It looked, that November, as if Gaius Marius would never succeed in becoming consul for the following year. A letter from Lucius Appuleius Saturninus drove out all hope of a plebiscite authorizing him to stand in absentia a third time.
The Senate won’t stand by idly again, because most of Rome is now convinced the Germans won’t come at all. Ever. In fact, the Germans have turned into a new Lamia, a monster employed to strike terror into every heart so often and for so long that eventually she holds no terror.
Naturally your enemies have made a great deal out of the fact that this is your second year in Gaul-across-the-Alps repairing roads and digging ship canals, and that your presence there with a large army is costing the State more than it can afford, especially with the price of wheat what it is.
I’ve tested the electoral water in the matter of your standing in absentia a third time, and the toe I dipped in has dropped off from the frost. Your chances would be somewhat better if you came to Rome to stand in person. But of course if you do that, your enemies will argue that the so-called emergency in Gaul-across-the-Alps does not actually exist.
However, I’ve done what I can for you, mainly lining up support in the Senate so you will at least have your command prorogued with proconsular status. This will mean next year’s consuls will be your superiors. And as a final note of cheer, the favored consular candidate for next year is Quintus Lutatius Catulus. The electors are so fed up with his standing every single year that they’ve decided to get rid of him by voting him in. I trust this finds you well.
When Marius finished reading Saturninus’s short missive, he sat frowning for a long time. Though the news it imparted was cheerless, there was yet a faintly jaunty feel to the letter; as if Saturninus too was deciding Gaius Marius was a man of the past, and was busy realigning his priorities.
Gaius Marius had no polling appeal. No more knight clout. For the Germans were much less of a threat than the Sicilian slave war and the grain supply; Lamia the monster was dead.
Well, Lamia the monster wasn’t dead, and Lucius Cornelius Sulla was alive to prove it. Only what was the point of sending Sulla to Rome to testify to this fact when he, Gaius Marius, had no excuse to accompany Sulla to Rome? Without support and power, Sulla wouldn’t prevail; he’d have to tell his whole story to too many men alienated from his commander, men who would find the idea of a Roman aristocrat masquerading as a Gaul for almost two years so disturbing they would end in having Rome dismiss Sulla’s story as unstable, unreliable, unacceptable. No, either both of them journeyed to Rome, or neither of them did.
Out came blank paper, pen, ink: Gaius Marius wrote to Lucius Appuleius Saturninus.
Vindicated you may be, Lucius Appuleius, but remember it was I who enabled you to survive until you were vindicated. You are still beholden to me, and I expect a clientlike loyalty from you.
Do not assume I cannot come to Rome. An opportunity may still arise. Or at least, I expect you to act as if I will indeed appear in Rome. Therefore here is what I want. The most immediate necessity is to postpone the consular elections, a job you and Gaius Norbanus as tribunes of the plebs are well able to do. You will do it. Wholeheartedly. Throwing all your energy into the job. After that, I expect you to use the brain you were born with to seize upon the first opportunity which will enable you to put pressure on the Senate and People to call me to Rome.
I will get to Rome, never doubt it. So if you want to rise a great deal higher than the tribunate of the plebs, it behooves you to remain Gaius Marius’s man.
And by the end of November an east wind blew Gaius Marius a smacking kiss from the goddess Fortuna, in the shape of a second letter from Saturninus that arrived by sea two days before the Senate courier and his dispatches reached Glanum. Saturninus said, very humbly:
I do not doubt you will reach Rome. Not one day after I received your chastening note, your esteemed colleague Lucius Aurelius Orestes, the junior consul, died suddenly. And, still feeling the lash of your displeasure, I seized upon this opportunity to force the Senate into recalling you. That had not been the plan formulated by the Policy Makers, who through the agency of the Leader of the House recommended that the Conscript Fathers choose a consul suffectus to fill the ivory chair left vacant by Orestes. But—amazing luck!—only the day before, Scaurus had delivered a long speech in the House to the effect that your presence in Gaul-across-the-Alps was an affront to the credulity of all Good Men, that you had manufactured the German panic to get yourself elected a virtual dictator. Of course the moment Orestes died, Scaurus changed his tune completely—the House did not dare recall you to exercise the electoral functions of the consul with the German menace threatening Italy, so the House must appoint a suffect consul to get the elections under way.
Having had no time to start using my tribunate to postpone any elections, I now found it unnecessary to do so. Instead, I rose in the House and made a very fine speech to the effect that our esteemed Princeps Senatus couldn’t have it both ways. Either there was a German menace, or there was not. And I chose to accept his speech of the day before as his honest opinion—there was no German menace, therefore there was no need to fill the dead junior consul’s chair with a suffectus. No, I said, Gaius Marius must be recalled; Gaius Marius must finally do the job he had been elected to do—carry out the duties of a consul. I didn’t need to accuse Scaurus of altering his viewpoint to fit the new set of circumstances in his second speech; everyone got the message.
