Colleen McCullough - 5. Caesar

And that, Caesar, is all for the moment. I was very sorry to hear that Quintus Laberius Durus was killed almost as soon as he landed in Britannia. What superb dispatches you send us!

He put Sextilis on the table and picked up September, a smaller scroll. Opening it, he frowned; some of the words were smeared and stained, as if water had been spilled on them before the ink had settled comfortably into the papyrus. The atmosphere in the room changed, as if the late sun, still shining brilliantly outside, had suddenly gone in. Hirtius looked up, his flesh crawling; Faberius began to shiver. Caesar's head was still bent over Pompey's second letter, but all of him was immensely still, frozen; the eyes, which neither man could see, were frozen too they would both have sworn to it. "Leave me," said Caesar in a normal voice. Without a word Hirtius and Faberius got up and slipped out of the tent, their pens, dribbling ink, abandoned on their papers.

Oh, Caesar, how can I bear it? Julia is dead. My wonderful, beautiful, sweet little girl is dead. Dead at the age of twenty-two. I closed her eyes and put the coins on them; I put the gold denarius between her lips to make sure she had the best seat in Charon's ferry. She died trying to bear me a son. Just seven months gone, and no warning of what was to come. Except that she had been poorly. Never complained, but I could tell. Then she went into labor and produced the child. A boy who lived for two days, so he outlived his mother. She bled to death. Nothing stopped that flood. An awful way to go! Conscious almost until the last, just growing weaker and whiter, and she so fair to start with. Talking to me and to Aurelia, always talking. Remembering she hadn't done this, and making me promise I'd do that. Silly things, like hanging the fleabane up to dry, though that is still months away. Telling me over and over again how much she loved me, had loved me since she was a little girl. How happy I had made her. Not one moment of pain, she said. How could she say that, Caesar? I'd made the pain that killed her, that scrawny skinned-looking thing. But I'm glad he died. The world would never be ready for a man with your blood and mine in him. He would have crushed it like a cockroach. She haunts me. I weep, and weep, and still there are more tears. The last part of her to let go of life was her eyes, so huge and blue. Full of love. Oh, Caesar, how can I bear it? Six little years. I'm fifty-two in a few days, yet all I had of her was six little years. I'd planned that she'd let go of me. I didn't dream it would be the other way around, and so soon. Oh, it would have been too soon if we'd been married for twenty-six years! Oh, Caesar, the pain of it! I wish it had been me, but she made me swear a solemn oath that I'd not follow her. I'm doomed to live. But how? How can I live? I remember her! How she looked, how she sounded, how she smelled, how she felt, how she tasted. She rings inside me like a lyre. But this is no good. I can't see to write, and it's my place to tell you everything. I know they'll send this on to you in Britannia. I got your middle Cotta uncle's son, Marcus he's a praetor this year to call the Senate into session, and I asked the Conscript Fathers to vote my dead girl a State funeral. But that mentula, that cunnus Ahenobarbus wouldn't hear of it. With Cato neighing nays behind him on the curule dais. Women didn't have State funerals; to grant my Julia one would be to desecrate the State. They had to hold me back, I would have killed that verpa Ahenobarbus with my bare hands if I could have laid them on him. They still twitch at the thought of wrapping themselves around his throat. It's said that the House never goes against the will of the senior consul, but the House did. The vote was almost unanimously for a State funeral. She had the best of everything, Caesar. The undertakers did their job with love. Well, she was so beautiful, even drained to the color of chalk. So they tinted her skin and did those great masses of silvery hair in the high style she liked, with the jeweled comb I gave her on her twenty-second birthday. By the time she sat at her ease amid the black and gold cushions on her bier, she looked like a goddess. No need with my girl to shove her in the secret compartment below and put a dummy on display. I had her dressed in her favorite lavender blue, the same color she was wearing the first time I ever set eyes on her and thought she was Diana of the Night. The parade of her ancestors was more imposing