doing this particular deed if we can't survive it in an odor of sanctity. We're tyrannicides, not murderers," said Trebonius, uttering his favorite sentence. "However, Gaius Cassius has joined us, and he's going to try to persuade Marcus Brutus to be the figurehead." "Edepol!" Antony exclaimed. "He'd be all of that." "I'm not sanguine about Cassius's chances of success." "How about," said Antony, pulling layers off an onion, "some additional guarantees in case you don't get your figurehead?" "Guarantees?" Trebonius asked, looking alert. "Don't forget I'll be consul and don't think for a moment that Dolabella's going to be a problem, because I won't let him. If You-know-who is dead, he'll lie down, roll over, and present me with his belly," said Antony. "What I'm proposing is to smooth things over for you with the Senate and People. My brother Gaius is a praetor and my brother Lucius is a tribune of the plebs. I'm happy to guarantee that none of the participants will be brought to trial, that none will be deprived of his magistracy, province, estates or entitlements. Don't forget that I'm Caesar's heir. Ill control the legions, who love me a great deal more than they do Lepidus or Calvinus or Dolabella. No one will dare to go against me in the Senate or the Assemblies." The ugly, attractive face turned feral. "I'm not nearly as big a fool as Caesar deems me, Trebonius. If he's killed, why not kill me and Uncle Lucius and Calvinus and Pedius? My life is in jeopardy too. So I'll make a bargain with you with you, and you alone! It's your scheme, and you're the one who'll hold the rest together. What I'm saying to you is between you and me, it's not for dissemination to the others. You make sure that I'm not a target and I'll make sure that no one suffers for the deed." Moist grey eyes reflective, Trebonius sat and thought. He was being made an offer too good to spurn. Antonius was an administrative sloth, not a maniac for work like Caesar. He'd be content to let Rome slide back into her old ways as long as he could strut around calling himself the First Man in Rome and as long as he had Caesar's staggering fortune to spend. "It's a deal," said Gaius Trebonius. "Our secret, Antonius. What the rest don't know won't hurt them." "That goes for Decimus too? I remember him from Clodius Club days, and he's maybe not as stable as most people think." "I won't tell Decimus, you have my oath on it."

Early in February, Caesar got his casus belli. News came from Syria that Antistius Vetus, sent to replace Cornificius, had blockaded Bassus inside Apameia thinking it would be a short, swift siege. But Bassus had fortified his Syrian "capital" very efficiently, so the siege became protracted. Worse than that, Bassus had sent to King Orodes of the Parthians for help, and help had arrived; a Parthian army under Prince Pacorus had just invaded Syria. The whole of the northern end of the province was being overrun, and Antistius Vetus was penned up in Antioch. Since no one could now possibly argue that Syria ought not to be defended or the Parthians contested, Caesar rifled the Treasury for a great deal more than he had originally intended, and sent the war chest to Brundisium to await his arrival; for safety, it was stored in the vaults of his banker Gaius Oppius. He issued orders that all the legions were to assemble in Macedonia as fast as the transports could ferry them there from Brundisium; his cavalry were shipped from Ancona, the closest port to Ravenna, where they were camped. Legates and staff were told to get to Macedonia yesterday, and he informed the House that he would step down as consul on the Ides of March. A startled Gaius Octavius suddenly found himself served a curt notice from Publius Ventidius to go to Brundisium, where he was to embark at the end of February with Agrippa and Salvidienus Rufus. The order was a welcome one, for his mother was weeping and wailing that she would never see her beloved only son again, and Philippus was, thanks to her dramatics, unusually testy. Deliberately abandoning two-thirds of what she had put together for him, he hired three gigs and two carts with a view to setting off down the Via Latina immediately. Freedom! Adventure! Caesar! Who managed to see him for a very brief farewell the evening before he departed. "I expect you to continue your studies, Octavius, because I don't think your destiny is a military one," said the Great Man, who seemed tired, unusually harassed. "I will, Caesar, I will. I'm taking Marcus Epidius and Arius of Alexandria to polish my rhetoric and knowledge of the law, and Apollodorus of Pergamum to keep me struggling with my Greek." He pulled a face. "It is improving a little, but no matter how hard I try, I still can't think in it." "Apollodorus is an old man," said Caesar, frowning. "Yes, but he assures me that he's fit enough to travel." "Then take him. And start educating Marcus Agrippa. That's one young man I'm anxious to see capable of a public career as well as a military one. Has Philippus arranged for you to stay with someone in Brundisium? The inns will be overflowing." "Yes, with his friend Aulus Plautius." Caesar laughed, looked suddenly boyish. "How convenient! You can keep an eye on the war chest, young Octavius." "The war chest?" "It takes many millions of sesterces to keep an army eating, marching and fighting," Caesar said gravely. "A prudent general takes his funds with him when he goes if he has to send back to Rome for more money, the Senate can prove very difficult. So my war chest of many millions of sesterces is sitting in Oppius's vaults right next door to Aulus Plautius's house." "I'll keep an eye on the war chest, Caesar, I promise." A quick handshake, a light kiss on the cheek, and Caesar was gone. Octavius stood staring at the empty doorway with an ache in his heart he couldn't define.

One more little King of Rome ploy, thought Mark Antony on the day before the festival of the Lupercalia. This year three teams would participate, with Antony leading the Luperci Julii. The Lupercalia was one of the oldest and most beloved feast days Rome owned, its archaic rituals fraught with sexual overtones that the prudish segment of the Roman upper classes preferred not to see. In the cliff on the corner of the Palatine Mount that faced the end of the Circus Maximus and the Forum Boarium was a small cave and spring called the Lupercal. Here, adjacent to the shrine of the Genius Loci and under an aged oak tree (though in her time it had been a fig tree), the she-wolf had suckled the abandoned twins Romulus and Remus. Romulus had gone on to found the original city on the Palatine, and executed his brother for some peculiar treason described as "jumping over the walls." One of Romulus's oval thatched huts was still preserved on the Palatine, just as the people of Rome still reverenced the Lupercal cave and prayed to Rome's spirit, the Genius Loci. It had all happened over six hundred years ago, but it continued to live, never more so than on the feast of Lupercalia. The men of the three colleges of luperci met at the cave, and there outside it, all stark naked, killed sufficient billy goats and one male dog The three prefects of Luperci Julii, Fabii and Quinctilii supervised their teams as they cut the victims' throats, then stood while the bloody knives were wiped across their foreheads, roaring with obligatory crazy laughter. Neither of the other two prefects laughed as loudly or as crazily as Mark Antony, blinking the blood out of his eyes until the members of his team cleaned the blood away with hanks of wool dipped in milk. The goats and dog were skinned and the gory hides hacked into strips which all the luperci then wrapped around their loins, making sure that a section of this gruesome drape was long enough to use as a flail. Few of the many thousands who came to Lupercalia were able to see this part of the ceremony, between the piers of houses above and the roofs of temples and shrines below; the Palatine had become too built up. Once the luperci were dressed, they offered little salt cakes called mola salsa to the faceless deities who safeguarded the People of Rome. The cakes were made by the Vestal Virgins from the first ears of the last Latin harvest, and constituted the real sacrifice; the goats and dog were killed to provide luperci apparel, albeit ritually. After which the three dozen fit, athletic men lay on the ground and ate a "feast" washed down by watered wine a sparse meal, actually, for as soon as it concluded the luperci commenced a run over two miles long. With Antony in their lead, they came down the Steps of Cacus from the Lupercal to plough into the huge throng below, laughing as they grasped the long pieces of their drapes and whipped them about. A path was cleared for them; they began their run up the Circus Maximus side of the Palatine, around the corner into the wide avenue of the Via Triumphalis, down to the swamps of the Palus Ceroliae, then up the hill to the Velia at the top of the Forum Romanum, down the Forum to the rostra on the Sacra Via, then ended by backtracking a short distance to Rome's first temple, the tiny old Regia. Every foot of the way, the run was made more difficult because the path through the crowd was barely wide enough to give one man passage at a time, and hordes of people dashed across it constantly, presenting themselves to be flailed. There was solemn purpose in the flail; whoever it struck was assured of procreating, so those who despaired of having children men as well as women implored to be let through the crush so that one of the luperci would lash them with his bloody whip. To Antony it was a simple fact of life; Fulvia's mother, Sempronia the daughter of Gaius Gracchus, had reached thirty-nine years of age without conceiving. Not knowing what else was left to do, she went to the Lupercalia and was struck. Nine months later she gave birth to Fulvia, her only child. So Antony swished and lashed his flail generously despite the additional labor it involved, roaring with laughter, pausing to drink water some kind soul in the press offered, thoroughly enjoying himself. He provided the crowd with more than this, however; as soon as he came into sight people screamed and swooned deliriously, for alone among the luperci he had made no attempt to cover his genitalia with the piece of hide; the most formidable penis and the largest scrotum in Rome were there for all to see, a treat in itself. Everybody loved it! Oh, oh, oh, strike me! Strike me! Nearing the finish of the run, the luperci streamed down the hill to the lower Forum with Antony still in the lead; ahead, sitting on his curule chair atop the rostra, was Caesar Dictator, for once not immersed in paperwork. He too was laughing, making jokes and exchanging pleasantries with the people thronging the whole area. When he saw Antony he made some remark directed at Antony's exposed genitals, it was obvious that had men and women falling on the ground in mirth. Witty mentula, Caesar, no one could deny it. Well, Caesar, take this flail! As he reached the bottom of the rostra Antony stretched out his left hand, took something from a hand in the crowd; suddenly he leaped up the steps and was behind Caesar, was tying a white ribbon around Caesar's head, already crowned with oak leaves. Caesar acted like lightning. The ribbon came off without marring the oak leaves, and on his feet, the diadem in his right hand, held on high, he cried out in a huge voice: "Jupiter Optimus Maximus is the only king in Rome!" The crowd began to cheer deafeningly, but he held up both his hands to hush them. "Quiris," he said to a young, togate man below him, "take this to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and lay it at the base of the Great God's statue as a gift from Caesar." The people cheered again as the young man, clearly overcome at the honor, ascended the rostra to accept the diadem. Caesar smiled at him, said a few words to him that no one could hear, then, dazed and uplifted, the Quiris descended and began the walk up the Clivus Capitolinus to the temple. "You haven't finished your run yet, Antonius," Caesar said to Antony, standing with chest heaving and a slight erection that had women whimpering. "Do you want to be the last man at the Regia? After you've had a bath and covered yourself, you have another job to do. Convene the Senate for dawn tomorrow in the Curia Hostilia."

The Senate met, shivering in dread, to find Caesar looking his usual self. "Let it be inscribed on bronze," he said levelly, "that on the day of the Lupercalia in the year of the consulship of Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius, the consul Marcus Antonius did offer Caesar a diadem, and that Caesar did refuse it publicly, to great applause from the people." "Well played, Caesar!" said Antony heartily as the House went off about other business. "Now the whole of Rome has seen you refuse to wear a diadem. Admit that I've performed a great service for you." "Kindly leave your philanthropy at that, Antonius. Otherwise one of your heads might part company from your body. My problem is, which head holds your thinking apparatus?"

Twenty-two was not a very large number, but getting twenty-two men together under one roof for a meeting of the Kill Caesar Club was depressingly difficult. None of the members they did not think of themselves as conspirators had a big enough dining room to accommodate so many diners, and it was too wintry for chats in a peristyle or public garden. Guilt and apprehension contributed to their reluctance to be seen together, even before a meeting of the Senate. Had Gaius Trebonius not been a distinguished tribune of the plebs in his day and maintained an interest above and beyond the normal in the history of the Plebs, the club may well have foundered for the lack of a safe place to meet. Luckily Trebonius was archiving the records of the Plebs, which were stored under the temple of Ceres on the Aventine Mount. Here, in what was held to be Rome's most beautiful temple, the club could meet unnoticed after dark, provided that said meetings were not held frequently enough to make a nosy female curious as to where her spouse or son or son-in-law was going. Like most temples, behind its exquisite facade of columns on all four sides, Ceres was a windowless building with close-fitting double bronze doors; once they were shut, no lights showed to indicate that anyone was inside. The cella was huge, dominated by a twenty-foot-high statue of the goddess, arms full of sheaves of emmer wheat, clad in a gloriously painted robe patterned in summer's beauties from roses to pansies and violets. Her golden hair was crowned by a wreath of flowers, cornucopias overflowing with fruits clustered at her feet. However, the most striking feature of the temple was a gigantic mural depicting a priapic Pluto carrying Proserpina off to rape and exile in Hades, while a tearful, disheveled Ceres wandered a sere, blasted winter landscape searching vainly for her beloved daughter. All the members came on the night that fell two days after Caesar's dictate that his rejection of the diadem be recorded on a bronze tablet. They were edgy and irritable, some to the point of mild panic; telling over their faces, Trebonius wondered how he was ever going to keep them together. Cassius charged into speech. "In less than a month, Caesar will be gone," he said, "and so far I've not seen a particle of evidence that any one of you is really serious about this business. It's all very well to talk! What we need is action!" "Are you getting anywhere with Marcus Brutus?" Staius Murcus asked waspishly. "There's more at stake than action, Cassius! I'm supposed to have left for Syria already, and our master is looking at me sideways because I'm still in Rome. My friend Cimber can say the same." Cassius's touchiness was a direct consequence of his failure with Brutus; between his extraordinary passion for Porcia and the war that Porcia and Servilia were pursuing relentlessly, Brutus had time for so little else that even his cherished but illicit commercial activities were suffering. "Give me another nundinum," Cassius said curtly. "If that doesn't do it, count him out. But that's not what's worrying me. Killing Caesar isn't going far enough. We have to kill Antonius and Dolabella as well. Also Calvinus." "Do that," Trebonius said calmly, "and we'll be declared nefas and sent into permanent exile without a sestertius if we keep our heads. Civil war isn't possible because there are no legions in Italian Gaul for Decimus to use, and every legion camped between Capua and Brundisium is on the move to Macedonia. This isn't a conspiracy to overthrow Rome's government, it's a club to rid Rome of a tyrant. As long as we confine ourselves to Caesar, we can claim that we acted rightly, within the law and in keeping with the mos maiorum. Kill the consuls and we're nefas, make no mistake." Marcus Rubrius Ruga was a nonentity of a family that had produced a governor of Macedonia unlucky enough to have to cope with a young Cato; of morals, ethics and principles he had none. "Why," he asked now, "are we going through all this? Why don't we simply waylay Caesar in secret, kill him, and never tell?" The silence hung like a pall until Trebonius spoke. "We are honorable men, Marcus Rubrius, that's why. Where's the honor in a simple murder? To do it and not admit to it? No! Never!" The growls of agreement that erupted from every throat had Rubrius Ruga shrinking into a dark corner. "I think Cassius has a point," said Decimus Brutus with a glance of contempt for Rubrius Ruga. "Antonius and Dolabella will come after us they're too attached to Caesar not to." "Oh, come, Decimus, how can you say that of Antonius? He pecks at Caesar remorselessly," Trebonius objected. "For his own ends, Gaius, not our ends. Don't forget that he swore an oath to Fulvia on his ancestor Hercules that he'd never touch Caesar," Decimus countered. "Which makes him doubly dangerous. If we kill Caesar and leave Antonius alive, he'll start to wonder when his turn will come." "Decimus is right," Cassius said strongly. Trebonius sighed. "Go home, all of you. We'll meet here again in one nundinum hoping, Cassius, that you bring Marcus Brutus with you. Concentrate on that, not on a bloodbath that would see no one left to sit on the curule dais, and Rome plunged into utter chaos." Since he held the key, Trebonius waited until the others had departed, some in groups, some singly, then went around snuffing the lamps, the last one in his hand. It's doomed, he thought. It's doomed. They sit there listening, hopping and leaping at the slightest noise, they offer not one word of encouragement, they have no opinions worth listening to sheep. Baa, baa, baa. Even men like Cimber, Aquila, Galba, Basilus. Sheep. How can twenty-two sheep kill a lion like Caesar?

The next morning Cassius went around the corner to Brutus's house and marched him into his study, where he bolted the door and stood glaring at the stupefied Brutus. "Sit down, brother-in-law," he said. Brutus sat. "What is it, Gaius? You look so strange." "As well I might, given Rome's condition! Brutus, when is it going to occur to you that Caesar is already the King of Rome?" The round shoulders slumped; Brutus looked down at his hands and sighed. "It has occurred to me, of course it has occurred to me. He was right when he said that 'rex' is just a word." "So what are you going to do about it?" "Do about it?" "Yes, do about it! Brutus, for the sake of your illustrious ancestors, wake up!" Cassius cried. "There's a reason why Rome at this very moment owns a man descended from the first Brutus and Servilius Ahala both! Why are you so blind to your duty?" The dark eyes grew round. "Duty?" "Duty, duty, duty! It's your duty to kill Caesar." Jaw dropped, face a mask of terror, Brutus gaped. "My duty to kill Caesar? Caesar?" "Can you do nothing other than make what I say into questions? If Caesar doesn't die, Rome is never going to be a republic again he's already its king, he's already established a monarchy! If he's let continue to live, he'll choose an heir within his lifetime, and the dictatorship will pass to his heir. So there are some of us determined to kill Caesar Rex. Including me." "Cassius, no!" "Cassius, yes! The other Brutus, Decimus. Gaius Trebonius. Cimber. Staius Murcus. Galba. Pontius Aquila. Twenty-two of us, Brutus! We need you to make it twenty-three." "Jupiter, Jupiter! I can't, Cassius! I can't!" "Of course you can!" a voice boomed. Porcia strode in from the colonnade door, face and eyes alight. "Cassius, it is the only thing to do! And Brutus will make it twenty-three." The two men stared at her, Brutus confounded, Cassius in a stew of apprehension. Why hadn't he remembered the colonnade? "Porcia, swear on your father's body that you won't say one word about this to anyone!" Cassius cried. "I swear it gladly! I'm not stupid, Cassius, I know how dangerous it is. Oh, but it's a right act! Kill the king and bring back Cato's beloved Republic! And who better to do the deed than my Brutus?" She began to stride up and down, shivering with joy. "Yes, a right act! Oh, to think I can help to avenge my father, bring back his Republic!" Brutus found words. "Porcia, you know that Cato wouldn't approve would never approve! Murder? Cato, condone murder? It is not a right act! Through all the years that Cato opposed Caesar, never once did he contemplate murder! It would it would denigrate him, destroy the memory of him as liberty's champion!" "You're wrong, wrong, wrong!" she shouted fiercely, coming to loom over him like a warrior, eyes blazing. "Are you craven, Brutus? Of course my father would approve! When Cato was alive, Caesar was a threat to the Republic, not its executioner! But now Caesar is its executioner! Cato would think as I think, as Cassius and all good men must think!" Brutus clapped his hands over his ears and fled the room. "Don't worry, I'll push him to it," Porcia said to Cassius. "By the time I finish with him, he'll do his duty." Her lips thinned, she stood frowning. "I know exactly how to do it, I really do. Brutus is a thinker. He'll have to be hunted into doing, he can't be given a moment to think. What I have to do is make him more afraid not to do it than do it. Hah!" she trumpeted, and walked out, leaving Cassius standing fascinated. "She's Cato's image," he breathed.

