The October Horse (98 page)

“He wouldn't understand anyway, his own health is too rude. We'll pitch my tent on the outer palisades at the very back, where I might get a sea wind across those marshes and—I hope, I hope!— blow the dust from trampling hooves away from me.”

“It will help,” Agrippa agreed, amazed that Caesar had gotten this far. The will inside him, he thought, is truly more than mortal. He refuses to quit, let alone die—if only because, should he do either, Antonius would be the chief beneficiary.

“If the wind changes or the dust increases, Caesar,” Agrippa added, “you can slip through that little gate there and make your way into the marshes themselves for relief.”

•      •      •

Both sides had nineteen legions at Philippi and could marshal about a hundred thousand foot, but the Liberators had over twenty thousand horse, while Antony had reduced his thirteen thousand to a mere three.

“Things have changed since Caesar's time in Gaul,” he said to Octavian over a shared dinner. “He thought himself superbly well off if he had two thousand horse to pitch against half of Gaul and a few levies of Sugambri to boot. I don't think he ever fielded more than one horseman to the enemy's three or four.”

“I know you're milling your troopers around as if you still had thousands upon thousands of them, Antonius, but you don't,” said Octavian, forcing down a piece of bread. “Yet our opponents have a vast cavalry camp up the valley, so Agrippa tells me. Why is that? Something to do with Caesar?”

“I can't find forage,” said Antony, wiping his chin, “so I'm betting that what cavalry I have will be enough. Just like Caesar. It's going to be a foot-slogger battle.”

“Do you think they'll fight?”

“They don't want to, that I know. But eventually they'll have to, because we're not going away until they do.”

•      •      •

Antony's abrupt arrival had shattered Brutus and Cassius, positive that he would skulk at Amphipolis until he realized that he was doing himself no good in Thrace. Yet here he was, it seemed spoiling for a battle.

“He won't get one,” said Cassius, frowning at the salt marshes.

The very next day he started work on his exposed salt marsh flank, bent on extending his fortifications right out into their middle, thus rendering it impossible for the Triumvirs to get around behind his lines. At the same time the gate across the Via Egnatia began to put forth ditches, extra walls and palisades; previously Cassius had thought that the Ganga River, flowing right in front of their two hills, would provide sufficient protection, but every day its level visibly dropped in this cold, rainless autumn of a cold, rainless year. Men could not only cross it, they could now fight in it. Therefore, more defenses, more fortifications.

“Why are they so busy?” Brutus asked Cassius as they stood atop Cassius's hill, his hand pointing to the Triumviral camp.

“Because they're preparing for a major engagement.”

“Oh!” gasped Brutus, and gulped.

“They won't get one,” said Cassius, tones reassuring.

“Is that why you've extended your defenses into the swamp?”

“Yes, Brutus.”

“I wonder what they're thinking about all this in Philippi town when they look down on us?”

Cassius blinked. “Does what Philippi town thinks matter?”

“I suppose not,” said Brutus, sighing. “I just wondered.”

•      •      •

October dragged on, saw nothing beyond a few minor skirmishes between foraging parties. Every day the Triumvirs stood waiting for battle, every day the Liberators ignored them.

To Cassius it seemed that this daily brandishing of arms was all the Triumvirs were doing, but he was wrong. Antony had decided to outflank Cassius in the marshes, and had put more than a third of the whole army to laboring in them. The noncombatants and baggage train attendants were clad in armor and made to imitate soldiers at the brandishing of arms ritual, while the soldiers toiled. To them, the work was a signal that battle was in the offing, and any soldier worth his salt looked forward to battle. Their mood and their attitude were sanguine, for they knew that they were well generaled and that most men lived through a fight. Not only did they have the great Marcus Antonius, they also had Caesar Divi Filius, who was their sacrificial victim as well as their darling.

Antony began to cut a negotiable channel through the marshes alongside Cassius's extended flank, his plan to come around behind and block the road to Neapolis as well as attack Cassius's underbelly. Every day for ten days he pretended to call his men to assemble for battle, while more than a third of them sweated in the marshes, hidden from Cassius by swamp grass and reeds. They labored to build a firm roadway, even driving piles to throw stout bridges across bottomless fens—and all in utter silence. As they progressed they equipped the road with salients ready to receive fortifications that would turn them into redoubts complete to towers and breastworks.

