1

It had been left to Sulla to organize Marius’s triumphal parade; he followed orders scrupulously despite his inner misgivings, these being due to the result of Marius’s instructions.

“I want the triumph over and done with quick-smart,” Marius had said to Sulla in Puteoli when they had first landed from Africa. “Up on the Capitol by the sixth hour of day at the very latest, then straight into the consular inaugurations and the meeting of the Senate. Rush through the lot, because I’ve decided it’s the feast must be memorable. After all, it’s my feast twice over, I’m a triumphing general as well as the new senior consul. So I want a first-class spread, Lucius Cornelius! No hard-boiled eggs and run-of-the-mill cheeses, d’you hear? Food of the best and most expensive sort, dancers and singers and musicians of the best and most expensive sort, the plate gold and the couches purple.”

Sulla had listened to all this with a sinking heart. He will never be anything but a peasant with social aspirations, Sulla thought; the hurried parade and hasty consular ceremonies followed by a feast of the kind he’s ordered is poor form. Especially that vulgarly splashy feast!

However, he followed instructions to the letter. Carts carrying clay tanks waxed inside to make them waterproof trundled trays of Baiae oysters and Campanian crayfish and Crater Bay shrimps into Rome, while other carts similarly fitted out trundled freshwater eels and pikes and bass from the upper reaches of the Tiber; a team of expert licker-fishermen were stationed around Rome’s sewer outlets; fattened on a diet of honey cakes soaked in wine, capons and ducks, piglets and kids, pheasants and baby deer were sent to the caterers for roasting and stuffing, forcing and larding; a big consignment of giant snails had come from Africa with Marius and Sulla, compliments of Publius Vagiennius, who wanted a report on Roman gourmet reactions.

So Marius’s triumphal parade Sulla kept businesslike and brisk, thinking to himself that when his triumph came, he’d make it so big it took three days to travel the ancient route, just like Aemilius Paullus. For to expend time and splendor upon a triumph was the mark of the aristocrat, anxious to have the people share in the treat; whereas to expend time and splendor upon the feast in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus that followed was the mark of the peasant, anxious to impress a privileged few.

Nevertheless, Sulla succeeded in making the triumphal parade memorable. There were floats showing all the highlights of the African campaigns, from the snails of Muluchath to the amazing Martha the Syrian prophetess; she was the star of the pageant displays, reclining on a purple-and-gold couch atop a huge float arranged as a facsimile of Prince Gauda’s throne room in Old Carthage, with an actor portraying Gaius Marius, and another actor filling Gauda’s twisted shoes. On a lavishly ornamented flat-topped dray, Sulla caused all of Marius’s personal military decorations to be carried. There were cartloads of plunder, cartloads of trophies consisting of enemy suits of armor, cartloads of important exhibits—all of these arranged so that the onlookers could see and exclaim over individual items—plus cartloads of caged lions, apes and bizarre monkeys, and two dozen elephants to walk flapping their vast ears. The six legions of the African army were all to march, but had to be deprived of spears and daggers and swords, carrying instead wooden staves wreathed in victory laurels.

“And pick up your heels and march, you cunni!” cried Marius to his soldiers on the scuffed sward of the Villa Publica as the parade was ready to move off. “I have to be on the Capitol by the sixth hour myself, so I won’t be able to keep an eye on you. But no god will help you if you disgrace me—hear me, fellatores?’

They loved it when he talked to them obscenely; but then, reflected Sulla, they loved him no matter how he talked to them.

*

Jugurtha marched too, clad in his kingly purple robes, his head bound for the last time with the tasseled white ribbon called the diadem, all his golden jeweled necklaces and rings and bracelets flashing in the early sun, for it was a perfect winter’s day, neither unspeakably cold nor inconveniently windy. Both Jugurtha’s sons were with him, purple clad too.

When Marius had returned Jugurtha to Rome Jugurtha could hardly believe it, so sure had he been when he and Bomilcar quit Rome that he would never, never be back.

The terracotta city of the brilliant colors—painted columns, vivid walls, statues everywhere looking so lifelike the observer expected them to start orating or fighting or galloping or weeping. Nothing whitely African about Rome, which did not build much in mud brick anymore, and never whitewashed its walls, but painted them instead. The hills and cliffs, the parklike spaces, the pencil cypresses and the umbrella pines, the high temples on their tall podiums with winged Victories driving four-horsed quadrigae on the very crests of the pediments, the slowly greening scar of the great fire on the Viminal and upper Esquiline. Rome, the city for sale. And what a tragedy, that he’d not been able to find the money to buy it! How differently things might have turned out, had he.

Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus had taken him in, an honored houseguest who yet was not permitted to step outside the house. It had been dark when they smuggled him in, and there for months he had remained, disbarred from the loggia which overlooked the Forum Romanum and the Capitol, limited to pacing up and down the peristyle-garden like the lion he felt himself. His pride would not let him go to seed; every day he ran in one spot, he touched his toes, he shadowboxed, he lifted himself up until his chin touched the bough he had chosen as a bar. For when he walked in Gaius Marius’s triumphal parade, he wanted them to admire him, those ordinary Romans—wanted to be sure they took him for a formidable opponent, not a flabby Oriental potentate.

With Metellus Numidicus he had kept himself aloof, declining to pander to one Roman’s ego at the expense of another’s—a great disappointment to his host, he sensed at once. Numidicus had hoped to gather evidence that Marius had abused his position as proconsul. That Numidicus got nothing instead was a secret pleasure to Jugurtha, who knew which Roman he had feared, and which Roman he was glad had been the one to beat him. Certainly Numidicus was a great noble, and had integrity of a sort, but as a man and a soldier he couldn’t even reach up to touch Gaius Marius’s bootlaces. Of course, as far as Metellus Numidicus was concerned, Gaius Marius was little better than a bastard; so Jugurtha, who knew all about bastardy, remained committed to Gaius Marius in a queer and pitiless comradeship.

On the night before Gaius Marius was to enter Rome in triumph and as consul for the second time, Metellus Numidicus and his speech-bereft son had Jugurtha and his two sons to dinner. The only other guest was Publius Rutilius Rufus, for whom Jugurtha had asked. Of those who had fought together at Numantia under Scipio Aemilianus, only Gaius Marius was absent.

It was a very odd evening. Metellus Numidicus had gone to enormous lengths to produce a sumptuous feast—for, as he said, he had no intention of eating at Gaius Marius’s expense after the inaugural meeting of the Senate in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

“But there’s scarcely a crayfish or an oyster left to buy, or a snail, or anything extra-special,” said Numidicus as they prepared to dine. “Marius cleaned the markets out.”

“Can you blame him?” asked Jugurtha, when Rutilius Rufus would not.

“I blame Gaius Marius for everything,” said Numidicus.

“You shouldn’t. If you could have produced him from your own ranks of the high nobility, Quintus Caecilius, well and good. But you could not. Rome produced Gaius Marius. I don’t mean Rome the city or Rome the nation—I mean Roma, the immortal goddess, the genius of the city, the moving spirit. A man is needed. A man is found,” said Jugurtha of Numidia.

“There are those of us with the right birth and background who could have done what Gaius Marius has done,” said Numidicus stubbornly. “In fact, it ought to have been me. Gaius Marius stole my imperium, and tomorrow is reaping my rewards.” The faint look of incredulity on Jugurtha’s face annoyed him, and he added, a little waspishly, “For instance, it wasn’t really Gaius Marius who captured you, King. Your captor had the right birth and ancestral background—Lucius Cornelius Sulla. It could be said—and in the form of a valid syllogism!—that Lucius Cornelius ended the war, not Gaius Marius.” He drew a breath, and sacrificed his own claim to pre-eminence upon the more logical aristocratic altar named Lucius Cornelius Sulla. “In fact, Lucius Cornelius has all the earmarks of a right-thinking, properly Roman Gaius Marius.”

“No!” scoffed Jugurtha, aware that Rutilius Rufus,. was watching him fixedly. “He’s a pard with very different spots, that one. Gaius Marius is straighter, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t have the remotest idea what you mean,” said Numidicus stiffly.

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Rutilius Rufus, and smiled delightedly.

Jugurtha grinned the old Numantia grin at Rutilius Rufus. “Gaius Marius is a freak,” he said, “a perfect fruit from an overlooked and ordinary tree growing just outside the orchard wall. Such men cannot be stopped or deflected, my dear Quintus Caecilius. They have the heart, the guts, the brains, and the streak of immortality to surmount every last obstacle set in their way. The gods love them! On them, the gods lavish all of Fortune’s bounty. So a Gaius Marius travels straight, and when he is compelled to walk crookedly, his path is still straight.”

“How right you are!” said Rutilius Rufus.

“Luh-Luh-Lucius Cor-Cor-Cornelius is buh-buh-buh-better!” young Metellus Piglet said angrily.

“No!” said Jugurtha, shaking his head for emphasis. “Our friend Lucius Cornelius has the brains... and the guts... and maybe the heart... but I don’t think he has the streak of immortality inside his mind. The crooked way feels natural to him; he sees it as the straighter way. There’s no war elephant about a man who’s happier astride a mule. Oh, brave as a bull! In a battle, there’s no one quicker to lead a charge, or form up a relief column, or dash into a gap, or turn a fleeing century around. But Lucius Cornelius doesn’t hear Mars. Where Gaius Marius never not hears Mars. I presume, by the way, that ‘Marius’ is some Latin distortion of ‘Mars’? The son of Mars, perhaps? You don’t know? Nor do you want to know, Quintus Caecilius, I suspect! A pity. It’s an extremely powerful-sounding language, Latin. Very crisp, yet rolling.”

“Tell me more about Lucius Cornelius Sulla,” said Rutilius Rufus, choosing a piece of fresh white bread and the plainest-looking egg.

Jugurtha was wolfing down snails, not having tasted one since his exile began. “What’s to tell? He’s a product of his class. Everything he does, he does well. Well enough that nine out of ten witnesses will never be able to fathom whether he’s a natural at what he’s doing, or just a very intelligent and thoroughly schooled unnatural. But in the time I spent with him, I never got a spark out of him that told me what was his natural bent—or his proper sphere, for that matter. Oh, he will win wars and run governments, of that I have no doubt—but never with the spirit side of his mind.” The garlic-and-oil sauce was slicked all over the guest of honor’s chin; he ceased talking while a servant scrubbed and polished shaven and bearded parts, then belched enormously, and continued. “He’ll always choose expedience, because he’s lacking in the sticking power only that streak of immortality inside the mind can give a man. If two alternatives are presented to Lucius Cornelius, he’ll pick the one he thinks will get him where he wants to be with the least outlay. He’s just not as thorough as Gaius Marius—or as clear-sighted, I suspect.”

