The Grass Crown (9 page)

“My father being dead, Quintus Caecilius, I can’t ask him. Certainly I never remember his being sober enough while he was alive to talk about family customs.”

“Oh well, doesn’t matter.” Metellus Numidicus thought for a moment, then said, “On the subject of names, I suppose you know that—that Italian always called me Piggle-wiggle?”

“I have heard Gaius Marius use it, Quintus Caecilius,” said Sulla gravely, and leaned over to fill both the beautiful glass goblets from an equally beautiful glass flagon; how fortunate that Piggle-wiggle had a penchant for glass!

“Disgusting!” said Metellus Numidicus, slurring the word.

“Absolutely disgusting,” agreed Sulla, feeling an enormous sense of well-being flow through him. Piggle-wiggle, Piggle-wiggle.

“It took me a long time to live that name down.”

“I’m not surprised, Quintus Caecilius,” said Sulla innocently.

“Nursery slang! He couldn’t even call me a fully fledged cunnus, that—that Italian.”

Suddenly Metellus Numidicus struggled to sit up, one hand to his brow, drawing audible breaths. “Oh, so dizzy! Can’t—seem to—catch my—breath!”

“Draw some more big deep ones, Quintus Caecilius.”

Obediently Metellus Numidicus labored, then gasped, “I—do not—feel well!”

Sulla slid toward the back of his couch, where his shoes lay. “I’ll get you a basin, shall I?”

“Servants! Call—servants!” His hands went to his chest, he fell back. “My—lungs!”

By now Sulla had come round to the front of the couch, and leaned across the table before it. “Are you sure it’s your lungs, Quintus Caecilius?”

Metellus Numidicus writhed, half-reclining, one hand still clutching at his chest, the other, fingers curled into claws, crawling across the couch toward Sulla. “So—dizzy! Can’t—breathe! Lungs!”

Sulla bellowed, “Help! Quickly, help!”

The room filled with slaves immediately; calmly efficient, he sent several for doctors and set others to propping Metellus Numidicus up on bolsters, for he would not lie down.

“It won’t be long, Quintus Caecilius,” he said gently as he sat down on the front edge of the couch, kicking the table aside with his shod foot; both the goblets fell to the floor along with the wine and water flagons, and broke into small pieces. “Here,” he said to the straining, bright-faced, terrified Metellus Numidicus, “take my hand.” And to one dumbfounded servant standing helplessly by, “Clean up that mess, would you? I wouldn’t want anyone cut.”

He remained holding Metellus Numidicus’s hand while the slave removed the shards and splinters from the floor and mopped up the liquid, almost entirely water; and he was still holding Metellus Numidicus’s hand when the room filled up with yet more people, doctors and their acolytes; and by the time Metellus Pius the Piglet arrived, Metellus Numidicus would not let go Sulla’s hand even to extend it to his indefatigable and beloved son.

So while Sulla held Metellus Numidicus’s hand and the Piglet wept inconsolably, the doctors went to work.

“The potion of hydromel with hyssop and crushed caper root,” said Apollodorus of Sicily, still reigning supreme on the best side of the Palatine. “I think we will blood him too. Praxis, my lancet, please.”

But Metellus Numidicus was too busy breathing to swallow the honeyed potion; his blood when the vein was opened streamed out a vivid scarlet.

“It is a vein, I am sure it is a vein!” said Apollodorus Siculus to himself, then said to the other physicians, “How bright the blood is!”

“He fights us so, Apollodorus, it is no wonder the blood is bright,” said Publius Sulpicius Solon the Athenian Greek. “Do you think—a plaster on the chest?”

“Yes, it must be a plaster on the chest,” said Apollodorus of Sicily, looking grave, and snapping his fingers imperiously at his chief assistant. “Praxis, the barbatum plaster!”

Still Metellus Numidicus struggled for breath, beat at his chest with his free hand, looked with clouding eyes at his son, refused to lie down, clung to Sulla’s hand.

