Labienus brought the news of Pompey the Great’s defeat at Pharsalus to Cato and Cicero; riding hard, he reached the Adriatic coast of Macedonia three days after the battle, his tenth horse on its last legs. Though he was alone and still in his dowdy, workmanlike war gear, the sentries at the camp gates did not need a second glance to recognize that dark, un-Roman countenance; Pompey’s commander of cavalry was known—and feared—by every ranker soldier.
Assured that Cato was in the general’s quarters, Labienus slid from his exhausted animal’s back and strode off up the Via Principalis toward the scarlet flag stretched rigid in a stiff sea breeze, hoping against hope that Cato would be on his own. Now was not the moment to suffer Cicero’s histrionics.
But that was not to be. The Great Advocate was within, his perfectly chosen, formally phrased Latin issuing out of the open door just as if it were a jury he addressed, rather than the dour, unimpressionable Cato. Who, Labienus saw in the instant that he crossed the threshold, was confronting Cicero with an expression that said his patience was being sorely tried.
Startled at this abrupt invasion, Cato and Cicero both jumped, mouths open to speak; Labienus’s face silenced them.
“He trounced us in less than an hour,” Labienus said curtly as he went straight to the wine table. Thirst made him drink the beaker’s contents at a gulp, then he grimaced, shuddered. “Why is it, Cato, that you never have any decent wine?”
It was Cicero who did the squawking, the horrified trumpeting, the agitated flapping. “Oh, this is shocking, terrible!” he cried, tears beginning to course down his face. “What am I doing here? Why did I ever come on this hideous, ill-fated expedition? By rights I should have stayed in Italy, if not in Rome—there I might have been of some use—here, I am an impediment!” And more, and more. Nothing was known that could stem the spate of this wordsmith’s verbosity.
Whereas Cato stood for many moments without a thing to say, conscious only of a numbness creeping through his jaws. The impossible had happened: Caesar was victorious. But how could that be? How? How could the wrong side have proven itself right?
Neither man’s reaction surprised Labienus, who knew them too well and liked them too little; dismissing Cicero as a nothing, he focused his attention on Cato, the most obdurate of all Caesar’s countless enemies. Clearly Cato had never dreamed that his own side—the Republicans, they called themselves—could be beaten by a man who had contravened every tenet of Rome’s unwritten constitution, who had committed the sacrilege of marching on his own country. Now Cato was the bull struck by the sacrificial hammer, down on his knees without knowing how he had gotten there.
“He trounced us in less than an hour?” Cato finally said.
“Yes. Though he was heavily outnumbered, had no reserves and only a thousand horse, he trounced us. I’ve never known such an important battle to take so little time. Its name? Pharsalus.”
And that, Labienus vowed to himself, is all you’re going to hear about Pharsalus from me. I generaled for Caesar from the first to the last year of his exploits in Long-haired Gaul, and I was sure I could beat him. I had become convinced that without me, he couldn’t have begun to conquer. But Pharsalus showed me that whatever he used to give me to do was given in the certainty that a skilled subordinate could not fail. He always reserved the strategy for himself, just turned Trebonius, Decimus Brutus, Fabius and the rest of us into tactical instruments of his strategic will.
Somewhere along the way between the Rubicon and Pharsalus I lost sight of that, so when I led my six thousand horse against Caesar’s mere thousand Germans at Pharsalus, I deemed the battle already won. A battle I engineered because the great Pompeius Magnus was too worn down by the strife inside his own command tent to think of anything beyond self-pity. I wanted battle, his couch generals wanted battle, but Pompeius Magnus wanted Fabian warfare—starve the enemy, harry the enemy, but never fight the enemy. Well, he was right, we were wrong.
How many pitched battles has Caesar fought in? Very often, literally fought in, shield and sword among his front-line troops? Near enough to fifty. There is nothing he hasn’t seen, nothing he hasn’t done. What I do by inspiring fear—nay, terror!—in my soldiers, he does by making his soldiers love him better than they love their own lives.
A surge of bitterness drove him to crack his hand against the almost empty wine flagon, send it flying with a clang. “Did all the good wine go east to Thessaly?” he demanded. “Is there no drop worth drinking in this benighted place?”
Cato came to life. “I neither know nor care!” he barked. “If you want to swill nectar, Titus Labienus, go somewhere else! And,” he added, with a sweep of his hand toward Cicero, who was still carrying on, “take him with you!”