“Huh-huh-huh-how duh-duh-do you know so muh-muh-muh-much about Luh-Luh-Luh-Lucius Cornelius?” asked Metellus Piglet.

“I shared a remarkable ride with him once,” said Jugurtha reflectively, using a toothpick. “And then we shared a voyage along the African coast from Icosium to Utica. We saw a lot of each other.” And the way he said that made all the others wonder just how many meanings it contained. But no one asked.

The salads came out, and then the roasts. Metellus Numidicus and his guests set to again, and with relish, save for the two young princes Iampsas and Oxyntas.

“They want to die with me,” Jugurtha explained to Ru-tilius Rufus, low-voiced.

“It wouldn’t be countenanced,” said Rutilius Rufus.

“So I’ve told them.”

“Do they know where they’re going?”

“Oxyntas to the town of Venusia, wherever that might be, and Iampsas to Asculum Picentum, another mystery town.”

“Venusia’s south of Campania, on the road to Brundisium, and Asculum Picentum is northeast of Rome, on the other side of the Apennines. They’ll be comfortable enough.”

“How long will their detention last?” Jugurtha asked.

Rutilius Rufus pondered that, then shrugged. “Hard to tell. Some years, certainly. Until the local magistrates write a report to the Senate saying they’re thoroughly indoctrinated with Roman attitudes, and won’t be a danger to Rome if they’re sent home.”

“Then they’ll stay for life, I’m afraid. Better they die with me, Publius Rutilius!”

“No, Jugurtha, you can’t say that with complete assurance. Who knows what the future holds for them?”

“True.”

The meal went on through more roasts and salads, and ended with sweetmeats, pastries, honeyed confections, cheeses, the few fruits in season, and dried fruits. Only Iampsas and Oxyntas failed to do the meal justice.

“Tell me, Quintus Caecilius,” said Jugurtha to Metellus Numidicus when the remains of the food were borne away, and unwatered wine of the best vintage was produced, “what will you do if one day another Gaius Marius should appear—only this time with all Gaius Marius’s gifts and vigor and vision—and streak of immortality inside his mind!—wearing a patrician Roman skin?”

Numidicus blinked. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, King,” he said. “Gaius Marius is Gaius Marius.”

“He’s not necessarily unique,” said Jugurtha. “What would you do with a Gaius Marius who came from a patrician family?”

“He couldn’t,” said Numidicus.

“Nonsense, of course he could,” said Jugurtha, rolling the superb Chian wine around his tongue.

“I think what Quintus Caecilius is trying to say, Jugurtha, is that Gaius Marius is a product of his class,” said Rutilius Rufus gently.

“A Gaius Marius may be of any class,” Jugurtha insisted.

Now all the Roman heads were shaking a negative in unison. “No,” said Rutilius Rufus, speaking for the group. “What you are saying may be true for Numidia, or for any other world. But never true of Rome! No patrician Roman could ever think or act like Gaius Marius.”

So that was that. After a few more drinks the party broke up, Publius Rutilius Rufus went home to his bed, and the inhabitants of Metellus Numidicus’s house scattered to their various beds. In the comfortable aftermath of excellent food, wine, and company, Jugurtha of Numidia slept deeply, peacefully.

When he was woken by the slave appointed to serve his needs as valet about two hours before the dawn, Jugurtha got up refreshed and invigorated. He was permitted a hot bath, and great care was devoted to his robing; his hair was coaxed into long, sausagelike curls with heated tongs, and his trim beard curled and then wound about with strings of gold and silver, the clean-shaven areas of cheeks and chin scraped closely. Perfumed with costly unguents, the diadem in place, and all his jewelry (which had already been catalogued by the Treasury clerks, and would go to the dividing of the spoils on the Campus Martius the day after the triumph) distributed about his person, King Jugurtha came out of his chambers the picture of a Hellenized sovereign, and regal from fingertips to toes to top of head.

“Today,” he said to his sons as they traveled in open sedan chairs to the Campus Martius, “I shall see Rome for the first time in my life.”

Sulla himself received them amid what seemed a chaotic confusion lit only by torches; but dawn was breaking over the crest of the Esquiline, and Jugurtha suspected the turmoil was due only to the number of people assembled at the Villa Publica, that in reality a streamlined order existed.

The chains placed on his person were merely token; where in all Italy could a Punic warrior-king go?

“We were talking about you last night,” said Jugurtha to Sulla conversationally.

“Oh?” asked Sulla, garbed in glittering silver cuirass and pteryges, silver greaves cushioning his shins, a silver Attic helmet crested with fluffy scarlet feathers, and a scarlet military cloak. To Jugurtha, who knew him in a broad-brimmed straw hat, he was a stranger. Behind him, his personal servant carried a frame upon which his decorations for valor were hung, an imposing enough collection.

“Yes,” said Jugurtha, still conversationally. “There was a debate about which man actually won the war against me—Gaius Marius or you.”

The whitish eyes lifted to rest on Jugurtha’s face. “An interesting debate, King. Which side did you take?”

“The side of right. I said Gaius Marius won the war. His were the command decisions, his the men involved, including you. And his was the order which sent you to see my father-in-law,’ Bocchus.” Jugurtha paused, smiled. “However, my only ally was my old friend Publius Rutilius. Quintus Caecilius and his son both maintained that you won the war because you captured me.”

“You took the side of right,” said Sulla.

“The side of right is relative.”

“Not in this case,” said Sulla, his plumes nodding in the direction of Marius’s milling soldiers. “I will never have his gift of dealing with them. I have no fellow feeling for them, you see.”

“You hide it well,” said Jugurtha.

“Oh, they know, believe me,” said Sulla. “He won the war, with them. My contribution could have been done by anyone of legatal rank.” He drew a deep breath. “I take it you had a pleasant evening, King?”

“Most pleasant!” Jugurtha jiggled his chains, and found them very light, easy to carry. “Quintus Caecilius and his stammering son put on a kingly feast for me. If a Numidian was asked which food he would want the night before he died, he would always ask for snails. And last night I had snails.”

“Then your belly’s nice and full, King.”

Jugurtha grinned. “Indeed it is! The right way to go to the strangler’s loop, I’d say.”

“No, that’s my say,” said Sulla, whose toothy grin was far darker in his far fairer face.

Jugurtha’s own grin faded. “What do you mean?”

“I’m in charge of the logistics of this triumphal parade, King Jugurtha. Which means I’m the one to say how you die. Normally you’d be strangled with a noose, that’s true. But it isn’t regulation, there is an alternative method. Namely, to shove you down the hole inside the Tullianum, and leave you to rot.” Sulla’s grin grew. “After such a kingly meal—and especially after trying to sow discord between me and my commanding officer—I think it would be a pity if you weren’t permitted to finish digesting your snails. So there will be no strangler’s noose for you, King! You can die by inches.”

Luckily his sons were standing too far away to hear; the King watched as Sulla flicked a salute of farewell to him, then watched as the Roman strode to his sons, and checked their chains. He gazed around at the panic all about him, the seething masses of servants doling out head wreaths and garlands of victory laurel leaves, the musicians tuning up their horns and the bizarre horse-headed trumpets Ahenobarbus had brought back from Long-haired Gaul, the dancers practising last-moment twirls, the horses snuffling and blowing snorting breaths as they stamped their hooves impatiently, the oxen hitched to carts in dozens with horns gilded and dewlaps garlanded, a little water donkey wearing a straw hat ludicrously wreathed in laurel and its ears poking up rampant through holes in the crown, a toothlessly raddled old hag with swinging empty breasts and clad from head to foot in purple and gold being hoisted up onto a pageant dray, where she spread herself on a purple-draped litter like the world’s greatest courtesan, and stared stared stared straight down into his eyes with eyes like the Hound of Hades—surely she should have had three heads…

Once it got going, the parade hustled. Usually the Senate and all the magistrates except the consuls marched first, and then some musicians, then dancers and clowns aping the famous; then there came the booty and display floats, after which came more dancers and musicians and clowns escorting the sacrificial animals and their priestly attendants; next came the important prisoners, and the triumphing general driving his antique chariot; and, in last place, the general’s legions marched. But Gaius Marius changed the sequence around a bit, preceding his booty and his pageants and his floats, so that he would arrive on the Capitol and sacrifice his beasts in time to be inaugurated afterward as consul, hold the inaugural meeting of the Senate, and then preside at his feast in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

Jugurtha found himself able to enjoy his first—and last— journey on foot through the streets of Rome. What mattered it how he died? A man had to die sooner or later, and his had been a most satisfying life, even if it had ended in defeat. He’d given them a good run for their money, the Romans. His dead brother, Bomilcar... He too had died in a dungeon, come to think of it. Perhaps fratricide displeased the gods, no matter how valid the reason. Well, only the gods had kept count of the number of his blood kin who had perished at his instigation, if not by his own hands. Did that lack of personal participation make his hands clean?

Oh, how tall the apartment buildings were! The parade jogged briskly into the Vicus Tuscus of the Velabrum, a part of the city stuffed with insulae, leaning as if they tried to embrace across the narrow alleys by falling on each other’s bricky chests. Every window held faces, every face cheered, and he was amazed that they cheered for him too, urged him on to his death with words of encouragement and best wishes.

And then the parade skirted the edges of the Meat Market, the Forum Boarium, where the statue of naked Hercules Triumphalis was all decked out for the day in the general’s triumphal regalia—purple-and-gold toga picta, palm-embroidered purple tunica palmata, the laurel branch in one hand and the eagle-topped ivory scepter in the other, and his face painted bright red with minim. The meaty business of the day was clearly suspended, for the magnificent temples on the borders of the huge marketplace were cleared of booths and stalls. There! The temple of Ceres, called the most beautiful in the entire city—and beautiful it was in a garish way, painted in reds and blues and greens and yellows, high on a podium like all Roman temples; it was, Jugurtha knew, the headquarters of the Plebeian Order, and housed their records and their aediles.

