The First Man in Rome (39 page)
As May slid into June, Metellus marched to Cirta, where he received another pleasant surprise. For the Numidian capital surrendered without a fight, its very large complement of Italian and Roman businessmen a significantly pro-Roman force in town politics. Besides which, Cirta did not like Jugurtha any more than he liked Cirta.
The weather was hot and very dry, normal for that time of the year; Jugurtha moved out of reach of the slipshod Roman intelligence network by going south to the tents of the Gaetuli, and then to Capsa, homeland of his mother's tribe. A small but heavily fortified mountain citadel in the midst of the Gaetulian remoteness, Capsa contained a large part of Jugurtha's heart, for it was here his mother had actually lived since the death of her husband, Bomilcar's father. And it was here that Jugurtha had stored the bulk of his treasure.
It was here in June that Jugurtha's men brought Nabdalsa, caught coming away from Roman-occupied Cirta after Jugurtha's spies in the Roman command finally obtained enough evidence of Nabdalsa's treachery to warrant informing the King. Though always known as Gauda's man, Nabdalsa had not been prevented from moving freely within Numidia; a remote cousin with Masinissa's blood in him, he was tolerated and considered harmless.
"But I now have proof," said Jugurtha, "that you have been actively collaborating with the Romans. If the news disappoints me, it's chiefly because you've been fool enough to deal with Metellus rather than Gaius Marius." He studied Nabdalsa, clapped in irons upon capture, and visibly wearing the signs of harsh treatment at the hands of Jugurtha's men. "Of course you're not in this alone," he said thoughtfully. "Who among my barons has conspired with you?"
Nabdalsa refused to answer.
"Put him to the torture," said Jugurtha indifferently.
Torture in Numidia was not sophisticated, though like all Eastern-style despots, Jugurtha did avail himself of dungeons and long-term imprisonment. Into one of Jugurtha's dungeons, buried in the base of the rocky hill on which Capsa perched, and entered only through a warren of tunnels from the palace within the citadel's walls, was Nabdalsa thrown, and there the subhumanly brutish soldiers who always seemed to inherit such positions applied the torture.
Not very long afterward, it became obvious why Nabdalsa had chosen to serve the inferior man, Gauda; he talked. All it had taken was the removal of his teeth and the fingernails of one hand. Summoned to hear his confession, the unsuspecting Jugurtha brought Bomilcar with him.
Knowing that he would never leave the subterranean world he was about to enter, Bomilcar gazed into the illimitable heights of the rich blue sky, sniffed the sweet desert air, brushed the back of his hand against the silky leaves of a flowering bush. And strove to carry the memories with him into the darkness.
The poorly ventilated chamber stank; excrement, vomitus, sweat, blood, stagnant water, and dead tissue clubbed together to form a miasma out of Tartarus, an atmosphereno man could breathe without experiencing fear. Even Jugurtha entered the place with a shiver.
The inquisition proceeded under terrible difficulties, for Nabdalsa's gums continued to bleed profusely, and a broken nose prevented attempts to stanch the haemorrhage by packing the mouth. Stupidity, thought Jugurtha, torn by a mixture of horror at the sight of Nabdalsa and anger at the thoughtlessness of his brutes, beginning in the one place they ought to have kept free and clear of their attentions.
Not that it mattered a great deal. Nabdalsa uttered the one vital word on Jugurtha's third question, and it was not too difficult to understand as it was mumbled out through the blood.
"Bomilcar."
"Leave us," said the King to his brutes, but was prudent enough still to order them to remove Bomilcar's dagger.
Alone with the King and the half-conscious Nabdalsa, Bomilcar sighed. "The only thing I regret," he said, "is that this will kill our mother."
It was the cleverest thing he could have said under the circumstances, for it earned him a single blow from the executioner's axe instead of the slow, lingering dying his half brother the King yearned to inflict upon him.
"
Why
?" asked Jugurtha.
Bomilcar shrugged. "When I grew old enough to start weighing up the years, brother, I discovered how much you had cheated me. You have held me in the same contempt you might have held a pet monkey."
"What did you want?" Jugurtha asked.
"To hear you call me brother in front of the whole world."
