Fortune's Favorites (37 page)

Burgundus listened to this impassively, then revealed that he could think. “Sell his horse,” he said, and began to weep. “Oh, it will break his heart! But there's nothing else.”

“Good boy, Burgundus!” said Ria briskly. “We'll be able to sell the horse easily. Not for what it's worth, but for enough to buy the sled, some oxen, and payment to Priscus and Gratidia for your lodging-even at the rate you eat.”

It was done, and done quickly. Bucephalus was led off down the lane by its delighted new owner, who couldn't believe his luck at getting an animal like this for nine thousand sesterces, and wasn't about to linger in case old Ria changed her mind.

The sled-which was actually a wagon complete with wheels over which polished planks with upcurving ends had been fixed-cost four thousand sesterces and the two oxen which pulled it a further thousand each, though the owner indicated that he would be willing to buy the equipage back in the summer for four thousand sesterces complete, leaving him with a profit of two thousand.

“You may get it back before then,” said Ria grimly.

She and Burgundus did their best to make Caesar comfortable in the sled, piling him round with wraps.

“Now make sure you turn him over every so often! Otherwise his bones will come through his flesh-he hasn't enough of it left, poor young man. In this weather your food will stay fresh far longer, that's a help, and you must try to give him milk from my ewe as well as water,” she lectured crabbily. “Oh, I wish I could come with you! But I'm too old.”

She stood looking over the white and rolling meadow behind her house until Burgundus and the sled finally disappeared; the ewe she had donated in the hope that Caesar would gain sufficient sustenance to survive. Then, when she could see them no more, she went into her house and prepared to offer up one of her doves to his family's goddess, Venus, and a dozen eggs to Tellus and Sol Indiges, who were the mother and father of all Italian things.

The journey to Priscus and Gratidia took eight days, for the oxen were painfully slow. A bonus for Caesar, who was hardly disturbed by the motion of his peculiar conveyance as it slid along the frozen surface of the snow very smoothly, thanks to many applications of beeswax to its runners. They climbed from the valley of the Himella where Nersae lay beside that swift stream along a road which traversed the steep ascent back and forth, each turn seeing them a little higher, and then on the other side did the same thing as they descended to the Aternus valley.

The odd thing was that Caesar began to improve almost as soon as he began to chill a little after that warm house. He drank some milk (Burgundus's hands were so big that he found it agony milking the ewe, luckily an old and patient animal) each time Burgundus turned him, and even chewed slowly upon a piece of hard cheese the German gave him to suck. But the languor persisted, and he couldn't speak. They encountered no one along the way so there was no possibility of shelter at night, but the hard freeze continued, giving them days of cloudless blue skies and nights of a heaven whitened by stars in cloudy tangles.

The coma lifted; the sleepiness which had preceded it came back, and gradually that too lifted. In one way, reasoned the slow alien mind of Burgundus, that seemed to be an improvement. But Caesar looked as if some awful underworld creature had drained him of all his blood, and could hardly lift his hand. He did speak once, having noticed a terrible omission.

“Where is Bucephalus?” he asked. “I can't see Bucephalus!”

“We had to leave Bucephalus behind in Nersae, Caesar. You can see for yourself what this road is like. Bucephalus couldn't have managed. But you mustn't worry. He's safe with Ria.” There. That seemed better to Burgundus than the truth, especially when he saw that Caesar believed him.

Priscus and Gratidia lived on a small farm some miles from Amiternum. They were about Ria's age, and had little money; both the sons who would have contributed to a greater prosperity had been killed during the Italian War, and there were no girls. So when they had read Ria's letter and Burgundus handed them the three thousand sesterces which were all now remaining, they took in the fugitives gladly.

“Only if his fever goes up I'm nursing him outside,” said Burgundus, “because as soon as he left Ria's house and got a bit cold, he started to get better.” He indicated the sled and oxen. “You can have this too. If Caesar lives, he won't want it.”

Would Caesar live? The three who looked after him had no idea, for the days passed and he changed but little. Sometimes the wind blew and it snowed for what seemed like forever, then the weather would break and snap colder again, but Caesar seemed not to notice. The fever had diminished and the coma with it, yet marked improvement never came, nor did he cease to have that bloodless look.

