The Blood of Caesar, page 31
part #2 of Pliny the Younger Series
“Everybody, my lord,” Glaucon said. “Your mother, Naomi, Laberius, Demetrius. Everyone who was going to Laurentium. They’ve all been arrested.”
“Arrested? What on earth for? They haven’t done anything.”
“It’s you they want, my lord,” Glaucon said.
“Me?”
“Yes, my lord. You’re charged with the murder of a Roman citizen, Quintus Decius.”
I snorted in disbelief. “Quintus Decius? I never heard of the man. How could I have killed him?”
“He’s also called the Cyclops, my lord.”
* * * *
We gave them something to eat and drink and Glaucon and Phineas told us the whole story—how they had been at the end of the caravan, how a unit of Praetorians had stopped them as they were rounding the foot of the Caelian Hill, how they had heard the charge against me and mixed in with the crowd that gathered to watch.
“Then we slipped away,” Phineas concluded. “We were fortunate to escape. I still don’t know how they missed us.”
“They didn’t miss you,” Agricola snapped. “You were let go so you could lead them straight to your master.”
“But no one followed us, my lord!” The dismay on Phineas’ face when he realized what he’d done seemed genuine. “I didn’t know where to go. Glaucon said we should come here to you.”
Glaucon kept his head down. I wished any other slave in my household had accompanied Phineas because there was no other slave I trusted less. “No one followed us, my lord,” the scribe said softly. “I’m sure of it. I know what you think of me, but I would never betray you.”
Agricola brushed aside their protests. “All it would take is two men. They would follow you to see where you went. By now one is no doubt on his way back to report, and the other is watching in case we move before Domitian’s men get here.”
“We have to move, don’t we?” I said, my voice rising in panic. “We can’t just sit here and wait to be taken. It’ll be the end for all of us.” My mother was in the most immediate danger, I knew, but Domitian was after Nelia and me. If Agricola was caught trying to protect us, he and Tacitus would fall along with us, and Musonius would be dragged down as well.
This time there would be no exile to a rocky island. Not for any of us.
“If we move,” Agricola said calmly, “we’ll be out in the open. This place can be defended. I’ll send a few of my men out tonight and have twice as many here by tomorrow morning. Domitian will probably send a small force to avoid drawing attention.”
“Why do you think that?” I was amazed at Agricola’s ability to put himself in the mind of his opponent.
“He knows he has to get Nelia, but he doesn’t want a lot of people to know why. Since we arrived before your servants did, his look-outs don’t know our strength. Whoever comes to arrest you tomorrow will be expecting to face a few of Musonius’ servants, not a contingent of armed, experienced men. We’ll have the advantage of numbers and surprise.”
* * * *
Nelia and Musonius went off to talk privately. Nelia took the box containing Agrippina’s memoir. I knew I shouldn’t interfere. All I wanted to do was sleep, but that wasn’t possible. With torches doused, Agricola, Velleius, Tacitus, and I sat in Musonius’ open courtyard and talked long into the night about how we ought to proceed. Agricola kept most of his men out of sight in the stable, except for a few whom he stationed on the edges of Musonius’ property. One of them reported that they had located the hiding place of Domitian’s look-out.
“Shouldn’t we capture him?” I asked. “Find out what he knows?”
Agricola shook his head. “He doesn’t know anything. Whoever comes tomorrow may be expecting to see some signal that everything is all right. If they miss that signal, they’re likely to wait and call in a larger force. As long as we know where the look-out is, he’s no danger to us. We just have to be sure he doesn’t see any unusual lights or movement to alert him to how many men we actually have.”
“How can I just sit here when my mother is in Domitian’s hands?”
“What could you do if you went back to Rome?” Tacitus asked.
“With Agricola’s men—”
“My men aren’t going back to Rome.” Agricola’s voice was quiet but rock-hard. “It would be foolhardy to storm the Palatine and try to rescue your mother. We don’t even know if that’s where Domitian is holding her.”
