Julius Caesar and the Werewolf

As to Caesar's health, there seems to me no cause for alarm. The symptoms you mention are, indeed, visible, though perhaps a little theatricized by your informant. Caesar has always been a whirlwind of energy and for that reason subject to nervous attacks, sudden tempers, funks and so forth. When I was young, I confidently put it down to excess of blood, a condition complicated (said I) by powerful intermittent ejections of bile; but phlebotomy agitates instead of quieting him, sad to say (sad for my diagnosis), and his habitual exhilaration, lately increased, makes the bile hypothesis hogwash. I speak lightly of these former opinions of mine, but you can hardly imagine what labor I've put into the study of this man, scribbling, pondering, tabulating, while, one after another, the chickens rise to confront a new day and my candles gutter out. All to no avail, but pride's for people with good digestion. I bungle along, putting up with myself as best I can. (You'll forgive a little honest whining.) No man of science was ever presented with a puzzle more perplexing and vexatious than this Caesar, or with richer opportunity for observing the subject of his inquiry. He's interested in my work--in fact, follows it closely. He allows me to sit at his elbow or tag along wherever I please--an amusing spectacle, Caesar striding like a lion down some corridor, white toga flying, his black-robed physician leaping along like a spasm behind him on one good leg, one withered one.

In any event, at the age of 55, his animal spirits have never been more vigorous. He regularly dictates to four scribes at a time--jabber, jabber, jabber, sentences crackling like lightning in a haystack, all of his letters of the greatest importance to the state. Between sentences, to distract his impatience, he reads from a book. Or so he'd have us think, and I'm gullible. It saves time, I find, and in the end makes no big difference. His baldness more annoys him, it seems to me, than all the plots of the senators. For years, as you know, he combed his straggling blond hairs straight forward, and nothing pleased him more than the people's decision to award him the crown of laurel, which he now wears everywhere except, I think, to bed. A feeble ruse and a delight to us all. The reflected light of his bald pate glows like a sun on the senate-chamber ceiling.

His nervous energy is not significantly increased, I think, from the days when I first knew him, many years ago, in Gaul. I was transferred to the legion for some disservice to the state--monumental, I'm sure, but it's been 35 years, and I've told the story so many times, in so many slyly self-congratulating versions, that by now I've forgotten the truth of it. I was glad of the transfer. I was a sea doctor before. I don't mind telling you, water scares the pants off me.

I remember my first days with Caesar clear as crystal. He struck me at once as singular almost to the point of freakishness. He was taller than other men, curiously black-eyed and blond-headed, like two beings in one body. But what struck me most was his speed, both physical and mental. He could outrun a deer, outthink every enemy he met--and he was, besides, very strong. We all knew why he fought so brilliantly. He was guilty of crimes so numerous, back in Rome, from theft to assault to suspicion of treason, that he couldn't afford to return there as a common citizen. (It was true of most of us, but Caesar was the worst.) By glorious victories, he could win public honors and appointments and, thus, stand above the law, or at least above its meanest kick. Whatever his reasons--this I have to give to him--no man in history, so far as it's recorded, ever fought with such effectiveness and passion or won such unshakable, blind-pig devotion from his men. He was not then the strategist he later became, killing a few left-handed and blindfolded, then persuading the rest to surrender and accept Roman citizenship. In those days, he painted the valleys red, weighed down the trees with hanging men, made the rivers run sluggish with corpses. He was always in the thick of it, like a rabid bitch, luring and slaughtering seven at a time. His body, it seems to me, runs by nature at an accelerated tempo: His sword moves much faster than a normal man's. And he's untiring. At the end of a 12 hour day's forced march, when the whole encampment was finally asleep, he used to pace like a half-starved jaguar in his tent or sit with a small fish-oil lamp, writing verse. I wonder if he may not have some unknown substance in common with the violent little flea.

Through all his wars, Caesar fought like a man unhinged, but I give you my word, he's not crazy. He has the falling sickness, as you know. A damned nuisance but, for all the talk, nothing more. All his muscles go violent, breaking free of his will, and he has a sudden, vividly real sense of falling into the deepest abyss, a fall that seems certain never to end, and no matter what servants or friends press around him (he's dimly aware of presences, he says), there's no one, nothing, he can reach out to. From an outward point of view, he's unconscious at these times, flailing, writhing, snapping his teeth, dark eyes bulging and rolling out of sight, exuding a flood of oily tears; but from what he reports, I would say he is not unconscious but in some way transformed, as if seized for the moment by the laws of a different set of gods. (I mean, of course, "forces" or "biological constraints.")

No doubt it adds to the pressure on him that he's a creature full of pangs and contradictions. Once, in Gaul, we were surprised by an ambush. We had moved for days through dangerous, twilit forest and had come, with relief, to an area of endless yellow meadow, where the grass reached only to our knees, so that we thought we were safe. Suddenly, out of the grass all around us leaped an army of women. Caesar cried, "Save yourselves! We're not in Gaul to butcher females!" In the end, we killed them all. (I, as Caesar's physician, killed no one.) I trace Caesar's melancholy streak to that incident. He became, thereafter, moody and uneasy, praying more than necessary and sometimes pausing abruptly to glance all around him, though not a shadow had stirred. It was not the surprise of the ambush, I think. We'd been surprised before. The enemy was young and naked except for weapons and armor, and they were singularly stubborn: They gave us no choice but to kill them. I watched Caesar himself cut one in half, moving his sword more slowly than usual and staring fixedly at her face.

