The second day it rained with a steady drab intensity. Mist had rolled in from the sea and the mouth of the valley was obscured. By late afternoon visibility was reduced to less than fifty paces; only the nearest olive trees emerged twisting grotesquely from the thin edge of the mist. In the morning Septimus had said to me, 'What we both need, General, is rest. Sleep, turn about, eh, and keep guard.' I nodded; it seemed natural to abdicate command to the boy.
By evening I was refreshed, but hardly more confident that we could escape. Yet the long sleeps had done something to calm my nerves. Septimus, perhaps sensing my change of mood, talked freely for the first time. His conversation was mostly about his family. His father's holding (he said) was small; it could not possibly support the seven grown sons. Three of his brothers had taken off for Rome; but not him. He had seen something of their life; it wasn't for him. There was no work for them in Rome. They depended on the corn dole, and spent their time hanging about taverns hoping someone would buy them a drink, and their chief interests were lottery tickets and the Games. Two of them were married; 'To foreigners, would you believe it, General; no, the city's no life for a man. I mean, it degrades him,' he said. 'On the other hand, I have to tell you, General, that my father's lot is hardly any happier. It's true he works his fields, and there's some satisfaction in that, and we grow our own grain for bread, and make our own wine from our own grapes, and my mother's brother supplies us with oil and olives in exchange for wine; and we do have a small flock of sheep that my elder brother takes to the summer pastures. All that may sound all right, but it gets more difficult every year. You see, my dad can't compete in the markets with the big landowners and their ranches with slave labour. None of the small farmers can. They undercut our prices all the time. All that's no good. He'll have to sell out if things don't get better. He's more and more in debt every year. So I saw no future, and joined the army. Join the army and see the world, they say. Some world, eh, we're seeing now?'
The next morning the sky cleared and the sun shone in a sparkling world. My spirits lifted with the mist. I began to feel for the first time that we might escape. I even hobbled (being still a little lame) out of the cottage to the corner of the olive grove, from where one could see beyond the mouth of the valley and down to the coast road.
I must set down baldly what followed. As I gazed down to the plain with a new peace in my heart in the brittle beauty of that October morning, I was suddenly chilled. A troop of horse turned off the coast road and up the valley track. It was impossible that they should miss our farm; it was impossible that they should not see us in flight. Our security had proved fool's gold. These were my immediate certainties: I had lost.
I called out to Septimus. He ran towards me. I indicated what it was hardly necessary to indicate. 'Bring my sword,' I said. 'There's no use in fighting,' he said. 'No,' I said, 'there's no use in fighting. Bring my sword.'
He looked at me, but did not obey. I hobbled into the hut, swearing at him, and seized my weapon. I took it by the point and held it out to him. His hand closed round the hilt, but he looked past me. I knelt down before him and pulled my tunic away at the neck… 'Strike,' I said. Still he looked past me and did not move.
'Strike,' I cried again, near tears. My heart beat fast and I could feel myself beginning to tremble all over. 'Strike in the name of the Gods. Let me at least die a Roman death. Do you not see that I have no wish to fall into Pompey's hands, to be made a fool of and a mockery for all time? Strike, if you love me…'
But he threw down the sword and knelt beside me, and put his arms round me… 'General,' he said, 'you're not yourself. Listen,' he spoke very gently, yet with an urgency that came from the heart, 'I have believed in you. That's why I've done what I've done these last days. When you came to us by the camp-fire and talked of your star and what you would do for Italy, I believed you, and loved you for it. Are you telling me now it was all a lie? That you and your star are cheats too, like everything else? I won't do it, even if you weep and beg me' -(and I was weeping, I was shaking with sobs). 'If you're determined to do so, you must kill yourself, but I'll not promise to follow. I'll leave the job of killing me to others. I'll cling on to life' (and he hugged me tighter as if I was life myself) 'though if they find me by your dead body they'll think I've done it, and either slay me too to give themselves the credit or, who knows, reward me? Only I'd not want that sort of reward. Do you hear me?' he was shouting now. 'Be a man, General. You say you're sent to save Rome, and I believe you, even if you're greeting like a bairn now…'
We knelt there a moment, joined together. Then the gentleness returned to his voice, and he said,
'Come now, General, on your feet. Let's meet whatever fortune brings us, whether it be ill or whether it be good, like men. What happens after death is known to none, but all men I have heard talk on the matter agree that it is better to face the prospect of death with a cheerful countenance.'