But Cassius saw none of it, heard none of it.

•      •      •

On the twenty-third day of October, Cassius turned forty-two; Brutus was four and a half months younger than he. By rights he ought to have been consul this year; instead, he was at Philippi outwaiting a determined enemy. Just how determined, he learned at dawn on this birth anniversary; Antony abandoned secrecy and sent a column of shock troops to occupy all the salients, use the materials put there to turn them into redoubts.

Aghast, Cassius raced to cut Antony off by trying to extend his fortifications all the way to the sea; he used his entire army, and drove them ruthlessly. Nothing else entered his mind, even the possibility that this was the start of something far bigger than one army trying to outflank the other. Had he only stopped to think, he might have realized what was really in the wind, but he didn't. So he threw battle preparedness away among his own troops, and completely forgot all about Brutus and his troops, to whom he sent no word, let alone orders. Not having heard a word from Cassius, Brutus assumed as the racket built that he was to sit pat and do nothing.

At noon Antony attacked on two fronts, using most of the combined army; only Octavian's two most inexperienced legions were held in reserve inside his small camp. Antony lined his men up facing east at Cassius's camp, then swung half of his line south to charge Cassius's men as they worked desperately in the swamps, while the other half charged at the main gate across the road, but on Cassius's side of it. Those at the main gate front had ladders and grapples, and fell to with great enthusiasm, delighted that the battle had finally come on.

The truth was that even as Antony attacked, Cassius was still convinced that Antony didn't want a battle. Though he and Antony were much the same age, they had not mixed in the same circles as children, or youths, or men. Antony the bully-boy demagogue riddled with vices, Cassius the martial scion of an equally old noble plebeian family doing everything the correct way: when they met at Philippi, neither man knew how the other's mind worked. So Cassius failed to take Antony's recklessness into account, he assumed that his opponent would act as he would himself. Now, with battle thrust upon him, it was too late to organize his resistance or send word to Brutus.

Antony's troops ran at Cassius's marsh wall under a hail of missiles and routed Cassius's front line, men drawn up outside the wall on dry ground. As soon as the front line fell, the Triumviral soldiers stormed Cassius's outer defenses and cut off those still toiling in the marshes. Good legionaries that they were, they had their arms and armor with them; they scrambled for battle and rushed up to join the fight, but Antony dealt with them by wheeling a few cohorts and driving them, leaderless, back into the swamps. There his shock troops manning the redoubts took over and rounded most of them up like sheep. Some managed to evade capture, sneaked around behind Cassius's hill, and sought shelter in Brutus's camp.

With the marsh attack an assured success, Antony turned his attention to the assault on Cassius's camp alongside the main gate, where his men had part of the wall down, were up and over to tackle Cassius's inner line of fortifications.

Thousands of soldiers stood along the Via Egnatia wall of Brutus's camp in full war gear, ears straining for the sound of a bugle or the bellowing of a legate. In vain. No one gave them the order to go to Cassius's rescue. So at two in the afternoon, the watchers took matters into their own hands. Without orders, they unsheathed their swords, dropped from Brutus's ramparts and charged Antony's men as they tore down Cassius's inner defenses. They did well until Antony brought up some of his reserves and threw them into a line between his own men and Brutus's men, at a disadvantage because they were attacking uphill.

These men of Brutus's were the hoary old veteran Caesareans; the moment they saw their cause was hopeless, they gave up that fight and embarked upon another. There stood Octavian's small camp, so they turned and charged it, literally romped into it. It held those two reserve legions, the bulk of the baggage train and a few cavalrymen. No match for the attackers. Brutus's hoary old Caesarean veterans took the camp, killed those defenders who stood up to them, and proceeded into the main camp, where there were no defenders at all. Having thoroughly looted the Triumviral camps, at six o'clock they turned and went home in the darkness to Brutus's hill.

