The Grass Crown by Colleen McCullough
"All you do," had said the son of Sextus Perquitienus, "is hold on to the bones of Mother Earth. And to do that, you just keep a stone in your hand as you swear. You have put yourself in the care of the gods of the Underworld because the Underworld is built of the bones of Mother Earth. Stone, Lucius Cornelius. Stone is bone!"
So when Lucius Cornelius Cinna swore his oath to uphold Sulla's laws, he held his stone tightly clenched in his left hand. Finished, he bent down quickly to the floor of the temple—which, being devoid of a roof, was littered by leaves, little stones, pebbles, twigs—and pretended to pick up his stone.
"And if I break my oath," he said in a clear and carrying voice, "may I be hurled from the Tarpeian Rock even as I hurl this stone away from me!"
The stone flew through the air, clattered against the grubby, peeling wall, and fell back to the bosom of its mother, Earth. No one seemed to grasp the significance of his action; Cinna released his breath in a huge gasp. Obviously the secret known to the son of Sextus Perquitienus was not known to Roman senators. Now when he was accused of breaking his oath, Cinna could explain why it did not bind him. The whole Senate had seen him throw his stone away, he had provided himself with a hundred impeccable witnesses. It was a trick could never work again—oh, but how Metellus Piggle-wiggle might have benefited had he only known of it!
Though he went to see the new consuls inaugurated, Sulla did not stay for the feast, pleading as his excuse that he had to ready himself to leave for Capua on the morrow. However, he was present at the Senate's first official meeting of the New Year in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, so he heard Cinna's short, ominous speech.
"I shall grace my office, not disgrace it," Cinna said. "If I have any misgiving, it is to see the outgoing senior consul lead an army to the East that should have been led by Gaius Marius. Even putting the illegal prosecution and condemnation of Gaius Marius aside, it is still my opinion that the outgoing senior consul ought to remain in Rome to answer charges."
Charges of what? No one quite knew, though the majority of the senators deduced that the charges would be treason, the basis of the charges Sulla's leading his army on Rome. Sulla sighed, resigned to the inevitable. A man without scruples himself, he knew that had he taken that oath, he would have broken it did the need arise. Of Cinna, he hadn't thought the man owned such metal. Now it seemed the man did. What a nuisance!
When he left the Capitol he headed in the direction of Aurelia's insula in the Subura, pondering as he walked how best to deal with Cinna. By the time he arrived he had an answer, so it was with a broad smile on his face that he entered when Eutychus held the door.
The smile faded, however, when he saw Aurelia's face; it was grim and the eyes held no affection.
"Not you too?" he asked, casting himself down on a couch.
"I too." Aurelia sat in a chair facing him. "You ought not to be here, Lucius Cornelius."
"Oh, I'm safe enough," he said casually. "Gaius Julius was settling himself in a cozy corner to enjoy the feast when I left."
"Nor would it worry you if he walked in at this moment," she said. "Well, I had better be adequately chaperoned— for my sake, if not for yours.'' She raised her voice. “Please come and join us, Lucius Decumius!"
The little man emerged from her workroom, face flinty.
"Oh, not you!" said Sulla, disgusted. "If it were not for the likes of you, Lucius Decumius, I would not have needed to lead an army on Rome! How could you fall for all that piffle about Gaius Marius's being fit? He's not fit to lead an army as far as Veii, let alone Asia Province."
"Gaius Marius is cured," said Lucius Decumius, defiant yet defensive. Sulla was not only the one friend of Aurelia's whom he couldn't like, he was also the one man of his own acquaintance whom he feared. There were many things he knew about Sulla that Aurelia did not; but the more he discovered, the less urge he experienced to say a word to anyone about them. It takes one to know one, he had thought to himself a thousand times, and I swear Lucius Cornelius Sulla is as big a villain as I am. Only he has bigger chances to do bigger villainies. And I know he does them too.
"It's not Lucius Decumius to blame for this mess, it's you!" said Aurelia snappishly.