Without waiting to see how they took this, Cato walked out his front door and made for the snakepath leading to the top of Petra hill.
* * *
Not months, but scant days. How many days, eighteen? Yes, it is only eighteen days since Pompeius Magnus led our massive army east to fresh ground in Thessaly. He didn’t want me with him—does he think I don’t know how my criticisms irk him? So he elected to take my dear Marcus Favonius with him in my stead, leave me behind here in Dyrrachium to care for the wounded.
Marcus Favonius, best of my friends—where is he? If he were alive, he would have returned to me with Titus Labienus.
Labienus! The butcher to end all butchers, a barbarian in Roman skin, a savage who took slavering pleasure in torturing fellow Romans simply because they had soldiered for Caesar rather than Pompeius. And Pompeius, who had the hubris to nickname himself “Magnus”—“Great”—never even made a token protest when Labienus tortured the seven hundred captured men of Caesar’s Ninth Legion. Men whom Labienus knew well from Long-haired Gaul. That is the nucleus of it, that is why we lost the critical confrontation at Pharsalus. The right cause has been pursued by the wrong people.
Pompeius Magnus is Great no longer, and our beloved Republic has entered its death throes. In less than one hour.
The view from the heights of Petra hill was beautiful; a wine-dark sea beneath a softly misty sky and its watery sun, lush verdant hills that soared in the distance toward the high peaks of Candavia, the small terra-cotta city of Dyrrachium and its stout wooden bridge to the mainland. Peaceful. Serene. Even the miles upon miles upon miles of forbidding fortifications, bristling with towers and duplicating themselves beyond a scorched no-man’s-land, were settling into the landscape as if they had always been there. Relics of a titanic siege struggle that had gone on for months until suddenly, in the space of a night, Caesar had vanished and Pompeius had deluded himself he was the victor.
Cato stood on Petra’s pinnacle and looked south. There, a hundred miles away on Corcyra Island, was Gnaeus Pompeius, his huge naval base, his hundreds of ships, his thousands of sailors, oarsmen and marines. Odd, that Pompeius Magnus’s elder son should have a talent for making war upon the sea.
The wind whipped at the stiff leather straps of his kilt and sleeves, tore his long and greying auburn hair to fluttering ribbons, plastered his beard against his chest. It was a year and a half since he had left Italy, and in all that time he had neither shaved nor cut his hair; Cato was in mourning for the crumbled mos maiorum, which was the way Roman things had always been and the way Roman things should always be, forever and ever. But the mos maiorum had been steadily eroded by a series of political demagogues and military marshals for almost a hundred years, culminating in Gaius Julius Caesar, the worst one of all.
How I hate Caesar! Hated him long before I was old enough to enter the Senate—his airs and graces, his beauty, his golden oratory, his brilliant legislation, his habit of cuckolding his political enemies, his unparalleled military skill, his utter contempt for the mos maiorum, his genius for destruction, his unassailably noble patrician birth. How we fought him in the Forum and the Senate, we who called outselves the boni, the good men! Catulus, Ahenobarbus, Metellus Scipio, Bibulus and I. Catulus is dead, Bibulus is dead—where are Ahenobarbus and that monumental idiot, Metellus Scipio? Am I the only one of the boni left?
When the perpetual rains of this coast suddenly began to fall, Cato returned to the general’s house, to find it empty save for Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion. Two faces he could greet with genuine gladness.
Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion had been Cato’s pair of tame philosophers for more years than any of them could remember; he boarded and paid them for their company. None but a fellow Stoic could have endured Cato’s hospitality for more than a day or two, for this great-grandson of the immortal Cato the Censor prided himself on the simplicity of his tastes; the rest of his world just called him stingy. Which judgement did not upset Cato in the least. He was immune to criticism and the good opinion of others. However, Cato’s was a household as much addicted to wine as to Stoicism. If the wine he and his tame philosophers drank was cheap and nasty, the supply of it was bottomless, and if Cato paid no more than five thousand sesterces for a slave, he could say with truth that he got as much work out of the man—he would have no women in his house—as he would have from one who cost fifty times that.