I jumped up from my chair. “Do you think she might be in the Praetorian Camp?” Imagining her a prisoner in Domtian’s house was bad enough. Any other possibility was too frightening to dwell on.
“You need to calm down, Gaius Pliny.” Agricola grabbed my arm and pulled me back down into my chair. “Wherever your mother is, we don’t have the forces to make a direct assault. Nor would I do so, even if I had a couple of legions under me. Any success I’ve had is due largely to one principle: whenever possible, make the enemy fight on my terms.”
“But if we kill or capture a few of Domitian’s men, he’ll just send more. What do we gain by holding up here?”
“What would we gain by running?”
“Our freedom.”
Agricola shook his head. “If we got across the Danube—which I’m certain we could never do—would you be content to live in a German’s hut? Could you leave your mother in Domitian’s clutches?”
“You’ve already said you won’t go back to Rome to rescue her.”
“That would be futile.”
“But so is staying here to fight. And so is running away.” I saw an abyss of despair opening in front of me. “Are you saying we have no hope?”
“No, I’m not. I’m formulating a plan, but before I can put it into action, I have to see who shows up here tomorrow.”
By the time we went to bed the rain had started again, slow and steady. I took some comfort from knowing that Domitian’s look-out would be thoroughly soaked by morning. We were likely to be damp ourselves. Musonius’ rustic house, though it had no visible leaks, seemed to absorb moisture like a sponge. I wondered how he kept his books from rotting. Even Agrippina’s memoir, which couldn’t be more than twenty years old, already felt like a relic from Caesar’s own time. If it wasn’t recopied soon, it would start to crumble and would ultimately be lost.
A servant showed me to a room next to Nelia’s. Seeing a light under her door, I decided to risk a knock. She opened the door, still holding a scroll in her other hand. She barely looked up from it to speak to me.
“Oh, Gaius Pliny. What can I do for you?”
That thing you did in the river would be nice, was the first thought that came to my mind, but I managed to keep it there. “I just wanted to say goodnight. Musonius has put me in the room next door.”
“Good. That’s a comfortable room.” She seemed ready to end the conversation, or perhaps just uncertain where to turn it.
“Is that one of Agrippina’s scrolls?” I asked.
“Yes, I brought the box up here to study them.”
She stepped back, inviting me to enter the room. The box of scrolls sat on a small table beside her bed. The only other pieces of furniture were a bronze lampstand and a chest with a small vase on it. Musonius kept to his Stoic—almost Spartan—principle of simplicity in his décor.
“Is that Greek?” I asked, nodding at the vase.
“No, it’s Etruscan. We found it a few years ago when we were digging a well.”
“It looks like it was done by a Greek artist.”
“Or by someone who studied with the Greeks.”
I peered closely at the vase, noticing a chip where a shovel had hit it. It depicted a muscular figure wearing nothing but a lionskin draped over his shoulder and carrying a club. Almost certainly Heracles. If only I could read the writing. But it probably said ‘stallion.’
“What about the book? Can you read any more of it?”
“I’ve found the place where she talks about Pandateria.”
“So quickly?” I turned back to Nelia.
“She didn’t translate names of people or places into Etruscan. She just wrote them in Greek letters, so they’re easy to spot.” She showed me a place on the scroll. “See, here’s her sister Livilla’s name. And here’s Pandateria.”
“And that’s Antistius, isn’t it?” I said, pointing to a spot lower on the page.
“Yes. This is where she talks about having a daughter while on Pandateria and giving the child—my mother—to Antistius Vetus and his wife.”
“That’s the final bit of proof then, isn’t it?”
“There’s also this.” She held up another one of the scrolls. I could see that an earlier work had been erased so the papyrus could be reused. “As often happens when a scroll is erased,” Nelia said, “the older writing eventually becomes visible again. I guess the ink was absorbed into the papyrus more deeply than the pumice stone could erase and it rises to the surface. This is the scroll that Musonius gave Agrippina when he visited her with Rubellius—with my father.”