"What on earth is going on?" Servilia demanded the next day. "Look at it! Disgraceful!" The bust of the first Brutus, archaically bearded, wooden of expression, was covered with a graffito: BRUTUS, WHY HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME? I BANISHED ROME'S LAST KING! Pen in hand, Brutus emerged from his study prepared for the hundredth time to make peace between his wife and his mother, to find no sign of the one and the other indignant for an unrelated reason. Oh, Jupiter! "Paint! Paint!" said Servilia wrathfully. "It will take a bucket of turpentine to remove it, and the proper paint will come off too! Who did this? And what does it mean, 'why have you forgotten me?' Ditus! Ditus!" she called, marching away. But that was only the beginning. When Brutus went to the urban praetor's tribunal in the Forum accompanied by a host of clients, he found it daubed with graffiti too: BRUTUS, WHY DO YOU SLEEP? BRUTUS, WHY ARE YOU FAILING ROME? BRUTUS, WHAT SHOULD YOUR FIRST EDICT BE? BRUTUS, WHERE IS YOUR HONOR? BRUTUS, WAKE UP! The statue of the first Brutus that stood next to the statues of the kings of Rome bore the words BRUTUS, WHY HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME? i BANISHED ROME'S LAST KING! And the statue of Servilius Ahala, close by, said BRUTUS, DON'T YOU REMEMBER ME? I KILLED MAELIUS WHEN HE TRIED TO BE KING! The stall in the general marketplace which sold turpentine ran out of it; Brutus had to send servants all over Rome to buy up turpentine, its price suddenly soaring. He was terrified, mostly because he was sure that Caesar, who noticed everything, would notice those graffiti and query their purpose, which to Brutus's appalled eyes was glaringly apparent: he was being urged to kill the Dictator Perpetuus. And at dawn on the following day when Epaphroditus let in his clients, not only was the original graffito back on the faded, ruined bust of the first Brutus, but his own bust now said STRIKE HIM DOWN, BRUTUS! all over it, and the bust of Servilius Ahala said I KILLED MAELIUS! AM I THE ONLY PATRIOT IN THIS HOUSE? Neatly printed across a tesselated panel on the atrium wall was CALL YOURSELF BRUTUS? UNTIL YOU STRIKE, YOU DO NOT DESERVE THAT ILLUSTRIOUS, IMMORTAL NAME! Servilia was screeching and stamping around, Porcia was in fits of wild laughter, the clients were huddled bewildered in the atrium, and poor Brutus felt as if some dreadful lemur had escaped from the underworld to haunt him into madness. Not to mention Porcia's perpetual nagging. Instead of the sweet bliss of her body against his in their bed, he lay next to a yapping, harping termagant who never let up. "No, I refuse!" he shouted over and over and over. "I will not do murder!" Finally she literally dragged him into her sitting room, dumped him in a chair, and produced a small knife. Thinking she meant to use it on him, Brutus shrank away, but she yanked up her dress and plunged the blade into her white, fleshy thigh. "See? See? You may be afraid to strike, Brutus, but I am not!" she howled, the wound gushing blood. "All right, all right, all right!" he gasped, ashen. "All right, Porcia, you win! I'll do it. I'll strike." Porcia fainted. And so it came to pass that the Kill Caesar Club gained its precious figurehead, Marcus Junius Brutus Servilius Caepio. He was too intimidated to go on refusing, and too horribly aware that the longer Porcia's campaign of nagging and graffiti went on, the more Rome talked. "I am not blind and I am not deaf, Brutus," Servilia said to him after the surgeon had ministered to Porcia. "Nor am I stupid. All this is an attempt to murder Caesar, isn't it? Whoever is plotting the deed needs your name to do it. Having said that, I insist upon every detail. Talk, Brutus, or you're dead." "I know of no plot, Mama," Brutus managed to say, even looked into her eyes as he said it. "Someone is trying to destroy my reputation, discredit me with Caesar. Someone very malign and quite mad. I suspect it's Matinius." "Matinius?" she asked blankly. "Your own business director?" "He's been peculating. I fired him several days ago, but I neglected to tell Epaphroditus that he wasn't to be admitted to the house." He smiled sheepishly. "It's been a little hectic." "I see. Go on." "Now that Epaphroditus knows, Mama, I think you'll find that the graffiti will cease," Brutus went on, growing more and more confident. It was true that Matinius had peculated and been fired, that was the lucky part. "What's more, I shall see Caesar this morning and explain. I've hired ex-gladiators to watch my tribunal and the public statues night and day, so that should be the end of Matinius's campaign to get me in trouble with Caesar." "It makes sense," Servilia said slowly. "Nothing else does, Mama." He tittered nervously. "I mean, do you honestly think I'm capable of murdering Caesar?" Her head went back, she laughed. "Honestly? A mouse like you? A rabbit? A worm? A spineless nonentity under the thumb of an atrocious monster of a wife? I can credit she'd murder him, but you? It's far easier to believe in flying pigs." "Quite so, Mama." "Well, don't stand there looking like a moron! Go and see Caesar before he has you charged with plotting his murder." Brutus did as he was told well, didn't he always? In the end, it was the best alternative. "So that's what happened, Caesar," he said to the Dictator Perpetuus in his study at the Domus Publica. "I apologize for the worry it must have caused you." "It intrigued me, Brutus, but it didn't worry me. Why should the thought of death worry any man? There's little I haven't done or achieved, though I trust I'll live long enough to conquer the Kingdom of the Parthians." The pale eyes were permanently washed out these days, the pressure of work almost too much even for a Caesar. "If it isn't conquered, our western world will rue it sooner or later. I do confess I won't be sorry to leave Rome." A smile lit the eyes. "Not the right thing for a man who aspires to be king to say, is it? Oh, Brutus, what man in his right mind would want to king it over a contentious, fractious, prickly lot of Romans? Not I!" Brutus blinked at sudden tears, lowered his lashes. "A good question, Caesar. I wouldn't want to king it either. The trouble is that the graffiti have started rumors that there's a plot afoot to kill you. Start using your lictors again, please." "I don't think so," Caesar said cheerfully, ushering his visitor out. "If I did, people would say I was afraid, and I can't have that. The worst part of it is that Calpurnia has heard the rumors, and frets. So does Cleopatra." He laughed. "Women! Let them, and they'd have a man shrinking like a violet." "How very true," said Brutus, and walked back to his house to face his wife. "Is it right, what Servilia said?" Porcia demanded ferociously. "I don't know until you tell me what she said." "That you've been to see Caesar." "After the rash of graffiti in so many public places, Porcia, I could do little else," Brutus said stiffly. "There's no need to fly into a rage Fortuna is smiling on your cause. I am able to blame Matinius. If that satisfied Mama, which it did, it couldn't help but satisfy our ruler." He took Porcia's hands in his own, squeezed them. "My dear girl, you must learn discretion! If you don't, we cannot succeed in this enterprise. Hysterical scenes and self-mutilation have to stop, hear me? If you genuinely love me, then protect me, don't incriminate me. Having seen Caesar, I now have to see Cassius, who must be as worried as I am. Not to mention the others involved. What was a secret is now being talked about everywhere, thanks to you." "I had to get you to do it," she said. "Granted, but you did. Your mood is too unstable. Have you forgotten that my mother lives here? She was Caesar's mistress for years, and she still loves him desperately." His face twisted. "Please believe me, my dearest one, when I say that I have no love for Caesar. All my pain is because of him. Were I a Cassius, to kill him would be easier than lifting a feather. But what you will not understand is that I am not a Cassius. To speak of murder and to do murder are two very different things. In all my life I have never killed a creature bigger than a spider. But to kill Caesar?" He shuddered. "That is like deliberately stepping into the Fields of Fire. A right act in one way, I can see that, but in another oh, Porcia, I cannot convince myself that killing him will benefit Rome or bring back the Republic. My instincts say that to kill him will only make matters worse. Because to kill him is to tamper with the will of the gods. All murder does that." She heard part of it, but only what her unruly heart would let her hear. Her light died, she drooped. "Dear Brutus, I see the justice in your criticisms of me. I am too unstable, my moods do get out of control. I will behave, I promise. But to kill him is the rightest act in Rome's history!"

February over, Caesar convened the Senate on the Kalends of March, intending it to be the last meeting before he stepped down as consul on the Ides. Shipment of the legions across the Adriatic continued at a furious pace; on the Macedonian side of that sea they were camped between Dyrrachium and Apollonia, with Caesar's personal staff located in Apollonia. Dyrrachium was the northern and Apollonia the southern terminus of the Via Egnatia, the Roman road east to Thrace and the Hellespont. An eight-hundred-mile march that the legions were expected to complete in a month. At the meeting on the Kalends Caesar outlined the intended campaign of Publius Vatinius and Marcus Antonius against King Burebistas of the Dacians, necessary because, said Caesar, he was going to plant colonies of Roman Head Count all around the margins of the Euxine Sea. As soon as the year was over, he went on, Publius Dolabella would go to Syria as governor and keep Caesar supplied during his campaigns. The House, quite sparsely attended, was polite enough to listen to this old news. "When the Senate convenes on the Ides, it will do so outside the pomerium, as the subject will be my war. In the Curia Pompeia, rather than in Bellona. Bellona is too small. At that meeting I will also allocate provinces to this year's praetors."

That night the Kill Caesar Club gathered at the temple of Ceres. When Cassius walked in with Marcus Brutus, the rest of the members stared in disbelief, including Gaius Trebonius. "Knock me over with a pine needle!" Publius Casca exclaimed. Like everybody else, he was extremely apprehensive, for the rumors of a conspiracy to kill Caesar were increasing. "Did you give us away to Caesar when you saw him, Brutus?" "Well, did you?" his brother, Gaius Casca, demanded. "We discussed the peculations of a colleague of mine," Brutus said coolly as he moved with Cassius to a bench beneath Pluto. He had gone beyond fear, was reconciled to what was going to happen, though setting eyes on some of these faces was no joy. Lucius Minucius Basilus! Did any noble purpose need such dross to fuel it? An upstart who claimed descent from Cincinnatus's Minucius and tortured his slaves! And Petronius, an insect whose father had been a dealer in mine and quarry slaves! Caesennius Lento, already a murderer of the great! And Aquila, his mother's lover, who was younger than her son! Oh, what a wonderful little group! "Order, order!" Trebonius said sharply; he too was feeling the strain. "Marcus Brutus, welcome." He walked to the center of the floor beneath the plinth of Ceres and looked at the twenty-two faces, ruddied by the lamplight, grotesquely shadowed, ominous and unfamiliar. "Tonight we have to make some decisions. There are but fourteen days left until the Ides of March. Though Caesar says he'll remain three further days in Rome after that, we can't count on it. If word should come from Brundisium that he's needed, he'll go at once. Whereas until the Ides, he has to be in Rome." He took a turn about the cella, an ordinary man of the most undistinguished kind, slight in build, average in height, drab of coloring and mien. Yet, as all the men present knew, remarkably able. If his brief consulship had been humdrum, it was only because Caesar had left him nothing of note to do. He was governor-designate of Asia Province, not a military command, admittedly, but a difficult job thanks to the province's financial distress. His greatest asset was his peculiarly Roman intelligence a mixture of pragmatism, an instinct for the right moment to act, a nose sensitive to brewing trouble, and superlative logistical skills. Therefore they settled down to listen to him feeling less queasy, less unsure. "For Marcus Brutus's benefit, I had better outline what has already been decided, namely, the location of the deed. The fact that Caesar has no lictors is of immeasurable importance, but he is still surrounded by hundreds of clients whenever he goes about the city. That narrowed our opportunity to one location the long lane between Cleopatra's palace and the Via Aurelia, because he takes no one with him when he goes to visit her except two or three secretaries. Now that the Transtiberini have been thinned out by his migrant pursuits, the area is deserted. So that is where we will ambush him. The date has not yet been decided." "Ambush?" asked Brutus, sounding amazed. "Surely you're not going to ambush Caesar? How will people know who did it?" "Ambush is the only way," said Trebonius blankly. "To prove we did it, we take his head and we go to the Forum, where we soften everybody up with a couple of magnificent speeches, call the Senate into session and demand that it commend us for ridding Rome of a tyrant. If we have to, we kidnap Cicero into attending he'll back us up, nothing surer." "That is absolutely appalling!" Brutus cried. "Disgusting! Sickening! Caesar's head? And why isn't Cicero a part of this?" "Because Cicero's chickenhearted and incapable of keeping his mouth shut!" Decimus Brutus snapped, hackles up. "We'll use him afterward, not before or during. How do you envision killing Caesar, Brutus? In public?" "Yes, in public," Brutus said without hesitation. A collective gasp went up. "We'd be lynched on the spot," said Galba, swallowing. "This is tyrannicide, not murder," said Brutus in the tone that told Cassius that Brutus's mind was irrevocably made up. "It must be a public deed, out in the open. Anything furtive brands us as assassins. I was led to believe that we're acting in the spirit of the first Brutus and Ahala, who were liberators, and hailed as such. Our motives are pure, our intentions noble. We're ridding Rome of a tyrant king, and that calls for the courage of our convictions. Don't you see?" he asked, hands out in appeal. "We cannot be applauded for this deed if it has been done secretly, by stealth!" "Oh, I do see," Basilus sneered. "We meet Caesar on the, say, Sacra Via, in the midst of a thousand of his clients, we part the sea of people, stroll up to him casually and say, 'Ave, Caesar, we are honorable men who are about to kill you. Now just stand there, drop the toga off your left shoulder, and present your heart for our daggers.' What utter rot! Whereabouts do you live, Brutus? Among the clouds of Olympus? Plato's ideal republic?" "No, but I don't busy myself with hot irons and pincers for my own amusement either, Basilus!" Brutus snarled, astonished at his own fierce anger. Pushed into this by Porcia he might have been, but he was not about to pander to the likes of a Minucius Basilus for a thousand Catos! Irrevocably committed, he found now that he cared. Listening to an obdurate Brutus had an unexpected effect on Cassius; from self-preservation he went to a sudden enormous desire to offer his very life on the altar of Brutus's making. Brutus was right! What better way to kill Caesar than out in the open? They would all die for it on the spot, but Rome would put their statues among the gods forever. There were worse fates. "Tacete, the lot of you!" he yelled, entering the fray. "He is right, you fools! We do the deed in public! It's my experience that things clandestine are more likely to go wrong straight ahead is the way to go, not down some crooked lane. Naturally we don't just walk up to Caesar and announce our intentions, Basilus, but a knife can kill as surely in public as anywhere else. What's more, it gives us the chance to kill all three of them in one swoop. Caesar has a habit of standing with his junior consul on one side and his suffect consul on the other." He hit the palm of one hand with the other's fist smack! "We get rid of Antonius and Dolabella as well as Caesar." "No!" Brutus shouted. "No, no! We're tyrannicides, not mass murderers! I won't hear of killing Antonius and Dolabella! If they happen to be flanking him, let them. We kill the king only the king! Crying out even as we do it that we are freeing Rome of a tyrant! Then we drop our daggers and we go to the rostra, where we speak to everyone proudly, unashamedly, jubilantly! Our best orators will have to make mountains move and gorgons weep, but we have orators in our ranks able to do that. We will call ourselves Rome's liberators, and stand there wearing caps of liberty to reinforce our action." Oh, why did I ever think that Marcus Brutus would prove an asset? Trebonius asked himself, listening to this nonsense with a leaden heart. His eyes met Decimus Brutus's, who rolled his upward in despair. No matter if Brutus was howled down, the plan was in tatters, its integrity undermined. To do the deed in secret and confess to it at a prearranged moment, with Antonius already apprised, was one thing. What Brutus suggested was sheer suicide. Antonius would have to retaliate by killing them! Mind racing, Trebonius tried to pluck something out of the debris that would retrieve the plan. "Wait! Wait! I have it!" he hollered, so loudly that the developing argument ceased. Every face turned to him. "It can be done publicly, yet safely," he said. "On the Ides of March, in the Curia Pompeia is that public enough for you, Brutus?" "A curia of the Senate is exactly the right kind of public place," Brutus gasped, eyes distended, sweat rolling off his brow. "I didn't mean to imply that it should necessarily be done in the midst of a huge Forum crowd, only that there must be witnesses of the highest repute present men able to swear on sacred oath to our sincerity, our honorable intentions. A meeting of the House would fulfill all my criteria, Trebonius." "Then that solves where we do it and when we do it," Trebonius said thankfully. "Caesar always goes straight inside, he never pauses to chat. Usually he spends the time between his entry and the House's seating itself in his eternal paperwork. But he never infringes the House rules by bringing any secretaries in, and he has no lictors. Once he enters the curia, he's totally unprotected. I agree with you entirely, Brutus, that we kill Caesar and Caesar alone. That means we have to keep the other curule magistrates outside until the deed is done, because they all have lictors. Lictors don't think, they act. Let any men raise a hand against Caesar in the presence of anyone's lictors, and they'll leap to his defense. We won't succeed. So it is vital that we keep the other curule magistrates outside." The faces were beginning to lighten; Trebonius was devising a new plan that had the merit of immediacy. Not one of the club members had been looking forward to doing the deed and confessing to it later, at the propitious moment, by producing a grisly trophy like Caesar's head. Some among them had already begun to wonder if all twenty-three would have the dedication and the courage to own up. "We have to strike fast," Trebonius went on. "There are sure to be backbenchers inside, but we'll be clustered around Caesar, and most won't realize what's going on until it's too late. And we will be right where we can make the most of our situation with oratory, caps of liberty, whatever. Everyone's first reaction will be shock, and shock paralyzes. By the time that Antonius gets his breath back, Decimus I think we all agree that he's our best orator will be in full spate. If he's nothing else, Antonius is a practical man. What's done will be done as far as he's concerned, Caesar's cousin or not. The House will take its attitude from him, not from Dolabella. Everyone knows there's bad blood between Caesar and Antonius. Truly, fellow members of our club, I am sure that Antonius will be prepared to listen, that he won't exact reprisals." Oh, Trebonius, Trebonius! What do you know that the rest of us don't? Decimus asked himself at the conclusion of this breathless but effective speech. You've struck a deal with our Antonius, haven't you? How clever of you! And how clever of Antonius! He gets what he wants without lifting a finger against Cousin Gaius. "I still say kill Antonius too," Cassius said stubbornly. Decimus answered. "No, I don't think so. Trebonius is right. If we're unapologetic about our deed of liberation an excellent word, Brutus, I think we should call ourselves the Liberators! then Antonius has many reasons to accommodate us. For one thing, he'll lead the invasion of the Parthians." "Isn't that to take Caesar's place?" Cassius grumbled. "It's a war, and Antonius likes making war. But take Caesar's place? He'll never do that, he's too lazy. The only strife will be between him and Dolabella over who's the senior consul," said Staius Murcus. "But I do suggest that one of us runs off to get Cicero, who won't be there while Caesar's in the House, but will be only too happy to be there to look on his dead body." "There's a more important problem," Decimus said, "namely, keeping Antonius, Dolabella and the other curule magistrates outside the curia itself while we do the deed. One of us will have to stay in Pompeius's garden. He has to be the one on best terms with Antonius, the one Antonius will be glad to linger with, talk to. If Antonius doesn't move to go inside, nor will any of the others, including Dolabella." He drew a long breath. "I nominate Gaius Trebonius to stay in the garden." When Trebonius jumped, Decimus walked up to him, took his hand and clasped it strongly. "Those of us from the Gallic War know that you're not afraid to use a dagger, so no one will call you craven, my dear Gaius I think it has to be you who stays outside, even if that means you won't have the opportunity to strike a blow for liberty." Trebonius returned the grip. "I'm willing, on condition that every one of you votes me in, and that you, Decimus, strike an extra blow for me. Twenty-three men, twenty-three blows. That way, no one will ever know whose dagger actually killed Caesar." "I'll do that gladly," said Decimus, eyes shining. The vote was taken: Gaius Trebonius was unanimously elected the man who stayed outside to detain Marcus Antonius. "Is there any need to meet again before the Ides?" Caecilius Buciolanus asked. "None," said Trebonius, smiling broadly. "What I do insist upon is that all of us congregate in the garden an hour after dawn. It doesn't matter if we huddle together and talk too earnestly to invite company, because as soon as the deed is done, everyone will know what we were talking about. We'll run through it then in greater detail. Caesar won't be on time. It's the Ides, don't forget, which means that Caesar will have to fill in for our nonexistent flamen Dialis and lead his sheep down the Sacra Via, then climb the steps to sacrifice it on the Arx. He'll also have unavoidable business, given that he leaves Rome so soon afterward or would, if he were still alive." They laughed dutifully, save for Brutus and Cassius. "I predict that we'll have some hours to discuss the deed before Caesar turns up," Trebonius continued. "Decimus, it would be a good idea if you presented yourself at the Domus Publica at dawn, then go with him to Jupiter's ceremony and wherever else he chooses. As soon as he starts for the Campus Martius, send us a warning. Be open about it tell him he's so late that it might be prudent to notify the senators that he's actually on his way." "In his high red boots." Quintus Ligarius giggled. At the doors of Ceres they all shook hands solemnly, looked into each other's eyes, then melted into the darkness.