“He is not dark blue in the face,” said Apollodorus Siculus in his stilted Greek to Metellus Pius and Sulla, “and that I do not understand! Otherwise, he has all the signs of a morbid acuteness in the lungs.” He nodded to where his assistant was smearing a black and sticky mess thickly upon a square of woolen fabric. “This is the best poultice, it will draw the noxious elements out. Scraped verdigris—a properly separated litharge of lead—alum—dried pitch—dried pine resin—all mixed to the right consistency with vinegar and oil. See, it is ready!”

Sure enough, the poultice was finished. Apollodorus of Sicily smoothed it upon the bared chest himself, and stood with praiseworthy calm to watch the barbatum plaster do its work.

But it could not cure, any more than the bloodletting or the potion; slowly Metellus Numidicus relinquished his hold on life, and on Lucius Cornelius Sulla’s hand. Face a bright red, eyes no longer capable of seeing, he passed from paralysis to coma, and so died.

As Sulla left the room, he heard the little Sicilian physician say timidly to Metellus Pius, “Domine, there should be an autopsy,” and heard the devastated Piglet say:

“What, so you Greek incompetents can butcher him as well as kill him? No! My father will go to his pyre unmolested!”

His eyes on Sulla’s back, the Piglet pushed between the cluster of doctors and followed Sulla out into the atrium.

“Lucius Cornelius!”

Slowly Sulla turned, his face when he presented it to Metellus Pius a picture of sorrow; the tears welled in his eyes, slipped down his cheeks unchecked. “My dear Quintus Pius!” he said.

Shock still kept the Piglet on his feet, and his own weeping had lessened. “I can’t believe it! My father is dead!”

“Very sudden,” said Sulla, shaking his head. A sob burst from him. “Very sudden! He was so well, Quintus Pius! I called to pay him my respects and he invited me to dinner. We had such a pleasant time! And then, when dinner was over—this!”

“Oh, why, why, why?” The Piglet’s tears began to increase again. “He was just home, he wasn’t old!”

Very tenderly Sulla gathered Metellus Pius to him, pressed the jerking head into his left shoulder, his right hand stroking the Piglet’s hair. But the eyes looking past that cradled head reflected the washed-out satisfaction following a great and physical emotion. What could he possibly do in the future to equal that amazing experience? For the first time he had inserted himself completely into the extremis of a dying, been much more than merely its perpetrator; he had been its minister as well.

The steward emerged from the triclinium to find the son of his dead master being comforted by a man who shone like Apollo. Then he blinked, shook his head. Imagination.

“I ought to go,” said Sulla to the steward. “Here, take him. And send for the rest of the family.”

Outside on the Clivus Victoriae, Sulla stood for long enough to allow his eyes to get used to the darkness. Laughing softly to himself, he moved off in the direction of the temple of Magna Mater. When he saw the barred maw of a drain he dropped his empty little bottle into its blackness.

“Vale, Piggle-wiggle, Piggle-wiggle!” he howled, and raised his hands to clutch at the sullen sky. “Oh, I feel better!”

“Jupiter!” said Gaius Marius, putting Sulla’s letter down to stare at his wife.

“What is it?”

“Piggle-wiggle is dead.”

The refined Roman matron her son thought would die if she heard anything cruder than Ecastor! didn’t turn a hair; she had been used to hearing Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus referred to as Piggle-wiggle since the first days of her marriage. “Oh, that’s too bad,” she said, not knowing what her husband wanted her to say.

“Too bad! It’s almost too good—too good to be true!” Marius picked up the scroll again and spread it out to mumble his way through his initial reading. Once he had deciphered its endless scrawl, he read it out more loudly and coherently to Julia, his voice betraying his elation.

The whole of Rome turned out for the funeral, which was the biggest I for one can remember—but then, I was not much interested in funerals when Scipio Aemilianus was popped on his pyre.

