The Grass Crown (47 page)

“I think so. Quintus Mucius Scaevola has a daughter who will come of age in four or five years. I’ve made overtures, and he isn’t averse.” Marius laughed irrepressibly. “I may be an Italian hayseed with no Greek, Lucius Cornelius, but it’s a rare Roman aristocrat who can resist the size of the fortune Young Marius will inherit one day!”

“Too true!” said Sulla, laughing just as hard. “So it only remains for me to find a wife for Young Sulla—and not one of Aurelia’s daughters!”

“How about one of Caepio’s daughters?” asked Marius, full of mischief. “Think of all that gold!”

“It’s a thought, Gaius Marius. There are two of them, aren’t there? Living with Marcus Livius?”

“That’s right. Julia was rather keen on the elder one for Young Marius, but I’m of the opinion that a Mucia will be much better for him politically.” For once in his life, Marius dredged up a morsel of diplomacy. “You’re differently situated, Lucius Cornelius. A Servilia Caepionis would be ideal.”

“I agree, she would. I’ll see to it.”

But the question of a wife for Young Sulla did not remain in Sulla’s mind beyond the moment in which he informed his daughter that she was to be betrothed to the son of Quintus Pompeius Rufus. Cornelia Sulla demonstrated only too clearly that she was Julilla’s child by opening her mouth and screaming, and going on screaming.

“Screech all you like,” said Sulla coldly, “it won’t make any difference, my girl. You’ll do as you’re told and marry whomsoever I say you’ll marry.”

“Go away, Lucius Cornelius!” cried Aelia, wringing her hands. “Your son is asking to see you. Leave me to deal with Cornelia Sulla, please!”

So Sulla went to see his son, still angry.

Young Sulla’s cold had not improved; the boy was still in bed, still plagued by aches and pains, still coughing up muck.

“This has got to stop, lad,” said Sulla lightly, sitting on the edge of the bed and kissing his son’s hot brow. “I know the weather is cold, but this room isn’t.”

“Who’s screaming?” asked Young Sulla, breath rasping.

“Your sister, Mormolyce take her!”

“Why?” asked Young Sulla, who was very fond of Cornelia Sulla.

“I’ve just told her that she’s to marry the son of Quintus Pompeius Rufus. But it appears she thought she was going to marry her cousin Young Marius.”

“Oh! We all thought she was going to marry Young Marius!” exclaimed Sulla’s son, shocked.

“No one ever suggested it, no one ever wanted it. Your avus Caesar was against marriage between any of you. Gaius Marius agrees. And so do I agree.” Sulla frowned. “Does this mean you have ideas of marrying one of the Julias?”

“What, Lia or Ju-ju?” Young Sulla laughed merrily until the activity provoked a bout of coughing only assuaged when he brought up a mass of foul-smelling sputum. “No, tata,” he said when he could, “I can’t think of anything worse! Whom am I to marry?”

“I don’t know, my son. One thing I promise you, how-ever. I will ask you first if you like her,” said Sulla.

“You didn’t ask Cornelia.”

Sulla shrugged. “She’s a girl. Girls don’t get offered choices or favors. They just do as they’re told. The only reason a paterfamilias puts up with the expense of girls is so that he can use them to advance his own career, or his son’s. Otherwise, why feed and clothe them for eighteen years? They have to be well dowered, yet nothing comes back to the father’s family. No, my son, a girl’s only use is for advantage. Though, listening to your sister scream, I’m not sure we didn’t do things better in the old days, when we just chucked girl-babies in the Tiber.”

“It doesn’t seem fair, tata.”

“Why?” asked tata, surprised at his son’s continuing obtuseness. “Females are inferiors, young Lucius Cornelius. They weave their patterns in fabrics, not on the loom of time. They don’t have any importance in the world. They don’t make history. They don’t govern. We look after them because it is our duty. We shield them from worry, from poverty, from responsibility—that’s why, provided they don’t die in childbirth, they all live longer than we men do. In return, we demand obedience and respect from them.”

“I see,” said Young Sulla, accepting this explanation in the light it was tendered—a simple statement of pure fact.

“And now I must go. I have something to do,” said Sulla, getting up. “Are you eating?”

“A little, but it’s hard to keep food down.”

“I’ll be back later.”

“Don’t forget, tata. I won’t be asleep.”

