Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (44 page)

We do know that Marcus Furius grew to the age of ten without either mishap or sign of genius. (None, at least, has been recorded.) His mother was delivered of a girl four years after his birth, a sister whose name does not survive, though the testaments of his love for her are many. We have no reason to believe that there was disharmony in the household, though outside the walls, tyrants clashed and marched on Rome, and many citizens were slain by the executioner's sword. Within the walls of Marcus Furius's house, we might imagine, the only tempests that blew were those that trouble the child and are forgotten by the man: the tedium of tutors; a ball rolls beneath the dining couch and cannot be retrieved; an infant sister steals sweet fruits from the altar, for which one is wrongly smacked. Marcus Furius later said he loved his lessons, especially those that described mathematics, where there were laws, said he, that comforted him, and axioms, things could be known and trusted, as his mother's affection for him was a given, and his father's benign rule over the household was pleasant, just, and absolute.

When Marcus Furius was about ten, his father's house caught fire. In those days, the wiring that ran to the better houses of the Esquiliae was newly strung and hung upon the poles, exposed to the night and the gnawing of pests, and the lines often sparked and encouraged flame. Marcus awoke to find the roof of the house alight and the servants calling for water. As the season had been dry, there was little water in the cisterns and none in the
impluvium.
Everyone in the house ran through the chambers in confusion. The boy, standing in the atrium, quickly saw that the best course for all was to flee before the roofs collapsed in general ruin. He caught up his mother's hand and pulled her out of the house into the street.

At the time of this fire, the great Crassus, soon to be one of the most powerful and most avaricious men in Rome, was still gathering his wealth.

One of the means by which he made this fortune was by speculating in properties that were aflame.

No sooner had the smoke of the fire risen above the city than it was sighted by Crassus's slaves, who were posted hovering above the Palatine Hill to spy out such opportunities. They sounded a klaxon, and having warned Crassus below of the conflagration, they rowed toward the house in their galley, which was outfitted with water tanks and with spouts and funnels and taps for discharge.

By the time the young Marcus reached the street, the galley was above the house, drifting to a halt at a safe distance, its keel ruddy with reflected flame. The boy's father was in angry negotiation with wealthy Crassus, who had already arrived and was haggling over a price for which he would agree to squelch the flames. Crassus demanded two hundred thousand denarii before he would allow his slaves to open even the first spout.

Marcus Furius's father, seeing his house burning with all his possessions in it, pleaded that he could not pay such an amount, that such a fee would ruin him utterly, and that they lost time in arguing. Crassus informed him that it would be a further hundred denarii for each spigot used in dousing the fire.

Marcus Furius's father, who had seen the waxen death masks of his family, precious to their remembrance, melting as he fled, and knew that all of his books and his furniture were likely char, now was in a rage at Crassus's delay, and he said he would not pay a copper coin above one hundred thousand denarii.

It was at this point that Marcus realized that his sister was not with them.

A shriek went up among the servants, and inquiries were made. It was determined that Marcus's young sister, six years of age, was likely trapped in the women's quarters on the second floor. She had not been brought out of the house when the others fled. The house was now a mass of flame.

The girl's father pled with Crassus, and her mother screamed for help. Crassus stood with his arms folded and concluded, upon consideration that two hundred and fifty thousand denarii would not be an unfair price for the dousing of the fire and the saving of the moppet, if she had not already been consumed, howling.

Making noises of fear and rage and grief that were not human sounds, but animal, Marcus's father and mother ran into the burning house to save their child.

Through his megaphone, Crassus cautioned his slaves to wait.

The fire had now devoured all of the roof. It had spread even to the trees in the peristyle. Their tufts could be seen to burn above the wall, as if there were some new, cataclysmic season with its own foliage and fruit.

While Marcus watched, the house collapsed, the roofs hurled down into the atrium. The destruction was prodigious. A wall toppled in, and there was a powerful wind as the fire devoured even the air. His mother, his father, and his sister were gone.

Crassus addressed himself to the boy: "Your father was a fool not to accept my terms. What is a thousand fewer denarii, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, when weighed against life itself? What does wealth matter?"

Having said this, he watched the fire take its course. He was delighted to see that the next house had caught alight, and he called out to the neighbor an offer like the one he had just presented to Marcus's father, adding that the cost of hesitation was clearly great, as the example of the family Furius had just shown. The neighbor having agreed to his terms, to be repaid in a lifetime of debt and servitude, Crassus cried up to his galley, and they opened their nozzles, and at last the cooling, sweet water rained down upon those who watched and upon their habitations.

Before he left, Crassus saw that the boy remained, unmoving, before the ruins of his burning house. It is said that Crassus reached out and closed a silver coin in the boy's right hand, saying slyly, "I will buy the ruins of your house and the land it sits upon for a single denarius. Keep this coin, child. When you look upon it, think upon your father, and let it be a reminder to you of the value of money."

With that, he quit the scene.

This is the earliest tale we hear of Marcus Furius Medullinus and of his history.

We may imagine his sorrow, though he never spoke of it. Ovid, in his poem
The Artifice,
describes the boy walking through the frigid streets of Rome as the morning light breaks, with no one to comfort him,

Thinking of his sister

And how she would run to him, demanding

To climb him as if he were Mount Ossa

Or towering Pelion; and how, when she had

Arrived at his shoulders, she would clap

And bid him to run through the garden,

Which was a service he gladly performed,

Galloping so quickly at her command

That she screamed with delight for him to stop.

This reverie is, of course, nothing but a poet's sentimental concoction and cannot be verified. Nor should we believe the tale Ovid spins of the boy, later that morning, running up the steps to Crassus's front gate with murder in his little heart. Ovid says young Marcus Furius pounded upon the door, but the gatekeeper laughed at the little assailant and, when the boy would not cease with his homicidal clamor, sent out a slave to drag the weak child away and throw him in a ditch.

