"He can't prove a thing. The money is lent by two of my clients, Matinius and Scaptius. All I've done is exert myself to protect my clients' interests, Mama."
"My dear Brutus, you forget that I was there long before you were old enough to control your fortune! Matinius and Scaptius are your employees. My father set the firm up, along with many, many others. Well disguised, it's true. But you can't afford to give someone with Cicero's wit and acumen any ammunition."
"I will deal with Cicero," he said, and looked as if he could deal with Cicero.
"Better, I hope, than your esteemed father-in-law has dealt with his problems!" Servilia snapped. "He left a trail of evidence of his peculations while governor of Cilicia that a blind man could follow. With the result that he's arraigned in the Extortion Court. And you, Brutus, were his accomplice. Do you think all of Rome doesn't know about your little rackets?" She smiled humorlessly, displaying small, perfect white teeth. "Appius Claudius would threaten to billet the army on some hapless Cilician town, then you would come along and hint that a gift of one hundred talents to the governor would avoid this fate, after which the firm of Matinius and Scaptius would offer to lend the town one hundred talents. Appius Claudius popped the money in his purse, and you made even more from lending it."
"They may try Appius Claudius, but he'll be acquitted, Mama."
"I have no doubt of it, my son. But the rumors are not going to do your public career any good. Pontius Aquila says so."
The disfigured, unhappy face darkened into a snarl; the black eyes flashed dangerously. "Pontius Aquila!" he said contemptuously. "Caesar I could understand, Mama, but not an ambitious nobody like Pontius Aquila! You demean yourself."
"How dare you!" she growled, leaping to her feet.
"Yes, Mama, I am afraid of you," Brutus said steadily as she loomed over him, "but I am not a boy of twenty anymore, and in some things I have a right to speak. Things which reflect badly on our blood, our nobility. As does Pontius Aquila."
Servilia turned and walked from the room, shutting the door with ostentatious quietness. Outside in the colonnade around the peristyle garden she stood, trembling, hands clenched. How dare he! Was he absolutely bloodless? Had he ever burned, itched, howled soundlessly into the night, wrenched with hunger, loneliness, need? No, he hadn't. Not Brutus. Anaemic, flaccid, impotent. Did he think she wasn't aware of it, with his wife living in her house? A wife he never penetrated, let alone slept with. Nor did he forage in any other pastures. Whatever her son was made of—and his exact composition eluded her—it wasn't fire, thunder, volcano, earthquake. Sometimes, as today when he had spoken his mind about Pontius Aquila, he could stand up to her and voice his displeasure. But how dare he! Didn't he have any idea?
So many years since Caesar had left for Gaul, years in which she lay alone and ground her teeth, pounded her fists on the pillow. Loving him, wanting him, needing him. Limp with love, wet with want, famished with need. Those fierce confrontations, duels of will and wit, wars of strength. Oh, and the exquisite satisfaction of knowing herself bested, of measuring up to a man and being flattened by him, dominated, punished, enslaved. Knowing full well the extent of her own abilities and intellect— what more could a woman ask than a man who engendered respect? Who was more than her, yet bound to her by nothing more tangible than woman's qualities? Caesar, Caesar ...
"You look fierce."
She gasped, turned, saw him. Lucius Pontius Aquila. Her lover. Younger than her own son at thirty, just admitted to the Senate as one of the urban quaestors. Not an old family, therefore of birth far inferior to hers. Which didn't matter the moment she laid eyes on him, as now. So handsome! Very tall, perfectly proportioned, short, curly auburn hair, truly green eyes, the face endowed with wonderful bone structure and a strong yet sensuous mouth. And the best thing about him was that he didn't remind her of Caesar.
"My thoughts were fierce," she said, leading the way to her suite of rooms.
"Love-fierce or hate-fierce?"
"Hate. Hate, hate, hate!"
"Then you weren't thinking of me."
"No. I was thinking of my son."
"What did he do to anger you?"
"Said that I demeaned myself, associating with you."
He locked the door, pulled the shutters closed, then turned to look at her with the smile that weakened her knees. "He's a great aristocrat, Brutus," Pontius Aquila said levelly. "I understand his disapproval."
