Clitumna had a nephew. Since he was her sister’s boy, he did not bear the family name, Clitumnus; his name was Lucius Gavius Stichus, which to Sulla indicated some ancestor of his father’s had been a slave. Why else the nickname Stichus? A slave’s name, but more than that. Stichus was the archetypal slave’s name, the joke name, the butt name. However, Lucius Gavius Stichus insisted his family had earned the name because of their long association with slavery; like his father and his grandfather at least, Lucius Gavius Stichus dealt in slaves, ran a snug little agency for domestic servants situated in the Porticus Metelli on the Campus Martius. It was not a high-flying firm catering to the elite, but rather a well-established business catering to those whose purses did not run to more than three or four slave helpers.
Odd, thought Sulla when the steward informed him that the mistress’s nephew was in the study, how he collected Gaviuses. There had been his father’s boon drinking companion, Marcus Gavius Brocchus, and the dear old grammaticus Quintus Gavius Myrto. Gavius. It wasn’t a very common family name, nor one of any distinction. Yet he had known three Gaviuses.
Well, the Gavius who had drunk with his father and the Gavius who had given Sulla no mean education aroused feelings in him he did not mind owning; but Stichus was very different. Had he suspected Clitumna was being honored by a visit from her awful nephew he wouldn’t have come home, and he stood for a moment in the atrium debating what his next course of action should be—flight from the house, or flight to some part of it where Stichus did not stick his sticky beak.
The garden. With a nod and a smile for the steward’s thoughtfulness in warning him, he bypassed the study and went into the peristyle, found a seat warmed a little by the weak sun, and sat gazing blindly at the dreadful statue of Apollo chasing a Daphne already more tree than dryad. Clitumna loved it, which was why she had bought it. But did the Lord of Light ever have such aggressively yellow hair, or eyes so putridly blue, or skin so cloyingly pink? And how could one admire a sculptor so lost to the criteria of asceticism that he turned all of Daphne’s fingers into identical bright green twigs, and all of Daphne’s toes into identical murky brown rootlets? The idiot had even—he probably considered it his master touch—bedaubed poor Daphne’s one remaining humanoid breast with a trickle of purple sap oozing from her knotty nipple! To gaze at it blindly was the only way Sulla had managed to preserve the work, when every part of his outraged senses screamed to take an axe to it.
“What am I doing here?” he asked poor Daphne, who ought to have looked terrified, and instead only managed to simper.
She didn’t answer.
“What am I doing here?” he asked Apollo.
Apollo didn’t answer.
He put up one hand to press its fingers against his eyes, and closed them, and began the all-too-familiar process of disciplining himself into—oh, not exactly acceptance, more a form of grim endurance. Gavius. Think of a different Gavius than Stichus. Think of Quintus Gavius Myrto, who had given him no mean education.
*
They had met not long after Sulla’s seventh birthday, when the skinny but strong little boy had been helping his sodden father home to the single room on the Vicus Sandalarius where they had lived at the time. Sulla Senior collapsed on the street, and Quintus Gavius Myrto had come to the boy’s rescue. Together they got the father home, with Myrto, fascinated by Sulla’s appearance and the purity of the Latin he spoke, firing questions at him the whole way.
As soon as Sulla Senior was tipped onto his straw pallet, the old grammaticus sat himself down on the only chair and proceeded to extricate as much of his family history from him as the boy knew. And ended in explaining that he himself was a teacher, and offering to teach the boy to read and write for nothing. Sulla’s plight appalled him: a patrician Cornelius with obvious potential stuck for the rest of his life in penury somewhere amid the stews of the poorest parts of Rome? It didn’t bear thinking of. The boy should at least be equipped to earn a living as a clerk or a scribe! And what if by some miracle the Sullan luck changed, and he had the opportunity to espouse his rightful way of life, only to be prevented by illiteracy?
Sulla had accepted the offer to be taught, but scorned the gratis element. Whenever he could, he stole enough to slip old Quintus Gavius Myrto a silver denarius or a plump chicken, and when he was a little older, he sold himself to get that silver denarius. If Myrto suspected that these payments were gained at the cost of honor, he never said so; for he was wise enough to understand that in tendering them,the boy was demonstrating the value he placed upon this unexpected chance to learn. So he took the coins with every indication of pleasure and gratitude, and never gave Sulla reason to think that he worried himself sick over how they were come by.
To be taught rhetoric and walk in the train of a great advocate of the law courts was a dream Sulla knew he would never attain, which only gave added luster to the humbler efforts of Quintus Gavius Myrto. For thanks to Myrto, he could speak the purest Attic Greek, and acquired at least the basic rudiments of rhetoric. Myrto’s library had been extensive, and so Sulla had read his Homer and his Pindar and his Hesiod, his Plato and his Menander and his Eratosthenes, his Euclid and his Archimedes. And he had read in Latin too—Ennius, Accius, Cassius Hemina, Cato the Censor. Ploughing through every scroll he could lay his hands on, he discovered a world where his own situation could be forgotten for a few precious hours, a world of noble heroes and great deeds, scientific fact and philosophical fantasy, the style of literature and the style of mathematics. Luckily the only asset his father had not lost long before Sulla was born was his beautiful Latin; thus of his Latin Sulla had no cause to be ashamed, but he also spoke the cant of the Subura perfectly, and a fairly correct yet lower class of Latin which meant he could move through any Roman sphere without comment.
Quintus Gavius Myrto’s little school had always been held in a quiet corner of the Macellum Cuppedenis, the spice and flower markets which lay behind the Forum Romanum on its eastern side. Since he could not afford premises but must teach in the public domain, Myrto would say, what better place to pound knowledge into thick young Roman skulls than amid the heady perfumes of roses and violets, peppercorns and cinnamon?
Not for Myrto a post as live-in tutor to some pampered plebeian pup, nor even the exclusivity of half a dozen knightly scions taught in a proper schoolroom decently cloistered from the racket of the streets. No, Myrto simply had his lone slave set up his high chair and the stools for his students where shoppers would not trip over them, and taught his reading, writing, and arithmetic in the open air amid the cries and bellows and sales pitches of the spice and flower merchants. Had he not been well liked and had he not given a small discount to boys and girls whose fathers owned stalls in the Cuppedenis, he would soon have been intimidated into moving on; but as he was well liked and he did discount his teaching, he was allowed to hold his school in the same corner until he died when Sulla was fifteen.
Myrto charged ten sesterces per week per student, and regularly dealt with ten or fifteen children (always more boys than girls, yet he was never without several girls). His income was about five thousand sesterces a year; he paid two thousand of that for a very nice large single room in a house belonging to one of his early students; it cost him about one thousand sesterces a year to feed himself and his elderly but devoted slave quite well, and the rest of his income he spent upon books. If he wasn’t teaching because it was a market day or a holiday, he could be found browsing in the libraries and bookshops and publishing houses of the Argiletum, a broad street which ran off the Forum Romanum alongside the Basilica Aemilia and the Senate House.
“Oh, Lucius Cornelius,” he was wont to say when he got the boy on his own after lessons were over, desperate (though he never let that desperation show) to keep the boy safe, to keep him off the streets, “somewhere in this enormous world a man or a woman has hidden the works of Aristotle! If you only knew how much I long to read that man! Such a volume of work, such a mind—imagine it, the tutor of Alexander the Great! They say he wrote about absolutely everything—good and evil, stars and atoms, souls and hell, dogs and cats, leaves and muscles, the gods and men, systems of thought and the chaos of mindlessness. What a treat that would be, to read the lost works of Aristotle!” And then he would shrug his shoulders, suck at his teeth in the irritating way he had that all his students for decades had mocked behind his back, strike his hands together in a little smack of frustration, and potter among the lovely leathery smell of book buckets and the acrid reek of best-quality paper. “Nevermind, nevermind,” he would say as he went, “I shouldn’t complain, when I have my Homer and my Plato.”
