1

Panaetius died in Tarsus halfway through February, which left Publius Rutilius Rufus little time to get home before the start of the campaigning season; originally he had planned to make the bulk of his journey overland, but urgency compelled him now to take his chances upon the sea.

“And I’ve been downright lucky,” he said to Gaius Marius the day after he arrived in Rome, just before the Ides of March. “For once the winds blew in the direction I wanted.”

Marius grinned. “I told you, Publius Rutilius, even Father Neptune wouldn’t have the courage to spoil Piggle-wiggle’s plans! Actually you’ve been lucky in more ways than that—if you’d been in Rome, you’d have had the unenviable task of going among the Italian Allies to persuade them to hand over troops.”

“Which is what you’ve been doing, I take it?”

“Since early January, when the lots gave Metellus charge of the African war against Jugurtha. Oh, it wasn’t difficult to recruit, not with all Italy burning to avenge the insult of passing beneath the yoke. But men of the right kind are getting very thin on the ground,” said Marius.

“Then we had better hope that the future doesn’t hold any more military disasters for Rome,” said Rutilius Rufus.

“Indeed we had.”

“How has-Piggle-wiggle behaved toward you?”

“Quite civilly, all considered,” said Marius. “He came to see me the day after he was inaugurated, and at least did me the courtesy of being blunt about his motives. I asked him why he wanted me—and you, for that matter—when we had made such a fool of him in the old days at Numantia. And he said he didn’t care a fig for Numantia. What concerned him was winning this present war in Africa, and he couldn’t think of a better way to do that than to avail himself of the services of the two men in all the world best equipped to understand Jugurtha’s strategy.”

“It’s a shrewd idea,” Rutilius Rufus said. “As the commander, he’ll reap the glory. What matters who wins the war for him, when it’s he who’ll ride in the triumphal chariot and gather in all the accolades? The Senate won’t offer you or me the new last name of Numidicus; they’ll offer it to him.”

“Well, he needs it more than we do. Metellus Piggle-wiggle is a Caecilius, Publius Rutilius! Which means his head rules his heart, especially where his skin is concerned.”

“Oh, very aptly put!” said Rutilius Rufus appreciatively.

“He’s already lobbying to have the Senate extend his command in Africa into next year,” Marius said.

“Which just goes to show that he got sufficient of Jugurtha’s measure all those years ago to realize beating Numidia into submission won’t be easy. How many legions is he taking?”

“Four. Two Roman, two Italian.”

“Plus the troops already stationed in Africa—say, two more legions. Yes, we ought to do it, Gaius Marius.”

“I agree.”

Marius got up from behind his desk and went to pour wine.

“What’s this I hear about Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio?” asked Rutilius Rufus, accepting the goblet Marius held out to him just in time, for Marius shouted with laughter and spilled his own drink.

“Oh, Publius Rutilius, it was wonderful! Honestly, I never cease to be amazed at the antics of the old Roman nobles. There was Scipio, respectably elected a praetor, and awarded the governorship of Further Spain when the lots were drawn for the praetor’s provinces. But what does he do? He gets up in the Senate and solemnly declines the honor of governing Further Spain! ‘Why?’ asks Scaurus, astonished—he supervised the drawing of the lots. ‘Because,’ says Scipio with an honesty I found quite endearing, ‘I would rape the place.’ It brought the House down— cheers, howls of mirth, feet stamping, hands clapping. And when the noise died down at last, Scaurus simply said, ‘I agree, Gnaeus Cornelius, you would rape the place.’ So now they’re sending Quintus Servilius Caepio to govern Further Spain in Scipio’s stead.”

“He’ll rape the place too,” said Rutilius Rufus, smiling.

“Of course, of course! Everyone knew that, including Scaurus. But Caepio at least has the grace to pretend he won’t, so Rome can turn a blind eye Spainward and life can go on in the usual way,” said Marius, back behind his desk. “I love this place, Publius Rutilius, I really do.”

“I’m glad Silanus is being kept at home.”

“Well, luckily someone has to govern Rome! What an escape! The Senate positively scrambled to prorogue Minucius Rufus’s governorship of Macedonia, I can assure you. And that niche being filled, nothing was left for Silanus except Rome, where things are more or less self-perpetuating. Silanus at the head of an army is a prospect to make Mars himself blanch.”

“Absolutely!” said Rutilius Rufus fervently.

“It’s a good year so far, actually,” Marius said. “Not only was Spain saved from the tender mercies of Scipio, and Macedonia from the tender mercies of Silanus, but Rome herself is considerably the lighter of villains, if I may be excused calling some of our consulars villains.”

“The Mamilian Commission, you mean?”

“Precisely. Bestia, Galba, Opimius, Gaius Cato, and Spurius Albinus have all been condemned, and there are more trials scheduled, though no surprises. Gaius Memmius has been most assiduous in assisting Mamilius in gathering evidence of collusion with Jugurtha, and Scaurus is a ruthless president of the court. Though he did speak in defense of Bestia—then turned round and voted to condemn him.”

Rutilius Rufus smiled. “A man has to be flexible,” he said. “Scaurus had to acquit himself of his duty toward a fellow consular by speaking up for him, but it wouldn’t swerve him from his duty toward the court. Not Scaurus.”

“No, not Scaurus!”

“And where have the condemned gone?” Rutilius Rufus asked.

“Quite a few seem to be choosing Massilia as their place of exile these days, though Lucius Opimius went to western Macedonia.”

“But Aulus Albinus survived.”

“Yes. Spurius Albinus took all the blame, and the House voted to permit him,” said Marius, and sighed. “It was a nice legal point.”

*

Julia went into labor on the Ides of March, and when the midwives informed Marius that it was not going to be an easy birth, he summoned Julia’s parents immediately.

“Our blood is too old and too thin,” said Caesar fretfully to Marius as they sat together in Marius’s study, husband and father bound together by a mutual love and fear.

“My blood isn’t,” said Marius.

“But that can’t help her! It may help her daughter if she has one, and we must be thankful for that. I had hoped my marrying Marcia would infuse a little plebeian strength into my line—but Marcia is still too noble, it seems. Her mother was patrician, a Sulpicia. I know there are those who argue that the blood must be kept pure, but I have noticed time and time again that the girls of ancient family have a tendency to bleed in childbirth. Why else is the death rate among the girls of ancient family so much higher than it is among other girls?’’ And Caesar ran his hands through his silver-gilt hair.

Marius couldn’t sit any longer; he got to his feet and began to pace up and down. “Well, she does have the best attention money can buy,” he said, nodding in the direction of the confinement room, from which no noises of distress had yet begun to emanate.

“They couldn’t save Clitumna’s nephew last autumn,” said Caesar, yielding to gloom.

“Who? Your unsatisfactory next-door neighbor, you mean?”

“Yes, that Clitumna. Her nephew died last September after a protracted illness. Only a young fellow, seemed healthy enough. The doctors did everything they could think of doing, but he died anyway. It’s preyed on my mind since.”

Marius stared at his father-in-law blankly. “Why on earth should it prey on your mind?” he asked. “What possible connection is there?”

Caesar chewed at his lip. “Things always happen in threes,” he said cheerlessly. “The death of Clitumna’s nephew was a death in close proximity to me and mine. There have to be two more deaths.”

“If so, then the deaths will occur in that family.”

“Not necessarily. There just have to be three deaths, all connected in some way. But until the second death happens, I defy a soothsayer to predict what the connection will be.”

Out went Marius’s hands, half in exasperation, half in despair. “Gaius Julius, Gaius Julius! Try to be optimistic, I beg of you! No one has yet come to say Julia is in danger of dying, I was simply told that the birth wouldn’t be easy. So I sent for you to help me blunder through this awful waiting, not to make me so downcast I can’t see a trace of light!”

Ashamed, Caesar made a conscious effort. “As a matter of fact, I’m glad Julia’s time is here,” he said more briskly. “I haven’t wanted to bother her of late, but once she’s over her delivery I’m hoping she will be able to spare the time to talk to Julilla.”

Privately Marius considered what Julilla needed was a sore bottom from an unsparing parental hand, but he managed to look interested; after all, he had never been a parent himself, and now that (all going well) he was about to become a parent, he ought to admit to himself that he might turn out to be as doting a tata as Gaius Julius Caesar.

“What’s the matter with Julilla?” he asked.

Caesar sighed. “She’s off her food. We’ve had some difficulty in making her eat for a long time, but during the last four months it’s worsened. She’s lost pounds and pounds! And now she’s prone to fainting fits, drops like a stone in her tracks. The doctors can find nothing wrong with her.’’

Oh, will I really get like this? Marius asked himself; there is nothing wrong with that spoiled young lady that a good dose of indifference wouldn’t cure! However, he supposed she was something to talk about, so he tried to talk about her. “I gather you’d like Julia to get to the bottom of it?”

“Indeed I would!”

“She’s probably in love with someone unsuitable,” said Marius, utterly ignorant, but totally correct.

“Nonsense!” said Caesar sharply.

“How do you know it’s nonsense?”

“Because the doctors thought of that, and I made full inquiries,” said Caesar, on the defensive.

“Who did you ask? Her?”

“Naturally!”

“It might have been more practical to ask her girl.”

“Oh, really, Gaius Marius!”

“She’s not pregnant?”

“Oh, really, Gaius Marius!”

“Look, Father-in-law, there’s no use starting to view me as an insect at this stage of things,” said Marius unfeelingly. “I’m a part of the family, not an outsider. If I, with my extremely limited experience of young ladies of sixteen, can see these possibilities, so too ought you, and even more so. Get her girl into your study and wallop her until you get the truth out of her—I guarantee she’s in Julilla’s confidence, and I guarantee she’ll break down if you question her properly—torture and death threats!”

“Gaius Marius, I couldn’t do that!” said Caesar, aghast at even the thought of such Draconian measures.

“You wouldn’t need to do more than cane her,” said Marius patiently. “A smarting pair of buttocks and the mere mention of torture will produce everything she knows.”

“I couldn’t do that,” Caesar repeated.

Marius sighed. “Have it your own way, then. But don’t assume you know the truth just because you’ve asked Julilla.”

“There has always been truth between me and mine,” said Caesar.

Marius didn’t answer, merely looked skeptical.

Someone knocked at the study door.

“Come!” called Marius, glad of the interruption.

It was the little Greek physician from Sicily, Athenodorus. “Domine, your wife is asking to see you,” he said to Marius, ‘ ‘and I think it would do her good if you came.’’

Down hurtled the contents of Marius’s chest into his belly; he drew a sobbing breath, his hand going out. Caesar had jumped to his feet, and was staring at the doctor painfully.

“Is she—is she—?” Caesar couldn’t finish.

“No, no! Rest easy, domine, she’s doing well,” said the Greek soothingly.

Gaius Marius had never been in the presence of a woman in labor, and now found himself terrified. It wasn’t hard to look on those killed or maimed in battle; they were comrades of the sword, no matter which side they belonged to, and a man always knew he might but for Fortune be one of them. In Julia’s case the victim was dearly beloved, someone to be shielded and protected, spared all possible pain. Yet now Julia was no less his victim than any enemy, put into her bed of pain because of him. Disturbing thoughts for Gaius Marius.

However, all looked very normal when he walked into the confinement chamber. Julia was indeed lying in a bed. The childing stool—the special chair on which she would be seated when she went into the final stage of her labor— was decently covered up in a corner, so he didn’t even notice it. To his vast relief, she didn’t look either worn out or desperately ill, and the moment she saw him she smiled at him radiantly, holding out both hands.

He took them and kissed them. “Are you all right?” he asked, a little foolishly.

“Of course I am! It’s just going to take a long time, they tell me, and there’s a bit of bleeding. But nothing to be worried about at this stage.” A spasm of pain crossed her face; her hands closed on his with a strength he hadn’t known she possessed, and clung there for perhaps a minute before she began to relax again. “I just wanted to see you,” she resumed, as if there had been no interruption. “May I see you from time to time, or will it be too distressing for you?”

“I would much rather see you, my little love,” he said, bending to kiss the line where brow and hair met, and a few fine, fluffy curls clustered. They were damp, his lips informed him, and her skin was damp too. Poor, sweet darling!

“It will be all right, Gaius Marius,” she said, letting go of his hands. “Try not to worry too much. I know everything will be all right! Is tata still with you?”

“He is.”

Turning to leave, he encountered a fierce glare from Marcia, standing off to one side in the company of three old midwives. Oh, ye gods! Here was one who wouldn’t forgive him in a hurry for doing this to her daughter!

“Gaius Marius!” Julia called as he reached the door.

He looked back.

“Is the astrologer here?” she asked.

“Not yet, but he’s been sent for.”

She looked relieved. “Oh, good!”

*

Marius’s son was born twenty-four hours later, in a welter of blood. He almost cost his mother’s life, but her will to survive was very strong, and after the doctors packed her solid with swabs and elevated her hips the haemorrhaging slowed down, and eventually stopped.

“He will be a famous man, dominus, and his life will be full of great events and great adventures,” said the astrologer, expertly ignoring those unpalatable aspects the parents of new sons never wished to hear about.

“Then he will live?” asked Caesar sharply.

“Undoubtedly he will live, dominus.” One long and rather grimy finger rested across a major Opposition, blocking it from sight. “He will hold the highest office in the land—it is here in his chart for all the world to see.” Another long and grimy finger pointed to a Trine.

“My son will be consul,” said Marius with huge satisfaction.

“Assuredly,” said the astrologer, then added, “But he will not be as great a man as his father, says the Quincunx.”

And that pleased Marius even more.

Caesar poured two goblets of the best Falernian wine, unwatered, and gave one to his son-in-law, beaming with pride. “Here’s to your son and my grandson, Gaius Marius,” he said. “I salute you both!”

*

Thus, when at the end of March the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus sailed for the African province with Gaius Marius, Publius Rutilius Rufus, Sextus Julius Caesar, Gaius Julius Caesar Junior, and four promising legions, Gaius Marius could sail in the happy knowledge that his wife was out of all danger, and his son was thriving. Even his mother-in-law had deigned to speak to him again!

“Have a talk to Julilla,” he said to Julia just before he departed. “Your father’s very worried about her.”

Feeling stronger and bursting with joy because her son was a magnificently large and healthy baby, Julia mourned but one thing: she was not yet well enough to accompany Marius to Campania, to have a few more days with him before he quit Italy.

“I suppose you mean this ridiculous starvation business,”said Julia, leaning more comfortably into Marius’s embrace.

“Well, I don’t know any more than your father told me, but I did gather it was about that,” said Marius. “You’ll have to forgive me, I’m not really interested in young girls.”

His wife, a young girl, smiled secretly; she knew he never thought of her as young, but rather as a person of his own age, equally mature and intelligent.

“I’ll talk to her,” said Julia, lifting her face for a kiss. “Oh, Gaius Marius, what a pity I’m not well enough to try for a little brother or sister for Young Marius!”

But before Julia could gird herself to talk to her ailing sister, the news of the Germans burst upon Rome, and Rome flew into a gabbling panic. Ever since the Gauls had invaded Italy three hundred years before, and almost vanquished the fledgling Roman state, Italy had lived in dread of barbarian incursions; it was to guard against them that the Italian Allied nations had chosen to link their fates to Rome’s, and it was to guard against them that Rome and her Italian Allies fought perpetual border wars along the thousand miles of Macedonian frontier between the Adriatic Sea and the Thracian Hellespont. It was to guard against them that Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had forged a proper land route between Italian Gaul and the Spanish Pyrenees a mere ten years ago, and subdued the tribes which lived along the river Rhodanus with a view to weakening them by exposing them to Roman ways and putting them under Roman military protection.

