The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough
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!”
February over, Caesar convened the Senate on the Kalends of March, intending it to be the last meeting before he stepped down as consul on the Ides. Shipment of the legions across the Adriatic continued at a furious pace; on the Macedonian side of that sea they were camped between Dyrrachium and Apollonia, with Caesar’s personal staff located in Apollonia. Dyrrachium was the northern and Apollonia the southern terminus of the Via Egnatia, the Roman road east to Thrace and the Hellespont. An eight-hundred-mile march that the legions were expected to complete in a month.
At the meeting on the Kalends Caesar outlined the intended campaign of Publius Vatinius and Marcus Antonius against King Burebistas of the Dacians, necessary because, said Caesar, he was going to plant colonies of Roman Head Count all around the margins of the Euxine Sea. As soon as the year was over, he went on, Publius Dolabella would go to Syria as governor and keep Caesar supplied during his campaigns. The House, quite sparsely attended, was polite enough to listen to this old news.
“When the Senate convenes on the Ides, it will do so outside the pomerium, as the subject will be my war. In the Curia Pompeia, rather than in Bellona. Bellona is too small. At that meeting I will also allocate provinces to this year’s praetors.”
That night the Kill Caesar Club gathered at the temple of Ceres. When Cassius walked in with Marcus Brutus, the rest of the members stared in disbelief, including Gaius Trebonius.
“Knock me over with a pine needle!” Publius Casca exclaimed. Like everybody else, he was extremely apprehensive, for the rumors of a conspiracy to kill Caesar were increasing. “Did you give us away to Caesar when you saw him, Brutus?”
“Well, did you?” his brother, Gaius Casca, demanded.
“We discussed the peculations of a colleague of mine,” Brutus said coolly as he moved with Cassius to a bench beneath Pluto. He had gone beyond fear, was reconciled to what was going to happen, though setting eyes on some of these faces was no joy. Lucius Minucius Basilus! Did any noble purpose need such dross to fuel it? An up-start who claimed descent from Cincinnatus’s Minucius and tortured his slaves! And Petronius, an insect whose father had been a dealer in mine and quarry slaves! Caesennius Lento, already a murderer of the great! And Aquila, his mother’s lover, who was younger than her son! Oh, what a wonderful little group!
“Order, order!” Trebonius said sharply; he too was feeling the strain. “Marcus Brutus, welcome.” He walked to the center of the floor beneath the plinth of Ceres and looked at the twenty-two faces, ruddied by the lamplight, grotesquely shadowed, ominous and unfamiliar. “Tonight we have to make some decisions. There are but fourteen days left until the Ides of March. Though Caesar says he’ll remain three further days in Rome after that, we can’t count on it. If word should come from Brundisium that he’s needed, he’ll go at once. Whereas until the Ides, he has to be in Rome.”
He took a turn about the cella, an ordinary man of the most undistinguished kind, slight in build, average in height, drab of coloring and mien. Yet, as all the men present knew, remarkably able. If his brief consulship had been humdrum, it was only because Caesar had left him nothing of note to do. He was governor-designate of Asia Province, not a military command, admittedly, but a difficult job thanks to the province’s financial distress. His greatest asset was his peculiarly Roman intelligence—a mixture of pragmatism, an instinct for the right moment to act, a nose sensitive to brewing trouble, and superlative logistical skills. Therefore they settled down to listen to him feeling less queasy, less unsure.
“For Marcus Brutus’s benefit, I had better outline what has already been decided, namely, the location of the deed. The fact that Caesar has no lictors is of immeasurable importance, but he is still surrounded by hundreds of clients whenever he goes about the city. That narrowed our opportunity to one location—the long lane between Cleopatra’s palace and the Via Aurelia, because he takes no one with him when he goes to visit her except two or three secretaries. Now that the Transtiberini have been thinned out by his migrant pursuits, the area is deserted. So that is where we will ambush him. The date has not yet been decided.”
“Ambush?” asked Brutus, sounding amazed. “Surely you’re not going to ambush Caesar? How will people know who did it?”
“Ambush is the only way,” said Trebonius blankly. “To prove we did it, we take his head and we go to the Forum, where we soften everybody up with a couple of magnificent speeches, call the Senate into session and demand that it commend us for ridding Rome of a tyrant. If we have to, we kidnap Cicero into attending—he’ll back us up, nothing surer.”
“That is absolutely appalling!” Brutus cried. “Disgusting! Sickening! Caesar’s head? And why isn’t Cicero a part of this?”