The melancholy streak has been darkened, in my opinion, by his years in Rome. His work load would rattle a stone Apollo--hundreds of letters to write every day, lines of suppliants stretching half a mile, each with his grievance large or small and his absurd, ancient right to spit softly into Caesar's ear--not to mention the foolish disputes brought in to him for settlement. Some starving scoundrel steals another scoundrel's newly stolen pig, the whole ramshackle slum is up in arms, and for the public good the centurions bring all parties before Caesar. Hours pass, lamps are lit, accuser and denier rant on, banging tables, giving the air fierce kicks by way of warning. Surely a man of ordinary tolerance would go mad--or go to sleep. Not our Caesar. He listens with the look of a man watching elderly people eat, then eventually points to one or the other or both disputants, which means the person's to be dragged away for hanging, and then, with oddly meticulous care, one hand over his eyes, he dictates to a scribe the details of the case and his dispensation, with all his reasonings. "Admit the next," he says, and folds his hands.

And these are mere gnats before the hurricane. He's responsible, as they say when they're giving him some medal, for the orderly operation of the largest, richest, most powerful empire the world has ever known. He must rule the senate, with all its constipated, red-nosed, wheezing factions--every bleary eye out for insult or injury, every liver-spotted hand half closed around a dagger. And he must show at least some semblance of interest in the games, escape for the bloodthirst of the citizenry. He watches the kills, man or lion or whatever, without a sign of emotion, but I'm onto him. He makes me think of my days at sea, that still, perfect weather before a plank buster.

All this work he does without a particle of help, not a single assistant except the four or five scribes who take dictation and the slave who brings him parchment, ink and fresh oil or sandals--unless one counts, as I suppose one must, Marc Antony: a loyal friend and willing drudge but, as all Rome knows, weak as parsley. (He's grown fat here in the city and even less decisive than he was on the battlefield. I've watched him trying to frame letters for Caesar, tugging his jaw over decisions Caesar would make instantly.) In short, the life of a Caesar is donkeywork and unquestionably dangerous to health. I've warned and warned him. He listens with the keenest interest, but he makes no changes. His wary glances to left and right become more frequent, more noticeable and odd. He has painful headaches, especially at executions, and now and then he sleepwalks, looking for something under benches and in every low cupboard. I find his heartbeat irregular, sometimes wildly rushing, sometimes all but turning around and walking backward, as if he were both in a frenzy and mortally bored.

Some blame the death of his daughter for all this. I'm dubious, though not beyond persuasion. That Julia was dear to his heart I don't deny. When she was well, he was off with her every afternoon he could steal from Rome's business, teaching her to ride, walking the hills with her, telling her fairy tales of gods disguised as people or people transformed into celestial constellations or, occasionally--the thing she liked best, of course--recounting his adventures. I remember how the girl used to gaze at him such times, elbows on her knees, hands on her cheeks, soft, pale hair cascading over her shoulders and down her long back--it made me think of those beautiful altar-lit statues in houses of prostitution. (I mean no offense. Old men are by nature prone to nastiness.) She was an intelligent girl, always pursing her lips and frowning, preparing to say, "Tut, tut." He taught her knots and beltwork and the nicer of the soldiers' songs, even taught her his special tricks of swordsmanship--because she nagged him to it (you know how daughters are)--and, for all I know, the subtleties of planning a campaign against India and China. I never saw a father more filled with woe than Caesar when the sickness first invaded her. He would rush up and down, far into the night (I never saw him take even a nap through all that period), and he was blistering to even the most bent-backed, senile and dangerous senators, to say nothing of whiny suppliants and his poor silent wife. His poems took an ugly turn--much talk of quicksand and maws and the like--and the bills he proposed before the senate weren't much prettier; and then there was the business with the gladiators. But when Julia died, he kissed her waxy forehead and left the room and, so far as one could see, that was that. After the great funeral so grumbled about in certain quarters, he seemed much the same man he'd seemed before, not just externally but also internally, so far as my science could reach. His blood was very dark but, for him, normal; his stools were ordinary; his seizures no more tedious than usual.

So what can have brought on this change you inquire of and find so disturbing--as do I, of course? (At my age, nothing's as terrible as might have been expected.) I have a guess I might offer, but it's so crackpot I think I'd rather sit on it. I'll narrate the circumstances that prompt it; you can draw your own conclusions.