She held the scroll under the lampstand at an angle and I could see Greek letters beneath Agrippina’s Etruscan.
“His treatise on why women should study philosophy?”
“Yes.” She dropped the scroll back into the box without even rolling it up. The confidence and bravado seemed to drain from her face, like water drains out of a bucket with a hole punched in its bottom. “Gaius, I’m so scared. Hold me.”
I couldn’t tell her I was as scared as she was.
* * * *
At dawn more of Agricola’s veterans began drifting in, one or two at a time, always from a direction that kept them away from Domitian’s soggy look-out. Agricola’s own look-outs were posted along the Via Flaminia, the most distant two miles down the road. They would pass along a signal as soon as they saw a squad of soldiers—or any group of men who even looked like soldiers out of uniform—headed our way.
Agricola still wouldn’t tell us what his plan was while we ate a bit of breakfast. All he would says was, “One piece of what I need to know is still missing, and it’s the keystone of the arch.”
“Whatever you have in mind,” Nelia said, “I’m going to be standing beside Musonius.”
“My lady, if you’ll pardon me, that’s insane. You need to be well hidden. You’re the treasure Domitian is looking for. We can’t just put it out in front of him.”
“He’s never seen me,” Nelia insisted, “not even with my hair long and in women’s clothes. He’ll never recognize me looking like this.”
I put my hand on her arm. “But why do you have to take this risk, now that we—”
She jerked away from me. “Gaius, nothing that happened between us yesterday or this morning gives you the right to tell me what to do. I will stand by Musonius or I will reveal myself to whoever comes looking for me, as I decide.”
About the fourth hour we got word that a Praetorian officer and six men were headed in our direction.
“Only six?” I said.
“Remember, he doesn’t have any idea of our numbers,” Agricola said. Then his face darkened with a second thought. “Or he’s got another contingent coming from somewhere else.” He quickly ordered two men to ride north and see if anyone was coming from that direction. “He could have sent a messenger during the night to gather troops from beyond here. A single man could have slipped past us without notice.”
At midday the Praetorians rode up to Musonius’ house, as Agricola and I watched from behind the shutters in an upper window. Like everything else here, the shutters were old and badly in need of repair. The cracks and warped places in them gave us a perfect vantage point.
The man leading the Praetorians wore the praefect’s armor, glistening in the sun which was now breaking through the clouds. He paid no attention to the ‘servants’ he saw working around the place, who were Agricola’s veterans. As the horses came to a stop I got a better look at him.
“Great Jupiter!” I said. “Is that Domitian?”
Agricola didn’t seem at all surprised. “Why, I believe it is.”
XX
I STARED AT DOMITIAN through a crack in the shutter and then back at Agricola in disbelief. “You knew he would come out here himself, didn’t you?”
“‘Knew’ is too strong a word. I didn’t see that he had any other choice.”
“But why?”
“This is a job he can’t trust to anyone else. Rumors can hurt him as much as facts. If there’s one living relative of Julius Caesar left this long after Nero’s death, might there not be others? He has to make certain Nelia is dead, along with anyone who knows about her.”
“That would be you, me, Tacitus, Musonius. How many more?”
Agricola clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Trying to answer that question is what may drive him mad and what makes him so predictable. He can’t trust the job to underlings. You know those myths where a servant is supposed to get rid of a baby but passes the job along to someone else ...”
“Who hands it off to someone else, and it never gets done.”
“And twenty years later, there’s the rival—Oedipus or Cyrus—who was never supposed to have survived infancy. Domitian knows those stories, so he knows this job has to be done by his own hand, today.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you expected him?”
“It would have ruined your night, wouldn’t it?”
I hadn’t gotten much sleep. Fearing I might have to confront Domitian in the morning, though, would have unmanned me completely. I turned his question back on him. “Did you get any sleep?”
