Clash of Iron (9 page)

“Why not?”

“It is the parents’ right to kill them and many do not want a girl. Girls are more likely to bring shame than honour to a family.” She smiled wryly. “As I have proven. Women cannot be any sort of official, so cannot curry favour or win battles. Look at our host, Julius Caesar. He has won awards and positions all his life, saturating his family in so much glory that they walk around smiling like sex pests in a gymnasium. Just this month he forsook a Triumphal march celebrating his Iberian victories so that he could be eligible for the vote for next year’s consuls. Everyone is saying what a hero he is, and how much he is sure to achieve. No woman has ever been able to draw such adoration. The Roman way won’t allow it. Women are kept down in other ways, too. Girls are given away as wives, often to much older husbands, and are expected to remain faithful, yet men are seen as lacking virility if they haven’t fucked all their slave girls and any number of their friends’ wives.”

“Sounds oppressive.” Ragnall considered putting a consoling hand on her smooth leg, but thought better of it.

Clodia, seeming to notice the tiny movement in his arm, took his wrist and placed his hand just above her knee, then carried on. “It is what it is, and we must move within its constraints. It need not be oppressive. Like a head slave who enjoys power and respect in his little kingdom, women can rule a family, and more. We can create and destroy men without them realising that we are controlling them. But yes, we must do it clandestinely and without acknowledgement.”

As she’d been talking, her aristocratic tones had dissolved into yet another accent, still refined, but quieter and sadder. That seemed odd, but not as odd as the fact that his hand was still on her knee. Perhaps it was a Roman thing. He tried not to think about it, but even thinking about not thinking about it caused stirrings under his loose toga that weren’t going to remain invisible for long.

“And Roman men are free,” Clodia continued, “perhaps freer than any men have ever been. But that freedom will destroy them. A handful of men now hold power – Crassus, Pompey, this fellow Caesar and a few more – and it will not end well. A few years ago Sulla nearly took it all for himself. These men, I sense, are even more greedy, and they seem to be friends. If they unite in some unholy threesome, it would be disastrous. There were rumours ten years ago that Caesar’s magician was working with Crassus, and that the six thousand rebel slaves who died on the Appian Way were crucified for him to perform some dark spells, but then the magician disappeared. Now he’s back. I don’t like it. We have an oracle called Sibyl, a soothsayer like your druids.”

“You know about druids?”

“I talk to my slaves. Sibyl has predicted Rome’s future. Do you know what she said?”

“…No?”

“That Rome’s own sons will rape her – a brutal, interminable, gang rape. Her words, not mine.”

“That doesn’t … sound good?”

“Ha ha!” Clodia’s face illuminated with a broad smile and her world-weariness fell from her, Ragnall thought, in much the same way that her blue dress might fall on to the rug-strewn stone floor of her undoubtedly opulent bedchamber.

“Enough misery!” she continued. “To business!”

Without taking her eyes off his, or his hand off her leg, she placed a cool hand on his nearest, bare knee, and curled long fingers around it. Her middle finger traced light circles on the knee’s inner declivity. It sent shivers of lightning up his thigh, into his torso and out along his other limbs. The erection that he’d been struggling to subdue burst into life like an excitable dog freed from its lead.

“You,” her hand slid maddeningly slowly up the inside of his thigh, that finger still rotating gently, “are a very attractive young barbarian and I intend to have,” she glanced at his crotch, widened her eyes and licked her lips, “a large part of your foreign body inside my Roman soul.”

She looked at him coolly, as if waiting for a reply.

He opened his mouth. No words came.

She smiled and removed her hand. “Visit me. Soon. Ask anyone where Metellus Celer’s house is.” She stood up and walked away.

“Who’s Metellus Celer?” he managed.

“My husband,” she called back, without slowing or turning.

Ragnall stayed sitting. A toga might suit him better than the British jerkin and trousers, but it was no good for concealment. It was almost as if Clodia had known that, and created his erection to spear him to the bench so that she could get away.

“You’re a barbarian.”