•

Some days ago, March first, shortly after nightfall, as I was washing out my underthings and fixing myself for bed, two messengers appeared at my door with the request--polite but very firm--that I at once get back into my clothes and go to Caesar. I naturally--after some perfunctory sniveling--obeyed. I found the great man alone in his chamber, staring out the one high window that overlooks the city. It was a fine scene, acted with great dignity, if you favor that sort of thing. He did not turn at our entrance, though only a man very deep in thought could have failed to notice the brightness of the torches as their light set fire to the wide marble floor with its inlay of gold and quartz. We waited. It was obvious that something was afoot. I was on guard. Nothing interests Caesar, I've learned, but Caesar. Full-scale invasion of the Empire's borders would not rouse in him this banked fire of restlessness--fierce playfulness, almost--except insofar as its repulsion might catch him more honor. There was a scent in the room, the smell of an animal, I thought at first, then corrected myself: a blood smell. "Show him," Caesar said quietly, still not turning.

I craned about and saw, even before my guides had inclined their torches in that direction, that on the high marble table at the far end of the room some large, wet, misshapen object had been placed, then blanketed. I knew instantly what it was, to tell the truth, and my eyes widened. They have other doctors; it was the middle of the night! I have bladder infections and prostate trouble; I can hardly move my bowels without a clyster! When the heavy brown cloth was solemnly drawn away, I saw that I'd guessed right. It was, or had once been, a tall, bronze-skinned man, a slave, probably rich and admired in whatever country he'd been dragged from. His knees were drawn up nearly to his pectorals and his head rolled out oddly, almost severed at the neck. One could guess his stature only from the length of his arms and the shiny span exposed, caked with blood, from knee to foot. One ear had been partially chewed away.

"What do you make of it?" Caesar asked. I heard him coming toward me on those dangerous, swift feet, then heard him turn, pivoting on one hissing sandal, moving back quickly toward the window. I could imagine his nervous, impatient gestures, though I did not look: gestures of a man angrily talking to himself, bullying, negotiating--rapidly opening and closing his fists or restlessly flipping his right hand, like a sailor paying out coil after coil of line.

"Dogs--" I began.

"Not dogs," he said sharply, almost before I'd spoken. I felt myself grow smaller, the sensation in my extremities shrinking toward my heart. I put on my mincing, poor-old-man expression and pulled at my beard, then reached out gingerly to move the head, examining more closely the clotted ganglia where the thorax had been torn away. Whatever had killed him had done him a kindness. He was abscessed from the thyroid to the vena cava superior. When I looked over at Caesar, he was back at the window, motionless again, the muscles of his arm and shoulder swollen as if clamping in rage. Beyond his head, the night had grown dark. It had been clear, earlier, with a fine, full moon; now it was heavily overcast and oppressive--no stars, no moon, only the lurid glow, here and there, of a torch. In the light of the torches the messengers held, one on each side of me, Caesar's eyes gleamed, intently watching.

"Wolves," I said, with conviction.

He turned, snapped his fingers several times in quick succession--in the high, stone room, it was like the sound of a man clapping--and almost the same instant, a centurion entered, leading a girl. Before she was through the archway, she was down on her knees, scrambling toward Caesar as if to kiss his toes and ankles before he could behead her. Obviously, she did not know his feeling of tenderness, almost piety, toward young women. At her approach Caesar turned his back to the window and raised his hands, as if to ward her off. The centurion, a young man with blue eyes, like a German's, jerked at her wrist and stopped her. Almost gently, the young man put his free hand into her hair and tipped her face up. She was perhaps 16, a thin girl with large, dark, flashing eyes full of fear.

Caesar said, never taking his gaze from her, "This young woman says the wolf was a man."

I considered for a moment, only for politeness. "Not possible," I said. I limped nearer to them, bending for a closer look at the girl. If she was insane, she showed none of the usual signs--depressed temples, coated tongue, anemia, inappropriate smiles and gestures. She was not a slave, like the corpse on the table--nor of his race, either. Because of her foreignness, I couldn't judge what her class was, except that she was a commoner. She rolled her eyes toward me, a plea like a dog's. It was hard to believe that her terror was entirely an effect of her audience with Caesar.

Caesar said, "The Goths have legends, doctor, about men who at certain times turn into wolves."

"Ah," I said, noncommittal.

He shifted his gaze to meet mine, little fires in his pupils. I shrank from him--visibly, no doubt. Nothing is stupider or more dangerous than toying with Caesar's intelligence. But he restrained himself. "'Ah!'" he mimicked with awful scorn and, for an instant, smiled. He looked back at the girl, then away again at once; then he strode over to the corpse and stood with his back to me, staring down at it, or into it, as if hunting for its soul, his fists rigid on his hips to keep his fingers from drumming. "You know a good deal, old friend," he said, apparently addressing myself, not the corpse. "But possibly not everything!" He raised his right arm, making purposely awkward loops in the air with his hand, and rolled his eyes at me, grinning with what might have been malice, except that he's above that. Impersonal rage at a universe too slow for him. He said, "Perhaps, flopping up and down through the world like a great, clumsy bat, trying to spy out the secrets of the gods, you miss a few things? Some little trifle here or there?"

I said nothing, merely pressed my humble palms together. To make perfectly (continued on page 86)Julius Caesar(continued from page 78) clear my dutiful devotion, I limped over to stand at his side, looking with him, gravely, at the body. Moving the leg--there was as yet no rigor mortis--I saw that the body had been partly disemboweled. The spleen was untouched in the intestinal disarray; the liver was nowhere to be seen. I could feel the girl's eyes on my back. Caesar's smile was gone now, hovering just below the surface. He had his hand on the dead man's foot, touching it as if to see if bones were broken or as if the man were a friend, a fellow warrior.