The parade now turned into the interior of the Circus Maximus, a greater structure than he had ever seen; it stretched the whole length of the Palatine, and seated about a hundred and fifty thousand people. Every one of its stepped wooden tiers was packed with cheering onlookers for Gaius Marius’s triumphal parade; from where he walked not far in front of Marius, Jugurtha could hear the cheers swell to screams of adulation for the general. No one minded thehasty pace, for Marius had sent out his clients and agents to whisper to the crowds that he hurried because he cared for Rome; he hurried so he could leave all the quicker for Gaul-across-the-Alps and the Germans.

The leafy spaces and magnificent mansions of the Palatine were thronged with watchers too, above the level of the herd, safe from assault and robbery, women and nursemaids and girls and boys of good family mostly, he had been told. They turned out of the Circus Maximus into the Via Triumphalis, which skirted the far end of the Palatine and had rocks and parklands above it on the left, and on the right, clustering below the Caelian Hill, yet another district of towering apartment blocks. Then came the Palus Ceroliae—the swamp below the Carinae and the Fagutal—and finally a turn into the Velia and the downhill trip to the Forum Romanum along the worn cobbles of the ancient sacred way, the Via Sacra.

At last he would see it, the center of the world, just as in olden days the Acropolis had been the center of the world. And then he set eyes on it, the Forum Romanum, and was hugely disappointed. The buildings were little and old, and they didn’t face a logical way, for they were all skewed to the north, where the Forum itself was oriented northwest to southeast; the overall effect was slipshod, and the whole place wore an air of dilapidation. Even the newer buildings—which did at least face the Forum at a proper angle— were not kept up well. In fact, the buildings along the way had been far more imposing, and the temples along the way bigger, richer, grander. The houses of the priests did sport fairly new coats of paint, admittedly, and the little round temple of Vesta was pretty, but only the very lofty temple of Castor and Pollux and the vast Doric austerity of the temple of Saturn were at all eye-catching, admirable examples of their kind. A drab and cheerless place, sunk down in a queer valley, damp and unlovely.

Opposite the temple of Saturn—from the podium of which the senior Treasury officials watched the parade— Jugurtha and his sons and those among his barons and his wives who had been captured were led out of the procession and put to one side; they stood to watch the lictors of the general, his dancers and musicians and censer bearers, his drummers and trumpeters, his legates, and then the chariot-borne general himself, remote and unrecognizable in all his regalia and with his minim-painted red face, pass by. They all went up the hill to where the great temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus presented its pillared side to the Forum, for it too was skewed north-south. Its front looked south. South to Numidia.

Jugurtha looked at his sons. “Live long and live well,” he said to them; they were going into custody in remote Roman towns, but his barons and his wives were going home to Numidia.

The guard of lictors who surrounded the King nudged his chains a little, and he walked across the crowded flags of the lower Forum, beneath the trees around the Pool of Curtius and the statue of the satyr Marsyas blowing his oboe, around the edge of the vast tiered well which saw meetings of the Tribes, and up to the start of the Clivus Argentarius. Above was the Arx of the Capitol and the temple of Juno Moneta, where the mint was housed. And there was the ancient shabby Senate House across the far side of the Comitia, and beyond it the small shabby Basilica Porcia, built by Cato the Censor.

But that was as far as his walk through Rome took him. The Tullianum stood in the lap of the Arx hill just beyond the Steps of Gemortia, a very tiny grey edifice built of the huge unmortared stones men all over the world called Cyclopean; it was only one storey high and had only one opening, a doorless rectangular gap in the stones. Fancying himself too tall, Jugurtha ducked his head as he came to it, but passed inside with ease, for it turned out to be taller than any mortal man.

His lictors stripped him of his robes, his jewels, his diadem, and handed them to the Treasury clerks waiting to receive them; a docket changed hands, officially acknowledging that this State property was being properly disposed of. Jugurtha was left only the loincloth Metellus Numidicus had advised him to wear, for Metellus Numidicus knew the rite. The fountainhead of his physical being decently covered, a man could go to his death decently.

The only illumination came from the aperture behind him, but by its light Jugurtha could see the round hole in the middle of the roundish floor. Down there was where they would put him. Had he been scheduled for the noose, the strangler would have accompanied him into the lower regions with sufficient helpers to restrain him, and when the deed was done, and his body tossed down into one of the drain openings, those who still lived would have climbed up a ladder to Rome and their world.

But Sulla must have found time to countermand the normal procedure, for no strangler was present. Someone produced a ladder, but Jugurtha waved it aside. He stepped up to the edge of the hole, then stepped into space without a sound issuing from his lips; what words were there to mark this event? The thud of his landing was almost immediate, for the lower cell was not deep. Having heard it, the escort turned in silence and left the place. No one lidded the hole; no one barred the entrance. For no one ever climbed out of the awful pit beneath the Tullianum.

Two white oxen and one white bull were Marius’s share of the sacrifices that day, but only the oxen belonged to his triumph. He left his four-horse chariot at the foot of the steps up to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and ascended them alone. Inside the main room of the temple he laid his laurel branch and his laurel wreaths at the foot of the statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, after which his lictors filed inside and their laurel wreaths too were offered to the god.

It was just noon. No triumphal parade had ever gone so quickly; but the rest of it—which was the bulk of it—was proceeding at a more leisurely pace, so the people would have plenty of time to see the pageants, floats, booty, trophies, soldiers. Now came the real business of Marius’s day. Down the steps to the assembled senators came Gaius Marius, face painted red, toga purple and gold, tunic embroidered with palm fronds, and in his right hand the ivory scepter. He walked briskly, his mind bent upon getting the inauguration over, his costume a minor inconvenience he could endure.

“Well, let’s get on with it!” he said impatiently.

Utter silence greeted this directive. No one moved, no one betrayed what he was thinking by an expression on his face. Even Marius’s colleague Gaius Flavius Fimbria and the outgoing consul Publius Rutilius Rufus (Gnaeus Mallius Maximus had sent word that he was ill) just stood there.

“What’s the matter with you?” Marius asked testily.

Out of the crowd stepped Sulla, no longer martial in his silver parade armor, but properly togate. He was smiling broadly, his hand outstretched, every inch of him the helpful and attentive quaestor.

“Gaius Marius, Gaius Marius, you’ve forgotten!” he cried loudly, reaching Marius and swinging him round with unexpected strength in his grip. “Get home and change, man!” he whispered.

Marius opened his mouth to argue, then he caught a secret look of glee on Metellus Numidicus’s face, and with superb timing he put his hand up to his face, brought it down to look at its reddened palm. “Ye gods!” he exclaimed, face comical. “I do apologize, Conscript Fathers,” he said as he moved toward them again. “I know I’m in a hurry to get to the Germans, but this is ridiculous! Please excuse me. I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can. The general’s regalia—even triumphal!—cannot be worn to a meeting of the Senate within the pomerium.” And as he marched away across the Asylum toward the Arx, he called over his shoulder, “I thank you, Lucius Cornelius!”

Sulla broke away from the silent spectators and ran after him, not something every man could do in a toga; but he did it well, even made it look natural.

“I do thank you,” said Marius to him when Sulla caught up. “But what on earth does it really matter? Now they’ve all got to stand around in the freezing wind for an hour while I wash this stuff off and put on my toga praetexta!”

“It matters to them,” said Sulla, “and I do believe it matters to me too.” His shorter legs were moving faster than Marius’s. “You’re going to need the senators, Gaius Marius, so please don’t antagonize them any further today! They weren’t impressed at being obliged to share their inauguration with your triumph, to start with. So don’t rub their noses in it!”

“All right, all right!” Marius sounded resigned. He took the steps that led from the Arx to the back door of his house three at a time, and charged through the door so violently that its custodian fell flat on his face and started to shriek in terror. “Shut up, man, I’m not the Gauls and this is now, not three hundred years ago!” he said, and started to yell for his valet, and his wife, and his bath servant.

“It’s all laid out ready,” said that queen among women, Julia, smiling peacefully. “I thought you’d arrive in your usual hurry. Your bath is hot, everyone is waiting to help, so off you go, Gaius Marius.” She turned to Sulla with her lovely smile. “Welcome, my brother. It’s turned cold, hasn’t it? Do come into my sitting room and warm yourself by the brazier while I find you some mulled wine.”

“You were right, it is freezing,” said Sulla, taking the beaker from his sister-in-law when she came back bearing it. “I’ve got used to Africa. Chasing after the Great Man, I thought I was hot, but now I’m perished.”

She sat down opposite him, head cocked inquisitively. “What went wrong?” she asked.

“Oh, you are a wife,” he said, betraying his bitterness.

“Later, Lucius Cornelius,” she said. “Tell me what went wrong first.”

He smiled wryly, shaking his head. “You know, Julia, I do love that man as much as I can love any man,” he said, “but at times I could toss him to the Tullianum strangler as easily as I could an enemy!”

Julia chuckled. “So could I,” she said soothingly. “It is quite normal, you know. He’s a Great Man, and they’re very hard to live with. What did he do?”

“He tried to participate in the inauguration wearing his full triumphal dress,” said Sulla.

“Oh, my dear brother! I suppose he made a fuss about the waste of time, and antagonized them all?” asked the Great Man’s loyal but lucid wife.

“Luckily I saw what he was going to do even through all that red paint on his face.” Sulla grinned. “It’s his eyebrows. After three years with Gaius Marius, anyone except a fool reads his mind from the antics of his eyebrows. They wriggle and bounce in code—well, you’d know, you’re certainly no fool!”

“Yes, I do know,” she said with an answering grin.

“Anyway, I got to him first, and yelled out something or other to the effect that he’d forgotten. Phew! I held my breath for a moment or two, though, because it was on the tip of his tongue to tell me to take a running jump into the Tiber. Then he saw Quintus Caecilius Numidicus just waiting, and he changed his mind. What an actor! I imagine everyone except Publius Rutilius was fooled into thinking he had genuinely forgotten what he was wearing.”

“Oh, thank you, Lucius Cornelius!” said Julia.

“It was my pleasure,” he said, and meant it.

“More hot wine?”

“Thank you, yes.”

When she returned, she bore a plate of steaming buns as well. “Here, these just came out of the pot. Yeasty and filled with sausage. They’re awfully good! Our cook makes them for Young Marius all the time. He’s going through that dreadful stage where he won’t eat anything he should.”