Because Romans, even those lowly enough to belong to the Head Count, liked to live as comfortably as possible, Cato’s peculiar devotion to austerity had set him apart as an admired—even treasured—eccentric; this, combined with his quite appalling tenacity and incorruptible integrity, had elevated him to hero status. No matter how unpalatable a duty might be, Cato would perform it with heart and soul. His harsh and unmelodic voice, his brilliance at the filibuster and harangue, his blind determination to bring Caesar down, had all contributed to his legend. Nothing could intimidate him, and no one could reason with him.
Statyllus and Athenodorus Cordylion would not have dreamed of trying to reason with him; few loved him, but they did.
“Are we housing Titus Labienus?” Cato asked, going to the wine table and pouring himself a full beaker, unwatered.
“No,” said Statyllus, smiling faintly. “He’s usurped Lentulus Crus’s old domicile, and scrounged an amphora of the best Falernian from the quartermaster to drown his sorrows.”
“I wish him well of anywhere except here,” Cato said, standing while his servant removed the leather gear from him, then sitting with a sigh. “I suppose the news of our defeat has spread?”
“Everywhere,” Athenodorus Cordylion said, rheumy old eyes wet with tears. “Oh, Marcus Cato, how can we live in a world that Caesar will rule as a tyrant?”
“That world is not yet a foregone conclusion. It won’t be over until I for one am dead and burned.” Cato drank deeply, stretched out his long, well-muscled legs. “I imagine there are survivors of Pharsalus who feel the same—Titus Labienus, most definitely. If Caesar is still in the mood to issue pardons, I doubt he’ll get one. Issue pardons! As if Caesar were our king. While all and sundry marvel at his clemency, sing his praises as a merciful man! Pah! Caesar is another Sulla—ancestors back to the very beginning, royal for seven centuries. More royal—Sulla never claimed to be descended from Venus and Mars. If he isn’t stopped, Caesar will crown himself King of Rome. He’s always had the blood. Now he has the power. What he doesn’t have are Sulla’s vices, and it was only Sulla’s vices prevented him from tying the diadem around his head.”
“Then we must offer to the gods that Pharsalus is not our last battle,” Statyllus said, replenishing Cato’s beaker from a new flagon. “Oh, if only we knew more about what happened! Who lives, who died, who was captured, who escaped—”
“This tastes suspiciously good,” Cato interrupted, frowning.
“I thought—given this dreadful news, you understand—that just this once we wouldn’t infringe our convictions if we followed Labienus’s example,” Athenodorus Cordylion said apologetically.
“To indulge oneself like a sybarite is not a right act, no matter how dreadful the news!” Cato snapped.
“I disagree,” said a honeyed voice from the doorway.
“Oh. Marcus Cicero,” Cato said flatly, face unwelcoming.
Still weeping, Cicero found a chair from which he could see Cato, mopped his eyes with a crisp, clean, large handkerchief—an indispensable tool for a courtroom genius—and accepted a cup from Statyllus.
I know, thought Cato with detachment, that his impassioned grief is genuine, yet it offends me almost to nausea. Aman must conquer all his emotions before he is truly free.
“What did you manage to learn from Titus Labienus?” he rapped, so harshly that Cicero jumped. “Where are the others? Who died at Pharsalus?”
“Just Ahenobarbus,” Cicero answered.
Ahenobarbus! Cousin, brother-in-law, indefatigable boni confrere. I shall never see that determined countenance again. How he railed about his baldness, convinced his shiny dome had set the electors against him whenever he ran for a priesthood…
Cicero was rattling on. “It seems Pompeius Magnus escaped, along with everybody else. According to Labienus, that happens in a rout. The conflicts which see men die on the field are those fought to a finish. Whereas our army caved in upon itself. Once Caesar shattered Labienus’s cavalry charge by arming his spare cohorts of foot with siege spears, it was all over. Pompeius left the field. The other leaders followed, while the troops either dropped their weapons and cried quarter, or ran away.”
“Your son?” Cato asked, feeling the obligation.
“I understand that he acquitted himself splendidly, but was not harmed,” Cicero said, transparently glad.
“And your brother, Quintus, his son?”
Anger and exasperation distorted Cicero’s very pleasant face. “Neither fought at Pharsalus—brother Quintus always said that he wouldn’t fight for Caesar, but that he respected the man too much to fight against him either.” A shrug. “That is the worst of civil war. It divides families.”
“No news of Marcus Favonius?” Cato asked, keeping his tones suitably hard.
“None.”
Cato grunted, seemed to dismiss the matter.