Ragnall started. A man melted from the display of fruit and vegetables. Had he been there the whole time and witnessed the entire exchange? The intruder was in his mid-thirties, about the same age as Clodia, but the height of a twelve-year-old back in Britain. Perched on a long neck with a pronounced Bel’s apple was a triangular head, flat across the top with a pointed chin. The uppermost parts of his ears stuck out, but were tight to his head at the lobes, like a pair of minute wings ready to flap into action. Save for people living on the streets, he was by far the messiest man Ragnall had seen in Rome. His toga was splattered with food stains and his tightly curled hair had not seen a comb for many a moon.

“I’m from Britain.” Ragnall realised he could now stand up and did so. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m just off.”

“In Rome, we introduce ourselves when our betters address us.”

Ragnall stopped. “I am sorry. It’s just that I’m here with my mentor and—”

“I am Cato. Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis.” He reached out a hand.

“I’m Ragnall. Ragnall Sheeplord.” Ragnall gripped the little man’s upper wrist and Cato gripped his, weakly. They released. Ragnall preferred this Roman hand-wrist shake to the British man-to-man greeting of the hug, which he found awkward and often smelly.

“How quaint. You should watch your step with Lady Copper Coin.”

“Lady Copper Coin?”

“Clodia. Her nickname comes from the copper-coin whores of the Aventine, although Athena knows it would be a rich streetwalker who managed to sleep with as many men as dear Clodia.”

“Why should I watch my step?”

“Each year we elect two consuls to rule. This year her husband, Metellus Celer, is one of them.”

Ragnall knew about consuls and the other Roman ranks – aediles, quaestors, senators, tribunes and more. Drustan had drilled them into him on the voyage. Consuls were top of the heap, which meant that they could have people killed on a whim.

“Moreover,” Cato continued, leaning in conspiratorially, “she herself is dangerous. The first thing you should know is that she’s a phony. She’s the eldest daughter of the Claudian family, one of Rome’s oldest and richest clans. Her name is really Claudia, but she changed it to Clodia to sound more plebeian, as if there was something good about that. Did you notice anything odd about her accent?”

“It changed…”

“She affects common parlance, then forgets. Pathetic. Is there anything that makes one’s skin crawl more than a posh person pretending to be a pleb? What’s worse, she seems to have made it the fashion.” He spat this last word with venom. “All the young are doing it now. Along with their silly little beards and their stupid finger signals. Sickening.”

“I liked her—”

“Really? Not long ago, a young fool like you liked her. He made the mistake of leaving copper coins by her bedside when he left in the morning. Most likely it was a tip for the slaves or possibly a joke.” Cato smiled. “But Clodia took it as an insult. So what do you think she did?”

“Didn’t see him again?”

“You’re right, she didn’t. But she went a little further. She hired a gang. They beat him and raped him in public.”

“What? You can’t rape a man!”

“You can and they did.”

“How do you rape a man?”

“Same way as a woman, but from the other side.”

Ragnall thought it through and his jaw dropped.

Cato seemed to enjoy the effect he was having. Ragnall didn’t like him at all. “I have to go,” he said.

“Stay away from her!” Cato called after him. “She’ll be your end!”

“There you are! I thought you’d been kidnapped,” said Drustan when Ragnall found him. “Meet Cicero.” The man who had been in conversion with Drustan held out an arm. Ragnall had heard of him. Cicero – Marcus Tullius Cicero – was a former consul and Rome’s best, or at least most famous, lawyer. He was taller than Ragnall had pictured. The grey hair that remained on his half-bald head was combed and lightly greased into small, regular, forward-reaching curls.

“You’re Ragnall Sheeplord, the British prince,” said Cicero. “Your tutor has told me about you. Welcome to Rome.” He had a quiet, measured voice which didn’t quite match his gangly, long-limbed figure. “Now, it’s apposite that you should mention kidnap, Drustan. I was just telling your tutor, Ragnall, about two potential pretenders to the power currently held by Crassus and Pompey. The one, Clodius the Beautiful, comes from the greater family. The other, Julius Caesar, whose party we have the honour of attending, is the greater man. I have told Drustan the story of how Caesar had to divorce his wife – poor, dear Pompeia – after Clodius was suspected of sleeping with her.”

Ragnall wondered if anyone was ever faithful in Rome.

“But the better stories, tales of honour and shame that explain the difference between the two men exquisitely well, come from when both, on separate occasions, were captured by pirates. Now, Ragnall and Drustan, I hope that you will indulge my joy of storytelling by lending me your ears for a grain or two of the hourglass?”