"Rubbish!" said Sulla roundly. "I didn't start this mess! I was minding my own business in Capua and planning to leave for Greece. It's fools like Lucius Decumius to blame— meddling in things they know nothing about, deluding themselves their heroes are made from superior metal than the rest of us! Your friend here recruited a large number of Sulpicius's bully-boys to stuff the Forum and make my daughter a widow—and he mustered more of the same when I entered the Forum Esquilinum wanting nothing more badly than I did peace! I didn't stir up the trouble! I just had to pay for it!"
Angry now, Lucius Decumius stood stiffly, every hackle up. "I believe in the People!" he said, out of his depth and not used to being at someone else's mercy.
"You see? There you go, mouthing idiocies as empty as your Fourth Class mind!" snarled Sulla. " 'I believe in the People' indeed! You'd do better to believe in your betters!"
"Lucius Cornelius, please!" said Aurelia, heart thudding, legs trembling. "If you're Lucius Decumius's better, then act like it!"
"Yes!" cried Lucius Decumius, collecting himself because his beloved Aurelia was fighting for him—and wanting to look courageous in her eyes. But Sulla was no Marius. His nature made Lucius Decumius feel the screech of nails being dragged down something smooth and stony. Yet he tried. For Aurelia. "You don't mind yourself, Big Important Consular Sulla, you just might get a knife in your back!"
The pale eyes glazed, Sulla's lips peeled back from his teeth; he got up from the couch wrapped in an almost tangible aura of menace and advanced on Lucius Decumius.
Lucius Decumius backed away—not from cowardice, rather from a superstitious man's contact with something as mysterious as it was terrible.
"I could stamp on you the way an elephant stamps on a dog," said Sulla pleasantly. "The only reason I don't is this lady here. She values you, and you serve her well. You may have taken many a knife to many a man, Lucius Decumius, but don't ever delude yourself you will to me! Even in your dreams. Stay out of my arena, content yourself with commanding in your own. Now be off!"
"Go, Lucius Decumius," said Aurelia. "Please!"
"Not when he's in a mood like this!"
"I will be better on my own. Please go."
Lucius Decumius went.
"There was no need to be so hard on him," she said, nostrils pinched. "He doesn't know how to deal with you, and he has his loyalties, for all he is what he is. His devotion to Gaius Marius is on behalf of my son."
Sulla perched on the edge of the couch, not sure whether to go or to stay. "Don't be angry with me, Aurelia. If you are, then I'll become angry with you. I agree, he's a poor target. But he helped Gaius Marius put me in a situation I didn't want, didn't ask for, didn't deserve!"
She drew a huge breath, exhaled slowly. "Yes, I can understand your feelings," she said. "As far as it goes, you have some right." Her head began to nod rhythmically. "I know that. I know that. I know you tried in every way possible to contain things legally, peacefully. But don't blame Gaius Marius. It was Publius Sulpicius."
"That's specious," said Sulla, beginning to relax. "You're a consul's daughter and a praetor's wife, Aurelia. You're more aware than most that Sulpicius couldn't have got his program started had he not been backed by someone a great deal more influential than he was. Gaius Marius."
"Was?" she asked sharply, eyes dilating.
"Sulpicius is dead. He was caught two days ago."
Her hands went to her mouth. "And Gaius Marius?"
"Oh, Gaius Marius, Gaius Marius, always Gaius Marius! Think, Aurelia, think! Why would I want Gaius Marius dead? Kill the People's hero? I'm not so big a fool! Hopefully I've given him a scare which will keep him out of Italy until I've got myself out of Italy. And not only for my own sake, woman. For Rome's sake too. He can't be allowed to fight Mithrid
"You should never have marched on Rome," she said.
"What other choice did I have, tell me that? If I could have found any other way, I would have! Unless you would rather have seen me continue to sit at Capua until Rome had a second civil war on her hands—Sulla versus Marius?"
Her color fled. "It could never have come to that!"
