Colleen McCullough - 3. Fortune's Favorites

Gaius Verres hurried down to the port, stumbling. How dared they, those stupid, stupid Greeks? Hiding her away as if she was Helen of Troy, when all the time she was a gorgon. Dolabella was not pleased at having to delay his departure while various crates and trunks belonging to Verres were loaded; Claudius Nero had already gone, and the Fimbriani with him. "Quin taces!" snarled Verres when his superior asked where was the beauteous Stratonice. "I left her behind in Lampsacus. They deserve each other." His superior was feeling the pinch of some time without the stimulating sexual sessions he had grown to rely upon; Verres soon found himself back in Dolabella's good graces, and spent the voyage from Lampsacus to Pergamum planning. He would return Dolabella to his usual condition and spend the rest of his term in Tarsus using up the gubernatorial stipend. So Caesar thought he'd prosecute, did he? Well, he wouldn't get the chance. He, Verres, would get in first! The moment Dolabella returned to Rome, he, Verres, would find a prosecutor with a prestigious name and testify Dolabella into permanent exile. Then there would be no one to contest the set of account books Verres intended to present to the Treasury. A pity that he hadn't managed to get to Bithynia and Thrace, but he had really done very nicely. "I believe," he said to Dolabella after they left Pergamum behind, that Miletus has some of the finest wool in the world, not to mention rugs and tapestries of rare quality. Let's stop in at Miletus and look at what's available."

"I can't get over the fact that those two socii died for nothing," said Caesar to Nicomedes and Oradaltis. "Why? Tell me why they just didn't produce the girl and show Verres what she was? That would have been the end of the affair! Why did they insist upon turning what ought to have been a comedy with Verres the butt into a tragedy as great as anything Sophocles dreamed of?" "Pride, mostly," said Oradaltis, tears in her eyes. "And perhaps a sense of honor." "It might have been understandable if the girl had looked presentable when she was a baby, but from the moment of her birth they would have known what she was. Why didn't they expose her? No one would have condemned them for it." The only person who might have been able to enlighten you, Caesar, died in the marketplace of Lampsacus," said Nicomedes. "There must have been a good reason, at least inside the mind of Philodamus. A vow to some god a wife and mother determined to keep the child a self inflicted pain who can tell? If we knew all the answers, life would hold no mysteries. And no tragedies." "I could have wept when I saw her. Instead I laughed myself sick. She couldn't tell the difference, but Verres could. So I laughed. He'll hear it inside his head for years, and fear me." "I'm surprised we haven't seen the man," said the King. "You won't see him," said Caesar with some satisfaction. "Gaius Verres has folded his tents and slunk back to Cilicia." "Why?" "I asked him to." The King decided not to probe this remark. Instead he said, "You wish you could have done something to avert the tragedy." "Of course. It's an actual agony to have to stand back and watch idiots wreak havoc in Rome's name. But I swear to you, Nicomedes, that I will never behave so myself when I have the age and the authority!" "You don't need to swear. I believe you." This report had been given before Caesar went to his rooms to remove the ravages of his journey, these being unusually trying. Each of the three nights he had spent in the harborside inn he had woken to find a naked whore astride him and the traitor inside the gates of his body so lacking in discernment that, freed by sleep from his mind's control, it enjoyed itself immensely. With the result that he had picked up an infestation of pubic lice. The discovery of his crop of tiny vermin had induced a horror and disgust so great that he had been able to keep no food down since, and only a sensible sensitivity about the effects of questionable substances upon his genitalia had prevented his seizing anything offered to kill the things. So far they had defied him by living through a dip in every freezing body of water he had encountered between Lampsacus and Nicomedia, and all through his talk with the old King he had been aware of the dreadful creatures prowling through the thickets of his body hair. Now, clenching teeth and fists, he rose abruptly to his feet. "Please excuse me, Nicomedes. I have to rid myself of some unwelcome visitors," he said, attempting a light tone. "Crab lice, you mean?" asked the King, who missed very little, and could speak freely because Oradaltis and her dog had departed some time before. "I'm driven mad! Revolting, sickening things!" Nicomedes strolled from the room with him. "There is really only one way to avoid picking up vermin when you travel," said the King. "It's painful, especially the first time you have it done, but it does work." "I don't care if I have to walk on hot coals, tell me and I'll do it!" said Caesar with fervor. "There are those in your peculiar society who will condemn you as effeminate!" Nicomedes said wickedly. "No fate could be worse than these pests. Tell me!" "Have all your body hair plucked, Caesar. Under the arms and in the groin, on the chest if you have hair there. I will send the man who attends to me and Oradaltis to you if you wish." "At once, King, at once!" Up went Caesar's hand to his head. "What about my hair hair?" "Have you visitors there too?" "I don't think so, but I itch everywhere." "They're different visitors, and can't survive in a bed. I wouldn't think you'll ever play host to them because you're so tall. They can't crawl upward, you see, so the people who pick them up from others are always the same height or shorter than the original host." Nicomedes laughed. "You'd catch them from Burgundus, but from few others. Unless your Lampsacan whores slept with you head to head." "My Lampsacan whores attacked me in my sleep, but I can assure you that they got short shrift the moment I woke!" An extraordinary conversation, but one Caesar was to thank his luck for many times in the years to come. If plucking out his body hair would keep these clinging horrors away, he would pluck, pluck, pluck. The slave Nicomedes sent to him was an expert; under different circumstances Caesar would have banished him from such an intimate task, for he was a perfect pansy. Under the prevailing circumstances, however, Caesar found himself eager to experience his touch. "I'll just take a few out every day," lisped Demetrius. "You'll take the lot out today," said Caesar grimly. "I've drowned all I could find in my bath, but I suppose their eggs stick. That seems to be why I haven't managed to get rid of all of them so far. Pah!" Demetrius squealed, appalled. "That isn't possible!" he cried. "Even when I do it, it's hideously painful!" "The lot today," said Caesar. So Demetrius continued while Caesar lay naked, apparently in no distress. He had self discipline and great courage, and would have died rather than flinch, moan, weep, or otherwise betray his agony. And when the ordeal was over and sufficient time had passed for the pain to die down, he felt wonderful. He also liked the look of his hairless body in the big silver mirror King Nicomedes had provided for the palace's principal guest suite. Sleek. Unashamed. Amazingly naked. And somehow more masculine rather than less. How odd! Feeling like a man released from slavery, he went to the dining room that evening with his new pleasure in himself adding a special light to face and eyes; King Nicomedes looked, and gasped. Caesar responded with a wink.