“My two eat anything that’s put in front of them,” Sulla said, face lighting up. “Oh, Julia, they’re lovely! I never realized anything living could be so—so—perfect*”

“I’m rather fond of them myself,” said their aunt.

“I wish Julilla was,” he said, face darkening.

“I know,” said Julilla’s sister softly.

“What is the matter with her? Do you know?”

“I think we spoiled her too much. Father and Mother didn’t want a fourth child, you know. They’d had two boys, and when I came along they didn’t mind a girl to round the family out. But Julilla was a shock. And we were too poor. So then when she grew up a little, everyone felt sorry for her, I think. Especially Mother and Father, because they hadn’t wanted her. Whatever she did, we found an excuse for. If there was a spare sestertius or two, she got them to fritter away, and was never chided for frittering them away. I suppose the flaw was there all along, but we didn’t help her to cope with it—where we should have taught her patience and forbearance, we didn’t. Julilla grew up fancying herself the most important person in the world, so she grew up selfish and self-centered and self-excusing. We are largely to blame. But poor Julilla is the one who must suffer.’’

“She drinks too much,” said Sulla.

“Yes, I know.”

“And she hardly ever bothers with the children.”

The tears came to Julia’s eyes. “Yes, I know.”

“What can I do?”

“Well, you could divorce her,” said Julia, the tears now trickling down her face.

Out went Sulla’s hands, smeared with the contents of a bun. “How can I do that when I’m going to be away from Rome myself for however long it takes to defeat the Germans? And she’s the mother of my children. I did love her as much as I can love anyone.”

“You keep saying that, Lucius Cornelius. If you love— you love! Why should you love any less than other men?”

But that was too near the bone. He closed up. “I didn’t grow up with any love, so I never learned how,” he said, trotting out his conventional excuse. “I don’t love her anymore. In fact, I think I hate her. But she’s the mother of my daughter and my son, and until the Germans are a thing of the past at least, Julilla is all they have. If I divorced her, she’d do something theatrical—go mad, or kill herself, or triple the amount of wine she drinks—or some other equally desperate and thoughtless alternative.”

“Yes, you’re right, divorce isn’t the answer. She would definitely damage the children more than she can at present.” Julia sighed, wiped her eyes. “Actually there are two troubled women in our family at the moment. May I suggest a different solution?”

“Anything, please!” cried Sulla.

“Well, my mother’s the second troubled woman, you see. She isn’t happy living with Brother Sextus and his wife and their son. Most of the trouble between her and my Claudian sister-in-law is because my mother still regards herself as the mistress of the house. They fight constantly. Claudians are headstrong and domineering, and all the women of that family are brought up to rather despise the old female virtues, where my mother is the exact opposite,” Julia explained, shaking her head sadly.

Sulla tried to look intelligent and at ease with all this female logic, but said nothing.

Julia struggled on. “Mama changed after my father’s death. I don’t suppose any of us ever realized how strong the bond was between them, or how heavily she relied on his wisdom and his direction. So she’s become crotchety and fidgety and fault finding—oh, sometimes intolerably critical! Gaius Marius saw how unhappy the situation was at home, and offered to buy Mama a villa on the sea somewhere so poor Sextus could have peace. But she flew at him like a spitting cat, and said she knew when she wasn’t wanted, and may she be treated like an oath breaker if she gave up residence in her house. Oh, dear!”

“I gather you’re suggesting that I invite Marcia to live with Julilla and me,” said Sulla, “but why should this suggestion appeal to her when the villa by the sea didn’t work?”

“Because she knew Gaius Marius’s suggestion was simply a way of getting rid of her, and she’s far too cantankerous these days to oblige poor Sextus’s wife,” said Julia frankly. “To invite her to live with you and Julilla is quite different. She would be living next door, for one thing. And for another, she’d be wanted. Useful. And she could keep an eye on Julilla.”

“Would she want to?” Sulla asked, scratching his head. “I gather from what Julilla’s said that she never comes to visit at all, in spite of the fact she’s living right next door.”

“She and Julilla fight too,” said Julia, beginning to grin as her worry faded. “Oh, do they! Julilla only has to set eyes on her coming through the front door, and she orders her home again. But if you were to invite her to make her home with you, then Julilla can’t do a thing.”

Sulla was grinning too. “It sounds as if you’re determined to make my house a Tartarus,” he said.

Julia lifted one brow. “Will that worry you, Lucius Cornelius? After all, you’ll be away.”

Dipping his hands in the bowl of water a servant was holding out to him, Sulla lifted one of his own brows. “I thank you, sister-in-law.” He got up, leaned over, and kissed Julia on the cheek. “I shall see Marcia tomorrow, and ask her to come and live with us. And I will be absolutely outspoken about my reasons for wanting her. So long as I know my children are being loved, I can bear being separated from them.”

“Are they not well cared for by your slaves?” Julia asked, rising too.

“Oh, the slaves pamper and spoil them,” said their father. “I will say this, Julilla acquired some excellent girls for the nursery. But that’s to make them into slaves, Julia! Little Greeks or Thracians or Celts or whatever other nationality the nurserymaids might happen to be. Full of outlandish superstitions and customs, thinking first in other languages than Latin, regarding their parents and relatives as some sort of remote authority figures. I want my children reared properly—in the Roman way, by a Roman woman. It ought to be their mother. But since I doubt that will happen, I cannot think of a better alternative than their stouthearted Marcian grandmother.”

“Good,” said Julia.

They moved toward the door.

“Is Julilla unfaithful to me?” he asked abruptly.

Julia didn’t pretend horror or experience anger. “I very much doubt that, Lucius Cornelius. Wine is her vice, not men. You’re a man, so you deem men a far worse vice than wine. I do not agree. I think wine can do your children more damage than infidelity. An unfaithful woman doesn’t stop noticing her children, nor does she burn her house down. A drunken woman does.” She flapped her hand. “The important thing is, let’s put Mama to work!”

Gaius Marius erupted into the room, respectably clad in purple-bordered toga and looking every inch the consul. “Come on, come on, Lucius Cornelius! Let’s get back and finish the performance before the sun goes down and the moon comes up!”

Wife and brother-in-law exchanged rueful smiles, and off went the two men to the inauguration.

*

Marius did what he could to mollify the Italian Allies. “They are not Romans,” he said to the House on the occasion of its first proper meeting, on the Nones of January, “but they are our closest allies in all our enterprises, and they share the peninsula of Italy with us. They also share the burden of providing troops to defend Italy, and they have not been well served. Nor has Rome. As you are aware, Conscript Fathers, at the moment a sorry business is working itself out in the Plebeian Assembly, where the consular Marcus Junius Silanus is defending himself against a charge brought against him by the tribune of the plebs Gnaeus Domitius. Though the word ‘treason’ has not been used, the implication is clear: Marcus Junius is one of those consular commanders of recent years who lost a whole army, including legions of Italian Allied men.”

He turned to look straight at Silanus, in the House today because the Nones were fasti—days of holiday or business—and the Plebeian Assembly could not meet. “It is not my place today to level any kind of charge at Marcus Junius. I simply state a fact. Let other bodies and other men deal with Marcus Junius in litigation. I simply state a fact. Marcus Junius has no need to speak in defense of his actions here today because of me. I simply state a fact.”

Deliberately he cleared his throat, the pause offering Silanus an opportunity to say something, anything; but Silanus sat in stony silence, pretending Marius didn’t exist. “I simply state a fact, Conscript Fathers. Nothing more, nothing less. A fact is a fact.”

“Oh, do get on with it!” said Metellus Numidicus wearily.

Marius bowed grandly, his smile wide. “Why, thank you, Quintus Caecilius! How could I not get on with it, having been invited to do so by such an august and notable consular as yourself?”

“‘August’ and ‘notable’ mean the same thing, Gaius Marius,” said Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus, with a weariness quite the equal of his younger brother’s. “You would save this House considerable time if you spoke a less tautologous kind of Latin.”

“I do beg the august and notable consular Lucius Caecilius’s pardon,” said Marius with another grand bow, “but in this highly democratic society of ours, the House is open to all Romans, even those—like myself—who cannot claim to be august and notable.” He pretended to search his mind, the eyebrows meeting in hairy abandon across his nose. “Now where was I? Oh, yes! The burden the Italian Allies share with us Romans, of providing troops to defend Italy. One of the objections to providing troops raised in the current spate of letters from the magistrates of the Samnites, the Apulians, the Marsi, and others”—he took a sheaf of small rolls from one of his clerks and showed it to the House—”concerns the legality of our asking the Italian Allies to provide troops for campaigns outside the borders of Italy and Italian Gaul. The Italian Allies, august and notable Conscript Fathers, maintain that they have been providing troops—and losing many, many thousands of these troops!—for Rome’s—and I quote the letters—’foreign wars’!”

The senators mumbled, rumbled.

“That allegation is completely unfounded!” snapped Scaurus. “Rome’s enemies are also Italy’s enemies!”

“I only quote the letters, Marcus Aemilius Princeps Senatus,” said Marius soothingly. “We should all be aware of what is in them, for the simple reason that I imagine this House will shortly be obliged to receive embassages from all the Italian nations who have expressed their discontent in these very many letters.”

His voice changed, lost its mildly bantering tone. “Well, enough of this skirmishing! We are living in a peninsula cheek by jowl with our Italian friends—who are not Romans, and never can be Romans. That they have been elevated to their present position of importance in the world is due purely to the great achievements of Rome and Romans. That Italian nationals are present in large numbers throughout the provinces and spheres of Roman influence is due purely to the great achievements of Rome and Romans. The bread on their tables, the winter fires in their cellars, the health and number of their children, they owe to Rome and Romans. Before Rome, there was chaos. Complete disunity. Before Rome, there were the cruel Etruscan kings in the north of the peninsula, and the greedy Greeks in the south. Not to mention the Celts of Gaul.”

The House had settled down. When Gaius Marius spoke in serious vein everybody listened, even those who were his most obdurate enemies. For the Military Man—blunt and forthright though he was—was a powerful orator in his native Latin, and so long as his feelings were governed, his accent was not noticeably different from Scaurus’s.