His words renewed me. I pulled myself up, and took the cloth he passed me, and wiped my eyes.
'And with your star,' he said, 'we may survive whatever is in store for us.'
'That's all right,' I said, 'I'm myself again. I'll not forget what you have done for me today.'
The horsemen were close enough now for us to hear the horses' hooves and the clatter of harness. The troop halted when they saw us standing there. Then three or four trotted forward and again paused about fifty yards distant. The man in front turned in his saddle and called out, 'It's him, it's the General himself,' and they broke ranks and in a moment surrounded me. I looked up and saw Agrippa's face.
'Where the devil have you sprung from?' I called out. 'How have you happened on me?'
'Soldier's instinct,' he said, looking smug for he had often told me he possessed this, and I didn't. 'Are you all right?'
I glanced at Septimus: 'We're all right,' I said, 'thanks to this man here…'
You may wonder, my sons, that I can bring myself to tell this story, and tell it in such detail. It would have been easy to ignore it. The skirmish in which we were defeated was an unimportant episode in the scrambling war with Sextus Pompey. It was a little setback in a contest we could hardly fail to win in the end. There is nothing in the story which redounds to my credit. I lost my nerve; I behaved like a poltroon. I was embarrassed to see Agrippa, and could not meet his eye.
Yet I would be dishonest to omit mention of my failure of nerve and resolution, and I am trying to tell you (and posterity) the truth about myself. This was the one occasion in my life when my certainty of victory evaporated, and I found no defences within myself against fear and despair. I really wanted Septimus to kill me, and I was saved only by this farmboy's confidence in me. His fortitude and the happy chance of Agrippa's discovery of our refuge (and the horsemen might not have been Agrippa's; they might indeed have been Pompey's for he still controlled by far the greater part of the island) together reassured me that the Gods favoured my cause. I had henceforth no doubts.
What could I do with Septimus? I could not keep him by me, for he was a perpetual reminder of my weakness, and I feared lest I should grow to hate him. I sent him first to Livia bearing a letter in which I said simply that he had saved my life -1 could not bring myself to reveal to Livia to what straits I had been reduced – and should be suitably rewarded. Eventually we granted him farmlands and olive groves near the spring of Clitumnus. For some years he sent us a gift of oil every winter. Then the gifts ceased. I made enquiries, discovered he had got into debt, had been too proud or too ashamed to seek the help which I should certainly have given. The first reports said he had drifted into the city; but when I gave orders that search should be made for him there, I had no success. Later reports contradicted the first: he had hanged himself from his own lintel rather than see his land pass to his creditors. Strange and disturbing symmetry of life.
The war with Pompey was a bore and a distraction. Gradually, thanks to Agrippa's genius for innovation and the invention of a new device called a harapax – a grapnel shot from a catapult that enabled him to lock Pompey's ships to ours and deny him the advantages of mobility which his pirates' superior seamanship had hitherto given him – we wore him down. Pompey's heart gave way; he fled to the East and threw himself on Antony's mercy: a letter from Antony tells the rest:
Caesar: Pompey arrived here spluttering with fear and foaming at the mouth with indignation at what he called 'the barbarity of your methods'. I am sorry to say – you'll be heart-broken to hear it yourself, dear boy – that he regards you as a twister. I say 'regards' but I should really use the past tense. I've had enough of Pompey. We've tried everything in the way of co-operation, and it hasn't worked. Now you've beaten him and it really
