Roma.The novel of ancient Rome - Saylor Steven - Страница 112

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A violent free-for-all followed. On the Palatine and down in the Forum, and even on the far side of the Tiber men could hear the sounds of combat atop the Capitoline.

Several of Tiberius’s supporters ran to his side and offered him their weapons, but he refused to take them. Instead he turned his back on the melee, faced the Temple of Jupiter, and raised his arms in prayer.

“Jupiter, greatest of gods, protector of my grandfather in battle-”

Blossius seized the folds of his toga and shouted at him. “Go inside the temple! Run! When they come for you, claim Jupiter’s protection-”

Blossius was struck across the belly by a club. With the breath knocked out of him, he fell to his knees.

Hands converged on Tiberius. They grabbed his toga and pulled it off him. Wearing only his under-tunic, Tiberius bolted up the steps of the temple, limping because of his injured toe; he tripped on a step and fell forward. Before he could get to his feet, a cudgel struck his head and sent him reeling. He blindly struggled to his feet and stood swaying for a moment. Another club, swung with tremendous force, struck his head and shattered his skull with a sickening crack.

Blossius had just managed to get to his feet. Red gore and pale bits of brain spattered his robes. He stood aghast and gaping at the bloody remains that lay crumpled on the steps.

One of the killers recognized him. “It’s the Greek philosopher-the would-be king’s adviser!”

“Toss him from the Tarpeian Rock!”

Whooping and laughing, they seized Blossius by his hands and feet and carried him down the steps. They headed toward the rock, dodging clubs and hopping over corpses that littered the way.

They reached the precipice, but instead of shoving him over, they made sport of swinging him back and forth, back and forth, gaining momentum.

“On the count of three: one…two…three!”

They released him and sent him hurtling into space.

For a brief moment, Blossius appeared to defy the earth’s pull. He soared skyward. Then, with a sickening twist in his gut, he began to fall.

They had thrown him clear of the precipice. Under normal circumstances, his downward plummet would have ended at the foot of the Capitoline. But many men had been pushed from the Tarpeian Rock before him. A few of these men had managed to grab hold of the rock face and cling to the sheer cliff. Flailing frantically, Blossius grabbed the garments of one of these men and broke his fall. Almost at once he lost his grip and fell upon the next man down. In such a manner, grasping at one desperate man after another, repeatedly breaking his fall and then falling again, he descended the cliff. More than once, a man above him lost his grip and plummeted past him, screaming.

At last, drained of the last vestige of will, overwhelmed with terror, with nothing left to grasp, Blossius fell in earnest.

He landed not upon hard earth, but upon a pile of bodies. More bodies fell around him, like hail dropping from the sky.

As night descended, the killers gathered the bodies of the dead, loaded them onto carts, and wheeled them across the Forum Boarium to dump them in the Tiber.

Blossius gradually woke. At first he imagined that he had been buried alive, but the confining mass surrounding him was not earth, but dead flesh. The cart jerked and bumped beneath him, sending a great throbbing soreness through every part of his body. He would have groaned, but he had no air in his lungs. The pressure against his chest would not allow him to draw a breath.

From somewhere he heard muffled sounds-women sobbing and shrieking. A woman cried out, “Let me have my husband’s body! At least give me his body!” A harsh masculine voice ordered her back.

The cart came to a halt. The world began to tilt. The mass of flesh all around him shifted and gave way, like a cliff disintegrating in a landslide. He tumbled helplessly forward.

He was suddenly underwater. The shock wrenched him to full consciousness. Sputtering, flailing his arms, he found the surface and sucked in a lungful of air.

The sky above was dark and full of stars. The swiftly flowing current was littered with bodies. In his dazed state, he somehow sensed which was the farther shore and swam toward it. Again and again, he collided with floating corpses. One of them seemed to wrap its arms around him. In a panic, he struggled to free himself. The man could not possibly be alive; that was obvious from his smashed skull.

As Blossius pulled free, he glimpsed the dead man’s face.

It was Tiberius.

Impulsively, he reached for the body, but it slipped away on the current, its torso spinning, its limbs bobbing, as lifeless as a floating branch.

Weary beyond hope and wracked with sobbing, Blossius pulled himself onto the riverbank and collapsed into oblivion.

“If I had followed your advice, dear mother-if I had tied my fortunes to those of Tiberius-just imagine the consequences!” Lucius Pinarius nervously paced the garden. “Now you must follow my advice. Drive this dangerous fool from our house!”

He pointed at Blossius, who sat stripped to the waist, patiently allowing Menenia to tend to his many wounds with ointment and fresh bandages. Three days had passed since his brush with death, but he was still badly shaken.

The entire city was reeling from the shock of the massacre on the Capitoline. At least three hundred men had been killed. No man alive could remember anything like it; for the first time since the fall of Tarquinius and the precarious early years of the Republic, political strife had erupted in mass bloodshed, with Romans killing Romans. The careless desecration of the bodies was grossly offensive even to many who opposed Tiberius, and had caused widespread anger and resentment. But the senatorial faction that had put an end to Tiberius, led by Scipio Nasica, was unrepentant. Having gained the upper hand, they had proceeded to order the arrest, interrogation, and execution, without trial, of anyone involved in what they called the “Gracchan sedition.” New names were constantly added to the list of suspects; those arrested were tortured until they implicated others. Rumor and panic ruled the city. The Tiber was jammed with vessels taking men to Ostia, where they hoped to board ships to take them away from Italy, into exile.

Blossius winced as Menenia dabbed the stinging ointment onto a cut across his shoulder, then he took her hand and kissed it. “Your son is right,” he said. “I escaped the massacre on the Capitoline, and somehow, so far, Nasica’s henchmen have overlooked me. But very soon, they’ll come for me.”

There was a banging at the door. Blossius stiffened, then stood and covered himself.

A troop of armed lictors came striding into the garden. The senior of the lictors spared only a glance for Lucius and his mother, then glared at Blossius. “Here you are, philosopher! We went looking for you at the would-be king’s house first. Isn’t that your official address here in Roma, where you sponge off the daughter of Africanus? Did you think you could escape us by hiding here? Or is this how you philosophers make a living, going from the house of one lonely Roman widow to another, sucking up their wine and spilling your seed in their beds?”

Lucius bolted forward angrily, but the lictor raised his club, and Lucius stepped back. His mother was less timid. She dabbed her fingertips in the jar of ointment, then flicked them in the lictor’s face. The man dropped his club and wiped the stinging unguent from his eyes.

“Bitch!” he shouted. “If you were anything but a woman, that would count as an act of sedition, and I’d see you stripped naked and flogged for it!”

The man bent to retrieve his club. Rising up, he struck Blossius hard across the belly. Blossius bent double in pain. A pair of lictors seized his arms and roughly escorted him from the garden.

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