Jugurtha stared at him in genuine wonder. "And raise you above your station? My dear Bomilcar, it is the sire who matters, not the dam! Our mother is a Berber woman of the Gaetuli, and not even the daughter of a chief. She has no royal distinction to convey. If I were to call you brother in front of the whole world, all who heard me do so would assume that I was adopting you into Masinissa's line. And that—since I have two sons of my own who are legal heirs—would be imprudent, to say the very least."
"You should have appointed me their guardian and regent," said Bomilcar.
"And raise you again above your station? My dear Bomilcar, our mother's blood negates it! Your father was a minor baron, a relative nobody. Where my father was Masinissa's legitimate son. It is from my father I inherit my royalty."
"But you're not legitimate, are you?"
"I am not. Nevertheless, the blood is there. And blood tells."
Bomilcar turned away. "Get it over and done with," he said. "I failed—not you, but myself. Reason enough to die. Yet—beware, Jugurtha."
"Beware? Of what? Assassination attempts? Further treachery, other traitors?"
"Of the Romans. They're like the sun and the wind and the rain. In the end they wear everything down to sand."
Jugurtha bellowed for the brutes, who came tumbling in ready for anything, only to find nothing untoward, and stood waiting for orders.
"Kill them both," said Jugurtha, moving toward the door. "But make it quick. And send me both their heads."
The heads of Bomilcar and Nabdalsa were nailed to the battlements of Capsa for all to see. For a head was more than a mere talisman of kingly vengeance upon a traitor; it was fixed in some public place to show the people that the right man had died, and to prevent the appearance of an imposter.
Jugurtha told himself he felt no grief, just felt more alone than ever before. It had been a necessary lesson: that a king could trust no man, even his brother.
However, the death of Bomilcar had two immediate results. One was that Jugurtha became completely elusive, never staying more than two days in any one place, never informing his guard where he was going next, never allowing his army to know what his plans for it were; authority was vested in the person of the King, no one else. The other result concerned his father-in-law, King Bocchus of Mauretania, who had not actively aided Rome against his daughter's husband, but had not actively aided Jugurtha against Rome either; the feelers went out from Jugurtha to Bocchus at once, and Jugurtha put increased pressure upon Bocchus to ally himself with Numidia, eject Rome from all of Africa.
By the end of summer, Quintus Caecilius Metellus's position in Rome had been totally undermined. No one there could find a kindly word to say about him or his conduct of the war. And still the letters kept coming, steady, relentless, influential in the extreme.
After the capture of Thala and the surrender of Cirta, the Caecilius Metellus faction had managed to gain some ground among the knights' lobbies, but then came further news from Africa that made it clear neither Thala nor Cirta would ensure an end to the war; and after that came reports of endless, pointless skirmishes, of advances further into the Numidian west achieving nothing, of funds misused and six legions kept in the field at huge cost to the Treasury and with no end to the expense in sight. Thanks to Metellus, the war against Jugurtha would certainly drag on for at least another year.
The consular elections were scheduled for mid-October, and Marius's name—now on everyone's lips—was constantly bruited about as a candidate. Yet time went on, and still he didn't appear in Rome. Metellus remained obdurate.
"I insist upon going," said Marius to Metellus for what must have been the fiftieth time.
"Insist all you like," said Metellus. "You're not going."
"Next year I
will
be consul," said Marius.
"An upstart like you consul? Impossible!"
"You're afraid the voters would elect me, aren't you?" asked Marius smugly. "You won't let me go because you know I will be elected."
"I cannot believe any true Roman would vote for you, Gaius Marius. However, you're an extremely rich man, and that means you can buy votes. Should you ever at any time in the future be elected consul—and it won't be next year!— you may rest assured that I will gladly expend every ounce of energy I possess in proving in a court of law that you bought office!"
"I don't need to buy office, Quintus Caecilius, I never have bought office. Therefore feel free to try," said Marius, still annoyingly smug.