"He doesn't know," said Servilia, unwrapping his plain white toga and placing it on a chair. "Put your foot up." She unlaced his senatorial shoe of maroon leather. "The other one." It too was removed and discarded. "Lift your arms." Off came the white tunic with the broad purple stripe over its right shoulder.
He was naked. Servilia moved back enough to see all of him, feasting her eyes, her mind, her spirit. A little dark red hair on his chest narrowed to a thin stripe which dived down to the bush of his brighter red pubic hair, out of the midst of which his dusky penis, growing already, protruded above a deliciously full and pendulous scrotum. Perfect, perfect. The thighs were slim, the calves large and well formed, the belly flat, the chest plump with muscle. Broad shoulders, long and sinewy arms.
She moved in a slow circle around him, purring over the round, firm buttocks, the narrow hips, the broad back, the way his head sat proudly atop his athlete's neck. Beautiful! What a man! How could she bear to touch such perfection? He belonged to Phidias and Praxiteles, to sculptural immortality.
"It's your turn," he said when the tour of his body was done.
Down came the masses of hair, black as ever save for two stark white streaks at the temples. Off came the layers of her scarlet and amber gown. Fifty-four years of age, Servilia stood naked, and felt at no disadvantage. Admittedly her skin was smoothly ivory and her full breasts were still proudly upright, but her buttocks had dropped, her waist thickened. Age, she knew, had nothing to do with it, this thing between a man and a woman. It was measured in delight, in appreciation. Never in years.
She lay down on her bed and put her hands on either side of her blackly hairy groin, pulling the lips of her vulva apart so he could see its sleek, plummy contours, the sheen of it. Hadn't Caesar said it was the most beautiful flower he had ever seen? Her confidence rested in that, in the triumph of keeping Caesar enslaved.
Oh, but the touch of this young, smooth, enormously virile man! To be covered so strongly yet so gently, to yield everything without modesty yet with intelligent restraint. She sucked at his tongue, his nipples, his penis, fought back with hungry strength, and when she reached her climax screeched her ecstasy at the top of her lungs. There, my son! I hope you heard that. I hope your wife heard that. I have just experienced a cataclysm neither of you will ever know. With a man I don't have to care about beyond this gigantic convulsion of absolute pleasure.
Afterward they sat, still naked, to drink wine and talk with the easy intimacy only physical intimacy engenders.
"I hear that Curio has just introduced a bill to set up a commission to supervise the roads of Italia, and that the head of the commission is to have a proconsular imperium," said Servilia, her feet in his lap, toes playing with that bright red hair.
"True enough, but he'll never get it past Gaius Marcellus Major," said Pontius Aquila.
"It seems an odd measure."
"So it seems to everyone."
"Does he belong to Caesar, do you think?"
"I doubt it."
"Yet the only person who might benefit from Curio's bill would be Caesar," said Servilia thoughtfully. "If he loses his provinces and his imperium on the Kalends of March, Curio's bill would provide him with another proconsulship and his imperium would continue. Not so?"
"Yes."
"Then Curio belongs to Caesar."
"I really do doubt that."
"He's suddenly free of debt."
Pontius Aquila laughed, head thrown back, and looked magnificent. "He also married Fulvia. Not before time, if the gossips are right. She
's very round in the belly for a newly wedded woman."
"Poor old Sempronia! A daughter who goes from one demagogue to another."
"I haven't seen any evidence that Curio is a demagogue."
"You will," said Servilia cryptically.
For over two years the Senate had been deprived of its ancient meeting house, the Curia Hostilia, yet no one had volunteered to rebuild it. So ingrained was the Treasury's parsimoniousness that the State would not foot the bill; tradition held that some great man should undertake the task, and no great man had so far been willing. Including Pompey the Great, who seemed indifferent to the Senate's plight.
"You can always use the Curia Pompeia," he said.
"Typical of him!" snapped Gaius Marcellus Major, stumping out to the Campus Martius and Pompey's stone theater on the Kalends of March. "He wants to compel the Senate to hold all its heavily attended meetings in something he built in days when we didn't need it. Typical!"
"Yet one more extraordinary command of a sort," said Cato, striding along at a pace Gaius Marcellus Major found difficult.