“What are we going to do?” Cicero asked rather pathetically.
“Strictly speaking, Marcus Cicero, that is your decision to make,” Cato said. “You are the only consular here. I have been praetor, but not consul. Therefore you outrank me.”
“Nonsense!” Cicero cried. “Pompeius left you in charge, not me! You’re the one living in the general’s house.”
“My commission was specific and limited. The Law prescribes that executive decisions be taken by the most senior man.”
“Well, I absolutely refuse to take them!”
The fine grey eyes studied Cicero’s mutinous, fearful face—why will he always end a sheep, a mouse? Cato sighed. “Very well, I will make the executive decisions. But only on the condition that you vouch for my actions when I am called to account by the Senate and People of Rome.”
“What Senate?” Cicero asked bitterly. “Caesar’s puppets in Rome, or the several hundred at present flying in all directions from Pharsalus?”
“Rome’s true Republican government, which will rally somewhere and keep on opposing Caesar the monarch.”
“You’ll never give up, will you?”
“Not while I still breathe.”
“Nor will I, but not in your way, Cato. I’m not a soldier, I lack the sinew. I’m thinking of returning to Italy and starting to organize civilian resistance to Caesar.”
Cato leaped to his feet, fists clenched. “Don’t you dare!” he roared. “To return to Italy is to abase yourself to Caesar!”
“Pax, pax, I’m sorry I said it!” Cicero bleated. “But what are we going to do?”
“We pack up and take the wounded to Corcyra, of course. We have ships here, but if we delay, the Dyrrachians will burn them,” Cato said. “Once we reach haven with Gnaeus Pompeius, we’ll get news of the others and determine our final destination.”
“Eight thousand sick men plus all our stores and supplies? We don’t have nearly enough ships!” Cicero gasped.
“If,” Cato said a little derisively, “Gaius Caesar could jam twenty thousand soldiers, five thousand noncombatants and slaves, all his mules, wagons, equipment and artillery into less than three hundred battered, leaky ships and cross ocean water between Britannia and Gaul, then there is no reason why I can’t put a quarter of that number aboard a hundred good stout transports and sail close to shore in placid waters.”
“Oh! Oh, yes, yes! You’re quite right, Cato.” Cicero rose to his feet, handed his beaker to Statyllus with trembling fingers. “I must start my own packing. When do you sail?”
“The day after tomorrow.”
The Corcyra that Cato remembered from a previous visit had vanished, at least along its coasts. An exquisite island, the gem of the Adriatic, hilly and lush, a place of dreamy inlets and translucent, glowing seas.
A series of Pompeian admirals culminating in Gnaeus Pompey had remodeled Corcyra; every cove contained transport ships or war galleys, every small village had turned into a temporary town to service the demands of camps on their peripheries, the once pellucid sea was awash with human and animal excreta and stank worse than the mud flats of Egyptian Pelusium. To compound this lack of hygiene, Gnaeus Pompey had established his main base on the narrow straits facing the coast of the mainland. His reason: that this area yielded the best catches as Caesar tried to ferry troops and supplies from Brundisium to Macedonia. But the currents in the straits did not suck the filth away; rather, it accumulated.
Cato seemed not to notice the stench, whereas Cicero railed about it constantly, his handkerchief muffling his green face and affronted nostrils. In the end he removed himself to a decayed villa atop a hill where he could walk in a lovely orchard and pick fruits from the trees, almost forget the misery of homesickness. Cicero uprooted from Italy was at best a shadow of himself.
The sudden appearance of Cicero’s younger brother, Quintus, and his son, Cicero’s nephew Quintus Junior, only served to swell his woes. Unwilling to fight for either side, the pair had skulked from place to place all over Greece and Macedonia, then, upon Pompey the Great’s defeat at Pharsalus, they had headed for Dyrrachium and Cicero. To find the camp deserted, and a general feeling in the neighborhood that the Republicans had sailed for Corcyra. Off they went to Corcyra.
“Now you know,” Quintus snarled at his big brother, “why I wouldn’t ally myself with that overrated fool, Pompeius Magnus. He’s not fit to tie Caesar’s bootlaces.”
“What is the world coming to,” Cicero riposted, “when the affairs of state are decided upon a battlefield? Nor, in the long run, can they be. Sooner or later Caesar has to return to Rome and pick up the reins of government—and I intend to be in Rome to make it impossible for him to govern.”