He lowered his voice. "This isn't the first," he said. "We've kept the matter quiet, but it's been happening for months." His right hand moved out like a stealthy animal, anticipating his thought. His voice grew poetic. (It was a bad idea, that laurel crown.) "A sudden black shadow, a cry out of the darkness, and in the morning--in some alley or in the middle of a field or huddled against some rotting door in the tanners' district--a corpse ripped and mauled past recognition. The victims aren't children, doctor; they're grown men, sometimes women." He frowned. The next instant, his expression became unreadable, as if he were mentally reaching back, abandoning present time, this present body. Six, maybe seven heartbeats passed; and then, just as suddenly, he was here with us again, leaning toward me, oddly smiling. "And then tonight," he said, "this treasure!" With a gesture wildly theatrical--I saw myself at the far end of the forum, at the great door where the commoners peer in--he swept his arm toward the girl. She looked, cowering, from one to the other of us, then up at the soldier.

Caesar crossed to her; I followed part way. "He was half man, half wolf; is that your story?" He bent over her, pressing his hands to his knees as he asked it. Clearly he meant to seem fatherly, but his body was all iron, the muscles of his shoulders and arms locked and huge.

After a moment, she nodded.

"He wore clothes like a man?"

Again she nodded, this time looking warily at me. She had extraordinary eyes, glistening, dark, bottomless and very large, perhaps the first symptom of a developing exophthalmic goiter.

Caesar straightened up and turned to the centurion. "And what was this young woman doing when you found her?"

"Dragging the body, sir." One side of his mouth moved, the faintest suggestion of a smile. "It appeared to us she was hiding it."

Now Caesar turned to me, his head inclined to one side, like a lawyer in court. "And why would she be doing that?"

At last the girl's terror was explicable.

•

I admired the girl for not resisting us. She knew, no doubt--all Romans know--that torture can work wonders. Although I've never been an optimist, I like to believe it was not fear of torture that persuaded her but the certain knowledge that whatever sufferings she might put herself through, she would in the end do as we wished. She had a curious elegance for a girl of her station. Although she walked head ducked forward, as all such people do, and although her gait was odd--long strides, feet striking flat, like an Egyptian's--her face showed the composure and fixed resolve one sometimes sees on statues, perhaps some vengeful, endlessly patient Diana flanked by her hounds. Although one of the centurions in our company held the girl's elbow, there seemed no risk that she would try to run away. Caesar, wearing a dark hood and mantle now, kept even with her or sometimes moved a little ahead in his impatience. The three other centurions and I came behind, I in great discomfort, wincing massively at every right-foot lurch but, for all that, watching everything around me, especially the girl, with sharp attention. It grew darker and quieter as we descended into the slums. The sky was still overcast, so heavily blanketed one couldn't even guess in which part of the night the moon hung. Now and then, like some mysterious pain, lightning would bloom and move deep in the clouds, giving them features and shapes for a moment, and we'd hear a low rumble; then blackness would close on us deeper than before. The girl, too, seemed to mind the darkness. Every so often, as we circled downward, I would see her lift and turn her head, as if she were trying to find her bearings.

No one was about. Nothing moved except now and then a rat researching garbage or scampering along a gutter, or a chicken stirring in its coop as we passed, its spirit troubled by bad dreams. In this part of town, there were no candles, much less torches--and just as well: The whole section was a tinderbox. The buildings were three and four stories high, leaning out drunkenly over the street or against one another like beggars outside a temple, black, rotten wood that went shiny as intestines when the lightning glowed, walls patched with hides and daubs of mud, straw and rotten hay packed in tightly at the crooked foundations. The only water was the water in the streets or in the river invisible in the darkness below us, poisonously inching under bridge after bridge toward the sea. When I looked back up the hill between lightning blooms, I could no longer make out so much as an arch of Caesar's palace or the firm, white mansions of the rich--only a smoky luminosity red under the clouds. The street was airless, heavy with the smell of dead things and urine. Every door and shutter was unhealthily closed tight.

We progressed more slowly now, barely able to see one another. I cannot say what we were walking on; it was slippery and gave underfoot. I was feeling cross at Caesar's refusal to use torches; but he was the crafty old warrior, not I. Once, with a clatter I at first mistook for thunder, some large thing rushed across the street in front of us, out of darkness and in again--a man, a donkey, some rackety demon--and we all stopped. No one spoke; then Caesar laughed. We resumed our walk.

Minutes later, the girl stopped without a word. We had arrived.