"Gaius, I wish that you'd recall your lictors," Lucius Caesar said to his cousin, encountering him leaving the Treasury. "And don't you dare ignore me to dictate a letter! This mania for work is becoming ridiculous." "I would love to be able to take an hour off, Lucius, but it is quite impossible," Caesar said, banishing the secretary to walk in his rear. "There are a hundred and fifty-three separate pieces of agrarian legislation, thanks to our lack of public land and the cantankerousness of every latifundium owner my commission's buying from there are almost as many colonies on foreign land as that, all of which have to be individually legislated in my function as censor, I have innumerable state contracts to let every day thirty or forty petitions come in from citizens of this town or that, all with serious grievances and that is but the surface of my work mountain. My senators and magistrates are either too lazy, too haughty or too disinterested in the machinery of government to act as deputies, and so far I haven't had the time to create the bureaucratic departments which will have to come in before I can step down as dictator." "I'm here and willing to help, but you don't ask me," Lucius said a little stiffly. Caesar smiled, squeezed his arm. "You're a venerable, not so young consular, and your services to me in Gaul alone must excuse you from the plod of paperwork. No, it's high time that the backbenchers were given something more to do than merely sit mum during infrequent meetings of the House and spend the rest of their days touting for juicy criminal lawsuits that benefit them but not Rome." Lucius looked mollified, consented to walk with Caesar as they passed between the Well of Juturna and the little round aedes of Vesta, heading a huge crowd of Caesar's clients, who were a part of a great man's burden. One that Lucius Caesar was glad to see now that his cousin refused to be escorted by lictors. Though stalls and booths had largely been banished from the Forum Romanum save for the impermanent barrows vending snacks to Forum frequenters, there were no laws on the tablets to prevent people from usurping a tiny spot of Forum ground, thereon to pursue an activity usually to do with the occult. Romans were a superstitious lot, loved astrologers, fortune-tellers and eastern magi, a number of whom dotted the margins of the area. Cross any of a dozen palms with a silver coin and you could find out what the morrow held, or why your business venture had failed, or what kind of future your newborn son could hope for. Old Spurinna enjoyed an unparalleled reputation among these soothsayers. His place was adjacent to the public entrance to the Vestal Virgin side of the Domus Publica, the door through which any Roman citizen desirous of depositing his or her will with the Vestals might enter and lodge it. An excellent site for one in the soothsaying business, for men and women with death on their minds and wills in their hands were always tempted to pause, give old Spurinna a denarius, and learn how much longer they had to live. His appearance inspired confidence in his mystical gift, for he was skinny, dirty, unkempt, seamed of face. As the two Caesars passed by him without noticing him he had been a fixture there for decades Spurinna got to his feet. "Caesar!" he cried. Both Caesars stopped, both looked at him. "Which Caesar?" Lucius asked, grinning. "There is only one Caesar, Chief Augur! His name will come to mean the man who rules Rome," Spurinna shrilled, dark irises ringed with the white halo that heralded the approach of death. " 'Caesar' means 'king'!" "Oh, no, not again." Caesar sighed. "Who's paying you to say that, Spurinna? Marcus Antonius?" "It isn't what I want to say, Caesar, and no one paid me." "Then what do you want to say?" "Beware the Ides of March!" Caesar fumbled in the purse attached to his belt, flipped a gold coin that Spurinna caught deftly. "What's going to happen on the Ides of March, old man?" "Your life will be imperiled!" "I thank you for the warning," Caesar said, and walked on. "He's usually uncannily right," Lucius said with a shiver. "Caesar, please recall your lictors!" "And let all of Rome know that I pay attention to rumors and ancient visionaries? Admit I am afraid? Never," said Caesar.

Caught in the web of his own making, Cicero had no choice but to sit in the spectators' bleachers while legislation, policy making and senatorial decrees went on without him. All he had to do was walk into the curia, have his slave unfold his stool, and put his bottom on it among the most senior consulars of the front benches. But pride, stubbornness and his detestation of Caesar Rex forbade it. Worse still, he was feeling the full force of Caesar's enmity since the publication of his "Cato," and Atticus too was unpopular with Caesar. No matter how they tried, or through whom, the migrant poor of Rome's seediest areas kept on flooding into the colony outside Buthrotum. It was Dolabella who first told him that there was a rumor going about that Caesar was to be assassinated. "Who? When?" he asked eagerly. "That's just it, no one really knows. It's a typical rumor 'they say' and 'I heard that' and 'there's a feeling in the air' no substance that I've managed to find. I know you can't stand him, but I'm Caesar's man through and through," Dolabella declared, "so I'm looking hard and listening harder. If anything happened to him, I'd be all to pieces. Antonius would run rampant." "No whisper of names, even a name?" Cicero asked. "None." "I'll pop around to see Brutus," Cicero said, and shooed his ex-son-in-law out. "Have you heard any stories that someone is plotting to assassinate Caesar?" Cicero demanded as soon as a goblet of wine-and-water was put into his hand. "Oh, that business!" Brutus said, sounding slightly angry. "So there is something to it?" Cicero asked eagerly. "No, there's absolutely nothing to it, that's what irritates me. As far as I know, it started because that madman Matinius daubed graffiti all over Rome instructing me to kill Caesar." "Oh, the graffiti! I didn't see them myself, but I heard. Is that all? How disappointing." "Yes, isn't it?" asked Brutus. "Dictator Perpetuus. You'd think there were some men in Rome with enough gumption to rid us of this Caesar." The dark eyes, sterner than of yore, held Cicero's with some irony in their depths. "Why don't you rid us of this Caesar?" "I? " Cicero gasped, clutching dramatically at his chest. "My dear Brutus, it's not my style. My assassinations are done with a pen and a voice. To each his own." "Staying out of the Senate has silenced your pen and voice, Cicero, that's the trouble. There's no one left in that body to aim a verbal dagger at Caesar. You were our only hope." "Enter the House with that man in a dictator's chair? I'd rather die!" Cicero declared in ringing tones. A small, uncomfortable silence fell, broken by Brutus. "Are you in Rome until the Ides?" he asked. "Definitely." Cicero coughed delicately. "Is Porcia well?" "Not very, no." "Then I trust your mother is?" "Oh, she's indestructible, but she isn't here at the moment. Tertulla is with child, and Mama thought some country air might benefit her, so they've gone to Tusculum," said Brutus. Cicero departed, convinced he was being palmed off, though why or because of what escaped him. In the Forum he encountered Mark Antony deep in conversation with Gaius Trebonius. For a moment he thought they were going to ignore him, then Trebonius started, smiled. "Cicero, how good to see you! In Rome for a while, I hope?" Antony being Antony simply grunted something, gave Trebonius a casual flip of his hand, and walked off toward the Carinae. "I detest that man!" Cicero exclaimed. "Oh, he's more bark than bite," Trebonius said comfortably. "His whole trouble is his size. It must be very hard to think of oneself as an ordinary man when one is so well endowed." A notorious prude, Cicero flushed. "Disgraceful!" he cried. "Absolutely disgraceful!" "The Lupercalia, you mean?" "Of course the Lupercalia! Exposing himself!" Trebonius shrugged. "That's Antonius." "And offering Caesar a diadem?" "I think that was a put up job between the pair of them. It enabled Caesar to engrave his public repudiation of the diadem on a bronze tablet which, I am reliably informed, will be attached to his new rostra. In Latin and in Greek." Cicero spotted Atticus emerging from the Argiletum, farewelled Trebonius and hurried off. It's done, thought Trebonius, glad to be rid of a nosy gossip like Cicero. Antonius knows when and where.

On the thirteenth day of March, Caesar finally managed to find the time to visit Cleopatra, who welcomed him with open arms, kisses, feverish endearments. As tired as he was, that wretched traitor in his groin insisted upon immediate gratification, so they retired to Cleopatra's bed and made love until well into the afternoon. Then Caesarion had to have his play with tata, who enjoyed the little fellow more each time he saw him. His Gallic son by Rhiannon, vanished without a trace, had also looked very like his father, but Caesar remembered him as a rather limited child who had not been able to name the fifty men inside his toy Trojan horse. Caesar had commissioned another for this boy, discovering in delight that he could identify every one of them after a single lesson. It boded well for his future, it meant he wasn't stupid. "Only one thing worries me," said Cleopatra over a late meal. "What's that, my love?" "I am still not with child." "Well, I haven't been able to get across the Tiber nearly as often as I had hoped," he said calmly, "and it seems I am not a man who impregnates his women the moment he doffs his toga." "I fell with Caesarion immediately." "Accidents do happen." "It must be because I don't have Tach'a with me. She could read the petal bowl, she knew the days to make love." "Offer to Juno Sospita. Her temple is outside the sacred boundary," he said easily. "I have offered to Isis and Hathor, but I suspect they don't like being so far from Nilus." "Never mind, they'll be home again soon." She rolled over on the couch, her big golden eyes raised to his face. Yes, he was terribly tired, and sometimes forgetful of his sweet drink. There had been one public episode when he fell and twitched, but luckily Hapd'efan'e had been there and got the syrup down before he needed to intubate. Caesar, recovered, had blamed it on muscle cramps, which seemed to satisfy his audience. The one good thing about it was that it had given him a fright, so he had been more mindful since, Hapd'efan'e more alert. "You've grown so beautiful in my eyes," he said, rubbing one palm on her belly. Poor little girl, deprived of her issue because a Roman man, Pontifex Maximus, could not condone incest. Purring and stretching, she lowered her long black lashes, reached out a hand to touch him. "Me, with my great beaky nose and my scrawny body?" she asked. "Even at sixty, Servilia is more beautiful." "Servilia is an evil woman, make no mistake about that. Once I did think her beautiful, but what kept me in her toils was never beauty. She's intelligent, interesting, and devious." "I've found her a very good friend." "For her own purposes, believe me." Cleopatra shrugged. "What do her purposes matter? I'm not a Roman woman she can ruin, and you're right, she's intelligent and interesting. She saved me from dying of boredom while you were in Spain. Through her, I actually met a few more Roman women. That Clodia!" She giggled. "A female rake, very good company. And she brought me Hortensia, surely the most intelligent woman here." "I wouldn't know. After Caepio died and that's over twenty years ago she donned widow's weeds and refused every suitor who dangled after her. I'm surprised she mixes with Clodia." "Perhaps," said Cleopatra demurely, "Hortensia prefers to have lovers. Perhaps she and Clodia sit together and choose them from among the naked young swimmers in the Trigarium." "One thing about that family of Claudians, they never have cared about their reputations. Do they still visit, Clodia and Hortensia?" "Often. In fact, I see more of them than I do of you." "A reproach?" "No, I understand, but that doesn't make your absences any easier to bear. Though since you've been back, I see more Roman men. Lucius Piso and Philippus, for instance." "And Cicero?" "Cicero and I don't get along," said Cleopatra, pulling a face. "What I want to know is, when will you bring some of the more famous Roman men to visit me? Like Marcus Antonius. I'm dying to meet him, but he ignores my invitations." "With Fulvia for wife, he wouldn't dare accept them." Caesar grinned. "She's very possessive." "Well, don't tell her he's coming." After a small pause she said, wistfully, "Won't I see you again until the Ides are gone? I'd hoped for tomorrow too." "I can sleep in your bed tonight, my love, but at dawn I must get back to the city. Too much work." "Then tomorrow night?" she pressed. "I can't. Lepidus is having a men's dinner I daren't miss. I'll have to work through it, but at least I'll have a chance to shake a few hands I mightn't otherwise. It would be churlish to tell Brutus and Cassius about their provinces for the first time in the full glare of the Senate." "Two more famous men I've never met." "Pharaoh, you're twenty-five years old now, therefore quite old enough to realize why a great many of Rome's most prominent men and women are reluctant to make your acquaintance," Caesar said levelly. "They call you the Queen of Beasts, and blame you for my reputed desire to become the King of Rome. You're deemed a corrupting influence." "How idiotic!" she cried, sitting up indignantly. "There's no one in the world could influence your thinking."

Marcus Aemilius Lepidus had done very well for himself since Caesar had been declared Dictator. The youngest of the three sons of that Lepidus who, with Brutus's father, had rebelled against Sulla, he had been born with a caul over his face; this was considered a mark of lifelong good fortune. Certainly he had been lucky to be too young to become embroiled in his father's revolt; the oldest boy had died in it, and the second boy, Paullus, had spent many years in exile. The family was patrician and immensely august, but after Lepidus Senior died of a broken heart, there didn't seem to be any chance that it would retrieve its position among the greatest of the Famous Families of Rome. Then Caesar had bribed the recalled Paullus into a consulship he had hoped to see enable him to be elected consul himself without crossing the pomerium to declare his candidacy. Unfortunately Paullus was a slug, not worth the enormous sum Caesar had paid him; Curio, bought more cheaply, had proven of better value. But none of Caesar's ploys to avoid unmerited prosecution had worked; crossing the Rubicon into rebellion, always his last resort, became the only alternative. And Marcus Lepidus, the youngest of those three sons, had immediately seen his opportunity, allied himself with Caesar, and never looked back. In personality he was easygoing and unobservant, was prone to seek the least taxing way to do things, and was generally regarded as a political lightweight. To Caesar, however, he had two great virtues: he was Caesar's man through and through, and a high enough aristocrat to give Caesar's faction some much needed respectability. His first wife had been a Cornelia Dolabellae who had owned no dowry, but died shortly thereafter in childbirth. His next bride came with five hundred talents; she was the middle daughter of Servilia and her second husband, Silanus. Junilla had married him some years before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, years during which her money kept Lepidus afloat. When civil war came, his mother-in-law, Servilia, was quite happy to have him and Vatia Isauricus in Caesar's camp, since Brutus and Tertulla were in Pompey's camp. No matter to Servilia which side won the war she couldn't lose. Lepidus was the son-in-law she liked the least, principally because his birth was so lofty that he never bothered to flatter her. But Lepidus, a tall, handsome man whose blood links to the Julii Caesares showed in his face, cared nothing for Servilia's good opinion. Nor did Junilla, who happened to love Lepidus very much. They had two sons and a daughter, all still children. Enriched through allegiance to Caesar, Lepidus had bought an imposingly large residence on the Germalus of the Palatine, overlooking the Forum, and owned a dining room large enough to hold six couches. His cooks were quite as good as Cleopatra's, his wine cellar commended by those privileged to sample its contents. Well aware that Caesar was likely to quit Rome the moment the meeting of the Senate on the Ides was over, Lepidus had gotten in early and secured Caesar for his dinner party on the evening before the Ides. He also invited Antony, Dolabella, Brutus, Cassius, Decimus Brutus, Trebonius, Lucius Piso, Lucius Caesar, Calvinus and Philippus; he had badly wanted Cicero, who declined "due to my grievous state of health." Much to his surprise, Caesar arrived first. "My dear Caesar, I thought you'd be the last to come and the first to go," Lepidus said, greeting him in the awesome atrium. "There's method in my madness, Master of the Horse," Caesar said, one hand indicating the retinue behind him, which included his Egyptian physician. "I'm afraid I'm going to be unpardonably rude by working all the way through dinner, so I came early enough to ask that you allocate me your meanest couch all to myself. Put whomsoever you like in the locus consularis, just give me an end couch where I can read, write and dictate without driving the rest of your guests to distraction." Lepidus took this with good humor unruffled. "Whatever you want shall be yours, Caesar," he said, leading the awkward guest of honor into the dining room. "I'll bring a fifth couch, then take your pick." "How many are we?" "Twelve, including you and me." "Edepol! That will leave you with two men only on one of your couches," Caesar said. "Not to worry, Caesar. I'll put Antonius on my couch in the locus consularis and no one between us," Lepidus said with a grin. "He's such a hulk that three on his couch is a tight squeeze." "Actually, I'm going to even you up," Caesar said as servants carried a fifth couch in and put it beyond the lone couch to the left of the host's lectus medius, which formed the crosspiece of the U. "I'll take it, it will suit me nicely. Plenty of room to spread my papers out, and, if you would, a chair behind it for my secretary. I'll use one man at a time, the rest can wait outside." "I'll see to it that they have comfortable chairs and plenty to eat," Lepidus said, hurrying away to call his steward. Thus it was that when the others began to arrive, they found Caesar already ensconced on the least enviable couch, a secretary on a chair behind him and the rest of his couch littered with piles of papers and scrolls. "Poor Lepidus!" said Lucius Caesar, eyes dancing. "You'd do best to put Calvinus, Philippus and me on the couch opposite this impolite reprobate. None of us is timid enough to leave him alone, and who knows? He might actually talk a little." When the first course was carried in, Mark Antony and Lepidus reclined alone on the lectus medius; Dolabella, Lucius Piso and Trebonius reclined to the immediate right, with Philippus, Lucius Caesar and Calvinus beyond them; on the immediate left lay Brutus, Cassius and Decimus Brutus, with Caesar beyond them. Naturally Caesar's industriousness came as no surprise to any of the diners, so the meal and the conversation proceeded merrily, aided by an excellent Falernian white to accompany the fishier, more nibbly first course, a superb Chian red to accompany the meaty, more substantial main course, and a sweetish, slightly effervescent white wine from Alba Fucentia to accompany the desserts and cheeses which formed the third, final course. Philippus was ecstatic over a new dessert Lepidus's cooks had devised, a gelatinous mixture of cream, honey, pulped early strawberries, egg yolks, and egg whites beaten stiffly, the whole turned out of a chilled mold shaped like a peacock and decorated with piped whipped cow's cream dyed in pinks, greens, blues, lilacs and yellows from leaf and petal juices. "Tasting this," he mumbled, "I admit that my Mons Fiscellus ambrosia is too sickly-sweet. This is perfect! Absolute ambrosia! Caesar, do have some!" Caesar glanced up, grinned, took a spoonful and looked quite astonished. "You're right, Philippus, it is ambrosia. Clause ten: it shall not be lawful to sell, barter, gift or otherwise dispose of a free grain chit, on penalty of fifty nundinae throwing lime into the paupers' pits of the necropolis." He ate another spoonful. "Very good! My physician would approve. Clause eleven: upon the death of a holder of a free grain chit, it shall be returned to the plebeian aedile's booth together with proof of death ..." "I thought," said Decimus Brutus, "that the free grain dole legislation was already in place, Caesar." "Yes, it is, but upon rereading it, I found it too ambiguous. The best laws, Decimus, contain no loopholes." "I like the punishment," said Dolabella. "Shoveling lime on stinking mass graves will deter anybody from almost anything." "Well, I had to think of a deterrent, which is very difficult when people have no money to pay fines and no property to impound. Holders of free grain chits are very poor," said Caesar. "Now that your head is up from your papers, answer me one question," said Dolabella. "I note you want a hundred pieces of artillery per legion for the Parthian campaign. I know you're an ardent exponent of artillery, Caesar, but isn't that excessive?" "Cataphracts," said Caesar. "Cataphracts," asked Dolabella, frowning. "Parthian cavalry," said Cassius, who had seen them in their thousands at the Bilechas River. "Clad in chainmail from head to foot. They ride giant horses clad in chainmail too." "Yes, I remembered in your report to the Senate, Cassius, that you said they couldn't charge at a full gallop, and it occurred to me that they would suffer terribly from heavy bombardment in the early stages of a battle, said Caesar, looking pensive. "It may also be possible to bombard the trains of camels bringing spare arrows up to the Parthian archer cavalry. If my ideas are wrong, I'll put however much of the artillery into storage, but somehow I don't think I'm wrong." "Nor do I," said Cassius, looking impressed. Antony, who detested all-men dinners populated by the stuffier among his peers, listened to this with his eyes roving thoughtfully over the three men on the lectus imus to his left Brutus, Cassius and Decimus Brutus and then onward to Caesar. Tomorrow, my dear cousin, tomorrow! Tomorrow you will be dead at the hands of these three men and that unappreciated genius facing them, Trebonius. He's stuck to it, and it's going to happen. Did you ever see a more miserable face than Brutus's? Why is he in it, if he's so terrified? I bet he never plunges his dagger in! "Returning to lime pits, necropolises and death," Antony said suddenly and loudly, "what's the best way to die?" Brutus jumped, went white, put his spoon down quickly. "In battle," said Cassius instantly. "In one's sleep," said Lepidus, thinking of his father, forced to divorce the wife he worshiped, pining away for her so slowly. "Of sheer old age," said Dolabella, chuckling. "With the taste of something like this coating one's tongue," said Philippus, licking his spoon. "With one's children around one," said Lucius Caesar, whose only son had been such a disappointment. There was no fate worse than outliving one's children. "Feeling vindicated," said Trebonius, casting Antony a look of loathing. Was this boor about to betray them? "In the act of reading a new poem better than Catullus's," said Lucius Piso. "I think Helvius Cinna might do it one day." Caesar looked up, brows raised. "The way doesn't matter," he said, "as long as it's sudden." Calvinus, who had been shifting and grunting for some time, gave a moan and clutched at his chest. "I fear," he said, face grey, "that my death is arriving. The pain! The pain!" Instead of abandoning his work to tell Brutus and Cassius of their provinces next year, Caesar had to summon Hapd'efan'e from the atrium; the matter was forgotten as the guests clustered to view Calvinus with concern, Caesar in their forefront. "It is a spasm of the heart," said Hapd'efan'e, "but I do not think he will die. He must be taken home and treated." Caesar supervising, Calvinus was put into a litter. "An ill-omened subject!" Caesar snapped at Antony. More ill-omened than you realize, said Antony silently.