Metellus tried a different tack. "I am not letting you go—reconcile yourself to that. As a Roman of the Romans, I would betray my class if I did let you go. The consulship, Gaius Marius, is an office far above anyone of your Italian origins. The men who sit in the consul's ivory chair must fit it by birth, by the achievements of their ancestors as much as by their own. I would rather be disgraced and dead than see an Italian from the Samnite borderlands—a semi-literate boor who ought never even have been praetor!—sit in the consul's ivory chair! Do your worst—or do your best! It makes not one iota of difference to me. I would rather be disgraced and dead than give you permission to go to Rome."
"If necessary, Quintus Caecilius, you will be both," said Marius, and left the room.
Publius Rutilius Rufus attempted to bring both men to reason, his motives concern for Rome as well as for Marius.
"Leave politics out of it," he said to them. "The three of us are here in Africa to beat Jugurtha, but neither of you is interested in devoting your energies to that end. You're more concerned with getting the better of each other than you are of Jugurtha, and I, for one, am fed up with the situation!"
"Are you accusing me of dereliction of duty, Publius Rutilius?" asked Marius, dangerously calm.
"No, of course I'm not! I'm accusing you of withholding that streak of genius I know you to possess in warfare. I am your equal tactically. I am your equal logistically. But when it comes to strategy, Gaius Marius—the long-term look at war—you have no equal at all anywhere. Yet have you devoted any time or thought to a strategy aimed at winning this war? No!"
"And where do I fit into this paean of praise for Gaius Marius?" asked Metellus, tight-lipped. "For that matter, where do I fit into this paean of praise for Publius Rutilius Rufus? Or am I not important?"
"You are important, you unmitigated snob, because you are the titular commander in this war!" snapped Rutilius Rufus. "And if you think you're better at tactics and logistics than I, or better at tactics and logistics and strategy than Gaius Marius, do not feel backward at coming forward about it, I beg you! Not that you would. But if it's praise you want, I am prepared to give you this much—you're not as venal as Spurius Postumius Albinus, nor as ineffectual as Marcus Junius Silanus. Your main trouble is that you're just not as good as you think you are. When you displayed sufficient intelligence to enlist me and Gaius Marius as your senior legates, I thought the years must have improved you. But I was wrong. You've wasted our talents as well as the State's money. We're not winning this war, we're engaged in an extremely expensive impasse. So take my advice, Quintus Caecilius! Let Gaius Marius go to Rome, let Gaius Marius stand for consul—and let
me
organize our resources and devise our military maneuvers. As for you—devote your energies to undermining Jugurtha's hold over his people. You are welcome to every scrap of public glory as far as I'm concerned, provided that within these four walls you're willing to admit the truth of what I'm saying."
"I admit nothing," said Metellus.
And so it went on, all through late summer and well into autumn. Jugurtha was impossible to pin down, indeed seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. When it became obvious even to the least ranker legionary that there was not going to be a confrontation between the Roman army and the Numidian army, Metellus withdrew from far western Numidia and went into camp outside Cirta.
Word had come that Bocchus of Mauretania had finally yielded to Jugurtha's pressure tactics, formed up his army, and marched to join his son-in-law somewhere to the south; united, rumor had it, they planned to move on Cirta. Hoping to join battle at last, Metellus made his dispositions and listened with more interest than usual to Marius and Rutilius Rufus. But it was not to be. The two armies lay some miles apart, with Jugurtha refusing to be drawn. Impasse descended again, the Roman position too strongly defended for Jugurtha to attack, and the Numidian position too ephemeral to tempt Metellus out of his camp.
And then, twelve days before the consular elections in Rome, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Piggle-wiggle formally released Gaius Marius from his service as senior legate in the campaign against Jugurtha.
"Off you go!" said Metellus, smiling sweetly. "Rest assured, Gaius Marius, that I will make all of Rome aware that I
did
release you before the elections."
"You think I won't get there in time," said Marius.
"I think—nothing, Gaius Marius."
Marius grinned. "That's true enough, at any rate," he said, and snapped his fingers. "Now where's the piece of paper that says I'm formally released? Give it to me."
Metellus handed over Marius's marching orders, his smile somewhat fixed, and as Marius reached the door he said, not raising his voice, "By the way, Gaius Marius, I have just had some wonderful news from Rome. The Senate has extended my governorship of Africa Province and my command in the Numidian war into next year."