Hopefully this will beat the courier. The time of year favors the sea over the road. Not that you are not perfectly capable of working out what must have been the sequence of events the moment you get the Senate’s communication! Only that if I do beat the courier, you have a little extra time to plan your campaign in Rome. I am starting things moving among the electors, naturally, and by the time you reach Rome you should have a most respectable deputation of leading lights of the People begging you to stand for the consulship.
“We’re on our way!” said Marius jubilantly to Sulla, tossing him Saturninus’s letter. “Pack your things—there’s no time to lose. You are going to tell the House that the Germans will invade Italy on three separate fronts in the autumn of next year, and I am going to tell the electors that I am the only man capable of stopping them.”
“How far do I go?” asked Sulla, startled.
“Only as far as you have to. I’ll introduce the subject, and state the findings. You’ll testify to their truth, but not in a way which gives the House to understand that you became a barbarian yourself.” Marius looked rueful. “Some things, Lucius Cornelius, are best left unsaid. They don’t know you well enough yet to understand what kind of man you are. Don’t give them information they can use against you later on. You’re a patrician Roman. So let them think your daring deeds were done inside a patrician Roman skin.”
Sulla shook his head. “It’s manifestly impossible to go prowling among the Germans looking like a patrician Roman!”
“They don’t know that,” said Marius with a grin. “Remember what Publius Rutilius said in his letter? The armchair generals on the back benches, he called them. Well, they’re armchair spies too, on the front benches as well as the back. They would not know the rules for spying if the rules ran up their arses!” And he began to laugh. “In fact, I wish I’d asked you to keep your moustaches and long hair for a little while. I’d have dressed you as a German and paraded you around the Forum. And you know what would happen, don’t you?”
Sulla sighed. “Yes. No one would recognize me.”
“Correct. So we won’t put unbearable strain on their Roman imaginations. I’ll be speaking first, and you take your cue from me,” said Marius.
*
To Sulla, Rome offered none of the political vigor or domestic warmth it did to Gaius Marius. In spite of his brilliant quaestorship—under Marius—and his brilliant career as a spy—under Marius—he was just another one of the Senate’s young up-and-coming men, walking in the shadow of the First Man in Rome. Nor was his future political career going anywhere fast enough, especially considering his late entry into the Senate; he was patrician and therefore not permitted to become a tribune of the plebs, he didn’t have the money to run for curule aedile, and he hadn’t been in the Senate long enough to run for praetor. That was the political side of things. At home he found a bitter and enervating atmosphere polluted by a wife who drank too much and neglected her children, and by a mother-in-law who disliked him quite as much as she disliked her situation. That was the domestic side of things.
Well, the political climate would improve for him, he was not so depressed he couldn’t see it; but the climate in his home could do nothing else than deteriorate. And what made it harder coming to Rome this time was that he was passing from his German wife to his Roman one. For just about a year he had lived with Hermana in the midst of an environment more alien to his aristocratic world than the old world of the Suburan stews had been. And Hermana was his solace, his fortress, his one normal point of reference in that bizarre barbarian society.
Tacking himself onto the Cimbric comet’s tail had not been difficult, for Sulla was more than just another brave and physically strong warrior; he was a warrior who thought. In bravery and physical strength many of the Germans left him far behind. But where they were an unalloyed metal, he was the tempered finality—cunning as well as brave, slippery as well as strong. Sulla was the small man facing the giant, the man who, in order to excel in armed combat, had no other way of going about it than to think. Therefore he had been noticed on the field against the Spanish tribes of the Pyrenees at once, and accepted into the warrior confraternity.
Then he and Sertorius had agreed that if they were to blend into this strange world to the point where they would rise high enough to be privy to German policies (such as they were), they would have to be more than useful soldiers. They would have to carve themselves niches in tribal life. So they had separated, chosen different tribes, and then taken women from among the ranks of those women recently widowed.
His eye had lighted upon Hermana because she was an outsider herself, and because she had no children. Her man had been the chief of his Cimbric tribe; otherwise the women of the tribe would never have tolerated her foreign presence among them when, in effect, she usurped a place which ought to have been filled by a Cimbric woman. And the angry women were already clubbing her to death inside their minds when Sulla—a meteor among the warriors—climbed into her wagon and thereby established his claim to her. They would be foreigners together. There was no sentiment or attraction of any kind in his selection of the Cheruscic Hermana; simply, she needed him more than a Cimbric woman would have within the tribal enclave, and also owed the tribe far less than a Cimbric woman would have. Thus if she should discover his Roman origins, Hermana would be far less likely to report him than a Cimbric woman.