When he died, which he did in the midst of a cold spell after his old slave had slipped on the icy stairs and broken his neck (amazing how when the line between two people is severed like that, thought Sulla at the time, both ends will go), it was easy to see how very well loved he had been. Not for Quintus Gavius Myrto the hideous indignity of a pauper’s place in the lime pits beyond the Agger; no, he had a proper procession, professional mourners, a eulogy, a pyre scented with myrrh and frankincense and Jericho balsam, and a handsome stone tomb to house his ashes. The coin was paid to the custodians of the death records at the temple of Venus Libitina, courtesy of the excellent undertaker hired to manage Myrto’s funeral. It had been organized and paid for by two generations of students, who wept for him with genuine grief.
Sulla had walked dry-eyed and high-headed in the throng which escorted Quintus Gavius Myrto out of the city to the burning place, thrown his bunch of roses into the fierce fire, and paid a silver denarius to the undertaker as his share. But later, after his father had crumpled in a wine-soaked heap and his unhappy sister had tidied things up as decently as she could, Sulla sat in his corner of the room in which the three of them lived at the time, and pondered his unexpected treasure trove in aching disbelief. For Quintus Gavius Myrto had arranged his death as tidily as he had his life; his will had been registered and lodged with the Vestal Virgins, a simple document, since he had no cash to bequeath. All that he had to leave—his books and his precious model of sun and moon and planets revolving around the earth—he left to Sulla.
Sulla had wept then, in drear and empty agony; his best and dearest and only real friend was gone, but every day of his life he would see Myrto’s little library, and remember.
“One day, Quintus Gavius,” he said through the pain of his spasming throat, “I will find the lost works of Aristotle.”
Of course he hadn’t managed to keep the books and the model long. One day he came home to find the corner where his straw pallet was lodged bare of everything save that pallet. His father had taken the lovingly accumulated treasures of Quintus Gavius Myrto and sold them all to buy wine. There followed the only occasion during Sulla’s life with his father when he tried to commit parricide; luckily his sister had been present and put herself between them until sanity returned. It was very shortly afterward that she married her Nonius and went with him to Picenum. As for young Sulla, he never forgot, and he never forgave. At the end of his life, when he owned thousands of books and half a hundred models of the universe, he still would dwell upon the lost library of Quintus Gavius Myrto, and his grief.
*
The mental trick had worked; Sulla came back to the present moment and the garishly painted, clumsily executed group of Apollo and Daphne. When his eyes drifted past it and encountered the even more ghastly statue of Perseus holding up the Gorgon’s head, he almost leaped to his feet, strong enough now to deal with Stichus. He stalked down the garden toward the study, which was the room normally reserved for the sole use of the head of the household; by default, it had been given over to Sulla, who functioned more or less as the man-about-the-house.
The pimply little fart was stuffing his face with candied figs when Sulla walked into the tablinum, poking his dirty sticky fingers through the rolls of books slowly accumulating in the pigeonholed walls.
“Ohhhhhhh!” Stichus whinnied at sight of Sulla, snatching his hands away.
“It’s lucky I know you’re too stupid to read,” said Sulla, snapping his fingers at the servant in the doorway. “Here,” he said to the servant, a costly pretty Greek not worth a tenth what Clitumna had paid, “get a bowl of water and a clean cloth, and wipe up the mess Master Stichus has made.”
His eerie eyes stared at Stichus with the fixed malice of a goat in them, and he said to that unfortunate, who was trying to wipe the syrup off his hands by rubbing them on his expensive tunic, “I wish you’d get it out of your head that I keep a store of naughty picture books! I don’t. Why should I? I don’t need them. Naughty picture books are for people who don’t have the guts to do anything. People like you, Stichus.”
“One day,” said Stichus, “this house and everything in it is going to be mine. You won’t be so uppity then!”
“I hope you’re offering plenty of sacrifices to postpone that day, Lucius Gavius, because it’s likely to be your last. If it weren’t for Clitumna, I’d cut you up into little pieces and feed you to the dogs.”
Stichus stared at the toga on Sulla’s powerful frame, raising his brows; he wasn’t really afraid of Sulla, he’d known him too long, but he did sense that danger lurked inside Sulla’s fiery head, therefore normally he trod warily. A mode of conduct reinforced by his knowledge that his silly old Auntie Clittie could not be swerved from her slavish devotion to the fellow. However, upon his arrival an hour earlier he had found his aunt and her boon companion Nicopolis in a fine state because their darling Lucius Cornelius had gone out in a rage wearing his toga. When Stichus dragged all of the story out of Clitumna, from Metrobius to the ensuing brawl, he was disgusted. Sickened.
So now he flopped himself down in Sulla’s chair and said, “My, my, we are looking every inch the Roman today! Been to the inauguration of the consuls, have we? What a laugh! Your ancestry isn’t half as good as mine.”
Sulla picked him up out of the chair by clamping the fingers of his right hand on one side of Stichus’s jaw and his right thumb on the other side, a hold so exquisitely painful that its victim couldn’t even scream; by the time he recovered enough breath to do so, he had seen Sulla’s face, and didn’t, just stood as mute and graven as his aunt and her boon companion had at dawn that morning.
“My ancestry,” said Sulla pleasantly, “is no business of yours. Now get out of my room.”
“It won’t be your room forever!” gasped Stichus, scuttling to the door and almost colliding with the returning slave, now bearing a bowl of water and a cloth.
“Don’t count on it” was Sulla’s parting shot.
The expensive slave sidled into the room trying to look demure. Sulla eyed him up and down sourly.
“Clean it up, you mincing flower,” he said, and went to find the women.
Stichus had beaten Sulla to Clitumna, who was closeted with her precious nephew and was not to be disturbed, said the steward apologetically. So Sulla walked down the colonnade surrounding the peristyle-garden to the suite of rooms where his mistress Nicopolis lived. There were savory smells coming from the cookhouse at the far end of the garden, a site it shared with the bathroom and the latrine; like most houses on the Palatine, Clitumna’s was connected to the water supply and the sewers, thus relieving the staff of the burden of fetching water from a public fountain and toting the contents of the chamber pots to the nearest public latrine or drain opening in the gutter.
“You know, Lucius Cornelius,” said Nicopolis, abandoning her fancy work, “if you would only come down out of your aristocratic high-flies occasionally, you’d do a lot better.”
He sat on a comfortable couch with a sigh, rugging himself up a little more warmly in his toga because the room was cold, and let the servant girl nicknamed Bithy remove his winter boots. She was a nice cheerful lass with an unpronounceable name, from the backwoods of Bithynia; Clitumna had picked her up cheap from her nephew and inadvertently acquired a treasure. When the girl finished unlacing the boots she bustled out of the room purposefully; in a moment she returned bearing a pair of thick warm socks which she smoothed carefully over Sulla’s perfect, snow-white feet.
“Thank you, Bithy,” he said, smiling at her and reaching out a careless hand to ruffle her hair.
She absolutely glowed. Funny little thing, he thought with a tenderness that surprised him, until he realized that she reminded him of the girl next door. Julilla...