Until five years ago, it was the barbarian Gauls and Celts had loomed largest in Roman fears; but then the Germans first came on the scene, and suddenly by comparison the Gauls and Celts seemed civilized, tame, tractable. Like all bogeys, these fears arose not out of what was known, but out of what was not known. The Germans had popped out of nowhere (during the consulship of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus), and after inflicting a hideous defeat upon a huge and superbly trained Roman army (during the consulship of Gnaeus Papirius Carbo) disappeared again as if they had never been. Mysterious. Incalculable. Oblivious to the normal patterns of behavior as understood and respected by all the peoples who dwelled around the margins of the Middle Sea. For why, when that ghastly defeat had spread the whole of Italy out before them as helpless as a woman in a sacked city, did the Germans turn away, disappear? It made no sense! But they had turned away, they had disappeared; and as the years since Carbo’s hideous defeat accumulated, the Germans became little more than a Lamia, a Mormolyce—a bogey to frighten children. The old, old fear of barbarian invasion lapsed back into its normal condition, somewhere between a shiver of apprehension and a disbelieving smile.

And now, out of nowhere again, the Germans were back, pouring in their hundreds of thousands into Gaul-across-the-Alps where the river Rhodanus flowed out of Lake Lemanna; and the Gallic lands and tribes which owed Rome tribute—the lands of the Aedui and the Ambarri—were awash in Germans, all ten feet tall, pallidly pale, giants out of legends, ghosts out of some northern barbarian underworld. Down into the warm, fertile valley of the Rhodanus the Germans spilled, crushing every living thing in their way, from men to mice, from forests to ferns, as indifferent to crops in the field as they were to birds on the wing.

The news reached Rome just days too late to recall the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus and his army, already landed in Africa Province. Thus, fool though he was, the consul Marcus Junius Silanus, kept in Rome to govern there where he could do least harm, now became the best the Senate could produce under the twin weights of custom and law. For a consul in office could not be passed over in favor of some other commander, if he indicated he was willing to undertake a war. And Silanus expressed himself delighted to undertake a war against the Germans. Like Gnaeus Papirius Carbo five years before him, Silanus envisioned German wagons loaded down with gold, and coveted that gold.

After Carbo had provoked the Germans into attacking him and gone down to crushing defeat, the Germans had failed to pick up the arms and armor the vanquished Romans had left behind, on their dead, or abandoned by those still living to accelerate the pace of their flight. Thus canny Rome rather than the oblivious Germans sent teams to collect every vestige of arms and gear, and bring it all back to Rome and store it. This military treasure trove still lay in warehouses all over the city, waiting to be used. The limited resources of manufactories to supply arms and gear at the start of the campaigning season had been exhausted by Metellus and his African expedition, so it was lucky indeed that Silanus’s hastily levied legions could be equipped from this cache; though of course the recruits lacking arms and a set of armor had to buy them from the State, which meant that the State actually made a little profit from Silanus’s new legions.

Finding troops to give Silanus was far more difficult. The recruiters labored mightily, and under an oppressive sense of urgency. Often the property qualifications were winked at; men anxious to serve who didn’t own quite enough to qualify were hastily enlisted, their inability to arm and protect themselves rectified from Carbo’s old cache, its cost deducted from their absentee compensation pay. Veterans who had retired were lured out of bucolic inertia—mostly with little trouble, as bucolic inertia did not suit many of the men who had done their ten seasons under the colors and therefore could not be called up again.

And finally it was done. Marcus Junius Silanus set off for Gaul-across-the-Alps at the head of a splendid army a full seven legions strong, and with a large cavalry arm of Thracians mixed with some Gauls from the more settled parts of the Roman Gallic province. The time was late May, a bare eight weeks after the news of the German invasion had reached Rome; in that time Rome had recruited, armed, and partially trained an army of fifty thousand men including the cavalry and noncombatants. Only a bogey as enormous as the Germans could have stimulated such a heroic effort.

“But nonetheless it’s living proof of what we Romans can do when we’ve the will to do it,” said Gaius Julius Caesar to his wife, Marcia, on their return; they had journeyed out to see the legions start their march up the Via Flaminia toward Italian Gaul, a dazzling sight, and a cheering one.

“Yes, provided Silanus can do the job,” said Marcia, a true senator’s wife, actively interested in politics.

“You don’t think he can,” said Caesar.

“Nor do you, if you’d only admit it. Still, watching so many booted feet march across the Mulvian Bridge made me very glad that we have Marcus Aemilius Scaurus and Marcus Livius Drusus as censors now,” Marcia said with a sigh of satisfaction. “Marcus Scaurus is right—the Mulvian Bridge is tottering, and won’t survive another flood. Then what would we do if all of our troops were south of the Tiber and needed to march north in a hurry? So I’m very glad he was elected, since he’s vowed to rebuild the Mulvian Bridge. A wonderful man!”

Caesar smiled a little sourly, but said, trying to be fair, “Scaurus is becoming an institution, damn him! He’s a showman, a dazzling trickster—and three parts sham. However, the one part which isn’t sham just happens to be worth more than any other man’s whole—and for that I must forgive all, I suppose. Besides which, he’s right—we do need a new program of public works, and not only to keep employment levels up. All these penny-pinching perusers of the senatorial rolls we seem to have endured as censors for the last few years are hardly worth the cost of the paper they scribble out the census on! Give Scaurus his due: he intends to see to some items I know should have been attended to long ago. Though I cannot condone his draining of the fens around Ravenna, or his plans for a system of canals and dikes between Parma and Mutina.”

“Oh, come now, Gaius Julius, be generous!” said Marcia a little sharply. “It’s terrific that he’s going to curb the Padus! With the Germans invading Gaul-across-the-Alps, we don’t need to find our armies cut off from the alpine passes by the Padus in full spate!”

“I’ve already said I agree it’s a good thing,” said Caesar, then added with stubborn disapproval, “Yet I find it fascinating that on the whole he’s managed to keep his program of public works firmly in those parts where he has clients galore—and is likely to sextuple their numbers by the time he’s finished. The Via Aemilia goes all the way from Ariminum on the Adriatic to Taurasia in the foothills of the western Alps—three hundred miles of clients packed as solid as the paving stones in it!”

“Well, and good luck to him,” said Marcia, equally stubborn. “I suppose you’ll find something to deride about his surveying and paving the west coast road too!”

“You forgot to mention the branch to Dertona that will link up the west coast road with the Via Aemilia,” gibed Caesar. “And he gets his name on the whole lot into the bargain! The Via Aemilia Scauri. Tchah!”

“Sourpuss,” said Marcia.

“Bigot,” said Caesar.

“There are definitely times when I wish I didn’t like you so much,” said Marcia.

“There are times when I can say the same,” said Caesar.

At which point Julilla drifted in. She was extremely thin, but not quite skeletal, and had remained in much the same state now for two months. For Julilla had discovered an equilibrium which allowed her to look pitiable yet prevented her dropping to a point where death became a strong possibility, if not from pure starvation, then certainly from disease. Death was not part of Julilla’s master plan, nor was her spirit troubled.

She had two objectives: one was to force Lucius Cornelius Sulla to admit he loved her, and the other was to soften up her family to breaking point, for only then, she knew, did she stand the remotest chance of securing her father’s permission to marry Sulla. Very young and very spoiled though she was, she hadn’t made the mistake of overestimating her power when compared to the power vested in her father. Love her to distraction he might, indulge her to the top limit of his monetary resources he might; yet when it came to deciding whom she would marry, he would follow his own wishes without regard for hers. Oh, if she was tractable enough to approve of his choice of a husband for her—as Julia had done—he would glow with a natural and simple pleasure, and she knew too that he would look for someone he felt sure would take care of her, love her, always treat her well and respectfully. But Lucius Cornelius Sulla as her husband? Never, never, never would her father consent to it, and no reason she—or Sulla—could put forward would change her father’s mind. She could weep, she could beg, she could protest undying love, she could turn herself inside out, and still her father would refuse to give his consent. Especially now that she had a dowry of some forty talents— a million sesterces—in the bank, which made her eligible, and marred Sulla’s chances of ever persuading her father that he wished to marry her for herself alone. That is, when he admitted that he wished to marry her.

As a child Julilla had never displayed any sign that she owned a streak of enormous patience, but now, when it was needed, she had it to hand. Patient as a bird hatching a sterile egg, Julilla embarked upon her master plan fully aware that if she was to get what she wanted—a marriage to Sulla—she must outwait and outendure everyone else she knew, from her victim, Sulla, to her controller, Gaius Julius Caesar. She was even aware of some of the pitfalls littering her path to success—Sulla, for instance, might marry elsewhere, or move away from Rome, or fall ill and die. But she did what she could to avert these possibilities, chiefly by using her apparent illness as a weapon aimed at the heart of a man she knew full well would not consent to see her. How did she know that? Because she had tried to see him many times during the first few months after he returned to Rome, only to suffer one rebuff after another, culminating in his informing her—hidden as they were behind a fat pillar in the Porticus Margaritaria—that if she didn’t leave him alone, he would quit Rome forever.

The master plan had evolved slowly, its nuclear germ the result of that first meeting, when he had derided her puppy fat and shooed her away. She had ceased to gobble sweeties, and lost a little weight, and had no reward from him for her pains. Then when he came back to Rome and was even ruder to her, her resolve had hardened, and she began to forsake food. At first it had been very difficult, but then she discovered that when she adhered to this semistarvation for long enough without once succumbing to the urge to stuff herself, her capacity to eat diminished, and the hunger pangs entirely went away.

So by the time that Lucius Gavius Stichus had died of his lingering illness eight months ago, Julilla’s master plan was more or less fully evolved; there remained only irritating problems to solve, from devising a way to keep herself in the forefront of Sulla’s mind to discovering a way to maintain herself in a weight equilibrium which would allow her to live.

Sulla she dealt with by writing him letters.

I love you, and I shall never tire of telling you so. If letters are the only way I can make you hear me, then letters there will be. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands, if the years mount up. I will smother you in letters, drown you in letters, crush you in letters. What more Roman way is there than the writing of letters? We feed on them, as I feed upon writing to you. What does food mean, when you deny me the food my heart and spirit crave? My crudest, most merciless, and un-pitying beloved! How can you stay away from me? Break down the wall between our two houses, steal into my room, kiss me and kiss me and kiss me! But you will not. I can hear you saying it as I lie here too weak to leave my awful and hateful bed. What have I done to deserve your indifference, your coldness? Surely somewhere inside your white, white skin there curls the smallest of womannikins, my essence given into your keeping, so that the Julilla who lives next door in her awful and hateful bed is only a sucked-out and dried-up simulacrum growing steadily shadowier, fainter. One day I shall disappear, and all that will be left of me is that tiny womannikin under your white, white skin. Come and see me, look upon what you have done? Kiss me and kiss me and kiss me. For I love you.

The food equilibrium had been more difficult. Determined not to gain weight, she kept on losing it in spite of her efforts to remain static. And then one day the whole gang of physicians who had over the months paraded through the house of Gaius Julius Caesar, trying vainly to cure her, went to Gaius Julius Caesar and advocated that she be force-fed. But in the way of physicians, they had left it up to her poor family to do their dirty work. So the whole house had gathered up its courage and prepared itself for the effort, from the newest slave to the brothers, Gaius and Sextus, and Marcia, and Caesar himself. It had been an ordeal no one cared to remember afterward—Julilla screaming as if she were being murdered rather than resurrected, struggling feebly, vomiting back every mouthful, spitting and gagging and choking. When Caesar finally ordered the horror abandoned, the family had gone into council and agreed without one dissenting voice that no matter what might happen to Julilla in the future, force-fed she was not going to be.

But the racket Julilla had made during the attempt to force-feed her had let the cat out of the Caesar bag; the whole neighborhood now knew of the Caesar troubles. Not that the family had concealed its troubles from shame, only that Gaius Julius Caesar loathed gossip, and tried never to be a cause of it.

To the rescue came none other than Clitumna from next door, armed with a food she guaranteed Julilla would voluntarily ingest, and which would stay down once it was ingested. Caesar and Marcia welcomed her fervently, and sat listening fervently as she talked.

“Find a source of cow’s milk,” said Clitumna importantly, enjoying the novel experience of being the center of Caesarean attention. “I know it’s not easy to come by, but I believe there are a couple of fellows out in the Camenarum Valley who do milk cows. Then for each cup of milk you break in one hen’s egg and three spoons of honey. You beat it up until there’s a froth on top, and add half a cup of strong wine right at the end. If you put the. wine in before you beat it up, you won’t get a nice froth on top. If you have a glass goblet, give it to her in that, because the drink’s very pretty to look at—quite a rich pink, with a nice yellow top of froth. Provided she can keep it down, it will certainly keep her alive and fairly healthy,” said Clitumna, who vividly remembered her sister’s period of starvation after she had been prevented from marrying a most unsuitable fellow from Alba Fucentia—a snake charmer, no less!

“We’ll try it,” said Marcia, eyes full of tears.

“It worked for my sister,” said Clitumna, and sighed. “When she got over the snake charmer, she married my dear, dear Stichus’s father.”

Caesar got up. “I’ll send someone out to the Camenarum at once,” he said, disappearing. Then his head came round the door. “What about the hen’s egg? Ought it to be a tenth egg, or will an ordinary one do?” he asked.

“Oh, we just used ordinary ones,” said Clitumna comfortably, relaxing in her chair. “The extra-large variety might upset the balance of the drink.”

“And the honey?” Caesar persisted. “Ordinary Latin honey, or should we try to get Hymettan, or at any rate smokeless?”

“Ordinary Latin honey is quite good enough,” said Clitumna firmly. “Who knows? Maybe it was the smoke in the ordinary honey that did the trick. Let us not depart from the original recipe, Gaius Julius.”

“Quite right.” Caesar disappeared again.

“Oh, if only she can tolerate it!” said Marcia, her voice shaking. “Neighbor, we are at our wits’ end!”

“I imagine you are. But don’t make such a fuss about it, at least not in Julilla’s hearing,” advised Clitumna, who could be sensible when her heart wasn’t involved, and would cheerfully have let Julilla die had she only known of those letters piling up in Sulla’s room. Her face puckered. “We don’t want a second death in these two houses,” she said, and sniffled dolefully.

“We most certainly don’t!” cried Marcia. Her sense of social fitness coming to the fore, she said delicately, “I do hope you’re over the loss of your nephew a little, Clitumna? It’s very difficult, I know.”

“Oh, I manage,” said Clitumna, who did grieve for Stichus on many levels, but upon one vital level had found her life a great deal easier without the friction between the deceased Stichus and her dear, darling Sulla. She heaved a huge sigh—sounding much like Julilla, had she only known it.

That encounter had proved to be the first of many, for when the drink actually worked, the Caesar household lay under a massive obligation to their vulgar neighbor.

“Gratitude,” said Gaius Julius Caesar, who took to hiding in his study whenever he heard Clitumna’s shrill voice in the atrium, “can be a wretched nuisance!”

“Oh, Gaius Julius, don’t be such a curmudgeon!” said Marcia defensively. “Clitumna is really very kind, and we can’t possibly hurt her feelings—which is what you’re in danger of doing when you avoid her so persistently.”

“I know she’s terribly kind!” exclaimed the head of the household, goaded. “That’s what I’m complaining about!”

*

Julilla’s master plan had complicated Sulla’s life to a degree which would have afforded her great satisfaction, had she only known. But she did not, for he concealed his torment from everyone save himself, and feigned an indifference to her plight which completely fooled Clitumna, always full of news about the situation next door now that she had donned the mantle of lifesaving miracle worker.

“I do wish you’d pop in and say hello to the poor girl,” Clitumna said fretfully about the time that Marcus Junius Silanus led his seven magnificent legions north up the Via Flaminia. “She often asks after you, Lucius Cornelius.”

“I’ve got better things to do than dance attendance on a female Caesar,” said Sulla harshly.

“What arrant nonsense!” said Nicopolis vigorously. “You’re as idle as any man could possibly be.”

“And is that my fault?” he demanded, swinging round on his mistress with a sudden savagery that made her draw back in fright. “I could be busy! I could be marching with Silanus to fight the Germans.”

