Caesar Dies by Talbot Mundy (best short books to read .txt) 📗

stuff. Where is Narcissus?"

"I don't know," said Galen. "Narcissus is another who will do well to protect himself. Commodus is well disposed toward him. Commodus might send for him—as he will surely send for me if belly-burning sets in. He and I would make a good pair to be blamed for murdering an emperor."

"You run!" urged Sextus. "Go now! Go to my camp in the Aventines. You will find Norbanus and two freedmen waiting near the Porta Capena; they are wearing farmers' clothes and look as if they came from Sicily. They know you. Say I bade them take you into hiding."

Galen smiled at him. "And you?" he asked.

"Narcissus shall smuggle me into the palace. It is I who will slay Commodus, lest Pertinax should stain his hands. If they prefer to turn on me, what matter? Pertinax, if he is to be Caesar, will do better not to mount the throne all bloody. Let him blame me and then execute me. Rome will reap the benefit. Marcia has the praetorian guard well under control, what with her bribes and all the license she has begged for them. Let Marcia proclaim that Pertinax is Caesar, the praetorian guard will follow suit, and the senate will confirm it so soon after daybreak that the citizens will find themselves obeying a new Caesar before they know the old one is dead! Then let Pertinax make new laws and restore the ancient liberties. I will die happy."

"O youth—insolence of youth!" said Galen, smiling. He resumed his mixing of the powders, adding new ingredients. "I was young once—young and insolent. I dared to try to tutor Commodus! But never in my long life was I insolent enough to claim all virtue for myself and bid my elders go and hide! You think you will slay Commodus? I doubt it."

"How so?"

Sextus was annoyed. The youth in him resented that his altruism should be mocked.

"Pertinax should do it," Galen answered. "If Rome needed no more than philosophy and grammar, better make me Caesar! I was mixing my philosophy with surgery and medicine while Pertinax was sucking at his mother's breast in a Ligurian hut. Rome, my son, is sick of too much mixed philosophy. She needs a man of iron—a riser to occasion—a cutter of Gordian knots, precisely as a sick man needs a surgeon. The senate will vote, as you say, at the praetorian guard's dictation. You have been clever, my Sextus, with your stirring of faction against faction. They are mean men, all so full of mutual suspicion as to heave a huge sigh when they know that Pertinax is Caesar, knowing he will overlook their plotting and rule without bloodshed if that can be done. But it can't be! Unless Pertinax is man enough to strike the blow that shall restore the ancient liberties, then he is better dead before he tries to play the savior! We have a tyrant now. Shall we exchange him for a weak-kneed theorist?"

"Are you ready to die, Galen?"

"Why not? Are you the only Roman? I am not so old I have no virtue left. A little wisdom comes with old age, Sextus. It is better to live for one's country than to die for it, but since no way has been invented of avoiding death, it is wiser to die usefully than like a sandal thrown on to the rubbish-heap because the fashion changes."

"I wish you would speak plainly, Galen. I have told you all my secrets. You have seen me risk my life a thousand times in the midst of Commodus' informers, coming and going, interviewing this and that one, urging here, restraining there, denying myself even hope of personal reward. You know I have been whole-hearted in the cause of Pertinax. Is it right, in a crisis, to put me off with subtleties?"

"Life is subtle. So is virtue. So is this stuff," Galen answered, poking at the mixture with a bronze spoon. "Every man must choose his own way in a crisis. Some one's star has fallen. Commodus'? I think not. That star blazed out of obscurity, and Commodus is not obscure. Mine? I am unimportant; I shall make no splendor in the heavens when my hour comes. Marcia's? Is she obscure? Yours? You are like me, not born to the purple; when a sparrow dies, however diligently he has labored in the dirt, no meteors announce his fall. No, not Maternus, the outlaw, to say nothing of Sextus, the legally dead man, can command such notice from the sky. That meteor was some one's who shall blaze into fame and then die."

"Dark words, Galen!"

"Dark deeds!" the old man answered. "And a path to be chosen in darkness! Shall I poison the man whom I taught as a boy? Shall I refuse, and be drowned in the sewer by Marcia's slaves? Shall I betray my friends to save my own old carcass? Shall I run away and hide, at my age, and live hounded by my own thoughts, fearful of my shadow, eating charity from peasants? I can easily say no to all those things. What then? It is not what a man does not, but what he does that makes him or unmakes him. There is nothing left but subtlety, my Sextus. What will you do? Go and do it now. Tomorrow may be too late."

Sextus shrugged his shoulders, baffled and irritated. He had always looked to Galen for advice in a predicament. It was Galen, in fact, who had kept him from playing much more than the part of a spy-listening, talking, suggesting, but forever doing nothing violent.