“How do you mean?” he asked Nicopolis, who seemed as usual impervious to the cold.
“Why should that greedy little crawler Stichus inherit everything when Clitumna goes to join her dubious ancestors? If you would only change your tactics a fraction, Lucius Cornelius my very dear friend, she’d leave the lot to you. And she’s got a lot, believe me!”
“What’s he doing, bleating that I hurt him?” asked Sulla, taking a bowl of nuts from Bithy with another special smile.
“Of course he is! And lavishly embroidering it, I’m sure. I don’t blame you in the least, he’s detestable, but he is her only blood kin—and she loves him, so she’s blind to his faults. But she loves you more, haughty wretch that you are! So when you see her next, don’t go all icy and proud and refuse to justify yourself—spin her a story about Sticky Stichy even better than the one he’ s spinning about you
Half-intrigued, half-skeptical, he stared at her. “Go on, she’d never be stupid enough to fall for it,” he said.
“Oh, darling Lucius! When you want, you can make any woman fall for any line you care to toss them. Try it! Just this once? For my sake?” wheedled Nicopolis.
“No. I’d end up the fool, Nicky.”
“You wouldn’t, you know,” Nicopolis persevered.
“There isn’t enough money in the world to make me grovel to the likes of Clitumna!”
“She doesn’t have all the money in the world, but she does have more than enough to see you into the Senate,” whispered the temptress beguilingly.
“No! You’re wrong, you really are. There’s this house, admittedly, but she spends every penny she gets—and what she doesn’t spend, Sticky Stichy does.”
“Not so. Why do you think her bankers hang on her every word as if she were Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi? She’s got a very tidy fortune invested with them, and she doesn’t spend half of her income. Besides which, give Sticky Stichy his due, he’s not short of a sestertius either. As long as his late father’s accountant and manager are capable of working, that business of Stichy’s will continue to do very nicely.”
Sulla sat up with a jerk, loosening the folds of toga. “Nicky, you wouldn’t spin me a tale, would you?”
“I would, but not about this,” she said, threading her needle with purple wool intertwined with gold bullion.
“She’ll live to be a hundred,” he said then, subsiding onto the couch and handing back the bowl of nuts to Bithy, no longer hungry.
“I agree, she might live to be a hundred,” said Nicopolis, plunging her needle into the tapestry and drawing her glittering thread through very, very carefully. Her big dark eyes surveyed Sulla tranquilly. “But then again, she may not. Hers isn’t a long-lived family, you know.”
There were noises outside; Lucius Gavius Stichus was evidently taking his leave of his Aunt Clitumna.
Sulla stood up, let the servant girl slip backless Greek slippers onto his feet. The massive length and breadth of the toga slumped to the floor, but he seemed not to notice.
“All right, Nicky, just this once I’ll try it,” he said, and grinned. “Wish me luck!”
But before she could, he was gone.
*
The interview with Clitumna didn’t go well; Stichus had done his work with cunning, and Sulla couldn’t make himself humble his pride to plead, as Nicopolis had wanted.
“It’s all your fault, Lucius Cornelius,” said Clitumna fretfully, twisting the expensive fringe of her shawl between beringed fingers. “You won’t make the slightest effort to be nice to my poor boy, where he always tries to meet you more than halfway!”
“He’s a grubby little “would-be-if-he-could-be,” said Sulla between his teeth.
At which moment Nicopolis, listening outside the door, drifted gracefully through it and curled herself up on the couch beside Clitumna; she stared up at Sulla in resignation.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, all innocence.
“It’s both my Luciuses,” said Clitumna. “They won’t get on together, and I want them to so much!”
Nicopolis disentangled fringe from fingers, then unhooked a few threads which had caught on the roughnesses of gem settings, and lifted Clitumna’s hand to rest its back against her cheek. “Oh, my poor girl!” she crooned. “Your Luciuses are a couple of roosters, that’s the trouble.”
“Well, they’re going to have to learn to get on,” said Clitumna, “because my darling Lucius Gavius is giving up his apartment and moving in with us next week.”
“Then I’m moving out,” said Sulla.
Both women began to squeal, Clitumna shrilly, Nicopolis like a small trapped kitten.
“Oh, be your age!” Sulla whispered, thrusting his face down until it was only inches from Clitumna’s. “He knows the situation here more or less, but how do you think he’s going to stomach living in the same house with a man who sleeps between two women, and one of them his aunt?”
Clitumna began to weep. “But he wants to come! How can I say no to my nephew?”
“Don’t bother! I’ll remove the cause of all his complaints by moving out,” said Sulla.
As he began to withdraw Nicopolis stretched out her hand and clutched his arm. “Sulla, darling Sulla, don’t!” she cried. “Look, you can sleep with me, and then whenever Stichus is out, Clitumna can come down and join us.”
“Oh, very crafty!” said Clitumna, stiffening. “You want him all to yourself, you greedy sow!”
Nicopolis went white. “Well, what else do you suggest? It’s your stupidity’s got us into this mess!”
“Shut up, both of you!” snarled Sulla in the whisper all who knew him well had learned to dread more than any other man’s shout. “You’ve been going to mimes so long you’re beginning to live them. Grow up, don’t be so vulgarly crass! I detest the whole wretched situation, I’m tired of being half a man!”
“Well, you’re not half a man! You’re two halves—half mine, and half Nicky’s!” said Clitumna nastily.
There was no telling which hurt worse, the rage or the grief; perfectly poised on the very edge of madness, Sulla glared at his tormentors, unable to think, unable to see.
“I can’t go on!” he said, wonder in his voice.
“Nonsense! Of course you can,” said Nicopolis with the smugness of one who knew beyond any shadow of doubt that she had her man right where she wanted him—under her foot. “Now run away and do something constructive. You’ll feel better tomorrow. You always do.”
*
Out of the house, off to anywhere—anywhere constructive. Sulla’s feet blundered up the alley rather than down, took him unaware across from the Germalus to the Palatium, that part of the Palatine which looked down toward the end of the Circus Maximus and the Capena Gate.
The houses were thinner here and there were many park-like spaces; the Palatium wasn’t terribly fashionable, it lay too far from the Forum Romanum. Uncaring that it was very cold and he clad only in his house tunic, he sat upon a stone and looked at the view; not at the vacant bleachers of the Circus Maximus nor the lovely temples of the Aventine, but at the vista of himself stretched endlessly into a terrible future, a warped roadway of skin and bone that had absolutely no purpose. The pain was like a colic without the release of purgation; he shook with it until he could hear the grinding of his teeth, and did not know he groaned aloud.
“Are you ill?” asked the voice, small and timid.
At first when he looked up he saw nothing, his agony took the power from his eyes, but then they cleared, and so she swam slowly into focus from pointed chin to golden hairline, a heart-shaped face that was all eyes, huge and honey-colored, very afraid for him.
She knelt in front of him, wrapped in her homespun cocoon, just as he had seen her at the site of Flaccus’s house.
“Julia,” he said with a shudder.
“No, Julia’s my older sister. They call me Julilla,” she said, smiling at him. “Are you ill, Lucius Cornelius?”
“Not with anything a physician can heal.” Sanity and memory were returning; he understood the galling truth of Nicopolis’s last remark, he would feel better tomorrow. And hated that more than anything. “I would like so much—so very, very much!—to go mad,” he said, “but it seems I can’t.”
Julilla remained where she was. “If you can’t, then the Furies don’t want you yet.”