As German women went, she was very ordinary. Most were tall, strongly yet gracefully built, with long legs and high breasts, flaxen hair, the bluest of eyes—and fair of face if one could forgive the ugliness of wide mouths and straight little noses. Hermana was a great deal shorter even than Sulla (who as Romans went was a respectable height at about three inches less than six feet—Marius, an inch over six feet, was very tall), and plumper than most of her fellows. Though her hair was extremely thick and long, it was definitely of that indeterminate shade universally known as mouse, and her eyes were a darkish grey-fawn to match her hair. For the rest, she was German enough—the bones of her skull were well defined, and her nose was like a short straight blade, fine and thin. She was thirty years old, and had been barren; if her man had not been the chief, and autocratic to the point of refusing to cast her off, Hermana would have died.
What made her distinctive enough to have been the choice of two men of superior quality in succession was not obvious on the surface. Her first man had called her different and interesting, but could be no more specific; Sulla thought her a natural aristocrat, a finicky aloof lady who yet radiated a powerfully sexual message.
They fitted together very well in every way, for she was intelligent enough to be undemanding, sensible enough not to trammel him, passionate enough to make bedding her a pleasure, articulate enough to make her an interesting communicant, and industrious enough to give him no additional work. Hermana’s beasts were always herded together properly, branded properly, milked properly, mated properly, medicined properly. Hermana’s wagon was always in tiptop condition, its canopy kept taut and patched or mended, its wooden tray oiled and chinked, its big wheels greased with a mixture of butter and beef drippings along the axle junctions and linch-pins, and never missing spokes or segments of their rims. Hermana’s pots and crocks and vessels were kept clean; her provisions were carefully stored against damp and marauders; her clothing and rugs were aired and darned; her killing and quartering knives were superbly sharp; her oddments were never put away in some place she forgot. Hermana, in fact, was everything Julilla was not. Except a Roman of blood as good as his own.
When she discovered she was pregnant—in fact, she fell at once—both of them were delighted, Hermana for one extra reason. She was now vindicated in the eyes of the tribe to which she did not belong, and the blame for her previous sterility was now thrown squarely upon the shoulders of her dead chieftain. A fact which didn’t please the women of the tribe one little bit, for they had long hated her. Not that there was much they could do about it, because by spring, when the Cimbri set off on their trek northward to the lands of the Atuatuci, Sulla was the new chief. Hermana, it might safely be inferred, had more than her share of luck.
And then in Sextilis, after a wearying yet uncomplaining gestation, Hermana gave birth to twin boys, big and healthy and red-haired; Sulla called one Herman, and the other Cornel. He had racked his brains to think of a name which would in some way perpetuate his gens, Cornelius, yet wouldn’t sound too odd in the German tongue. “Cornel” was his solution.
The babies were everything twin boys ought to be: so alike it was difficult to tell them apart, even for their mother and father; content to be together; more interested in thriving than crying. Twins were rare, and their birth to this strange outlander couple was considered an omen important enough to secure Sulla the thaneship of a whole group of small tribes. In consequence, he went to the grand council Boiorix called of all the Germans of all three peoples after the King of the Cimbri settled Atuatuci-Teutonic friction without bloodshed.
For some time, of course, Sulla had known he would soon have to leave, but he put off his departure until after that grand council, aware that he worried over what should have been a very minor consideration—what would happen to Hermana and his sons once he was gone? The men of his tribe he might possibly have trusted, but the women were not to be trusted, and in any domestic tribal situation, the women would prevail. The moment he disappeared, Hermana would die under the clubs, even if her sons were allowed to survive.
It was September, and time was of the essence. Yet Sulla made a decision which ran counter both to self-interest and Rome’s interest. Though he could ill afford the time, before he returned to Marius he would take Hermana back to her own people in Germania. That meant he had to tell her who and what he was. She was more fascinated than surprised; he saw her eyes turn to their sons with wonder in them, as if now she truly understood how important they were, these sons of a demigod. No grief appeared on her face when he told her he would have to leave her forever, but gratitude did when he told her he would first deliver her to the Marsi of Germania, in the hope that among her own settled people she would be protected and allowed to live.
At the beginning of October they left the gargantuan enclave of Germans wagons, during the first hours of darkness, having chosen a site for their wagons and beasts from which their departure was less likely to attract notice. When day broke they were still wending their way between German wagons, but no one paid them any attention, and two days after that they finally drew clear of the encampment.
The distance from the Atuatuci to the Marsi was no more than a hundred miles, and the countryside was fairly flat. But between Long-haired Gaul of the Belgae and Germania flowed the biggest river in all of western Europa: the Rhenus. Somehow Sulla had to get his wife’s wagon across it. And somehow he had to protect his family from marauders. He did it the Sullan way, very simply and directly, by trusting to his bond with the goddess Fortuna, who did not desert him.