“Well, and why didn’t you go?” Nicopolis asked. “They’ve dropped the property qualifications so drastically that I’m sure with your name you could have managed to enlist.”

His lips drew back from his teeth, revealing the overlong and sharply pointed canines which gave his smile a feral nastiness. “I, a patrician Cornelius, to march as a ranker in a legion?” he asked. “I’d sooner be sold into slavery by the Germans!”

“You might well be, if the Germans aren’t stopped. Truly, Lucius Cornelius, there are times when you demonstrate only too well that you yourself are your own worst enemy! Here you are, when all Clitumna asked of you was a miserable little favor for a dying girl, grizzling that you have neither the time nor the interest—really, you do exasperate me!” A sly gleam crept into her eyes. “After all, Lucius Cornelius, you must admit your life here is vastly more comfortable since Lucius Gavius so conveniently expired.” And she hummed the tune of a popular ditty under her breath, a song with words to the effect that the singer

had murdered his rival in love and got away with it. “Con-veeeeeeniently ex-piiiiiiired!” she warbled.

His face became flinty, yet oddly expressionless. “My dear Nicopolis, why don’t you stroll down to the Tiber and do me the enormous favor of jumping in?”

The subject of Julilla was prudently dropped. But it was a subject which seemed to crop up perpetually, and secretly Sulla writhed, aware of his vulnerability, unable to display concern. Any day that fool girl of Julilla’s could be caught out carrying one of the letters, or Julilla herself caught in the deed of writing one—and then where would he be? Who would believe that he, with his history, was innocent of any kind of intrigue? It was one thing to have an unsavory past, but if the censors deemed him guilty of corrupting the morals of a patrician senator’s daughter—he would never, never be considered for membership of the Senate. And he was determined he was going to reach the Senate.

What he yearned to do was to leave Rome, yet he didn’t dare—what might the girl do in his absence? And, much though he hated having to admit it, he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her while she was so ill. Self-induced her illness might be, but it was nonetheless a serious illness. His mind circled inside itself like a disorientated animal, unable to settle, unable to discipline itself to a sensible or logical path. He would drag the withered grass crown out from its hiding place in one of his ancestral cupboards and sit holding it between his hands, almost weeping in a frenzy of anxiety; for he knew where he was going and what he intended to do, and that wretched girl was an unbearable complication, and yet that wretched girl was the start of it all, with her grass crown—what to do, what to do? Bad enough to have to pick his way unerringly through the morass of his coming intentions, without the additional strain of Julilla.

He even contemplated suicide, he who was the last person in the world likely to do that deed—a fantasy, a delicious way out of everything, the sleep which has no end. And then back his thoughts would go to Julilla, always back to Julilla—why? He didn’t love her, he wasn’t capable of loving. Yet there were times when he hungered for her, craved to bite her and kiss her and impale her until she screamed in ecstatic pain; and there were other times, especially when he lay wakeful between his mistress and his stepmother, that he actively loathed her, wanting the feel of her skinny throat between his hands, wanting to see her empurpled face and goggling eyes as he squeezed the last vestige of her life out of her starving lungs. Then would come another letter—why didn’t he just throw them away, or carry them to her father with a fierce look on his face and a demand that this harassment cease? He never did. He read them, those passionate and despairing pleas her girl kept slipping into the sinus of his toga in places too public to draw attention to her action; he read each one a dozen times, then put it away in his ancestral cupboards with the others.

But he never broke down in his resolve not to see her.

And spring turned into summer, and summer into the dog days of Sextilis, when Sirius the Dog Star shimmered sullenly over a heat-paralyzed Rome. Then, as Silanus was marching confidently up the Rhodanus toward the churning masses of the Germans, it began to rain in central Italy. And kept on raining. To the denizens of sunny Rome, a worse fate than the Sextilian dog days. Depressing, highly inconvenient, a worry in case of flood, a nuisance on all fronts. The marketplaces couldn’t hope to open, political life was impossible, trials had to be postponed, and the crime rate soared. Men discovered their wives in flagrante delicto and murdered them, the granaries leaked and wetted the wheat stored therein, the Tiber rose just enough to ensure that some of the public latrines backfilled and floated excrement out of their doors, a vegetable shortage developed when the Campus Martius and the Campus Vaticanus were covered with a few inches of water, and shoddily built high-rise insulae began to crumble into total collapse or suddenly manifested huge cracks in walls and foundations. Everyone caught cold; the aged and infirm began to die of pneumonia, the young of croup and quinsy, all ages of that mysterious disease which paralyzed the body and, if survived, left an arm or a leg shriveled, wasted.

Clitumna and Nicopolis began to fight every day, and every day Nicopolis would remark to Sulla in a whisper how very convenient Stichus’s death had been for him.

Then, after two full weeks of remorseless rain, the low clouds hauled their last tatters over the eastern horizon, and the sun came out. Rome steamed. Tendrils of vapor curled off the paving stones and roof tiles; the air was thick with it. Every balcony, loggia, peristyle-garden, and window in the city burgeoned with mouldy washing, contributing to the general fug, and houses where small babies dwelled— like the one of the merchant banker Titus Pomponius— suddenly found their peristyle-gardens filled with line upon line of drying diapers. Shoes had to be divested of mildew, every book in every literate house unrolled and inspected minutely for insidious fungus, the clothes chests and cupboards aired.

But there was one cheering aspect to this foetid dampness; mushroom season arrived with a phenomenal surplus. Always avid for the fragrant umbrellas after the normal summer dry, the whole city gobbled mushrooms, rich and poor alike.

And Sulla was once again loaded down with Julilla’s letters, after a wonderful wet two weeks which had prevented Julilla’s girl from finding him to drop them into his toga. His craving to quit Rome escalated until he knew if he didn’t shake Rome’s vaporous miasma off himself for the space of one little day, he would truly go mad at last. Metrobius and his protector, Scylax, were vacationing in Cumae, and Sulla didn’t want to spend that day of respite alone. So he resolved that he would take Clitumna and Nicopolis on a picnic to his favorite spot outside the city.

“Come on, girls,” he said to them on the third fine dawn in a row, “put on your glad rags, and I’ll take you on a picnic!”

The girls—neither feeling at all girlish—looked at him with the sour derision of those in no mood to be jollied out of their doldrums, and declined to budge from the communal bed, though the humid night had left it sweatily soaked.

“You both need some fresh air,” Sulla persisted.

“We are living on the Palatine because there is nothing wrong with the air up here,” said Clitumna, turning her back.

“At the moment the air on the Palatine is no better than any other air in Rome—it’s full of the stink of drains and washing,” he said. “Come on, do! I’ve hired a carriage and we’ll head off in the direction of Tibur—lunch in the woods—see if we can catch a fish or two—or buy a fish or two, and a good fat rabbit straight out of the trap—and come home before dark feeling a lot happier.”

“No,” said Clitumna querulously.

Nicopolis wavered. “Well...”

That was enough for Sulla. “Get ready, I’ll be back in a few moments,” he said, and stretched luxuriantly. “Oh, I am so tired of being cooped up inside this house!”

“So am I,” said Nicopolis, and got out of bed.

Clitumna continued to lie with her face to the wall, while Sulla went off to the kitchen to command a picnic lunch.

“Do come,” he said to Clitumna as he donned a clean tunic and laced on open boots.

She refused to answer.

“Have it your own way, then,” he said as he went to the door. “Nicopolis and I will see you this evening.”

She refused to answer.

Thus the picnic party consisted only of Nicopolis and Sulla and a big hamper of goodies the cook had thrown together at late notice, wishing he could go along himself. At the foot of the Steps of Cacus an open two-wheeled gig was waiting; Sulla helped Nicopolis up into the passenger’s seat, then hoisted himself into the driver’s seat.

“Away we go,” he said happily, gathering in the reins and experiencing an extraordinary spurt of lightheartedness, a rare sense of freedom. He confessed to himself that he wasn’t sorry Clitumna had declined to come. Nicopolis was company enough. “Gee up, you mules!” he cried.

The mules geed up nicely; the gig rattled down the Valley of Murcia in which the Circus Maximus lay, and left the city through the Capena Gate. Alas, the view at first was neither interesting nor cheering, for the ring road Sulla took in heading east crossed the great cemeteries of Rome. Tombstones and more tombstones—not the imposing mausolea and sepulchra of the rich and noble which flanked every arterial road out of the city, but the gravestones of simpler souls. Every Roman and Greek, even the poorest, even the slaves, dreamed that after his going he would be able to afford a princely monument to testify that he had onceexisted. For that reason, both poor and slaves belonged to burial clubs, and contributed every tiny mite they could afford to the club funds, carefully managed and invested; embezzlement was rife in Rome as in any place of human habitation, but the burial clubs were so jealously policed by their members that their executives had no choice save to be honest. A good funeral and a lovely monument mattered.

A crossroads formed the central point of the huge necropolis sprawled over the whole Campus Esquilinus, and there at the crossroads stood the massive temple of Venus Libitina, in the midst of a leafy grove of sacred trees. Inside the temple’s podium lay the registers in which the names of Rome’s dead citizens were inscribed, and there too lay chest after chest of money paid in over the centuries to register each citizen death. In consequence the temple was enormously rich, the funds belonging to the State, yet never touched. The Venus was that Venus who ruled the dead, not the living, that Venus who presided over the extinction of the procreative force. And her temple grove was the headquarters of Rome’s guild of undertakers. Behind the precinct of Venus Libitina was an area of open space on which the funeral pyres were built, and beyond that was the paupers’ cemetery, a constantly changing network of pits filled with bodies, lime, soil. Few, citizens or noncitizens, elected to be inhumed, apart from the Jews, who were buried in one section of the necropolis, and the aristocrats of the Famous Family Cornelius, who were buried along the Via Appia; thus most of the monuments transforming the Campus Esquilinus into a crowded little stone city housed urns of ashes rather than decomposing bodies. No one could be buried within Rome’s sacred boundary, not even the greatest.

However, once the gig passed beneath the arches of the two aqueducts which brought water to the teeming northeastern hills of the city, the vista changed. Farmlands stretched in all directions, market gardens at first, then grass pastures and wheat fields.

Despite the effect the downpour had had on the Via Tiburtina (the densely packed layer of gravel, tufa dust, and sand on top of the paving stones had been eroded), the two in the gig were thoroughly enjoying themselves. The sun was hot but the breeze cooling, Nicopolis’s parasol was large enough to shade Sulla’s snow-white skin as well as her own olive hide, and the mules turned out to be a willingly tractable pair. Too sensible to force the pace, Sulla let his team find their own, and the miles trotted by delightfully.

To go all the way to Tibur and back was impossible in one day, but Sulla’s favorite spot lay well short of the climb up to Tibur itself. Some distance out of Rome was a forest that stretched all the way into the ranges which rose, ever increasing in height, to the massif of the Great Rock, Italy’s highest mountain. This forest cut diagonally across the route of the road for perhaps a mile before wandering off crosscountry; the road then entered the Anio River valley, most fertile, eminently arable.

However, the mile or so of forest was harder ground, and here Sulla left the road, directing the mules down an un-paved wagon track which dived into the trees and finally petered out.

“Here we are,” said Sulla, jumping down and coming round to help Nicopolis, who found herself stiff and a little sore. “I know it doesn’t look promising, but walk a little way further with me and I’ll show you a place well worth the ride.”

First he unharnessed the mules and hobbled them, then he shoved the gig off the track into the shade of some bushes and took the picnic hamper out of it, hoisting it onto his shoulder.

“How do you know so much about dealing with mules and harness?” Nicopolis asked as she followed Sulla into the trees, picking her way carefully.

“Anyone does who’s worked in the Port of Rome,” said Sulla over his unburdened shoulder. “Take it slowly, now! We’re not going far, and there’s no hurry.”

Indeed, they had made good time. Since the month was early September, the twelve hours of daylight were still on the long side at sixty-five minutes each; it still wanted two hours before noon when Sulla and Nicopolis entered the woods.

“This isn’t virgin forest,” he said, “which is probably why no one logs in it. In the old days this land was given over to wheat, but after the grain started coming from Sicily and Sardinia and Africa Province, the farmers moved into Rome and left the trees to grow back, for it’s poor soil.”

“You’re amazing, Lucius Cornelius,” she said, trying to keep up with Sulla’s long, easy strides. “How is it that you know so many things about the world?’’

“It’s my luck. What I hear or read, I remember.”

They emerged then into an enchanting clearing, grassy and filled with late-summer flowers—pink and white cosmos, great blooming jungles of pink and white rambling roses, and lupines in tall spikes, pink and white. Through the clearing flowed a stream in full spate from the rain, its bed filled with jagged rocks which divided its waters into deep still pools and foaming cascades; the sun glittered and flashed off its surface, amid dragonflies and little birds.

“Oh, how beautiful!” cried Nicopolis.

“I found it last year when I went away for those few months,” he said, putting the hamper down in a patch of shade. “My gig cast a wheel right where that track runs into the forest, and I had to put Metrobius up on one of the mules and send him to Tibur for help. While I waited, I explored.”

It gave Nicopolis no satisfaction to know that the despised and feared Metrobius had undoubtedly been shown this special place first, but she said nothing, simply flopped down in the grass and watched Sulla take a big skin of wine from the interior of the hamper. He immersed the wineskin in the stream where a natural fence of rocks anchored it, then took off his tunic and removed his open boots, all he wore.

Sulla’s lighthearted mood still lay inside his bones, as warming as the sun upon his skin; he stretched, smiling, and looked about the glade with an affection which had nothing to do with Metrobius or Nicopolis. Simply, his pleasure came from a divorcement from the predicaments and frustrations which so hedged his normal life around, a place where he could tell himself that time did not move, politics did not exist, people were classless, and money an invention for the future. His moments of pure happiness were so few and dispersed so thinly along the route march of his life that he remembered every single one of them with piercing clarity—the day when the jumble of squiggles on a piece of paper suddenly turned into understandable thoughts, the hour in which an enormously kind and thoughtful man had shown him how perfect the act of love could be, the stunning emancipation of his father’s death, and the realization that this clearing in a forest was the first piece of land he had ever been able to call his own, in that it belonged to no one who cared enough to visit it except for him. And that was all. The sum total. None was founded in an appreciation of beauty, or even of the process of living; they represented the acquisition of literacy, erotic pleasure, freedom from authority, and property. For those were the things Sulla prized, the things Sulla wanted.

Fascinated, Nicopolis watched him without even beginning to understand the source of his happiness, marveling at the absolute whiteness of his body in full sun—a sight she had never seen before—and the fiery gold of head and chest and groin. All far too much to resist; she doffed her own light robe and the shift she wore beneath it, its long back tail caught between her legs and pinned in front, until she too was naked and could relish the kiss of the sun.

They waded into one of the deep pools, gasping with the cold, stayed there long enough to warm up while Sulla played with her erect nipples and her beautiful breasts, then clambered out upon the thick soft grass and made love while they dried off. After which they ate their lunch, breads and cheeses and hard-boiled eggs and chicken wings, washed down with the chilly wine. She made a wreath of flowers for Sulla’s hair, then made another for her own, and rolled over three times from the sheer voluptuous gratification of being alive.

“Oh, this is wonderful!” she sighed. “Clitumna doesn’t know what she’s missing.”

“Clitumna never knows what she’s missing,” said Sulla.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nicopolis idly, the mischief-bee back buzzing inside her mind. “She’s missing Sticky Stichy.” And she began to hum the ditty about murder until she caught the flickering end of a glance from him that told her he was becoming angry. She didn’t honestly believe Sulla had contrived at Stichus’s death, but when she implied for the first time that Sulla had, she picked up interesting echoes of alarm from Sulla, and so kept it up from sheer idle curiosity.

Time to stop it. Leaping to her feet, she held out her hands to Sulla, still lying full length. “Come on, lazybones, I want to walk under the trees and cool off,” she said.