“Are you here on your own?” he asked, disapproving. “What are your parents about, to let you wander abroad at this hour?”
“My girl is with me,” she said tranquilly, sinking back on her heels. A sudden light of mischief darted through her eyes, turned up the delicious corners of her mouth. “She’s a good girl. The most loyal and discreet person.”
“You mean she lets you go wherever you like and doesn’t tell on you. But one day,” said the man who was perpetually caught, “you’ll be caught.”
“Until I am, what’s the use of worrying?”
Lapsing into silence, she studied his face with unself-conscious curiosity, clearly enjoying what she saw.
“Go home, Julilla,” he said, sighing. “If you must get caught, don’t let it be with me.”
“Because you’re a bad lot?” she asked.
That brought a faint smile. “If you like.”
“I don’t think you are!”
Oh, what god had sent her? Thank you, unknown god! His muscles were untwining themselves; he felt suddenly light, as if indeed some god had brushed by him, benign and good. A strange feeling for one who knew no good.
“I am a bad lot, Julilla,” he said.
“Nonsense!” Her voice was firm and positive.
No novice, he recognized the symptoms of a girlish crush, and knew an impulse to dispel it by some coarse or frightening action. But he couldn’t. Not to her, she didn’t deserve it. For her, he would reach into his grab bag of tricks and produce the best Lucius Cornelius Sulla of them all, free from artifice, innocent of smut and smirch and smarm.
“Well, I thank you for your faith, young Julilla,” he said a little lamely, unsure what she wanted to hear, anxious that it should reflect the best in him.
“I have some time,” she said gravely. “Might we talk?”
He moved over on his rock. “All right. But sit here, the ground’s too damp.”
“They say,” she said, “that you’re a disgrace to your name. But I don’t see how that’s possible, when you haven’t had a chance to prove different.”
“I daresay your father’s the author of that remark.”
“Which remark?”
“That I’m a disgrace to my name.”
She was shocked. “Oh, no! Not tata! He’s the wisest man in the world.”
“Where mine was the most foolish. We’re at the opposite ends of Rome’s spectrum, young Julilla.”
She was plucking at the long grass around the base of the rock, pulling it out in long rhizomes, then wove with her nimble fingers until she had made a wreath of it. “Here,” she said, and held it out to him.
His breath caught; the future spasmed, opened up to show him something, closed again with the glimpse too painfully short. “A crown of grass!” he said, wondering. “No! Not for me!”
“Of course it’s for you,” she insisted, and when he still made no move to take it, she leaned forward and put it on his head. “It should be flowers, but not at this time of year.”
She didn’t understand! Well, he wouldn’t tell her. “You give a wreath of flowers only to a loved one,” he said instead.
“You are my loved one,” she said softly.
“Only for a little while, girl. It will pass.”
“Never!”
He got up, laughed down at her. “Go on! You can’t be more than fifteen,” he said.
“Sixteen!” she said quickly.
“Fifteen, sixteen, what’s the difference? You’re a baby.”
Flushed with indignation, her face grew set, sharp. “I am not a baby!” she cried.
“Of course you are.” He laughed again. “Look at you, all swaddled up, a little roly-poly puppy.” There! That was better! That ought to put her in her place.
It did, but more than that She was blighted, withered, killed. The light died in her. “I’m not pretty?” she said. “I always thought I was.”
“Growing up is a cruel business,” said Sulla harshly. “I suppose almost all families tell their girl-children they’re pretty. But the world judges by different standards. You’ll be passable when you’re older, you won’t lack a husband.”
“I only want you,” she whispered.
“That’s now. Anyway, disabuse yourself, my fat puppy. Run away before I pull your tail. Go on, shoo!”
She ran, her servant girl left far behind, calling after her vainly. Sulla stood watching until they both disappeared over the brow of the slope behind.
The grass crown was still on his head, its tawny color a subtle contrast to his fiery curls; he reached up and plucked it off, but didn’t throw it away, stood holding it between his hands and staring at it. Then he tucked it in his tunic, and turned to go.
Poor little thing. He had hurt her after all. Still, she had to be discouraged; the last complication he needed in his life was Clitumna’s next-door neighbor’s daughter mooning over the wall, and she a senator’s daughter.
With every step he took as he walked away the grass crown tickled his skin, reminding him. Corona Graminea. Grass crown. Given to him here on the Palatine, where hundreds of years before the original city of Romulus had stood, a bevy of oval thatched huts like the one still lovingly cared for near the Steps of Cacus. A grass crown given to him by a personification of Venus—truly one of Venus’s girls, a Julia. An omen.
“If it comes to pass, I will build you a temple, Venus Victorious,” he said aloud.
For he saw his way clear at last. Dangerous. Desperate. But for one with nothing to lose and everything to gain, possible nonetheless.
*
Winter twilight lay heavy when he was admitted back into Clitumna’s house and asked where the ladies were. In the dining room, heads together, waiting for him before summoning the meal. That he had been the subject of their talk was obvious; they sprang apart on the couch, tried to look idly innocent.
“I want some money,” he said baldly.
“Now, Lucius Cornelius—” Clitumna began, looking wary.
“Shut up, you pathetic old drab! I want money.”
“But Lucius Cornelius!”
“I’m going away for a holiday,” he said, making no move to join them. “It’s up to you. If you want me back— if you want more of what I’ve got—then give me a thousand denarii. Otherwise, I’m quitting Rome forever.”
“We’ll give you half each,” said Nicopolis unexpectedly, dark eyes fixed on his face.
“Now,” he said.
“There may not be so much in the house,” Nicopolis said.
“You’d better hope there is, because I’m not waiting.”
When Nicopolis went to his room fifteen minutes later, she found him packing. Perching herself on his bed, she watched in silence until he should deign to notice her.
But it was she who broke down first. “You’ll have your money, Clitumna’s sent the steward to her banker’s house,” she said. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. Just so long as it’s away from here.” He folded socks together, thrust them into closed-toe boots, every movement as economical as it was efficient.
“You pack like a soldier.”
“How would you know?”
“Oh, I was the mistress of a military tribune once. I followed the drum, would you believe it? The things one does for love when one is young! I adored him. So I went with him to Spain, and then to Asia.” She sighed.
“What happened?” he asked, rolling his second-best tunic around a pair of leather knee breeches.
“He was killed in Macedonia, and I came home.” Pity stirred her heart, but not for her dead lover. Pity for Lucius Cornelius, trapped, a beautiful lion destined for some sordid arena. Why did one love at all? It hurt so much. So she smiled, not a pretty smile. “He left everything he had to me in his will, and I became quite rich. There was plenty of booty in those days.”
“My heart bleeds,” he said, wrapping his razors inside their linen sheath and sliding it down the side of a saddlebag.
Her face twisted. “This is a nasty house,” she said. “Oh, I do hate it! All of us bitter and unhappy. How many truly pleasant things do we say to each other? Precious few. Insults and indignities, spite and malice. Why am I here?”
“Because, my dear, you’re getting a bit frayed around the edges,” he said, reinforcing her observation. “You’re not the girl you used to be when you trudged all over Spain and Asia.”
“And you hate us all,” she said. “Is that where the atmosphere originates? In you? I swear it’s getting worse.”
“I agree, it is. That’s why I’m going away for a while.” He strapped the two bags, hefted them easily. “I want to be free. I want to spend big in some country town where no one knows my wretched face, eat and drink until I spew, get at least half a dozen girls pregnant, pick fifty fights with men who think they can take me with one arm tied behind their backs, find every pretty-boy between here and wherever I end up and give them sore arses.” He smiled evilly. “And then, my dear, I promise I’ll come tamely home to you and Sticky Stichy and Auntie Clittie, and we’ll all live happily ever after.”