"Oh, there was a third alternative! That I lie down tamely under the feet of a maniac tribune of the plebs and a demented old man! Allow Gaius Marius to do to me what he did to Metellus Numidicus, use the Plebs to take away my lawful command? When he did that to Metellus Numidicus, Metellus Numidicus was no longer consul! I was consul, Aurelia! No one takes the command off a consul still in office. No one!"
"Yes, I see your point," she said, color returning. Her eyes filled with tears. "They will never forgive you, Lucius Cornelius. You led an army on Rome."
He groaned. "Oh, for the sake of all the gods, don't cry! I have never seen you cry! Not even at my boy's funeral! If you couldn't cry for him, then you can't cry for Rome!"
Her head was bent; the tears didn't run down her cheeks, they splashed into her lap, and the light caught glitters off her wet black lashes. "When I am most moved, I cannot cry," she said, and wiped her nose with the side of her hand.
"I don't believe that," he said, throat hard and aching.
She looked up. The tears ran down her cheeks. "I'm not crying for Rome," she said huskily, and wiped her nose again. "I am crying for you."
He got off the couch, gave her his handkerchief, and stood behind her chair with one hand pressed into her shoulder. Best she should not see his face.
"I will love you forever for that," he said, put his other hand in front of her face and took some of the tears from her lashes, then licked them from his palm. "It's Fortune," he said. "I was given the hardest consulship a man has ever had. Just as I was given the hardest life a man has ever had. I'm not the kind to surrender, and I'm not the kind to care how I win. There are plenty of eggs in the cups and plenty of dolphins down. But the race won't be over until I'm dead." He squeezed her shoulder. "I have taken your tears into me. Once I dropped an emerald quizzing-glass down a drain because it had no value to me. But I will never lose your tears."
His hand left her, he left the house. Walking very proudly, enriched and uplifted. All the tears those other women had shed over him were selfish tears, shed for the sake of their own broken hearts. Not for his. Yet she who never wept had wept for him.
Perhaps another man would have softened, reconsidered. Not Sulla. By the time he reached his house, a long walk, that private exaltation was tucked away below conscious thought; he dined very pleasantly with Dalmatica, took her to bed and made love to her, then slept his normal dreamless ten hours—or if he dreamed, he did not remember. An hour before dawn he woke and rose without disturbing his wife, took some crisp, freshly baked bread and cheese in his study and stared abstractedly as he ate at a box about the size of one of his ancestral temples. It sat on the far corner of his desk, and it held the head of Publius Sulpicius Rufus.
The rest of the condemned had escaped; only Sulla and a few of his colleagues knew that no exhaustive attempts to apprehend them had been mounted. Sulpicius, however, had to go. Therefore to catch him was imperative.
The boat across the Tiber had been a ruse. Further downstream Sulpicius crossed back again, but bypassed Ostia in favor of the little harbor town of Laurentum, some few miles down the coast. Here the fugitive had tried to engage a ship—and here, with the aid of one of his own servants, he was run to earth. Sulla's hirelings had killed him on the spot, but knew Sulla better than to ask for money without furnishing proof. So they cut off Sulpicius's head, put it in a waterproofed box, and brought it to Sulla's house in Rome. They were then paid. And Sulla had the head, still fairly fresh; it had only left its owner's shoulders two days earlier.
On his way out of Rome on that second day of January, Sulla summoned Cinna to the Forum. And there, stapled to the wall of the rostra, was a tall spear carrying Sulpicius's head. Sulla took Cinna ungently by the arm.
"Look well," he said. "Remember what you see. Remember the expression on its face. They say that when a man's head is taken, his eyes still have sight. If you did not believe that in the past, you will in the future. That's a man who watched his own head hit the dust. Remember well, Lucius Cinna. I do not intend to die in the East. And that means I will return to Rome. If you tamper with my remedies for Rome's current diseases, you too will watch your own head hit the dust."