He rose obediently, took her hand, and strolled with her under the eaves of the forest, where no undergrowth marred the carpet of sodden leaves, warm after the day’s perfect portion of sun. Being barefoot was a treat.

And there they were! A miniature army of the most exquisite mushrooms Nicopolis had ever seen, every last one unmarked by insect hole or animal paw, purest white, fat and fleshy of canopy yet nicely slender of stalk, and giving off a heady aroma of earth.

“Oh, goody!” she cried, dropping to her knees.

Sulla grimaced. “Come on,” he said.

“No, don’t be mean just because you dislike mushrooms! Please, Lucius Cornelius, please! Go back to the hamper and find me a cloth—I’m going to take some of these home for my supper,” said Nicopolis, voice determined.

“They mightn’t be good ones,” he said, not moving.

“Nonsense, of course they’re good! Look! There’s no membrane covering up the gills, no spots, no red color. They smell superb too. And this isn’t an oak, is it?” She looked up at the tree in the base of which the mushrooms were growing.

Sulla eyed is* deeply scalloped leaves and experienced a vision of the inevitability of fate, the pointing finger of his lucky goddess. “No, it’s not an oak,” he said.

“Then please! Please?” she wheedled.

He sighed. “All right, have it your own way.”

A whole miniature army of mushrooms perished as Nicopolis selected her treasure trove, then wrapped it in the napkin Sulla had brought her and carefully laid it in the bottom of the hamper, where it would be protected from the heat as they drove home.

“I don’t know why you and Clitumna don’t like mushrooms,” she said after they were ensconced in the gig again, and the mules were trotting eagerly in the direction of their stables.

“I never have liked them,” said Sulla, not interested.

“All the more for me,” she said, and giggled.

“What’s so special about this lot, anyway?” Sulla asked.

“At the moment you can buy mushrooms by the ton in the markets, and dirt-cheap too.”

“These are mine,” she tried to explain. “I found them, I saw how absolutely perfect they were, I picked them. The ones in the markets are any old how—full of grubs, holes, spiders, the gods know what. Mine will taste much better, I promise you.”

They did taste better. When Nicopolis brought them into the kitchen the cook handled them suspiciously, but had to admit he couldn’t fault them with eyes or nose.

“Fry them lightly in a little oil,” said Nicopolis.

As it happened, the vegetable slave had brought home a huge basket of mushrooms from the markets that morning, so cheap that the entire staff was allowed to gorge on them, and had been doing so all day. Therefore no one was tempted to steal a few of the new arrivals; the cook was able to fry all of them just long enough to soften them and heat them through, then tossed them in a dish with a little freshly ground pepper and a squeeze of onion juice, and sent them to the dining room for Nicopolis. Who ate of them ravenously, her appetite sharpened by the day out—and by Clitumna’s monumental fit of the sulks. For, of course, the moment it was too late to send a servant to catch them, Clitumna had regretted her decision not to go on the famous picnic. Subjected to a paean on the subject throughout dinner, she reacted badly, and ended her day by announcing that she would sleep alone.

It was eighteen hours later before Nicopolis experienced a pain in her belly. She became nauseated and was a little sick, but had no diarrhoea, and admitted the pain was bearable, she’d known worse. Then she urinated a small volume of fluid red with blood, and panicked.

Doctors were summoned at once; the household ran about distractedly; Clitumna sent servants out to look for Sulla, who had gone out early in the day without leaving any word of his destination.

When Nicopolis’s heart rate went up and her blood pressure fell, the doctors looked grave. She had a convulsion, her respiration grew slow and shallow, her heart began to fibrillate, and she passed inexorably into coma. As it happened, no one even thought of mushrooms.

“Kidney failure,” said Athenodorus of Sicily, now the most successful medical practitioner on the Palatine.

Everyone else concurred.

And about the time that Sulla came rushing home, Nicopolis died from a massive internal haemorrhage—the victim, said the doctors, of a complete systemic collapse.

“We should perform an autopsy,” said Athenodorus.

“I agree,” said Sulla, who didn’t mention mushrooms.

“Is it catching?” asked Clitumna pathetically, looking old and ill and desperately alone.

Everyone said no.

*

The autopsy confirmed the diagnosis of renal and hepatic failure: kidneys and liver were swollen, congested, and full of haemorrhages. The envelope around Nicopolis’s heart had bled, as had the linings of her stomach, her small intestine, and her colon. The innocent-looking mushroom called The Destroyer had done its subtle work well.

Sulla organized the funeral (Clitumna was too prostrated) and walked in the procession as chief mourner, ahead of the stars of the Roman comedic and mimetic theaters; their presence assured a good attendance, which would have pleased Nicopolis.

And when Sulla returned to Clitumna’s house afterward, he found Gaius Julius Caesar waiting for him. Throwing off his dark mourning toga, Sulla joined Clitumna and her guest-in her sitting room. On few occasions had he set eyes on Gaius Julius Caesar, and knew the senator not at all; that the senator would visit Clitumna because of the untimely death of a Greek strumpet struck Sulla as very odd, so he was on his guard and punctiliously correct as he was introduced.

“Gaius Julius,” he said, bowing.

“Lucius Cornelius,” said Caesar, bowing also.

They did not shake hands, but when Sulla sat down, Caesar resumed his own seat with apparent tranquillity. He turned to the weeping Clitumna and spoke kindly.

“My dear, why stay?” he asked. “Marcia is waiting next door for you. Have your steward take you to her. Women stand in need of women’s company in times of grief.”

Without a word Clitumna rose and tottered to the door, while the visitor reached into his dark toga and produced a small roll of paper, which he then laid on the table.

“Lucius Cornelius, your friend Nicopolis had me draw up her will and lodge it with the Vestals a long time ago. The lady Clitumna is aware of its contents, which is why she did not need to stay to hear me read it.”

“Yes?” asked Sulla, at a loss. He could rind nothing further to say, and so sat dumbly, gazing at Caesar rather blankly.

Caesar moved to the crux of the matter. “Lucius Cornelius, the lady Nicopolis made you her sole heir.”

Sulla’s expression remained blank. “She did?”

“She did.”

“Well, I suppose if I’d thought about it, I would have known she’d be bound to do that,” said Sulla, recovering. “Not that it matters. Everything she had, she spent.”

Caesar looked at him keenly. “She didn’t, you know. The lady Nicopolis was quite wealthy.”

“Rubbish!” said Sulla.

“Truly, Lucius Cornelius, she was quite wealthy. She owned no property, but she was the widow of a military tribune who did extremely well out of booty. What he left her, she invested. As of this morning, her estate is in excess of two hundred thousand denarii,” said Caesar.

There could be no mistaking the genuineness of Sulla’s shock. Whatever Caesar might have thought of him until that moment, he knew he was now looking at a man who possessed no inkling of this information; Sulla sat stupefied.

Then he sank back in his chair, put shaking hands up to his face, shuddered, and gasped. “So much! Nicopolis?”

“So much. Two hundred thousand denarii. Or eight hundred thousand sesterces, if you prefer. A knight’s portion.”

Down came Sulla’s hands. “Oh, Nicopolis!” he said.

Caesar got to his feet, extending his hand. Sulla took it dazedly.

“No, Lucius Cornelius, don’t get up,” said Caesar warmly. “My dear fellow, I cannot tell you how delighted I am for you. I know it’s difficult to salve your grief at this early stage, but I would like you to know that I’ve often wished with all my heart that one day you would better your fortune—and your luck. In the morning I’ll commence probate. You had better meet me in the Forum at the second hour. By the shrine of Vesta. For now, I bid you good day.”

After Caesar had gone, Sulla sat without moving for a long time. The house was as silent as Nicopolis’s grave; Clitumna must have stayed next door with Marcia, and the servants were creeping about.

Perhaps as many as six hours went by before he finally got up, stiff and sore, and stretched a little. The blood began to flow, his heart to fill with fire.

“Lucius Cornelius, you are on your way at last,” he said, and began to laugh.

Though it started very softly, his laughter swelled and rolled into a shriek, a roar, a howl of mirth; the servants, listening terrified, debated among themselves as to which one was going to venture into Clitumna’s sitting room. But before they could reach a decision, Sulla stopped laughing.

*

Clitumna aged almost overnight. Though her years numbered only fifty, the death of her nephew had kicked the ageing process into a gallop; now the death of her dearest friend—and her lover—compounded her devastation. Not even Sulla had the power to jolly her out of her megrims. Not mime nor farce could lure her out of the house, nor could her regular visitors Scylax and Marsyas provoke a smile. What appalled her was the shrinking world of her intimates as well as her own encroaching dotage; if Sulla should abandon her—for his inheritance from Nicopolis had freed him from economic dependence upon her—she would be completely alone. A prospect she dreaded.

Soon after Nicopolis died, she sent for Gaius Julius Caesar. “One cannot leave anything to the dead,” she said to him, “and so I must alter my will yet again.”

The will was altered forthwith, and taken back to repose in the Vestal pigeonholes.

Still she moped. Her tears dropped like rain, her once restless hands were folded in her lap like two unbaked leaves of pastry waiting for the cook to fill them. Everyone worried; everyone understood there was nothing to be done save wait for time to heal. If there was time.

For Sulla it was time.

Julilla’s latest missive said:

I love you, even though the months and now the years have shown me how little my love is returned, how little my fate matters to you. Last June I turned eighteen, by rights I should be married, but I have managed to postpone that evil necessity by making myself ill. I must marry you, you and no one but you, my most beloved, my dearest Lucius Cornelius. And so my father hesitates, unable to present me to anyone as a suitable or desirable bride, and I shall keep it that way until you come to me and say that you will marry me. Once you said I was a baby, I would grow out of my immature love for you, but surely so long after— it is almost two years—I have proven my worth, I have proven that my love for you is as constant as the return of the sun from the south each spring. She is gone, your thin Greek lady I hated with every breath I drew, and cursed, and wished dead dead dead. You see how powerful I am, Lucius Cornelius? Why then do you not understand that you cannot escape me? No heart can be as full of love as mine and not generate reciprocation. You do love me, I know you love me. Give in, Lucius Cornelius, give in. Come and see me, kneel down beside my bed of pain and sorrow, let me draw down your head onto my breast, and offer me your kiss. Don’t sentence me to die! Choose to let me live. Choose to marry me.

Yes, for Sulla it was time. Time to end many things. Time to slough off Clitumna, and Julilla, and all those other dreadful human commitments which tied his spirit down and cast such eerie shadows into the corners of his mind. Even Metrobius must go.

Thus midway through October Sulla went to knock on Gaius Julius Caesar’s door at an hour when he could confidently expect the master of the house to be at home. And confidently expect that the women of the house would be banished to their quarters; Gaius Julius Caesar was not the kind of husband or father to permit his womenfolk to rub shoulders with his clients or his men friends. For though a part of his reason for knocking on Gaius Julius Caesar’s door was to rid himself of Julilla, he had no wish to set eyes on her; every part of him, every thinking component, every source of energy, must be focused on Gaius Julius Caesar and what he had to say to Gaius Julius Caesar. What he had to say must be said without arousing any suspicion or mistrust.

He had already gone with Caesar to have Nicopolis’s will probated, and come into his inheritance so easily, so free from reproach, that he was doubly wary. Even when he had presented himself to the censors, Scaurus and Drusus, everything went as smoothly as a well-orchestrated theatrical production, for Caesar had insisted upon going with him, and stood guarantor for the authenticity of all the papers he had had to produce for censorial scrutiny. At the end of it all, none other than Marcus Livius Drusus and Marcus Aemilius Scaurus had risen to their feet and shaken him by the hand and congratulated him sincerely. It was like a dream—but was it possible he would never again have to wake?

So, without the slightest need to contrive it, imperceptibly he had slipped into an acquaintance with Gaius Julius Caesar that ripened into a rather distant kind of friendly tolerance. To the Caesar house he never went; the acquaintance was pursued in the Forum. Both Caesar’s sons were in Africa with their brother-in-law, Gaius Marius, but he had come to know Marcia a little in the weeks since Nicopolis had died, for she had made it her business to visit Clitumna. And it had not been hard to see that Marcia eyed him askance; Clitumna, he suspected, was not as discreet as she might have been about the bizarre relationship among Sulla and herself and Nicopolis. However, he knew very well that Marcia found him dangerously attractive, though her manner gave him to understand that she had classified his attractiveness somewhere between the alien beauty of a snake and a scorpion.

Thus Sulla’s anxieties as he knocked on Gaius Julius Caesar’s door halfway through October, aware that he did not dare postpone the next phase of his plans any further. He must act before Clitumna began to cheer up. And that meant he had to be sure of Gaius Julius Caesar.

The lad on door duty opened to him immediately, and did not hesitate to admit him, which indicated to Sulla that he had been placed on Caesar’s list of those he was prepared to see anytime he was home.

“Is Gaius Julius receiving?” he asked.

“He is, Lucius Cornelius. Please wait,” said the lad, and sped off toward Caesar’s study.

Prepared to wait for a little while, Sulla strolled into the modest atrium, noting that this room, so plain and unadorned, contrived to make Clitumna’s atrium look like the anteroom to an Eastern potentate’s harem. And as he debated the nature of Caesar’s atrium, Julilla walked into it.

For how long had she persuaded every servant likely to be given door duty that she must be told the moment Lucius Cornelius came to call? And how long would it be before the lad sped where he ought to have sped in the beginning, to tell Caesar who had come to call?

These two questions flew into Sulla’s mind faster than it took a flicker of lightning to extinguish itself, faster than the responses of his body to the shock of the sight of her.

His knees gave way; he had to put out a hand to grab at the first object it could find, which happened to be an old silver-gilt ewer standing on a side table. Since the ewer was not anchored to the table, his frantic clutching at it unseated it, and it fell to the floor with a ringing, clanging crash just as Julilla, hands over her face, ran out of the room again.

The noise echoed like the interior of the Sibyl’s cave at Cumae, and brought everyone running. Aware that he had lost every last vestige of what little color he owned, and that he had broken out in a chilling sweat of fear and anguish, Sulla elected to let his legs buckle completely, slid down the length of his toga to the floor, and sat there with his head between his knees and his eyes fast closed, trying to blot out the image of the skeleton wrapped in Julilla’s golden skin.

When Caesar and Marcia got him to his feet and assisted him to walk into the study, he had reason to be thankful for the grey tinge in his face, the faint blueness about his lips; for he really did present the picture of a man genuinely ill.

A draft of unwatered wine brought him to a semblance of normality, and he was able to sit up on the couch with a sigh, wiping his brow with one hand. Had either of them seen? And where had Julilla gone? What to say? What to do?

Caesar looked very grim. So did Marcia.

“I’m sorry, Gaius Julius,” he said, sipping again at the wine. “A faintness—I don’t know what came over me.”

“Take your time, Lucius Cornelius,” said Caesar. “I know what came over you. You saw a ghost.”

No, this was not the man to cheat—at least not blatantly. He was far too intelligent, far too perceptive.

“Was it the little girl?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Caesar, and nodded a dismissal to his wife, who left at once, and without a look or a murmur..

“I used to see her several years ago around the Porticus Margaritaria in the company of her friends,” said Sulla, “and I thought she was—oh, everything a young Roman girl should be—always laughing, never vulgar—I don’t know. And then once on the Palatium—I was in pain—a pain of the soul, you understand—”

“Yes, I think I do,” said Caesar.

“She thought I was ill, and asked if she could help me. I wasn’t very nice to her—all I could think was that you wouldn’t want her striking up an acquaintance with the likes of me. But she wouldn’t be put off, and I just couldn’t manage to be rude enough. Do you know what she did?” Sulla’s eyes were even stranger than usual, for the pupils had dilated and now were huge, and around them were two thin rings of pallid grey-white, and two rings of grey-black outside of that; they gazed up at Caesar a little blindly, and did not look human.

“What did she do?” asked Caesar gently.