Quintus Junior snorted. “Gerrae, Uncle Marcus! If you set foot on Italian soil, you’ll be arrested.”
“That, nephew, is where you’re wrong,” Cicero said with lofty scorn. “I happen to have a letter from Publius Dolabella begging me to return to Italy! He says that my presence will be welcome—that Caesar is anxious to have consulars of my standing in the Senate. He insists upon healthy opposition.”
“How nice to have a foot in both camps!” Quintus Senior sneered. “One of Caesar’s chief minions your son-in-law! Though I hear that Dolabella isn’t being a good husband to Tullia.”
“All the more reason for me to go home.”
“What about me, Marcus? Why should you, who openly opposed Caesar, be permitted to go home free and clear? My son and I—who have not opposed Caesar!—will have to find him and secure pardons because everyone thinks we fought at Pharsalus. And what are we going to do for money?”
Conscious that his face was reddening, Cicero tried to look indifferent. “That is surely your own business, Quintus.”
“Cacat! You owe me millions, Marcus, millions! Not to mention the millions you owe Caesar! Cough some of it up right this moment, or I swear I’ll slice you up the front from guts to gizzard!” Quintus yelled.
As he was not wearing his sword or dagger, an empty threat; but the exchange set the tenor of their reunion, which exacerbated Cicero’s rudderlessness, worry for his daughter, Tullia, and indignation at the heartless conduct of his wife, Terentia, a termagant. Possessed of an independent fortune she had refused to share with the spendthrift Cicero, Terentia was up to every trick in the money book, from shifting the boundary stones of her land to declaring the most productive tracts sacred sites, thereby avoiding taxes. Activities Cicero had lived with for so long that he took them for granted. What he couldn’t forgive her was the way she was treating poor Tullia, who had good cause to complain about her husband, Publius Cornelius Dolabella. But not as far as Terentia was concerned! If Cicero didn’t know for a fact that Terentia had no feelings beyond satisfaction at making a profit, he would have said she was in love with Dolabella herself. Siding with him against her own flesh and blood! Tullia was ill, had been ever since she lost her child. My baby, my sweetheart!
Though, of course, Cicero didn’t dare voice much of all that in his letters to Dolabella; he needed Dolabella!
Toward the middle of September (the very beginning of summer by the seasons that year), the Admiral of Corcyra called a small council in his headquarters.
Going on for thirty-two now, Gnaeus Pompey looked very much like his fabled father, though his hair was a darker shade of gold, his eyes were more grey than blue, and his nose was more Roman than Pompey the Great’s despised snub. Command sat upon him easily; as he had his father’s gift for organization, the task of manipulating a dozen separate fleets and many thousands of their servitors suited his talents. What he lacked were Pompey the Great’s overweening conceit and inferiority complex; Gnaeus Pompey’s mother, Mucia Tertia, was a high aristocrat with famous ancestors, so the dark thoughts of obscure Picentine origins which had so plagued poor Pompey the Great never crossed his son’s mind.
Only eight men were present: Gnaeus Pompey, Cato, all three Cicerones, Titus Labienus, Lucius Afranius and Marcus Petreius.
Afranius and Petreius had generaled for Pompey the Great for many years, had even run both the Spains for him until Caesar had thrown them out last year. Grizzled they might be, but they were Military Men to the core, and old soldiers never die. Arriving in Dyrrachium just before the exodus to Corcyra, naturally they tagged along, delighted to see Labienus, a fellow Picentine.
They had brought more news—new which cheered Cato immensely, but cast Cicero down: resistance to Caesar was going to reform in Roman Africa Province, still held by a Republican governor. Juba, King of neighboring Numidia, was openly on the Republican side, so all the survivors of Pharsalus were trying to head for Africa Province with as many troops as they could find.
“What of your father?” Cicero asked Gnaeus Pompey hollowly as he seated himself between his brother and his nephew. Oh, the horror of having to traipse off to Africa Province when all he yearned to do was go home!
“I’ve sent a letter to half a hundred different places around the eastern end of Our Sea,” Gnaeus Pompey said quietly, “but so far I’ve heard nothing. I’ll try again soon. There is a report that he was in Lesbos briefly to meet my stepmother and young Sextus, but if so, my letter there must have missed him. I have not heard from Cornelia Metella or Sextus either.”