The Piglet is beside himself with grief, and has definitely branded himself Pius forevermore by weeping and wailing from one gate of Rome to the next. The Caecilius Metellus ancestors were a homely lot if their imagines are anything to go by, which I presume they are. Some of the actors wearing them hopped and skipped and jumped like some sort of peculiar hybrid frog-cricket-deer, and I found myself wondering just where the Caecilii Metelli came from. An odd breeding ground, at any rate.

The Piglet clings to me these days, probably because I was there when Piggle-wiggle died, and—since his dear tata wouldn’t leave go my hand—the Piglet is convinced all differences between me and Piggle-wiggle were at an end. I didn’t tell him my invitation to dinner was a spur of the moment thing. One fact of interest—all through the time his tata was dying and even afterward, the Piglet never stammered once. Mind you, he only developed his speech impediment after the battle of Arausio, so one must assume it is a nervous tic of the tongue rather than an innate defect. He says it bothers him most these days when he remembers it, or he has to give a formal speech. I keep visualizing him conducting a religious ceremony! How hard I’d laugh to see everybody shifting from one foot to another while the Piglet tripped over his tongue and was forced to start all over again.

I write this on the eve of departing for Nearer Spain, and what hopefully will be a good war. From the reports, the Celtiberians are absolutely boiling and the Lusitani creating havoc in the Further Province, where my remote Cornelian cousin Dolabella has had a trifling success or two without stamping rebellion out.

The tribunes of the soldiers have been elected, and Quintus Sertorius goes with Titus Didius too. Almost like old times. Except that our leader is a different—and a less outstanding—New Man than Gaius Marius. I shall write whenever there is news, but in return I expect you to write and tell me what sort of man is King Mithridates.

“What was Lucius Cornelius doing, dining with Quintus Caecilius?” asked Julia curiously.

“Currying favor, I suspect,” said Marius gruffly.

“Oh, Gaius Marius, no!”

“And why shouldn’t he, Julia? I don’t blame him. Piggle-wiggle is—was—in high fettle, and his clout is certainly greater than mine these days. Under the circumstances, poor Lucius Cornelius can’t attach himself to Scaurus, and I also understand why he has not tried to attach himself to Catulus Caesar.” Marius gave a sigh, shook his head. “However, Julia, at some time in the future I predict that Lucius Cornelius will mend all his fences, and stand on excellent terms with the lot of them.”

“Then he is no friend to you!”

“Probably not.”

“I don’t understand it! You and he were so close.”

“Yes,” said Marius, speaking deliberately. “However, my dear, it wasn’t the closeness of two men drawn together by a natural affinity of mind and heart. Old Caesar Grandfather felt much the same about him as I do—one couldn’t have a better man at one’s side in a tight spot, or when there’s work to be done. It’s easy to maintain pleasant relations with such a man. But I doubt that Lucius Cornelius will ever enjoy the kind of friendship that I enjoy with Publius Rutilius, for example. You know, when one loves the faults and quirks with the same affection as one does the splendid attributes. Lucius Cornelius hasn’t got it in him to sit in silence on a bench with a friend, just relishing being together. That type of behavior is foreign to his nature.”

“What is his nature, Gaius Marius? I’ve never known.”

But Marius shook his head, laughed. “No one knows. Even after all our years together, I couldn’t begin to guess at it.”

“Oh, I think you could,” said Julia shrewdly, “but I don’t think you want to. At least to me.” She moved to sit beside him. “If he has a friend at all, it’s Aurelia.”

“So I’ve noticed,” said Marius dryly.

“Now don’t go assuming there’s anything between them, because there isn’t! It’s just that I think if Lucius Cornelius opens his innermost self to anyone, it’s to her.”

“Huh,” said Marius, ending the conversation.

They were in Halicarnassus for the winter, having arrived in Asia Minor too late in the season to attempt the journey overland from the Aegean coast to Pessinus. In Athens they had lingered too long because they loved it so, and from there they went to Delphi to visit Apollo’s precinct, though Marius had refused to consult the Pythoness.

Surprised, Julia had asked him why.