Brutus and Cassius walked most of the way home together, not speaking until they came to Cassius's door. "We're all meeting tomorrow morning half an hour after dawn at the foot of the Steps of Cacus," Cassius said. "That leaves plenty of time to get out to the Campus Martius. I'll see you there and then." "No," said Brutus, "don't wait for me. I'd prefer to go on my own. My lictors will be company enough." Cassius frowned, peered at the pale face. "I hope you're not thinking of backing out?" he asked sharply. "Of course not." Brutus drew a breath. "It's just that poor Porcia has worked herself into such a state she knows " Came the sound of Cassius grinding his teeth. "That woman is a menace!" He banged on his door. "Just don't renege, hear me?" Brutus trudged around the corner to his own house, knocked on its door and was admitted by the porter, praying as he tiptoed through the corridors toward the master's sleeping cubicle that Porcia would be asleep. She was not. The moment the wan light of his lamp showed in the doorway she leaped out of their bed, threw herself at him and clasped him convulsively. "What is it, what is it?" she whispered loudly enough for the whole house to hear. "You're so early! Is it discovered?" "Hush, hush!" He closed the door. "No, it is not discovered. Calvinus took seriously ill, so the party broke up." He shed his toga and tunic, left them lying on the floor, sat on the edge of the bed to unbuckle his shoes. "Porcia, go to sleep." "I can't sleep," she said, sitting beside him with a thump. "Then take some syrup of poppies." "It constipates me." "Well, you're rapidly sending me the other way. Please, oh, please, just get into your own side of the bed and pretend you're asleep! I need peace." Sighing and grumbling, she did as she was told; Brutus felt his bowels move, got up, put on his tunic, some slippers. "What is it, what is it?" "Nothing except a bellyache," he said, took the lamp and went to the latrine. There he remained until he was sure that he had nothing left to evacuate, then, shivering in the icy night, he stood on the colonnade until the coldness drove him back in the direction of his cubicle and Porcia. On the way he passed Strato of Epirus's door: closed, no light beneath it. Volumnius's door: closed, no light beneath it. Statyllus's door: slightly open, a light showing. The moment he scratched Statyllus was there, drawing him inside. It hadn't struck him as odd after he married Porcia that she should ask if Statyllus could come to live with them, and she had not told him that her reason was to separate Lucius Bibulus from Statyllus and the tippling. It was a delight to Brutus to have Cato's philosopher friend in his house. Never more so than now. "May I lie on your couch?" Brutus asked, teeth chattering. "Of course you may," said Statyllus. "I can't face Porcia." "Dear, dear." "She's hysterical." "Dear, dear. Lie down, I'll get some blankets." None of the three philosophers knew of the plot to kill Caesar, though all of them knew something was wrong. Their conclusion was that Porcia was going mad. Well, who could blame Cato's daughter, so highly strung and sensitive, with Servilia verbally cutting and slashing at her as soon as Brutus went out? Statyllus, however, had watched Porcia grow up, the other two had not. When he realized that she loved Brutus, he had tried to prevent its bearing fruit. Some of his opposition was due to jealousy, but most of it was due to his fear that she would wear Brutus down with her fits and starts. What he hadn't taken into account was Servilia's enmity, though he should have how much she had hated Cato! And now here was poor Brutus, too intimidated to face his wife. So Statyllus clucked and crooned, settled Brutus on his couch, then sat with a lamp to guard him. Brutus drifted into a light sleep, moaned and tossed, woke suddenly when the dream of stabbing Caesar reached its bloody, awful climax. Still sitting in the chair, Statyllus had nodded off, but snapped to attention the moment Brutus swung his feet on to the floor. "Rest again," the little philosopher said. "No, the Senate is meeting and I can hear cocks crowing, so it can't be more than an hour from dawn," Brutus said, stood up. "Thank you, Statyllus, I needed a refuge." He sighed, took his lamp. "Now I'd better see how Porcia is." At the door he paused, gave a peculiar laugh. "Thank all the gods that my mother won't be back from Tusculum until this afternoon." Porcia too had found solace in sleep; she was lying on her back, her arms above her head, the signs of copious tears on her face. His bath was ready; Brutus went to it, lay in the warm water and soaked for a little while, his imperturbable manservant standing by to drape him in a soft linen towel as he emerged. Then, feeling better, he dressed in a clean tunic, put on his curule shoes, and went to his study to read Plato. "Brutus, Brutus!" Porcia yelled, erupting into the room with her hair in tangled skeins around her, eyes starting from her head, a robe falling off her shoulders. "Brutus, it is today!" "My dear, you're not well," he said, not getting up. "Go back to bed and let me send for Atilius Stilo." "I don't need a physician! There's nothing wrong with me!" Unaware that her every gesture and expression contradicted this statement, she skittled around the perimeter, rummaged in the sadly empty pigeonholes, grabbed a pen from a beaker of them sitting on the desk, began to stab the air with it. "Take that, you monster! And that, you murderer of the Republic!" "Ditus!" Brutus shouted. "Ditus!" The steward came immediately. "Ditus, find the lady Porcia's women and send them to her. She's unwell, so send for Atilis Stilo too." "I am not unwell! Take that! Die, Caesar! Die!" Epaphroditus cast her a frightened look and fled, returned suspiciously quickly with four womenservants. "Come, domina," said Sylvia, who had been with Porcia since childhood. "Lie down until Atilius comes." Porcia went, but against her will, struggling so strongly that two male slaves had to help. "Lock her in her rooms, Ditus," Brutus said, "but make sure that her scissors and paper knife are removed. I fear for her sanity, I really do." "It is very sad," said Epaphroditus, more worried on Brutus's behalf; he looked frightful. "Let me get you something to eat." "Has dawn broken yet?" "Yes, domine, but only just. The sun hasn't risen." "Then I'll have some bread and honey, and a drink of that herb tea the cook makes. I have a sore belly," said Brutus. Atilius Stilo, one of Rome's fashionable medics, was at the door when Brutus departed, draped in his purple-bordered toga, his post-assassination speech clutched in his right hand. "Whatever else you do, Stilo, give the lady Porcia a potion to calm her down," said Brutus, and stepped into the lane, where his six lictors were waiting, fasces shouldered. The sun's rays were just touching the gilded statues atop Magna Mater's temple as he hurried down the Steps of Cacus into the Forum Boarium and turned toward the Porta Flumentana, the gate in the Servian Walls which led into the Forum Holitorium, already bustling with vegetable and fruit vendors putting their wares on display for early shoppers. This was the shortest route to Pompey the Great's vast theater complex upon the Campus Martius if one lived upon the Palatine no more than a quarter-hour walk. Mind a teeming jumble of thoughts, Brutus was conscious with every step he took of that dagger residing upon his belt, for it was long enough to thrust its sheathed tip into the top of his thigh, and in all his life he had never worn a dagger under his toga. He knew it was going to happen, yet it seemed to have no reality save for that dagger. Dodging between the carts loaded with cabbages and kale, parsnips and turnips, celery and onions, whatever could be grown in the market gardens of the outer Campus Martius and the Campus Vaticanus at this turning season of the year, Brutus was surprised to find the ground muddy and pooled with water had it rained during the night? How stolid lictors were! Just walked. "Terrible storm!" said a gardener, standing in the back of his cart pitching bunches of radishes to a woman. "I thought the world would end," she answered, deftly catching. A storm? Had there been a storm? He hadn't heard it, not a mutter of thunder nor a reflection of lightning. Was the storm in his heart so cataclysmic that it had blotted out a real storm? Once past the Circus Flaminius, Pompey the Great's gigantic marble theater dominated the greensward of the Field of Mars, the semicircle of the theater itself towering farthest west. Behind it going east was a magnificent rectangular peristyle garden hemmed in on all four sides by a colonnade that contained exactly one hundred fluted pillars with Corinthian capitals, lavishly gilded, painted in shades of blue; the walls behind were painted scarlet between a series of murals. One short end of the garden abutted on to the straight stage wall of the theater; the other was equipped with shallow steps that led upward into the Curia Pompeia, Pompey's consecrated senatorial meeting house. Brutus entered the hundred-pillared colonnade through its south doors and paused, blinking in the sudden shade, to see where the Liberators were gathered. Hanging on to that word was all that had steeled him to come they were not murderers, they were liberators. The Liberators. There! Out in the garden itself, in a sunny spot sheltered from the wind, close by the ornate fountain that played winter and summer through heated water pipes. Cassius waved, left the group to meet him. "How's Porcia?" he asked. "Not well at all. I sent for Atilius Stilo." "Good. Come and listen to Gaius Trebonius. He's been waiting for you to arrive."

3

Caesar had heard the storm, the first of the equinoctial season, with its high winds and tormented weather, gone out into the main peristyle to watch the fantastic lacework of lightning in the clouds, the huge cracks of thunder as the storm drifted directly over Rome. When the rain began to come down in sheets he retreated to his sleeping cubicle, lay down and had those four precious hours of deep, dreamless sleep. Two hours before dawn, the storm gone, he was awake again and the early shift of secretaries and scribes was reporting for duty. At dawn Trogus brought him freshly baked, crusty bread, some olive oil and his habitual hot drink lemon juice at this time of year, far nicer than vinegar, especially now that Hapd'efan'e insisted it be sweetened by honey. He felt well, refreshed, all of him profoundly glad that his time in Rome was finally drawing to an end. Calpurnia came in as he was finishing his breakfast, eyes heavy and ringed with the blackness of fatigue; he got up at once and went to greet her with a kiss, then put one hand beneath her chin and looked into her face, his own concerned. "My dear, what is it? Did the storm frighten you?" "No, Caesar, my dream did that," she said, and clasped his arm anxiously. "A nasty dream?" She shuddered. "A terrible dream! I saw some men surround you and stab you to death." "Edepol!" he exclaimed, feeling rather helpless. How did one calm worried wives? "Just a dream, Calpurnia." "But it was so real!" she cried. "In the Senate, though not in the Curia Hostilia. Pompeius's curia, because it happened near his statue. Please, Caesar, don't go to the meeting today!" He disengaged her hands, held them and chafed them. "I have to go, my dear. Today I step down as consul, it's the end of my official business in Rome." "Don't! Please don't! It was so real!" "Then I thank you for the warning, and will endeavor not to be stabbed in Pompeius's curia," he said, gently but firmly. Trogus came in with his toga trabea; already clad in his crimson-and-purple-striped tunic, the high red boots upon his feet, Caesar stood while Trogus draped the massive garment about his body arranged the folds over his left shoulder so that they would not tumble down his left arm as he moved it. How magnificent he looks, thought Calpurnia; purple and red become him more than white. "What are you doing as the Pontifex Maximus?" she asked. "Can't you use that as an excuse?" "No, I can't," he said, sounding a little exasperated. "It's the Ides, a brief sacrifice." And off he went to join the procession waiting outside on the Sacra Via; a quick check of the sheep, and he was away down the hill toward the lower Forum and the Arx of the Capitol. Within an hour he was back to change, discovering with a sigh that the reception room was thronged with clients, some of whom would have to be seen before he could set out on his rounds. He found Decimus Brutus in his study, chatting to Calpurnia. "I hope," Caesar said, coming in wearing his purple-bordered toga, "that you've managed to convince my wife that I stand in no danger from assassins today?" "I've been trying, though I'm not sure I've succeeded," Decimus said, his rump and palms propped on the edge of Caesar's malachite desk, his ankles casually crossed. "I have to see some fifty clients, none for very long, and none privately, if you want to stay. What brings you here so bright and early?" "I thought you might be visiting Calvinus on your way to the meeting, and I'd like to see him," Decimus said easily. "If I showed up there on my own, I'd likely be refused, whereas if I show up with you, I can't be refused." "Clever." Caesar chuckled. He looked at Calpurnia, brows up. "Thank you, my dear, I have work to do." "Decimus, take care of him!" she begged from the door. Decimus smiled broadly such a comforting smile! "Don't worry, Calpurnia, I promise I'll take care of him."

Two hours later the pair of them left the Domus Publica to walk up the Vestal Steps on to the Palatine, a host of clients in their wake. As they turned the corner of the house to head for Vesta's aedes, they passed old Spurinna, squatting in his usual spot beside the Door of Wills. "Caesar! Beware the Ides of March!" he called. "The Ides of March are here, Spurinna, and as you see, I am perfectly fit and well." Caesar laughed. "The Ides of March are here, yes, but they haven't gone." "Silly old fool," Decimus muttered. "He's many things, Decimus, but not that," Caesar said. At the foot of the Vestal Steps the crowd pressed in on them; a hand thrust a note at Caesar. Decimus intercepted it, took the note and put it inside the sinus of his toga. "Let's get a move on," he said. "I'll give it to you to read later." At Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus's door they were admitted, taken straight to where Calvinus lay on a couch in his study. "Your Egyptian physician is a marvel, Caesar," Calvinus said as they entered. "Decimus, what a pleasure!" "You look much better than you did last night," Caesar said. "I feel much better." "We're not staying, but I needed to see you for myself, old friend. Lucius and Piso say they're skipping the meeting today to come and keep you company, but if they tire you, throw them out. What was the trouble?" "A heart spasm. Hapd'efan'e gave me an extract of digitalis and I settled down almost at once. He said my heart was well, the word he used was 'fluttering' very evocative! Apparently I have some fluid accumulated around the organ." "As long as you recover enough to be Master of the Horse. Lepidus leaves for Narbonese Gaul today, so there's yet another won't be in the House. Nor Philippus, who overindulged yesterday him and his ambrosias! So I fear the front benches will be sparsely populated for my last appearance," said Caesar. Rather surprisingly, he leaned to kiss Calvinus on the cheek. "Look after yourself." Then he was gone, Decimus Brutus in his wake. Calvinus lay frowning; his eyelids drooped, he dozed.