His answer was a look of scorn and contempt, but Cinna may as well have saved himself the effort. For the moment he finished speaking Sulla hauled his mule's head around and trotted off up the Forum Romanum without a backward glance, his wide-brimmed hat upon his head. Not anyone's picture of the successful general. But Cinna's private picture of Nemesis.
He turned then to look up at the head, its eyes wide, its jaw sagging. Dawn had barely broken; if it was removed now, no one would see it.
"No," said Cinna aloud. "It should stay there. Let all of Rome see how far the man who invaded Rome is prepared to go."
4
In Capua, Sulla closeted himself with Lucullus and got down to the logistics of transferring his soldiers to Brundisium. It had been Sulla's original intention to sail from Tarentum until he learned it did not possess sufficient transport ships. Brundisium it must be.
"You will go first, taking all the cavalry and two of the five legions," Sulla said to Lucullus. "I'll follow with the other three. However, don't look for me on the other side of the Ionian Sea. As soon as you land in Elatria or Buchetium, march for Dodona. Strip every temple in Epirus and Acarnania—they won't yield you a big fortune, but I suspect they'll yield you enough. A pity the Scordisci plundered Dodona so recently. However, never forget that Greek and Epirote priests are canny, Lucius Licinius. It may be that Dodona managed to hide quite a lot from a collection of barbarians."
"They won't hide anything from me," said Lucullus, smiling.
'”Good! March your men overland to Delphi, and do what you have to do. Until I reach you, it's your theater of war.''
"What about you, Lucius Cornelius?" Lucullus asked.
"I'll have to wait at Brundisium until your transports return, but before that I'll have to wait in Capua until I'm sure things are quiet in Rome. I don't trust Cinna, and I don't trust Sertorius."
As three thousand horses and a thousand mules were not popular residents around Capua, Lucullus marched for Brundisium by the middle of January, though winter was fast approaching and both Lucullus and Sulla doubted that Lucullus would sail much before March or April. Despite his urgent need to leave Capua, Sulla still hesitated; the reports from Rome were not promising. First he heard that the tribune of the plebs Marcus Vergilius had made a magnificent speech to the Forum crowd from the rostra, and had avoided infringing Sulla's laws by refusing to call it a meeting. Vergilius had advocated that Sulla—no longer consul— be stripped of his imperium and brought to Rome—by force if necessary—to answer charges of treason for the murder of Sulpicius and th
Nothing came of the speech, but Sulla then heard that Cinna was actively lobbying many of the backbenchers for their support when Vergilius and another tribune of the plebs, Publius Magius, submitted a motion to the Senate to recommend to the Centuriate Assembly that Sulla be stripped of his imperium and made to answer charges of treason and murder. The House refused steadfastly to countenance any of these ploys, but Sulla knew they boded no good; they all knew he was still in Capua with three legions, so they had obviously decided he would not have the courage to march on Rome a second time. They felt they could defy him with impunity.
At the end of January a letter came to Sulla from his daughter, Cornelia Sulla.
Father, my position is desperate. With my husband and my father-in-law both dead, the new paterfamilias—my brother-in-law who now calls himself Quintus—is behaving abominably toward me. He has a wife who dislikes me intensely. While my husband and my father-in-law were alive, there could be no trouble. Now, however, the new Quintus and his dreadful wife are living with my mother-in-law and me. By rights the house belongs to my son, but that seems to have been forgotten. My mother-in-law—naturally, I suppose—has transferred her allegiance to her living son. And they have all taken to blaming you for Rome's troubles as well as their own. They even talk that you deliberately sent my father-in-law to his death in Umbria. As a result of all this, my children and I find ourselves without servants, we are given the same food to eat as the servants, and we are poorly housed. When I complain, I am told that technically I am your responsibility! Just as if I had not borne my late husband a son who is actually the heir to most of his grandfather's fortune! That too is a great source of resentment. Dalmatica is beseeching me to live with her in your house, but I feel I cannot do that until I obtain your permission.