“No man can badger the gods,” he said. “I’ve had my share of prophecies. If I ask for more revelations of the future, the gods will turn away from me.”

“Couldn’t you ask on behalf of Young Marius?”

“No,” said Gaius Marius.

They had also visited Epidauros in the near Peloponnese, and there, after dutifully admiring the buildings and the exquisite sculptures of Thrasymedes of Paros, Marius took the sleep diagnosis administered by the priests of Asklepios. He had drunk his potion obediently, then gone to the dormitories lying near the great temple, and slept the night away. Unfortunately he could remember no dreams, so the best the priests could do was to instruct him to reduce his weight, take more exercise, and do no stressful mental work.

“Quacks, if you ask me,” said Marius scornfully, having given the god a costly bejeweled golden goblet as thanks.

“Sensible men, if you ask me,” said Julia, eyes fixed upon his expanding waistline.

It was therefore October before they sailed from the Piraeus in a large ship which plied a regular route between Greece and Ephesus. But hilly Ephesus hadn’t pleased Gaius Marius, who huffed and puffed across its cobbles, and very quickly procured his family room on a ship sailing south to Halicarnassus.

Here, in perhaps the most beautiful of all the Aegean port cities of the Roman Asia Province, Marius settled down for the winter in a hired villa, well staffed, and equipped with a heated bath of seawater; for though the sun shone for much of the time, it was too cold to bathe. The mighty walls, the towers and the fortresses, the imposing public buildings all made it seem both safe and rather Roman, though Rome did not own a structure as wonderful as the Mausoleum, the tomb his sister-wife Artemisia had erected, inconsolable in her grief, after King Mausolus died.

Late the following spring, the pilgrimage to Pessinus got under way, not without protest from Julia and Young Marius, who wanted to stay on the sea for the summer; that they lost the battle was a foregone conclusion. From invaders to pilgrims, everyone followed the route along the valley of the Maeander River between coastal Asia Minor and central Anatolia. As did Marius and his family, marveling at the prosperity and the sophistication of the various districts they passed through. After leaving the fascinating crystal formations and mineral spas of Hierapolis, where black wool was treated and its coveted color fixed by the salts in the water, they crossed the immensely tall and rugged mountains—still following the Maeander—into Phrygia’s forests and wildernesses.

Pessinus, however, lay at the back of an upland plain devoid of encroaching woodlands, but green with wheat when they reached it. Like most of the great religious sanctuaries of inner Anatolia, their guide explained, the temple of the Great Mother at Pessinus owned vast tracts of land and whole armies of slaves, and was rich enough and self-contained enough to function like any other state. The only difference was that the priests governed in the name of the Goddess, and preserved the sanctuary’s wealth to entrench the Goddess’s power.

Expecting a Delphi situated amid stunning mountains, they were amazed to discover that Pessinus lay below the level of its plain, down in a brilliantly white, chalky, steep-sided gulch. The precinct lay at its northern end, narrower and less fertile than the miles meandering southward, and was built athwart a spring-fed stream which eventually fed into the big river Sangarius. Town and temple and sanctuary buildings oozed antiquity, though the present structures were Greek in style and date, and the great temple, perched on a rise in the valley floor, plunged down at its front abruptly in a three-quarter circle of steps, upon which the pilgrims sat to have their congress with the priests.

“Our navel-stone you have in Rome, Gaius Marius,” said the archigallos Battaces, “given to you freely in your time of need. For that reason, when Hannibal fled to Asia Minor, he came nowhere near Pessinus.”

Remembering Publius Rutilius Rufus’s letter about the visit of Battaces and his underlings to Rome at the time when the German invasion threatened, Marius tended to view the man with some amusement, an attitude Battaces was quick to pick up.

“Is it my castrated state makes you smile?” he asked.

Marius blinked. “I didn’t think you were, archigallos.”

“One cannot serve Kubaba Cybele and remain intact, Gaius Marius. Even her consort, Attis, was required to make that great sacrifice,” said Battaces.