The man was old. He might have been sitting there, behind his table in the dark, for centuries. It was not dark now. As soon as the hide door was tightly closed, Caesar had tipped back his hood, reached into his cloak past his heavy iron sword and brought out candles, which he gave to two centurions to light and hold; the room was far too confined for torches. The other two centurions waited outside; even so, there was not much room. The man behind the table was bearded, not like a physician but like a foreigner--a great white-silver beard that flicked out like fire in all directions. His hair was long, unkempt, his eyebrows bushy; his blurry eyes peered out as if from deep in a cave. Purple bruises fell in chevrons from just under his eyes into his mustache. If he was surprised or alarmed, he showed no sign, merely sat--stocky, firmly planted--behind his square table, staring straight ahead, not visibly breathing, like a man waiting in the underworld. The girl sat on a low stool, her back against the wall, between her father and the rest of us. She gazed at her knees in silence. Her face was like that of an actress awaiting her entrance, intensely alive, showing no expression.

The apartment, we saw as the light seeped into it, was a riddle. Although in the poorest section of the city, it held a clutter of books, and the furniture, though sparse, was elaborately carved and solid; it would bring a good price in the markets that specialize in things outlandish. Herbs hung from the rafters, only a few of them known to me. Clearly it wasn't poverty or common ignorance that had brought these people here. Something troubled my nostrils, making the hair on the back of my (continued on page 174)Julius Caesar(continued from page 86) neck rise--not the herbs or the scent of storm in the air but something else: the six-week smell of penned animals in the hold of a ship, it came to me at last. That instant, a terrific crash of thunder struck, much nearer than the rest, making all of us, even Caesar, jump--all, that is, but the bearded old man. I heard wind sweep in, catching at the ragged edges of things, moving everything that would move.

The first indication that the old man was aware of us--or, indeed, aware of anything--came when Caesar inclined his head to me and said, "Doctor, it's close in here. Undo the window." The bearded man's mouth opened as if prepared to object--his teeth gleamed yellow--and his daughter's eyes flew wide; then both, I thought, gave way, resigned themselves. The man's beard and mustache became one again, and the flicker of life sank back out of his face. I, too, had certain small reservations. The only window in the room, its shutters now rattling and tugging, was the one behind the bearded man's right shoulder; and though he seemed not ferocious--he behaved like a man under sedation, in fact, his eyelids heavy, eyes filmed over--I did not relish the thought of moving nearer to a man who believed he could change into a wolf. Neither did I much like Caesar's expression. I remembered how once, halting his army, he'd sent three men into a mountain notch to find out whether they drew fire.

I made--cunning old fart that I am--the obvious and inevitable choice. I hobbled to the window, throwing my good leg forward and hauling in the bad one, making a great show of pitiful vulnerability, my face a heart-rending mask of profoundest apology--I unfastened the latches, threw the shutters wide and hooked them, then ran like a child playing sticks in the ring back to Caesar. To my horror, Caesar laughed. Strange to say, the bearded man, gloomier than Saturn until this moment, laughed, too. I swung around like a billy goat to give him a look. Old age, he should know, deserves respect or, at least, mercy--not really, of course; but I try to get one or the other if I can.

"He keep clear.... werewolf," the bearded man said. His speech was slurred, his voice like the creakiest hinge in Tuscany. He tapped his finger tips together as if in slowed-down merriment. The night framed in the window behind him was as dense and black as ever but alive now, roaring and banging. Caesar and the two centurions laughed with the old man as if there were nothing strange at all in his admission that, indeed, he was a werewolf. The girl's face was red, whether with anger or shame I couldn't guess. For an instant, I was mad as a hornet, suspecting they'd set up this business as a joke on me; but gradually, my reason regained the upper hand. Take it from an old man who's seen a few things: It's always a mistake to assume that anything has been done for you personally, even evil.

The world flashed white and the loudest crash of thunder yet stopped their laughter and, very nearly, my heart. Now rain came pouring down like a waterfall, silver-gold where the candlelight reached it, a bright sheet blowing away from us, violently hissing. The girl had her hands over her ears. The werewolf smiled, uneasy, as if unsure what was making all the noise.

Now that we were all on such friendly terms, we introduced ourselves. The man's name was Vodfiet--one of those northern names that have no meaning. When he held out his leaden hand to Caesar, Caesar thoughtfully bowed and looked at it but did not touch it. I, too, looked, standing a little behind Caesar and to his left. The man's fingernails were thick yellow and carved with ridges, like old people's toenails, and stranger yet, the lines of the palm--what I could see of them--were like the scribbles of a child who has a vague sense of letters but not of words. It was from him that the animal smell came, almost intolerably rank, up close, even with the breeze from the window. I'd have given my purse to get the palps of my fingers into his cranium, especially the area--as close as I could get--of the pallium prolectus. Preferably after he was dead.

"Strange," Caesar said, gently stroking the sides of his mouth, head bowed, shoulders rigid, looking from the werewolf to me, then back. Caesar seemed unnaturally alert, yet completely unafraid or else indifferent--no, not indifferent: on fire, as if for some reason he thought he'd met his match. The fingers of his left hand drummed on the side of his leg. He said, with the terrible coy irony he uses on senators, "You seem not much bothered by these things you do."

The werewolf sighed, made a growllike noise, then shrugged and tipped his head, quizzical. He ran his tongue over his upper teeth, a gesture we ancients know well. We're authorities on rot. We taste it, insofar as we still taste, with every breath.

