Roma - Saylor Steven - Страница 111
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A pathway opened in the crowd and one of Tiberius’s supporters in the Senate, Fulvius Flaccus, rushed toward him, breathless with alarm.
“Tiberius, I’ve just come from an emergency meeting of the Senate. All morning your enemies have been demanding that the consul Scaevola declare today’s election an illegal assembly—”
“Illegal? The people have the right to elect tribunes—”
“They claim the disorder is too great, a menace to public safety—or worse.”
“Worse?”
“Your cousin Scipio Nasica says you’re mustering a mob to bring down the state. After you massacre your opponents in the Senate, you’ll declare yourself king—”
“Nasica!” Tiberius spat the word. The two cousins, both heirs to the bloodline of Africanus, despised each other. There was no greater reactionary in the Senate than Nasica. While Tiberius had made himself the champion of the common people, Nasica made no secret of despising them. Even when he campaigned for their votes, he could not resist insulting them. “I know better than you lot what is good for the state,” he had once shouted at an unruly crowd; opponents joked that this was his idea of a campaign slogan. And once, shaking the horny palm of a farm laborer, Nasica had snidely commented, “How does one get such calluses? Do you walk on your hands?”
Blossius spoke up. “The consul Scaevola is a good man.”
“Indeed he is,” said Flaccus. “He’s refused to sanction any attempt to cancel the election. But that hasn’t stopped Nasica. ‘If the consul won’t act to save the state, then private citizens must do so’—that’s what Nasica said. He and a number of other senators gathered outside, and then they were joined by a gang of cutthroats—the roughest sort of men you can imagine, armed with clubs.”
“They planned this ahead of time,” said Blossius.
“Obviously!” said Flaccus. “And now they’re coming this way, with Nasica leading them. They mean to kill you, Tiberius! They think they’re on a sacred mission—the senators have wrapped the red hem of their togas across their foreheads, like priests about to carry out a sacrifice!”
Tiberius’s blood ran cold. He stared at the unsuspecting crowd.
“The signal!” cried Blossius. “Give the signal!”
Tiberius raised his arms in the air. The movement drew the attention of the crowd. With all eyes on him, Tiberius pointed to his head.
His supporters understood at once. They seized the shafts carried by the election officials, broke them in pieces, and passed the fragments among themselves; the longer sections could serve as cudgels and the splintered ends as daggers. There were a number of benches throughout the assembly area. They began to smash these as well, to use the fragments as weapons.
Tiberius’s opponents in the crowd took the signal to mean something else. “He points at his head—he’s demanding a crown!” men cried. “Look at his followers, gathering weapons—they mean to take the Capitoline by force. They’ll declare Tiberius king!”
Amid the mounting chaos, there was an even greater commotion at the entry to the assembly area. Nasica and his fellow senators, with their gang of cutthroats, had arrived.
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.
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