“I thought Attis was cut because he strayed to another woman,” said Marius, feeling he had to say something, and not willing to become enmeshed in a discussion about amputated gonads, though the priest clearly wanted to discuss his condition.

“No!” said Battaces. “That story is a Greek embroidery. Only in Phrygia do we keep our worship pure, and with it, our knowledge of the Goddess. We are her true followers, to us she came from Carchemish aeons ago.” He walked from the sunlight into the portico of the great temple, dimming the brilliance of his cloth-of-gold garments, the glitter of his many jewels.

In the Goddess’s cella they stood, it appeared so Marius could admire her statue.

“Solid gold,” said Battaces complacently.

“Sure of that?” asked Marius, remembering how the guide at Olympia had told him about the technique used to make Zeus.

“Absolutely.”

Life-sized, it stood upon a high marble plinth, and showed the Goddess seated upon a short bench; to either side of her sat a maneless lion, and her hands rested on their heads. She wore a high, crownlike hat, a thin robe which showed off the beauty of her breasts, and a girdle. Beyond the lion on the left stood two child shepherds, one blowing a set of double pipes, the other plucking a large lyre. To the right of the other lion stood Kubaba Cybele’s consort, Attis, leaning on a shepherd’s staff, his head covered by the Phrygian cap, a soft conical affair which rose to a rounded point, and flopped over to one side; he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt tied at his neck but open to display a well-muscled belly, and his long trousers were slit up the front of each leg, then held together at intervals with buttons.

“Interesting,” said Marius, who didn’t consider it at all beautiful, solid gold or not.

“You do not admire it.”

“I daresay that’s because I’m a Roman, archigallos, rather than a Phrygian.” Turning away, Marius paced back down the cella toward its great bronze doors. “Why is this Asian goddess so concerned with Rome?” he asked.

“She has been for a long time, Gaius Marius. Otherwise, she would never have consented to giving Rome her navel-stone.”

“Yes, yes, I know that! But it doesn’t answer my question,” said Marius, growing testy.

“Kubaba Cybele does not reveal her reasons, even to her priests,” said Battaces, once more a vision to hurt the eyes, for he had moved down to the three-quarter circle of steps, bathed in sun. He sat down, patting the marble slab in an invitation to Marius to be seated. “However, it would seem that she feels Rome will continue to increase in importance throughout the world, and perhaps one day have dominion over Pessinus. You have sheltered her in Rome now for over one hundred years as Magna Mater. Of all her foreign temples, it is her most favored one. The great precinct in the Piraeus of Athens—and the one in Pergamum, for that matter—do not seem to concern her half as much. I think she simply loves Rome.”

“Well, good for her!” said Marius heartily.

Battaces winced, closed his eyes. A sigh, a shrug, and then he pointed to where beyond the steps there stood the wall and coping of a round well. “Is there anything you yourself would care to ask the Goddess?”

But Marius shook his head. “What, roar down that thing and wait for some disembodied voice to answer? No.”

“It is how she answers all questions put to her.”

“No disrespect to Kubaba Cybele, archigallos, but the gods have done well by me in the matter of prophecies, and I do not think it wise to ask them more,” said Marius.

“Then let us sit here in the sun for a while, Gaius Marius, and listen to the wind,” said Battaces, concealing his acute disappointment; he had arranged some important oracular answers.

“I don’t suppose,” said Marius suddenly after several moments, “that you’d know how best I can contact the King of Pontus? In other words, do you know where he is? I’ve written to him at Amaseia, but not a sign of a reply have I had, and that was eight months ago. Nor did my second letter reach him.”

“He’s always moving about, Gaius Marius,” said the priest easily. “It’s possible he hasn’t been in Amaseia this year.”

“What, doesn’t he have his mail forwarded on?”

“Anatolia is not Rome, or Roman territory,” said Battaces. “Even King Mithridates’s courts do not know whereabouts he is unless he notifies them. He rarely does so.”