When they reached the Rhenus, they found its banks populous and the people not interested in preying upon one lone wagon and one lone German, especially with red-haired twin boys sitting one in each of their mother’s arms. A barge big enough to carry the wagon plied the great river regularly, the price a jar of most precious wheat; since the summer had been relatively dry, the water was at its quietest, and Sulla for the payment of three jars of wheat was able to get all Hermana’s beasts across as well as the wagon.
Once into Germania they made brisk progress, for the land this far downstream of the Rhenus was cleared of vast forests, and some simple growing was attempted, more for winter cattle fodder than human consumption. During the third week of October Sulla found Hermana’s tribe of the Marsi, and delivered her into their care. And concluded his treaty of peace and friendship between the German Marsi and the Senate and People of Rome.
Then when the moment of actual parting came, they wept in dreadful grief, finding it harder by far than either of them had dreamed. Carrying the twins, Hermana followed Sulla on foot until the legs of his horse wore her to a standstill, and there she stood, howling, long after he had passed out of her sight forever. While Sulla rode his horse southwest, so blinded by tears he had to trust to the instincts of this horse for many miles.
Hermana’s people had given him a good mount, so that he was able to trade it for another good mount at the end of the day, and so continued well mounted for the twelve days it took him to ride from the sources of the river Amisia, where lay the Marsi settlements, to Marius’s camp outside Glanum. He cut cross-country the whole way, avoiding the high mountains and thickest forests by following the great rivers—Rhenus to Mosella, Mosella to Arar, Arar to Rhodanus.
His heart lay so heavy within him that he had to force himself to take note of the country and peoples he traversed, though once he caught himself listening with amazement to himself speaking the Gallic of the Druids, and thought, I am fluent in German of several dialects and fluent in Carnutic Gallic—I, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, senator of Rome!
But what neither he nor Quintus Sertorius discovered of the German dispositions among the Atuatuci did not transpire until the following spring, long after both Sulla and Sertorius were gone from their lives and wives of Germania. For when the wagons began to roll in their thousands upon thousands and the three great hosts divided up to invade Italy, the Cimbri and the Teutones and the Tigurini and the Cherusci and the Marcomanni left something behind for the Atuatuci to guard against their return. They left a force of six thousand of their finest men to ensure that the Atuatuci suffered no incursions from other tribes; and they left every last tribal treasure they, owned—gold statues, gold chariots, gold harness, gold votives, gold coins, gold bullion, several tons of finest amber, and various other treasures they had picked up along their migration to swell what had been theirs for many generations. The only gold which moved with the Germans as they, started out was gold they wore on their bodies. All the rest remained hidden among the Atuatuci, in much the same way as the Volcae Tectosages of Tolosa had minded the gold of the Gallic peoples.
*
So when Sulla saw Julilla again, he contrasted her with Hermana, and found her slipshod, careless, intellectually untutored, disordered and unmethodical, and—hateful. She had at least learned enough from their previous reunion not to throw herself at him immodestly under the gaze of their servants. But, he thought wearily over dinner on that first day home, his being spared that particular ordeal was more likely to have been due to the presence of Marcia in the house rather than a wish on Julilla’s part to please him. For Marcia was quite a presence—stiff, straight, unsmiling, unloving, unforgiving. She hadn’t aged gracefully, and after so many years of happiness as the wife of Gaius Julius Caesar, her widowhood was a great burden to her. Also, Sulla suspected, she loathed being the mother of a daughter as unsatisfactory as Julilla.
Little wonder in that. He loathed being married to a wife as unsatisfactory as Julilla. Yet it was not politic to cast her off, for she was no Metella Calva, coupling indiscriminately with the lowborn, nor did she couple with the highborn. Fidelity had become perhaps her only virtue. Unfortunately the drinking had not progressed to the point where everyone in Rome knew her as a wine bibber; Marcia had worked indefatigably to conceal it. Which meant that a diffarreatio divorce (even had he been willing to undergo its hideousness) was out of the question.
And yet she was impossible to live with. Her physical demands within the bedroom were so starved and scratchy that he could experience no emotion more scorching than a ghastly, all-pervading embarrassment; he only had to set eyes on Julilla, and every iota of erectile tissue belonging to his body shrank inside itself like one of Publius Vagiennius’s snails. He didn’t want to touch her, and he didn’t want her touching him.
It was easy for a woman to counterfeit sexual desire, sexual pleasure too, but a man couldn’t counterfeit sexual desire any more than he could sexual pleasure. If men were by nature more truthful than women, thought Sulla, it was surely because they carried a tattletale truth teller between their legs into every sexual encounter, and this colored all aspects of masculine life. And if there was a reason why men were drawn to men, it lay in the fact that the act of love required no accompanying act of faith.