“Conscript Fathers, you and the People of Rome have given me a mandate to rid us—and Italy!—of the Germans. As soon as possible, I will be taking the propraetor Manius Aquillius and the valiant senator Lucius Cornelius Sulla with me as my legates to Gaul-across-the-Alps. If it costs us our lives, we will rid you of the Germans, and make Rome— and Italy!—safe forever. So much I pledge you, in my own name and in the names of my legates, and in the names of every last one of my soldiers. Our duty is sacred to us. No stone will be left unturned. And before us we will carry the silver eagles of Rome’s legions and be victorious!”

The anonymous clusters of senators in the back of the House began to cheer and stamp their feet, and after a moment the front ranks of senators began to clap, even Scaurus. But not Metellus Numidicus.

Marius waited for silence. “However, before I leave, I must beg this House to do what it can to alleviate the concern of our Italian Allies. We can give no credence to these allegations that Italian troops are being used to fight in campaigns which do not concern the Italian Allies. Nor can we cease to levy the soldiers all the Italian Allies formally agreed per treaty to give us. The Germans threaten the whole of our peninsula, and Italian Gaul as well. Yet the dreadful shortage of men suitable to serve in the legions affects the Italian Allies as much as it affects Rome. The well has run dry, my fellow senators, and the level of the table feeding it will take time to rise. I would like to give our Italian Allies my personal assurance that so long as there is breath left in this un-august and un-notable body, never again will Italian—or Roman!—troops waste their lives on a battlefield. Every life of every man I take with me to defend my homeland I will treat with more reverence and respect than I do my own! So do I pledge it.”

The cheers and the stamping of feet began again, and the front ranks were quicker to start applauding. But not Metellus Numidicus. And not Catulus Caesar.

Again Marius waited for silence. “A reprehensible situation has been drawn to my attention. That we, the Senate and People of Rome, have taken into debt bondage many thousands of Italian Allied men, and sent them as our slaves throughout the lands we control around the Middle Sea. Because the majority of them have farming backgrounds, the majority of them are currently working out their debts in our grainlands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Africa. That, Conscript Fathers, is an injustice! If we do not enforce slavery upon Roman debtors anymore, nor should we on our Italian Allies. No, they are not Romans. No, they never can be Romans. But they are our little brothers of the Italian Peninsula. And no Roman sends his little brother into debt bondage.”

He didn’t give the few big grainland-owning senators time to protest; he swept on to his peroration. “Until I can give our grainland farmers their source of labor back in the form of German slaves, they must look for other labor than Italian debt slaves. For we, Conscript Fathers, must today enact a decree—and the Assembly of the People must ratify that decree—freeing all slaves of Italian Allied birth. We cannot do to our oldest and loyalest allies what we do not do to ourselves. These slaves must be freed! They must be brought home to Italy, and made to do what is their natural duty to Rome—serve in Rome’s auxiliary legions.

“I am told there is no capite censi population in any Italian nation anymore, because it is enslaved. Well, my fellow senators, the Italian capite censi can be better employed than in working the grainlands. We cannot field our traditional armies anymore, for the men of property who served in them are either too old, too young—or too dead! For the time being, the Head Count is our only source of military manpower. My valiant African army—entirely Roman Head Count!—has proved that the men of the Head Count can be turned into superb soldiers. And, just as history has demonstrated that the propertied men of the Italian nations are not one iota inferior as soldiers to the propertied men of Rome, so too will the next few years show Rome that the Head Count men of the Italian nations are not one iota inferior as soldiers to the Head Count men of Rome!”

He stepped down from the curule dais and walked to the middle of the floor. “I want that decree, Conscript Fathers! Will you give it to me?”

It had been supremely well done. Borne away on the force of Marius’s oratory, the House stampeded to a Division, while Metellus Numidicus, Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus, Scaurus, Catulus Caesar, and others shouted vainly to be heard.

“But how,” asked Publius Rutilius Rufus as he and Marius strolled the few short paces to Marius’s house after the Senate had been dismissed, “are you going to reconcile the grainland owners to this decree? You realize, I hope, that you’re treading heavily on the toes of exactly that group of knights and businessmen you depend upon most for support. All the favors you doled out in Africa to these men will seem very hollow. Do you understand how many of the grain slaves are Italian? Sicily runs on them!”

Marius shrugged. “My agents are at work already; I’ll survive. Besides which, just because I’ve been sitting down at Cumae for the last month doesn’t say I’ve been idle. I had a survey done, and the results are highly informative, not to mention interesting. Yes, there are many thousands of Italian Allied grain slaves. But in Sicily, for instance, the vast majority of the grain slaves are Greeks. And in Africa I’ve sent to King Gauda for replacement labor when the Italians are freed. Gauda is my client; he doesn’t have any choice but to do as I ask. Sardinia is the most difficult, for in Sardinia almost all the grain slaves are Italian. However, the new governor—our esteemed propraetor Titus Albucius—can be persuaded to do his level best in my cause, I’m sure.”

“He’s got a pretty arrogant quaestor in Pompey Cross-eyes from Picenum,” said Rutilius Rufus dubiously.

“Quaestors are like gnats,” said Marius contemptuously, “not experienced enough to head for parts unknown when a man starts clapping round his head.”

“That’s not a very complimentary observation to make about Lucius Cornelius!”

“He’s different.”

Rutilius Rufus sighed. “I don’t know, Gaius Marius, I’m sure! I just hope it all turns out as you think it will.”

“Old Cynic,” said Marius affectionately.

“Old Skeptic, if you please!” said Rutilius Rufus.

*

Word came to Marius that the Germans showed no sign of moving south into the Roman province of Gaul-across-the-Alps, save for the Cimbri, who had crossed to the western bank of the Rhodanus and were keeping clear of the Roman sphere. The Teutones, said Marius’s agent’s report, were wandering off to the northwest, and the Tigurini-Marcomanni-Cherusci were back among the Aedui and Ambarri looking as if they never intended to move. Of course, the report admitted, the situation could change at any moment. But it took time for eight hundred thousand people to gather up their belongings, their animals, and their wagons, and start moving. Gaius Marius need not expect to see any Germans coming south down the Rhodanus before May or June. If they came at all.

It didn’t really please Gaius Marius, that report. His men were excited and primed for a good fight, his legates were anxious to do well, and his officers and centurions had been toiling to produce a perfect military machine. Though Marius had known since landing in Italy the previous December that there was a German interpreter saying the Germans were at loggerheads with each other, he hadn’t really believed they would not resume their southward progress through the Roman province. The Germans having annihilated an enormous Roman army, it was logical, natural, and proper for them to take advantage of their victory and move into the territory they had in effect won by force of arms. Settle in it, even. Otherwise, why give battle at all? Why emigrate? Why anything?

“They are a complete mystery to me!” he cried, chafing and frustrated, to Sulla and Aquillius after the report came.

“They’re barbarians,” said Aquillius, who had earned his place as senior legate by suggesting that Marius be made consul, and now was very eager to go on proving his worth.

But Sulla was unusually thoughtful. “We don’t know nearly enough about them,” he said.

“I just remarked about that!” snapped Marius.

“No, I was thinking along different lines. But”—he slapped his knees—”I’ll go on thinking about things for a bit longer, Gaius Marius, before I speak. After all, we don’t really know what we’ll find when we cross the Alps.”

“That one thing we do have to decide,” said Marius.

“What?” asked Aquillius.

“Crossing the Alps. Now that we’ve been assured the Germans are not going to prove a threat before May or June at the very earliest, I’m not in favor of crossing the Alps at all. At least, not by the usual route. We’re moving out at the end of January with a massive baggage train. So we’re going to be slow. The one thing I’ll say for Metellus Dalmaticus as Pontifex Maximus is that he’s a calendar fanatic, so the seasons and the months are in accord. Have you felt the cold this winter?” he asked Sulla.

“Indeed I have, Gaius Marius.”

“So have I. Our blood is thin, Lucius Cornelius. All that time in Africa, where frosts are short-lived, and snow is something you see on the highest mountains. Why should it be any different for the troops? If we cross through the Mons Genava Pass in winter, it will go very hard on them.’’

“After furlough in Campania, they’ll need hardening,” said Sulla unsympathetically.

“Oh, yes! But not by losing toes from frostbite and the feeling in their fingers from chilblains. They’ve got winter issue—but will the cantankerous cunni wear it?”

“They will, if they’re made.”

“You are determined to be difficult,” said Marius. “All right then, I won’t try to be reasonable—I’ll simply issue orders. We are not taking the legions to Gaul-across-the-Alps by the usual route. We’re going to march along the coast the whole long way.”

“Ye gods, it’ll take an eternity!” said Aquillius.

“How long is it since an army traveled to Spain or Gaul along the coast?” Marius asked Aquillius.

“I can’t remember an occasion when an army has!”

“And there you have it, you see!” said Marius triumphantly. “That’s why we’re going to do it. I want to see how difficult it is, how long it takes, what the roads are like, the terrain—everything. I’ll take four of the legions in light marching order, and you, Manius Aquillius, will take the other two legions plus the extra cohorts we’ve managed to scrape together, and escort the baggage train. If when they do turn south, the Germans head for Italy instead of for Spain, how do we know whether they’ll go over the Mons Genava Pass into Italian Gaul, or whether they’ll head—as they’ll see it, anyway—straight for Rome along the coast? They seem to have precious little interest in discovering how our minds work, so how are they going to know that the quickest and shortest way to Rome is not along the coast, but over the Alps into Italian Gaul?”

His legates stared at him.

“I see what you mean,” said Sulla, “but why take the whole army? You and I and a small squadron could do it better.”

Marius shook his head vigorously. “No! I don’t want my army separated from me by several hundred miles of impassable mountains. Where I go, my whole army goes.”

So at the end of January Gaius Marius led his whole army north along the coastal Via Aurelia, taking notes the entire way, and sending curt letters back to the Senate demanding that repairs be made to this or that stretch of the road forthwith, bridges built or strengthened, viaducts made or refurbished.

“This is Italy,” said one such missive, “and all available routes to the north of the peninsula and Italian Gaul and Liguria must be kept in perfect condition; otherwise we may rue the day.”

