The Grass Crown (76 page)

“Death can find nothing to expose in him that is not beautiful,” he would say over and over to himself, picturing the young warrior dead—so brave, so noble, so perfect that, be he Achilles or Hector or Patroclus, he triumphed even over his own passing.

But then he would hear his aunt calling, or a servant would come to knock on the workroom door and tell him he was wanted again, and down would go the book immediately, his burden shouldered once more. Without resentment or frustration.

Gaius Marius was a heavy burden. Old—thin and fat and then thin again—his skin hanging in sloppy folds and wattles—that frightful fleshly landslide down the left side of his face—and the look in those terrible eyes. He drooled from the left side of his mouth without seeming to know he drooled, so that the gobbet hung until it made contact with his tunic and soaked into a permanently wet patch. Sometimes he ranted, mostly at his hapless watch-pup, the only person who was tethered to him for long enough to use as a verbal vent for all that ire; sometimes he would weep until tears joined the spittle, and his nose ran disgustingly too; sometimes he would laugh at some private joke until the very rafters shook and Aunt Julia would come drifting in with her smile plastered in place, and gently shoo Young Caesar home.

At first the child felt helpless, not knowing what to do or how to do it. But he was a creature of infinite resource, so in time he found out how to handle Gaius Marius. It was either that, or fail in the task his mother had given him—a thought so unthinkable he could not begin to imagine the consequences. He also discovered the flaws in his own nature. He lacked patience, for one thing, though his mother’s training enabled him to conceal this shortcoming under mountains of what genuinely seemed like patience, and in the end he came not to know the difference between real patience and assumed patience. Being of strong stomach he came not to notice the drooling, and being of strong mind he came to know what must be done. No one ever told him, for no one ever understood save he; even the physicians. Gaius Marius must be made to move. Gaius Marius must be made to exercise. Gaius Marius must be made to see that he would live again as a normal man.

“And what else have you learned from Lucius Decumius, or some other Suburan ruffian?” Marius asked.

The lad jumped, so sudden was the question, so aimless and faraway his own thoughts. “Well, I’ve pieced something together—if I’m right. I think I am.”

“What?”

“The reason behind Cato the Consul’s decision to leave Samnium and Campania to Lucius Cornelius and transfer himself to your old command against the Marsi.”

“Oho! Tell me your theory, Young Caesar.”

“It’s about the kind of man I think Lucius Cornelius has to be,” said Young Caesar seriously.

“What kind of man is that?”

“A man who can make other men very afraid.”

“He can that!”

“He must have known he would never be given the southern command. It belongs to the consul. So he didn’t bother to argue. He just waited for Lucius Cato the Consul to arrive in Capua, and then he cast a spell that frightened Cato the Consul so badly that Cato the Consul decided to put as big a distance between himself and Campania as he possibly could.”

“How did you piece that hypothesis together?”

“From Lucius Decumius. And from my mother.”

“She’d know,” said Marius cryptically.

Frowning, Young Caesar glanced sideways at him, then shrugged. “Once Lucius Cornelius has the top command and no one stupid to hamper him, he has to do well. I think he’s a very good general.”

“Not as good as me.” Marius sighed, half a sob.

The boy pounced immediately. “Now don’t you start to feel sorry for yourself, Gaius Marius! You’ll be fit to command again, especially once we get out of this silly garden.”

Not up to this attack, Marius changed the subject. “And has your Suburan grapevine told you how Cato the Consul is doing against the Marsi?” he asked, and snorted. “No one ever tells me what’s going on—they think it might upset me! What upsets me, however, is not knowing what goes on. If I didn’t hear from you, I’d explode!”

Young Caesar grinned. “My grapevine has it that the consul got into trouble the moment he arrived in Tibur. Pompey Strabo took your old troops—he’s very good at that!—so Lucius Cato the Consul is left with none save raw recruits—farm boys newly enfranchised, from Umbria and Etruria. Not only is he at a loss how to train them, but his legates don’t know either. So he commenced his training program by calling an assembly of the whole army. He harangued them without pity. You know the sort of thing—they were idiots and yokels, cretins and barbarians, a miserable lot of worms, he was used to far better, they’d all be dead if they didn’t smarten up, and so forth.”

“Shades of Lupus and Caepio!” cried Marius incredulously.