“She made me a grass crown! She made me a grass crown and she put it on my head. Me! And I saw—I saw—something!”

A silence fell. Because neither man could fathom how to break it, it lingered for many moments, moments during which each man assembled his thoughts and circled warily, wondering if the other was an ally or an adversary. Neither wanted to force the issue.

“Well,” said Caesar finally, sighing, “what did you come to see me about, Lucius Cornelius?”

It was his way of saying that he accepted the fact of Sulla’s innocence, no matter what interpretation he might have put upon the conduct of his daughter. And it was his way of saying that he wished to hear no more on the subject of his daughter; Sulla, whose thoughts had dwelled upon bringing up Julilla’s letters, decided not to.

His original purpose in coming to see Caesar now seemed very far away, and quite unreal. But Sulla squared his shoulders and got off the couch, seated himself in the more manly chair on the client’s side of Caesar’s desk, and assumed the air of a client.

“Clitumna,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about her. Or it might be that I should talk to your wife about Clitumna. But the proper person to start with is you, certainly. She’s not herself. Well, you’re aware of that. Depressed— weepy—uninterested. Not at all the sort of behavior I’d call normal. Or even normal in this time of grief. The thing is, I don’t know what to do for the best.” He filled his chest with air. “I owe her a duty, Gaius Julius. Yes, she’s a poor silly vulgar sort of woman and not exactly an adornment to the neighborhood, but I do owe her a duty. She was good to my father, and she’s been good to me. And I don’t know what to do for the best about her, I really don’t.”

Caesar sat back in his chair, conscious that something about this petition jarred. Nothing did he doubt in Sulla’s story, for he had seen Clitumna himself, and listened often enough to Marcia on the subject. No, what perturbed him was Sulla’s coming to him seeking advice; not in character for Sulla, thought Caesar, who very much doubted that Sulla was experiencing any uncertainty what to do about his stepmother, who gossip said was his mistress as well. About that, Caesar wasn’t prepared to hazard a guess; if his coming here to seek help was any indication, it was probably a distorted lie, typical Palatine gossip. Just as was the rumor that Sulla’s stepmother had been sexually involved with the dead woman, Nicopolis. Just as was the rumor that Sulla had been sexually involved with both of them—and at the same time, no less! Marcia had indicated that she thought there was something fishy about the situation, but, when pressed, hadn’t been able to produce any concrete evidence. Caesar’s disinclination to believe these rumors was not mere naiveté; it was due more to a personal fastidiousness which not only dictated his own behavior, but reflected itself in his beliefs about the behavior of others. Proof positive was one thing, hearsay quite another. In spite of which, something did not ring true about Sulla’s coming here today to seek advice.

It was at this point that an answer occurred to Caesar. Not for one moment did he think there was anything established between Sulla and his younger daughter—but for a man of Sulla’s character to faint upon seeing a starved-looking young girl—incredible! Then had come that odd story about Julilla’s fashioning him a grass crown. Caesar of course understood the significance of that completely. Perhaps their congress had been limited to a very few times, and mostly in passing; but, decided Caesar, there was definitely something between them. Not shabby, not shoddy, not shifty either. Just something. Something worth watching carefully. Naturally he could not condone a relationship of any kind between them. And if they had an affinity for each other, that was too bad. Julilla must go to a man able to hold his head up in the circles to which the Caesars belonged.

While Caesar leaned back in his chair and considered these things, Sulla leaned back in his chair and wondered what was going through Caesar’s mind. Because of Julilla, the interview had not gone according to plan, even remotely. How could he have had so little self-control? Fainting! He, Lucius Cornelius Sulla! After betraying himself so obviously, he had had little choice save to explain himself to this watchful father, and that in turn had meant telling a part of the truth; had it helped Julilla, he would have told all of the truth, but he didn’t think Caesar would relish perusing those letters. I have made myself vulnerable to Gaius Julius Caesar, thought Sulla, and disliked the sensation very much.

“Have you any course of action in mind for Clitumna?” asked Caesar.

Sulla frowned. “Well, she has a villa at Circei, and I wondered if it might not be a good idea to persuade her to go down there and stay for a while,” he said.

“Why ask me?”

The frown deepened; Sulla saw the gulf open beneath his feet, and endeavored to leap it. “You are quite right, Gaius Julius. Why ask you? The truth is, I’m caught between Scylla and Charybdis, and I was hoping you’d extend me an oar and rescue me.”

“In what way can I rescue you? What do you mean?”

“I think Clitumna is suicidal,” said Sulla.

“Oh.”

“The thing is, how can I combat it? I’m a man, and with Nicopolis dead, there is literally no woman of Clitumna’s house or family—or even among her servants—in a position of sufficient trust and affection to help Clitumna through.” Sulla leaned forward, warming to his theme. “Rome isn’t the place for her now, Gaius Julius! But how can I send her down to Circei without a woman to rely on? I’m not sure that I’m a person she wants to see at the moment, and besides, I—I—I have things to do in Rome at the moment! What I was wondering was, would your wife be willing to accompany Clitumna down to Circei for a few weeks? This suicidal mood won’t last, I’m sure of that, but as of this moment, I’m very worried. The villa is very comfortable, and even though it’s turning cold, Circei is good for the health at any time of the year. It might benefit your wife to breathe a bit of sea air.”

Caesar visibly relaxed, looking as if an enormous load had suddenly vanished from his bowed back. “I see, Lucius Cornelius, I see. And I understand better than you think. My wife has indeed become the person Clitumna depends upon most. Unfortunately, I cannot spare her. You have seen Julilla, so you do not need to be told how desperate our situation is. My wife is needed at home. Nor would she consent to leave, fond of Clitumna though she is.”

Sulla looked eager. “Well, why couldn’t Julilla go down to Circei with them? The change might work wonders for her!”

But Caesar shook his head. “No, Lucius Cornelius, I am afraid it’s out of the question. I myself am fixed in Rome until the spring. I could not countenance the absence of my wife and daughter from Rome unless I could be with them, not because I am selfish enough to deny them a treat, but because I would worry about them all the time they were away. If Julilla was well, it would be different. So—no.”

“I understand, Gaius Julius, and I sympathize.” Sulla got up to go.

“Send Clitumna to Circei, Lucius Cornelius. She’ll be all right.” Caesar walked his guest to the front door, and opened it himself.

“Thank you forbearing with my foolishness,” said Sulla.

“It was no burden. In fact, I’m very glad you came. I think I can deal better with my daughter now. And I confess I like you the better for this morning’s events, Lucius Cornelius. Keep me informed about Clitumna.” And, smiling, Caesar held out his hand.

But the moment he closed the door behind Sulla, Caesar went to find Julilla. She was in her mother’s sitting room, weeping desolately, her head buried in her arms as she slumped against the worktable. One hand to her lips, Marcia rose as Caesar appeared in the doorway; together they crept out and left her weeping.

“Gaius Julius, it is terrible,” said Marcia, lips tight.

“Have they been seeing each other?”

A burning blush ran up under Marcia’s pale-brown skin; she shook her head so savagely that the pins holding her hair in a prim bun loosened, and the bun dangled half-unrolled on the nape of her neck. “No, they haven’t been seeing each other!” She struck her hands together, wrung them. “Oh, the shame of it! The humiliation!”

Caesar possessed himself of the writhing hands and held them gently but firmly still. “Calm yourself, wife, calm yourself! Nothing can possibly be so bad that you drive yourself into an illness. Now tell me.”

“Such deceit! Such indelicacy!”

“Calm yourself. Start at the beginning.”

“It’s had nothing to do with him, it’s all her own doing! Our daughter, Gaius Julius, has spent the last two years shaming herself and her family by—by—throwing herself at the head of a man who is not only unfit to wipe the mud off her shoes, but who doesn’t even want her! And more than that, Gaius Julius, more than that! She has tried to capture his attention by starving herself and so forcing a guilt upon him he has done nothing to earn! Letters, Gaius Julius! Hundreds of letters her girl has delivered to him, accusing him of indifference and neglect, blaming him for her illness, pleading for his love the way a female dog grovels!” Marcia’s eyes poured tears, but they were tears of disillusionment, of a terrible anger.

“Calm yourself,” Caesar repeated yet again. “Come, Marcia, you can cry later. I must deal with Julilla, and you must see me deal with her.”

Marcia calmed herself, dried her eyes; together they went back to her sitting room.

Julilla was still weeping, hadn’t noticed that she was alone. Sighing, Caesar sat in his wife’s favorite chair, hunting in the sinus of his toga as he did so, and finally bringing out his handkerchief.

“Here, Julilla, blow your nose and stop crying, like a good girl,” he said, thrusting the cloth under her arm. “The waterworks are wasted. It’s time to talk.”

Most of Julilla’s tears had their source in terror at being found out, so the reassuringly strong firm impartial tone of her father’s voice enabled her to do as she was told. The waterworks turned off; she sat with her head down, her frail body shaken by convulsive hiccoughs.

“You have been starving yourself because of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, is that right?” her father asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Julilla, you cannot avoid the question, and you’ll get no mercy by maintaining silence. Is Lucius Cornelius the cause of all this?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Caesar’s voice continued to sound strong, firm, impartial, but the words it framed burned into Julilla all the deeper for its level tone; so did he speak to a slave who had done him some unpardonable wrong, never did he speak to his daughter thus. Until now.

“Do you even begin to understand the pain, the worry, the fatigue you have caused this entire family for the past year and more? Ever since you began to waste away, you have been the pivot around which every one of us has turned. Not only me, your mother, your brothers, and your sister, but our loyal and admirable servants, our friends, our neighbors. You have driven us to the edge of dementia. And for what? Can you tell me for what?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Nonsense! Of course you can! You’ve been playing a game with us, Julilla. A cruel and selfish game, conducted with a patience and intelligence worthy of a nobler purpose. You fell in love—at sixteen years of age!—with a fellow you knew was unsuitable, could never meet with my approval. A fellow who understood his unsuitability, and gave you absolutely no kind of encouragement. So you proceeded to act with deceit, with cunning, with an aim so manipulatory and exploitative—! Words fail me, Julilla,” said Caesar unemotionally.

His daughter shivered.

His wife shivered.

“It seems I must refresh your memory, daughter. Do you know who I am?”

Julilla didn’t answer, head down.

“Look at me!”

Her face came up at that; drowned eyes fixed themselves on Caesar, terrified and wild.

“No, I can see that you don’t know who I am,” said Caesar, still in conversational voice. “Therefore, daughter, it behooves me to tell you. I am the paterfamilias, the absolute head of this household. My very word is law. My actions are not actionable. Whatever I choose to do and say within the bounds of this household, I can do and I can say. No law of the Senate and People of Rome stands between me and my absolute authority over my household, my family. For Rome has structured her laws to ensure that the Roman family is above the law of all save the paterfamilias. If my wife commits adultery, Julilla, I can kill her, or have her killed. If my son is guilty of moral turpitude, or cowardice, or any other kind of social imbecility, I can kill him, or have him killed. If my daughter is unchaste, Julilla, I can kill her, or have her killed. If any member of my household—from my wife through my sons and my daughters to my mother, to my servants—transgresses the bounds of what I regard as decent conduct, I can kill him or her, or have him or her killed. Do you understand, Julilla?”

Her eyes had not swerved from his face. “Yes,” she said.

“It grieves me as much as it shames me to inform you that you have transgressed the bounds of what I regard as decent conduct, daughter. You have made your family and the servants of this household—above all you have made its paterfamilias—your victim. Your puppet. Your plaything. And for what? For self-gratification, for personal satisfaction, for the most abominable of motives—yourself alone.”

“But I love him, tata!” she cried.

Caesar reared up, outraged. “Love? What do you know of that peerless emotion, Julilla? How can you besmirch the word ‘love’ with whatever base imitation you have experienced? Is it love, to make your beloved’s life a misery? Is it love, to force your beloved to a commitment he doesn’t want, hasn’t asked for? Well, is any of it love, Julilla?”

“I suppose not,” she whispered, and then added, “but I thought it was.”

The eyes of her parents met above her head; in both lay a wry and bitter pain as they finally understood Julilla’s limitations, their own illusions.

“Believe me, Julilla, whatever it was you felt that made you behave so shabbily and dishonorably, it was not love,” said Caesar, and stood up. “There will be no more cow’s milk, no more eggs, no more honey. You will eat whatever the rest of your family eats. Or you will not eat. It is a matter of no moment to me. As your father and as paterfamilias, I have treated you from the time of your birth with honor, with respect, with kindness, with consideration, with tolerance. You have not thought well enough of me to reciprocate. I do not cast you off. And I am not going to kill you, or have you killed. But from this time on, whatever you make of yourself is entirely on your own head. You have injured me and mine, Julilla. Perhaps even more unpardonably, you have injured a man who owes you nothing, for he does not know you and is not related to you. Later on, when you are less appalling to look at, I shall require that you apologize to Lucius Cornelius Sulla. I do not require an apology from you for any of the rest of us, for you have lost our love and respect, and that renders apologies valueless.”

He walked out of the room.

Julilla’s face puckered; she turned instinctively toward her mother, and tried to hurl herself into her mother’s arms. But Marcia drew back as if her daughter wore a poisoned robe.

“Disgusting!” she hissed. “All that for the sake of a man who isn’t fit to lick the ground a Caesar walks on!”

“Oh, Mama!”

“Don’t ‘oh, Mama!’ me! You wanted to be grown up, Julilla; you wanted to be woman enough to marry. Now live with it.” And Marcia too walked out of the room.

Wrote Gaius Julius Caesar some days later to his son-in-law, Gaius Marius:

And so, the unhappy business is finally wearing itself down. I wish I could say that Julilla has learned a lesson, but I very much doubt it. In later years, Gaius Marius, you too will face all the torments and dilemmas of parenthood, and I wish I could offer you the comfort of saying that you will learn by my mistakes. But you will not. For just as each and every child born into this world is different, and must be handled differently, so too is every parent different. Where did we go wrong with Julilla? I do not honestly know. I do not even know if we went wrong at all. Perhaps the flaw is innate, intrinsic. I am bitterly hurt, and so too is poor Marcia, as best evidenced by her subsequent rejection of all Julilla’s overtures of friendship and regret. The child suffers terribly, but I have had to ask myself whether we owe it to her to maintain our distance for the present, and I have decided we must do so. Love we have always given her, an opportunity to discipline herself we have not. If she is to gain any good out of all this, she must suffer.

Justice forced me to seek out our neighbor Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and tender him a collective apology which will have to do until Julilla’s looks have improved and she can apologize to him in person. Though he didn’t want to hand them over, I insisted that he return all of Julilla’s letters—one of the few times being paterfamilias has had real value. I made Julilla burn them, but not until she had read every one of the silly things out to me and her mother. How awful, to have to be so hard upon one’s own flesh and blood! But I very much fear that only the most personally galling of lessons will sink into Julilla’s self-centered little heart.

There. Enough of Julilla and her schemes. Far more important things are happening. I may actually turn out to be the first to send this news to Africa Province, as I have a firm promise that this will go on a fast packet leaving Puteoli tomorrow. Marcus Junius Silanus has been shockingly defeated by the Germans. Over thirty thousand men are dead, the rest so demoralized and poorly led that they have scattered in all directions. Not that Silanus seems to care, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he seems to value his own survival ahead of his troops’. He brought the news to Rome himself, but in such a toned-down version that he stole a march on public indignation, and by the time that all the truth was known, he had stripped the disaster of much of its shock value. Of course what he’s aiming for is to wriggle out of treason charges, and I think he’ll succeed. If the Mamilian Commission were empowered to try him, a conviction might be possible. But a trial in the Centuriate Assembly, with all those antiquated rules and regulations, and so many jurors? It’s not worth the effort of initiating proceedings, and so most of us feel.