"You know as well as I do, there is nothing ready," he retorted. "Long ago I could have had a thousand armed men waiting for a moment such as this to rally behind Pertinax. But I listened to you—"

"And are accordingly alive, not crucified!" said Galen. "The praetorian guard is well able to slaughter any thousand men, to uphold Commodus or to put Pertinax in the place of Commodus. Your thousand men would only decorate a thousand gibbets, whether Pertinax should win or lose. If he should win, and become Caesar, he would have to make them an example of his love of law and order, proving his impartiality by blaming them for what he never invited them to do. For mark this: Pertinax has never named himself as Commodus' successor. I warn you: there is far less safety for his friends than for his enemies, unless he, with his own hand, strikes the blow that makes him emperor."

"If Marcia should do it—?"

"That would be the end of Marcia."

"If I should do it?"

"That would be the end of you, my Sextus."

"Let us say farewell, then, Galen! This right hand shall do it. It will save my friends. It will provide a culprit on whom Pertinax may lay the blame. He will ascend the throne unguilty of his predecessor's blood—"

"And you?" asked Galen.

"I will take my own life. I will gladly die when I have ridded Rome of
Commodus."

He paused, awaiting a reply, but Galen appeared almost rudely unconcerned.

"You will not say farewell?"

"It is too soon," Galen answered, folding up his powder in a sheet of parchment, tying it, at great pains to arrange the package neatly.

"Will you not wish me success?"

"That is something, my Sextus, that I have no powders for. I have occasionally cured men. I can set most kinds of fractures with considerable skill, old though I am. And I can divert a man's attention sometimes, so that he lets nature heal him of mysterious diseases. But success is something you have already wished for and have already made or unmade. What you did, my Sextus, is the scaffolding of what you do now; this, in turn, of what you will do next. I gave you my advice. I bade you run away—in which case I would bid you farewell, but not otherwise."

"I will not run."

"I heard you."

"And you said you are sentimental, Galen!"

"I have proved it to you. If I were not, I myself would run!"

Galen led the way out of the room into the hall where the mosaic floor and plastered walls presented colored temple scenes—priests burning incense at the shrine of Aesculapius, the sick and maimed arriving and the cured departing, giving praise.

"There will be no hero left in Rome when they have slain our Roman Hercules," said Galen. "He has been a triton in a pond of minnows. You and I and all the other little men may not regret him afterward, since heroes, and particularly mad ones, are not madly loved. But we will not enjoy the rivalry of minnows."

He led Sextus to the porch and stood there for a minute holding to his arm.

"There will be no rivals who will dare to raise their heads," said
Sextus, "once our Pertinax has made his bid for power."

"But he will not," Galen answered. "He will hesitate and let others do the bidding. Too many scruples! He who would govern an empire might better have fetters on feet and hands! Now go. But go not to the palace if you hope to see a heroism—or tomorrow's dawn!"

XII.-LONG LIVE CAESAR!

That night it rained. The wind blew yelling squalls along the streets. At intervals the din of hail on cobble-stones and roofs became a stinging sea of sound. The wavering oil lanterns died out one by one and left the streets in darkness in which now and then a slave-borne litter labored like a boat caught spreading too much sail. The overloaded sewers backed up and made pools of foulness, difficult to ford. Along the Tiber banks there was panic where the river-boats were plunging and breaking adrift on the rising flood and miserable, drenched slaves labored with the bales of merchandize, hauling the threatened stuff to higher ground.

But the noisiest, dismalest place was the palace, the heart of all Rome, where the rain and hail dinned down on marble. There was havoc in the clumps of ornamental trees—crashing of pots blown down from balconies— thunder of rent awnings and the splashing of countless cataracts where overloaded gutters spilled their surplus on mosaic pavement fifty or a hundred feet below. No light showed, saving at the guard-house by the main gate, where a group of sentries shrugged themselves against the wall—ill-tempered, shivering, alert. However mutinous a Roman army, or a legion, or a guard might be, its individuals were loyal to the routine work of military duty.

A decurion stepped out beneath a splashing arch, the lamplight gleaming on his wetted bronze and crimson.

"Narcissus? Yes, I recognize you. Who is this?" Narcissus and Sextus were shrouded in loose, hooded cloaks of raw wool, under which they hugged a change of footgear. Sextus had his face well covered. Narcissus pushed him forward under the guard-room arch, out of the rain.

"This is a man from Antioch, whom Caesar told me to present to him," he said. "I know him well. His names is Marius."

"I have no orders to admit a man of that name." Narcissus waxed confidential.

"Do you wish to get both of us into trouble?" he asked. "You know Caesar's way. He said bring him and forgot, I suppose, to tell his secretary to write the order for admission. Tonight he will remember my speaking to him about this expert with a javelin, and if I have to tell him—"

"Speak with the centurion."

The decurion beckoned them into the guard-house, where a fire burned in a bronze tripod, casting a warm glow on walls hung with shields and weapons. A centurion, munching oily seed and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, came out of an inner office. He was not the type that had made Roman arms invincible. He lacked the self-reliant dignity of an old campaigner, substituting for it self-assertiveness and flashy manners.