What he didn’t tell her was that he was taking Metrobius with him; and he wouldn’t tell old Scylax, either.
Nor did he tell anyone, even Metrobius, just what he was up to. For it wasn’t a holiday. It was an investigative mission. Sulla was going to make inquiries into subjects like pharmacology, chemistry, and botany.
*
He didn’t return to Rome until the end of April. Dropping Metrobius off at Scylax’s elegant ground-floor apartment on the Caelian Hill outside the Servian Walls, he then drove down into the Vallis Camenarum to surrender the gig and mules he had hired from a stable there. Having paid the bill, he slung his saddlebags over his left shoulder and set out to walk into Rome. No servant had traveled with him; he and Metrobius had made do with the staff of the various inns and posting houses they had stayed in up and down the peninsula.
As he trudged up the Via Appia to where the Capena Gate interrupted the twenty-foot-high masonry of Rome’s ramparts, the city looked very good to him. Legend had it that Rome’s Servian Walls had been erected by King Servius Tullus before the Republic was established, but like most noblemen, Sulla knew these fortifications, at least, had not existed until three hundred years ago when the Gauls had sacked the city. The Gauls had poured down in teeming hordes from the western Alps, spreading across the huge valley of the Padus River in the far north, gradually working their way down peninsular Italy on both east and west. Many settled where they fetched up, especially in Umbria and Picenum, but those who came down the Via Cassia through Etruria headed purposely toward Rome—and having reached Rome, almost wrested the city permanently off her rightful owners. It was only after that the Servian Walls went up, while the Italian peoples of the Padus Valley, all Umbria, and northern Picenum mingled their blood with the Gauls, became despised half-castes. Never again had Rome suffered its walls to lapse into disrepair; the lesson had been a hard one, and the fear of barbarian invaders could still provoke horrified chills in every Roman.
Though there were a few expensive insula apartment towers on the Caelian Hill, the scene in the main was pastoral until Sulla reached the Capena Gate; the Vallis Camenarum outside it was given over to stockyards, slaughterhouses, smokehouses, and grazing fields for the animals sent to this greatest market in all Italy. Inside the Capena Gate lay the real city. Not the congested jumble of the Subura and the Esquiline, yet urban nonetheless. He strolled up along the Circus Maximus and took the Steps of Cacus onto the Germalus of the Palatine, after which it was only a short distance to the house of Clitumna.
Outside its door he took a deep breath, then sounded the knocker. And entered a world of shrieking women. That Nicopolis and Clitumna were delighted to see him was very plain. They wept and whinnied, draped themselves about his neck until he pushed them off, after which they kept circling close about him and would not leave him in peace.
“Where do I sleep these days?” he asked, refusing to hand his saddlebags to the servant itching to take them.
“With me,” said Nicopolis, glittering triumphantly at the suddenly downcast Clitumna.
The door to the study was tightly shut, Sulla noted as he followed Nicopolis out onto the colonnade, leaving his stepmother standing in the atrium wringing her hands.
“I take it Sticky Stichy’s well ensconced by now?” he asked Nicopolis as they reached her suite of rooms.
“Here,” she said, ignoring his question, so bursting was she to show him his new quarters.
What she had done was to yield up her very spacious sitting room to him, leaving herself with a bedroom and a much smaller chamber. Gratitude filled him; he looked at her a little sadly, liking her in that moment more than he ever had.
“All mine?” he asked.
“All yours,” she said, smiling.
He threw the saddlebags down on his bed. “Stichus?” he asked, impatient to know the worst.
Of course she wanted him to kiss her, make love to her, but she knew him well enough to understand that he was in no need of sexual solace simply because he had been away from her and Clitumna. The lovemaking would have to wait; sighing, Nicopolis reconciled herself to the role of informant.
“Stichus is very well entrenched indeed,” she said, and went over to the saddlebags to unpack for him.
He put her aside firmly, dropped the saddlebags down behind one of the clothes chests, and moved to his favorite chair, which stood behind a new desk. Nicopolis sat on his bed.
“I want all the news,” he said.
“Well, Stichy’s here, sleeping in the master’s cubicle and using the study, of course. It’s been better than expected in one way, really, because Stichy at close quarters every day is hard to take, even for Clitumna. A few more months, and I predict she’ll throw him out. It was clever of you to go away, you know.” Her hand smoothed the stack of pillows beside her absently. “I didn’t think so at the time, I admit, but you were right and I was wrong. Stichy entered the place like a triumphing general, and you weren’t here to dim his glory. Oh, things sailed around, I can tell you! Your books went into the rubbish bin—it’s all right, the servants rescued them—and whatever else you left in the way of clothing and personal stuff went into the rubbish bin after the books. Since the staff like you and loathe him, nothing of yours was lost—it’s all here in this room somewhere.”
His pale eyes traveled around the walls, across the lovely mosaic floor. “This is nice,” he said. And then, “Continue.”
“Clitumna was devastated. She hadn’t counted on Stichy’s throwing your things out. In fact, I don’t think she ever really wanted him to move in, but when he said he wanted to, she couldn’t find a way to refuse. Blood and the last of her line and all the rest of it. Clitumna’s not very bright, but she knew perfectly well his only reason for demanding to move in here was to get you moving in the direction of the street. Stichy’s not hard up. But when you weren’t even here to see your stuff being thrown out, it rather took the edge off Stichy’s pleasure. No quarrels, no opposition, no—presence. Just a passively surly staff, a very weepy Auntie Clittie, and me—well, I just look through him as if he isn’t there.”
The little servant girl Bithy came sidling through the door bearing a plate of assorted buns, pasties, pies, and cakes, put it down on the corner of the desk with a shy smile for Sulla, and spied the leather band connecting the two saddlebags, poking up from behind the clothes chest. Off she went across the room to unpack.
Sulla moved so quickly Nicopolis didn’t see him intercept the girl; one moment he was leaning back comfortably in his chair, the next the girl was being moved gently away from the clothes chest. Smiling at her, Sulla pinched Bithy gently on the cheek and thrust her out the door. Nicopolis stared.
“My, you are worried about those bags!” she said. “What’s in them? You’re like a dog guarding a bone.”
“Pour me some wine,” he said, sitting down again, and selecting a meat pasty from the plate.
She did as he asked, but she was not about to let go of the subject. “Come, Lucius Cornelius, what’s in those bags that you don’t want anyone to see?” A cup of unwatered wine was put in front of him.
Down went both corners of his mouth; he threw out his hands in a gesture indicating growing exasperation. “What do you think? I’ve been away from both my girls for almost four months! I admit I didn’t think of you all the time, but I did think of you! Especially when I saw some little thing I thought might please one or the other of you.”
Her face softened, glowed; Sulla was not a gift giver. In fact, Nicopolis could never remember his presenting her or Clitumna with a single gift, even of the cheapest kind, and she was a wise enough student of human nature to know this was evidence of parsimony, not of poverty; the generous will give, even when they have nothing to give.
“Oh, Lucius Cornelius!” she exclaimed, beaming. “Truly? When may I see?”
“When I’m good and ready,” he said, turning his chair to glance through the big window behind him. “What’s the time?”
“I don’t know—about the eighth hour, I think. Dinner isn’t due yet, anyway,” she said.
