Steven Saylor - A Mist of Prophecies

She happened to look down and saw us staring up at her. That was the first time I looked into her eyes and saw that they were blue. Her face was blank, without expression-the face of Athena as molded by the Greek sculptors, I thought-and that in itself seemed odd, considering that she was watching a riot. I thought of a bird watching the activities of humans below her, apathetic to their violence against one another.

She gave a jerk. I thought that we had frightened her somehow, and that she was about to bolt. Instead, her eyes rolled back, and her knees buckled under her. She swayed, lost her footing, and tumbled forward.

To say that Cassandra quite literally fell into my arms would be true but misleading, lending the moment a romantic flair in no way evident at the time. In fact, when I saw that she was about to fall, I felt a quiver of panic-not for her, but for myself. When a man of my years sees a woman falling toward him from a considerable height, he thinks not of heroism but of his own frail bones. Still, I suspect that the instinct to catch a falling woman is strong in any man, no matter what his years. Hieronymus reacted just as I did, and it was into both our arms that she tumbled.

The moment was painfully awkward. Hieronymus and I essentially collided, and an instant later Cassandra fell onto us, and all three of us very nearly collapsed to the ground in a heap. If we had been actors in a comedy by Plautus, the staging could not have been more hilarious. By some miracle of balance and counterbalance, Hieronymus and I both stayed on our feet. Together we managed to lower our dazed cargo to her own unsteady feet, supporting her arms to keep her upright.

The breath was knocked out of me. A sharp pain shot up my spine. Spots swam before my eyes. None of this mattered when Cassandra fell swooning against me, one hand across her face and the other across her bosom.

To observe the form of a beautiful woman at a distance is one thing. To abruptly feel a warm, solid, breathing body enclosed within your arms is another thing altogether. It was precisely for this, to experience such moments of human contact, that the gods made us. That was what I felt in that instant, even if I did not consciously realize it.

Cassandra gradually came to her senses and drew back from me, but only slightly, still remaining in my embrace. Over her shoulder I saw Hieronymus looking rather envious of me. I looked in Cassandra's eyes and saw again that they were blue, but not quite the shade I had thought. There was a bit of green in them, or was that only a momentary trick of the light? Her eyes fascinated me.

"Was I… did I… fall?" she asked. It seemed to me that her Latin carried a slight accent, but I couldn't place it.

"You did. From up there." I nodded toward the platform.

"And… you caught me?"

"We caught you," said Hieronymus, crossing his arms petulantly. Cassandra glanced at him over her shoulder. She gently pulled herself from my embrace.

"Are you all right?" I said. "Can you stand?"

"Of course."

"What happened? Did you faint?"

"I'm perfectly all right now. I should go." She turned away.

"Go where?" I reached for her arm, then stopped myself. Where she went was none of my business. Perhaps she thought so too, for she made no answer. Yet it seemed to me that there must be more to say. "What's your name?"

"They call me Cassandra." She looked back at me. Her expression, briefly animated after she recovered from her daze, had become remote again-goddess like, birdlike, or simply the affectless face of a madwoman?

"But that can't be your real name," I said. "You must have another."

"Must I?" She looked confused for a moment, then turned and walked away with a slow, imperturbable stride, her head and shoulders erect, seemingly oblivious of the men who occasionally ran across her path in flight from the continuing melee before the tribunals of the rival magistrates.

"What an extraordinary woman," said Hieronymus.

I merely nodded.

My interview with Terentia and the Vestal Fabia had yielded some new information about Cassandra, if not much. I decided next to consult Fulvia the twice-widowed; I had rendered her a service in the past by investigating the murder of her husband, Clodius-as partial payment she had given me Mopsus and Androcles-and I could expect at least a cordial welcome at her door. And so, after leaving Cicero's house and returning to my own for a frugal midday meal and a fitful nap during the hottest part of the day, I set out as the sun was lowering to the house of Rome's most famous widow.

As before, I took Davus with me for protection. As we walked down the familiar streets of the Palatine, I was reminded of the days when Davus first entered my household as a slave, only shortly after I first met Fulvia as a stunned and grieving widow. It seemed a memory from another age. Could it actually have been only four years ago that Clodius was murdered on the Appian Way? Rome had been wracked with riots. Clodius's radical supporters had burned the Senate House. Pompey had been called upon to restore order and given almost dictatorial powers; he had exploited the situation to engineer a series of trials that banished many of his enemies from Rome, upsetting once and for all the precarious constitutional balance between his interests and those of Caesar. In retrospect, the murder of Clodius had been the temporal fulcrum between the moment when civil war seemed unthinkable and the moment when it became inevitable. The murder of Fulvia's first husband had been the beginning of the end of our tattered Republic.

Her grief for Clodius had been deep and genuine. They had been true lovers, I think, as well as partners in a broader sense; for Fulvia, as a politician's wife, had always been the exact opposite of Cicero's Terentia. She was a woman with opinions, plans, projects, allies, and enemies. She plotted and schemed alongside her husband and served as his closest advisor. His death had robbed her not only of a husband and a father to their two children; it had robbed her of her role in the political sphere. Women can play no part in the Senate or the magistracies. Women cannot vote. By law they cannot even own property in their own names, although clever women find ways around such technicalities, just as women who care about the course of worldly events find ways to wield their influence, usually through their husbands. While Clodius lived, Fulvia had been one of the most powerful people in Rome, male or female. When he died, she was like a strong man suddenly paralyzed and stricken mute.

But a woman as intelligent, wealthy, and ambitious as Fulvia-who was also a striking woman, if not beautiful-did not have to endure the helplessness of widowhood for long. To a certain kind of man, her combination of qualities must have been almost maddeningly attractive. When she consented to marry Gaius Curio, many people thought that she had found the perfect match. He had been a part of her circle for many years, one of that coterie of ambitious, bright young men with voracious appetites and endless schemes to remake the world in their own image, men like Dolabella, Clodius, Caelius, and Marc Antony. Some said that Fulvia actually would have preferred Antony, had he been available and not already married to his cousin Antonia, and that Fulvia had settled on Antony's boyhood friend (some said lover) Curio as the next best thing; but most agreed that Curio was in fact the better choice because he was more malleable and less inclined to debauchery than Antony.

Like Antony, Curio early on allied himself with Caesar and never wavered in his devotion or relented in proselytizing on Caesar's behalf. Indeed, it was largely Curio's influence that had brought Marcus Caelius into the fold. On the eve of the war, Caelius and Curio had ridden out together to be by Caesar's side when he crossed the Rubicon. But while Caelius had ultimately been relegated to a minor praetorship in Rome, Curio had been given command of four legions. When Caesar headed for Spain, he dispatched Curio to take on the Pompeian forces led by Cato in Sicily. Cato, disorganized and unready like the rest of the Pompeians, abandoned the island without a fight. Curio, flush from an easy conquest, left two of his legions in Sicily and with his other two pressed on to Africa-and that was where Curio's troubles began.