"Come, come," Caesar said, suddenly bending forward, smiling, sharp-eyed, and jerked his right hand, fingers tight, toward the werewolf's face. The man no more flinched than an ox would have done, drugged for slaughter. His heavy eyelids blinked once, slowly. Caesar said, again in a voice that seemed ironic, perhaps self-mocking, "Your daughter seems bothered enough!"

The werewolf looked around the room until he found her, still there on her stool. She went on staring at her knees. Thunder hit, not as close now, but loud. Her back jerked.

"And yet, you," Caesar said, his voice rising, stern--again there was that hint of self-mockery and something else: lidded violence--"that doesn't trouble you. Your daughter's self-sacrifice, her labor to protect you--"

The man raised his hands from the table, palms out, evidently struggling for concentration, and made a growling noise. Perhaps he said, "Gods." He spread one hand over his chest in the age-old sign of injured innocence, then slowly raised the hand toward the ceiling, or possibly he meant the window behind him, and with an effort splayed out the fingers. "Moon," he said, and looked at us hopefully, then saw that we didn't understand him. "Moon," he said carefully. "Cloud." His face showed frustration and confusion, like a stroke victim's, though obviously that wasn't his trouble, I thought; no muscle loss, no discernible differentiation between his left side and his right. "Full moon...shine...no, but...." Although his eyes were still unfocused, he smiled, eager; he'd caught my worried glance at the window. After a moment's hesitation, the werewolf lowered his hands again and folded them.

"The moon," Caesar said, and jabbed a finger at the night. "You mean you blame--"

The man shrugged, his confusion deepening, and opened his hands as if admitting that the excuse was feeble, then rested his dull eye on Caesar, tipped his head like a dog and went on waiting.

Caesar turned from him, rethinking things, and now I saw real fury rising in him at last. "The moon," he said half to himself, and looked hard at the centurion, as if checking his expression. Recklessly, he flew back to the table and slammed the top with the flat of both hands. "Wake up!" he shouted in the werewolf's face, so ferocious that the cords of his neck stood out.

The werewolf slowly blinked.

Caesar stared at him, eyes bulging, then again turned away from him and crossed the room. He clamped his hands to the sides of his face and squeezed his eyes shut--perhaps he had a headache starting up. Thunder banged away, and the rain, still falling hard, was now a steady hiss, a rattle of small rivers on the street. We could hear the two centurions outside the door flap ruefully talking. At last, Caesar half turned back to the werewolf. In the tone men use for commands, he asked, "What does it feel like, coming on?"

The werewolf said nothing for a long moment, then echoed, as if the words made no sense to him, "Feel like." He nodded slowly, as if deeply interested or secretly amused. The girl put her hands over her face.

Caesar said, turning more, raising has hand to stop whatever words might be coming, "Never mind that. What does it feel like afterward?"

Again it seemed that the creature found the question too hard. He concentrated with all his might, then looked over at his daughter for help, his expression wonderfully morose. She lowered her hands by an act of will and stared as before at her knees. After a time, the old man moistened his lips with his tongue, then tipped his head and looked at Caesar, hoping for a hint. A lightning flash behind him momentarily turned his figure dark.

Caesar bowed and shook his head, almost smiling in his impatience and frustration. "Tell me this: How many people have you killed?"

This question the werewolf did seem to grasp. He let the rain hiss and rattle for a while, then asked, "Hundreds?" He tipped his head to the other side, watching Caesar closely, then cautiously ventured a second guess. "Thousands?"

Caesar shook his head. He raised his fist, then stopped himself and changed it to a stiffly cupped hand and brought it to his mouth, sliding the finger tips up and down slowly. A pool was forming on the dirt floor, leaking in. I cleared my throat. The drift of the conversation was not what I call healthy.

The werewolf let out a sort of groan, a vocal sigh, drew back his arm and absently touched his forehead, then his beard. "Creatures," he said. The word seemed to have come to him by lucky accident. He watched hopefully; so did Caesar. At last, the werewolf groaned or sighed more deeply than before and said, "No, but...." Perhaps he'd suffered a stroke of some kind unknown to me. No, but is common, of course--often, in my experience, the only two words the victim can still command. He searched the walls, the growing pool on the floor, for language. I was sure he was more alert now, and I reached out to touch Caesar's elbow, warning him. "Man," the werewolf said; then, hopelessly, "moon!"

"Men do things," Caesar exploded, striking his thigh with his fist. He raised his hand to touch the hilt of his sword, not quite absently, as if grimly making sure he could get at it.

"Ax," the werewolf said. He was working his eyebrows, looking at his palely window-lit palms as if he couldn't remember having seen them before. "Ax!" he said. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and strained for a long time before trying again. "No, but.... No.... No, but...."

Caesar waved, dismissive, as if imagining he'd understood.

Their eyes met. The thunder was distant, the rain coming down as hard as ever.

"Ax," the werewolf said at last, softly, slowly shaking, then bowing, his head, resting his forehead on his finger tips, pausing to take a deep, slow, whistling breath through his nostrils. "Ax," he said, then something more.

The girl's voice broke out like flame. She was looking at no one. "He's saying accident."

Caesar started, then touched his mouth.