Cicero looked from Ragnall to Drustan. The two Britons nodded enthusiastically. Ragnall had never felt so drawn into a conversation, even though it was more of a monologue. By his childish nodding, Drustan felt the same. Ragnall’s chest swelled to think that one of Rome’s most important and famous citizens would even acknowledge him and his tutor, let alone take the time to tell them a story.

“Before you start,” he asked, “is Clodius the Beautiful related to Clodia Metelli?”

Cicero smiled knowingly. “You have been using your time in Rome well. He is her brother. Now, the story. Ragnall, you are about nineteen years old?”

“Twenty.”

“When Gaius Julius Caesar was a year younger than you, he won the civic crown for high gallantry, for saving others’ lives while storming the walls of a city that all had said was impregnable.”

“Ragnall himself won a battle for our queen in Britain last year, when he was nineteen,” said Drustan.

Ragnall beamed. Cicero looked him up and down appraisingly: “I’m sorry, I had no idea I was talking to a hero. Perhaps you will follow in Caesar’s footsteps? But on with my tale.

“Six years later, when he was twenty-five years old, Caesar took a ship to Rhodes, headed for the oratory school of Appolonius Molon, where all the greatest orators have their skills honed by the greatest teacher. You are not a thousand miles away from his most successful graduate.” Ragnall was confused for a moment, then realised that Cicero meant himself. “At the time, before Pompey’s purges, Our Sea teemed with pirates. The pirates were not Roman, but they were created by Rome. You will have noticed many slaves in Rome?”

Drustan and Ragnall nodded. The city teemed with them. In the smarter areas like the Palatine Hill, there were more slaves than citizens. On the poverty drenched streets of the Aventine Hill, where Drustan and Ragnall lived, there weren’t so many. There, it was mostly moon-eyed, formerly rural Italian families apparently driven from their farms by large-scale landowners who had replaced them with slaves.

“The pirates grew fat from the slave trade,” Cicero continued. “On the island of Delos a decade ago the pirates sold ten thousand slaves every day. And to whom did they sell their slaves?”

“Romans?” asked Ragnall.

“Give the boy a prize. And why did nobody crush the pirates, or at least make some sort of effort towards preventing misery and murder from flourishing quite so virulently across Our Sea?”

Ragnall had no idea. He looked at Drustan, who said: “Because Rome gained more than it lost from the pirates, and Rome had destroyed all the other powers in the Mediterranean – Your Sea – that might have checked the pirates’ expansion.”

“Exactly! You have a brilliant tutor, Ragnall.” Ragnall thought he saw a blush bloom in Drustan’s cheeks. Surely he was mistaken?

Cicero lent in and continued in a voice that was just above a whisper: “So, it was no surprise when Caesar’s boat was taken by pirates on the way to Rhodes. Outnumbered, he would have been a fool to fight. The pirates, in turn, would have been fools to kill him, or to sell him on Delos. One could ransom a high-born Roman like him back to his family for much, much more than his slave price.

“The pirates returned to their base – some well-hidden cove – and demanded twenty talents for Caesar’s freedom. Young Julius told them that he was worth fifty and sent some of the crew from his ship to collect that sum. For the next few weeks he stayed with the pirates, not as a moping captive, but living as one as them. He joined with their sports and their carousing. He read them passages that he’d written. He insisted that they were quiet when he wanted to sleep. He began to teach some of them how to read.

“All the time, he told them that after he was ransomed he’d return and crucify the lot of them. They must have thought he was joking.”

“He wasn’t?” Ragnall asked. The rest of the party had disappeared for him, enveloped as he was in Cicero’s tale. He pictured a young man standing on a hot shore, making impertinent demands from fierce cutthroats. Could he really have been that confident and capable, or was he a brilliant blagger who’d spent every moment in captivity terrified for his life?

Cicero continued. “He was not joking. The ransom arrived – fifty talents – and Caesar was freed. He sailed to the city of Miletus, and, with no authority beyond his own boldness, with no funds other than promises, in a foreign city miles from home, he raised a small army and commandeered four ships.

“He returned to the pirates’ base and, using his knowledge of their habits and defences, captured them all with no casualties on either side. He sailed the pirates in shackles to Asia and handed them over to the Roman governor there. The governor dithered, which didn’t suit Caesar at all, so he carried out his own justice, as promised.”