Caesar Dies, Talbot Mundy [top reads TXT] 📗

had bought from an Egyptian. She snatched it from him.

"Caesar!" she exclaimed, bounding toward Commodus and standing in his way. Not even she dared lay a hand on him when he was in that volcanic mood. "As you love me, will you wear this?"

"For love of you, what have I not done?" he retorted, smiling at her.
"What now?"

She advanced another half-step, but no nearer. There was laughter on his lips, but in his eye cold cruelty.

"My Caesar, wear it! It protects against conspiracy."

He showed her a new sword that he had girded on along with the short tunic of a gladiator.

"Against the bellyache, use Galen's pills; but this is the right medicine against conspiracy!" he answered. Then he took the little golden charm into his left hand, tossing it on his palm and looked at her, still smiling.

"Where did you get this bauble?"

"Not I. One of those magicians who frequent that Forum sold it to
Narcissus."

"Bah!" He flung it through the window. "Who is the magician? Name him! I will have him thrown into the carceres. We'll see whether the charms he sells so cheap are any good! Or is he a Christian?" he asked, sneering.

"The Christians, you know, don't approve of charms," Marcia answered.

"By Jupiter, there's not much that they do approve of!" he retorted. "I begin to weary of your Christians. I begin to think Nero was right, and my father, too! There was a wisdom in treating Christians as vermin! It might not be a bad thing, Marcia, to warn your Christians to procure themselves a charm or two against my weariness of their perpetual efforts to govern me! The Christians, I suppose, have been telling you to keep me out of the arena? Hence this living statuary in the corridor, and all this talk about the dignity of Rome! Tscharr-rrh! There's more dignity about one gladiator's death than in all Rome outside the arena! Woman, you forget you are only a woman. I remember that! I am a god! I have the blood of Caesar in my veins. And like the unseen gods, I take my pleasure watching men and women die! I loose my javelins like thunderbolts—like Jupiter himself! Like Hercules—"

He paused. He noticed Marcia was laughing. Only she, in all the Roman empire, dared to mock him when he boasted. Not even she knew why he let her do it. He began to smile again, the frightful frown that rode over his eyes dispersing, leaving his forehead as smooth as marble.

"If I should marry you and make you empress," he said, "how long do you think I should last after that? You are clever enough to rule the fools who squawk and jabber in the senate and the Forum. You are beautiful enough to start another siege of Troy! But remember: You are Caesar's concubine, not empress! Just remember that, will you! When I find a woman lovelier than you, and wiser, I will give you and your Christians a taste of Nero's policy. Now—do you love me?"

"If I did not, could I stand before you and receive these insults?" she retorted, trusting to the inspiration of the moment; for she had no method with him.

"I would willingly die," she said, "if you would give the love you have bestowed on me to Rome instead, and use your godlike energy in ruling wisely, rather than in killing men and winning chariot races. One Marcia does not matter much. One Commodus can—"

"Can love his Marcia!" he interrupted, with a high-pitched laugh. He seized her, nearly crushing out her breath. "A Caius and a Caia we have been! By Jupiter, if not for you and Paulus I would have left Rome long ago to march in Alexander's wake! I would have carved me a new empire that did not stink so of politicians!"

He strode into the anteroom where all the gladiators waited and Narcissus had to follow him—well named enough, for he was lithe and muscular and beautiful, but, nonetheless, though taller, not to be compared with Commodus—even as the women, chosen for their good looks and intelligence, who hastened to reappear the moment the emperor's back was turned, were nothing like so beautiful as Marcia.

In all the known world there were no two finer specimens of human shapeliness than the tyrant who ruled and the woman whose wits and daring had so long preserved him from his enemies.

"Come to the arena," he called back to her. "Come and see how Hercules throws javelins from a chariot at full pelt!"

But Marcia did not answer, and he forgot her almost before he reached
the entrance of the private tunnel through which he passed to the arena.
She had more accurately aimed and nicely balanced work to do than even
Commodus could do with javelins against a living target.

VII. MARCIA

In everything but title and security of tenure Marcia was empress of the world, and she had what empresses most often lack—the common touch. She had been born in slavery. She had ascended step by step to fortune, by her own wits, learning by experience. Each layer of society was known to her—its virtues, prejudices, limitations and peculiar tricks of thought. Being almost incredibly beautiful, she had learned very early in life that the desired (not always the desirable) is powerful to sway men; the possessed begins to lose its sway; the habit of possession easily succumbs to boredom, and then power ceases. Even Commodus, accordingly, had never owned her in the sense that men own slaves; she had reserved to herself self-mastery, which called for cunning, courage and a certain ruthlessness, albeit tempered by a reckless generosity.

She saw life skeptically, undeceived by the fawning flattery that Rome served up to her, enjoying it as a cat likes being stroked. They said of her that she slept with one eye open.