At Pisae, where the river Arnus flowed into the sea, they crossed from Italy proper into Italian Gaul, which was a most peculiar area, neither officially designated a province nor governed like Italy proper. It was a kind of limbo. From Pisae all the way to Vada Sabatia the road was brand-new, though work on it was far from finished; this was Scaurus’s contribution when he had been censor, the Via Aemilia Scauri. Marius wrote to Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus:

You are to be commended for your foresight, for I regard the Via Aemilia Scauri as one of the most significant additions to the defense of Rome and Italy since the opening-up of the Mons Genava Pass, and that is a very long time ago, considering that it was there for Hannibal to use. Your branch road to Dertona is vital strategically, for it represents the only way across the Ligurian Apennines from the Padus to the Tyrrhenian coast—Rome’s coast.The problems are enormous. I talked to your engineers, whom I found to be a most able group of men, and am happy to relay to you their request that additional funds be found to increase the work force on this piece of road. It needs some of the highest viaducts—not to mention the longest—I have ever seen, more indeed like aqueduct construction than road building. Luckily there are local quarry facilities to provide stone, but the pitifully small work force is retarding the pace at which I consider the work must progress. With respect, may I ask that you use your formidable clout to pry the money out of the House and Treasury to speed up this project? If it could be completed by the end of this coming summer, Rome may rest easier at the thought that a mere fifty-odd miles of road may save an army several hundreds.

“There,” said Marius to Sulla, “that ought to keep the old boy busy and happy!”

“It will, too,” said Sulla, grinning.

The Via Aemilia Scauri ended at Vada Sabatia; from that point on there was no road in the Roman sense, just a wagon trail which followed the line of least resistance through an area where very high mountains plunged into the sea.

“You’re going to be sorry you chose this way,” said Sulla.

“On the contrary, I’m glad. I can see a thousand places where ambush is possible, I can see why no one in his right mind goes to Gaul-across-the-Alps this way, I can see why our Publius Vagiennius—who hails from these parts—could climb a sheer wall to find his snail patch, and I can see why we need not fear that the Germans will choose this route. Oh, they might start out along the coast, but a couple of days of this and a fast horseman going ahead will see them turn back. If it’s difficult for us, it’s impossible for them. Good!”

Marius turned to Quintus Sertorius, who, in spite of his very junior status, enjoyed a privileged position nothing save merit had earned him.

“Quintus Sertorius, my lad, whereabouts do you think the baggage train might be?” he asked.

“I’d say somewhere between Populonia and Pisae, given the poor condition of the Via Aurelia,” Sertorius said.

“How’s your leg?”

“Not up to that kind of riding.” Sertorius seemed always to know what Marius was thinking.

“Then find three men who are, and send them back with this,” said Marius, drawing wax tablets toward him.

‘‘ You’ re going to send the baggage train up the Via Cassia to Florentia and the Via Annia to Bononia, and then across the Mons Genava Pass,” said Sulla, sighing in satisfaction.

“We might need all those beams and bolts and cranes and tackle yet,” said Marius. He smacked the backs of his fingers down on the wax to produce a perfect impression from his seal ring, and closed the hinged leaves of the tablet. “Here,” he said to Sertorius. “And make sure it’s tied and sealed again; I don’t want any inquisitive noses poking inside. It’s to be given to Manius Aquillius himself, understood?”

Sertorius nodded and left the command tent.

“As for this army, it’s going to do a bit of work as it goes,” Marius said to Sulla. “Send the surveyors out ahead. We’ll make a reasonable track, if not a proper road.”

In Liguria, like other regions where the mountains were precipitous and the amount of arable land small, the inhabitants tended to a pastoral way of life, or else made a profession out of banditry and piracy, or like Publius Vagiennius took service in Rome’s auxiliary legions and cavalry. Wherever Marius saw ships and a village clustered in an anchorage and deemed the ships more suited to raiding and boarding than to fishing, he burned both ships and village, left women, old men, and children behind, and took the men with him to labor improving the road. Meanwhile the reports from Arausio, Valentia, Vienne, and even Lugdunum made it increasingly clear as time went on that there would be no confrontation with the Germans this year.

At the beginning of June, after four months on the march, Marius led his four legions onto the widening coastal plains of Gaul-across-the-Alps and came to a halt in the well-settled country between Arelate and Aquae Sextiae, in the vicinity of the town of Glanum, south of the Druentia River. Significantly, his baggage train had arrived before him, having spent a mere three and a half months on the road.

He chose his campsite with extreme care, well clear of arable land; it was a large hill having steep and rocky slopes on three sides, several good springs on top, and a fourth side neither too steep nor too narrow to retard swift movement of troops in or out of a camp atop the hill.

“This is where we are going to be living for many moons to come,” he said, nodding in satisfaction. “Now we’re going to turn it into Carcasso.”

Neither Sulla nor Manius Aquillius made any comment, but Sertorius was less self-controlled.

“Do we need it?” he asked. “If you think we’re going to be in the district for many moons to come, wouldn’t it be a lot easier to billet the troops on Arelate or Glanum? And why stay here? Why not seek the Germans out and come to grips with them before they can get this far?”

“Well, young Sertorius,” said Marius, “it appears the Germans have scattered far and wide. The Cimbri, who seemed all set to follow the Rhodanus to its west, have now changed their minds and have gone—to Spain, we must presume—around the far side of the Cebenna, through the lands of the Arverni. The Teutones and the Tigurini have left the lands of the Aedui and gone to settle among the Belgae. At least, that’s what my sources say. In reality, I imagine it’s anyone’s guess.”

“Can’t we find out for certain?” asked Sertorius.

“How?” asked Marius. “The Gauls have no cause to love us, and it’s upon the Gauls we have to rely for our information. That they’ve given it to us so far is simply because they don’t want the Germans in their midst either. But on one thing you can rely: when the Germans reach the Pyrenees, they’ll turn back. And I very much doubt that the Belgae will want them any more than the Celtiberians of the Pyrenees. Looking at a possible target from the German point of view, I keep coming back to Italy. So here we stay until the Germans arrive, Quintus Sertorius. I don’t care if it takes years.”

“If it takes years, Gaius Marius, our army will grow soft, and you will be ousted from the supreme command,” Manius Aquillius pointed out.

“Our army is not going to grow soft, because I am going to put it to work,” said Marius. “We have close to forty thousand men of the Head Count. The State pays them; the State owns their arms and armor; the State feeds them. When they retire, I shall see to it that the State looks after them in their old age. But while they serve in the State’s army, they are nothing more nor less than employees of the State. As consul, I represent the State. Therefore they are my employees. And they are costing me a very large amount of money. If all they are required to do in return is sit on their arses waiting to fight a battle, compute the enormity of the cost of that battle when it finally comes.” The eyebrows were jiggling up and down fiercely. “They didn’t sign a contract to sit on their arses waiting for a battle, they enlisted in the army of the State to do whatever the State requires of them. Since the State is paying them, they owe the State work. And that’s what they’re going to do. Work! This year they’re going to repair the Via Domitia all the way from Nemausus to Ocelum. Next year they’re going to dig a ship canal all the way from the sea to the Rhodanus at Arelate.”

Everyone was staring at him in fascination, but for a long moment no one could find anything to say.

Then Sulla whistled. “A soldier is paid to fight!”

“If he bought his gear with his own money and he expects nothing more from the State than the food he eats, then he can call his own tune. But that description doesn’t fit my lot,” said Gaius Marius. “When they’re not called upon to fight, they’ll do much-needed public works, if for no other reason than it will give them to understand that they’re in service to the State in exactly the same way as a man is to any employer. And it will keep them fit!”

“What about us?” asked Sulla. “Do you intend to turn us into engineers?”

“Why not?” asked Marius.

“I’m not an employee of the State, for one thing,” said Sulla, pleasantly enough. “I give my time as a gift, like all the legates and tribunes.”

Marius eyed him shrewdly. “Believe me, Lucius Cornelius, it’s a gift I appreciate,” he said, and left it at that.

*

Sulla left the meeting dissatisfied nonetheless. Employees of the State, indeed! True for the Head Count, perhaps, but not for the tribunes and legates, as he had pointed out. Marius had taken the point, and backed away. But what Sulla had left unsaid was true just the same. Monetary rewards for the tribunes and legates would be shares in the booty. And no one had any real idea how much booty the Germans were likely to yield. The sale of prisoners into slavery was the general’s perquisite — he did not share it with his legates, his tribunes, his centurions, or his troops — and somehow Sulla had a feeling that at the end of this however-many-years-long campaign, the pickings would be lean except in slaves.

Sulla had not enjoyed the long, tedious journey to the Rhodanus. Quintus Sertorius had snuffled his way like a hound on a leash, tail wagging, all of himself aquiver with pleasure at the slightest whiff of any kind of job. He had taught himself to use the groma, the surveyor’s instrument; he had settled down to watch how the corps of engineers dealt with rivers in spate, or fallen bridges, or landslides; he had led a century or two of soldiers to winkle out a nest of pirates from some mean cove; he had done duty with the gangs on road repairs; he had gone ranging ahead to spy out the land; he had even cured and tamed a young eagle with a broken wing, so that it still came back to visit him from time to time. Yes, everything was grist to Quintus Sertorius ‘s mill. If in nothing else, in that one could see that he was related to Gaius Marius.

But Sulla needed drama. He had gained sufficient insight into himself to understand that now he was a senator, this represented a flaw in his character, yet at thirty-six years of age, he didn’t think he was going to be able to excise a facet of himself so innate. Until that dreary interminable journey along the Via Aemilia Scauri and through the Maritime Alps, he had thoroughly enjoyed his military career, finding it full of action and challenge, be it the action and challenge of battle or of carving out a new Africa. But making roads and digging canals? That wasn’t what he had come to Gaul-across-the-Alps to do! Nor would he!

And in late autumn there would be a consular election, and Marius would be replaced by someone inimical, and all that he’d have to show for his much-vaunted second consulship was a magnificently upkept road already bearing someone else’s name. How could the man remain so tranquil, so unworried? He hadn’t even bothered to answer that half of Aquillius’s statement, to the effect that he would be ousted from his command. What was the Arpinate fox up to? Why wasn’t he worried?

Suddenly Sulla forgot these vexed questions, for he had spied something which promised to be deliciously piquant; his eyes began to dance with interest and amusement.

Outside the senior tribunes’ mess tent two men were in conversation. Or at least that was what it looked like to a casual observer. To Sulla it looked like the opening scene of a wonderful farce. The taller of the two men was Gaius Julius Caesar. The shorter was Gaius Lusius, nephew (by marriage only, Marius had been quick to say) of the Great Man.