than any Roman man's. I had Corinna the mime in the leading chariot, wearing a mask of Julia's face I had Venus in my temple of Venus Victrix at the top of my theater done with Julia's face. Corinna wore Venus's golden dress too. They were all there, from the first Julian consul to Quintus Marcius Rex and Cinna. Forty ancestral chariots, every horse as black as obsidian. I was there, even though I'm not supposed to cross the pomerium into the city. I informed the lictors of the thirty Curiae that for this day I was assuming the special imperium of my grain duties, which did permit me to cross the sacred boundary before I accepted my provinces. I think Ahenobarbus was a frightened man. He didn't put any obstacle in my way. What frightened him? The size of the crowds in the Forum. Caesar, I've never seen anything like it. Not for a funeral, even Sulla's. They came to gape at Sulla. But they came to weep for my Julia. Thousands upon thousands of them. Just ordinary people. Aurelia says it's because Julia grew up in the Subura, among them. They adored her then. And they still do. So many Jews! I didn't know Rome had them in such numbers. Unmistakable, with their long curled hair and their long curled beards. Of course you were good to them when you were consul. You grew up among them too, I know. Though Aurelia insists that they came to mourn Julia for her own sake. I ended in asking Servius Sulpicius Rufus to give the eulogy from the rostra. I didn't know whom you would have preferred, but I wanted a really great speaker. Yet somehow I couldn't, when it came down to it, nerve myself to ask Cicero. Oh, he would have done it! For me if not for you. But I didn't think his heart would have been in it. He can never resist the chance to act. Whereas Servius is a sincere man, a patrician, and a better orator than Cicero when the subject's not politics or perfidy. Not that it mattered. The eulogy was never given. Everything went exactly according to schedule from our house on the Carinae down into the Forum. The forty ancestral chariots were greeted with absolute awe; all you could hear was the sound of thousands weeping. Then when Julia on her bier came past the Regia into the open space of the lower Forum, everyone gasped, choked, began to scream. I've been less frightened at barbarian ululations on a battlefield than I was at those bloodcurdling screams. The crowd surged, rushed at the bier. No one could stop them. Ahenobarbus and some of the tribunes of the plebs tried, but they were shoved aside like leaves in a flood. The next thing, the people had carried the bier to the very center of the open space. They began piling up all kinds of things onto a pyre their shoes, papers, bits of wood. The stuff kept coming from the back of the crowd overhead I don't even know where they got it from. They burned her right there in the Forum Romanum, with Ahenobarbus having an apoplectic fit on the Senate steps and Servius aghast on the rostra, where the actors had fled to huddle like barbarian women when they know that the legions are going to cut them down. There were empty chariots and bolting horses all over Rome, and the chief mourners had gotten no further than Vesta, where we stood helpless. But that wasn't the end of it by any means. There were leaders of the Plebs in the crowd too, and they went to beard Ahenobarbus on the Senate steps. Julia, they said, was to have her ashes placed in a tomb on the Campus Martius, among the heroes. Cato was with Ahenobarbus. They defied this deputation. No, no! Women were never interred on the Campus Martius! Over their dead bodies would it happen! I really did think Ahenobarbus would have a stroke. But the crowd kept gathering until finally Ahenobarbus and Cato realized that it would be their dead bodies unless they yielded. They had to swear an oath. So my dear little girl is to have a tomb on the sward of the Campus Martius among the heroes. I haven't been able to control my grief enough to set it in train, but I will. The most magnificent tomb there, you have my word on it. The worst of it is that the Senate has forbidden funeral games in her honor. No one trusts the crowd to behave. I have done my duty. I have told it all. Your mother took it very hard, Caesar. I remember I said she didn't look a day over forty-five. But now she looks her full seventy years. The Vestal Virgins are caring for her your little wife Calpurnia is too. She'll miss Julia. They were good friends. Oh, here are the tears again. I have wept an ocean. My girl is gone forever. How can I bear it?