He got up, went across to the clothes chest, and hooked the saddlebags out from behind it, slinging them over his shoulder. “I’ll be back in time for dinner,” he said.
Jaw dropped, she watched him go to the door. “Sulla! You are the most annoying creature in the entire world. I swear it! Just arrived home, and you’re off somewhere! Well, I doubt you need to visit Metrobius, since you took him with you!”
That arrested his progress. Grinning, he stared at her. “Oh, I see! Scylax came a-calling to complain, did he?”
“You might say. He arrived like a tragedian playing Antigone, and left like a comedian playing the eunuch. Clitumna certainly put a squeak in his voice!” She laughed at the memory.
“Serves him right, the old whore. Do you know he’d deliberately prevented the boy’s learning to read and write?”
But the saddlebags were gnawing again. “Don’t trust us enough to leave them behind while you go out?” she asked.
“I’m not a fool,” he said, and departed.
Female curiosity. He was a fool, to have overlooked it. So down to the Great Market he took himself and his saddlebags, and in the course of the next hour went on a concentrated shopping spree with the last of his thousand silver denarii, that remnant he had thought to save for the future. Women! Nosy, interfering sows! Why hadn’t he thought of it?
The saddlebags weighed down with scarves and bangles, frivolous Eastern slippers and gewgaws for the hair, he was let back into Clitumna’s house by a servant who informed him the ladies and Master Stichus were in the dining room, but had elected to wait a while before eating.
“Tell them I’ll be there shortly,” he said, and went to Nicopolis’s suite.
*
There didn’t seem to be anyone about, but to make sure, he closed the shutters on his window and then bolted his door. The hastily purchased presents he heaped on the desk, some new book rolls alongside them. The left-hand bag he ignored; the top layer of clothes in the right-hand bag he dumped out on the bed. Then from the depths of the right-hand bag he drew forth two pairs of rolled-up socks, and fiddled with them until they yielded two small bottles whose stoppers were heavily sealed with wax. Next emerged a plain wooden box, small enough to fit in his hand easily; as if unable to help himself, he lifted its lid, which fitted closely. The contents were uninspiring: just a few ounces of a sluggish off-white powder. Down went the lid; his fingers tamped it firmly into place. Then he looked around the room, frowning. Where?
A row of decrepit little wooden cupboards shaped like models of temples occupied the top of a long, narrow sideboard table: the relics of the House of Cornelius Sulla. All he had inherited from his father, all his father couldn’t sell for wine, more likely for lack of a buyer than lack of the will to sell. Five cupboards, each a cube two feet by two feet by two feet; each had painted wooden doors in its front between an outer stand of columns; each had a pediment decorated with carved temple figures at apex and ends; and on the simple entablature running below the pediment, each had a man’s name inscribed. One was the original ancestor common to all seven branches of the patrician House of Cornelius; one was Publius Cornelius Rufinus, consul and dictator over two hundred years earlier; one was his son, twice consul and once dictator during the Samnite wars, then expelled from the Senate for hoarding silver plate; one was the first Rufinus to be called Sulla, priest of Jupiter all his life; and the last was his praetor son, Publius Cornelius Sulla Rufinus, famous for his founding of the ludi Apollinares, the Games of Apollo.
It was the cupboard of the first Sulla which Sulla opened, very delicately, for the wood had been neglected for many years, and had grown frail. Once the paint had been bright, the tiny relief figures clearly outlined; now they were faded, chipped. One day he intended to find the money to restore his ancestral cupboards, and have a house with an imposing atrium in which he could display his cupboards proudly. However, for the moment it seemed appropriate to hide his two little bottles and his box of powder in the cupboard of Sulla the flamen Dialis, most sacred man in the Rome of his day, serving Jupiter Optimus Maximus.
The interior of the cupboard was filled with a life-size bewigged wax mask, exquisitely lifelike, so well had the tints been applied to it. Eyes glared out at Sulla, blue rather than his own palest grey; the skin of Rufinus was fair, but not so fair as Sulla’s; and the hair, thick and curling, was a carrot-red rather than a golden-red. Sufficient space lay around the mask to permit its removal, for it was fixed to a wooden head-shaped block from which it could be detached. The last time it had come out was at his father’s funeral, which Sulla had paid for in a painful series of encounters with a man he detested.
Lovingly Sulla closed the doors, then plucked at the steps of the podium, which looked smooth and seamless. But, like a real temple, the podium of this ancestral cupboard was hollow; Sulla found the right spot, and out of the front steps there slid a drawer. It was not intended as a hiding place, but as a safe receptacle in which to store the written record of the ancestor’s deeds, as well as a detailed description of his size, gait, posture, physical habits, and bodily distinguishing marks. For when a Cornelius Sulla died, an actor would be hired to don the mask and imitate the dead ancestor so accurately that he might be supposed to have come back to see this later scion of his noble house ushered out of the world he himself had once adorned.
The documents relating to Publius Cornelius Sulla Rufinus the priest were inside the drawer, but there was plenty of room for the bottles and the box; Sulla slipped them in, then pushed the drawer shut and made sure the closure was undetectable. His secret would be safe with Rufinus.
Feeling easier, Sulla opened up the window shutters and unbolted his door. And gathered up the heap of fripperies lying all over his desk, with a malicious grin at the scroll he also picked out from among the others stacked there.
Of course Lucius Gavius Stichus was occupying the host’s place on the left-hand end of the middle couch; this was one of the few dining rooms where the women reclined rather than sat on upright chairs, since neither Clitumna nor Nicopolis was ruled by old-fashioned shibboleths.
“Here you are, girls,” said Sulla, tossing his armful of gifts at the two adoring female faces following his progress into the room like flowers the sun. He had chosen well, things which might indeed have come from elsewhere than a market inside Rome, and things which neither woman would be ashamed to wear.
But before he slid artfully between Clitumna and Nicopolis on the first couch, he slapped the rolled-up book he was holding down in front of Stichus.
“A little something for you, Stichus,” he said.
While Sulla settled himself between the two women, who responded with giggles and purrs, Stichus, startled at being the recipient of a gift, untied the tapes holding the book together, and unfurled it. Two scarlet spots flared in his sallow acne-pocked cheeks as his goggling eyes took in the beautifully drawn and painted male figures, penises erect as they performed all manner of athletic feats with each other upon the unsuspecting papyrus. With shaking fingers he rolled the thing up and tied it, then had of course to pluck up the courage to look at his benefactor. Sulla’s frightful eyes were gleaming at him over the top of Clitumna’s head, speaking silent volumes of contempt.
“Thank you, Lucius Cornelius,” Stichus squeaked.
“You’re very welcome, Lucius Gavius,” said Sulla from the bottom of his throat.
At which moment the gustatio—the first course—came in, hastily augmented, Sulla suspected, in honor of his return; for besides the normal fare of olives, lettuce salad, and hard-boiled eggs, it contained some little pheasant sausages and chunks of tunnyfish in oil. Enjoying himself hugely, Sulla tucked in, sliding wicked sidelong glances at Stichus, alone on his couch while his aunt applied as much of her side to Sulla’s side as she possibly could, and Nicopolis caressed Sulla’s groin shamelessly.
“Well, and what’s the news on the home front?” he asked as the first course was cleared away.
“Nothing much,” said Nicopolis, more interested in what was happening under her hand.
Sulla turned his head toward Clitumna. “I don’t believe her,” he said, as he picked up Clitumna’s hand and began to nibble its fingers. Then when he saw the look of distaste upon Stichus’s face, he began to lick the fingers voluptuously. “Tell me, love”—lick—”because I refuse to believe”—lick—”nothing’s happened.” Lick, lick, lick.
