Colleen McCullough - 6. The October Horse - A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

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!"