“What do you yourself intend to do, Gnaeus Pompeius?” asked Labienus, baring his big yellow teeth in the snarl as unconscious and habitual as a facial tic.
Ah, that’s interesting, the silent Cato thought, eyes going from one face to the other. Pompeius’s son dislikes this savage quite as much as I do.
“I shall remain here until the Etesian winds arrive with the Dog Star—at least another month,” Gnaeus Pompey answered, “then I’ll move all my fleets and personnel to Sicily, Melite, Gaudos, the Vulcaniae Isles. Anywhere I can gain a toehold and make it difficult for Caesar to feed Italy and Rome. If Italy and Rome starve for lack of grain, it will be that much harder for Caesar to inflict his will on them.”
“Good!” Labienus exclaimed, and sat back contentedly. “I’m for Africa with Afranius and Petreius. Tomorrow.”
Gnaeus Pompey raised his brows. “A ship I can donate you, Labienus, but why the hurry? Stay longer and take some of Cato’s recovering wounded with you. I have sufficient transports.”
“No,” Labienus said, rising with a nod to Afranius and Petreius. “I’ll go to Cythera and Crete first to see what I can pick up there by way of refugee troops—in your donated ship. If I find men to transport, I’ll commandeer more ships and press crews if I have to, though the soldiers can row. Save your own resources for Sicily.”
The next moment he was gone, Afranius and Petreius in his wake like two big, amiable, elderly hounds.
“So much for Labienus,” said Cicero through his teeth. “I can’t say I’ll miss him.”
Nor I, Cato wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he addressed Gnaeus Pompey. “So what of the eight thousand men I brought from Dyrrachium? A thousand at least are fit to sail for Africa at once, but the rest need more time to heal. None of them wants to give up the struggle, but I can’t leave them here if you go.”
“Well, it seems our new Great Man is more interested in Asia Minor than he is in the Adriatic.” Lip lifted in contempt, Gnaeus Pompey snorted. “Kissing the ground at Ilium in honor of his ancestor Aeneas, if you please! Remitting Trojan taxes! Looking for the tomb of Hector!” Suddenly he grinned. “Not that leisure has lasted long. A courier came today and informed me that King Pharnaces has come down from Cimmeria to invade Pontus.”
Quintus Cicero laughed. “Following in his dear old dad’s footsteps, eh? Has Caesar moved to contain him?”
“No, Caesar’s still heading south. It’s that traitorous cur Calvinus has to contend with the son of Mithridates the Great. These oriental kings! Hydra-headed. Chop one off, and two more sprout from the stump. So I dare-say Pharnaces means it’s war as usual from one end of Anatolia to the other.”
“Which gives Caesar plenty to do at the eastern end of Our Sea,” Cato said with huge satisfaction. “We’ll have sufficient time to grow strong again in Africa Province.”
“You realize, Cato, that Labienus is trying to steal a march on you, and on my father, and on anyone else who might lay claim to the high command in Africa?” Gnaeus Pompey asked. “Why else is he so anxious to get there?” He pounded his fist against the palm of his other hand, anguished. “Oh, I wish I knew where my father is! I know him, Cato, I know how depressed he can get!”
“He’ll turn up, have no fear,” Cato said, leaning to clasp the Admiral’s brawny arm with unusual demonstrativeness. “As for me, I have no desire to occupy the command tent.” He jerked his head toward Cicero. “There sits my superior, Gnaeus Pompeius. Marcus Cicero is a consular, so when I leave for Africa, it will be under his authority.”
Cicero emitted a squeak of outrage and leaped to his feet. “No, no, no, no! I’ve told you before, my answer is no! Go where you want and do what you want, Cato—appoint one of your philosopher toadies—or a baboon—or that painted whore who pesters you so—to the command tent, but don’t appoint me! My mind is made up, I’m going home!”
Which brought Cato to tower at his full imposing height, looking down that even more imposing nose at Cicero as if he suddenly spied some noisome insect. “By virtue of your rank and your own windbag prating, Marcus Tullius Cicero, you are first and foremost the Republic’s servant! What you want and what you do are two quite different horses! Not once in your lordly life have you genuinely done your duty! Especially when that duty requires you to pick up a sword! You’re a Forum creature whose deeds don’t begin to rival your words!”