I wonder, does it take one to know one? Sulla asked himself as he strolled up to them. Caesar obviously didn’t know one when he saw one, and yet it was clear to Sulla that every instinct in Caesar was clanging an alarm.

“Oh, Lucius Cornelius!” whinnied Gaius Lusius. “I was just asking Gaius Julius whether he knew what sort of night life there is in Arelate, and if there is any, whether he’d care to sample it with me.”

Caesar’s long, handsome face was an expressionless mask of courtesy, but his anxiety to be away from his present company showed itself in a dozen ways, thought Sulla; the eyes that tried to remain focused on Lusius’s face but drifted aside, the minimal movements his feet made inside his military boots, the little flicks his fingers were making, and more.

“Perhaps Lucius Cornelius knows better than I do,” said Caesar, beginning to make his bolt for freedom by shifting all his weight onto one foot, and poking the other forward a trifle.

“Oh no, Gaius Julius, don’t go!” Lusius protested. “The more the merrier!” And he actually giggled.

“Sorry, Gaius Lusius, I have to go on duty,” said Caesar, and was away.

More Lusius’s own height, Sulla put his hand on Lusius’s elbow and drew him further away from the tent. His hand fell immediately.

Gaius Lusius was very good-looking. His eyes were long-lashed and green, his hair a tumbled mass of darkish red curls, his brows finely arched and dark, his nose rather Greek in its length, high bridge, and straightness. Quite the little Lord Apollo, thought Sulla, unmoved and untempted.

He doubted whether Marius had so much as set eyes on the young man; that would not have been Marius’s way. Having been pressured by his family into accepting Gaius Lusius into his military family—he had appointed Lusius an unelected tribune of the soldiers because his age was correct—Marius would prefer to forget the young man’s existence. Until such time as the young man intruded himself upon his notice, hopefully via some deed of valor or extraordinary ability.

“Gaius Lusius, I’m going to offer you a word of advice,” said Sulla crisply.

The long-lashed eyelids fluttered, lowered. “I am grateful for any advice from you, Lucius Cornelius.”

“You joined us only yesterday, having made your own way from Rome,” Sulla began.

Lusius interrupted. “Not from Rome, Lucius Cornelius. From Ferentinum. My uncle Gaius Marius gave me special leave to remain in Ferentinum because my mother was ill.”

Aha! thought Sulla. That explains some of Marius’s gruff offhandedness about this nephew by marriage! How he would hate to trot out that reason for the young man’s tardy arrival, when he would never have used it to excuse himself!

“My uncle hasn’t asked to see me yet,” Lusius was busy complaining now. “When may I see him?”

“Not until he asks, and I doubt he’ll ask at all. Until you prove your worth, you’re an embarrassment to him, if for no other reason than that you claimed extra privilege before the campaign even started—you came late.”

“But my mother was ill!” said Lusius indignantly.

“We all have mothers, Gaius Lusius—or we all did have mothers. Many of us have been obliged to go off to military service when our mothers were ill. Many of us have learned of a mother’s death when on military service very far away from her. Many of us are deeply attached to our living mothers. But a mother’s illness is not normally considered an adequate excuse for turning up late on military service. I suppose you’ve already told all your tentmates why you’re tardy?”

“Yes,” said Lusius, more and more bewildered.

“A pity. You’d have done better to have said nothing at all, and let your tentmates guess in the dark. They won’t think the better of you for it, and your uncle knows they won’t think the better of him for allowing it. But blood family is blood family, and often unfair.” Sulla frowned. “However, that is not what I wanted to say to you. This is the army of Gaius Marius, not the army of Scipio Africanus. Do you know what I am referring to?’ ‘

“No,” said Lusius, completely out of his depth.

“Cato the Censor accused Africanus and his senior officers of running an army riddled with moral laxity. Well, Gaius Marius is a lot closer in his thinking to Cato the Censor than he is to Scipio Africanus. Am I making myself understood?”

“No,” said Lusius, the color fading from his cheeks.

“I think I am, really,” said Sulla, smiling to show his long teeth unpleasantly. “You’re attracted to handsome young men, not to pretty young women. I can’t accuse you of overt effeminacy, but if you go on fluttering your eyelashes at the likes of Gaius Julius — who happens to be your uncle’s brother-in-law, as indeed am I — you’ll find yourself in boiling water up to the neck. Preferring one’s own sex is not considered a Roman virtue. On the contrary, it is considered — especially in the legions! — an undesirable vice. If it wasn’t, perhaps the women of the towns near which we camp wouldn’t make so much money, nor the women of the enemies we conquer find rape their first taste of our Roman swords. But you must know some of this, at least!”

Lusius writhed, torn between a feeling of inexplicable inferiority and a burning sense of injustice. “Times are changing,” he protested. “It isn’t the social solecism it was!”

“You mistake the times, Gaius Lusius, probably because you want them to change, and have been associating with a group of your peers who feel the same way. So you gather together and you compare notes, seizing upon any remark to support your contention. I can assure you,” Sulla said very seriously, “that the more you go about the world into which you were born, the more you will come to see that you are deluding yourself. And nowhere is there less forgiveness for preferring your own sex than in Gaius Marius’s army. And no one will crack down on you harder than Gaius Marius if he learns of your secret.”

Almost weeping, Lusius wrung his hands together in futile anguish. “I’ll go mad!” he cried.

“No, you won’t. You’ll discipline yourself, you’ll be extremely careful in whatever overtures you make, and as soon as you can, you’ll learn the signals that operate here between men of your own persuasion,” said Sulla. “I can’t tell you the signals because I don’t indulge in the vice myself. If you’re ambitious to succeed in public life, Gaius Lusius, I strongly advise you not to indulge in the vice. But if—you are young, after all—you find you cannot restrain your appetites, make very sure you pick on the right man.” And with a kinder smile, Sulla turned on his heel and walked away.

For a while he simply strolled about aimlessly, hands behind his back, scarcely noticing the orderly activity all around him. The legions had been instructed to build a temporary camp, in spite of the fact that there wasn’t an enemy force inside the province; simply, no Roman army slept unprotected. The permanent hilltop camp was already being tackled by the surveyors and engineers, and those troops not detailed to construct the temporary camp were put onto the first stages of fortifying the hill. This consisted in procuring timber for beams, posts, buildings. And the lower Rhodanus Valley possessed few forests, for it had been populous now for some centuries, ever since the Greeks founded Massilia, and Greek—then Roman—influence spread inland.

The army lay to the north of the vast salt marshes which formed the Rhodanus delta and spread both west and east of it; it was typical of Marius that he had chosen unfilled ground whereon to build his camps, both temporary and permanent.

“There’s no point in antagonizing one’s potential allies,” he said. “Besides which, with fifty thousand extra mouths in the area to feed, they’re going to need every inch of arable land they’ve got.”

Marius’s grain and food procurators were already riding out to conclude contracts with farmers, and some of the troops were building granaries atop the hill to hold sufficient grain to feed fifty thousand men through the twelve months between one harvest and the next. The heavy baggage contained all manner of items Marius’s sources of information had said would either be unobtainable in Gaul-across-the-Alps, or would be scarce—pitch, massive beams, block-and-tackle, tools, cranes, treadmills, lime, and quantities of precious iron bolts and nails. At Populonia and Pisae, the two ports which received the rough-smelted bloom-iron “sows” from the isle of Ilva, the praefectus fabrum had purchased every sow available and carted them along too in case the engineers had to make steel; in the heavy baggage were anvils, crucibles, hammers, fire bricks, all the tools necessary. Already a group of soldiers were fetching timber to make a large cache of charcoal, for without charcoal it was impossible to get a furnace hot enough to melt iron, let alone steel it.

And by the time that he turned back toward the general’s command tent, he had decided that the time had come; for Sulla had an answer to boredom already thoroughly thought out, an answer which would give him all the drama he could ask for. The idea had germinated while he was still in Rome, and grown busily all the way along the coast, and now could be permitted to flower. Yes, time to see Gaius Marius.

The general was alone, writing industriously.

“Gaius Marius, I wonder if you have an hour to spare? I would like your company on a walk,” Sulla said, holding open the flap between the tent and the hide awning under which the duty officer sat. An inquisitive beam of light had stolen in behind him, and so he stood surrounded by an aura of liquid gold, his bare head and shoulders alive with the fire of his curling hair.

Looking up, Marius eyed this vision with disfavor. “You need a haircut,” he said curtly. “Another couple of inches and you’ll look like a dancing girl!”

“How extraordinary!” said Sulla, not moving.

“I’d call it slipshod,” said Marius.

“No, what’s extraordinary is that you haven’t noticed for months, and right at this moment, when it’s in the forefront of my mind, you suddenly do notice. You may not be able to read minds, Gaius Marius, but I think you are attuned to the minds of those you work with.”

“You sound like a dancing girl as well,” said Marius. “Why do you want company on a walk?”

“Because I need to speak to you privately, Gaius Marius, somewhere that I can be sure neither the walls nor the windows have ears. A walk should provide us with such a place.”

Down went the pen, the roll of paper was furled; Marius rose at once. “I’d much rather walk than write, Lucius Cornelius, so let’s go,” he said.

They strode briskly through the camp, not talking, and unaware of the curious glances which followed them from parties of soldiers, centurions, cadets, and more soldiers; after three years of campaigning with Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the men of these legions had developed an inbuilt sense of sureness about their commanders that told them whenever there was something important in the offing. And today was such an occasion; every man sensed it.

It was too late in the day to contemplate climbing the hill, so Marius and Sulla stopped where the wind blew their words away.

“Now, what’s the matter?” asked Marius.

“I started growing my hair long in Rome,” said Sulla.

“Never noticed until now. I take it the hair has something to do with what you want to talk to me about?”

“I’m turning myself into a Gaul,” Sulla announced.

Marius looked alert. “Oho! Talk on, Lucius Cornelius.”

“The most frustrating aspect of this campaign against the Germans is our abysmal lack of reliable intelligence about them,” Sulla said. “From the very beginning, when the Taurisci first sent us their request for aid and we discovered that the Germans were migrating, we’ve been handicapped by the fact that we know absolutely nothing about them. We don’t know who they are, where they come from, what gods they worship, why they migrated from their homelands in the first place, what sort of social organization they enjoy, how they are led. Most important of all, we don’t know why they keep defeating us and then turning away from Italy, when you wouldn’t have stopped Hannibal or Pyrrhus with a barricade of a million war elephants.”