“Yes. A soldier learns he can’t change what’s going to happen in the morning, any more than he can stop the sun from rising. The best thing he can do is to make sure he’s well rested and ready to face whatever awaits him.” He patted me on the back. “Now that we have the keystone in place”—he pointed to Domitian—“here’s what you have to do.”
As Agricola revealed my part in his plan, we watched Musonius walk out to meet Domitian. Agricola had already explained Musonius’ role to him—on the assumption that Domitian would show up and that Musonius wouldn’t lose any sleep—so the philosopher was bent over and hobbling as though still in pain. One servant held his arm, while two others walked behind him.
The two behind him were Agricola’s men, both with short swords concealed under their tunics. The one holding his arm was Nelia in her young man’s disguise. Agricola and I both held our breath, but Domitian took no notice of her.
“Caesar Domitian,” Musonius said, so weakly I could barely hear him, “this is an unexpected ... honor. What can I do for you?”
Domitian was having trouble keeping his horse still. The animal seemed to sense the danger to which his rider was oblivious. “You can surrender the criminal Gaius Pliny so he can face the charge of murdering the citizen Quintus Decius.”
With Nelia’s help Musonius labored down his steps and took the horse’s bridle, rubbing his muzzle and calming him. “But, Caesar ...”
“Don’t deny that he’s here, old man. He arrived yesterday and hasn’t left. I know that.”
“Forgive me, Caesar. Yes, Gaius Pliny came here as my guest. You know what obligations a host has to his guest under Roman law and age-old custom.”
“I know a Roman citizen cannot harbor a man who’s guilty of murdering another citizen.”
Musonius’ eyebrows shot up and his voice strengthened. “Guilty? You said he was accused. What is so important about this matter that you yourself have ridden all this way to attend to it?”
From the way the soldiers looked at one another I could see Musonius’ question was one they’d been asking themselves. The old philosopher’s calm amazed me. He was within striking distance of several armed soldiers, but he might as well have been talking to a group of children. Of course, he knew that some of Agricola’s men, with spears ready, were hidden on the roof of the house with orders to plant their weapons just above the breastplate of any man who reached for a sword.
Domitian pushed Musonius away with his foot, sending him staggering back. Nelia barely kept him on his feet. “This is your last chance, old man,” the princeps growled. “Shut up and bring Pliny out here before I send my men in after him.”
Musonius gestured for Nelia to fetch me. I met her just inside the door, trying to remember what Agricola had told me to say. He hadn’t worked out all my lines because, he said, we didn’t know exactly how Domitian would respond. I would have to improvise.
Nelia threw her arms around me and kissed me hard. “I pray to any and all gods that nothing happens to you,” she said.
This was no time for a discussion of my skeptical views. Two of Agricola’s veterans, who had been stashed in the library with Tacitus, joined us. We hesitated for a moment, to make it appear they had to search for me. Nelia mussed my hair and tore the front of my tunic, then ran back out to stand beside Musonius.
“Come out, Gaius Pliny!” Domitian called. “You can’t escape. My men are all around this place.”
A bald-faced lie. Agricola’s look-outs had not reported seeing any other troops.
Agricola’s men each took one of my arms and dragged me out onto the portico that linked the two wings of Musonius’ house. This would give us four armed men ready to confront Domitian.
“Musonius!” I cried out, struggling with the men on either side of me. “You can’t do this to me.”
Leaning on Nelia, Musonius looked at me like Agamemnon about to sacrifice Iphigenia. “What else can I do, Gaius? The princeps himself has given me an order.”
“But ... but you’re my friend—”
“A criminal has no friends,” Domitian sneered. He had dismounted and come to the top of the short flight of steps leading up to the portico. Agricola’s men threw me to the ground in front of him, much more roughly, I thought, than our act required. I could feel that one of my knees was badly scraped.
I looked up at Domitian and launched into the crucial part of the drama. “Please, Caesar, don’t do this. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll give you ... anything.”
Domitian laughed harshly and shook his head. “You’re a sniveling coward after all, aren’t you? What do you think you could give me that I couldn’t just take from you?”