Luckily the fercula—the main courses—arrived at that moment; greedy Clitumna snatched her hand away and stretched it out to grab at the roast mutton with thyme sauce.
“Our neighbors have been busy,” she said between swallows, “to make up for how quiet we’ve been while you were away.” A sigh. “Titus Pomponius’s wife had a little boy in February.”
“Ye gods, another boring money-hungry merchant banker for the future!” was Sulla’s comment. “Caecilia Pilia is well, I trust?”
“Very! No trouble at all.”
“And on the Caesar side?’’ He was thinking of delectable Julilla and the grass crown she had given him.
“Big news there!” Clitumna licked her own fingers. ‘ They had a wedding—quite a society affair.’’
Something happened to Sulla’s heart; it actually seemed to drop like a stone to the bottom of his belly, and sit there churning amid the food. The oddest sensation.
“Oh, really?” He kept his tone disinterested.
“Indeed! Caesar’s elder daughter married none other than Gaius Marius! Disgusting, isn’t it?”
“Gaius Marius...”
“What, don’t you know him?” Clitumna asked.
“I don’t think so. Marius... He must be a New Man.”
“That’s right. He was praetor five years ago, never made it to the consulship, of course. But he was governor of Further Spain, and made an absolute fortune out there. Mines and the like,” said Clitumna.
For some reason Sulla remembered the man with the mien of an eagle at the inauguration of the new consuls; he had worn a purple-bordered toga. “What does he look like?”
“Grotesque, my dear! The most enormous eyebrows! Like hairy caterpillars.” Clitumna reached for the braised broccoli. “He’s at least thirty years older than Julia, poor dear.’’
“What’s so unusual about that?” demanded Stichus, feeling it time he had something to say. “At least half the girls in Rome marry men old enough to be their fathers.”
Nicopolis frowned. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say half, Stichy,” she said. “A quarter would be more like it.”
“Disgusting!” said Stichus.
“Disgusting, rubbish!” said Nicopolis vigorously, sitting up so she could glare at him more effectively. “Let me tell you, fart-face, that there’s a lot to be said for older men as far as a young girl is concerned! At least older men have learned to be considerate and reasonable! My worst lovers were all under twenty-five. Think they know it all, but know nothing. Erk! Like being hit by a bull. Over before it starts.’’
Since Stichus was twenty-three years old, he bridled.
“Oh, you would! Think you know it all, don’t you?” he sneered.
The look he got was level. “I know more than you do, fart-face,” she said.
“Now, now, let’s be happy tonight!” cried Clitumna. “Our darling Lucius Cornelius is back.”
Their darling Lucius Cornelius promptly grabbed his stepmother and rolled her over on the couch, tickling her ribs until she screeched shrilly and kicked her legs in the air. Nicopolis retaliated by tickling Sulla, and the first couch became a melee.
This was too much for Stichus; clutching his new book, he slid off his couch and stalked out of the room, not sure they even noticed his going. How was he going to dislodge that man? Auntie Clittie was besotted! Even while Sulla was away, he had not managed to persuade her to send Sulla packing. She just wept that it was a pity her two darling boys couldn’t get on.
Though he had eaten hardly anything, Stichus wasn’t upset by the fact, for in his study he kept an interesting array of comestibles—a jar of his favorite figs in syrup, a little tray of honeyed pastry the cook was under orders to keep filled, some tongue-cloying perfumed jellies which came all the way from Parthia, a box of plumply juicy raisins, honey cakes, and honeyed wine. Roast mutton and braised broccoli he could live without; every tooth in his head was a sweet one.
Chin on his hand, a quintuple lamp chasing away the beginnings of evening, Lucius Gavius Stichus munched syruped figs while he carefully perused the illustrations of the book Sulla had given him, and read the short accompanying Greek text. Of course he knew the present was Sulla’s way of saying he didn’t need such books, because he’d done it all, but that couldn’t stifle his interest; Stichus was not endowed with so much pride. Ah! Ah ah ah! Something was happening under his embroidered tunic! And he dropped his hand from chin to lap with a furtive innocence quite wasted upon its only audience, the jar of syruped figs.
*
Yielding to an impulse he despised himself for feeling, Lucius Cornelius Sulla walked next morning across the Palatine to the spot on the Palatium where he had encountered Julilla. It was high spring now, and the patches of parkland sported flowers everywhere, narcissus and anemone, hyacinths, violets, even an occasional early rose; wild apples and peaches were in full blossom, white and pink, and the rock upon which he had sat in January now was almost hidden by lushly green grass.
Her servant girl in attendance, Julilla was there, looking thinner, less honey-colored. And when she saw him, a wild triumphant joy suffused her from eyes to skin to hair—so beautiful! Oh, never in the history of the world had any mortal woman been so beautiful! Hackles rising, Sulla stopped in his tracks, filled with an awe akin to terror. Venus. She was Venus. Ruler of life and death. For what was life except the procreative principle, and what was death save its extinction? All else was decoration, the furbelows men invented to convince themselves life and death must mean more. She was Venus. But did that make him Mars, her equal in godhead—or was he merely Anchises, a mortal man she stooped to fancy for the space of one Olympian heartbeat?
No, he wasn’t Mars. His life had equipped him for pure ornamentation, and even that of the cheapest gimcrack kind; who could he be but Anchises, the man whose only real fame lay in the fact that Venus stooped to fancy him for a moment? He shook with anger, directed his hateful frustration at her, and so pumped venom into his veins, creating an overwhelming urge to strike at her, reduce her from Venus to Julilla.
“I heard you came back yesterday,” she said, not moving toward him.
“Got your spies out, have you?” he asked, refusing to move closer to her.
“That isn’t necessary in our street, Lucius Cornelius. The servants know everything,” she said.
“Well, I hope you don’t think I came here looking for you today, because I didn’t. I came here for a little peace.”
Her beauty actually increased, though he hadn’t thought it possible. My honey-girl, he thought. Julilla. It dropped like honey off the tongue. So did Venus.
“Does that mean I disturb your peace?” she asked, very sure of herself for one so young.
He laughed, contriving to make it sound light, amused, trifling. “Ye gods, baby girl, you have a lot of growing up to do!” he said, and laughed again. “I said I came here for peace. That means I thought I’d find it here, doesn’t it? And by logical progression, the answer must be that you don’t disturb my peace one iota.”
She fought back. “Not at all! It might simply indicate that you didn’t expect to find me here.”
“Which leads straight back to indifference,” he said.
It was an unequal contest, of course; before his eyes she was shrinking, losing her luster, an immortal turned mortal. Her face puckered, but she managed not to cry, just gazed at him bewildered, not able to reconcile how he looked and what he said with the true instinct of her heart, which told her in every beat that she had caught him in her toils.
“I love you!” she said, as if it explained everything.
Another laugh. “Fifteen! What would you know of love?”
“I’m sixteen!” she said.
“Look, baby girl,” Sulla said, his tone cutting, “leave me alone! Not only are you a nuisance, you’re rapidly becoming an embarrassment.” And turned, and walked away without once looking back.
Julilla didn’t collapse in floods of tears; it would have been better for her future welfare had she. For a passionate and painful bout of tears might have convinced her that she was wrong, that she stood no chance to capture him. As it was, she walked across to where Chryseis, her servant girl, was standing pretending to be absorbed in the prospect of an empty Circus Maximus. Her chin was up; so was her pride.