Livius had complained in the Thermae to Pertinax that the wine of influence was going to Marcia's head, but he merely expressed the opinion of one man, who would have liked to feel himself superior to her and to use her for his own ends. She was not deceived by Livius, or by anybody else. She knew that Livius was keeping watch on her, and how he did it, having shrewdly guessed that a present of eight matched litter- bearers was too extravagant not to mask ulterior designs. She watched him much more artfully than he watched her. Her secret knowledge that he knew her secret was more dangerous to him than anything that he had found out could be dangerous to her.

The eight matched litter-bearers waited with the gilded litter near a flight of marble steps that descended from the door of Marcia's apartments in the palace to a sunlit garden with a fountain in the midst. There was a crowd of servants and four Syrian eunuchs, sleek offensive menials in yellow robes; two lictors besides, with fasces and the Roman civic uniform—a scandalous abuse of ancient ceremony—ready to conduct a progress through the city. But they all yawned. Marcia and her usual companion did not come; there was delay—and gossip, naturally.

A yawning eunuch rearranged the bowknot of his girdle.

"What does she want with Livius? He usually gets sent for when somebody needs punishing. Who do you suppose has fallen foul of her?"

"Himself! He sent her messenger back with word he was engaged on palace business. I heard her tell the slave to go again and not return without him! Bacchus! But it wouldn't worry me if Livius should lose his head! For an aristocrat he has more than his share of undignified curiosity— forever poking his sharp nose into other people's business. Marcia may have found him out. Let's hope!"

At the foot of the marble stairway, in the hall below Marcia's apartment, Livius stood remonstrating, growing nervous. Marcia, dressed in the dignified robes of a Roman matron, that concealed even her ankles and suggested the demure, self-conscious rectitude of olden times, kept touching his breast with her ivory fan, he flinching from the touch, subduing irritation.

"If the question is, what I want with you, Livius, the answer is, that I invite you. Order your litter brought."

"But Marcia, I am subprefect. I am responsible to—"

"Did you hear?"

"But if you will tell where we are going, I might feel justified in neglecting the palace business. I assure you I have important work to do."

"There are plenty who can attend to it," said Marcia. "The most important thing in your life, Livius, is my good-will. You are delaying me."

Livius glared at Caia Poppeia, the lady-in-waiting, who was smiling, standing a little behind Marcia. He hoped she would take the hint and withdraw out of earshot, but she had had instructions, and came half a step closer.

"Will you let me go back to my office and—"

"No!" answered Marcia.

He yielded with a nervous gesture, that implored her not to make an indiscretion. A subprefect, in the nature of his calling, had too many enemies to relish repetition in the palace precincts of a threat from Marcia, however baseless it might be. And besides, it might be something serious that almost had escaped her lips. Untrue or true, it would be known all over the palace in an hour; within the day all Rome would know of it. There were two slaves by the front door, two more on the last step of the stairs.

"I will come, of course," he said. "I am delighted. I am honored. I am fortunate!"

She nodded. She sent one of her own slaves to order his private litter brought, while Livius attempted to look comfortable, cudgeling his brains to know what mischief she had found out. It was nothing unusual that his litter should follow hers through the streets of Rome; in fact, it was an honor coveted by all officials of the palace, that fell to his share rather frequently because of his distinguished air of a latter-day man of the world and his intimate knowledge of everybody's business and ancestry. He was often ordered to go with her at a moment's notice. But this was the first time she had refused to say where they were going, or why, and there was a hint of malice in her smile that made his blood run cold. He was a connoisseur of malice.

Marcia leaned on his arm as she went down the steps to her litter. She permitted him to help her in. But then, while her companion was following through the silken curtains, she leaned out at the farther side and whispered to the nearest eunuch. Livius, climbing into his own gilt vehicle and lifted shoulder-high by eight Numidians, became aware that Marcia's eunuchs had been told to keep an eye on him; two yellow- robed, insufferably impudent inquisitors strode in among his own attendants.

An escort of twenty praetorian guards and a decurion was waiting at the gate to take its place between the lictors and Marcia's litter, but that did not in any way increase Livius' sense of security. The praetorian guard regarded Marcia as the source of its illegal privileges. It looked to her far more than to the emperor for favors, buying them with lawless loyalty to her. She ruined discipline by her support of every plea for increased perquisites. No outraged citizen had any hope of redress so long as Marcia's ear could be reached (although Commodus got the blame for it). It was the key to Marcia's system of insurance against unforeseen contingencies. The only regularly drilled and armed troops in the city were as loyal to her, secretly and openly, as Livius himself was to the principle of cynical self-help.

He began to feel thoroughly frightened, as he told himself that the escort and their decurion would swear to any statement Marcia might make. If she had learned that he was in the habit of receiving secret information from her slave, there were a thousand ways she might take to avenge herself; a very simple way would be to charge him with improper overtures and