“How dare you!” Cicero gasped, face mottling. “How dare you, Marcus Porcius Cato, you sanctimonious, self-righteous, pigheaded monster! It was you and no one else who brought us to this, it was you and no one else who—who forced Pompeius Magnus into civil war! When I came to him with Caesar’s very reasonable and fair offer of terms, it was you who threw such a colossal tantrum that you literally terrified the life out of him! You screeched, screamed and howled until Magnus was a shivering heap of jelly—you had the man groveling and crawling to you more abjectly than Lucullus groveled and crawled to Caesar! No, Cato, I don’t blame Caesar for this civil war, I blame you!”
Gnaeus Pompey was out of his chair too, white with rage. “What do you mean, Cicero, you ancestorless nobody from the back hills of Samnium? My father intimidated to jelly? My father groveling and crawling? Take that back, or I’ll ram it between your rotting teeth with my fist!”
“No, I will not recant!” Cicero roared, beside himself. “I was there! I saw what happened! Your father, Gnaeus Pompeius, is a spoiled baby who toyed with Caesar and the idea of civil war to inflate his own opinion of himself, who never believed for one moment that Caesar would cross the Rubicon with one paltry legion! Who never believed that there are men with that kind of brazen courage! Who never believed in anything except his own—his own myth! A myth, son of Magnus, that started when your father blackmailed Sulla into giving him the co-command, and ended a month ago on a battlefield called Pharsalus! Much though it pains me to have to admit it, your father, son of Magnus, isn’t Caesar’s bootlace when it comes to war or politics!”
The stupefaction that had paralyzed Gnaeus Pompey almost audibly snapped; he launched himself at Cicero with a bellow, hands out to throttle him.
Neither of the Quintuses moved, too enthralled to care what Gnaeus Pompey did to the family tyrant. It was Cato who stepped in front of Pompey the Great’s mortally insulted son and grasped both his wrists. The tussle between them was brief; Cato forced Gnaeus Pompey’s arms down effortlessly and whipped them behind his back.
“That is enough!” he snapped, eyes blazing. “Gnaeus Pompeius, go back to caring for your fleets. Marcus Cicero, if you refuse to be the Republic’s loyal servant, go back to Italy!”
“Yes, go!” Pompey the Great’s son cried, and slumped into his chair to massage feeling back into his hands. Ye gods, who would ever have thought Cato so strong? “Pack your belongings, you and your kindred, and may I never see any of your faces again! A pinnace will be waiting at dawn tomorrow to take you to Patrae, from whence you can return to Italy, or take a trip to Hades to pat Cereberus’s heads! Go! Get out of my sight!”
Head up, two scarlet spots in his cheeks, Cicero cuddled the massive folds of toga draped over his left shoulder and stalked out, his nephew by his side. Quintus Senior delayed a little to turn in the doorway.
“I shit on both your pricks,” he said with grave dignity.
Which struck Gnaeus Pompey as exquisitely funny; he dropped his head into his hands and howled with mirth.
“I see nothing to laugh about,” Cato said, inspecting the wine table. The last few moments had been thirsty work.
“You wouldn’t, Cato,” Gnaeus Pompey said when he was able. “By definition, a Stoic has no sense of humor.”
“That is true,” Cato agreed, sitting down again to nurse a goblet—no beakers or cups for Gnaeus Pompey—of excellent Samian wine. “However, Gnaeus Pompeius, we have not yet arrived at a conclusion about either me or the wounded.”
“How many of your eight thousand do you really think will ever be fit to fight again?”
“At least seven thousand. Can you supply me with enough transports to get the thousand best of them across to Africa in four days’ time?”
Gnaeus Pompey wrinkled his brow. “Wait until the Etesian winds come, Cato, they’ll blow you straight to our Roman province. If you start before them, you’ll be at the mercy of Auster—or Libotonus—or Zephyrus—or any other wind that Aeolus fancies letting out of his bag for a stretch and a canter.”
“No, I must leave as soon as maybe, and ask that you send the rest of my men on before you shift traps yourself. Your work is vital, but it is different from mine. My task is to preserve the very brave soldiers your father placed in my care. For they are brave. If they were not, their wounds would be nonexistent.”
“As you wish,” said Gnaeus Pompey with a sigh. “There is a difficulty about those you want me to send on later—I’m going to need the transports back for my own use. If the Etesian winds are late, I can’t guarantee that they’ll reach Africa Province.” He shrugged. “In fact, all of you could land anywhere.”