As they passed the Circus Flaminius, picking their way between the puddles, Decimus spoke. "Caesar, may I send word ahead that we're coming?" "Of course." One of Decimus's servants sped off. When they entered the colonnade they found some four hundred senators dotted around the garden, some reading, some dictating to scribes, some stretched out asleep on the grass, some clustered in chattering, laughing groups. Mark Antony strode to meet them and shook Caesar's hand. "Ave, Caesar. We had about given up on you until Decimus's messenger came running in." Caesar dropped Antony's hand with a cold look that said it was nobody's business how late the Dictator was, and bounded up the steps to the Curia Pompeia, two servants in his wake, one with his ivory curule chair and a folding table, the other with wax tablets and a sack full of scrolls. They set up his chair and table at the front of the curule dais, received a nod of dismissal and left. Satisfied the furniture was correctly placed, Caesar emptied the sack of its contents a few at a time, setting the scrolls neatly one on top of the other along the back of the table, then seated himself with the wax tablets stacked to his left and a steel stylus beside them in case he wished to take notes. "He's working already," said Decimus, joining the twenty-two others at the foot of the steps. "About forty pedarii are inside, none near the curule end. Trebonius, time to act." Trebonius moved immediately to join Antony, who had decided that the best way to keep Dolabella outside was to stay with him and make an effort to be civil. Their lictors, twelve each, were standing some distance away, the fasces (which belonged to the senior, Dolabella, as this was March) grounded. Though the meeting was outside the pomerium, it was within one mile of the city, so the lictors were togate and had no axes in their bundles of rods. A refinement had occurred to Trebonius during the night, and he put it into effect as soon as Brutus came in with his six lictors. Namely, that out of respect for Caesar, lictorless for some nundinae by now, all the praetors and the two curule aediles should dismiss their lictors forthwith, attend the meeting without them. None objected as Cassius went the rounds of the other curule magistrates; glad of this unexpected holiday, the praetorian and aedilician lictors hurried back to their college, which was located behind the inn on the Clivus Orbius, and therefore handy for a thirsty lictor. "Stay outside with me a while," Trebonius said cheerfully to Antony, "there's something I need to discuss with you." Dolabella had spied a crony playing dice with two others, nodded to his lictors that they still had time to waste, and went to join the dice game; he was feeling lucky today. While Antony and Trebonius talked earnestly at the foot of the steps, Decimus led the Liberators inside. Had any of the senators left in the garden thought to look at them, he might have wondered at the gravity of their faces, the slightly furtive manner they had unconsciously adopted; but no one looked. Lagging behind, Brutus felt a tug at his toga and turned to see one of his house servants standing red-faced and panting. "Yes, what is it?" he asked, unbearably happy that something delayed his embarkation upon tyrannicide. "Domine, the lady Porcia!" The man gasped. "What about her?" "She's dead!" The world didn't rock, heave, or spin; Brutus stared at the slave in disbelief. "Nonsense," he said. "Domine, she's dead, I swear she's dead!" "Tell me what happened," Brutus said calmly. "Well, she was in a terrible state running around like one demented, screaming that Caesar was dead." "Hadn't Atilius Stilo seen her?" "Yes, domine, but he became angry and left when she refused to drink the potion he mixed for her." "And?" "She fell over, stone dead. Epaphroditus couldn't find one single sign of life nothing! She's dead! Dead! Come home, please come home, domine!" "Tell Epaphroditus that I will come when I can," Brutus said, putting a foot on the bottom step. "She isn't dead, I promise you. I know her. It's a fainting spell." And mounted the next step, leaving the slave to gape at his back. The chamber, large enough to hold six hundred when crammed, looked very empty despite the few backbencher senators already seated, scholarly men who seized any opportunity to read. None had put his stool at the curule dais end, for the light from a series of clerestory grilles streamed in best near the outer doors, but the readers were fairly evenly distributed between the two sides of the House, right top tier and left top tier. Very good, thought Decimus, shepherding his flock ahead of him, glancing back to see Brutus still outside lost his courage, had he? Caesar sat with his head bent over an unfurled scroll, lost to the world. Suddenly he moved, but not to look at the group walking down the center of the floor. His left hand plucked the top tablet off his stack, flipped it open, while his right picked up the stylus, began to inscribe the wax quickly and deftly. Within ten feet of the dais the group came to a confused halt; it didn't seem proper that Caesar failed to notice his assassins. Decimus's eyes went to Pompey's statue, very tall on its four-foot plinth, nestled into its alcove at the back of the platform, which was expansive, as it had to hold between sixteen and twenty men seated on curule chairs. Fingers suddenly clumsy Decimus felt for his dagger, withdrew it, held it hidden by his side. He could sense the others doing the same, saw Brutus scuttle up the chamber out of the corner of his eye he'd found the courage after all. Lucius Tillius Cimber walked up the lictors' step seats at the side of the dais, his dagger on naked display. "Wait, you impatient cretin, wait!" Caesar barked irritably, his head still down, steel stylus still gouging at the wax. Lips tightening in outrage, Cimber cast his fellow Liberators a fierce glare see what a boor our Dictator is? and strode forward to yank the toga away from the left side of Caesar's neck. But Gaius Servilius Casca, pushing up on Cimber's left, got in first, driving down from behind at Caesar's throat. The blow glanced off the collarbone, inflicted a superficial wound at the top of the chest. Caesar was on his feet so quickly that the movement was a blur, striking out instinctively with his steel stylus. It plunged into Gaius Casca's arm as the rest of the Liberators, emboldened, pressed forward with daggers raised. Though he fought strenuously, Caesar neither cried out nor spoke. The table went flying, scrolls raining everywhere, the ivory chair followed, and spattering drops of blood. Now some of the senators on the top tiers were looking, exclaiming in horror, but none moved to come to Caesar's aid. Retreating backward, he encountered Pompey's plinth just as Cassius pushed to the fore, sank his blade into Caesar's face, screwed it around, enucleating an eye and rendering that beauty nonexistent. A furore descended as the Liberators crowded in, daggers rising and falling, blood spurting now. Suddenly Caesar ceased to struggle, accepting the inevitable; that unique mind directed its flagging energies to dying with dignity unimpaired. His left hand came up to pull a fold of toga over his face and hide it, his right clenched the toga so that when he fell his legs would be decently covered. No one among this carrion should see what Caesar thought as he died, nor be able to jeer at the memory of Caesar's legs bared. Caecilius Buciolanus stabbed him in the back, Caesennius Lento in the shoulder. Bleeding terribly, Caesar still stood as the flurry of blows continued. Second-last and cool warrior that he was, Decimus Brutus put everything he had into the first of his two stabs, deep into the left side of Caesar's chest. As the dagger went home to his heart, Caesar collapsed in a heap, Decimus following him down to deal his second blow, for Trebonius. And Brutus, the last to strike, blinded by sweat, palsied by fear, knelt to jab his knife at the genitals his mother had so adored, its tip piercing the many folds of toga because, entirely by accident, Brutus had aimed directly downward. He heard the metal grind and crunch on bone, retched, and scrambled to his feet as a searing pain crossed the back of his hand; someone had cut him. The deed was done. All twenty-two men had wounded Caesar somewhere, Decimus Brutus twice. Face and legs covered, Caesar lay beneath Pompey's statue, the creamish-white toga sliced to ribbons around his chest and back, soaking up the brilliantly red blood spreading over the white marble of the platform until it seemed there couldn't possibly be more blood to come, there was so much of it pouring everywhere. Everywhere. Some skipped to avoid it, but Decimus didn't notice it until it flowed around his shoes and percolated inside; he whimpered, sure it burned him. Sobbing for breath, the Liberators stared at one another, eyes wild, Brutus absorbed in trying to staunch his bleeding hand. As if by instantaneous yet unvoiced consent, they turned and ran for the doors, Decimus as panicked as the rest. The pedarii who had witnessed the deed were already outside, screaming that he was dead, Caesar was dead! The panic became universal as the Liberators emerged into the garden, togas bloody, knives still in their sticky fists. Men fled in all directions save into the Curia Pompeia; senators, lictors and slaves took to their heels, howling that Caesar was dead, Caesar was dead, Caesar was dead! All their grand plans for speeches and thundering oratory forgotten, the Liberators fled too. Who among them could ever have believed that the reality would be so different from the dream, that staring at Caesar dead was such a terrible end to ideas, to philosophies, to aspirations? Only after the deed was done did any of them, even Decimus Brutus, truly understand its meaning. The titan had fallen, the world was so changed that no Republic could ever spring fully armed from its brow. The death of Caesar was a liberation, but what it had liberated was chaos. By sheer instinct the Liberators ran for asylum to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, legs driving like mill shafts across the grass of the Campus Martius, up the back steps of the Capitol on to Romulus's original Asylum, then up the final slope and all those steps to the temple. There, inside, groaning for breath, knees given way, the twenty-two men fell to the floor. Above them reared fifty feet of the Great God in gold and ivory splendor, his bright red terra-cotta face smiling that asinine, shut-mouthed, ear-to-ear smile.

* * *

As soon as the first pedarius bolted out of the Curia Pompeia shrieking that Caesar was assassinated, Mark Antony let out a yelp and began to run as well out of the peristyle in the direction of the city! Staggered by Antony's utterly unexpected reaction, Trebonius ran in his wake, shouting at him to stop, return and convene the Senate. But it was too late. Dolabella and his lictors were fleeing, all the senators, stool slaves and the Liberators. All Trebonius could do was attempt to catch Antony. Inside was absolute silence. Unable to look down at what lay at its feet, the statue of Pompey gazed up the chamber at the open doors, its pupils already pinpoints against the blinding glare because the artist had wanted an overwhelming blueness. Caesar huddled partly on his right side, his face veiled by a fold of toga, the flow of blood finally come to a halt forming a tiny cascade over one side of the dais. Sometimes a small bird flew in, fluttered vainly around the honeycombed roses of the ceiling until the light drew it out again into freedom. The hours dripped on, but no man or woman ventured inside. Caesar and Pompey did not move.

It was well into the afternoon when Calvinus's steward came into his master's study, where the invalid, very much better, was talking to Lucius Caesar and Lucius Piso. On the steward's heels came the Egyptian physician, Hapd'efan'e. "Not another examination!" Calvinus exclaimed, feeling so much like himself that he could resent medical interruptions. "No, domine. I asked Hapd'efan'e to be here just in case." "Just in case of what, Hector?" "The whole city is buzzing with a horrible rumor." Hector hesitated, then blurted it out. "Everyone is saying that Caesar has been murdered." "Jupiter!" Piso cried as Calvinus leaped off the couch. "Where? How? Speak, man, speak!" Lucius Caesar snapped. "Lie down, lord Calvinus, please lie down," Hapd'efan'e was beseeching Calvinus while Hector answered Lucius Caesar. "No one seems to know, domine. Just that Caesar's dead." "Back on the couch, Calvinus, and no arguments. Piso and I will investigate," said Lucius Caesar, halfway out the door. "Keep me informed!" Calvinus yelled. "It can't be, it can't be," Lucius Caesar was muttering as he went down the Vestal Steps five at a time, Piso keeping up. They burst into the Pontifex Maximus's reception room, the first room inside, to find Quinctilia and Cornelia Merula pacing about; Calpurnia sat limply on a bench with Junia supporting her. When the men entered, all the women ran to them. "Where is he?" Lucius Caesar demanded. "No one knows, Chief Augur," said Quinctilia, a fat, jolly woman who was Chief Vestal. "It's just that the whole Forum is saying that he's been murdered." "Did he come home from the meeting at the Curia Pompeia?" "No, he didn't." "Has anyone of authority been here?" "No, no one." "Piso, hold the fortress," Lucius Caesar commanded. "I'm off to the Curia Pompeia to see if anyone's still there." "Take some lictors with you!" Piso shouted. "No, Trogus and some of his sons will do." Lucius moved at the double through the Velabrum run, trot, walk, run, trot, walk with Gaius Julius Trogus and three of his sons. People were clustered in groups everywhere, some wringing their hands, some weeping, but no one he barked a question at knew anything more than that Caesar was dead, Caesar had been murdered. Past the Circus Flaminius, out to the theater, into the hundred-pillared colonnade; clutching at a stitch in his side, Lucius paused to get his breath back. No one, but there were many signs that a large number of men had left in a hurry. "Stay here," he said curtly to Trogus, walked up the steps and into the Curia Pompeia. He smelled it before he saw it: unmistakable to a soldier, the smell of old, congealing blood. The ivory chair was in small pieces around the purple-and-white marble floor, a folding table had come to rest against the bottom tier on the right side they had attacked from the left, then there were scrolls scattered for many feet around, and a body lay on the bare curule dais, absolutely still. When he bent over it he could see that Caesar had been dead for some hours, but he peeled the fold of toga gently away from the head, gasped, choked. The left side of the face was a ruin of blood and flesh, white bone glistening, the eye a runny mess. Oh, Caesar! "Trogus!" he screamed. Trogus came running, started to wail like a child. "There's no time for that, man! Send two of your sons to the Forum Holitorium and commandeer a hand cart. Go on, man, do it! Cry afterward." He heard two of the young men run off; when Trogus and his remaining lad came into the chamber, Lucius waved them away. "Wait outside," he said, and slumped on to the edge of the curule dais where he could see his beloved cousin, so still, in such a welter of blood. To have produced so much of it, the wound that killed him must have been among the last. "Oh, Gaius, that it should have come to this! What will we do? How can the world go on without you? It would be easier to lose our gods." The tears began to pour down his face; he wept for the years, the memories, the joy, the pride, the sheer waste of this luminous, peerless Roman. Caesar reduced all others to insignificance. Which was why they had killed him, of course. But when Trogus came to say that the barrow had arrived, Lucius Caesar arose dry-eyed. "Bring it in," he said. It came, an unpainted old wooden cart perched on two wheels, its flat tray very narrow but long enough to take a body, two handles at one end to push it. Lucius absently plucked a few scraps of leaf out of it, brushed some particles of soil away with his hands, made sure that the wrecked face was covered. "Pick him up gently, lads, lie him on it." He hadn't begun to stiffen yet; now that he was lying on his back, one arm and hand refused to stay by his side, insisted upon flopping off the barrow. Lucius shrugged himself out of his purple-bordered toga and spread it over Caesar, tucked it in all around. Let the arm and hand dangle free; they would tell the world what kind of burden the old hand cart carried. "Let's take him home."

Trebonius ran after Antony frantically, shouting at him to calm down, help deal with the situation, call the House into session. But Antony, who could move like the wind despite his size, tore through the Forum with his lictors and kept on going. Angry and frustrated, Trebonius gave up trying to catch him. Striving to collect himself, he instructed his stool slave to return to the Curia Pompeia and find out what was going on there, then come to report to him at Cicero's house; that done, he ascended the Palatine and asked to see Cicero. Who wasn't in, but was expected back at any moment. Trebonius sat down in the atrium, accepted wine and water from the steward, and prepared to wait. His stool slave came first, to inform him that the Curia Pompeia was deserted, and that the Liberators had fled en masse to seek asylum in Jupiter Optimus Maximus's. Stupefied, Trebonius put his head in his hands and tried to work out what had gone wrong. Why had they sought asylum when they ought to be on the rostra proclaiming their deed? "My dear Trebonius, what is it?" boomed Cicero's golden voice some time later, alarmed at nothing more than the sight of Gaius Trebonius with his head in his hands; he had been playing marriage counselor with Quintus's wife, Pomponia, and had heard no rumors. "In private," said Trebonius, rising. "Well?" asked Cicero, shutting the door quickly. "A group of senators killed Caesar in the Curia Pompeia four hours ago," Trebonius said calmly. "I wasn't one of them, but I was their commanding officer." The aging, shrunken face lit up like the Alexandrian Pharos; Cicero whooped, clapped his hands together in wild applause, then wrung Trebonius's hand ecstatically. "Trebonius! Oh, what wonderful, wonderful news! Where are they? On the rostra? Still in the Curia Pompeia talking?" Trebonius wrenched his hand away. "Hah! I should hope!" he snarled savagely. "No, they're not at the Curia Pompeia! No, they're not on the rostra! First that dolt Antonius panicked and ran for the Carinae, I imagine, as he certainly didn't stop in the Forum! He was supposed to spearhead the campaign to extol Caesar's elimination, not scuttle home as if the Furies chased him!" "Antonius was a part of it?" Cicero breathed incredulously. Remembering to whom he was speaking, Trebonius tried to mend this fence at least. "No, no, of course not! But I knew he wasn't very fond of Caesar, so I thought I could talk him into seeing the sense in smoothing the killing over once it was a fact, that's all. When he wouldn't stop running, I came to find you, which was what I planned to do anyway. Thinking that you'd lend us your support." "Gladly, gladly!" "It's too late!" Trebonius cried despairingly. "Do you know what they did? They panicked! Panicked! Men like Decimus Brutus and Tillius Cimber panicked! My trusty band of tyrannicides came charging out of the Curia Pompeia and fled to Jupiter Optimus Maximus's, where they're cowering like whipped dogs! Leaving four hundred pedarii to fly in all directions screaming that Caesar was dead, murdered, then presumably rush home to lock themselves in. The ordinary folk are down in the Forum milling about, and there's no one in authority to tell them anything." "Decimus Brutus? No, he'd never panic!" Cicero whispered. "I tell you, he panicked! They all did! Cassius Galba Staius Murcus Basilus Quintus Ligarius there are twenty-two men up there on the Capitol praying to Jupiter's statue and shitting themselves in fear! It all went for nothing, Cicero," Trebonius said grimly. "I thought that bringing them up to the mark would be the hard partI never even took into account what might happen afterward! Panic! The scheme's in ruins, no one can retrieve our position now. They did the deed, yes, but they didn't hold their ground. Fools, fools!" Trebonius groaned. Cicero squared his shoulders and patted Trebonius's. "It may not be too late," he said briskly. "I'm off to the Capitol at once, but I suggest you round up some of Decimus Brutus's troupe of gladiators they're in Rome for some ancestor's funeral games or at least that's what he told me the other day. With this in the wind, perhaps he brought them in as bodyguards for after." He extended a hand to Trebonius. "Come, my dear fellow, cheer up! You go and find them some protection, and I'll get them down to the rostra." He whooped again, chuckled with glee. "Caesar is dead! Oh, what a gift for liberty! They must be extolled, they must be praised to the skies!"

It was late afternoon when Cicero walked into the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, his beloved freedman Tiro in his wake. "Congratulations!" he roared. "Fellow senators, what a feat! What a victory for the Republic!" That huge voice had them jumping, squawking, scrambling into the corners of the cella. Eyes adjusting to the gloom, Cicero told them over in astonishment. Marcus Brutus? Ye gods! How had they managed to talk him into this? But how terrified they were! Killing Caesar had utterly unmanned them, even Cassius, even Decimus Brutus, even that wolfshead Minucius Basilus. So he settled to talk them out of their panic, only to find that nothing he said could persuade them to emerge from the temple, declaim upon the rostra. Finally he sent Tiro to buy wine, and when it came he dished it out in the rude clay beakers the vendor had supplied, watched them drink it so thirstily that it was gone in a trice. When Trebonius walked in he was still trying to jolly them. "The gladiators are outside," Trebonius said briefly, then snorted in disgust. "As I feared, Antonius ran home and has bolted himself in. So has Dolabella and every member of the Senate who knows." He turned on the Liberators in exasperated anger. "Why did you panic?" he demanded. "Why aren't you down there on the rostra? People are gathering like flies on a carcass, but there's no one to tell them what's happened." "He looked so awful!" Brutus moaned, rocking back and forth. "How could anyone so alive be dead? Awful, awful!" "Come," said Cicero suddenly, pulled Brutus to his feet and crossed to where Cassius sat, head between his knees. Cassius too was hauled up. "The three of us are going down to the rostra, and I'll hear no arguments. Someone has to speak to the people, and, since we lack Antonius or Dolabella, yours are the two best-known faces. Move! Come on, move!" One hand in Cassius's, the other in Brutus's, Cicero dragged the pair out of the temple and propelled them down the Clivus Capitolinus, thrust them up on to the rostra. A crowd gathered, not a huge one; its mood was docile, bewildered, aimless. As he looked at it, Brutus regained sufficient composure to understand that Cicero was right, that something had to be said. His cap of liberty on his dark curls, his toga long gone, he stepped to the front of the rostra. "Fellow Romans," he said in a small voice, "it is true that Caesar is dead. That he should continue to live had become intolerable to all men who love freedom. So some of us, including me, decided to free Rome from Caesar's dictatorial tyranny." He held his dagger aloft in his bloody hand, its makeshift bandage emphasizing the redness. A moan went up, but the crowd, growing rapidly as word spread that someone was speaking from the rostra, made no move, evinced no rage. "Caesar couldn't be let strip land off men who have held it for centuries just to settle his veterans in Italy," Brutus said in the same small voice. "We, the Liberators, who killed Caesar Dictator, the King of Rome, understand that Rome's soldiers must have land to retire on, and we love Rome's soldiers just as much as Caesar did, but we love Rome's landowners too, and what were we to do, I ask you? Caesar leaned too much one way, so Caesar had to go. Rome is more than merely veterans, though we, who have liberated Rome from Caesar, love Rome's veterans " He wandered and meandered, all about veteran soldiers and their land, which meant very little to this urban crowd, and told them virtually nothing about why or how Caesar had died. No one who tried to decipher what Brutus was saying was sure who these Liberators were, or who had freed whom from what. Cicero stood listening with a leaden heart. He couldn't speak until Brutus finished anyway, but the longer Brutus dribbled on, the less he wanted to speak at all. Phrases like "committing verbal suicide" danced through his mind; the trouble was that this wasn't his arena, he needed the resonance of a good hall to bounce his voice around and he needed to look at intelligent faces, not masses. Run down, Brutus stopped very suddenly. The crowd remained still and silent. A scream shattered that silence, ripping from the direction of the Velabrum, then was followed by another, closer, from the shadows the Basilica Julia's bulk cast on the Vicus lugarius. Another scream, another. On the rostra, Brutus saw what was coming through a widening gap in the throng a vegetable cart pushed by two very tall, strong young men who looked like Gauls. On it lay something covered in a purple-bordered toga, and off one side of the barrow hung a limply flopping hand and lower arm, white as chalk. Behind the two Gauls pushing this burden walked two more, and in their wake, Lucius Julius Caesar in a tunic. Brutus began to shriek, terrible sounds of horror and pain. Then, before Cicero could restrain him, he was running, Cassius too, off the rostra, back up the hill of the Capitol to the temple. Not knowing what else to do, Cicero followed them. "He's in the Forum! He's dead, he's dead, he's dead, he's dead! I've seen him!" Brutus howled as he reached the cella, fell on the floor and began to weep like one demented. Not in much better case, Cassius crawled to his corner and sobbed. The next thing all of them were crying, moaning. "I give up," said Cicero to Trebonius, who looked exhausted. "I'm going to get them some food and decent wine. You stay here, Trebonius. Sooner or later they have to come to their senses, but not before morning, I think. I'll send blankets too it's cold in here." At the doorway he tilted his head, stared at Trebonius dolefully. "Hear that? Mourning, not jubilation. It seems that those in the Forum would rather have Caesar than liberty."

They took Caesar to the Pontifex Maximus's bathroom first; Hapd'efan'e, who had returned from Calvinus's, hung on to his physician's composure and peeled the tattered toga off, the tunic beneath it; no togate man wore a loincloth. While Trogus took off the high red boots of the Alban kings, Hapd'efan'e began to wash away the blood, Lucius Caesar watching. He was a beautifully made man, Caesar, even at fifty-five, his skin always white where the sun hadn't weathered it, but utterly white now, for all his blood had poured away. "Twenty-three wounds," said Hapd'efan'e, "but if he had had immediate attention, none would have killed him except that one, there." He pointed to the most professionally administered blow, not very large, but right over the heart. "He died the moment it fell, I don't have to open his chest to know that the blade went right inside the heart. Two of his assailants had something very personal to say there" pointing to the face "and there." He pointed to the genitals. "They knew him much better than the others. His beauty and his virility offended them." "Can you mend him well enough to display his body?" Lucius asked, wondering which two had hated Caesar so personally, for as yet he had no idea who the assassins were. "I am trained in mummification, lord Lucius. I know that is not necessary for a people who cremate, but even his face will be whole again when I have finished," said Hapd'efan'e. He hesitated, his very dark, slightly sloed eyes staring at Lucius painfully. "Pharaoh does she know?" he asked. "Oh, Jupiter! Probably not," said Lucius, and sighed. "Yes, Hapd'efan'e, I'll go and see her now. Caesar would want that." "His poor women," said Hapd'efan'e, and went on working.