None of these cogitations boded well for Julilla, who had no idea what her husband thought, but was devastated by the all-too-evident little he felt. For two nights in succession she found herself pushed away, while Sulla’s patience frayed and his excuses grew more perfunctory, less convincing. And on the third morning Julilla rose even earlier than Sulla so that she could have a copious breakfast of wine, only to be caught in the act by her mother.
The result was a quarrel between the two women so bitter and acrimonious that the children wept, the slaves fled, and Sulla shut himself inside his tablinum calling down cursesupon the heads of all women. What snatches of the argument he overheard indicated that the subject was not new, nor this confrontation the first. The children, Marcia alleged in a voice loud enough to be heard as far away as the temple of Magna Mater, were being completely ignored by their mother. Julilla retorted in a scream audible as far away as the Circus Maximus that Marcia had stolen the children’s affections, so what could she expect?
The battle raged for longer than any altercation so verbally violent should have—another indication, Sulla decided, that the subject and the argument had been thoroughly explored on many earlier occasions. They were proceeding almost by rote. It ended in the atrium just outside Sulla’s study door, where Marcia informed Julilla that she was taking the children and their nanny for a long walk, and she didn’t know when she’d be back, but Julilla had better be sober when she did come back.
Hands pressed over his ears to shut out the pathetic sobs and pleas for peace both children were making of their mother and grandmother, Sulla tried to concentrate upon what beautiful children they were. He was still filled with the delight of seeing them again after so long; Cornelia Sulla was over five now, and little Lucius Sulla was four. People in their own right—and quite old enough to suffer, as he well knew from the memories of his own childhood, buried yet never forgotten. If there was any mercy in his abandonment of his German twin sons, it lay in the fact that when he left them they were still very young babies, heads nodding up and down, mouths blowing bubbles, every kink in every bone from head to toe stuffed with dimples. It would be far harder to part with his Roman children because they were old enough to be people. He pitied them deeply. And loved them deeply too, a very different kind of feeling from any he had ever experienced for either man or woman. Selfless and pure, untainted and rounded.
His door burst open; Julilla rushed into the room with draperies swirling, her fists knotted, her face dyed a dark rose from rage. And wine.
“Did you hear that?” she demanded.
Sulla laid his pen down. “How could I help hearing it?” he asked in a tired voice. “The whole Palatine heard.”
“That old turnip! That dried-up old troublemaker! How dare she accuse me of neglecting my children?”
Do I, or don’t I? asked Sulla of himself. Why am I putting up with her? Why don’t I get out my little box of white powder from the Pisae foundry and dose her wine until her teeth fall out of her head and her tongue curls up into a smoking string and her tits swell up like puffballs and explode? Why don’t I find a nice wet oak tree and harvest a few flawless mushrooms and feed them to her until she pours blood from every orifice? Why don’t I give her the kiss she’s panting for, and snap her skinny nasty neck the way I did Clitumna’s? How many men have I killed with sword, dagger, arrow, poison, stone, axe, club, thong, hands? What does she have none of those others had? He found the answer at once, of course. Julilla had given him his dream. Julilla had given him his luck. And she was a patrician Roman, blood of his blood. He’d sooner kill Hermana.
Even so, words couldn’t kill her, this tough, sinewy Roman madam, so words he could use.
“You do neglect your children,” he said. “That’s why I brought your mother to live here in the first place.”
She gasped stagily, choked, wrapped her hands about her throat. “Oh! Oh! How dare you? I have never neglected my children, never!”
‘‘ Rubbish. You’ve never cared a scrap for them,” he said in the same tired patient voice he seemed to have adopted since he set foot in this awful, blighted house. “The only thing you care about, Julilla, is a flagon of wine.”
“And who can blame me?” she asked, hands falling. “Who can honestly blame me? Married to a man who doesn’t want me, who can’t even get it up when we’re in the same bed and I’ve got it in my mouth sucking and licking until my jaws crack!”
“If we’re going to be explicit, would you please close the door?” he asked.
“Why? So the precious servants can’t hear? What a filthy hypocrite you are, Sulla! And whose is the shame, yours or mine? Why isn’t it ever yours? Your reputation as a lover is far too well established in this town for my miserable failure to have you classified impotent! It’s only me you don’t want! Me! Your own wife! I’ve never so much as looked at another man, and what thanks do I get? After nearly two years away, you can’t even get it up when I turn myself into an irrumator!” The huge hollow yellow eyes were bleeding tears. “What did I ever do? Why don’t you love me? Why don’t you even want me? Oh, Sulla, look at me with eyes of love, touch me with hands of love, and I will never need another sip of wine as long as I live! How can I love you the way I love you without striking so much as one tiny little spark in return?”