And, I hear you ask, what of the Germans? Are they even now pouring down toward the coast of the Middle Sea, are the inhabitants of Massilia packing up in panic? No. For would you believe it, having annihilated Silanus’s army, they promptly turned around again and went north. How can one deal with an enemy so enigmatic, so utterly unpredictable? I tell you, Gaius Marius, we shiver in our boots. For they will come. Later rather than sooner, it now seems, they will come. And we have no better commanders to oppose them than the likes of Marcus Junius Silanus. As usual these days, the Italian Allied legions took the brunt of the losses, though many Roman soldiers fell too. And the Senate is having to deal with a stream of complaints from the Marsi and the Samnites, and a host of other Italian nations.

But to finish on a lighter note, we are currently having a hilarious battle with our esteemed censor Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. The other censor, Marcus Livius Drusus, died very suddenly three weeks ago, which brought the lustrum of the censors to an abrupt end. Scaurus of course is obliged to stand down. Only he won’t! And therein lies the hilarity. As soon as the funeral of Drusus was over, the Senate convened and directed Scaurus to lay aside his censorial duties so that the lustrum could be officially closed in the customary ceremony. Scaurus refused.

“I was elected censor, I’m in the middle of letting contracts for my building programs, and I cannot possibly abandon my work at this juncture,” he said.

“Marcus Aemilius, Marcus Aemilius, it isn’t up to you!” said Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus. “The law says that when one censor dies in office, the lustrum is at an end, and his fellow censor must resign immediately.”

“I don’t care what the law says!” Scaurus replied. “I cannot resign immediately, and I will not resign immediately.”

They begged and they pleaded, they shouted and they argued, all to no avail. Scaurus was determined to create a precedent by flouting convention and remaining censor. So they begged and they pleaded, they shouted and they argued all over again. Until Scaurus lost patience and temper.

“I piss on the lot of you!” he cried, and went right on with his contracts and his plans.

So Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus called another meeting of the Senate, and forced it to pass a formal consultum calling for Scaurus’s immediate resignation. Off went a deputation to the Campus Martius, and there interviewed Scaurus as he sat on the podium of the temple of Jupiter Stator, which edifice he had chosen for his office because it’s right next door to the Porticus Metelli, where most of the building contractors have their headquarters.

Now as you know, I am not a Scaurus man. He’s as crafty as Ulysses and as big a liar as Paris. But oh, I do wish you could have seen him make mincemeat out of them! How such an ugly, skinny, undersized specimen as Scaurus can do it, I do not know—he hasn’t even got a hair left on his head! Marcia says it’s his beautiful green eyes and his even more beautiful speaking voice and his wonderful sense of humor. Well, I will admit the sense of humor, but the charms of his ocular and vocal apparatus escape me. Marcia says I’m a typical man, though what her point about that is, I do not know. Women tend to seek refuge in such remarks when pinned down to logic, I have found. But there must also be some obscure logic to his success, and who knows? Perhaps Marcia has the right of it.

So there he sat, the little poseur, surrounded by all the utter magnificence of Rome’s first marble temple, and those glorious statues of Alexander the Great’s generals all mounted on horseback that Metellus Macedonicus pillaged from Alexander’s old capital of Pella. Dominating the lot. How can that be possible, a hairless Roman runt outclassing Lysippus’s quite superbly lifelike horses? I swear every time I see Alexander’s generals, I expect them to step down from their plinths and ride away, each horse as different as Ptolemy is from Parmenion.

I digress. Back to business, then. When Scaurus saw the deputation he shoved contracts and contractors aside and sat spear-straight on his curule chair, toga perfectly draped, one foot extended in the classic pose.

“Well?” he asked, addressing his question to Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus, who had been appointed the spokesman.

“Marcus Aemilius, the Senate has formally passed a consultum commanding that you resign your censorship at once,” said this unhappy man.

“I won’t do it,” said Scaurus.

“You must!” bleated Dalmaticus.

“I mustn’t anything!” said Scaurus, and turned his shoulder on them, beckoning the contractors to draw close again. “Now what was I saying before I was so rudely interrupted?” he asked.

Dalmaticus tried again. “Marcus Aemilius, please!”

But all he got for his pontificial pains was an “I piss on you! Piss, piss, piss!”

The Senate having shot its bolt, the whole problem was referred to the Plebeian Assembly, thereby making the Plebs responsible for a matter it hadn’t created, considering that it is the Centuriate Assembly, a more exclusive body by far than the Plebeian Assembly, that elects the censors. However, the Plebs did hold a meeting to discuss Scaurus’s stand, and handed its College of Tribunes one last duty for their year in office. They were instructed to remove Marcus Aemilius Scaurus from office as censor, one way or another.

So yesterday, the ninth day of December, saw all ten tribunes of the plebs march off to the temple of Jupiter Stator, Gaius Mamilius Limetanus in their lead.

“I am directed by the People of Rome, Marcus Aemilius, to depose you from office as censor,” said Mamilius.

“As the People did not elect me, Gaius Mamilius, the People cannot depose me,” said Scaurus, his hairless scone shining in the sun like a polished old winter apple.

“Nonetheless, Marcus Aemilius, the People are sovereign, and the People say you must step down,” said Mamilius.

“I won’t step down!” said Scaurus.

“In that case, Marcus Aemilius, I am authorized by the People to arrest you and cast you into prison until you formally resign,” said Mamilius.

“Lay one hand on me, Gaius Mamilius, and you will revert to the soprano voice of your boyhood!” said Scaurus.

Whereupon Mamilius turned to the crowd which had naturally gathered to see the spectacle, and cried out to it, “People of Rome, I call you to witness the fact that I hereby interpose my veto against any further censorial activity by Marcus Aemilius Scaurus!” he declared.

And that of course was the end of the matter. Scaurus rolled up his contracts and handed everything over to his clerks, had his chair slave fold up his ivory seat, and stood bowing in all directions to the applauding throng, which loves nothing better than a good confrontation between its magistrates, and adores Scaurus wholeheartedly because he has the kind of courage all Romans admire in their magistrates. Then he strolled down the temple steps, gave Perdiccas’s roan horse a pat in passing, linked his arm through Mamilius’s, and left the field wearing all the laurels.

Caesar sighed, leaned back in his chair, and decided that he had better comment upon the news Marius—by no means such a wordy correspondent as his father-in-law—had sent from the Roman African province, where Metellus, it appeared, had succeeded in bogging the war against Jugurtha in a mire of inconsistent activity and poor generalship. Or at least that was Marius’s version, though it did not tally with the reports Metellus kept sending the Senate.

You will shortly hear—if you have not heard already—that the Senate has prorogued Quintus Caecilius’s command of the African province and the Jugurthine war. It will not in any way surprise you, I am sure. And I expect that, having leaped this biggest hurdle, Quintus Caecilius will step up his military activity, for once the Senate has prorogued a governor’s command, he can be sure to retain that command until he considers the danger to his province over. It is a shrewd tactic to be inert until the consulship year is over and proconsular imperium is bestowed.

But yes, I do agree that your general was shockingly dilatory in not even starting his campaign until summer was almost over, especially considering that he arrived in early spring. But his dispatches say his army needed thorough training, and the Senate believes them. And yes, it escapes me as to why he appointed you, an infantryman, to lead his cavalry arm, just as it seems a waste of Publius Rutilius’s talents to use him as praefectus fabrum when he would serve better in the field than running round dealing with supply columns and artillery repairs. However, it is the prerogative of the general to use his men as he likes, from his senior legates all the way down to his auxiliary rankers.

All Rome was delighted when the news of the capture of Vaga came, though I note your letter said the town surrendered. And—if you will forgive my playing Quintus Caecilius’s advocate—I fail to see why you are so indignant at the appointment of Quintus Caecilius’s friend Turpillius as the commander of the Vaga garrison. Is it important?

I am far more impressed with your version of the battle at the river Muthul than I am with the version contained-in Quintus Caecilius’s senatorial dispatch, which should console you somewhat for my hint of skepticism, and reassure you that I do indeed remain on your side. And I’m sure you’re right in telling Quintus Caecilius that the best way to win the war against Numidia is to capture Jugurtha himself, for, like you, I believe him to be the fountainhead of all Numidian resistance.

I’m sorry this first year has been so frustrating for you, and that Quintus Caecilius has apparently decided he can win without properly using either your talents or those of Publius Rutilius. It will make your attempt to be elected consul the year after next much harder if you do not receive an opportunity to shine in the coming Numidian campaigns. But, Gaius Marius, I do not expect that you will take such cavalier treatment lying down, and I’m sure you’ll find a way to shine in spite of the very worst Quintus Caecilius can do.

I shall close with one further Forum item. Due to the loss of Silanus’s army in Gaul-across-the-Alps, the Senate has nullified one of the last surviving laws of Gaius Gracchus, namely the one limiting the number of times a man can enlist. Nor does he have to be seventeen anymore, nor do ten years under the colors exclude him from the levies anymore, nor do six campaigns exclude him anymore. A sign of the times. Both Rome and Italy are rapidly becoming denuded of men for the legions.

Do look after yourself, and write as soon as my mild attempts to play advocate for Quintus Caecilius have faded enough to allow you to think of me with affection. I am still your father-in-law, and I still think very well of you.

And that, decided Gaius Julius Caesar, was a letter well worth the sending, full of news and good advice and comfort. Gaius Marius would have it before the old year expired.

*

In the end it was almost halfway through December before Sulla escorted Clitumna down to Circei, all solicitude and tender kindness. Though he had worried that his plans might go awry because time would improve Clitumna’s mood, the extraordinary change in his luck continued to bless him, for Clitumna remained deeply depressed, as Marcia would be bound to report to Caesar.

As villas on the Campanian coast went, Clitumna’s version was not overlarge, but even so, it was far bigger than the house on the Palatine; vacationing Romans able to afford the luxury of owning country villas liked to feel surrounded by space. Standing atop a volcanic headland and having its own private beach, the villa lay some distance south of Circei, and had no close neighbors. One of the many speculation builders who frequented the Campanian coast had put it up during the course of the winter three years before, and Clitumna had bought it the moment she discovered the builder had a genius for plumbing, and had installed a shower bath as well as a proper bathing tub.

Thus the first thing Clitumna did after she arrived was to have a shower bath, after which she dined, after which she and Sulla went to bed in separate rooms, and alone. He remained at Circei for two days only, devoting all his time to Clitumna, who continued to be cheerless, though she didn’t want Sulla to leave.

“I have a surprise for you,” he said to her as he walked with her in the grounds of the villa early in the morning of the day he returned to Rome.

Even that hardly evoked a response. “Yes?” she asked.

“On the first night of the full moon you will receive your surprise,” he said seductively.

“Night?” she asked, becoming the slightest bit interested.

“Night, and full moon! That is, provided it’s a fine clear night and you can see the full moon.”

They were standing beneath the tall front facade of the villa, which like most was built upon sloping ground, with a loggia atop the front section, where the villa dweller could sit to take in the view. Behind this narrow front facade was a vast peristyle-garden, and behind the peristyle-garden lay the villa proper, in which the bulk of the rooms were situated. The stables were located on the ground level of the front facade, with living quarters for the stable staff above, and the loggia above that again.

The land in front of Clitumna’s villa sloped away in grass and tangles of rambling roses to the cliff top, and was most artfully planted on either flank with a grove of trees which ensured privacy should another villa go up on the next block of land.

Sulla pointed to the large clump of salt pines and pencil cypresses on their left.

“It’s a secret, Clitumna,” he said in what she called his “growly voice,” always a sign of prolonged and particularly delicious lovemaking.

“What is a secret?” she asked, beginning to be eager.

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret any longer,” he whispered, nibbling her ear.

She squirmed a little, cheered up a little. “Is the secret the same as the surprise on the night of the moon?”

“Yes. But you must keep everything a secret, including my promising you a surprise. Swear?”

“I swear,” she said.

“What you must do is sneak out of the house at the beginning of the third hour of darkness, eight days from last night. You must come down here absolutely on your own, and hide in that grove of trees,” said Sulla, stroking her flank.

Her listlessness was gone. “Oooooooooh! Is it a nice surprise?” she asked, squeaking on the last word.

“It will be the biggest surprise of your entire life,” said Sulla, “and that’s not an idle promise, darling. But I do require a couple of conditions.”

She wrinkled her nose girlishly and simpered, looking very silly. “Yes?”

“First of all, no one must know, not even little Bithy. If you do take anyone into your confidence, your chief surprise will be disappointment. And I will be very, very angry. You don’t like it when I’m very, very angry, do you, Clitumna?”

She shivered. “No, Lucius Cornelius.”

“Then keep our secret. Your reward will be amazing, a completely new and different kind of experience,” he whispered. “In fact, if you can manage to seem specially downcast from now until you receive your surprise, it will turn out even better, I promise you.”

“I’ll be good, Lucius Cornelius,” she said fervently.

He could see the way her mind was working, and knew that she had decided the surprise was a new and delectable companion—female, attractive, sexually willing, compatible, and a cozy gossipy talker for the passing of the long days between the lovely nights. But she knew Sulla well enough to understand that she must abide by his conditions, or he was just as likely to take whoever it was away again forever—perhaps install her in an apartment of her own, now that he had Nicopolis’s money. Besides which, no one defied Sulla when he spoke in earnest, a reason why the servants of Clitumna’s household held their tongues about what had gone on between Clitumna and Nicopolis and Sulla, and if they ever said anything at all, did so in a fear which robbed their words of much of their normal impact.

“There’s a second condition,” he said.

She snuggled against him. “Yes, darling Lucius?”

“If the night is not fine, the surprise cannot come. So you will have to respect the weather. If the first night is wet, wait for the next dry one.”

“I understand, Lucius Cornelius.”

*

Thus Sulla drove off to Rome in a hired gig leaving Clitumna faithfully hugging her secret, and trying assiduously to present a picture of acute depression. Even Bithy, with whom Clitumna had taken to sleeping, believed her mistress desolate.

Upon reaching Rome, Sulla summoned the steward of Clitumna’s house on the Palatine; he was one staff member not relocated to Circei, as the villa there had its own steward, who acted as caretaker in his mistress’s absence—and cheated her very cleverly. So did the steward of her Palatine house.

“How many servants did the mistress leave here, Iamus?” asked Sulla, sitting at his desk in the study; he was evidently making out some kind of list, for it lay beneath his hand.

“Just myself, two house boys, two house girls, a market boy, and the undercook, Lucius Cornelius,” said the steward.

“Well, you’re going to have to hire some extra help, because four days from now, Iamus, I am going to throw a party.”

Sulla flapped his list at the astonished steward, who didn’t know whether to protest that the lady Clitumna had given him no word of a party in her absence, or to go along with the idea and pray there were no ructions later, when the bills came in. Then Sulla relieved his mind.

“It’s my show, so I’m paying for it,” said Sulla, “and there’ll be a big bonus in it for you on two conditions—one, that you co-operate fully in helping me put on the party, and two, that you make no mention of it to the lady Clitumna after she returns home, whenever that may be. Is that clear?”

“Fully, Lucius Cornelius,” said Iamus, bowing deeply; largesse was a subject every slave risen high enough to be a steward understood almost as well as he understood how to doctor the household account books.

*

Off went Sulla to hire dancers, musicians, tumblers, singers, magicians, clowns, and other acts. For this was going to be the party to end all parties, one he intended would be heard far and wide across the Palatine. His last stop was the flat of Scylax the comedic actor.

“I want to borrow Metrobius,” he said, erupting into the room Scylax had preferred to set up as a sitting room rather than as a study. It was the apartment of a voluptuary, redolent with incense and cassia wood, tapestried to death, overfurnished with couches and pouffes all stuffed with the finest wool.

Scylax sat up indignantly at the same moment Sulla was sinking into one of the sybaritically cushioned couches.

“Honestly, Scylax, you’re as soft as custard-pudding and as decadent as a Syrian potentate!” said Sulla. “Why don’t you get a bit of ordinary horsehair furniture? This stuff makes a man feel as if he’s sinking into the arms of a gigantic whore! Ugh!”