“He’s going to be difficult,” she said, “but never mind. Sooner or later I shall get him, Chryseis.”
“I don’t think he wants you,” said Chryseis.
“Of course he wants me!” said Julilla scornfully. “He wants me desperately]”
Long acquaintance with Julilla put a curb on Chryseis’s tongue; instead of trying to reason with her mistress, she sighed, shrugged. “Have it your own way,” she said.
“I usually do,” answered Julilla.
They began to walk home, the silence between them unusual, for they were much of an age, and had grown up together. But when they reached the great temple of Magna Mater, Julilla spoke, voice determined.
“I shall refuse to eat,” she said.
Chryseis stopped. “And what do you think that’s going to do?” she asked.
“Well, in January he said I was fat. And I am.”
“Julilla, you’re not!”
“Yes, I am. That’s why I haven’t eaten any sweetmeats since January. I’m a little thinner, but not nearly thin enough. He likes thin women. Look at Nicopolis. Her arms are like sticks.”
“But she’s old!” Chryseis said. “What looks good on you wouldn’t look good on her. Besides, you’ll worry your parents if you stop eating—they’ll think you’re sick!”
“Good,” said Julilla. “If they think I’m sick, so will Lucius Cornelius. And he’ll worry about me dreadfully.”
Better and more convincing arguments Chryseis could not produce, for she was neither very bright nor very sensible. So she burst into tears, which pleased Julilla enormously.
*
Four days after Sulla returned to Clitumna’s house, Lucius Gavius Stichus came down with a digestive disorder which prostrated him; alarmed, Clitumna called in half a dozen of the Palatine’s most fashionable doctors, all of whom diagnosed an attack of food poisoning.
“Vomiting, colic, diarrhoea—a classic picture,” said their spokesman, the Roman physician Publius Popillius.
“But he hasn’t eaten anything the rest of us haven’t!” protested Clitumna, her fears unallayed. “In fact, he isn’t eating nearly as well as the rest of us, and that’s what’s worrying me most!”
“Ah, domina, I think you are quite wrong,” lisped the nosiest of them, Athenodorus Siculus, a practitioner with the famous Greek investigative persistence; he had wandered off and poked into every room opening off the atrium, then into the rooms around the peristyle-garden. “Surely you are aware that Lucius Gavius has half a sweetmeat shop in his study?”
“Pish!” squeaked Clitumna. “Half a sweetmeat shop, indeed! A few figs and pastries, that’s all. In fact, he hardly ever touches them.”
The six learned medical men looked at each other. ‘ ‘Domina, he eats them all day and half the night, so your staff tell me,” said Athenodorus the Greek from Sicily. “I suggest you persuade him to give up his confectioneries. If he eats better foods, not only will his digestive troubles clear up, but his general level of health will improve.”
Lucius Gavius Stichus was privy to all this, lying on his bed too weak from the violence of his purging to defend himself, his slightly protruding eyes jumping from one face to another as the conversation jumped from one speaker to another.
“He has pimples, and his skin is a bad color,” said a Greek from Athens. “Does he exercise?”
“He doesn’t need to,” said Clitumna, the first hint of doubt appearing in her tone. “He rushes about from place to place in the course of his business, it keeps him constantly on the run, I do assure you!”
“What is your business, Lucius Gavius?” asked the Spaniard.
“I’m a slaver,” said Stichus.
Since all save Publius Popillius had started life in Rome as slaves, more jaundice appeared suddenly in their eyes than they could find in Lucius Gavius’s, and they moved away from his vicinity under pretext that it was time to leave.
“If he wants something sweet, then let him confine himself to the honeyed wine,” said Publius Popillius. “Keep him off solid foods for a day or two more, and then when he’s feeling hungry again, let him have a normal diet. But mind—I said normal, domina! Beans, not sweetmeats. Salads, not sweetmeats. Cold collations, not sweetmeats.”
Stichus’s condition did improve over the next week, but he never got fully well. Eat nothing but nourishing and wholesome foods though he did, still he suffered from periodic bouts of nausea, vomiting, pain, and dysentery, none as severe as his initial attack, all debilitating. He began to lose weight, just a little at a time, so that no one in the house really noticed.
By the end of summer he couldn’t drag himself as far as his office in the Porticus Metelli, and the days he fancied lying on a couch in the sun grew fewer and further apart. The fabulous illustrated book Sulla had given him ceased to interest him, and food of any kind became an ordeal to consume. Only the honeyed wine could he tolerate, and not always even that.
By September every medical practitioner in Rome had been called to see him, and many and varied were the diagnoses, not to mention the treatments, especially after Clitumna began to resort to quacks.
“Let him eat what he wants,” said one doctor.
“Let him eat nothing and starve it out,” said another.
“Let him eat nothing but beans,” said a doctor of the Pythagorean persuasion.
“Be consoled,” said the nosy Greek doctor, Athenodorus Siculus. “Whatever it is, it’s obviously not contagious. I believe it is a malignancy in the upper bowel. However, make sure those who come in physical contact with him or have to empty his chamber pot wash their hands thoroughly afterward, and don’t let them near the kitchen or the food.”
Two days later, Lucius Gavius Stichus died. Beside herself with grief, Clitumna fled Rome immediately after the funeral, begging Sulla and Nicopolis to come with her to Circei, where she had a villa. But though Sulla escorted her down to the Campanian seashore, he and Nicopolis refused to leave Rome.
When he returned from Circei, Sulla kissed Nicopolis and moved out of her suite of rooms.
“I’m resuming tenancy of the study and my own sleeping cubicle,” he said. “After all, now that Sticky Stichy is dead, I’m the closest thing she has to a son.” He was sweeping the lavishly illustrated scrolls into a burning bucket; face twisting in disgust, he held up one hand to Nicopolis, who was watching from the doorway of the study. “Look at that! Not an inch of this room that isn’t sticky!”
The carafe of honeyed wine stood in a caked ring on the priceless citrus-wood console against one wall. Lifting it, Sulla looked down at the permanently ingrained mark amid the exquisite whorls of the wood, and hissed between his teeth.
“What a cockroach! Goodbye, Sticky Stichy!”
And he pitched the carafe through the open window onto the peristyle colonnade. But it flew farther than that, and broke into a thousand shards on the plinth of Sulla’s favorite statue, Apollo pursuing the dryad Daphne. A huge star of syrupy wine marred the smooth stone, and began to trickle down in long runnels which soaked into the ground. Darting to the window to look, Nicopolis giggled.
“You’re right,” she said. “What a cockroach!” And sent her little serving maid Bithy to clean the pedestal with rag and water.
No one noticed the traces of white powder adhering to the marble, for it too was white. The water did its work: the powder vanished.
“I’m glad you missed the actual statue,” said Nicopolis, sitting on Sulla’s knee, both of them watching Bithy as she washed away.
“I’m sorry,” said Sulla, but looked very pleased.
“Sorry? Lucius Cornelius, it would have ruined all that wonderful paintwork! At least the plinth is plain marble.”
His upper lip curled back to show his teeth. “Bah! Why is that I seem permanently surrounded by tasteless fools?” he asked, tipping Nicopolis off his lap.
The stain was completely gone; Bithy wrung out her rag and emptied her basin into the pansies.
“Bithy!” Sulla called. “Wash your hands, girl, and I mean wash them properly! You don’t know what Stichus died of, and he was very fond of honeyed wine. Go on, off you go!”
Beaming because he noticed her, Bithy went.