“That is my worry,” Cato said with all his usual sturdy resolution, but somewhat less of his usual shout.
Four days later fifty of the transports Cato had used to move his men, equipment and supplies from Dyrrachium were loaded and ready to go: 1,200 recovered soldiers formed into two cohorts, 250 noncombatant assistants, 250 pack mules, 450 wagon mules, 120 wagons, a month’s supply of wheat, chickpea, bacon and oil, plus grindstones, ovens, utensils, spare clothing and arms—and, a gift from Gnaeus Pompey that traveled on Cato’s own ship, a thousand talents of silver coins.
“Take it, I have plenty more,” Gnaeus Pompey said cheerfully. “Compliments of Caesar! And,” he went on, handing over a bundle of small rolls of paper, each tied and sealed, “these came from Dyrrachium for you. News of home.”
Fingers trembling a little, Cato told the letters over, then tucked them inside the armhole of his light leather cuirass.
“Aren’t you going to read them now?”
The grey eyes looked very stern, yet clouded, and the generous curve of Cato’s mouth was drawn up as if with pain. “No,” he said, at his loudest and most truculent, “I shall read them later, when I have the time.”
Though it took all day to get the fifty transports out of an inadequate harbor, Gnaeus Pompey remained on the little wooden pier until the last ships went hull down over the horizon, until all that was left of them were hair-thin masts, black prickles against the opalescent skies of early evening.
Then he turned and trudged back to his headquarters; life would be more peaceful, certainly, but somehow when Cato was no longer a part of things, an emptiness entered. How Cato had awed him in his youth! How much his pedagogues and rhetors had harped on the different styles of the three greatest orators in the Senate: Caesar, Cicero and Cato. Names he had grown up with, men he could never forget; his father, the First Man in Rome, never a good orator, but a master at getting his own way. Now all of them were scattered while the same patterns went on aweaving, one life strand entwined with another until Atropos took pity and snipped this thread, that thread.
Lucius Scribonius Libo was waiting; Gnaeus Pompey stifled a sigh. A good man who had been Admiral after Bibulus died, then had yielded gracefully to Pompey the Great’s son. As was fitting. The only reason this scion of the wrong branch of the Scribonius family had risen so high so quickly lay in the fact that Gnaeus Pompey had taken one look at his dimpled, ravishingly pretty daughter, divorced his boring Claudia, and married her. A match Pompey the Great had abhorred, deplored. But that was Father, himself obsessed with marrying only the most august aristocrats, and determined that his sons should do the same. Well, Sextus was still too young for marriage, and Gnaeus had tried for the sake of harmony until he’d set eyes on the seventeen-year-old Scribonia. Love, Pompey the Great’s elder son reflected as he greeted his father-in-law, could destroy the best-laid plans.
They dined together, discussed the coming move to Sicily and environs, the potential resistance in Africa Province—and the possible whereabouts of Pompey the Great.
“Today’s courier reported a rumor that he’s taken Cornelia Metella and Sextus away from Lesbos, and is island-hopping down the Aegean,” his elder son said.
“Then,” said Scribonius Libo, preparing to depart, “I think it’s time that you wrote again.”
So when he had gone Gnaeus Pompey sat down resolutely at his desk, drew a blank double sheet of Fannian paper toward him, and picked up his reed pen, dipped it in the inkwell.
We are still alive and kicking, and we still own the seas. Please, I beg you, my beloved father, gather what ships you can and come either to me or to Africa.
But before Pompey the Great’s brief reply could reach him, he learned of his father’s death on the mud flats of Egyptian Pelusium at the hands of a torpid boy king and his palace cabal.
Of course. Of course. As cruel, as unethical as Orientals are, they killed him thinking to curry favor with Caesar. Not for one moment would it have occurred to them that Caesar hungered to spare him. Oh, Father! This way is better! This way, you are not beholden to Caesar for the gift of continued life.
When he was sure he could work without unmanning himself in front of his subordinates, Gnaeus Pompey sent 6,500 more of Cato’s wounded to Africa, offering to the Lares Permarini, to Neptune and to Spes that they and Cato would find each other on that two-thousand-mile coast between the Nile Delta and Africa Province. Then he began the onerous task of removing himself, his fleets and men into bases around Sicily.
Its few natives unsure whether they were glad or sorry to see the Romans go, Corcyra slowly lost its scars and returned to its sweet oblivion. Slowly.