Toward the end of April a thaw set in and promised to turn into spring. It had been, so those in that part of Italy said, the hardest winter in living memory. For Caesar, it was to be the hardest of his life.

“I think,” said Gratidia, who was a cousin of Ria's, “that Caesar will die after all unless he can be moved to a place like Rome, where there are doctors and medicines and foods that we in the mountains cannot hope to produce. His blood has no life in it. That's why he gets no better. I do not know how to remedy him, and you forbid me to fetch someone from Amiternum to see him. So it is high time, Burgundus, that you rode to Rome to tell his mother.”

Without a word the German walked out of the house and began to saddle the Nesaean horse; Gratidia had scarcely the time to press a parcel of food on him before he was away.

“I wondered why I hadn't heard a word,” said Aurelia, white-faced. She bit her lip, began to worry at it with her teeth, as if the stimulus of some tiny pain would help her think. “I must thank you more than I can say, Burgundus. Without you, my son would certainly be dead. And we must get him back to Rome before he does die. Now go and see Cardixa. She and your boys have missed you very much.”

It would not do to approach Sulla again by herself, she knew. If that avenue hadn't worked before the New Year, it would never work now, four months into the New Year. The proscriptions still raged-but with less point these days, it seemed, and the laws were beginning to come; great laws or terrible laws, depending upon whom one spoke to. Sulla was fully occupied.

When Aurelia had learned that Sulla had sent for Marcus Pupius Piso Frugi several days after their interview, and learned too that he had ordered Piso Frugi to divorce Annia because she was Cinna's widow, she had dared to hope for Caesar. But though Piso Frugi had obeyed, had divorced Annia with alacrity, nothing further happened. Ria had written to tell her that the money had been swallowed by one who was named for the size of what he could swallow, and that Caesar and Burgundus were gone; but Ria had not mentioned Caesar's illness, and Aurelia had allowed herself to think all must be well if she heard nothing at all.

“I will go to see Dalmatica,” she decided. “Perhaps another woman can show me how to approach Sulla.”

Of Sulla's wife, who had arrived from Brundisium in December of last year, Rome had seen very little. Some whispered that she was ill, others that Sulla had no time for a private life, and neglected her; though no one whispered that he had replaced her with anyone else. So Aurelia wrote her a short note asking for an interview, preferably at a time when Sulla himself would not be at home. This latter request, she was careful to explain, was only because she did not wish to irritate the Dictator. She also asked if it was possible for Cornelia Sulla to be there, as she wished to pay her respects to someone she had once known very well; perhaps Cornelia Sulla would be able to advise her in her trouble too. For, she ended, what she wished to discuss was a trouble.

Sulla was now living in his rebuilt house overlooking the Circus Maximus; ushered into a place which reeked of fresh, limey plaster and all kinds of paints and had that vulgar look only time erases, Aurelia was conducted through a vast atrium to an even vaster peristyle garden, and finally to Dalmatica's own quarters, which were as large as Aurelia's whole apartment. The two women had met but had never become friends; Aurelia did not move in the Palatine circle to which belonged the wives of Rome's greatest men, for she was the busy landlady of a Suburan insula, and not interested in tittle-tattle over sweet watered wine and little cakes.

Nor, to do her justice, had Dalmatica belonged to that circle. For too many years she had been locked up by her then husband, Scaurus Princeps Senatus, and in consequence had lost her youthful appetite for tittle-tattle over sweet watered wine and little cakes. There had come the exile in Greece- an idyll with Sulla in Ephesus, Smyrna and Pergamum-the twins-and Sulla's awful illness. Too much worry, unhappiness, homesickness, pain. Never again would Caecilia Metella Dalmatica find it in her to cultivate an interest in shopping, comedic actors, petty feuds, scandal and idleness. Besides which, her return to Rome had been something in the nature of a triumph when she found a Sulla who had missed her into loving her more than ever.

However, Sulla did not confide in her, so she knew nothing of the fate of the flamen Dialis; indeed, she didn't know Aurelia was the mother of the flamen Dialis. And Cornelia Sulla only knew that Aurelia had been a part of her childhood, a link to the vague memory of a mother who had drunk too much before she killed herself, and to the vivid memory of her beloved stepmother, Aelia. Her first marriage-to the son of Sulla's colleague in his consulship-had ended in tragedy when her husband died during Forum riots at the time of Sulpicius's tribunate of the plebs-and her second marriage-to Drusus's younger brother, Mamercus-had brought her great contentment.