For sixteen months he remained in or around about Bithynia, an idyll he was to remember as the most wonderful period of his life until he reached his fifty third year and found an even more wonderful one. He visited Troy to do homage to his ancestor Aeneas, he went to Pessinus several times, and back to Byzantium, and anywhere, it seemed, save Pergamum and Tarsus, where Claudius Nero and Dolabella remained an extra year after all. Leaving aside his relationship with Nicomedes and Oradaltis, which remained an enormously satisfying and rewarding experience for him, the chief joy of that time lay in his visit to a man he hardly remembered: Publius Rutilius Rufus, his great uncle on his mother's side. Born in the same year as Gaius Marius, Rutilius Rufus was now seventy nine years old, and had been living in an honorable exile in Smyrna for many years. He was as active as a fifty year old and as cheerful as a boy, mind as sharp as ever, sense of humor as keenly developed as had been that of his friend and colleague, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus. "I've outlived the lot of them," Rutilius Rufus said with gleeful satisfaction after his eyes and mind had approved the look of this fine young great nephew. "That doesn't cast you down, Uncle?" "Why should it? If anything, it cheers me up! Sulla keeps writing to beg me to return to Rome, and every governor and other official he sends out here comes to plead in person." "But you won't go." "I won't go. I like my chlamys and my Greek slippers much more than I ever liked my toga, and I enjoy a reputation here in Smyrna far greater than any I ever owned in Rome. It's a thankless and savage place, young Caesar what a look of Aurelia you have! How is she? My ocean pearl found on the mud flats of Ostia ... That was what I always called her. And she's widowed, eh? A pity. I brought her and your father together, you know. And though you may not know it, I found Marcus Antonius Gnipho to tutor you when you were hardly out of diapers. They used to think you a prodigy. And here you are, twenty one years old, a senator twice over, and Sulla's most prized war hero! Well, well!" "I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm his most prized war hero," said Caesar, smiling. "Oh, but you are! I know! I sit here in Smyrna and hear everything. Sulla writes to me. Always did. And when he was settling the affairs of Asia Province he visited me often it was I gave him his model for its reorganization. Based it on the program Scaurus and I evolved years ago. Sad, his illness. But it hasn't seemed to stop him meddling with Rome!" He continued in the same vein for many days, hopping from one subject to another with the lightness of an easy heart and the interest of a born gossip, a spry old bird the years had not managed to strip of plumage or the ability to soar. If he had a favorite topic, that was Aurelia; Caesar filled in the gaps in his knowledge of her with gracefully chosen words and evident love, and learned in return many things about her he had not known. Of her relationship with Sulla, however, Rutilius Rufus had little to tell and refused to speculate, though he had Caesar laughing over the confusion as to which of his nieces had borne a red haired son to a red haired man. "Gaius Marius and Julia were convinced it was Aurelia and Sulla, but it was Livia Drusa, of course, with Marcus Cato." "That's right, your wife was a Livia." "And the older of my two sisters was the wife of Caepio the Consul, who stole the Gold of Tolosa. You are related to the Servilii Caepiones by blood, young man." "I don't know the family at all." A boring lot no amount of Rutilian blood could leaven. Now tell me about Gaius Marius and the flaminate he wished upon you." Intending to remain only a few days in Smyrna, Caesar ended in staying for two months; there was so much Rutilius Rufus wanted to know, and so much Rutilius Rufus wanted to tell. When finally he took his leave of the old man, he wept. "I shall never forget you, Uncle Publius." "Just come back! And write to me, Caesar, do. Of all the pleasures my life still holds, there is none to equal a rich and candid correspondence with a genuinely literate man."