“Perhaps that’s a part of the problem,” he said, clinically detached. “I don’t like being loved excessively. It’s not right. In fact, it’s unhealthy.”
“Then tell me how to stop loving you!” she wept. “I don’t know how! Do you think if I could stop, I wouldn’t? In less time than it takes to strike that spark from a good dry flint, I’d stop! I pray to stop! I yearn to stop! But I can’t stop. I love you more than I love life itself.”
He sighed. “Perhaps the answer is to finish growing up. You look and act like an adolescent. In mind and body, you’re still sixteen. Only you’re not, Julilla. You’re twenty-four. You have a child of five, and another going on for four.”
“Maybe sixteen was the last time I was ever happy,” she said, rubbing her palms around her running cheeks.
“If you haven’t been happy since you were sixteen, the blame for it can hardly be laid at my door,” said Sulla.
“Nothing’s ever your fault, is it?”
“Absolutely true,” he said, looking superior.
“Well, what about other women?”
“What about them?”
“Is it possible that one of the reasons why you haven’t shown any interest in me since you came back is because you’ve got a woman tucked away in Gaul?”
“Not a woman,” he corrected gently, “a wife. And not in Gaul. In Germania.”
Her mouth dropped open, she gaped. “A wife?”
“Well, according to the German custom, anyway. And twin boys about four months old now.” He closed his eyes, the pain in them too private a thing to let her see. “I miss her badly. Isn’t that odd?”
Julilla managed to shut her mouth and swallow convulsively. “Is she that beautiful?” she whispered.
His pale eyes opened, surprised. “Beautiful? Hermana? No, not at all! She’s dumpy and in her thirties. Not even one hundredth as beautiful as you. Not even as blonde. Not even the daughter of a chief, let alone a king. Just a barbarian.”
“Why?”
Sulla shook his head. “I don’t know. Except that I liked her a great deal.”
“What does she have that I haven’t?”
“A good pair of breasts,” said Sulla, shrugging, “but I’m not partial to breasts, so it can’t be that. She worked hard. She never complained. She never expected anything of me—no, that’s not it. Better to say, she never expected me to be what I’m not.” He nodded, smiled with obvious fondness. “Yes, I think that must be it. She belonged to herself, and so she didn’t burden me with herself. You’re a lead weight chained about my neck. Hermana was a pair of wings strapped to my feet.”
Without another word Julilla turned and walked out of the study. Sulla got up, followed her to the door, and closed it.
But not enough time elapsed for Sulla to compose himself sufficiently to resume his doodling—for write sensibly he couldn’t that morning—before the door opened again.
His steward stood there, giving a superb imitation of an inanimate block of wood.
“Yes?”
“A caller, Lucius Cornelius. Are you in?”
“Who is it?”
“I would have given you his name, dominus, if I knew it,” said the steward stiffly. “The caller preferred to charge me with a message for you. ‘Scylax sends greetings.’ “
Sulla’s face cleared like a breath from the surface of a polished mirror; a delighted smile dawned. One of the old gang! One of the mimes, the comedians, the actors he used to know! Oh, terrific! This nincompoop steward Julilla had bought wouldn’t know, of course he wouldn’t know. Clitumna’s slaves weren’t good enough for Julilla. “Well, bring him in!”
He would have known who it was anywhere, anytime.
And yet—how much he had changed! From boy into man.
“Metrobius,” Sulla said, getting to his feet, his eyes flicking to the door automatically to make sure it was shut. It was. The windows were not shut, but they didn’t matter, for there was an ironclad rule in Sulla’s house: that no one was ever to stand where they could see into Sulla’s study through the colonnade windows.
He must be twenty-two now, thought Sulla. Quite tall for a Greek. The long mane of black curls had been barbered neatly into a manly cap, and where the skin of his cheeks and chin had once been milky-smooth, now it displayed the blue shadow of a heavy beard kept closely shaven. He still had a profile like a Praxiteles Apollo, and something of the same epicene repose, a Nicias painted marble so true to life it might step down from its plinth and begin to walk, yet remained still folded away within itself, keeping the secret of its mystery, its wellsprings.
The marmoreal control of perfect beauty held perfectly broke then; Metrobius looked at Sulla with perfect love, and smilingly extended his arms.
The tears stood forth in Sulla’s eyes; his mouth shook. As he came around it, the corner of his desk struck his hip, but Sulla didn’t notice. He just walked into Metrobius’s arms and let them close about him, and put his chin on Metrobius’s shoulder, and his arms about Metrobius’s back. And felt as if he had come home at last. So the kiss when it happened was exquisite, the understanding heart grown up, the act of faith made without cognizance, without pain of any kind.
“My boy, my beautiful boy!” said Sulla, and wept in simple gratitude that some things did not change.