“Because Cicero’s chickenhearted and incapable of keeping his mouth shut!” Decimus Brutus snapped, hackles up. “We’ll use him afterward, not before or during. How do you envision killing Caesar, Brutus? In public?”
“Yes, in public,” Brutus said without hesitation.
A collective gasp went up.
“We’d be lynched on the spot,” said Galba, swallowing.
“This is tyrannicide, not murder,” said Brutus in the tone that told Cassius that Brutus’s mind was irrevocably made up. “It must be a p
“Oh, I do see,” Basilus sneered. “We meet Caesar on the, say, Sacra Via, in the midst of a thousand of his clients, we part the sea of people, stroll up to him casually and say, ‘Ave, Caesar, we are honorable men who are about to kill you. Now just stand there, drop the toga off your left shoulder, and present your heart for our daggers.’ What utter rot! Whereabouts do you live, Brutus? Among the clouds of Olympus? Plato’s ideal republic?”
“No, but I don’t busy myself with hot irons and pincers for my own amusement either, Basilus!” Brutus snarled, astonished at his own fierce anger. Pushed into this by Porcia he might have been, but he was not about to pander to the likes of a Minucius Basilus for a thousand Catos! Irrevocably committed, he found now that he cared.
Listening to an obdurate Brutus had an unexpected effect on Cassius; from self-preservation he went to a sudden enormous desire to offer his very life on the altar of Brutus’s making. Brutus was right! What better way to kill Caesar than out in the open? They would all die for it on the spot, but Rome would put their statues among the gods forever. There were worse fates.
“Tacete, the lot of you!” he yelled, entering the fray. “He is right, you fools! We do the deed in public! It’s my experience that things clandestine are more likely to go wrong—straight ahead is the way to go, not down some crooked lane. Naturally we don’t just walk up to Caesar and announce our intentions, Basilus, but a knife can kill as surely in public as anywhere else. What’s more, it gives us the chance to kill all three of them in one swoop. Caesar has a habit of standing with his junior consul on one side and his suffect consul on the other.” He hit the palm of one hand with the other’s fist—smack!“We get rid of Antonius and Dolabella as well as Caesar.”
“No!” Brutus shouted. “No, no! We’re tyrannicides, not mass murderers! I won’t hear of killing Antonius and Dolabella! If they happen to be flanking him, let them. We kill the king—only the king! Crying out even as we do it that we are freeing Rome of a tyrant! Then we drop our daggers and we go to the rostra, where we speak to everyone proudly, unashamedly, jubilantly! Our best orators will have to make mountains move and gorgons weep, but we have orators in our ranks able to do that. We will call ourselves Rome’s liberators, and stand there wearing caps of liberty to reinforce our action.”
Oh, why did I ever think that Marcus Brutus would prove an asset? Trebonius asked himself, listening to this nonsense with a leaden heart. His eyes met Decimus Brutus’s, who rolled his upward in despair. No matter if Brutus was howled down, the plan was in tatters, its integrity undermined. To do the deed in secret and confess to it at a prearranged moment, with Antonius already apprised, was one thing. What Brutus suggested was sheer suicide. Antonius would have to retaliate by killing them! Mind racing, Trebonius tried to pluck something out of the debris that would retrieve the plan.
“Wait! Wait! I have it!” he hollered, so loudly that the developing argument ceased. Every face turned to him. “It can be done publicly, yet safely,” he said. “On the Ides of March, in the Curia Pompeia—is that public enough for you, Brutus?”
“A curia of the Senate is exactly the right kind of public place,” Brutus gasped, eyes distended, sweat rolling off his brow. “I didn’t mean to imply that it should necessarily be done in the midst of a huge Forum crowd, only that there must be witnesses of the highest repute present—men able to swear on sacred oath to our sincerity, our honorable intentions. A meeting of the House would fulfill all my criteria, Trebonius.”
“Then that solves where we do it and when we do it,” Trebonius said thankfully. “Caesar always goes straight inside, he never pauses to chat. Usually he spends the time between his entry and the House’s seating itself in his eternal paperwork. But he never infringes the House rules by bringing any secretaries in, and he has no lictors. Once he enters the curia, he’s totally unprotected. I agree with you entirely, Brutus, that we kill Caesar and Caesar alone. That means we have to keep the other curule magistrates outside until the deed is done, because they all have lictors. Lictors don’t think, they act. Let any men raise a hand against Caesar in the presence of anyone’s lictors, and they’ll leap to his defense. We won’t succeed. So it is vital that we keep the other curule magistrates outside.”