It behooves us to leave such imaginings where they belong — bid them farewell, and watch the retreat of those bright green eyes, fixed in their glare, peering out from the gutters at Crassus's
domus.

The poet may fabricate, but the historian can say only this: His parents and sister being dead, Marcus Furius appears to have attached himself to a lesser branch of the family, who were engaged in the technical trades. He was taken in by an unnamed member of that clan and, we may presume, shortly thereafter began working in the Guild of Mechanics, taking the adoptive agnomen
Machinator,
that is to say, "Engineer." He worked diligently to learn his art, and by the time he was twenty-one years of age, he had distinguished himself for his ingenuity, devising new swivels for the solar platters on the civic quinqueremes.

In these years, as Marcus Furius learned his trade, one mechanic among many, sleeping in the dormitories, dreaming dreams we cannot know, Crassus the Rich enjoyed an even more astonishing career. He enlarged his fortune by confiscating the property of the condemned during the Sullan purges. He acquired land in times of hardship and sold it later at great profit. It was said that at one time or another, he had owned most of the city of Rome; and it is still said that Crassus was one of the wealthiest men who ever walked upon the earth.

Not content with wealth, however, Crassus also sought glory and high office. He took upon his shoulders the scarlet cloak of generalship, and he paid out of his own purse for the army he led against the rebellion of the slave Spartacus. After many setbacks, he defeated Spartacus at Lucania and nailed the rebel slaves on crosses at intervals along the Appian Way, where their corpses could be seen for many years, withered to bone, a sign of Rome's might and its just anger. Having won that war, Crassus was elected consul, and so sat at the head of the Senate. In celebration, he held a feast in the streets of Rome, at which ten thousand tables were laden with food for a hundred thousand guests. With a liberal hand, he granted each family in Rome enough grain to last three months. He delighted in renown and command.

When Crassus had reached sixty years of age, he looked about him, and this is what he saw: he was one of the three most powerful men in all the republic, which is to say, in all the world.

And yet that was not enough, because this meant that there were still two others in rivalry with him. They were younger than he was and yet (he feared) surpassed him in ambition: they were Pompey the Great and Gaius Julius Caesar. These three together towered above the city like colossi.

Much has been written of their rivalry and many reasons put forward to explain their strife. But do men like this — men of such noble and restless spirit—require some specific reason to feel the sting of jealousy when they look upon another man as powerful as them? No, they do not. For such statesmen, there is no throne that stands high enough for them, no robe of a purple too deep; and in their secret hearts, they are like Alexander the Great, who, having fought his way to the very shores of the Indian Ocean, sat upon the sand and wept, because there was no more world to conquer.

In their rivalry, they concocted a plan. They divided the world into three between them, and each pledged to subdue his third, and so show off his prowess. Julius Caesar was granted command to go north across the Alps and subdue the Gauls. Pompey the Great demanded that the people should appoint him another consulship and allow him to rule over the west, the Spanish provinces. Crassus the Rich would receive a consulship, too, as well as the charge to head to the eastern deserts, where he would prove himself by conquering the Parthian Empire.

In this way, everyone was satisfied. Each of these three men thought,
Now I shall show myself greater than the other two.
In the Senate, people said, "It is for the best that they go far away from Rome, for right now they tussle like juvenile giants amid our roads and alleyways, arms locked about each other's necks, ankles tangling in aqueducts, legs kicking blindly at tiny temples, and we never know when a villa, a family, a lineage, a tribe will be crushed by a slip or a fall. Let them spread out across the world. Perhaps — who knows? — we shall be lucky, and all three shall be killed."

Such speeches as this could be heard thrumming along the wires that led through the city, by those who lurked close to the relay boxes and listened, whisking away the pigeons with impatient hand.

Though Crassus chose to take up the eastern generalship for glory, and though he went about the city boasting of his future triumphs, there were many who were unimpressed with his mission. The Par-thians, some scoffed, were no worthy opponent for a Roman hero, being desert barbarians who did not have the gift of flight. Even worse, some said, the Parthians had done Rome no injury. They had broken no treaty, nor invaded any territory claimed by the republic, and so there was no justification for a war against them. For these reasons, some said the war against the Parthians would be accursed.

When the time came for Crassus to gather his legions and transport them across the sea, he went, as was the custom, to the priests and soothsayers so that he could determine whether the powers almighty favored his mission. Members of the Senate as well as Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar all went to observe the reading of the lightning. At the temple, the civic soothsayer ran Promethean current through his own body so that he would be ecstatic. When he, screaming and twitching, recovered from the shock, he ran Promethean current on a silken belt through the twin metal heads of the Dioscuri, and he observed which way the lightning leaped. The bolt cracked from the left head to the right, and at that moment, in the same quadrant, a startled crow flew over, crying as if for vengeance.

"I fear," said the soothsayer, "that the gods will not smile upon this expedition."

Crassus, furious with the man, looked at the proud and haughty faces of his rivals. He saw that Caesar would not meet his eye, and Pompey actually smiled insolently at him. Crassus declared that he would make an immediate sacrifice of a bull and see if this would please Olympus.

He dedicated the bull to Phoebus Apollo, since he and his army would require the sun's favor to shine down upon his legions, to expand the aetherial sacs of the war engines, and to keep the triremes aloft. The priest slit the bull and pulled out its entrails, delivering them in tangled fistfuls to Crassus. Crassus took them up, but they slithered from his hands and landed in the dirt. It was a terrible omen.

A murmur of horror went up from the patricians who had assembled.

"Do not fear," Crassus called out to them. He added, as if in jest, "This means nothing—j ust the slip of an old man. Know this: I will hold my sword fast enough in my hand when we confront the Parthians."