*
Outside Sulla’s open study windows Julilla stood and watched her husband walk into the lovely young man’s arms, watched them kiss, heard the words of love which passed between them, watched as they moved together to the couch and sank upon it, and began the initial intimacies of a relationship so old and so satisfying to them both that this was merely a homecoming. No one needed to tell her that here was the real reason for her husband’s neglect, and for her own drinking, and for her revenge in neglecting her children. Her husband’s children.
Before they could loosen each other’s clothing Julilla turned away, and walked with head held high and eyes tearless into the bedroom she shared with Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Her husband. Beyond it was a smaller cubicle they used as a clothes repository, more cluttered now that Sulla was home again, for his dress-parade armor was suspended from a T-shaped frame, its helmet on a special stand, and his sword with its ivory eagle’s head handle hung upon the wall complete with scabbard and baldric.
Getting the sword down was easy; getting it free from its sheath and belt was more difficult. But she managed at last, and drew in her breath sharply when the blade sheared her hand open to the bone, so well honed was it. She experienced a twinge of surprise that she could actually feel physical pain at this moment, then dismissed both surprise and pain as irrelevant. Without hesitation she picked up the sword by its ivory eagle, turned it in upon herself, and walked into the wall.
It was badly done. She fell in a sprawling tangle of blood and draperies with the sword buried in her belly, her heart beating, beating, beating, the rasp of her own breathing heavy in her ears like someone stealing up behind her to take life or virtue. Neither virtue nor life did she own anymore, so what could it matter? She felt the dreadful agony of it then, and the warmth of her own blood on her skin as it quit her. But she was a Julius Caesar; she would not cry out for help, or regret this decision for what little time she had remaining. Not a thought of her two little children crossed her mind; all she could think of was her own foolishness, that for many years she had loved a man who loved men.
Sufficient reason to die. She wouldn’t live to be laughed at, jeered at, made a mockery of by all those lucky lucky women out there who were married to men who loved women. As the blood flowed away carrying life along with it, her burning mind began to cool, and slow, and petrify. Oh, how wonderful, to stop loving him at last! No more torment, no more anguish, no more humiliation, no more wine. She had asked him to show her how to stop loving him, and he had shown her. So kind to her he had finally been, her darling Sulla. Her last lucid moments of thought were about her children; at least in them, something of herself she would leave behind. So she waded into the sweet shallows of the ocean Death wishing her children long life, and much happiness.
*
Sulla returned to his desk and sat down. “There’s wine; pour me some,” he said to Metrobius.
How like the boy the man was, once animation stole into his face! Easier then to remember that once the boy had offered to give up every luxury for the chance to live in penury with his darling Sulla.
Smiling softly, Metrobius brought the wine and sat down in the client’s chair. “I know what you’re going to say, Lucius Cornelius. We can’t make a habit of this.”
“Yes. Among other things.” Sulla sipped his wine, then looked at Metrobius sternly. “It isn’t possible, dearest lad. Just sometimes, when the need or the pain or whatever it is becomes too much to bear. I’m the width of a whisker away from everything I want, which means I can’t have you too. If this were Greece, yes. But it isn’t. It’s Rome. If I were the First Man in Rome, yes. But I’m not. Gaius Marius is.”
Metrobius pulled a face. “I understand.”
“Are you still in the theater?”
“Of course. Acting’s all I know. Besides, Scylax was a good teacher, give him his due. So I don’t lack parts, and I don’t rest very often.” He cleared his throat and looked a little self-conscious. “The only change is, I’ve become serious.”
“Serious?”
“That’s right. It turned out, you see, that I didn’t have the true comedic touch. I was all right when I was a child star, but once I grew out of the Cupid’s wings and the mirthful imps, I discovered my real talent lay in tragedy, not comedy. So now I play Aeschylus and Accius instead of Aristophanes and Plautus. I don’t repine.”
Sulla shrugged. “Oh well, at least that means I’ll be able to go to the theater without betraying myself because you’re there playing the hapless ingenue. Are you a citizen?”
“No, alas.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Sighing, Sulla put his goblet down and folded his hands together like a banker. “Let us meet by all means—but not too often—and never again here. I have a rather mad wife whom I can’t trust.”
“It would be wonderful if we could meet occasionally.”
“Do you have a reasonably private place of your own, or are you still living with Scylax?”
Metrobius looked surprised. “I thought you knew! But of course, how could you, when it’s years since you’ve lived in Rome? Scylax died six months ago. And he left me everything he owned, including his apartment.”
“Then that’s where we’ll meet.” Sulla got up. “Come, I’ll show you out myself. And I’ll enroll you as my client, so that if you should ever need to come here, you’ll have a valid reason for doing so. I’ll send a note to your place before I call round.”