First he had to behave normally, go off with Aelia to dinner at the house of Quintus Pompeius Rufus, very eager to commence friendly relations. Luckily Sulla had not indicated he would bring Cornelia Sulla along to meet the son; she had ceased her screaming, but, said Aelia, looking flustered, she had retired to her bed and announced she wouldn’t eat.

Nothing else poor Cornelia Sulla might have thought to do in protest could have affected Sulla the way that news did; the eyes he turned on Aelia were like bitter stars, blazing ice.

“That will stop!” he snapped, and was gone before Aelia could prevent him, down to Cornelia Sulla’s sleeping cubicle.

He came through the door and hauled the weeping girl out of her narrow bed in the same stride, heedless of her fear, dragging her up from the floor onto her toes with his fingers locked in her hair. Again and again his hand cracked across her face. She didn’t scream, she emitted shrieks so high-pitched they were scarcely audible, more terrified by the look on her father’s face than by his physical abuse.

Perhaps twelve times he struck her, then threw her away like a stuffed doll, so angry he didn’t care if the violence of his thrust killed her.

“Don’t do it, girl,” he said then, very softly. “Don’t you try to bluff me with starvation! As far as I’m concerned, it would be good riddance! Your mother almost died because she wouldn’t eat. But let me tell you, you won’t do it to me! Starve yourself to death, or choke on the food I’ll have forced down your throat with a lot less consideration than a farmer gives to his goose! You will marry young Quintus Pompeius Rufus, and you’ll do it with a smile on your face and a song on your lips, or I’ll kill you. Do you hear me? I will kill you, Cornelia.”

Her face was on fire, her eyes blackened, her lips swollen and split, her nose running blood, but the pain in her heart was far, far worse. In all her life she hadn’t known this kind of rage existed, or feared her father, or worried for her own safety. “I hear you, Father,” she whispered.

Aelia was waiting outside the door, tears running down her cheeks, but when she went to enter Sulla grabbed her cruelly by one arm, and pulled her away.

“Please, Lucius Cornelius, please!” Aelia moaned, the wife in her terrified, the mother in her anguished.

“Leave her alone,” he said.

“I must go to her! She needs me!”

“She’ll stay where she is, and no one will go to her.”

“Then let me stay home, please!” Try though she did to stem her tears, she was weeping harder.

Sulla’s towering rage toppled, he could hear his heart beating, tears were close to the surface in him too—tears of reaction, not tears of grief. “All right, then stay home,” he said harshly, and drew a quivering breath. “I shall represent the family joy at the prospect of this marriage. But don’t go to her, Aelia, or I’ll deal with you as I’ve dealt with her.”

Thus he went alone to the house of Quintus Pompeius Rufus, on the Palatine, but overlooking the Forum Romanum; and made a good impression upon the delighted Pompeius Rufus family, including its women, who were tickled at the thought that young Quintus would be marrying a patrician Julio-Cornelian. Young Quintus was a handsome fellow, green-eyed and auburn-haired, tall and graceful, but it didn’t take Sulla long to estimate his intelligence at about half that of his father. Which was all to the good; he would fill the consulship because his father had, he would breed red-haired children with Cornelia Sulla, and he would be a good husband, as faithful as considerate. In fact, thought Sulla, smiling in private amusement, little though his daughter would admit it did she know, young Quintus Pompeius Rufus would be far pleasanter and more tractable to live with than that spoiled and arrogant pup Gaius Marius had spawned.

Since the Pompeii Rufi were still at heart country folk, the dinner was well over before darkness fell, even though Rome was in the depths of seasonal winter. Knowing he had one more task to perform before he went home, Sulla stood atop the Ringmakers’ Steps leading down to the Via Nova and the Forum Romanum, and looked into the distance frowningly. Too far to walk out to see Metrobius, and too dangerous too. Where else might he fill in an hour or so?

The answer came the moment his eyes rested upon the smoky declivity of the Subura—Aurelia, of course. Gaius Julius Caesar was off again governing Asia Province. Provided he made sure Aurelia was adequately chaperoned, why shouldn’t he pay her a visit? He ran down the steps with the ease and suppleness of a man far junior to himself in years, and strode off toward the Clivus Orbius, the quickest way to the Subura Minor and that triangular insula of Aurelia’s.

Eutychus admitted him, but a little reluctantly; Aurelia’s manner was much the same.

“Are your children up?” Sulla asked.

She smiled wryly. “Unfortunately, yes. I seem to have bred owls, not larks. They hate to go to bed, and they hate to get up.”