So Lucius Caesar, wrapped in one of his cousin's togas, set out with two of Trogus's mourning sons to see Cleopatra. He didn't bother boating across the river, he took the Pons Aemilia and the Via Aurelia, not sorry for the solitude of the long walk. Gaius, Gaius, Gaius . . . You were tired, so tired. I've seen it descending upon you like a dense fog a little at a time, ever since they forced you to cross the Rubicon. That was never what you wanted. All you wanted was your due. The men who denied you that were small, petty, mean-spirited, devoid of a particle of common sense. Their emotions drove them, not their intellects. That's why they could never understand you. A man with your kind of detachment is an indictment of irrational stupidity. Oh, but I will miss you! Somehow Cleopatra knew; she met him clad in black. "Caesar is dead," she said very steadily, her chin up, those remarkable eyes tearless. "Did you hear the rumor, even out here?" "No. Pu'em-re saw it when he spilled the sands and sifted them. He did that after we found Amun-Ra turned on his pedestal to the west, and Osiris broken into pieces on the ground." "An earth tremor on this side of the river. There was none in the city that I know of," Lucius said. "Gods move the earth when they die, Lucius. I mourn him in my body, but not in my soul, for he is not dead. He has gone into the west, from whence he came. Caesar will be a God, even in Rome. Pu'em-re saw it in the sands, saw his temple in the Forum. Divus Julius. He was murdered, wasn't he?" she asked. "Yes, by little men who couldn't bear to be eclipsed." "Because they thought he wanted to be a king. But they did not know him, did they? A terrible deed, Lucius. Because they murdered him, the whole world will take a different course onward. It is one thing to murder a man, quite another to murder a God on earth. They will pay for their crime, but all the peoples of the world will pay far more. They tampered with the Will of Amun-Ra, who is Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Zeus. They played the God game." "How will you tell his son?" "Honestly. He is Pharaoh. Once we return to Egypt, I will put my brother down like the jackal he is, and raise Caesarion to the throne beside me. One day he will inherit Caesar's world." "But he can't be Caesar's heir," Lucius said gently. The yellow eyes widened, looked scornful. "Oh, Caesar's heir must be a Roman, I know that. But it is Caesarion who is Caesar's blood son, who will inherit all that Caesar was." "I can't stay," Lucius said, "but I urge you to leave for Egypt as soon as possible. The men who killed Caesar might thirst for other blood." "Oh, I intend to go. What is left here for me?" Her eyes shimmered, but no tears fell. "I didn't have a chance to say goodbye." "None of us did. If there's anything you need, come to me." She let him out into the cold night, and sent torchbearers with him armed with spare ones; her torches were dipped in the fine asphalt from the Palus Asphaltites in Judaea, but no torch lasted very long. Just as no life lasted very long. Only the Gods lived forever, and even they could be forgotten. How calm she is! thought Lucius. Perhaps sovereigns are different from other men and women. Caesar was, and he had been a natural sovereign. It is not the diadem, it is the spirit. On the Pons Aemilius he met Caesar's oldest friend, the knight Gaius Matius, whose family had occupied the other ground-floor apartment in Aurelia's Suburan insula. They fell on each other's shoulders and wept. "Do you know yet who did it, Matius?" Lucius asked, wiping his eyes and putting an arm around Matius's shoulders as they walked. "I've heard some names, which is why Piso asked me to go to meet you. Marcus Brutus, Gaius Cassius and two of his own Gallic marshals, Decimus Brutus and Gaius Trebonius. Pah!" Matius spat. "They owed him everything, and this is how they thank him." "Jealousy is the worst vice of all, Matius." "The idea was Trebonius's," Matius went on, "though he didn't strike a blow. His job was to keep Antonius out of the House while the rest did the deed. No lictors inside. It was very clever, but it fell down afterward. They panicked and went to earth in Jupiter Optimus Maximus's." Lucius felt a coldness growing in the pit of his belly. "Was Antonius a part of the plot?" "Some say yes, some say no, but Lucius Piso doesn't think so, nor does Philippus. There's no real reason to suppose it, Lucius, if Trebonius was obliged to stay outside and detain him." A sob, several more, then Matius broke into a fresh spate of tears. "Oh, Lucius, what will we do? If Caesar, with all his genius, couldn't find a way out, then who is there left to try? We're lost!"

Servilia had had an irritating day, between Tertulla, who continued to be poorly, and the local Tusculan midwife, who had advised against the jolting journey back to an unhealthy, grimy city the lady Tertulla was sure to have a miscarriage! So Servilia traveled alone, and arrived in Rome after dark. Sweeping past the porter, she never noticed that his lips were parted to give her a message; up the women's side of the colonnade she marched her stumpy legs, her ears offended by the sounds of jubilation emanating from the three suites on the opposite side where those useless, parasitic philosophers lived on the wine again, no doubt. Were it left to her, they'd be roosting on top of the rubbish dump near the Agger lime pits. Or, better still, hanging from three crosses in the peristyle rose beds. Her maidservant running to keep up, she entered her own suite of rooms and dumped her voluminous wrap on the floor; conscious that her bladder was full to bursting, she debated whether to return to the latrine to empty it, then shrugged and went onward to the corridor between the dining room and Brutus's study, looking for him. The lamps were all lit; Epaphroditus came to meet her, wringing his hands. "Don't tell me!" she barked, not in a good mood. "What's the wretched girl done now?" "This morning we thought her dead, domina, and sent to the master at the Curia Pompeia, but he was right. He said it was a fainting fit, and it was." "So he's been sitting by her bedside all day when he should have been in the House?" "That's just it, domina! He sent a message back with the servant that it was only a fainting fit he didn't come home!" Epaphroditus burst into noisy tears. "Oh, oh, oh, and now he can't come home!" he wailed. "What do you mean, can't come home?" "He means," cried Porcia, running in, "that Caesar is dead, and that my Brutus my Brutus! killed him!" Shock paralyzed Servilia; she stood feeling warm urine gush down her legs, numb to the marrow, breath suspended, mouth agape, eyes goggling. "Caesar's dead, my father is avenged! Your lover's dead because your son killed him! And I made Brutus do it I made him!" The power to move returned. Servilia leaped at Porcia and punched her with fist closed. Down Porcia went in a sprawl while Servilia got both hands in that mass of hair and dragged her to the pool of urine, scrubbed her face in it until she came to, choking. "Meretrix mascula! Femina mentula! Filthy, crazy, lowborn verpa!" Porcia heaved herself to her feet and went for Servilia with teeth and nails; the two women swayed, locked in furious, silent combat as Epaphroditus shrieked for assistance. It took six men to separate them. "Shut her in her room!" Servilia panted, very pleased because she had gotten by far the best of the tussle. It was Porcia all bleeding and scratched, Porcia all bitten and torn. "Go on, do it!" she roared. "Do it, or I'll have the lot of you crucified!" The three tame philosophers had tumbled out of their doors to gape, but none ventured close, and none protested as the howling, screaming Porcia was dragged to her room and locked in. "What are you looking at?" the lady of the house demanded of the three philosophers. "Anxious to hang on crosses, are you, you wine-soaked leeches?" They bolted back into their suites, but Epaphroditus stood his ground; when Servilia was like this, best to see it out. "Is what she said true, Ditus?" "I fear so, domina. Master Brutus and the others have sought sanctuary in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus." "The others?" "A number, it seems. Gaius Cassius is an assassin too." She tottered, grabbed at the steward. "Help me to my room, and have someone clean this mess up. Keep me informed, Ditus." "Yes, domina. The lady Porcia?" "Stays right where she is. No food, no drink. Let her rot!" The maidservant banished, Servilia slammed her door, dropped on to a couch, rocked with grief. Caesar, dead? No, it couldn't be! But it was. Cato, Cato, Cato, may you roll boulders for all eternity in Tartarus for this! It's your doing, no one else's. It's you brought that piss-puss up, it's you put the idea in Brutus's head to marry her, it's you and the mentula who fathered you have ruined my life! Caesar, Caesar! How much I have loved you. I will always love you, I cannot scour it out of my mind. She leaned back, lashes fanning down over her pallid cheeks, dreaming first of how she was going to kill Porcia oh, what a day that would be! Then, eyes opening dull and black and fierce, she started to work on a far more important problem how to retrieve Brutus from this insane catastrophe, how to make sure that the family Servilius Caepio and the family Junius Brutus would emerge from it with fortunes and reputations intact. Caesar dead, but family ruin wouldn't bring him back.

"It's been dark for two hours," Antony said to Fulvia. "I should be safe by now." "Safe for what?" Fulvia asked, purplish-blue eyes gone murky in the dimness. "Marcus, what are you going to do?" "Go to the Domus Publica." "Why?" "To see for myself that he's really dead." "Of course he's dead! If he weren't, someone would have come to tell you. Stay here, please! Don't leave me alone!" "You'll be all right." And he was gone, a winter cloak thrown around his shoulders. An exclusive district of large houses, the Carinae was a fork of the Esquiline Mount that traveled toward the Forum, divided from the festering stews behind it by several temple sanctuaries and a grove of oaks. Therefore Antony hadn't far to walk. Lamps flickered down the Sacra Via toward the Forum; there were many people out and about, all going to Rome's heart to wait for news of Caesar. Face covered, he slipped in among them and shuffled along. Some kept moving to the lower Forum, but the area around the Domus Publica was thronged; he was obliged to push through the crowd and hammer on the Pontifex Maximus's door in a more public way than he had hoped. But no one moved to restrain him. Most of the people wept desolately, and all were ordinary Romans. No senators waited outside Caesar's residence. Seeing the face, Trogus opened the door just enough to let Antony squeeze inside, then closed it quickly. Lucius Piso stood behind him, swarthy face bleak. "Is he here?" Antony asked, tossing the cloak at Trogus. "Yes, in the temple. Come," said Piso. "Calpurnia?" "My daughter's in bed. That odd Egyptian fellow mixed her a sleeping draft." The temple lay between the two sides of the Domus Publica, a huge room without an idol, for it belonged to Rome's numina, the shadowy gods without faces or human forms that preceded Greek ideas by centuries and still formed the true nucleus of Roman worship; they were the forces that governed functions, actions, entities like larders, granaries, wells, crossroads. It was lit to brilliance with chandeliers, its great double bronze doors open at either end, one set on to the colonnade around the main peristyle, the other on to the mysterious vestibule of the Kings, with its two amygdalae and its three downward sloping mosaic pathways to yet another set of doors. Along either side of the chamber stood the imagines of the Chief Vestals since the time of the first Aemilia, lifelike wax masks encased in miniature temples, each perched on a costly pedestal. Caesar sat upright on a black bier in the exact middle, and looked as if he slept. Only Hapd'efan'e knew that the upper left side of his face was carefully tinted wax smeared on a bed of gauze; the eyes were closed, so too the mouth. More shocked and afraid than he had thought to be, Antony inched up to the bier and looked into the dreaming countenance. His toga and tunic were the crimson and purple of the Pontifex Maximus, his head adorned with the oak-leaf crown. The only ring he had ever worn was his seal, but it was gone; the long, tapering fingers were folded on each other in his lap, nails trimmed and polished. Suddenly the sight was too much; Antony turned away, left the cella to go to Caesar's study, Piso following. "Is there any money here?" Antony asked abruptly. Piso looked blank. "How would I know?" he asked. "Calpurnia will. Wake her." "I beg your pardon?" "Wake Calpurnia! She'll know where he keeps his money." As he spoke Antony opened a desk drawer, began to rummage inside it. "Antonius, stop that!" "I'm Caesar's heir, it will all be mine anyway. What's the difference between taking a bit now or later? I'm being dunned, I have to find enough to satisfy the moneylenders tomorrow." Piso angry was a terrifying sight; his unfortunate face had a naturally villainous cast, and when he bared his rotten, broken teeth in a snarl, they looked like fangs. Angry now, he wrested Antony's hand out of the drawer, slammed it shut. "I said, stop that! Nor am I waking my poor daughter!" "I'm Caesar's heir, I tell you!" "And I am Caesar's executor! You do nothing, you take nothing until I've seen Caesar's will!" Piso declared. "All right, that can be arranged." Antony strode to the temple, where Quinctilia, the Chief Vestal, had taken up residence on a chair to keep vigil over Caesar. "You!" Antony barked, yanking her roughly off the chair. "Fetch me Caesar's will!" "But " "I said, fetch me Caesar's will now!" "Don't you dare molest Rome's luck!" Piso growled. "It will take a few moments," Quinctilia babbled, frightened. "Then don't waste them here! Find it and bring it to Caesar's study! Move, you fat, stupid sow!" "Antonius!" Piso roared. "He's dead, what does he care?" Antony asked, flapping a hand at Caesar's body. "Where's his seal ring?" "In my possession," Piso whispered, too angry to yell. "Give it to me! I'm his heir!" "Not until I see that for myself." "He must have scrip, deeds, all sorts of things," said Antony, ransacking the study pigeonholes. "Yes, he does, but not here, you impious, avaricious fool! Everything is kept with his bankers he's no Brutus, to have his own strong room!" Piso usurped the desk before Antony could. "I pray," he said coldly, "that you die very slowly and horribly." Quinctilia appeared with a scroll in her hand, bound with wax and heavily sealed. When Antony went to grab it, she skipped past him with surprising agility and handed it to Piso, who took it and held it to a lamp, examined the seal. "Thank you, Quinctilia," Piso said. "Please ask Cornelia and Junia to come and act as witnesses. This ingrate insists that I open Caesar's testament now." The three Vestals, clad in white from head to foot, hair crowned with seven circlets of wool beneath their veils, clustered at one side of the desk while Piso broke the seal and unfurled the short, small document. A good reader, and assisted by the dot that Caesar always put over the top letter of a new word, Piso scanned it quickly, his arm deliberately obscuring it from Antony's gaze. Without any warning, he threw his head back and roared with laughter. "What? What?" "You're not Caesar's heir, Antonius! In fact, you don't get a mention!" Piso managed to say, fumbling for his handkerchief to wipe away his tears, half grief, half mirth. "Well done, Caesar! Oh, well done!" "I don't believe you! Here, give it to me!" "There are three Vestal witnesses, Antonius," Piso warned as he handed it over. "Don't attempt to destroy it." Fingers trembling, Antony read only enough to see a ghastly name, didn't get to the adoption clause. "Gaius Octavius? That simpering, mincing little pansy? It's a joke! Either that, or Caesar was mad when he wrote it. I'll contest!" "By all means try," Piso said, snatching the will back. He smiled at the three Vestals, as delighted as he at this wonderful retribution. "It's watertight, Antonius, and you know it. Seven-eighths to Gaius Octavius, one-eighth to be divided between um, Quintus Pedius, Lucius Pinarius, Decimus Brutus that won't hold up, he's one of the assassins and my daughter, Calpurnia." Piso leaned back and closed his eyes as Antony stormed out. He has to be worth at least fifty thousand talents, he thought to himself, still smiling. One-eighth of that is six thousand, two hundred and fifty talents ... Ignoring Decimus Brutus, who can't inherit as the result of a crime, that gives my Calpurnia something over two thousand talents. Well, well, well! He's tied it up for her as a decent husband should, too. I can't touch it without her consent, at any rate. He opened his eyes to find he was alone; the Vestals had gone back to their vigil, no doubt. Popping the will into the sinus of his toga, he rose to his feet. Two thousand talents! That made Calpurnia a major heiress. As soon as her official mourning period of ten months was over, he could marry her to someone powerful enough to be a big help for his infant son. Wouldn't Rutilia be thrilled? Interesting, however, that Caesar had made no provision for a child of Calpurnia's body. That means he knows there won't be one or that if there is, it doesn't belong to him. Too busy across the river with Cleopatra. Gaius Octavius was going to be the richest man in Rome.

Having heard the news of Caesar's assassination as he passed through Veii, not far north of Rome, Lepidus arrived at Antony's house at dawn. Grey with shock and fatigue, he accepted a goblet of wine and stared at Antony. "You look worse than I feel," Lepidus said. "I feel worse than I look." "Odd, I didn't think Caesar's death would hit you so hard, Antonius. Think of all that money you're inheriting." Whereupon Antony began to laugh insanely, walking back and forth, slapping his thighs, stomping his huge feet on the floor, "I am not Caesar's heir!" he hollered. Jaw dropped, Lepidus gaped. "You're joking!" "I am not joking!" "But who else is there to leave it to?" "Think of the least likely candidate." Lepidus gulped. "Gaius Octavius?" he whispered. "Gaius Cunnus Octavius," said Antony. "It all goes to a girl in a man's toga." "Jupiter!" Antony collapsed on to a chair. "I was so sure," he said. "But Gaius Octavius? It makes no sense, Antonius! What is he, about eighteen or nineteen?" "Eighteen. Sitting across the Adriatic in Apollonia. I wonder did Caesar tell him? They were mighty thick in Spain. I didn't read that far, but no doubt he's been adopted." "More important," said Lepidus, leaning forward, "what's going to happen now? Shouldn't you be talking to Dolabella? He's the senior consul." "We'll see about that," Antony said grimly. "Did you bring any troops with you?" "Yes, two thousand. They're on the Campus Martius." "Then the first thing is to garrison the Forum." "I agree," Lepidus was saying when Dolabella walked in. "Pax, pax!" Dolabella cried, holding up his hands, palms out. "I've come to say that I think you should be senior consul now Caesar's dead, Antonius. This shock changes everything. If we don't present a united front, the gods know what might brew up." "That's the first piece of good news I've heard!" "Go on, you're Caesar's heir!" "Quin taces!" Antony snarled, swelling. "He's not Caesar's heir," Lepidus explained. "Gaius Octavius is. You know, his great-nephew? The pretty pansy?" "Jup-i-ter!" said Dolabella. "What are you going to do?" "Stall the bloodsuckers for the moment, and get some money out of the Senate. Now that Caesar's dead, his dictate about who can pull money out of the Treasury will have to go you do agree, I hope, Dolabella?" "Definitely," Dolabella said cheerfully. "I owe money too." "And what about me?" Lepidus asked ominously. "Pontifex Maximus, for a start," Antony said. "Oh, that will please Junilla! I can sell my house." "What are we going to do about the assassins? Do we know yet how many of them there are?" Dolabella asked. "Twenty-three, if you include Trebonius," Antony said. "Trebonius? But he " "Stayed outside to keep me out, and therefore you out. No lictors inside. They carved the old boy into mincemeat. Why don't you know any of this? Lepidus has come from Veil, and he knows." "Because I've been shut in my house!" "So have I, but I know!" "Oh, stop arguing!" said Lepidus. "Knowing Cicero, he's been to see you already, am I right?" "You're right. Now there's a happy man! He wants an amnesty for all of them, of course," Antony said. "No, a thousand times no!" Dolabella shouted. "I'm not going to let them get away with murdering Caesar!" "Calm down, Publius," said Lepidus. "Think, man, think! If we don't handle this in the most peaceful way possible, there's certain to be another civil war, and that's the last thing anybody wants. We have to get Caesar's funeral over and done with, which means convoking the Senate he'll have to have a state ceremony. Have you seen the crowds in the Forum? They're not angry, but the numbers are growing in leaps and bounds." He got up. "I'd best get out to the Campus Martius and deploy my men. When for the Senate meeting? Where?" "Tomorrow at dawn next door in Tellus. We'll be safe," said Antony. "Pontifex Maximus!" Lepidus said gleefully. "Wasn't it odd?" he asked at the door. "When we were talking about the way to die at my dinner. 'As long as it's sudden,' he said. I'm rather glad he got his wish. Can you imagine Caesar dying by inches?" "He'd fall on his sword first," Dolabella said gruffly, and winked away tears. "Oh, I shall miss him!" "Cicero told me that the assassins they call themselves the Liberators, can you believe it? are wrecks," said Antony. "That's why we ought to go easy on them. The more we try to persecute them, the angrier men like Decimus Brutus might get he can general troops. Softly, softly, Dolabella." "For the time being" was as far as Dolabella was prepared to go. "When I have half a chance, Antonius, they'll pay!"