A kiss looked out of the beautiful dark eyes when they parted at the outside door, but nothing was said, and nothing done to indicate to either the hovering steward or the door porter that the amazingly good-looking young man was anything more than a new client from the old days.
“Give my love to everyone, Metrobius.”
“I daresay you won’t be in Rome for the theatrical games?”
“Afraid not,” said Sulla, smiling casually. “Germans.”
And so they parted, just as Marcia came down the street shepherding the children and their nanny. Sulla waited for her and acted as porter himself.
“Marcia, come into my study, please.”
Eyes wary, she sidled into the room ahead of him and went to the couch, where, Sulla saw with horror, there was a wet patch glaring at him like a beacon.
“In the chair, if you don’t mind,” he said.
She sat down, glowering at him with her chin up and her mouth set hard.
“Mother-in-law, I’m well aware that you don’t like me, and I have no intention of trying to woo you,” Sulla began, making sure he appeared at his ease, unworried. “I didn’t ask you to come and live here because I liked you, either. My concern was for my children. It still is. And I mustthank you with all my heart for your good offices there. You’ve done a wonderful job in caring for them. They’re little Romans again.”
She thawed a little. “I’m glad you think so.”
“In consequence, the children are no longer my main worry. Julilla is. I heard your altercation with her this morning.”
“The whole world heard it!” snapped Marcia.
“Yes, that’s true... “ He sighed heavily. “After you took the children out, she had an altercation with me which the whole world also heard—or at least heard her half of it. I wondered if you had any idea what we can do.”
“Unfortunately not enough people know she drinks to divorce her on those grounds, which are really your only grounds,” said Marcia, knowing full well she had concealed it. “I think you just have to be patient. Her drinking is increasing, I won’t be able to hide it for much longer. The moment it’s general knowledge, you can put her away without condemnation,” said Julilla’s mother.
“What if that stage should arrive while I’m away?”
“I’m her mother; I can put her away. If it happens in your absence, I’ll send her to your villa at Circei. Then when you return, you can divorce her and shut her up elsewhere. In time she’ll drink herself to death.” Marcia got up, anxious to be gone, and giving no hint as to the degree of pain she felt. “I do not like you, Lucius Cornelius,” she said, “but I do not blame you for Julilla’s plight.”
“Do you like any of your in-laws?” he asked.
She snorted. “Only Aurelia.”
He walked out into the atrium with her. “I wonder where Julilla is?” he asked, suddenly realizing that he had neither heard nor seen her since the arrival of Metrobius. A frisson of alarm skimmed up his spine.
“Lying in wait for one or the other of us, I imagine,” she said. ‘ ‘Once she starts the day with a quarrel, she usually continues to quarrel until she becomes so drunk she passes out.”
Sulla’s distaste pulled his lips down. “I haven’t seen her since she ran out of my study. An old friend called to see me not a moment later, and I was just letting him out when you came back with the children.”
“She’s not normally so backward,” said Marcia, and looked at the steward. “Have you seen your mistress?” she asked.
“The last I did see of her, she was going into her sleeping cubicle,” he said. “Shall I ask her maid?” ,
“No, don’t bother.” Marcia glanced sideways at Sulla. “I think we ought to see her together right now, Lucius Cornelius. Maybe if we tell her what will happen unless she pulls herself out of her pigsty, she might see reason.”
And so they found Julilla, twisted and still. Her fine woolen draperies had acted like a blotter and soaked up much of the blood, so that she was clad in wet, rusting scarlet, a Nereid out of some volcano.
Marcia clutched at Sulla’s arm, staggering; he put the arm about her and held her upright.
But Quintus Marcius Rex’s daughter made the effort and brought herself under iron control. “This is one solution I did not expect,” she said levelly.
“Nor I,” said Sulla, used to slaughter.
“What did you say to her?”
Sulla shook his head. “Nothing to provoke this, as far as I can remember—we can probably find out from the servants; they heard her half of it at least.”
“No, I do not think it advisable to ask them,” Marcia said, and turned suddenly within Sulla’s arm, seeking shelter against his body. “In many ways, Lucius Cornelius, this is the best solution of all. I’d rather the children suffered the shock of her death than the slow disillusionment of her drinking. They’re young enough to forget now. But any later, and they’d remember.” She laid her cheek against Sulla’s chest. “Yes, it’s by far the best way.” A tear oozed beneath her closed eyelid.
“Come, I’ll take you to your room,” he said, guiding her out of the blood-drenched cubicle. “I never even thought of my sword, fool that I am!”
“Why should you?”
“Hindsight,” said Sulla, who knew exactly why Julilla had found his sword and used it; she had looked through his study windows at his reunion with Metrobius. Marcia was right. This was the best way by far. And he hadn’t had to do it.