The werewolf breathed deeply again; the same whistling noise. "Green parks--no, but--chill-den--"

Abruptly, the girl said, shooting her burning gaze at Caesar, "He means you. You're strong; you make things safe for children." She shook her hands as if frustrated by words, like the werewolf. "But you're just lucky. Eventually, you'll die."

"The Empire will go on," Caesar broke in, as if he'd known all along what the werewolf was saying and it was not what he'd come here to talk about. "It's not Caesar's 'indomitable will.' We have laws." Suddenly, his eyes darted away, avoiding the girl's.

"Moon," the werewolf wailed.

Caesar's voice slashed at him. "Stop that."

It was beginning to get light out. It came to me that the old man was weeping. He laid his head to one side, obsequious. "Thank ... gods ... unspeakable ... no, but...." His bulging forehead struggled. The candlelight was doing something queer to his glittering, tear-filled eyes, making them like windows to the underworld. He raised his voice. "No, but. No, but!" He gave his head a shake, then another, as if to clear it. Furtively, he brushed one eye, then the other. "Vile!" he cried out. "No, but...." His hands were trembling, as were the edges of his mouth. His voice took on pitch and intensity, the words in the extremity of his emotion becoming cloudy, more obscure than before. I had to lean close to watch his lips. I glanced at Caesar to see if he was following, then at the girl.

It was the girl's expression that made me realize my error: She was staring at the window, where the light, I saw at last, was not dawn but a parting of the thick black hood of clouds. There was no sound of rain. Moonlight came pouring through the window, sliding toward us across the room. The girl drew her feet back as if the light were alive.

I cannot say whether it was gradual or instantaneous. His beard and mouth changed; the alertness of his ears became a change in their shape and then bristling, tufted fur, and I saw distinctly that the hand swiping at his nose was a paw. All at once, the man behind the table was a wolf. A violent growl erupted all around us. He was huge, flame-eyed, already leaping, a wild beast tangled in clothes. He was still in mid-air when Caesar's sword thwunked into his head, cleaving it--a mistake, pure instinct, I saw from Caesar's face. Only the werewolf's daughter moved more quickly: She flew like a shadow past Caesar and the rest of us, running on all fours, slipped like ball lightning out the door, and vanished into the night.

•

It's difficult to put one's finger exactly on the oddity in Caesar's behavior. One cannot call it mania in any usual sense--delusional insanity, dementia, melancholia, and so forth. Nonetheless, he's grown odd. (No real cause for alarm, I think.) You've no doubt heard of the squall of honors recently conferred on him--statues, odes, feasts, gold medals, outlandish titles: Prince of the Moon, Father of Animals, Shepherd of Ethiopia and worse--more of them every day. They're nearly all his own inventions, insinuated into the ears of friendly senators or enemies who dare not cross him. I have it on good authority that those who hate him most are quickest to approve these absurdities, believing such inflations will ultimately make him insufferable to the people--as well they may. Indeed, the man who hungers most after his ruin has suggested that Caesar's horse be proclaimed divine. Caesar seems delighted. It cannot be put down to megalomania. At each new outrage he conceives or hears suggested, he laughs--not cynically but with childlike pleasure, as if astonished by how much foolishness the gods will put up with. (He's always busy with the gods, these days, ignoring necessities, reasoning with priests.) I did catch him once in an act of what seemed authentic lunacy. He was at the aquarium, looking down at the innumerable, flickering goldfish and carp, whispering something. I crept up on him to hear. He was saying, "Straighten up those ranks, there! Order! Order!" He shook his finger. When he turned and saw me, he looked embarrassed, then smiled, put his arm around my shoulders and walked with me. "I try to keep the Empire neat, doctor," he said. "It's not easy!" And he winked with such friendliness that, testy as I am when people touch me, I was moved. In fact, tears sprang to my eyes, I admit it. Once a man's so old he's started to piss on himself, he might as well let go with everything. Another time, I saw him hunkered down, earnestly reasoning--so it seemed--with a colony of ants. "Just playing, doctor," he said when he saw that I saw.

"Caesar, Caesar!" I moaned. He touched his lips with one finger.

The oddest thing he's come up with, of course, is his proposed war with Persia--himself, needless to say, as general. Persia, for the love of God! Even poor befuddled Mark Antony is dismayed.

"Caesar, you're not as young as you used to be," he says, and throws a woeful look over at me. He sits with interdigitated fists between his big, blocky knees. We're in Caesar's council room, the guards standing stiff as two columns, as usual, outside the door. Mark Antony grows fatter by the day. Not an interesting problem--he eats and sleeps too much. I'd prescribe exercise, raw vegetables and copulation. He has an enlarged subcutaneous cyst on the back of his neck. It must itch, but he pretends not to notice, for dignity's sake. Caesar lies on his couch as if disinterested, but his legs, crossed at the ankles, are rigid, and the pulse through his right inner jugular is visible. It's late, almost midnight. At times, he seems to be listening for something, but there's nothing to be heard. Cicadas; occasional baying of a dog.