"Why do we have to hurry, Cato? Paullus holds the fasces for March, and he'll take his time."
"Which is why Paullus is a pudding," said Cato.
The complex Pompey had built upon the green sward of the Campus Martius not far from the Circus Flaminius was most imposing; a vast stone theater which could accommodate five thousand people reared high above the sparse structures which had existed here for much longer than a mere five years. Very shrewdly Pompey had incorporated a temple to Venus Victrix at the top of the cavea, and thus turned what would otherwise have been an impious structure into something entirely in keeping with the mos maiorum. Rome's customs and traditions deplored theater as a malign moral influence on the people, so until Pompey's stone edifice had gone up five years ago, the theater which pervaded all games and public feasts had been conducted in temporary wooden premises. What made Pompey's theater permissible was the temple to Venus Victrix.
Behind the auditorium Pompey had built a vast peristyle garden surrounded by a colonnade containing exactly one hundred pillars, each fluted and adorned with the fussy Corinthian capitals Sulla had brought back from Greece, each painted in shades of blue and lavishly gilded. The red walls along the back of the colonnade were rich with magnificently painted murals, unfortunately marred by the peculiarity of their blood-soaked subject matter. For Pompey owned a great deal more money than good taste, and nowhere did it show more than in his hundred-pillared colonnade and garden stuffed with fountains, fish, frills, frights.
At the rear of the peristyle Pompey had erected a curia, a meeting house which he had ensured was religiously inaugurated in order to house meetings of the Senate. It was very adequate in size, and in layout resembled the ruined Curia Hostilia, being a rectangular chamber containing three tiers down either side of a space ending in the dais upon which the curule magistrates sat. Each shelflike tier was broad enough to accommodate a senator's stool; upon the highest tier sat the pedarii, the senators who were not senior enough to speak in debate because they had never held a magistracy or won a Grass Crown or a Civic Crown for valor. The two middle tiers held senators who had attained a minor magistracy—tribune of the plebs, quaestor or plebeian aedile—or were military heroes, and the two bottom tiers were reserved for those who had been curule aediles, praetors, consuls or censors. Which meant that those who sat on the bottom or middle tiers had more room to spread their feathers than the pedarii up at the top.
The old Curia Hostilia had been uninspiring within: the tiers had been blocks of unrendered tufa, the walls drably painted with a few red curliques and lines on a beige background, the curule dais more tufa stone, and the central space between the two banks of tiers tessellated in black and white marble so old it had long lost polish or majesty. In glaring contrast to this antique simplicity, Pompey's Curia was entirely done in colored marbles. The walls were purple and rose tiles laid in complicated patterns between gilded pilasters; the back tier on either side was faced in brown marble, the middle tier in yellow marble, the bottom tier in cream marble, and the curule dais in a lustrous, shimmering blue-white marble brought all the way from Numidia. The space between the two banks of tiers had been paved in patterned wheels of purple and white. Light poured in through high clerestory windows well sheltered by a wide eave on the non-colonnade side, and each aperture was covered by a gilded grille.
Though the interior of the Curia Pompeia provoked many a sniff because of its ostentation, the interior was not what really offended. That was the statue of himself which Pompey had erected at the back of the curule dais. Exactly his own height (therefore not an insult to the Gods), it limned him as he had been at the time of his first consulship twenty years ago: a graceful, well-knit man of thirty-six with a shock of bright gold hair, brilliantly blue eyes, and a demure, round, distinctly un-Roman face. The sculptor had been the best, so too the painter who had colored in the tones of Pompey's flesh, hair, eyes, maroon senatorial shoes fastened with the crescent buckles of the consul. Only the toga and what showed of the tunic had been done in the new way: not painted but made of highly polished marble, white for the fabric of toga and tunic, purple for the border of the toga and the latus clavus stripe on the tunic. As he had caused the statue to be placed on a plinth four feet tall, Pompey the Great towered over everyone and inarguably presided over any meeting of the Senate conducted there. The arrogance! The insufferable hubris!
