John Roberts - Oracle of the Dead

“I could name you their tribes,” I said. “These are warriors, Julia. Gallic warriors do no work, unless it involves horses. All their lives they do nothing but fight and train to fight. They are aristocrats, by their own reckoning. Their lands are worked for them by slaves. To them, fighting to the death is nothing. Being set to work would be an unthinkable degradation. They’d commit suicide before they’d pick up a shovel. No, these men wouldn’t want to be doing anything else, since they can no longer be warriors in Gaul. Sabinilla, who is your trainer?”

“Astyanax. He’s the best trainer in Campania. In his fighting days he contended as a Thracian, but he’s expert at all the styles. He had fifty-one victories. He comes here three days in ten to work with my men. He trains several of the small private troupes in the district.” This evening her nails were silver-gilt, and she wore all silver jewelry in place of the bronze she had worn earlier. Her gown was a shimmery white, about as close to silver as you can get with cloth.

Dinner was the usual lavish affair, with a huge number of guests. Sabinilla couldn’t resist showing all her neighbors that she had the Roman praetor under her roof. There were local officials, some of whom I’d already met, priests from various temples, the most prominent equites, even a few senators who had villas in the area. As it Romanized, the district was becoming more and more popular with the Roman elite, with its resorts, its beautiful landscape, and its wonderful climate. After all the meeting and a lengthy dinner, at which I was uncharacteristically moderate, I found myself huddled with the senators. This was inevitable. No matter the location, Roman politicians have to get together to talk politics and intrigue.

“Praetor,” began a man named Lucullus, who was a distant relation to the great Lucullus, “what do you think Caesar will do next?” As ranking man, they all deferred to me. Plus, through Julia, they expected me to know all about Caesar’s doings.

“He’ll cross the Rubicon and he’ll bring his army with him and there will be civil war.” I was heartily sick of the subject and wanted to keep my answer short.

“Surely not!” all of them chorused.

“Surely so,” I said.

“It will be the days of Marius and Sulla come again,” said one, his face pale. “All Italy will be devastated. The carnage will be terrible.”

“That I rather doubt,” I said, enjoying the offshore evening breeze. We stood on a beautiful terrace behind the main house. It stood at the very tip of the spit of rocky land, high above the sea, and was rimmed by a marble balustrade topped with beautiful Greek statues of heroes, also of marble. The surf crashed musically below, foaming over jagged rocks.

“How can that be?” said the pale-faced one. “The minute Caesar crosses that river, the Senate will declare a state of civil war and Pompey will raise his legions to meet him.”

“Pompey has not seen Caesar move and I have. He’ll come down on Italy faster than the Gauls or the Carthaginians or the Teutones or Cimbri ever did. Pompey won’t have time to get his troops together, much less drilled and provisioned for war. He’ll have to run for it and have his men join him elsewhere, maybe Greece, maybe Illyria. There will be plenty of fighting and it will be bloody, but I doubt there will be much of it in Italy.”

I am not trying to appear prescient in hindsight. It is exactly what I said that evening, and events bore me out. This is because I did indeed know Caesar well, insofar as anyone really knew that man. He was perfectly happy to exterminate whole nations of barbarians on Rome’s behalf, but he had a strange reluctance to kill citizens and applied the death penalty more sparingly than most ordinary judges. It was, incidentally, this magnanimity that eventually got him killed. He was assassinated by a conspiracy of men most of whom he had spared or called back from exile when he had every reason and every right to kill them. Let that be a lesson to anyone who seizes absolute power: Always kill all your enemies as soon as you have the power to. You’re just making trouble for yourself if you don’t. It was a lesson our First Citizen certainly took to heart.

Sabinilla appeared like a silver vision and suddenly I understood why she had chosen her fantastic color scheme. It was so that she would be dazzlingly visible after the sun was down and everyone was gathered outside, on the terraces or in the formal gardens and courtyards. It was a clever bit of planning. She outshone every other woman there.

“You men shouldn’t be huddled here plotting,” she said. “Come and enjoy the evening’s entertainments.”

“You mean there’s more?” I said.

“Of course there is! And you gentlemen must let me borrow the praetor for a while. Come along, now.” She took my arm in an elegant but viselike grip and dragged me away from the clump of white togas.

“I had to rescue you,” she said. “I heard them bringing up Caesar and I knew you’ve had your fill of that.”

“I can only express my gratitude,” I said, sure that she had some other motive. I was getting suspicious of everyone lately.

Abruptly, a crowd of dancers and mountebanks stormed the terrace. Like every other bit of the evening’s festivities this was contrived to be spectacular at night, for all of the acts involved fire. The outdoor lamps and torches were extinguished and fire-eaters rushed among the guests, breathing flame like mythical beasts, making the ladies scream delightedly. Then dancers performed an act I had never seen before. They were all women, naked and sparkling with oil in which flecks of mica glittered like stars all over their lithe bodies. They twirled short torches with flames at both ends, so swiftly that they formed great, glowing circles, and they did this without ever missing a step of their elaborate, acrobatic dances. After that, tightrope walkers traversed and did handsprings high above the terrace on ropes that flamed furiously, yet their hands and feet seemed to be unburned, and the ropes never burned through.

“How do they do that?” I said, like a yokel who had never seen such mountebanks before.

“It’s the secret of their art,” Sabinilla answered. “My master of ceremonies devised this entertainment some time ago and scoured Italy and Greece and Sicily for entertainers with the requisite skills.”

Something occurred to me. “You only learned this morning that I would be coming to Stabiae. Surely you didn’t throw this evening’s entertainment together just since we met by chance on the road?”

She laughed at my cloddish lack of subtlety. “Of course not! As soon as I heard that you would be visiting Campania and staying at the Hortalus Villa, I started planning this. I knew you’d eventually make your way to Stabiae for the assizes, so I had all in readiness for that day.”

“You mean you’ve been housing all these people here for months?”

“Actually, the dancers only arrived about ten days ago. They’re from Spain, where all the greatest dance troupes are trained. I’m so glad they arrived in time for this. The evening wouldn’t have been complete without them. Oh, look!” She pointed to a sidespit of rock that jutted out from the main formation about a hundred paces away. A tongue of flame had sprung up and now it spread with incredible speed until a huge bonfire was burning at furnace heat. It lit up the terrace like a rising sun and was almost as unbearable to look at directly. A blast of heat reached us even across that distance and the flames leapt into the sky as high, it seemed, as the Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria. I knew that only oil-soaked pine could blaze so high, so fast.

“Surely,” I said, “this is the climax of your evening. I must say it’s awe-inspiring. It’s like watching an enemy city burn.”