“I piss on your taste,” lisped Scylax.

“As long as you hand over Metrobius, you can piss on anything you like.”

“Why should I, you—you—savage?” Scylax ran his hands through his carefully arranged, dyed golden locks; he fluttered his long lashes, darkened with stibium, and rolled his eyes between them.

“Because the boy’s not yours body and mind,” said Sulla, testing a pouffe with his foot to see if it was less yielding.

“He is mine body and mind! And he hasn’t been the same since you stole him from me and took him all over Italy with you, Lucius Cornelius! I don’t know what you did to him, but you certainly spoiled him for me!”

Sulla grinned. “Made a man out of him, did I? Doesn’t like eating your shit anymore, eh? Aaaaaaaah!” With which sound of disgust, Sulla lifted his head and roared, “Metrobius!”

The lad came flying through the door and launched himself straight at Sulla, covering his face with kisses.

Over the black head Sulla opened one pale eye at Scylax, and wiggled one ginger brow. “Give up, Scylax, your bum-boy just likes me better,” he said, and demonstrated the truth of this by lifting the boy’s skirt to display his erection. Scylax burst into tears, streaking his face with stibium.

“Come on, Metrobius,” said Sulla, struggling to his feet. At the door he turned back to flip a folded paper at the blubbering Scylax. “Party at Clitumna’s house in four days,” he said. “It’s going to be the best one ever, so swallow your spleen and come. You can have Metrobius back if you do.”

*

Everyone was invited, including Hercules Atlas, who was billed as the world’s strongest man, and hired himself out to fairs and fetes and festivals from one end of Italy to the other. Never seen outside his door unless wearing a moth-eaten lion skin and toting an enormous club, Hercules Atlas was a bit of an institution. However, he was rarely asked as a guest to the parties where he entertained with his strongman act, for when the wine flowed down his throat like water down the Aqua Marcia, Hercules Atlas became very aggressive and bad-tempered.

“You’re touched in the head, to ask that bull!” said Metrobius, playing with Sulla’s brilliant curls as he leaned over Sulla’s shoulder to peer at yet another list. The real change in Metrobius that had occurred while he was away with Sulla was his literacy; Sulla had taught the lad to read and write. Willing to teach him every art he knew from acting to sodomy, Scylax had yet been too crafty to endow him with something as emancipating as letters.

“Hercules Atlas is a friend of mine,” said Sulla, kissing the lad’s fingers one by one with a great deal more pleasure than ever he felt kissing Clitumna’s.

“But he’s a madman when he’s drunk!” Metrobius protested. “He’ll tear this house apart, and very likely two or three of the guests as well! Hire his act by all means, but don’t have him present as a guest!”

“I can’t do that,” said Sulla, seeming unworried. He reached up and pulled Metrobius down across his shoulder, settling the boy in his lap. And Metrobius wound his arms about Sulla’s neck and lifted his face: Sulla kissed his eyelids very slowly, very tenderly.

“Lucius Cornelius, why won’t you keep me?” Metrobius asked, settling against Sulla’s arm with a sigh of utter content.

The kisses ceased. Sulla frowned. “You’re far better off with Scylax,” he said abruptly.

Metrobius opened huge dark eyes, swimming with love. “But I’m not, truly I’m not! The gifts and the acting training and the money don’t matter to me, Lucius Cornelius! I’d much rather be with you, no matter how poor we were!”

“A tempting offer, and one I’d take you up on in a trice— if I intended to remain poor,” said Sulla, holding the boy as if he cherished him. “But I am not going to remain poor. I have Nicopolis’s money behind me now, and I’m busy speculating with it. One day I’ll have enough to qualify for admission to the Senate.”

Metrobius sat up. “The Senate!” Twisting, he stared into Sulla’s face. “But you can’t, Lucius Cornelius! Your ancestors were slaves like me!”

“No, they weren’t,” said Sulla, staring back. “I am a patrician Cornelius. The Senate is where I belong.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“It’s the truth,” said Sulla soberly. “That’s why I can’t avail myself of your offer, alluring though it is. When I do qualify for the Senate, I’m going to have to become a model of decorum—no actors, no mimes—and no pretty-boys.” He clapped Metrobius on the back, and hugged him. “Now pay attention to the list, lad—and stop wriggling! It’s not good for my concentration. Hercules Atlas is coming as a guest as well as performing, and that’s final.”

In fact, Hercules Atlas was among the first guests to arrive. Word of the revels to come had got out all up and down the street, of course, and the neighbors had steeled themselves to endure a night of howls, shrieks, loud music, and unimaginable crashes. As usual, it was a costume affair. Sulla had tricked himself out as the absent Clitumna, complete with fringed shawls, rings, and hennaed wig convoluted with sausagelike curls, and he constantly emitted uncanny imitations of her titters, her giggles, her loud whinnies of laughter. Since the guests knew her well, his performance was deeply appreciated.

Metrobius was equipped with wings again, but this night he was Icarus rather than Cupid, and had cleverly melted his large feathered fans along their outer edges, so that they drooped, and looked half-finished. Scylax came as Minerva, and contrived to make that stern, tomboyish goddess look like an old and over-made-up whore. When he saw how Metrobius hung all over Sulla, he proceeded to get drunk, and soon forgot how to manage his shield, his distaff, his stuffed owl, and his spear, and eventually tripped over them into a corner, where he wept himself to sleep.

Thus Scylax failed to see the endless succession of party turns, the singers who commenced with glorious melodies and stunning trills, and ended in warbling ditties like

My sister Piggy Filler

Got caught with Gus the Miller

A-grinding of her flower

Beneath the miller’s tower.

“Enough of this,” said our dad.

“It’s clear that you’ve been had.

Married you’d better be quick

Or your arse will feel my stick!”

which were far more popular with the guests, who, knew the words, and could sing along.

There were dancers who stripped to the buff with exquisite artistry, displaying pubes devoid of the smallest hair, and a man whose performing dogs could dance almost as well— if not as lubriciously—and a famous animal act from Antioch which consisted of a girl and her donkey—very, very popular with the audience, the male half of which was too intimidated by the donkey’s endowments to proposition the girl afterward.

Hercules Atlas did his turn last of all, just before the party segregated into those too drunk to be interested in sex, and those drunk enough to be interested in nothing else. The revelers gathered around the colonnades of the peristyle-garden, in the midst of which Hercules Atlas had set himself up on a very sturdy dais. After warming up by bending a few iron bars and snapping a few thick logs like twigs, the strong man picked up squealing girls by the half dozen, piling them on his shoulders, on his head, and under each arm. Then he lifted an anvil or two in his hands and began to roar lustily, more fearsome than any lion in any arena. Actually he was having a wonderful time, for the wine was flowing down his throat like water down the Aqua Marcia, and his capacity to guzzle was as phenomenal as his strength. The trouble was, the more anvils he picked up, the more uncomfortable the girls became, until their squeals of joy became squeals of terror.

Sulla strolled out into the middle of the garden and tapped Hercules Atlas politely on his knee.

“Here, old fellow, do drop the girls,” he said in the most friendly way. “You’re squashing them with lumps of iron.”

Hercules Atlas dropped the girls immediately. But he picked up Sulla instead, his hair-trigger temper let loose.

“Don’t you tell me how to do my act!” he bellowed, and spun Sulla around his head like a priest of Isis his wand; wig, shawls, draperies fell from Sulla in a cascade.

Some of the party goers began to panic; others decided to help by venturing out into the garden and pleading with the demented strong man to put Sulla down. But Hercules Atlas solved everyone’s dilemma by shoving Sulla under his left arm as casually as a shopper a parcel, and leaving the festivities. There was no way he could be stopped. Ploughing through the bodies hurling themselves at him as if they were a cloud of gnats, he gave the door servant a shove in the face that sent him halfway across the atrium, and disappeared into the lane, still toting Sulla.

At the top of the Vestal Steps he halted. “All right? Did I do all right, Lucius Cornelius?” he asked, setting Sulla down very gently.

“You did perfectly,” said Sulla, staggering a little because he was dizzy. “Come, I’ll walk home with you.”

“Not necessary,” said Hercules Atlas, hitching up his lion skin and starting down the Vestal Steps. “Only a hop and a skip away from here, Lucius Cornelius, and the moon’s just about full.”

“I insist,” said Sulla, catching him up.

“Have it your own way,” shrugged Hercules Atlas.

“Well, it’s less public if I pay you inside than out in the middle of the Forum,” said Sulla patiently.

“Oh, right!” Hercules Atlas clapped a hand to his well-muscled head. “I forgot you haven’t paid me yet. Come on, then.”

He lived in four rooms on the third floor of an insula off the Clivus Orbius, on the fringes of the Subura, but in a better neighborhood by far. Ushered in, Sulla saw at a glance that his slaves had seized their opportunity and taken the night off, no doubt expecting that when their master came in, he would be in no state to take a head count. There did not seem to be a woman of the house, but Sulla checked anyway.

“Wife not here?” he asked.

Hercules Atlas spat. “Women! I hate ‘em,” he said.

A jug of wine and some cups stood on the table at which the two men seated themselves. Sulla pulled a fat purse from where he had secreted it inside a linen band around his waist. While Hercules Atlas poured two cups full of wine, Sulla loosened the strings holding the mouth of the purse shut, and deftly palmed a plump screw of paper he fished out of its interior. Then he tipped the purse up and sent a stream of bright silver coins tumbling across the tabletop. Too quickly; three or four rolled all the way to the far edge and fell to the floor, tinkling tinnily.

“Oh, hey!” cried Hercules Atlas, getting down on all fours to retrieve his pay.

While he was occupied in crawling about the floor, Sulla, taking his time, untwisted the paper he had palmed and tipped the white powder it contained into the further of the two cups; for want of any other instrument, he stirred the wine with his fingers until Hercules Atlas finally lumbered up from all fours to hind legs, and sat down.

“Good health,” said Sulla, picking up the nearer cup and tipping it at the strong man in the friendliest manner.

“Good health and thanks for a terrific night,” said Hercules Atlas, tilting his head back and his cup up, and draining it without pausing for breath. After which he refilled the cup and tossed a second drink back, it seemed on the same lungful of air.

Sulla got up, pushed his own cup under the strong man’s hand, and took the other cup away, tucking it inside his tunic. “A little souvenir,” he said. “Good night.” And slipped out the door quietly.

The insula was asleep, its open concrete walkway around the central courtyard heavily screened to prevent refuse being tipped down the light well, and deserted. Very quickly and without making a sound, Sulla stole down three flights of stairs, and stepped into the narrow street unnoticed. The cup he had purloined went between the bars of a gutter drain; Sulla listened until he heard it splash far below, then thrust the screw of paper after it. At the Well of Juturna beneath the Vestal Steps he paused, dipped his hands and arms to the elbows in its still waters, and washed, and washed, and washed. There! That ought to rinse off whatever white powder might have adhered to his skin while he handled the paper and stirred the wine Hercules Atlas had devoured so satisfactorily.

But he didn’t go back to the party. He bypassed the Palatine completely, heading up the Via Nova toward the Capena Gate. Outside the city he entered one of the many stables in the vicinity that hired out horses or vehicles to those resident inside Rome; few Roman houses kept mules, horses, transport. It was cheaper and easier to hire.

The stable he chose was good and reputable, but its idea of security was lax; the only groom in attendance was sound asleep in a mound of straw. Sulla assisted him into a far deeper sleep with a rabbit punch behind one ear, then took his time cruising up and down until he found a very strong-looking, amiable mule. Never having saddled a mount in his life, it took him some time to work out precisely what to do, but he had heard of an animal’s holding its breath while the girth was being strapped tight, so he waited patiently until he was sure the mule’s ribs were normal, then swung himself up into the saddle and kicked the beast gently in the flanks.

Though he was a novice rider, he wasn’t afraid of horses or mules, and trusted to his luck in managing his mount. The four horns—one on each corner of the saddle—kept a man fairly securely upon the beast’s back provided it wasn’t prone to buck, and mules were more docile than horses in this respect. The only bridle he had managed to persuade the mule to take had a plain snaffle bit, but his steed seemed comfortable and placid chewing on it, so he headed down the moonlit Via Appia with every confidence in his ability to get quite a long way before morning. It was about midnight.

He found the ride exhausting, not being used to the activity. Ambling along beside Clitumna’s litter was one thing, this hurried progress quite another. After a few miles his legs ached intolerably from hanging down unsupported, and his buttocks squirmed with the effort of keeping him straight in the saddle, and his balls felt every little jolt. However, the mule was a willing goer, and he got as far as Tripontium well before dawn.

From here he left the Via Appia and cut across country toward the coast, for there were a few rough roads traversing the bogs of the outer Pomptine Marshes, and it was much shorter—as well as much less public—than following the Via Appia down to Tarracina and then backtracking north to Circei. In a stand of trees some ten miles into the wilderness he stopped, for the ground felt dry and hard, and there didn’t seem to be any mosquitoes. Tethering the mule on a long halter he had thought to purloin, he put the saddle down as a pillow under the shade of a pine, and slept dreamlessly.

Ten short daylight hours later, after giving himself and the mule a long drink in a nearby stream, Sulla resumed his ride. Covered from the gaze of any who might chance to see him by a hooded cloak he’d taken from the stable, he pattered along with considerably more grace than earlier, despite the ghastly ache in his spine and the deep soreness in rump and balls. So far he had eaten nothing, but felt no hunger; the mule had grazed on good grass, so was content enough, and remarkably fresh. And at dusk he came to the promontory on which sat Clitumna’s villa, dismounting then with real relief. Once more he divested the mule of saddle and bridle; once more he tethered it so it could graze. But this time he left it by itself to rest.

His luck had held. The night was perfect, still and starry, not a cloud to be seen anywhere in the cold indigo vault. And then as the second hour of night began to drip away, the full moon rose over the hills far in the east and slowly drenched the landscape with its strange luminosity, a light which gave the eyes power to see, yet was of itself utterly invisible.

And the sense of his own inviolability swelled within Sulla, banished fatigue and pain, quickened the flow of his chilly blood and set his mind, curiously peacefully engaged, into a phase of sheer enjoyment. He was felix; he was lucky. Everything was going beautifully, and would continue to go beautifully. And that meant he could idle his way through in a haze of well-being; he could really enjoy himself. When the chance to rid himself of Nicopolis had presented itself so suddenly, so unexpectedly, there hadn’t been time to enjoy it, only to make a lightning decision and wait out the hours. His investigations during his holiday with Metrobius had revealed The Destroyer to him, but Nicopolis it had been who chose the fashion of her own demise; he was involved only as catalyst. Luck had put her there. His luck. But tonight brain had put him where he was; luck would carry him through. As for fear—what was there to be afraid of?

Clitumna was there, waiting in the shadows of the salt pines, not yet impatient, but readying herself to turn impatient if her surprise was late. However, Sulla did not announce himself immediately; first he inspected the entire area to make sure she hadn’t brought anyone with her. And yes, she was quite alone. Even the untenanted stables and rooms below the loggia were devoid of people, interested or uninterested.

As he approached her, he made enough noise to reassure her. Thus when she saw him emerge from the darkness she was prepared for it to be him, and held out her arms.

“Oh, it’s just as you said!” she whispered, giggling into his neck. “My surprise! Where’s my surprise?”

“A kiss first?” he asked, white teeth showing whiter than his skin for once, so strange was the moonlight, so magical the spell which bound him.

Starved for him, Clitumna offered her lips greedily. And was standing, her mouth glued to his, her feet up on their toes, when he broke her neck. It was so easy. Snap. Probably she never even knew, for he could see no hint of knowledge in her staring eyes when his hand pushed her head back to meet his other hand keeping her back straight, a movement as fast as a blow. Easy. Snap. The sound traveled, it was so sharp, so clear-cut on its edges. And as he released her, expecting her to sink to the ground, she rose up even higher on her toes and began to dance for him, arms akimbo, head lolling obscenely, jerks and hops and staccato heaves which culminated in her twirling round and round before she fell in a tangle of elbows and knees, ugly, utterly ungainly. The warm acrid smell of voided urine curled up to meet his distended nostrils then, and after it, the heavier stench of voided bowels.

