Chapter 5 — The Triumph Reaches Cardena

The news came up the valley twice that summer, once free and once under seal, and the two arrivals taught Marcellus more about his district than either taught him about Rome.

The free version came first. It came up on a wool-barge, whose crew had it at Hispalis from a wine-boat, whose master had it from a coaster out of the strait; and by the time it stepped ashore at Portus Albus it had shed whatever it had weighed at starting and taken on ballast of another sort, and it went up the valley road faster than any courier the fiscus ever paid, because every man who carried it was paid in the telling. Marcellus had it at the second hour of a market morning, from Philon, who had it at the door from the oil-broker's boy, and who delivered it in the flat, careful voice he kept for unattested copies: the Emperor's son had triumphed at Rome over the Jews — the son alone, riding in gold, the father watching from a chair like old Saturn — and in honor of it the Emperor had forgiven the provinces their arrears. Had ordered the debt-rolls carried out of the temple of Saturn and burned in the Forum, said the wool-crew. Had forgiven the Spains and the Gauls but not Africa, said the carters by noon. Had forgiven all that was owed from before the burning of the Capitol and nothing since, said, by evening, certain men who claimed cousins in the procurator's offices. On the particulars the valley was flexible, and improved them hourly. On the marrow of it the valley had settled at once, with the speed of a market finding a price: something owed was now not owed. That part was believed instantly, having been wanted so long.

By the next market he could have entered the rumor's work in a register, had there been a form for it. The quaestor's man, sent round to press the summer payments, came back from doors that had been anxious a market past and were now serene. Two of the men of the middle couch — he had it from three directions before the second hour — had drunk the Emperor's health in the forum, largely, at their creditors' expense. A payment promised to the town's chest for the Ides was deferred, with compliments, pending confirmation of what all men were saying; and the letter of deferral was, as ever in Cardena, the best-made thing in the whole affair. Prices moved a little, as prices will when a great sum of money changes its mind about existing: nothing dramatic; a loosening; an easing of grips. The town owed less, the town felt, than it had owed at the last market, and the town had felt its way to this through no document whatever.

The quaestor himself came to the tabularium on the third day, carrying his anxiety the way he carried keys, wrapped and with ceremony, and asked the commissioner what was true.

"Nothing has come under seal," Marcellus said. "When it comes, it will come to your table and mine together."

"The ordo hopes the commissioner might say a word in the forum. Men are putting off what they owe."

"If I deny it with nothing in my hand," Marcellus said, "I am only a rumor in a toga. We will wait for the writing."

But he found the thing itself worth study, and studied it, those eighteen days, the way he studied everything: as a document. It was a document with no author and every man for its copyist, and each copy was corrected — this was the heart of it — not toward the original but toward its readers' hope. You could not summon it, could not depose it, could not put your seal on it or anyone's; it outran every courier on the road and paid no toll at any bench; and the market obeyed it as it obeyed no edict he had ever seen published. Somewhere at Corduba, he supposed, clerks were preparing the true account at a clerk's pace. Meanwhile the false one governed, cheerfully, a hundred miles of river.

The truth came eighteen days behind the lie, by the ordinary courier, in two letters.

The procurator's was brief, and the relevant clause was the last: The Emperor and Titus Caesar have triumphed together over Judaea, one day, father and son, and the city, they write, has never seen the like. You will hear it said the arrears of the provinces are forgiven. They are not. Nothing was burned, nothing remitted, and the talk at Rome runs all the other way: the Emperor recovers, resumes, and calls in; he has said in the Senate, they report, what sum the world must find to set the state on its feet — forty thousand times a thousand thousand sesterces; a sum I had rather report than collect. Whoever in your district has deferred a payment on the strength of the Forum's bonfire may now pay twice: the sum, and the embarrassment. Collect both.

The second letter was from Porcia, and he read it twice by lamp and once more standing at the window, and kept it.

The triumph I had from a man of my father's house who was in Rome for it and stood the whole day. The two of them came in together, the father and the son, and the younger son rode beside on a white horse. They carried the treasure of the temple of the Jews: a table of gold; a lampstand of gold, made not as ours are made, seven-branched; and the books of their law, carried like a captive. There were towers drawn on wagons, painted with the war, so that the war itself walked through Rome and could be read as it went. At the day's end they did with the enemy's general what is always done, at the prison, and the shout, he says, was heard across the river. They speak of a temple to Peace, to be raised out of the war's gold. — Your son has cut two teeth and used them on the nurse, which I enter under gains. The olives look fair. The hill parcel is not sold and will not be while I hold the seal. Come back to us advanced, but come back. — P.