The faces were beginning to lighten; Trebonius was devising a new plan that had the merit of immediacy. Not one of the club members had been looking forward to doing the deed and confessing to it later, at the propitious moment, by producing a grisly trophy like Caesar’s head. Some among them had already begun to wonder if all twenty-three would have the dedication and the courage to own up.
“We have to strike fast,” Trebonius went on. “There are sure to be backbenchers inside, but we’ll be clustered around Caesar, and most won’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late. And we will be right where we can make the most of our situation with oratory, caps of liberty, whatever. Everyone’s first reaction will be shock, and shock paralyzes. By the time that Antonius gets his breath back, Decimus—I think we all agree that he’s our best orator—will be in full spate. If he’s nothing else, Antonius is a practical man. What’s done will be done as far as he’s concerned, Caesar’s cousin or not. The House will take its attitude from him, not from Dolabella. Everyone knows there’s bad blood between Caesar and Antonius. Truly, fellow members of our club, I am sure that Antonius will be prepared to listen, that he won’t exact reprisals.”
Oh, Trebonius, Trebonius! What do you know that the rest of us don’t? Decimus asked himself at the conclusion of this breathless but effective speech. You’ve struck a deal with our Antonius, haven’t you? How clever of you! And how clever of Antonius! He gets what he wants without lifting a finger against Cousin Gaius.
“I still say kill Antonius too,” Cassius said stubbornly.
Decimus answered. “No, I don’t think so. Trebonius is right. If we’re unapologetic about our deed of liberation—an excellent word, Brutus, I think we should call ourselves the Liberators!—then Antonius has many reasons to accommodate us. For one thing, he’ll lead the invasion of the Parthians.”
“Isn’t that to take Caesar’s place?” Cassius grumbled.
“It’s a war, and Antonius likes making war. But take Caesar’s place? He’ll never do that, he’s too lazy. The only strife will be between him and Dolabella over who’s the senior consul,” said Staius Murcus.
“But I do suggest that one of us runs off to get Cicero, who won’t be there while Caesar’s in the House, but will be only too happy to be there to look on his dead body.”
“There’s a more important problem,” Decimus said, “namely, keeping Antonius, Dolabella and the other curule magistrates outside the curia itself while we do the deed. One of us will have to stay in Pompeius’s garden. He has to be the one on best terms with Antonius, the one Antonius will be glad to linger with, talk to. If Antonius doesn’t move to go inside, nor will any of the others, including Dolabella.” He drew a long breath. “I nominate Gaius Trebonius to stay in the garden.”
When Trebonius jumped, Decimus walked up to him, took his hand and clasped it strongly. “Those of us from the Gallic War know that you’re not afraid to use a dagger, so no one will call you craven, my dear Gaius. I think it has to be you who stays outside, even if that means you won’t have the opportunity to strike a blow for liberty.”
Trebonius returned the grip. “I’m willing, on condition that every one of you votes me in, and that you, Decimus, strike an extra blow for me. Twenty-three men, twenty-three blows. That way, no one will ever know whose dagger actually killed Caesar.?
“I’ll do that gladly,” said Decimus, eyes shining.
The vote was taken: Gaius Trebonius was unanimously elected the man who stayed outside to detain Marcus Antonius.
“Is there any need to meet again before the Ides?” Caecilius Buciolanus asked.
“None,” said Trebonius, smiling broadly. “What I do insist upon is that all of us congregate in the garden an hour after dawn. It doesn’t matter if we huddle together and talk too earnestly to invite company, because as soon as the deed is done, everyone will know what we were talking about. We’ll run through it then in greater detail. Caesar won’t be on time. It’s the Ides, don’t forget, which means that Caesar will have to fill in for our nonexistent flamen Dialis and lead his sheep down the Sacra Via, then climb the steps to sacrifice it on the Arx. He’ll also have unavoidable business, given that he leaves Rome so soon afterward—or would, if he were still alive.”
They laughed dutifully, save for Brutus and Cassius.
“I predict that we’ll have some hours to discuss the deed before Caesar turns up,” Trebonius continued. “Decimus, it would be a good idea if you presented yourself at the Domus Publica at dawn, then go with him to Jupiter’s ceremony and wherever else he chooses. As soon as he starts for the Campus Martius, send us a warning. Be open about it—tell him he’s so late that it might be prudent to notify the senators that he’s actually on his way.”
“In his high red boots.” Quintus Ligarius giggled.