Cicero was pleased with everything except the sad performance of the Liberators in oratory. Twice that day he had persuaded Brutus to speak, the first time from the rostra, the second from the steps of the temple dismal, doleful, ineffectual, silly! When he didn't ramble in circles about privately owned land being given to the veterans, but how much he loved the veterans, he was maintaining that the Liberators had not forsworn their oaths to safeguard Caesar, because the oaths were invalid. Oh, Brutus, Brutus! Cicero's tongue itched to take over, but his instinct for self-preservation was stronger, and kept him silent. He was also, truth to tell, miffed that they hadn't taken him into their confidence beforehand if he had known, this shocking mess would not exist, and most of the First Class would not be locked inside their Palatine houses fearing revolution and murder. What he did do was spend a lot of time talking to Antony, Dolabella and Lepidus, pushing them gently into admitting that, after all, the assassination of Caesar Dictator wasn't the worst crime ever committed. When the Senate met in the temple of Tellus on the Carinae at dawn of the second day after Caesar's death, the Liberators were not in attendance; they were still living in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, still refusing to come out. Most other senators were there, but not Lucius Caesar, not Calvinus, and not Philippus. Tiberius Claudius Nero opened proceedings by asking that special honors be granted to the Liberators for freeing Rome from a tyrant, which provoked howls of outrage from the pedarii. "Sit down, Nero, no one asked you for your opinion on anything," Antony said, and swept on into a very reasonable, dulcetly phrased speech that acquainted the conscript fathers with the way the Roman wind was going to blow from the curule dais: the deed was done, the deed could not be undone, and yes, it was misguided, but no, there could be no doubt that the men who slew Caesar were as honorable as they were patriotic. By far the most important aspect, Antony kept hammering, was that government should continue with himself, the senior consul Marcus Antonius, in command. If some stared at Dolabella in astonishment, Dolabella simply nodded agreement. "That is what I want, and that is what I must insist upon," Antony said in no-nonsense tones. "However, it is essential that the House should confirm Caesar's laws and dictates, including those he intended to pass, but didn't." Many grasped the tenor of that: that whenever he needed to do something, Antony would pretend that Caesar was going to bring it into law later, hadn't gotten around to it before he died. Oh, how Cicero yearned to dispute that! But he couldn't, he had to devote his speech to a plea for the Liberators, who were well intentioned and honorable, must be excused their zeal in killing Caesar. Amnesty was essential! His only reference to Caesar's unpromulgated laws and dictates came at the end, when he protested that he didn't think it was wise to consider things Caesar had not yet mooted. The meeting broke up with the resolution that government should continue under the aegis of Marcus Antonius, Publius Cornelius Dolabella and the praetors; and a senatus consultum that the Liberators, all patriotic men, should go unpunished. From the temple of Tellus the senior magistrates, together with Aulus Hirtius, Cicero and some thirty others, walked to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There Antony informed the dirty, unshaven Liberators that the Senate had decreed a general amnesty, that they were perfectly safe from retribution. Oh, the relief! Then the whole party ascended the rostra and publicly shook hands with each other under the sullen eyes of the enormous crowd, watching silently. Not for, but not against. Passive. "To cement our pact," said Antony as they left the rostra, "I suggest that each of us ask one Liberator to dinner today. Cassius, will you be my guest?" Lepidus asked Brutus, Aulus Hirtius asked Decimus Brutus, Cicero asked Trebonius, and so on, until every Liberator had an invitation to dinner that afternoon. "I can't believe it!" whooped Cassius to Brutus as they toiled up the Vestal Steps. "Home free!" "Yes," said Brutus absently; he had just that moment remembered that Porcia might be dead. This was the first moment since he had left the slave to walk into the Curia Pompeia that he had even thought of her name. But of course she was alive. Were she dead, Cicero would have been the first to tell him. Servilia met him just beyond the porter's lodge, standing as Klytemnestra must have done just after killing Agamemnon. All she lacked was the axe. Klytemnestra! That is who my mother is. "I've locked your wife up," she greeted him. "Mama, you can't do that! This is my house," he bleated. "This is my house, Brutus, and it will be until the day I die. That monstrous incubus is no concern of mine, including at law. She drove you to murder Caesar." "I freed Rome from a tyrant," he said, wishing with every fiber of his being that he could just this once! gain the better of her. Wish on, Brutus, that will never happen. "The Senate has decreed an amnesty for the Liberators, so I am still the urban praetor. I still have my wealth and estates." She started to laugh. "Don't tell me you believe that?" "It is a fact, Mama." "The murder of Caesar is a fact, my son. Senatorial decrees are not worth the paper they're written upon."

Decimus Brutus's mind was in a turmoil so chaotic that he wondered about his sanity. He had panicked! Surely that fact alone said his thought processes were quite unhinged. Panic! He, Decimus Junius Brutus, to panic? He, the veteran of many battles, of many life-threatening situations, had looked down at Caesar's body and panicked. He, Decimus Junius Brutus, had run away. Now he was going to dine with another veteran of the Gallic War: the clerkly warrior Aulus Hirtius, as good with a pen as with a sword, inarguably Caesar's loyalest adherent. Next year Hirtius would be consul with Vibius Pansa if Caesar's dictate held up. But Hirtius is a peasant, a nobody. I am a Junius Brutus, a Sempronius Tuditanus. Loyalty is something I owe first and foremost to myself. And to Rome, of course. That goes without saying. I slew Caesar because he was ruining the Rome of my ancestors. Knitting up a Rome none of us wanted. Decimus, stop deluding yourself! You are going mad! You killed Caesar because he outshone you so brilliantly that you realized the only way that men would ever remember your name was if you killed him. That is the truth. You'll be in the history books, thanks to Caesar. It was hard to meet Hirtius's eyes, a nondescript shade of grey-blue-green, peaceful yet stern; the sternness was uppermost, but Hirtius extended his hand cordially and drew Decimus into his very nice house bought, like Decimus's own, out of the spoils from Longhaired Gaul. They dined alone, a great relief for Decimus, who had dreaded the presence of others. Finally, the last course and the servants gone, the wine and water remaining, Hirtius turned himself on his end of the couch so that he could see Decimus more comfortably. "This is a shocking mess you've gotten yourself into," he said as he poured unwatered wine. "Why say that, Aulus? The Liberators have been granted a general amnesty, things will go on as they always have." "I'm afraid not. Things have been started that can't go on as they were, because they didn't exist. They're entirely new." Startled, Decimus spilled a little of his wine. "I don't understand what you're saying." "Come with me, I'll show you." Hirtius swung his legs off the couch, slid his feet into backless slippers. Bewildered, Decimus followed suit, walked with Hirtius through the atrium and out on to the loggia, which had a fine view of the lower Forum. The sun was still well up, the sea of people manifest. As far as the eye could travel, masses and masses of people. Just standing there, hardly moving, hardly talking. "So?" Decimus asked. "There are plenty of women there, but look at the men. Look at them properly! What do you see?" "Men," said Decimus, bewilderment growing. "Decimus, is it really so long ago? Look at them! Half of the men in that crowd are old soldiers Caesar's old soldiers. Old in terms of soldiering, but not old in years. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, no more. Old, yet still young. The word is spreading up and down Italy that Caesar is dead, murdered, and they've come to Rome for his funeral. Thousands of them. The House hasn't even discussed a date for the funeral yet, but look at how many of them there are already. By the time that Caesar is burned, Lepidus's men will be hopelessly outnumbered." Shivering, Hirtius turned. "It's cold. We can go inside again." Back on the couch, Decimus downed half a goblet of wine, then stared at Hirtius very levelly. "Do you want my blood, Aulus?" "I grieve deeply for Caesar," Hirtius answered. "He was my friend as well as my benefactor. But the world can't run backward. If we who are left don't stick together, there'll be another civil war and that, Rome can't afford. But," Hirtius went on with a sigh, "we're educated, wealthy, privileged, and to some extent detached. It's the veterans you have to worry about, Decimus, not men like me or Pansa, much though we loved Caesar. I don't want your blood, but the veterans will. And if the veterans want it, then those in power will have to oblige them. The moment the veterans start baying for your blood, so will Marcus Antonius." Decimus broke into a cold sweat. "You're exaggerating." "No, I am not. You served with Caesar. You know how his soldiers felt about him. It was a love affair, pure and simple. Even the mutinies. Once the funeral's over, they'll turn ugly. So will Antonius. Or if not Antonius, someone else with power. Dolabella. That slippery eel, Lepidus. Or someone we haven't taken into account as a power because he's waiting in the wings." More wine, and he felt better. "I'll stick it out in Rome," Decimus muttered, almost to himself. "I doubt you'll be let stick it out in Rome. The Senate will renege on its amnesty because the people and the veterans will insist it does. The ordinary people loved him too he was a part of them. And once he rose high, he never forgot them, always had a cheerful word for them, stopped to listen to their woes. What does the abstract concept of political liberty mean to a man or woman of the Subura, Decimus, tell me that? Their votes don't even count in an election of Centuries, People, or Plebs. Caesar belonged to them. None of us ever have or ever will." "If I leave Rome, then I admit that I did wrong." "That's true." "Antonius is strong. He's been remarkably decent to us." "Decimus, don't trust Marcus Antonius!" "I have very good reason to trust him," Decimus said, knowing what Hirtius could not know: that Marcus Antonius had contrived at the murder of Caesar. "I believe that he wants to protect you, yes. But the people and the veterans won't let him. Besides, Antonius wants Caesar's power, and any man who aspires to that courts the same fate as Caesar. This assassination has set a precedent. Antonius will begin to fear that he'll be the next man cut down." Hirtius cleared his throat. "I don't know what he'll do, but whatever it is, take it from me, it won't benefit the Liberators." "You're hinting," Decimus said slowly, "that the Liberators should find honorable, legitimate excuses to leave the city. For me, that's easy. I can go to my province at once." "You can go. But you won't keep Italian Gaul long." "Nonsense! The House moved that Caesar's laws and dictates be upheld, and Caesar himself gave me Italian Gaul to govern." "Believe me, Decimus, you'll keep your province only as long as it suits Antonius and Dolabella."

* * *

The moment he got home Decimus Brutus sat and wrote in haste to Brutus and Cassius, told them what Hirtius had told him, and, back in that blind panic again, announced that he intended to quit Rome and Italy for his province. As he wrote, the letter grew more and more garbled, talked wildly of a mass migration of the Liberators to Cyprus or the most remote regions of Spanish Cantabria. What could they do except flee? he asked. They had no general like Pompeius Magnus to lead them, not one of them had any clout with the legions or foreign rulers. Sooner or later they were going to be declared public enemies, which would cost them their citizenship and their heads, or at best they would be tried and sent into permanent exile without the funds to live. In the midst of which he was begging them to work very hard on Antonius, assure him that no Liberator had any designs on the state or intention of killing the consuls. He ended by asking that the three of them meet around the fifth hour of night at a place of their choosing. So they met at Cassius's house, speaking in whispers with the shutters closed in case some servant grew curious. Brutus and Cassius were stunned by the extent of Decimus's mania, and therefore were not convinced that he knew what he was talking about. Perhaps, Cassius suggested, Hirtius was, for reasons of his own, trying to frighten them into bolting? For the moment they left Rome, they were admitting they had committed a crime. So no, Brutus and Cassius wouldn't leave Rome, and no, they refused to start gathering their liquid assets together either. "Have it your own way," Decimus said, rising. "Go or stay, I don't care anymore. I'm off to my province as soon as I can make arrangements. If I'm well entrenched in Italian Gaul, then Antonius and Dolabella might decide to leave me alone. Though I think I'll safeguard myself by doing a little secret recruiting of troops among the veterans up there. Just in case." "Oh, this is terrible!" Brutus cried to Cassius after the obsessed Decimus had gone. "My mother has ill-wished me, Porcia hasn't said two sensible words Cassius, we've lost our luck!" "Decimus is wrong," Cassius said confidently. "I'm the one who had dinner with Antonius, so I can assure you that he's totally wrong. It struck me that Antonius was thrilled to see the end of Caesar." His teeth flashed in a grin. "Except, that is, for the contents of Caesar's will." "Are you going to the Senate meeting tomorrow?" Brutus asked. "Very definitely. We all should in fact, we must. And don't worry, Decimus will be there too, I'm sure."

Lucius Piso had called the meeting to discuss Caesar's funeral. Entering the dilapidated interior of Tellus's hesitantly, the Liberators met with no overt hostility, though not one of the backbenchers would go near them in case he should inadvertently touch them. Caesar's obsequies were fixed for two days hence, the twentieth day of March. "So be it," said Piso, and looked at Lepidus. "Marcus Lepidus, is the city secure?" he asked. "The city is secure, Lucius Piso." "Then isn't it time you read Caesar's will publicly, Piso?" Dolabella asked. "I gather it contains a public bequest." "Let us go to the rostra now," said Piso. With one accord the House rose and walked to the rostra amid that sea of people. Shrinking, haunted, shuddering, Decimus noted how right Aulus Hirtius was: many of those present were veteran soldiers, more today than yesterday. There were also professional Forum frequenters present, men who knew every prominent face in the First Class. When Brutus and Cassius mounted the rostra with Antony and Dolabella, the Forum frequenters whispered among their less knowledgeable neighbors. A growl began in one throat after another, ominously swelling; Dolabella, Antony and Lepidus made a great show of friendliness toward Brutus, Cassius and Decimus Brutus until the growling eventually died away. Lucius Calpurnius Piso read Caesar's will out in full. Not only did it name Gaius Octavius as his heir, it also formally adopted him as Caesar's son, to be known henceforward as Gaius Julius Caesar. Murmurs of amazement rose from the crowd; no one knew who this Gaius Octavius was, the Forum frequenters able to give his origins, but unable to describe his appearance. When Decimus Brutus was mentioned as a minor heir, another growl went up, but Piso nimbly hopped to the bequest of most interest three hundred sesterces to every Roman citizen man, and public use of Caesar's gardens across the Tiber. The news was greeted with an alarming silence. No one cheered, no one threw objects into the air, no one applauded. After Piso concluded by announcing the date of the funeral, the Senate left the vicinity of the rostra very quickly, each member escorted by six of Lepidus's soldiers.

It was as if the whole world waited for Caesar's funeral, as if no man or woman in Rome was prepared to make a judgement until Caesar's last rites were over. Even when Antony told the Senate the next day in Jupiter Stator 's that he was permanently expunging the office of dictator from the constitution, only Dolabella reacted with enthusiasm. Apathy, everywhere apathy! And the crowds grew thicker, denser. After dark the whole of the Forum and the streets leading to it were ablaze with lights from lamps and campfires; worried residents in the surrounding insulae didn't sleep for fear of fire. A relief then, when the day of Caesar's funeral dawned. A special shrine had been erected on an open piece of ground slightly down-Forum from the side of the Domus Publica and the little round aedes of Vesta; it was an exact but smaller replica of the temple of Venus Genetrix in Caesar's Forum, made from wood painted to look like marble. Atop it was a platform accessed by steps to one side, its supports made to look like pillars too. After long consultation with the Senate, the two in charge of the funeral arrangements, Lucius Caesar and Lucius Piso, had decided that the rostra was just too dangerous a site for the public display of the body and the eulogy. This site at mid-Forum was safer. From it, the funeral procession could turn straight into the Vicus Tuscus and the Velabrum without invading the nucleus of the crowd. Once the cortege reached the Circus Flaminius, it would enter and proceed down its length; as this circus held fifty thousand spectators in its bleachers, Rome's citizens would have a good opportunity to mourn Rome's most beloved son. And from there it would be on to the Campus Martius, where the body would be burned, several hundred litters of aromatics bought at state expense to fuel the pyre. The procession commenced at the fringes of the Palus Ceroliae swamps, where there was room for every participant to gather. Caesar's bier would join it as it passed the Domus Publica. All Lepidus's two thousand soldiers kept the crowds off the Sacra Via itself, and defended a space around the viewing and eulogy site large enough to accommodate the huge pageant. Fifty gilded black chariots drawn by pairs of black horses carried the actors wearing the wax masks of Caesar's ancestors from Venus and Aeneas and Mars through Iulus and Romulus to his uncles by marriage, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla down from the Velia to stand in a triple semi-circle in front of the platformed shrine. One hundred of the many hundreds of litters piled with frankincense, myrrh, nard and other costly, burnable aromatics were stacked as a fence between the back row of chariots and the crowd, with shoulder-to-shoulder soldiers as an additional barrier. Interspersed with the chariots and litters as the procession came down from the Velia were black-robed professional mourners beating their breasts, tearing their hair, emitting eldritch wails and keening dirges. The crowd was gigantic, the greatest number of people since the famous gathering of Saturninus. When Caesar appeared on his bier from out of the doors to the vestibule of the Kings, a moan went up, a sigh, a tremble as of a million leaves. Lucius Caesar, Lucius Piso, Antony, Dolabella, Calvinus and Lepidus carried him, each clad in a black tunic and toga. Behind it the masses closed in. The soldiers standing with their backs pressed against the fence of litters started to look at each other uneasily, feeling the litters begin to wobble and creak as the crowd behind them pushed inexorably. Their worry communicated itself to the chariot horses, which grew restive, and that in turn had the actors shivering. Caesar sat upright upon the black cushions of the bier in the glory of his pontifical robes, head crowned with the corona civica, face serene, eyes closed. He rode on high like a mighty king, for all six of his pallbearers were imposingly tall, and looked the great noblemen they were. The pallbearers climbed the steps smoothly; Caesar hardly moved as they compensated for the slope. The bier was set down upon the platform so that Caesar was on full display. Mark Antony went to the front of the edifice and looked out across that ocean, a corner of his appalled mind noting the many Jews with their corkscrew curls and beards, the foreigners of all descriptions and the veterans, who had chosen to wear a sprig of laurel on their black togas. What was always a white crowd, for Romans at public affairs were togate, had become a black crowd. Fitting, thought Antony, intending to give the greatest speech of his career to the greatest audience any speaker since Saturninus had ever owned. But it was never given. All Antony managed to say were the opening words inviting Rome to mourn for Caesar. Screams of terrible grief erupted from countless thousands of throats, and the crowd moved as if seized by a single convulsion. Those in the forefront of the crush laid hands upon the hundred litters of aromatics as the chariot horses began to plunge and rear, the actors to scramble for their lives. Suddenly the air was full of chunks of flying wood, bark, resin, raining down on the platform, thrown inside the shrine, around it in growing heaps. The pallbearers, including Antony, fled down the platform steps and ran for the Domus Publica. Someone threw a torch, and the whole area burst into a pillar of flames. Like his daughter before him, Caesar burned at the wish of the people, not by decree of the Senate. And after so many days of silence, the crowd shouted for the blood of the Liberators. "Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!" on and on and on. Yet there was no riot. Thundering for Liberator blood, the masses stood watching the platform, bier and shrine dissolve into a wall of solid fire, not moving again until the blaze died away and the whole of Rome was filled with the dizzying, beautiful smell of burning aromatics. Only then did anger erupt into violence. Ignoring Lepidus's soldiers, the masses raced in all directions looking for victims. Liberators! Where were the Liberators? Death to the Liberators! Many poured up on to the Palatine, where doors were bolted in anonymous rows down dozens of narrow alleys and no one knew behind which one lived a Liberator. A Forum frequenter, crazed with grief, spotted Gaius Helvius Cinna, poet senator, running like one possessed, and mistook him for the other Cinna, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who had once been Caesar's brother-in-law and was rumored to be a Liberator. Innocent of any wrongdoing, Helvius Cinna was literally torn into small pieces. With night falling, and balked of any other positive prey, the weeping, anguished mobs dispersed.