He didn’t scream. He didn’t leap away. He enjoyed it all immensely, and while she danced for him, he watched in fascination, and when she fell, he watched in revulsion.

“Well, Clitumna,” he said, “you died no lady.”

It was necessary that he lift her, even though that meant he would be soiled, stained, smeared. There must be no marks in the tender moon-dewed grass, no sign of a body’s being dragged—the main reason why he had stipulated that it be a fine night. So he lifted her, excrement and all, and carried her in his arms the short distance to the top of the cliff, her draperies gathered close to keep in the excrement, for he didn’t want a trail of faeces across the grass either.

He had already found the right spot, and went to it without faltering because he had marked it with a pale stone days before, when he first brought her down. His muscles bunched, spasmed; in one beautiful drapery tracery he rejected her forever, threw her out and away in a flapping ghost-bird plummet all the way down to the rocks. There she spread herself, a shapeless drift of something the sea might have washed up beyond the reach of all but the wildest storms. For it was vital that she be found; he wanted no estate in limbo.

As at dawn, he had tethered the mule near running water, but before he went to bring it to drink, he waded into the stream fully clad in his woman’s tunic, and washed away the last traces of his stepmother, Clitumna. After which there was one more thing to do, which he did the moment he left the water. On his belt was a small dagger in a sheath; using its pointed tip, he cut a very small gash in the skin of his left forehead about an inch below the hairline. It began to bleed immediately, as scalp cuts do, but that was only the start. Nothing about it could look neat or even. So he got the middle and ring fingers of each hand on either side of the nick and pulled until the flesh parted raggedly, considerably enlarging the wound. His bleeding increased dramatically, spattering his filthy, running-wet party garb in huge drops and runs that spread through the soaked fabric in a wonderfully gory way. There! Good! Out of his belt pouch he took a prepared pad of white linen and jammed it down hard on the tear in his brow, then bound it tightly with a ribbon of linen. Blood had run down into his left eye; he wiped it away with one hand, blinking, and then went to find the mule.

All through the night he rode, kicking the mule ruthlessly onward whenever it faltered, for it was very tired. However, it knew it was heading home to its stall, and, like all its kind, had a better heart and stouter sinews than a horse. It liked Sulla; that was the secret of its gallant response. It liked the comfort of the snaffle bit in a mouth more used to the pain of curbs; it liked his silence and economy; it liked his peacefulness. So for his sake it trotted, cantered, fell to a walk, picked up its stride again as soon as it was able, the steam rising from its shaggy coat in little trails that drifted behind them. For it knew nothing of the woman lying, neck broken ahead of her fall, on the cruel rocks below the great white villa. It took Sulla as it found him, and it found him interestingly kind.

*

A mile from the stables Sulla dismounted and removed the tack from the mule, throwing it aside into some bushes; then he smacked the animal on its rump and shooed it in the direction of its stables, sure it would find its way home. But when he began to plod toward the Capena Gate the mule followed him, and he was forced in the end to shy stones at it before it took the hint, swished its meager tail, and made off.

Muffled in his hooded cloak, Sulla entered Rome just as the eastern sky was pearling; in nine hours of seventy-four minutes each he had ridden from Circei to Rome, no mean feat for a tired mule and a man who had only really learned to ride on the journey.

The Steps of Cacus led from the Circus Maximus up onto the Germalus of the Palatine, and were surrounded by the most hallowed ground—the spirit of Romulus’s original city lived thereabouts, and a small uninspiring cavelet and spring in the rock was the place where the she-wolf had suckled the twins Romulus and Remus after they had been abandoned. To Sulla, this seemed a fitting place to abandon his trappings, so the cloak and the bandage were carefully tucked into a hollow tree behind the monument to the Genius Loci. His wound immediately began to bleed again, but sluggishly; and thus those in Clitumna’s street who were out and about early were stunned to see the missing man come staggering along in a bloodied woman’s tunic, filthy and mauled.

Clitumna’s household was astir, not having been to bed all at once since Hercules Atlas had blazed his way out of the place some thirty-two hours before. When the door servant admitted Sulla, looking ghastly, people flew from all directions to succor him. He was put to bed, bathed and sponged, none other than Athenodorus of Sicily was summoned to inspect his wounded head, and Gaius Julius Caesar came from next door to ask him what had happened, for the whole of the Palatine had been searching for him.

“Tell me what you can,” said Caesar, sitting by his bed.

Sulla looked totally convincing. There was a blue shade of pain and weariness about his lips, his colorless skin was even paler than usual, and his eyes, glazed with exhaustion, were red-rimmed and bloodshot.

“Silly,” he said, slurring his words. “I shouldn’t have tried to interfere with Hercules Atlas. But I’m strong, and I can look after myself. I just never counted on any man’s being as strong as he turned out to be—I thought he’d got a good act together, was all. He was roaring drunk, and he—he just—carried me away with him! I couldn’t do a thing to stop him. Somewhere or other he put me down. I tried to get away, and he must have clouted me, I really don’t know. But I came to in some alley in the Subura. I must have lain there, out to it, for at least a whole day. But you know what the Subura’s like—everyone left me to it. When I could move, I came home. That’s all, Gaius Julius.”

“You’re a very lucky young man,” said Caesar, lips tight. “Had Hercules Atlas carried you back to his flat, you might have shared his fate.”

“His fate?”

“Your steward came to see me yesterday when you didn’t come home, and asked me what he should do. After I learned the story, I took some hired gladiators to the strong man’s lodgings, and found an absolute shambles. For whatever reason, Hercules Atlas had wrecked the place—splintered every piece of furniture, broken great holes in the walls with his fists, terrified the other residents of his insula so much that none of them had gone near. He was lying in the middle of the living room, dead. My personal belief is that he ruptured a blood vessel in his brain, and went mad with the agony of it. Either that, or some enemy poisoned him.” An expression of distaste hovered on Caesar’s face, and was resolutely ironed away. “He’d made a disgusting mess in dying. I think his servants found him first, but they’d gone long before I arrived. As we found no money whatsoever in the place, I presume they took whatever they could carry with them, and have run away. Did he, for instance, have a fee from your party? If so, it wasn’t in the flat.”

Sulla closed his eyes, not needing to feign tiredness. “I had paid him in advance, Gaius Julius, so I can’t tell you if he had money there.”

Caesar got to his feet. “Well, I have done all that I can.” He looked down on the immobile figure in the bed sternly, knowing his look was wasted, for Sulla’s eyes remained closed. “I do pity you deeply, Lucius Cornelius,” he said, “but this conduct cannot go on, you know. My daughter nearly starved herself to death because of an immature emotional attachment to you, and has not even now recovered from that attachment. Which makes you a considerable nuisance to me as a neighbor, though I have to acquit you of encouraging my daughter, and must be fair enough to admit that she has made a considerable nuisance of herself to you. All of which suggests to me that you would do better if you lived elsewhere. I have sent to your stepmother in Circei and informed her what has transpired in her absence. I also informed her that she has long outworn her welcome in this street, and she might be more comfortable housed on the Carinae or the Caelian. We are a quiet body of people hereabouts. It would pain me to have to lodge a complaint— and a suit—with the urban praetor to protect our entitlement to peace, quiet, and physical well-being. But pain or no, Iam prepared to lodge that suit if I have to, Lucius Cornelius. Like the rest of your neighbors, I have had enough.”

Sulla didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes; as Caesar stood wondering how much of this homily had sunk in, his ears heard a snore. He turned at once and left.

But it was Sulla who got a letter from Circei first, not Gaius Julius Caesar. The next day a messenger came bearing a missive from Clitumna’s steward, informing Sulla that the lady Clitumna’s body, had been found at the base of the cliff bordering her estate. Her neck had been broken in the fall, but there were no suspicious circumstances. As Sulla knew, said the steward, the lady Clitumna’s mental state had been extremely depressed of late.

Sulla swung his legs out of bed and stood up.

“Run me a bath, and set out my toga,” he said.

The little wound on his brow was healing nicely, but its edges were livid and swollen still; aside from that, there was nothing left to suggest his condition of the day before.

“Send for Gaius Julius Caesar,” he said to Iamus the steward when he was dressed.

On this coming interview, Sulla understood with perfect clarity, all of his future hinged. Thank the gods that Scylax had taken Metrobius home from the party, protest though the lad did that he wanted to see what had happened to his beloved Sulla. That, and Caesar’s early arrival on the scene, represented the only flaws in Sulla’s plans. What an escape! Truly his luck was in its ascendancy! The presence of Metrobius in Clitumna’s house when Caesar had been summoned by the worried Iamus would have cooked Sulla’s goose forever. No, Caesar would never damn Sulla on hearsay, but the evidence of his own eyes would have put an entirely different complexion upon the situation. And Metrobius would not have been backward in coming forward. I am treading on eggshells, said Sulla to himself, and it is high time I stopped. He thought of Stichus, of Nicopolis, of Clitumna, and he smiled. Well, now he could stop.

He received Caesar looking every inch the patrician Roman, immaculate in white, the narrow knight’s stripe adorning the right shoulder of his tunic, his magnificent head of hair cut and combed into a manly yet becoming style.

“I apologize for having to drag you here yet again, Gaius Julius,” said Sulla, and handed Caesar a small roll of paper. “This has just arrived from Circei, and I thought you ought to see it at once.”

Without a change of expression Caesar read it very slowly, his lips moving, but the sound of the words he said over to himself very quiet. He was weighing, Sulla knew, each and every word as he separated it from the uninterrupted flow of letters on the paper. Done, he laid the sheet down.

“It is the third death,” said Caesar, and actually seemed happy about that fact. “Your household is sadly diminished, Lucius Cornelius. Please accept my condolences.”

“I presumed that you had made Clitumna’s will for her,” Sulla said, standing very straight, “otherwise I assure you that I would not have bothered you.”

“Yes, I have made several wills for her, the last one just after Nicopolis died.” His handsome face, his direct blue eyes, everything about Caesar was carefully, legally noncommittal. “I would like you to tell me, Lucius Cornelius, what exactly you felt for your stepmother.’’

Here it was, the frailest eggshell yet. He must tread as surely and delicately as a cat on a windowsill strewn with broken shards a full twelve floors above the pavement. “I remember saying something to you before, Gaius Julius,” he said, “but I’m glad to have the opportunity to speak at greater length about her. She was a very silly and stupid and vulgar woman, but as it happens, I was fond of her. My father”—and Sulla’s face twisted—”was an incurable drunkard. The only life I ever remember with him—and for some years with my older sister too, until she married and escaped—was a nightmare. We were not impoverished gentry, Gaius Julius. We didn’t live in a style in any way reminiscent of our origins. We were so poor we had no slave, not one. If it hadn’t been for the charity of an old marketplace teacher, I, a patrician of the gens Cornelius, would not even have learned to read and write. I have never done my basic military training on the Campus Martius, nor learned to ride a horse, nor been the pupil of some advocate in the law courts. Of soldiering, of rhetoric, of public life, I know nothing. Such did my father do to me. And so—I was fond of her. She married my father, and she took him and me to live with her, and who knows? Perhaps, had my father and I gone on living in the Subura, I would one day have gone quite mad, and murdered him, and offended the gods beyond mercy. As it was, until he died she took the brunt of him, and I was liberated. Yes, I was fond of her.”

“She was fond of you too, Lucius Cornelius,” said Caesar. “Her will is simple and straightforward. It leaves everything she had to you.”

Easy, easy! Not too much joy, but not too much grief either! The man he was facing was very intelligent and must have great experience of men.

“Did she leave me enough to enter the Senate?’’ he asked, looking into Caesar’s eyes.

“More than enough.”

Sulla visibly sagged. “I—can’t—believe it!” he said. “Are you sure? I know she had this house and the villa at Circei, but I didn’t think there was much else.”

“On the contrary, she was an extremely wealthy woman—money invested, stocks and interests in all kinds of companies, as well as in a dozen merchant ships. I advise you to divest yourself of the ships and the company shares, and use the funds they realize to buy property. You’ll need to have your affairs in exquisite order to satisfy the censors.”

“It’s a dream!” said Sulla.

“I can understand that you must find it so, Lucius Cornelius. But rest assured, it’s all real enough.” Caesar sounded tranquil, not repelled by Sulla’s reaction, nor suspicious of feigned grief his common sense would have told him a Lucius Cornelius Sulla could never feel for a Clitumna, no matter how kind to his father she might have been.

“She might have gone on for years and years,” said Sulla, voice wondering. “Mine is a happy fate after all, Gaius Julius. I never thought to be able to say that. I shall miss her. But I hope that in the years to come, the world will say that the greatest contribution she made to it was in her dying. For I intend to be an ornament to my class and to the Senate.” Did that sound all right? Did it imply what he intended it to imply?

“I agree, Lucius Cornelius, that it would make her happy to think you used her bequest fruitfully,” said Caesar, taking what Sulla said exactly the right way. “And I trust there will be no more wild parties? No more dubious friends?”

“When a man can espouse the life his birth entitles him to, Gaius Julius, there is no need for wild parties or dubious friends.” Sulla sighed. “They were a way of passing the time. I daresay that must seem inexplicable to you. But the life I have lived for over thirty years has hung on my neck like a huge millstone.”

“Of course it has,” said Caesar.

A horrifying thought occurred to Sulla. “But there are no censors! What can I do?”

“Well, though there is no need to elect more until four more years have elapsed, one of the conditions Marcus Scaurus put upon his voluntary resignation—such as it was—was that new censors be elected next April. You will just have to contain yourself until then,” Caesar said comfortably.

Sulla girded himself, drew a deep breath. “Gaius Julius, I have one further request to make of you,” he said.

The blue eyes held an expression Sulla found impossible to fathom, as if Caesar knew what was coming—yet how could that be, when the idea had just popped into his mind? The most brilliant idea yet, the luckiest. For if Caesar consented, Sulla’s application to the censors would have far greater weight than mere money, far greater effect than the claim of birth, marred as it was by the kind of life he had led.

“What request is that, Lucius Cornelius?” asked Caesar.

“That you consider me as a husband for your daughter Julilla,” he said.

“Even after she injured you so?”

“I—love her,” said Sulla, and believed he meant it.

“At the moment Julilla is nowhere near well enough to contemplate marriage,” said Caesar, “but I will take note of your request, Lucius Cornelius.” He smiled. “Perhaps you deserve each other, after so much trouble.”

“She gave me a grass crown,” said Sulla. “And do you know, Gaius Julius, it was only after that my luck turned?”

“I believe you.” Rising, he prepared to go. “Nonetheless, for the moment we will say nothing to anyone of your interest in marrying Julilla. Most particularly, I charge you to stay away from her. However you feel about her, she is still trying to find her way out of her predicament, and I want no easy solution presented to her.”

Sulla accompanied Caesar to the door, and there held out his hand, smiling with his lips closed; for no one knew the effect of those overlong and oversharp canines better than their owner. Not for Gaius Julius Caesar any nasty chilling grins. No, Caesar was to be treasured and courted. Ignorant of the proposition Caesar had once put to Gaius Marius about a daughter, Sulla had come to the same conclusion. What better way to endear himself to the censors—and the electorate—than to have a Julia as his wife? Especially when there was one so close to hand she had nearly died for him.

“Iamus!” Sulla called when he had shut the door.

“Lucius Cornelius?”

“Don’t bother with dinner. Put the house into mourning for the lady Clitumna, and see to the return of all her servants from Circei. I’m leaving at once to see to her funeral.”

And, thought Sulla, packing quickly, I shall take young Metrobius with me, and say goodbye. Goodbye to every last trace of the old life, goodbye to Clitumna. None of it will I miss save Metrobius. And him I will miss. Badly.