“Anyway, one of the men assembled at Tibur to hear all this rubbish is a friend of Lucius Decumius’s. Name of Titus Titinius. By profession Titus Titinius is a retired veteran centurion whom you gave a bit of your Etrurian land to after Vercellae. He says he did you a good turn once.”

“Yes, I remember him very well,” said Marius, trying to smile and dribbling copiously.

Out came Young Caesar’s “Marius handkerchief” as he called it; the saliva was wiped neatly away. “He comes to Rome to stay with Lucius Decumius regularly because he likes to hear the goings-on in the Forum. But when the war broke out he enlisted as a training centurion. He was based in Capua for a long time, but he was sent to help Cato the Consul at the beginning of this year.”

“I presume Titus Titinius and the other training centurions hadn’t had a chance to begin to train when Cato the Consul delivered his harangue at Tibur?”

“Exactly. But he didn’t exclude them from the harangue.

And that was how he got into trouble. Titus Titinius became so angry as he listened to Cato the Consul abuse everybody that he finally bent down and picked up a big clod of earth. And he threw it at Cato the Consul! The next thing, everyone was bombarding Cato the Consul with clods of earth! He ended knee-deep in them, with his army on the verge of mutiny.” Finding inspiration, the boy chuckled. “Marred, mired, muzzled!”

“Stop fiddling around with words and get on with it!”

“Sorry, Gaius Marius.”

“So?”

“He wasn’t hurt at all, but Cato the Consul felt that his dignitas and auctoritas had suffered intolerably. Instead of just forgetting the incident, he clapped Titus Titinius in chains and sent him to Rome with a letter asking that the Senate try him for inciting a mutiny. He arrived this morning, and he’s sitting in the Lautumiae cells.”

Marius began to struggle to his feet. “Well, that settles our destination tomorrow morning, Young Caesar!” he said, sounding quite lighthearted.

“We’re going to see what will happen to Titus Titinius?”

“If it’s in the Senate, boy, I am, anyway. You can wait in the vestibule.”

Young Caesar hauled Marius up and moved automatically to his left side to take the weight of the useless limbs. “I won’t need to do that, Gaius Marius. He’s being brought before the Plebeian Assembly. The Senate wants nothing to do with it.”

“You’re a patrician, you can’t stand in the Comitia when the Plebs are meeting. But in my state, I can’t either. So we will find a good spot on top of the Senate steps and watch the circus from there,” said Marius. “Oh, I needed this! A Forum circus is far better than anything the aediles can ever think to put in the games!”

If Gaius Marius had ever doubted the depth of the love the people of Rome bore him, those fears would have been laid to rest the following morning when he emerged from his house and turned to negotiate the steep slope of the Clivus Argentarius as it plunged down through the Fontinalis Gate to end in the lower Forum. In his right hand he had a stick, on his left side he had the boy Gaius Julius Caesar—and soon, to right and to left of him, in front and behind him, he had every man and woman in the vicinity. He was cheered, he was wept over; with every grotesque step, the out-thrust of his right leg and the terrible dragging of his left leg twisting his hip, those who clustered around urged him on. Soon the word was going on ahead of him, so glad, so uplifted:

“Gaius Marius! Gaius Marius!”

When he entered the lower Forum the cheers were deafening. Sweat standing on his brow, leaning more heavily on Young Caesar than anyone there knew save he and Young Caesar, he hauled himself around the lip of the Comitia. Two dozen senators rushed to lift him to the top of the Curia Hostilia podium, but he held them at bay and struggled, step by dreadful step, all the way up. A curule chair was brought, he got himself down onto it with no help from anyone except the boy.

“Left leg,” he said, chest heaving.

Young Caesar understood at once, got down on his knees and pulled the useless member forward until it rested ahead of the right in the classic pose, then took the inanimate left arm and laid it across Marius’s lap, hiding the stiff clumped fingers of the hand beneath a fold of toga.

Gaius Marius sat then more regally than any king, bowing his head to acknowledge the cheers while the sweat rolled down his face and his chest labored like a gigantic bellows. The Plebs were already convoked, but every last man in the well of the Comitia turned to face the Senate steps and cheered, after which the ten tribunes of the plebs on the rostra called for three vast hurrahs.