It strikes me that, for all his flab, Mark Antony is a handsome man. His once-mighty muscles, now toneless, suggest a potential for heart disease, and there's blue under his too-smooth skin; nonetheless, one can imagine him working himself back to vigor, the dullness gradually departing from his eyes. Anything's possible. Look at me, still upright, thanks mainly to diet, though I'm farther along than he is. I frequently lose feeling in my right hand.

"If you must attack Persia," he says, "why not send me? You're needed here, Caesar!" His eyes squirt tears, which he irritably brushes away. "Two, three years--not even you can win a war with Persia in less time than that. And all that while, Rome and all her complicated business in the hands of Mark Antony! It will be ruin, Caesar! Everyone says so!"

Caesar gazes at him. "Are you, my friend, not nobler and more honest than all the other Romans put together?"

Mark Antony looks confused, raises his hands till they're level with his shoulders, then returns them to their place between his knees, which he once more clenches. "You're needed here," he says again. "Everyone says so." For all his friends' warnings, I do not think Mark Antony grasps how thoroughly he's despised by the senate. Caesar's confidant, Caesar's right arm. But besides that--meaning no disrespect--he really would be a booby. Talk about opening the floodgates!

Caesar smiles, snatches a moth out of the air, examines the wings with great curiosity, like a man trying to read Egyptian, then gently lets it go and lies still again. After a moment, he raises his right hand, palm outward, pushing an invisible bark out to sea. "You really would like that," he says. "Away to Persia for murder and mayhem."

Mark Antony looks to me for help. What can I say?

Now suddenly, black eyes flashing, Caesar rears up on one elbow and points at Mark Antony. "You are Rome," he says. "You are the hope of humanity!"

Later, Mark Antony asks me, "Is he insane?"

"Not by any rules I understand," I say. "At any rate, there's no cause for alarm."

He moves back and forth across the room like a huge, slow mimicry of Caesar, rubbing his hands together like a man preparing to throw dice. His shadow moves, much larger than he is, on the wall. For some reason, it frightens me. Through the window I see the sharp-horned, icy-white half-moon. Most of Mark Antony's fat has gone into his buttocks.

"They'll kill him rather than leave the Empire in my hands," he says. Then, without feeling, his palms pressed together like a priest's: "After that, they'll kill me."

His clarity of vision surprises me. "Cheer up," I say. "I'm his personal physician. They'll kill me, too."

•

Last night, the sky was alive with omens: stars exploding, falling every which way. "Something's up!" says Caesar, as tickled as if he himself had caused the discord in the heavens. His bald head glows with each star burst, then goes dark. He stood in the garden--the large one created for his daughter's tomb--till nearly sunrise, watching for more fireworks.

Mark Antony's been sent off, plainly a fool's errand, trumped up to let him out of Rome. "Don't come back," says Caesar. "Never come back until I send for you." I don't like this. Not at all, not one damn bit. My life line has changed. My stool this morning was bilious.

•

All day, Caesar has been receiving urgent visitors, all with one message: "It would be good if tomorrow you avoided the forum." There can be no doubt that there's a plot afoot.

Late this afternoon, at the onset of twilight, I saw--I think--the werewolf's daughter. She's grown thinner, as if eaten away by disease. (Everyone, these days, looks to me eaten away by disease. My prostate's nearly plugged, and there's not a surgeon in Rome whom I'd trust to cut my fingernails.) She stood at the bottom step of the palace stairway, one shaky hand reaching out to the marble hem. She left herbs of some kind. Their use, whether for evil or good, is unknown to me. Then she fled. Later, it occurred to me that I hadn't really gotten a good look at her. Perhaps it was someone I don't know.

•

Strange news. You'll have heard it before you get this letter. Forgive the handwriting. My poor old nerves aren't all they might be. Would that I'd never lived to see this day. My stomach will be acid for a month.

Caesar was hardly seated, had hardly gotten out the call for prayer, before they rose like a wave from every side, 60 senators with daggers. He was stabbed a dozen times before he struggled to his feet--or, rather, leaped to his feet--eyes rolling, every muscle in spasm, as if flown out of control, though it clearly wasn't that. You wouldn't have believed what strength he called up in his final moment! He dragged them from one end of the forum to the other, hurling off senators like an injured bear and shrieking, screaming his lungs out. It was as if all the power of the gods were for an instant contracted to one man. They tore his clothes from him, or possibly he did it himself for some reason. His blood came spurting from a hundred wounds, so that the whole marble floor was slippery and steaming. He fell down, stood up again, dragging his assassins; fell down, then rose to crawl on hands and knees toward the light of the high central door where, that moment, I was running for my life. His slaughtered-bull bellowings are still in my ears, strangely bright, like a flourish of trumpets or Jovian laughter.

John Gardner had just begun to make minor revisions in this story for Playboy when he was killed in a motorcycle accident on September 14, 1982. It is published here exactly as Gardner originally wrote it, and although it stands on its own, one fact that may help readers is that Caesar's "falling sickness" was epilepsy, an illness whose symptoms can resemble the convulsions suffered by the werewolf. Gardner dedicated the story "to Liz."

"Caesar swept his arm toward the girl. She looked, cowering, from one to the other of us."