John Roberts - The Sacrilege

"Two more!" I yelled. "I want two more of you pointy-bearded Tuscian slaves to pay for the blood of two Romans. The one I got last night wasn't enough!" No sooner asked for than received. The Etruscans attacked, howling. Even in the excitement of the moment I noted that the others weren't so eager. I would like to think that they were overawed by my heroics, but more likely they thought it unworthy to assist wretched foreigners in killing a Senator.

One came in, swinging a hammer. I ducked the blow and ran him through and then jumped on the next one before he had a chance to understand that it was I who was on the offensive. With a sense of the very finest irony, I poked him in the throat with the point of my gladius, just as my instructor had taught me years before, in the old Statilian ludus. I only wished that I had a hammer to whack him between the eyes with.

The others began to close in. I'd had my two. Rome was avenged. I turned and fled downhill, scattering citizens right and left. The pack baying at my heels caused further alarm. The press of celebrating citizenry got too dense to push through, and I turned to confront my pursuers. At that moment, something large and solid bowled into me, shoving me through a dense pack of ivy-wreathed celebrators and into an alley, down a flight of stairs and through a low doorway.

"Keeping you alive could call for the full-time attentions of a legion," said Titus Milo. People looked up from their tables. I smiled at them and sheathed my sword. They returned their attention to their food and wine.

"I have to get to the temple," I said.

"You won't. At least, not for a while. Let's wait here until things are quiet outside. I don't think they saw where we went."

"Good idea," I said. The tavern was like a hundred others in the city. By law they were not supposed to stay open to the public after sunset, but this was a holiday, and besides, nobody paid any attention to that law anyway. We found a table and within minutes were tearing into roast duck with fruit and white bread, which we helped down with rough local wine. I told Milo about the odd interlude with Caesar.

"He's a strange one, Caesar," he said. "But he's like one of those horses in the Circus that surprises you by coming out of nowhere to win, when you'd put your money on the flashy, quick ones."

"I think you're right," I said, helping myself to a handful of figs. "Until now, I'd dismissed him as a posturing buffoon. Everyone has. But he's been behind it all."

"Behind what all?" Milo said alertly.

I told him what I had learned from Nero's letter. "Clodius thinks it was his own doing, and doubtless Pompey and Crassus each thinks himself the dominant member of this-this triumvirate, but it is Caesar who holds the reins. He is the near trace horse." The familiar chariot-race image seemed the best way to describe Caesar's place in the arrangement.

Milo sat back, and I could see the machinery working in his head as he sorted through this information and analyzed it for political content.

"Perhaps his niece is right," Milo said at last. "He may be trying to keep the peace between the others while he is away."

"That's part of it, I have no doubt. But when he returns, the three of them will be at each other's throats. Three such men cannot last as peaceful, cooperating colleagues: a general, a financier, and a: whatever Caesar is."

"A politician," Milo said. It was a new word. I think Milo made it up. "He is a man whose sole qualification for office is that he knows how to manipulate people. As you have remarked, he brings nothing to the bargain but shattering debts and inexperience. It does not matter. He is using the system itself to propel himself into prominence."

"He underestimates the Senate," I said.

"Does he?" Milo's bland, understated contempt for the wisdom and power of the Senate did more than anything in my recent experience to shake my faith in it.

I reached within my clothes and took out the message tube. "When I reveal this, they will have to take action. The Senate has grown lax and corrupt, but even so, they cannot allow such men as these to wield power. As for Caesar and Pompey and Crassus, their ambitions could never survive such ignominy."

"Let us hope so," he said.

We ate for a while in silence. "Speaking of the Senate," Milo said, "If you are truly foolish enough to go up there and confront Pompey, you had better do it while they're sober enough to understand you."

"You're right," I said. "It is getting late."

We rose and went outside. To my surprise, the streets were still jammed. We forced our way with difficulty through the Forum and began to ascend the Capitol. Above, we could see a great lurid glare of torchlight and could hear a raucous bellowing, some of it human.

"What's happening?" I said. "The procession ended hours ago." I had a dreadful premonition that there had been a change in procedure.

"Let's ask somebody," Milo said, with his accustomed good sense. He took a citizen by the arm and made the relevant inquiry.

"Pompey is coming back down," the man said. "Word spread an hour ago that he is planning something extraordinary!"

"He's cut the banquet short!" I said. "It should go on until midnight!"

Milo grinned. "But then most of the citizens would be asleep and unable to admire their idol."

"I have to get up there!" I shouted. "If I can't get to the temple before the Senate breaks up, it will be days before they meet again!"

"And you don't have days to live, at this rate," Milo said. "Let's see what we can do." What Milo could do was considerable. He shouldered his way through the tight-tacked mob almost as if it weren't there, and I followed his broad back.

Feverishly, I thought about the usual triumphal honors enjoyed by a victorious general. Ordinarily, the day culminated with the banquet on the Capitol, at the end of which the triumphator descended the hill, escorted by the Senate, bearing torches to light his way. Lucullus, at the time of his triumph, had thrown his own banquet in his new garden, but I had not heard that Pompey had asked permission for a change of routine. Pompey, it seemed, was fond of his little surprises.

Halfway to the Capitol, we broke through the crowd. A mass of lictors held it back, holding their fasces obliquely, the way soldiers carry spears when they are controlling a mob.

"I must get to the temple!" I shouted at them.

"You may pass, Senator," said a lictor, "but not your friend." There is no one more officious than a lictor who has been given a little authority.

"You're on your own," Milo said cheerfully. "Try not to die foolishly."

I began to trot up the hill. There was a great deal of milling about going on up there. The heat built up rapidly beneath my heavy toga, but I dared not throw it off. Running heavily armed into the massed Senate could mean real trouble. I stopped to catch my breath and brush the sweat from my face; then I saw what I had feared the most: a double line of torches coming toward me. I cursed mightily and resumed running toward the lights, so agitated that I didn't notice that they moved rather oddly. As I neared them, I snatched the message tube from within my tunic and held it aloft.

"Noble Senators!" I screamed. "I must address you! Stop! Cnaeus Pompeius has no right to-" Then I stopped and gaped. The torches were not held by Senators wearing wreaths. The were carried by elephants, at least fifty of them.

Pompey had assembled his monsters atop the Capitol so that he could come down the hill in real style. Each elephant had a mahout straddling his neck, and behind each mahout was a wooden castle manned with youths and girls who were armed with baskets of flowers and trinkets to scatter among the onlookers.

The mahout on the lead elephant pointed at me with his goad and gabbled something. I stood transfixed by the bizarre spectacle, at risk of imminent trampling.