•      •      •

At the start of the conflict a huge pall of dust had arisen, so dry was the ground outside the marshlands; never was a battle so befogged as First Philippi. For which fact Octavian could give thanks, for it spared him the ignominy of being captured; feeling the asthma worsening, with Helenus's assistance he had gotten himself through the small gate and made his way to the marshes, where he could face the sea and breathe.

But for Cassius the opaque cloud meant total loss of contact with what was going on now that the swamp battle had gone all Antony's way. Even atop the hill inside his camp, he could see nothing. Brutus's camp, such a short distance away, was blotted from sight, utterly invisible. What he did know was that the enemy was penetrating his defenses along the Via Egnatia, and that his camp was inevitably doomed. Was Brutus under the same ferocious assault? Was Brutus's camp doomed too? He had to presume so, but he couldn't see.

“I'm going to try to find a vantage spot,” he said to Cimber and Quinctilius Varus, with him. “Get yourselves away, I think we're defeated. I think—but I don't know! Titinius, will you come with me? We might be able to see from Philippi itself.”

So at half after four in the afternoon, Cassius and Lucius Titinius mounted a pair of horses and rode out the back gate, around the rear of Brutus's hill, and came to the road that led up to Philippi's mesa. An hour later, with dusk closing in, they reached the heights above the dust cloud and looked down. To see that the light below had died and the pall lay like a higher level, flat, featureless plain.

“Brutus must be done for as well,” said Cassius to Titinius, his voice dull. “We've come so far, and all for nothing.”

“We still don't really know,” Titinius comforted.

Then a group of horsemen emerged from the brown fog, coming up the hill toward them at a gallop.

“Triumviral cavalry,” said Cassius, peering.

“They could as easily be ours—let me intercept them and find out,” said Titinius.

“No, they look like Germans to me. Don't go, please!”

“Cassius, we have German troopers too! I'm going.”

Kicking his horse in the ribs, Titinius turned and rode down to meet the newcomers. Cassius, watching, saw them surround his friend, take hold of him—the noise of cries drifted up to him.

“He's taken,” he said to Pindarus, his freedman who bore his shield, and dismounted, struggling to unbuckle his cuirass. “As a free man, Pindarus, you owe me nothing except my death.” His dagger came free of its sheath, the same knife he had twisted so cruely in Caesar's face—odd, all he could think of at this moment was how much he had hated Caesar at that moment. He held the dagger out to Pindarus. “Strike well,” he said, baring his left side for the blow.

Pindarus struck well. Cassius pitched forward to lie in the road; his freedman stared down, weeping, then scrambled on to his horse and spurred it away toward the town above.

But the German cavalry troopers belonged to the Liberators, and had come to tell Cassius that Brutus's men had stormed the Triumviral camp, won a victory. First Philippi was a draw. With Titinius in their midst, they came up the slope to find Cassius alone and dead, his horse nosing at his face. Tumbling from the saddle, Titinius ran to him, held him close and wept.

“Cassius, Cassius, it was good news! Why didn't you wait?”

There seemed no point in continuing to live if Cassius was dead. Titinius pulled his sword and fell on it.

•      •      •

Brutus had spent the whole of that frightful afternoon on top of his hill, trying vainly to see the field. He had no idea what was happening, had no idea that several of his legions had taken matters into their own hands and won a victory, had no idea what Cassius expected him to do. Nothing, was what he presumed, and

“Nothing, I presume” was what he told his legates, friends, all those who came badgering him to do something, do anything!

It was the disheveled and breathless Cimber who told him of his victory, the spoils his legions had dragged across the Ganga River whooping in jubilation.

“But—but Cassius didn't—didn't order that!” said Brutus with a stammer, eyes dismayed.

“They did it anyway, and good for them! Good for us too, you doleful stickler!” Cimber snapped, patience tried.

“Where's Cassius? The others?”

“Cassius and Titinius rode for Philippi town to see if they could discern what's happening in this fog. Quinctilius Varus thought all was lost, and fell on his sword. About the rest, I don't know. Oh, was there ever such a mess?”

Darkness fell, and slowly, very slowly, the dust cloud began to settle. No one on either side would be able to assess the results of this day until the morrow, so those Liberators who had survived it gathered to eat in Brutus's wooden house, bathed and changed into warm tunics.