He sat with that letter a long time after the lamp needed trimming, and let himself feel what it was no use pretending he did not feel. Two years ago the Capitol had burned. Four emperors in one year had eaten each other's armies, and the world's whole revenue with them, and he had stood at his father's tomb in that year believing — needing to believe — that the empire was not the emperors, and had had precious little evidence for it beyond the belief itself. Now the account was closing. The war ended; the treasure carried in order through the middle of the city, weighed, displayed, entered; the enemy's general paid out at the old window; and a temple to be built to Peace out of the balance, as a man who has settled a great and doubtful account might build a shrine with what the settling left over. Say what you liked of triumphs — his father had said a good deal, none of it reverent — this one was an accounting of the world, done publicly, in gold, and it said: the disorder is paid for; the columns close; we begin again from a true total. He was proud. He noticed the pride, examined it as he examined everything, and found that for once it was exactly what it claimed to be; and he wished — the wish surprised him with its weight — that there had been one man in that town he could have said so to.

The correction ran down the valley in a day, and was received as corrections of good news are received everywhere: as a small bereavement. The deferred payment arrived at the quaestor's chest with a second letter more beautiful than the first. The healths of the middle couch were not drunk again. By the following market the Forum's bonfire had never happened; no one had believed it; several men had said from the first, they now said, that it could not be true; and the valley, which had believed it to a man for eighteen days, agreed with them all warmly.

The ordo, having no remission to celebrate, voted to celebrate the victory. Silo rose to propose it and was, for once, brief, because his feeling was real: a day of thanksgiving, a bull to Jupiter for the Emperor and his sons, the town's loyalty made visible — and an inscription, he added, to stand by the temple door, so that the visible might also be permanent. Memmius Vetus, from his bench, agreed to the bull. "A bull is owed and a bull will answer," he said. "As for letters cut in stone, save them, duovir, for the charter you are always about to be sent." The laughter was of the safe amount. The bull carried; the inscription did not; Marcellus, invited to attend as the district's guest, watched the two factions vote a piety between them the way two partners split a fee, and entered the proportions in his private register that evening.

The day itself came in fine. The altar stood before the old temple above the forum, the ordo turned out in wool in the July sun — they took the gods as seriously as they had taken him, which he chose to find creditable — and the bull went down well and cleanly at the first blow, which everyone was pleased with and nobody quite said so. The smoke stood straight up. Silo, serving the altar as his office asked, spoke the formula in his council-chamber voice, the Emperor's names going by like barges, and Marcellus, standing where they had put him, at the front, in the place of honor he had learned to occupy the way you occupy a boundary, looked not at the altar but at the crowd, because the crowd was his work now, whether either of them liked it or not.

The town had come. The town stood decently, bareheaded, quiet at the right moments. And the town watched its Emperor's triumph the way the boy with the goats had watched Marcellus himself on the valley road in April: fully, patiently, without fear or hope that it concerned them — the way one watches weather. A thing that comes up from far off, does what it does, and passes, leaving the field better or worse but in any case the field. The men nearest him were farmers on a rare town day; he could see them noting the sky over the altar smoke, pricing the wind. The children watched the bull with a butcher's interest. Somewhere behind the colonnade the first stalls were already opening, softly, out of respect, like men whispering in a sickroom about the price of wool.

Only Silo, at the altar, wore what Marcellus was feeling, and Silo's version of it had a petition folded inside; his Rome was a door, and his pride had an address. There was no one else. Standing in the smell of blood and incense, in the town he was slowly taking apart on paper, Marcellus understood — not as grievance, merely as an entry, the kind of finding a man notes in passing and reads again years later with different eyes — that of the two thousand people in that forum, the number to whom Rome was a faith and not a weather stood, on a generous count, at two; and one of the two was for sale in the ordinary municipal way; and the other one was himself.

The smoke bent at last, when the breeze off the river found it, and went down the valley — the way the valley bent everything, toward the water, toward the port, toward the sea that carried everything away. By the sixth hour the altar was cold and the market was loud. The town went back to its prices.

Marcellus went back to the tabularium, where the columns waited, and found that he minded; and there being, in all the forms he was master of, no column for the minding, he did not enter it anywhere. That was the summer the empire came up his valley, late, wrong, and then right; and it was received, entire, in eighteen days of hope, one bull, and an afternoon; and the only man it had reached to the bone was the one sent to collect its arrears.