His eyes were looking ninety degrees away from Marius, and the last shafts of the sun shone through them from side to side, filling Marius with an uneasy awe; on rare occasions he was struck by a facet of Sulla normally hidden, the facet he thought of as Sulla’s inhumanity, and he didn’t use that word for any of its more accepted connotations. Simply, Sulla could suddenly drop a veil and stand revealed as no man—but no god either—a different invention of the gods than a man. A quality reinforced at this moment, with the sun bound up inside his eyes as if it belonged there.

“Go on,” said Marius.

Sulla went on. “Before we left Rome, I bought myself two new slaves. They’ve traveled with me; they’re with me now. One is a Gaul of the Carnutes, the tribe which controls the whole Celtic religion. It’s a strange sort of worship— they believe trees are animate, in that they have spirits, or shades, or something of the kind. Difficult to relate to our own ideas. The other man is a German of the Cimbri, captured in Noricum at the time Carbo was defeated. I keep them isolated from each other. Neither man knows of the other’s existence.”

“Haven’t you been able to find out about the Germans from your German slave?” asked Marius.

“Not a thing. He pretends to have no knowledge of who they are or where they come from. My inquiries lead me to believe that this ignorance is a general characteristic in the few Germans we have managed to capture and enslave, though I very much doubt that any other Roman owner has actively tried to obtain information. That is now irrelevant. My purpose in buying my German was to obtain information, but when he proved recalcitrant—and there doesn’t seem to be much point in torturing someone who stands there like a gigantic ox—I had a better idea. Information, Gaius Marius, is usually secondhand. And for our purposes, secondhand isn’t good enough.”

“True,” said Marius, who knew where Sulla was going now, but had no wish to hurry him.

“So I began to think that if war with the Germans was not imminent, it behooved us to try to obtain information about them at first hand,” said Sulla. “Both my slaves have been in service to Romans for long enough to have learned Latin, though in the case of the German, it’s a very rudimentary sort of Latin. Interestingly, from my Carnutic Gaul I learned that once away from the Middle Sea and into Long-haired Gaul, the second language among the Gauls is Latin, not Greek! Oh, I don’t mean to imply that the Gauls walk round exchanging Latin quips, only that thanks to contacts between the settled tribes like the Aedui and ourselves— be it in the guise of soldiers or traders—there is an occasional Gaul who has a smattering of Latin, and has learned to read and write. Since their own languages are not written, when they read and write, they do so in Latin. Not in Greek. Fascinating, isn’t it? We’re so used to thinking of Greek as the lingua franca of the world that it’s quite exhilarating to find one part of the world preferring Latin!”

“Not being either scholar or philosopher, Lucius Cornelius, I must confess to some lack of excitement. However,” said Marius, smiling faintly, “I am extremely interested in finding out about the Germans!”

Sulla lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Point taken, Gaius Marius! Very well, then. For nearly five months I have been learning the language of the Carnutes of central Long-haired Gaul, and the language of the Cimbric Germans. My tutor in Carnute is far more enthusiastic about the project than my tutor in German—but then, he’s also a brighter specimen.” Sulla stopped to consider that statement, and found himself dissatisfied with it. “My impression that the German is duller may not necessarily be correct. He may be—since the shock of separation from his own kind is far greater than for the Gaul—merely living at a mental remoteness from his present plight. Or, given the luck of the grab bag and the fact that he was foolish enough to let himself be captured in a war his people won, he may just be a dull German.”

“Lucius Cornelius, my patience is not inexhaustible,” said Marius, not snappishly, more in tones of resignation. “You are showing all the signs of a particularly peripatetic Peripatetic!’’

“My apologies,” Sulla said with a grin, and turned now to look at Marius directly. The light died out of his eyes, and he seemed once again quite human.

“With my hair and skin and eyes,” Sulla said crisply, “I can pass very easily for a Gaul. I intend to become a Gaul, and travel into areas where no Roman would dare go. Particularly, I intend to shadow the Germans on their way to Spain, which I gather means the people of the Cimbri for certain, and perhaps the other peoples. I now know enough Cimbric German to at least understand what they say, which is why I will concentrate upon the Cimbri.” He laughed. “My hair actually ought to be considerably longer than a dancing girl’s, but it will have to do for the moment. If I’m quizzed about its shortness, I shall say I had a disease of the scalp, and had to shave it all off. Luckily it grows very fast.”

He fell silent. For some moments Marius didn’t speak, just put his foot up on a handy log and his elbow on his knee and his chin on his fist. The truth was that he couldn’t think of what to say. Here for months he had been worrying that he was going to lose Lucius Cornelius to the fleshpots of Rome because the campaign was going to be too boring, and all the time Lucius Cornelius was fastidiously working out a plan sure not to be boring. What a plan! What a man! Ulysses had been the first recorded spy, donning the guise of some Trojan nobody and sneaking inside the walls of Ilium to pick up every scrap of information he could—and one of the favorite debates a boy’s grammaticus concocted was whether or not Calchas had defected to the Achaeans because he was genuinely fed up with the Trojans, or because he wanted to spy for King Priam, or because he wanted to sow discord among the kings of Greece.

Ulysses had had red hair too. Ulysses had been highborn too. And yet—Marius found it impossible to think of Sulla as some latter-day Ulysses. He was his own man, complete and rounded. Just as was his plan. There was no fear in him, so much was plain; he was approaching this extraordinary mission in a businesslike and—and—invulnerable way. In other words, he was approaching it like the Roman aristocrat he was. He harbored no doubts that he would succeed, because he knew he was better than other men.

Down came the fist, the elbow, the foot. Marius drew a breath, and asked, “Do you honestly think you can do it, Lucius Cornelius? You’re such a Roman! I’m consumed with admiration for you, and it’s a brilliant, brilliant plan. But it will call for you to shed every last trace of the Roman, and I’m not sure any Roman can do that. Our culture is so enormously strong, it leaves ineradicable marks on us. You’ll have to live a lie.”

One red-gold brow lifted; the corners of the beautiful mouth went down. “Oh, Gaius Marius, I have lived one kind of lie or another all my life!”

“Even now?”

“Even now.”

They turned to commence walking back.

“Do you intend to go on your own, Lucius Cornelius?” Marius asked. “Don’t you think it might be a good idea to have company? What if you need to send a message back to me urgently, but find you cannot leave yourself? And mightn’t it be a help to have a comrade to serve as your mirror, and you as his?”

“I’ve thought of all that,” said Sulla, “and I would like to take Quintus Sertorius with me.”

At first Marius looked delighted, then a frown gathered. “He’s too dark. He’d never pass for a Gaul, let alone a German.”

“True. However, he could be a Greek with Celtiberian blood in him.” Sulla cleared his throat. “I gave him a slave when we left Rome, as a matter of fact. A Celtiberian of the tribe Illergetes. I didn’t tell Quintus Sertorius what was in the wind, but I did tell him to learn to speak Celtiberian.”

Marius stared. “You’re well prepared. I approve.”

“So I may have Quintus Sertorius?”

“Oh, yes. Though I still think he’s too dark, and I wonder if that fact mightn’t undo you.”

“No, it will be all right. Quintus Sertorius is extremely valuable to me, and his darkness will, I fancy, turn out to be an asset. You see, Quintus Sertorius has animal magic, and men with animal magic are held in great awe by all barbarian peoples. His darkness will contribute to his shaman-power.”

“Animal magic? What exactly do you mean?”

“Quintus Sertorius can summon wild creatures to him. I noticed it in Africa, when he actually whistled up a pard-cat and fondled it. But I only began to work out a role for him on this mission when he made a pet out of the eagle chick he cured, yet didn’t kill its natural wish to be free and wild. So now it lives as it was meant to, yet it still remains his friend, and comes to visit him, and sits on his arm and kisses him. The soldiers reverence him. It is a great omen.”

“I know,” said Marius. “The eagle is the symbol of the legions, and Quintus Sertorius has reinforced it.”

They stood looking at the place where six silver eagles upon silver poles ornamented with crowns and phalerae medals and torcs were driven into the ground; a fire in a tripod burned before them, sentries stood to attention, and a togate priest with folds pulled up to cover his head threw incense on the coals in the tripod as he said the sundown prayers.

“What exactly is the importance of this animal magic?” Marius asked.

“The Gauls are highly superstitious about the spirits which dwell in all wild things, and so I gather are the Cimbric Germans. Quintus Sertorius will masquerade as a shaman from a Spanish tribe so remote even the tribes of the Pyrenees will not know much about him,” said Sulla.

“When do you intend to set out?”

“Very soon now. But I’d prefer it if you told Quintus Sertorius,” said Sulla. “He’ll want to come, but his loyalty to you is complete. So it’s better that you tell him.” He blew through his nostrils. “No one is to know. No one!”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Marius. “However, there are three slaves who know a little something, since they’ve been giving you language lessons. Do you want them sold and shipped overseas somewhere?”

“Why go to so much trouble?” asked Sulla, surprised. “I intended to kill them.”

“An excellent idea. But you’ll lose money on the deal.”

“Not a fortune. Call it my contribution to the success of the campaign against the Germans,” said Sulla easily.

“I’ll have them killed the moment you’re gone.”

But Sulla shook his head. “No, I’ll do my own dirty work. And now. They’ve taught me and Quintus Sertorius as much as they know. Tomorrow I’ll send them off to Massilia to do a job for me.” He stretched, yawned voluptuously. “I’m good with a bow and arrow, Gaius Marius. And the salt marshes are very desolate. Everyone will simply assume they’ve run away. Including Quintus Sertorius.”

I’m too close to the earth, thought Marius. It isn’t that I mind sending men to extinction, even in cold blood. To do so is a part of life as we know it, and vexes no god. But he is one of the old patrician Romans, all right. Too far above the earth. Truly a demigod. And Marius found himself turning in his mind to the words of the Syrian prophetess Martha, now luxuriating as an honored guest in his house in Rome. A far greater Roman than he, a Gaius too, but a Julius, not a Marius... Was that what it needed? That semi-divine drop of patrician blood?