The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(31)
By the time I’d finished my honeycake, the assembly had grown. I’d never seen so many purple-striped togas gathered together in one place. The portico of the Theatrum Pompeii was swarming with senators, clustered and milling about like a flock of agitated geese as Caesar appeared and climbed the stone steps. I watched as they waved scrolls and tablets at him to try to get his attention, treading on the hems of each other’s garments and tripping all over themselves.
I had never understood the Roman mode of dress, and that scene did nothing to change my mind as to its practicality. How in the world was a man—even a soldier and an athlete like Caesar—supposed to be able to move wrapped up in all that wool with swathes of the stuff draped over one arm? The chiefs of Prydain would never dress so foolishly as to limit their mobility to such an extent and take away the usefulness of a limb. They would never leave themselves so vulnerable to attack.
Caesar would have done well to learn from his foreign adversaries. Because the other thing about the toga was this: All those folds of cloth made ideal hiding places for knives.
As I shouldered my way through the packed market crowd, I kept my gaze focused on where Caesar stood beneath the shadows of the portico, a head taller than most of his fellows. As I drew nearer to the theater, I could hear the faint, muted clamor of arguing voices. A senatorial squabble that suddenly spiked sharply when one voice rose heatedly above all the others. I saw Caesar turn to address the man behind him, and there was anger written plainly on his face. But his expression shifted suddenly to shock.
Caesar took a stumbling step forward, his body rigid, spine arching like a drawn bow. Something was terribly wrong. Half the senatorial crowd shrank back. The other half surged forward. Caesar staggered out from the shadows, into a beam of sunlight. And when he opened his mouth, gouts of blood spewed from his lips, staining the front of his snow-white robes.
I felt my whole body tense as if I was in the arena or on the battlefield. There was a moment of stillness as Caesar reached out, grasping handfuls of air . . . and then a group of men charged him like a pack of jackals on a wounded lion. There were dozens of assailants. Dagger blades flashed and descended, blood flew, spattering the gleaming marble columns of the theater portico. With a furious roar, Caesar threw off his attackers and lurched forward, his toga stained crimson. For a moment, I thought he was free of them, but his sandals slipped in his own blood, flowing in a stream down the stone steps, and he crashed heavily to one knee.
I don’t know if I cried out loud then or if the sound of my denial thundered only inside my own skull. The din in the marketplace was such that no one—not a slave or a citizen—had even noticed the violence in their midst. No one but me . . . And then I saw Caesar lift his head, and for an instant it seemed as if his pain-clouded gaze found me where I still stood, half-hidden behind a textile stall, gaping in horror. I glanced around wildly, wondering where Caesar’s bodyguards were. But, of course, why would Caesar need his praetorians that day, surrounded as he was by his great good friends, the senators of the Republic?
One of those friends—a broad-shouldered man with close-cropped black hair who I recognized as Marcus Junius Brutus—stepped up behind Caesar, and I saw one last knife blade descend. Caesar threw his hands in the air, his fingers spread wide like the talons of one of his eagles . . . and then he fell forward.
The murder itself was over in mere moments.
The consequences would ripple down through the days and years to come.
What followed next was simply sheer, unbridled terror.
A matron carrying a basket of olives suddenly seemed to notice the blood, and the body of the man it poured from. She screamed, her skirling shriek piercing clean through the general, muddling chaos of the streets, and suddenly there seemed to be some sort of collective realization of what had actually just happened. As her wail died on the fitful breeze, everyone turned to stare first at the woman where she stood, one hand to her mouth, the other pointing, stiff-armed . . . and then at Gaius Julius Caesar, tangled in his bloody, purple-striped senator’s robes, as his body slowly rolled down the steps. It came to a stop at the bottom, one arm flung out, as if in supplication, toward the crowd.
Men started shouting, women began to wail, the sounds of grief mingled with outrage, and a thick, cloying fog of fear descended. If Caesar’s assassins had been expecting a triumphant rejoicing in the wake of their heinous act, they had seriously misjudged the citizens of the Republic. Instead, the very air all around me suddenly felt like it did in the moments before a terrible storm—dangerous, deadly even . . . something that wordlessly warned “seek shelter.”
People started running, hiding, and tripping over themselves, knocking over baskets and displays in the market. Food sellers and wine merchants ducked and scrambled to gather up their wares before the chaos turned into outright rioting in the streets. They needn’t have worried. The city itself would soon be silent and empty, windows shuttered like the eyes of a corpse, doors barred against the coming storm.
The crowd of senators—those who were Optimates and those who were Populares alike—began to melt away as they scurried like rats in all directions. I saw Brutus pelting toward the vomitorium entrance to the theatrum, where he and three or four of his fellow conspirators were swiftly surrounded and swallowed up by the crowd of black-clad gladiators I’d seen earlier.
That explains it, I thought, stunned.
Those gladiators had been there, waiting, in case the assassination—and that was exactly what it was, an assassination—went badly. It hadn’t been a sudden, unexpected brawl nor a heated disagreement gone wrong. No. The thing I had just witnessed was the end result of a calculated plan to murder Caesar. To remove—permanently—the man who’d only just been decreed Rome’s dictator for life, and the planning for it went deep. It had to have. As deep as the catacombs beneath Pontius Aquila’s Domus Corvinus.