The Forum Romanum lay deserted under a pall of sweet smoke.

On the morrow the undertakers searched for Caesar's ashes, put what tiny fragments of charred bones they could find into a gem-studded golden urn.

And on the following day, dawn revealed that the blackened flags where shrine and platform had been were covered with little bunches of early spring flowers, and little woollen dolls, and little woollen balls. Soon the little bunches of flowers, the little woollen dolls and the little woollen balls lay a foot thick. Those who left the flowers were women; those who left the dolls were Roman citizen men; and those who left the balls were slaves. The offerings had specific religious significance, and showed how far love for Caesar percolated through every stratum of the city. Of all five Classes, only the First had not universally loved him. And the Head Count, too lowly to have a Class at all, had loved him most. Slaves had no heads to count, hence the balls, but there were just as many little woollen balls as little woollen dolls. Who can tell why some men are loved, and others not? To a very angry Mark Antony, it was a mystery he had no hope of solving, though, had he asked Aulus Hirtius, Hirtius would have said that all who set eyes on him remembered Caesar, that he radiated some powerfully attractive force impossible to define, that, perhaps, he was simply the personification of the legendary hero. An angry Antony ordered the removal of the flowers, dolls and balls, but it turned out to be an exercise in futility. For every lot hauled away, twice as many appeared. Baffled, Antony had to give up, to close his eyes to the hundreds upon hundreds of people who were always there around the place where Caesar had burned to pray to him, to offer to him. Three days after the funeral, the dawn light revealed a magnificent marble altar on the spot where Caesar had burned, and the flowers, the dolls and the balls spread right down the Forum to the rostra. Eight days after the funeral, a twenty-foot-high column of pure white Proconnesian marble reared alongside the altar. All done in the night marches. Lepidus's soldiers hadn't seen a thing, they protested; they loved Caesar too. Caesar, who was being worshiped as a god by almost all of Rome.

Lucius Caesar didn't stay in Rome to witness most of this. He came down with pain in every limb, climbed laboriously into a litter and set off for his villa near Neapolis. On the way, he visited Cleopatra. The palace had become a sparsely furnished desert of bleak polished stone and wooden crates; the barges were already moving things downstream to Ostia. "Are you so ill, Lucius?" she enquired anxiously. "I am ill in the spirit, Cleopatra. I just couldn't bear to be in a city that allows two blatant murderers in purple-bordered togas to go about their praetorian business." "Brutus and Cassius. Though I believe that they haven't yet had the courage to go about their praetorian business." "They daren't until the veterans have left Rome. You heard that poor Helvius Cinna was killed? Piso is desolate." "Instead of the other Cinna, yes. Was the other Cinna truly one of the assassins?" "That ingrate? No. He merely thanked Caesar for recalling him from exile by stripping off his praetorian insignia in public because Caesar gave them to him. It gave him a day in the sun." "It's the end of everything, isn't it?" she asked. "Either an end, or a beginning." "And Caesar adopted Gaius Octavius." She shivered. "That was brilliant of him, Lucius. Gaius Octavius is very dangerous." Lucius laughed. "An eighteen-year-old boy? I think not." "At eight. At eighty." She looks, Lucius thought, blighted yet entire. Well, she was reared in a cruel nest. She will survive. "Where's Caesarion?" he asked. "Gone with his nursemaids and Hapd'efan'e. It's not politic to put two Ptolemies aboard the same ship, or even in the same fleet of ships. We go in two segments. I shall wait another two nundinae. Charmian and Iras have remained, and Servilia visits. Oh, Lucius, how she suffers! She blames Porcia for Brutus's share in it, probably with justice. But it's Caesar's death eats at her. She loved him more than anyone." "More than you loved him?" "Past tense? No, always present tense. Her love is different from mine. I have a country to care for, and Caesar's blood son." "Will you marry again?" "I will have to, Lucius. I am Pharaoh, I must have issue to nurture Nilus and my people."

So Lucius Julius Caesar went on his way to Neapolis, feeling the grief of Caesar's going more now than in the beginning. Matius is right. If Caesar, with all his genius, could not find a way out, who is there left to try? An eighteen-year-old? Never. The wolves of Rome's First Class will tear Gaius Octavius into tinier bits than the Head Count did Helvius Cinna. We of the First Class are our own worst enemies.

IX

Caesar's Heir

From APRIL until DECEMBER of 44 B.C.

Legates, military tribunes and prefects of all ranks, even contubernales, since they came from families with clout or had distinguished themselves in some way, were not subject to the restrictions and disciplines placed on ranker soldiers and their centurions; it was, for instance, their right to leave military service at any time. Thus, having arrived in Apollonia at the beginning of March, Gaius Octavius, Marcus Agrippa and Quintus Salvidienus were not obliged to live in the enormous leather-tented camps that stretched from Apollonia all the way north to Dyrrachium. The fifteen legions Caesar had assembled for his campaign went about their camping business indifferent to the presence of the upper-class men who would later assume a sometimes purely nominal command of their battle activities. Save for battle, the twain rarely met. For Octavius and Agrippa, accommodation was not an issue; they went to the house in Apollonia set aside for Caesar and moved into a small, undesirable room. The penurious Salvidienus, eight years their senior and unsure of his duties or even his rank until Caesar defined them, reported to the quartermaster-general, Publius Ventidius, who assigned him to a room in a house rented for junior military tribunes not yet old enough to stand for election as tribunes of the soldiers. The problem was that the room already had a tenant, another junior military tribune named Gaius Maecenas, who went to Ventidius and explained that he didn't want to share his room or his life with another fellow, especially a Picentine. The fifty-year-old Ventidius was another Picentine, and had a personal history more ignominious by far than Salvidienus's. As a little boy he had walked as a captive in a triumphal parade Pompey the Great's father had celebrated for victories over the Italians in the Italian War. Childhood afterward had been a parentless ordeal, and only marriage to a wealthy widow from Rosea Rura country had given him a chance to rise. As the Rosea Rura bred the best mules in the world, he went into the business of breeding and selling army mules to generals like Pompey the Great. Thus his contemptuous nickname, Mulio, "the muleteer." Lacking education and the proper background, he had hungered in vain for a military command, knowing in his bones that he could general troops. By the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon he was well known to Caesar; he attached himself to Caesar's cause and waited for his chance. Unfortunately Caesar preferred to give him quartermaster's duties than command of a legion, but, being Ventidius, he applied himself to this organizational job with dour efficiency. Be it regulating the lives of junior military tribunes or doling out food equipment and arms to the legions, Publius Ventidius did it well, still hoping in his heart for that opportunity to general. It was getting closer. Caesar had promised him a praetorship next year, and praetors commanded armies, didn't serve as quartermasters. Understandably, when the wealthy, privileged Gaius Maecenas came complaining about a squalid Picentine moving into his room, Ventidius was not impressed. "The answer's easy, Maecenas," he said. "Do what others in the same situation do rent yourself a house at your own expense." "Do you think I wouldn't, if there were any to rent?" gasped Maecenas. "My servants are living in a hovel as it is!" "Hard luck" was Ventidius's unsympathetic reply. Maecenas's reaction to this lack of official co-operation was typical of a wealthy, privileged young man: he couldn't keep Salvidienus out, but nor was he prepared to move over for him. "So I'm living in about a fifth of a room that's plenty big enough for two ordinary tribunes," Salvidienus said to Octavius and Agrippa in disgust. "I'm surprised you haven't just pushed him into his half and told him to lump it," said Agrippa. "If I do that, he'll go straight to the legatal tribunal board and accuse me of making trouble, and I can't afford to earn a reputation as a troublemaker. You haven't seen this Maecenas he's a fop with connections to all the higher-ups," said Salvidienus. "Maecenas," Octavius said thoughtfully. "An extraordinary name. Sounds as if he goes back to the Etruscans. I'm curious to meet this Gaius Maecenas." "What a terribly good idea," said Agrippa. "Let's go." "No," said Octavius, "I'd rather fish on my own. The pair of you can spend your day on a picnic or a nice long walk." So when Gaius Octavius strolled alone into the room in one of the junior military tribunes' buildings, Gaius Maecenas glanced up from his writing with a puzzled frown. Four-fifths of the space was crammed with Maecenas's gear: a proper bed with a feather mattress, portable pigeonholes full of scrolls and papers, a walnut desk inlaid with some very good marquetry, a matching chair, a couch and low table for dining, a console table that held wine, water and snacks, a camp bed for his body servant, and a dozen large wood-and-steel trunks. The owner of all this clutter was anything but a martial type. Maecenas was short, plump, quite homely of face, clad in a tunic of expensive patterned wool, with felt slippers upon his feet. His dark hair was exquisitely barbered, his eyes were dark, his moist red lips in a permanent pout. "Greetings," said Octavius, perching on a trunk. Clearly one look had informed Gaius Maecenas that he confronted a social equal, for he got up with a welcoming smile. "Greetings. I'm Gaius Maecenas." "And I'm Gaius Octavius." "Of the consular Octavii?" "The same family, yes, though a different branch. My father died a praetor when I was four years old." "Some wine?" Maecenas asked. "Thank you, but no. I don't drink wine." "Sorry I can't offer you a chair, Octavius, but I had to move my guest's chair out to make room for some oaf from Picenum." "Quintus Salvidienus, you mean?" "That's him. Faugh!" said Maecenas with a moue of distaste. "No money, only one servant. I'll get no contributions toward decent dinners there." "Caesar favors him highly," Octavius said idly. "A Picentine nobody? Nonsense!" "Appearances can be very deceiving. Salvidienus led the cavalry charge at Munda and won nine gold phalerae. He'll be attached to Caesar's personal staff when we set out." How very nice it was to be in a position of superior knowledge when it came to command affairs! thought Octavius, crossing his legs and linking his hands around one knee. "Have you had any military experience?" he asked sweetly. Maecenas flushed. "I was Marcus Bibulus's contubernalis in Syria," he said. "Oh, a Republican!" "No. Bibulus was simply a friend of my father's. We elected," Maecenas said stiffly, "to stay out of the civil war, so I returned from Syria to my home in Arretium. However, now that Rome's more settled, I intend to enter public life. My father thought it er politic that I gain additional military experience in a foreign war. So here I am," he concluded airily, "in the army." "But very much on the wrong foot," said Octavius. "Wrong foot?" "Caesar is no Bibulus. In his army, rank has few privileges. Senior legates like his nephew Quintus Pedius don't travel in the luxury I see here. I'll bet you have a stable of horses too, but since Caesar walks, so does everybody else, even his senior legates. One horse for battle is mandatory, but more will earn you censure. As will a whole large wagon full of personal possessions." The liquid eyes gazing at this most unusual youth were growing more and more confused, the redness beneath the skin was deepening. "But I am a Maecenas from Arretium! My ancestry obliges me to emphasize my status!" "Not in Caesar's army. Look at his ancestry." "Just who do you think you are, to criticize me?" "A friend," said Octavius, "who would dearly like to see you shift from the wrong foot to the appropriate one. If Ventidius has decided that you and Salvidienus are to share, then you'll continue to share for many moons. The only reason why Salvidienus hasn't beaten the daylights out of you is because he doesn't want to earn a reputation as a troublemaker before the campaign begins. Think about it, Maecenas," said that persuasive voice. "Once we've seen action a couple of times, Salvidienus will stand even higher in Caesar's estimation than he does now. Once that happens, he will beat the daylights out of you. Perhaps under your soft exterior, you are a military lion, but I doubt it." "What do you know? You're only a boy!" "True, but I don't live in ignorance of what kind of general or man Caesar is. I was with him in Spain, you see." "A contubernalis!" "Precisely. One who knows his place, what's more. However, I'd like to see peace in our little corner of Caesar's campaign, which means you and Salvidienus will have to learn to get along. Salvidienus matters to us. You're a pampered snob," Octavius said genially, "but for some reason, I've taken a fancy to you." He waved his hand at the hundreds of scrolls. "What I see is a man of letters, not of the sword. If you take my advice, you'll apply to Caesar when he arrives for a position as one of his personal assistants on the secretarial front. Gaius Trebatius isn't with him, so there's scope for you to advance that public career as a man of letters with Caesar's help." "Who are you?" Maecenas asked hollowly. "A friend," Octavius said with a smile, and got up. "Think about what I've said, it's good advice. Don't let your wealth and education prejudice you against men like Salvidienus. Rome needs all kinds of men, and it's to Rome's advantage if different kinds of men tolerate one another's quirks and dispositions. Send all of this except your literature back to Arretium, give Salvidienus half of your quarters, and don't live like a sybarite in Caesar's army. He's not quite as strict as Gaius Marius, but he's strict." A nod, and he was gone. When Maecenas got his breath back, he stared at his furniture through a veil of tears. Several fell when his eyes reached his big, comfortable bed, but Gaius Maecenas was no fool. The lovely lad had exuded a strange authority. No arrogance, no hauteur, no coldness. Nor the slightest hint of an invitation, though Octavius had revealed a degree of perception about behavior that must surely have informed him that Gaius Maecenas, lover of women, was also a lover of men. He hadn't referred to this by word or look, but he definitely understood that the principal reason Maecenas had tried to eject Salvidienus lay in a need for privacy above and beyond mere literary pursuits. Well, on this campaign it would have to be women, none but women. So when Salvidienus returned several hours later, he found the room stripped of its trappings, and Gaius Maecenas seated at a plain folding table, his ample behind on a folding stool. Out came a manicured hand. "I apologize, my dear Quintus Salvidienus," said Maecenas. "If we're to live together for many moons, then we'd best learn to get along. I'm soft, but I'm not a fool. If I annoy you, tell me. I'll do the same." "I accept your apology," said Salvidienus, who understood a few things about behavior too. "Octavius visited, did he?" "Who is he?" Maecenas asked. "Caesar's nephew. Have you been issued orders?" "Oh, no," said Maecenas. "That's not his style."

The fact that Caesar didn't arrive in Apollonia toward the end of March was generally blamed on the equinoctial gales, now blowing fitfully. Stuck in Brundisium, was the consensus. On the Kalends of April, Ventidius sent for Gaius Octavius. "This just came for you by special courier," he said, his tone disapproving; in Ventidius's catalogue of priorities, mere cadets didn't receive specially couriered letters. Octavius took the scroll, which bore Philippus's seal, with a stab of alarm that had nothing to do with his mother or his sister. White-faced, he sank without permission into a chair to one side of Ventidius's desk and gazed at the trusty muleteer, a helpless agony in his eyes that silenced Ventidius's tongue. "I'm sorry, my knees have gone," he said, and wet his lips. "May I open this now, Publius Ventidius?" "Go ahead. It's probably nothing," Ventidius said gruffly. "No, it's bad news about Caesar." Octavius broke the seal, unfurled the single sheet, and read it laboriously. Finished, he didn't look up, just thrust the paper across the desk. "Caesar is dead, assassinated." He knew before he opened it! thought Ventidius, snatching the letter. Having mumbled his way through it in disbelief, he stared at its recipient in numbed horror. "But why to you, news like this? And how did you know? Are you prescient?" "Never before, Publius Ventidius. I don't know how I knew." "Oh, Jupiter! What will happen to us now? And why hasn't this news been conveyed to me or Rabirius Postumus?" Tears gathered in the muleteer's eyes; he put his face upon his arms and wept bitterly. Octavius got to his feet, his breath suddenly whistling. "I must return to Italy. My stepfather says he'll be waiting for me in Brundisium. I'm sorry that the news came to me first, but perhaps the official notification was delayed by events." "Caesar dead!" came Ventidius's muffled voice. "Caesar dead! The world has ended." Octavius left the office and the building, went down to the quays to hire a pinnace, laboring over the short walk as he hadn't labored for months. Come, Octavius, you can't suffer an attack of the asthma now! Caesar is dead, and the world is ending. I must know it all as soon as possible, I can't lie here in Apollonia gasping for every breath. "I'm for Brundisium today," he told Agrippa, Salvidienus and Maecenas an hour later. "Caesar has been assassinated. Whoever wants to come with me is welcome, I've hired a big enough pinnace. There won't be any expedition to Syria." "I'll come with you," Agrippa said instantly, and left the common room to pack his single trunk, call his single servant. "Maecenas and I can't just leave," said Salvidienus. "We'll have work to do if the army is to be stood down. Perhaps we'll meet again in Rome." Salvidienus and Maecenas stared at Octavius as if at a total stranger; he had walked in looking blue around the mouth and wheezing, but absolutely calm. "I haven't time to deal with Epidius and my other tutors," he said now, producing a fat purse. "Here, Maecenas, give this to Epidius and tell him to get everybody and everything to Rome." "There's a gale coming," Maecenas said anxiously. "Gales never stopped Caesar. Why should they stop me?" "You're not well," Maecenas said courageously, "that's why." "Whether I'm on the Adriatic or in Apollonia, I won't be well, but sickness wouldn't stop Caesar, and it isn't going to stop me." He went off to supervise the packing of his trunk, leaving Salvidienus and Maecenas to look at each other. "He's too calm," said Maecenas. "Maybe," Salvidienus said pensively, "there's more of his uncle in him than meets the eye." "Oh, I've known that since the moment I met him. But he does a balancing act on a nervous tightrope that nothing in the history books says Caesar did. The history books! How terrible, Quintus, to think he's now relegated to the history books."

"You're not well," said Agrippa as they walked down to the quays in the teeth of a rising wind. "That subject is forbidden. I have you, and you're enough." "Who would dare to murder Caesar?" "The heirs of Bibulus, Cato and the boni, I imagine. They won't go unpunished." His voice dropped until it became inaudible to Agrippa. "By Sol Indiges, Tellus and Liber Pater, I swear that I will exact retribution!" The open boat put out into a heaving sea, and Agrippa found himself Octavius's nursemaid, for Scylax the body servant Octavius chose to go with him succumbed to seasickness even faster than his master did. As far as Agrippa was concerned, Scylax could die, but that couldn't be Octavius's fate. Between his shivering bouts of retching and an attack of the asthma that had him greyish-purple in the face, it did look to the worried Agrippa as if his friend might die, but they had no alternative save to go westward for Italy; wind and sea insisted upon pushing them in that direction. Not that Octavius was a troublesome or demanding patient. He simply lay in the bottom of the boat on a board to keep him clear of the foul water slopping there; the most Agrippa could do for him was to keep his chin up and his head to one side so that he couldn't aspirate the almost clear fluid he vomited. Agrippa now discovered convictions in himself that he hadn't known he possessed: that this sickly fellow scant months younger than he wasn't going to die, or disappear into obscurity now that his all-powerful uncle was no longer there to push him upward. At some point in the distant future, Octavius was going to matter to Rome, when he had grown to maturity and could emulate the earlier members of his family by entering the Senate. He will need military men like Salvidienus and me, he will need a paper man like Maecenas, and we must be there for him, despite whatever happens during the years that must elapse between now and when Gaius Octavius comes into his own. Maecenas is too exalted to be a client, but as soon as Octavius improves, I am going to ask him if I may become his first client, and advise Salvidienus to be his second client. When Octavius fought to sit upright, Agrippa took him into his arms and held him where his feeble gestures indicated that he could breathe easiest, a sagum sheltering him from the rain and spume. At least, thought Agrippa, it's not going to be a long passage. We'll be in Italy before we know it, and once we're on dry land he's bound to lose the seasickness, if not the asthma. Whoever heard of something called asthma? But landfall when it came was a bitter disappointment; the storm had blown them to Barium, sixty miles north of Brundisium. In charge of Octavius's purse as well, for he had no money of his own Agrippa paid the pinnace owner and carried his friend ashore, leaving Scylax to totter in his wake supported by his own man, Phormion, who to Agrippa represented the difference between utter penury and some pretensions to gentility. "We must hire two gigs and get to Brundisium at once," said Octavius, who looked much better just for leaving the sea. "Tomorrow," said Agrippa firmly. "It's barely dawn. Today, Agrippa, and no arguments."