“A letter.”
“A letter.”
“Caesarion, I’ll write it. You don’t even have to look at it. Just sign it. And it’ll all be cool. Just go out there and tell him you’ll do it and you don’t even have to turn a hand. It’ll happen. It’ll get dealt with.”
“He hasn’t called my mother into this, has he?”
Brutus shook his head. “No. Just him.”
Caesarion set his jaw. “What kind of letter?”
“You don’t need to know. Just shut up, go out there, tell him you’ll do it, and I’ll write it. Go on. You don’t want him to call your mother in.”
Caesarion shoved back from the table and slouched his way to the door. Attitude. A lot of it. But he was fragile. Brutus had that pegged.
It didn’t take too long.
Caesarion came back in, scowling. “So,” he said, shoved his hands in his pockets and went over and stared out the window.
Brutus didn’t say a thing, just went over to the desk and got paper. Didn’t want to know what Julius had said, what Julius had offered, but he didn’t want to tip the balance, whatever it was. Julius could be damned scary. Usually he wasn’t.
But you didn’t want to be his son and tell him you weren’t going to do something.
The house sent papers to Cicero. Back came back more papers.
Decius Mus took more papers to Cicero. A considerable sum of money. A case of wine. And a potted rosebush. Mus was gone more than he was present that day, ferrying this and that here and there.
The very next day Cicero announced he was coming to the villa with papers to sign.
“He wants what?” Augustus cried, reading same.
They sat in the portico, overlooking the rose garden. Galba served, Mus stood by, his Republican-era armor all polished and oiled. Julius and Augustus were in togas, and everybody else – everybody else – was told to keep to the house.
On the other side of the garden gate, the flood had reached the very shadow of the gate. It stretched past the several estates, and glowed hellfire red as the sky in the distance, next to the skyscrapers of downtown hell.
“It could be further negotiated,” Cicero said. “But it is very likely the position will harden on some matters. Right now we have a settlement that costs nothing in personal favors, one statue, a dozen rosebushes, and one truckload of Chian wine.”
“A Praxiteles,” Augustus lamented, looking toward the Niobe, who stood amid the rose garden, appropriately spattered in rain and framed by floodwaters.
“I’ll scour up another one,” Julius said. “We’ll get something. That fool Memmius lost a raft of them into the bay. They come on the market.”
“It took a century to get her!” Augustus said.
“And our alternatives?” Julius said … and noticed, oddly enough, that Dante Alighieri had come out of the house, ahead of two Scorpion Guards in hot pursuit.
The scholarly little Italian was no athlete. They had him before he reached the gate. And Cicero didn’t even notice. The two Mesopotamian bruisers got to the gate first, snagged the little poet up, each by an arm, and carried him off, screaming … which did get Cicero’s attention. The genteel old man cast a look that way, raised an eyebrow, and looked at Julius.
“One of the houseguests,” Julius said. “Late. You wouldn’t know him. A poet. Quite fond of Vergilius. Based a lot on him.”
“Ah,” Cicero said. “Does he give recitals?”
“For a select few,” Julius said. “Of course – our friends are invited. We can ask Vergilius himself. If you’d be interested.”
“A traditional fellow? None of this Beat poetry.”
“Oh, absolutely traditional,” Julius said. “Best of the new Old School. Cheer up, nephew. We’ll find another Praxiteles. ‘Prometheus and his Vulture,’ maybe.”
“Not funny,” Augustus said. “I love that statue. The old goat is aiming this straight at me. And where did I deserve it?”
“Your adopted brothers owe you one,” Julius said. “Let’s get this thing signed, get ink dry on the line and get that statue moved, the roses dug, and the whole transaction done today, before something worse happens. Galba.”
“Master.”
“Tell Niccolo. The bushes could stand thinning as is. Tell him we can’t wait for the weather.”
The house door shut, on Dante and his problems.
“All right, all right,” Augustus said, downcast. “I’ll sign it. Damn him.”
It was a damned downpour. Niccolo was soaked to the skin and had no help. Dante, damn him to a nether circle of hell, was sitting warm and dry in the basement and they daren’t let him out until it all had blown over. So Niccolo Machiavelli got the job of pruning, wrapping, then digging up ten prickly, man-high rose trees, shaping and wrapping their rootballs – the damned roots moved when insulted, and stabbed you if you hung on. Then, solo, in the rain and cursing Dante all the way, he turned the ten thorny, muddy, burlapped bundles over to the armored, uniformed bevy of regulation legion engineers, who showed up with a noisy truck and a small flatbed load of timbers, regular legionaries, and chain.
Niccolo wrapped himself in spare burlap and slogged over to the shelter of the portico, ordering a passing servant to fetch him a mocha latte. “Grandissimo. And very hot.”
Then he tucked up in a chair, unwilling to hose off twice. He’d have work to do when the engineers had their go. If something was going to go wrong, if somehow they ended up missing a rosebush and in technical violation of the agreement, giving the old lecher a way to wiggle – well, Niccolo Machiavelli wasn’t going to let that happen. They didn’t have mocha lattes in the nether circles of hell. They didn’t have a lot of things, and Niccolo, who’d had his personal dose of dungeon life, didn’t intend to let anybody screw up.
Besides, they’d gotten a rumor of what one of Erra’s Seven had done to a complainant in court.
No. Niccolo wasn’t going to go there. Niccolo wasn’t going to make a mistake.
Boards thumped and boomed down off the truck. The legion engineers, likewise dripping wet, supervising a handful of legionaries, poor sods, who hammered down the disturbed earth and laid planks. Then while Machiavelli shivered under the portico, and huddled in dry burlap, being muddy from head to foot, the serious work started.
Up went beams in an A frame. Pulleys. The engineers set up a pentaspastos on the bed of planks and sent the soldiers swarming up to gird poor weeping, naked Niobe in belts and rope.
One so hoped they didn’t drop the old girl and doom them all. Niobe rose, rose, rose from her pedestal, and set down again beside the rear of the truck.
Then the pedestal moved, by the same expedient, while legionaries, with sly grins and roving hands, steadied la signora Niobe.
The engineers gave orders, and quite smartly those who weren’t mauling the statue disassembled the pentaspastos and reassembled it on the truck bed, fast as fast. It wasn’t as if the age of the truck didn’t manage hoists somewhat more complicated, Niccolo thought. His age had had them.
But the engineers, stubborn fellows, clearly didn’t believe in powered winches and hoists, and it was amazing how very fast that ancient machine reformed and got into operation. The legionaries on the ground attached the robes, the legionaries on the flatbed, three of them, hauled, and Niobe rose, rose, rose to the truck bed.
The legionaries scrambled up then to put the lady into her web of braces and ropes, which would hold her steady on the short drive down past the park. They’d turn at West 96th, round the corner and turn again – easy drive. They’d manage it.