Almost all the four hundred senators present in Rome came to the Curia Pompeia and this long-awaited meeting on the Kalends of March. To some extent Gaius Marcellus Major had been right in thinking that Pompey wanted to force the Senate to meet in his curia because the Senate had ignored his curia's existence until its own beloved chamber burned down; but Marcellus Major had neglected to take .his reasoning one step further, to the fact that these days the Senate had no option other than to meet outside Rome's sacred boundary for any session likely to draw a full House. Which meant that Pompey could attend these meetings in person while comfortably retaining his imperium as governor of the Spains; as his army was in Spain and he was also curator of the grain supply, he enjoyed the luxury of living just outside Rome and traveling freely throughout Italia, two things normally forbidden to the governors of provinces.
Dawn was just paling the sky above the Esquiline Mount when the senators began to straggle into the peristyle garden, where most of them chose to linger until the convening magistrate, Lucius Aemilius Lepidus Paullus, chose to appear. They clustered in small groups of like political thinking, talking with more animation than they could usually summon up so early in the day; this promised to be a momentous meeting, and anticipation was high. Everyone likes to be present to see the idol topple, and today everyone was convinced that Caesar, idol of the People, would topple.
The leaders of the boni stood on the rear colonnade itself outside the Curia Pompeia doors: Cato, Ahenobarbus, Metellus Scipio, Marcus Marcellus (the junior consul of last year), Appius Claudius, Lentulus Spinther, Gaius Marcellus Major (the junior consul this year), Gaius Marcellus Minor (predicted to be consul next year), Faustus Sulla, Brutus, and two tribunes of the plebs.
"A great, great day!" barked Cato in his harsh voice.
"The beginning of the end of Caesar," said Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, beaming.
"He's not without support," Brutus ventured timidly. "I see Lucius Piso, Philippus, Lepidus, Vatia Isauricus, Messala Rufus and Rabirius Postumus huddled together. They look confident."
"Rabble!" said Marcus Marcellus disdainfully.
"But who knows how the backbenchers will feel when it comes to the vote?" asked Appius Claudius, under some strain thanks to the fact that his trial for extortion was still going on.
"More of them will vote for us than for Caesar," said the haughty Metellus Scipio.
At which moment the senior consul, Paullus, appeared behind his lictors and entered the Curia Pompeia. The senators streamed inside after him, eac
h with his servant carrying his folded stool, some with scribes hovering in attendance to take private verbatim records of this historic meeting.
The prayers were said, the sacrifice made, the omens deemed to be auspicious; the House settled down on its stools, the curule magistrates on their ivory chairs atop the blue-white marble dais dominated by the statue of Pompey the Great.
Who sat on the bottom tier to the left of the dais in his purple-bordered toga and looked directly at the dais, eyes dwelling on the face of his effigy, lips faintly smiling at the delicious irony of it. What a wonderful day this one would be! The only man who seemed likely to eclipse him was going to have the feet cut out from under him. And all without one word from him, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. No one would be able to point the finger at him and accuse him of conspiring to unseat Caesar; it was going to happen without his needing to do more than be here. Naturally he would vote to strip Caesar of his provinces, but so would most of the House. Speak on the subject he would not, were he to be asked. The boni were quite capable of doing all the oratory necessary.
Paullus, holding the fasces during the month of March, sat with his curule chair slightly forward of Gaius Marcellus Major's, the eight praetors and two curule aediles ranked behind them.
Just below the front of the curule dais stood a very long, stout, highly polished wooden bench. On this sat the ten tribunes of the plebs, the men elected by the Plebs to safeguard their interests and keep the patricians in their place. Or so it had been at the dawn of the Republic, a time when the patricians had controlled the Senate, the consulship, the courts, the Centuriate Assembly and all aspects of public life. But that state of affairs hadn't lasted long once the Kings of Rome were dispensed with. The Plebs had risen high, held more and more of the money, and wanted a much bigger say in government. For one hundred years the duel of wits and wills between the Patriciate and the Plebs had persisted, the Patriciate fighting a losing battle. At the end of it, the Plebs had won the right to have at least one of the two consuls a plebeian, half the places in the pontifical colleges, and the right to call plebeian families noble once a member attained the rank of praetor, and had established the College of the Tribunes of the Plebs, sworn to guard plebeian interests even at the price of lives.