Each of the women was pleased at how the others looked, and as each was held one of Rome's great beauties, it was fair to deduce that they all felt they had weathered the corroding storms of time better than most. At forty-two, Aurelia was the oldest; Dalmatica was thirty-seven, and Cornelia Sulla a mere twenty-six.

“You have more of a look of your father these days,” said Aurelia to Cornelia Sulla.

The eyes too blue and sparkling to be Sulla's filled with mirth, and their owner burst out laughing. “Oh, don't say that, Aurelia! My skin is perfect, and I do not wear a wig!”

“Poor man,” said Aurelia, “it's very hard for him.”

“It is,” agreed Dalmatica, whose brown beauty was softer than Aurelia remembered, and whose grey eyes were much sadder.

The conversation passed to mundanities for a little while, Dalmatica tactfully steering it away from the more uncomfortable topics her stepdaughter would have chosen. Not a natural talker, Aurelia was content to contribute an occasional mite.

Dalmatica, who had a boy and a girl by her first husband, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, as well as the twins, was preoccupied with her eldest, Aemilia Scaura.

“The prettiest girl!” she said warmly, and looked happy. “We think she's pregnant, but it's a little early to be sure.”

“Whom did she marry?” Aurelia asked; she never kept up with who married whom.

“Manius Acilius Glabrio. They'd been betrothed for years, Scaurus insisted. Traditional ties between the families.”

“He's a nice fellow, Glabrio,” said Aurelia in carefully neutral tones; privately she considered him a loudmouthed and conceited son of a far better father.

“He's a conceited loudmouth,” said Cornelia Sulla flatly.

“Now, now, he wouldn't suit you, but he does suit Aemilia Scaura,” said Dalmatica.

“And how is dear little Pompeia?” asked Aurelia quickly.

Cornelia Sulla beamed. “Absolutely ravishing! She's eight now, and at school.” Because she was Sulla's daughter and had much of his detachment, she went on to say, “Of course she is abysmally stupid! I'll count myself fortunate if she learns enough Latin to write a thank-you note-she'll certainly never manage to learn any Greek! So I'm very glad she's going to be a beauty. It's better that a girl's beautiful than brilliant.”

“It certainly is when it comes to finding a husband, but a decent dowry helps,” said Aurelia dryly.

“Oh, she'll have a decent dowry!” said Pompeia's mother. “Tata has grown to be enormously rich, and she'll inherit a bit from him as well as from the Pompeii Rufi-who have quite changed their tune since I was a widow living in their house! Then they made my life a misery, but now I bask in reflected light from tata. Besides, they're afraid he might proscribe them.”

“Then we'll have to hope that Pompeia finds a very nice husband,” said Dalmatica, and looked at Aurelia in a more serious way. “It is delightful to see you and I hope I can now count on you as a much-needed friend, but I know you didn't come merely to pay your respects-you're too renowned as a sensible woman who minds her own business. What is this trouble, Aurelia? How may I help you?”

The story came out, told in that unsensational and unvarnished style Aurelia had made her own. She could not fault her audience, who listened in complete silence.

“We must do something,” said Dalmatica when the tale was told. She sighed. “Lucius Cornelius has too many things on his mind, and I'm afraid he's not a very warm person.” She shifted, looked uncomfortable. “You were his friend for many years,” she said awkwardly. “I can't help thinking that if you could not influence him, I stand little chance.”

“I trust that isn't true,” said Aurelia stiffly. “He did come to see me from time to time, but I do assure you there was nothing untoward between us. It was not my so-called beauty that drew him. Unromantic though it may sound, what drew him was my common sense.”

“I believe that,” said Dalmatica, smiling.

Cornelia Sulla assumed control. “Well, it's all a long way down the river,” she said briskly, “and it can't influence what we need today. You're quite right, Aurelia, when you say you can't try to see tata on your own again. But you must try to see him-and the sooner, the better. He's between laws at the moment. It will have to be a formal delegation. Priests, male relatives, Vestal Virgins, you. Mamercus will help, I'll talk to him. Who are Caesar's closest relatives not on the proscription lists?”