“Then give them a treat,” he said, sitting down on a well-padded and comfortable couch. “Invite them to join us, Aurelia. There are no better chaperones than one’s children.”

Her face lightened. “You are quite right, Lucius Cornelius.”

So their mother settled the children in a far corner of the room, the two girls grown tall because they were nearing puberty, and the boy grown tall because that was his fate, always to be much taller than the rest.

“It’s good to see you,” Sulla said, ignoring the wine the steward put at his elbow.

“And good to see you.”

“Better than last time, eh?”

She laughed. “Oh, that! I was in serious trouble with my husband, Lucius Cornelius.”

“I understood that! Why? No loyaler or chaster wife ever lived than you, as I have good cause to know.”

“Oh, he didn’t think I had been disloyal, any more than he believed I had been unchaste. The trouble between Gaius Julius and me is more—theoretical,” said Aurelia.

“Theoretical?” asked Sulla, smiling broadly.

“He doesn’t like the neighborhood. He doesn’t like my acting as a landlady. He doesn’t like Lucius Decumius. And he doesn’t like the way I’m raising our children, who can all speak the local cant as well as they can speak Palatine Latin. They also speak about three different kinds of Greek, plus Aramaic, Hebrew, Arvernian Gallic, Aeduan Gallic, Tolosan Gallic, and Lycian.”

“Lycian?”

“We have a Lycian family on the third floor these days, you see. The children go wherever they like, not to mention that they pick up languages the way you or I might pick up pebbles on a beach. I didn’t realize the Lycians had a language of their own, and incredibly antique too. It’s akin to Pisidian.”

“Did you have a very bad argument with Gaius Julius?”

She shrugged, pulled her mouth down. “Bad enough.”

“Made worse by the fact that you stood up for yourself in a most unladylike, un-Roman-woman way,” said Sulla tenderly, fresh from assaulting his own daughter for doing exactly that. But Aurelia was Aurelia, she couldn’t be measured by any standards save her own—as many people said, with admiration rather than condemnation, so strong was her spell.

“I’m afraid I did stand up for myself,” she said, not seeming very sorry. “In fact, I stood up for myself so well that my husband lost.” Her eyes were suddenly sorrowful. “And that, as I’m sure you will appreciate, Lucius Cornelius, was the worst part about our difference of opinion. No man of his status likes losing a fight with his wife. So he retreated into a kind of aloof disinterest and wouldn’t even consider a re-match, for all my prodding. Oh, dear!”

“Has he fallen out of love with you?”

“I don’t think so. I wish he had! It would make life a great deal easier for him when he’s here,” she said.

“So you wear the toga these days.”

“I am afraid so. Purple border and all.”

His lips thinned, he nodded wisely. “You should have been a man, Aurelia. I never saw it until now, but it’s a truth.”

“You’re right, Lucius Cornelius.”

“So he was glad to go away to Asia Province, and you were glad to see him go, eh?”

“You’re right again, Lucius Cornelius.”

He passed then to his trip to the East, and gained one more auditor; Young Caesar scrambled up beside his mother on her couch, and listened avidly as Sulla recounted the story of his meetings with Mithridates, Tigranes, and the Parthian envoys.

The boy was almost nine years old. And more beautiful than ever, Sulla noted, unable to take his eyes off that fair face. So like Young Sulla! Yet not like Young Sulla at all. He had emerged from his questioning phase and passed into his listening phase, and sat leaning against Aurelia, eyes shining, lips parted, his face a constantly changing panorama reflecting his mind, his body still.

At the end he had questions to ask, asking them with more intelligence than Scaurus, more education than Marius, more interest than either. How does he know all this? asked Sulla of himself, finding himself speaking with an eight-year-old on precisely the same level as he had with Scaurus and Marius.

“What do you think will happen?” Sulla asked, not because he patronized, but because he was intrigued.

“War with Mithridates and Tigranes,” said Young Caesar.

“Not war with the Parthians?”

“Not for a long time to come. But if we win a war against Mithridates and Tigranes, it brings Pontus and Armenia within our fold, and then the Parthians will start to worry about Rome the way Mithridates and Tigrane’s do at the moment.”

Sulla nodded. “Quite right, Young Caesar.”

For a further hour they talked, then Sulla rose to go, ruffling Young Caesar’s hair in farewell. Aurelia walked with him to the door, shaking her head slightly to the hovering Eutychus, who began to shepherd children bedward.