The boy stood beside the curule chair and looked down at the crowd, this his first experience of the extraordinary euphoria so many united people could generate, feeling the adulation brush his cheek because he stood so close to its source, and understanding what it must be like to be the First Man in Rome. And as the cheers eventually died down his sharp ears caught the murmured whispers,

“Who is that beautiful child?”

He was well aware of his beauty, and aware too of the effect it had on others; since he liked to be liked, he also liked being beautiful. If he forgot what he was there for, however, his mother would be angry, and he hated vexing her. A bead of drool was forming in the flaccid corner of Marius’s mouth, it must be wiped away. He took the Marius handkerchief from the sinus of his purple-bordered child’s toga, and while the whole crowd sighed in tender admiration, he dabbed the sweat from Marius’s face and at the same time whisked the gobbet away before anyone could notice it.

“Conduct your meeting, tribunes!” Marius cried loudly when he could find the breath.

“Bring the prisoner Titus Titinius!” ordered Piso Frugi, the President of the College. “Members of the Plebs gathered here in your tribes, we meet to decide the fate of one Titus Titinius, pilus prior centurion in the legions of the consul Lucius Porcius Cato Licinianus. His case has been referred to us, his peers, by the Senate of Rome after due consideration. The consul Lucius Porcius Cato Licinianus alleges that Titus Titinius did strive to incite a mutiny, and demands that we deal with him as severely as the law allows. As mutiny is treason, we are here to decide if Titus Titinius should live or die.”

Piso Frugi paused while the prisoner, a big man in his early fifties clad only in a tunic, chains attached to manacles about his wrists and ankles, was led onto the rostra and made to stand at the front, to one side of Piso Frugi.

“Members of the Plebs, the consul Lucius Porcius Cato Licinianus states in a letter that he did call an assembly of all the legions of his army, and that while he was addressing this legally convoked assembly, Titus Titinius, the prisoner here on display, did strike him with a missile thrown from the shoulder, and that Titus Titinius did then incite all the men around him to do the same. The letter bears the consul’s seal.”

Piso Frugi turned to the prisoner. “Titus Titinius, how answer you?”

“That it’s true, tribune. I did indeed strike the consul with a missile thrown from the shoulder.” The centurion paused, then said, “A clod of soft earth, tribune, that was my missile. And when I threw it, everyone around me did the same.”

“A clod of soft earth,” said Piso Frugi slowly. “What made you hurl such a missile at your commander?”

“He called us yokels, miserable worms, stupid upcountry fools, impossible material to work with, and more besides!” shouted Titus Titinius in his parade voice. “Now I wouldn’t have minded if he’d called us mentulae and cunni, tribune—that’s good talk between a general and his men.” He drew in a breath and thundered, “If there had been rotten eggs to hand, I’d rather have thrown rotten eggs! But a ball of soft earth is the next best thing, and there was plenty of that to hand! I don’t care if you strangle me, I don’t care if you throw me off the Tarpeian Rock! Because if I ever see Lucius Cato again, he’ll get more of the same from me, and that’s a fact!”

Titinius turned to face the Senate steps and pointed at Gaius Marius, chains clanking. “Now there’s a general! I served Gaius Marius as a legionary in Numidia and I served him again in Gaul—but as a centurion! When I retired he gave me a bit of land in Etruria off his own estates. And I tell you, members of the Plebs, that Gaius Marius wouldn’t have got himself buried by clods of earth! Gaius Marius loved his soldiers! He didn’t hold them in contempt like Lucius Cato! Nor would Gaius Marius have clapped a man in chains and sent him to be judged by a lot of civilians in Rome just because that man lobbed anything at him! The general would have rubbed that man’s face in whatever it was he threw! I tell you, Lucius Cato is no general and Rome will get no victories from him! A general cleans up his own messes. He doesn’t give that job to the tribes in a gathering!”

A profound silence had fallen. When Titus Titinius ceased to speak, not one voice broke it.

Piso Frugi sighed. “Gaius Marius, what would you do with this man?” he asked.

“He’s a centurion, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi. And I do know him, as he says. Too good a man to waste. But he buried his general in clods of earth, and that is a military offense no matter what the provocation. He can’t go back to the consul Lucius Porcius Cato. That would be to insult the consul, who dismissed this man from his service by sending him to us. I think we can best serve the interests of Rome by sending Titus Titinius to some other general. Might I suggest he return to Capua and take up his old duties there?”