The First Man in Rome (4 page)

"What did I do?" he yelped, curling himself up into a defensive ball and shielding his groin, where his princely erection had collapsed like an empty wineskin.

They were only too eager to tell him—both at once. However, he was now remembering the reason for himself; just as well, for the two of them shrieking together made their explanation unintelligible. Metrobius, curse his eyes! Oh, but what eyes! Liquid-dark as polished jet, fringed with black lashes so long they could be curled around a finger. Skin like thick cream, black curls straying around his slender shoulders, and the sweetest arse in the world. Fourteen years old in time, a thousand years old in vice, the apprentice of old Scylax the actor—and a tease, a torment, a trollop, a tiger cub.

On the whole Sulla preferred women these days, but Metrobius was a case apart. The boy had come with Scylax to the party, dressed as Cupid to Scylax's raddled Venus, a ridiculous pair of little feathered wings strapped to his back and the tiniest skirt of Coan floss silk about his waist, dyed with some cheap imitation saffron that had run a little because the room was closely shuttered and stuffily hot, leaving orange-yellow stains down the insides of his thighs that served only to draw attention to what was hidden, but barely.

From that first glance he had fascinated Sulla, and Sulla had fascinated him. Well, how many men in the world besides Sulla had skin as white as snow and hair the color of the rising sun and eyes so pale they were almost white? Not to mention a face which had started a stampede in Athens a few years back, when an Aemilius who shall remain nameless had smuggled the penniless sixteen-year-old Sulla across on the packet to Patrae, and enjoyed his favors all the way from Patrae to Athens by the most prolonged route possible, right around the coast of the Peloponnese.

In Athens Sulla had been summarily dumped; the Aemilius was too important to have any slur attached to his masculinity. The Roman despised homosexuality; the Greek considered it the highest form of love. So what the one hid in fear and dread, the other flaunted before the eyes of his dazzled peers. As far as Sulla was concerned, however, the one soon turned out to be no better than the other, for there was absolutely no doubt that fear and dread added an element of spice—and a great deal more largesse. The Greeks, as he quickly learned, were loath to pay for what was readily available free of charge, even when the prize was as unusual as a Sulla. So he had blackmailed the Aemilius for a first-class fare back to Italy and Rome, and quit Athens forever.

Of course manhood had changed all that. Once his beard grew in sufficiently for him to have to shave daily, and he sprouted a chest of red-gold hair, his appeal to men faded— and the largesse along with it. Women, he discovered, were bigger fools and had a hankering to settle down which made them exploitable. As a child he had never really known many women, for his mother had died before he was old enough to form a memory of her he could cherish, and his father, an impoverished drunkard, cared little for either of his progeny. Sulla had a sister, Cornelia Sulla, two years older than he was; equally spectacular in looks, she had seized a chance of marriage with a very rich rustic from Picenum named Lucius Nonius, and gone north with him to enjoy whatever luxuries life in Picenum might hold. That left the sixteen-year-old Sulla to look after his father unaided, which affected the quality of their lives chiefly on the level of cleanliness.

Then when Sulla turned twenty-four, his father remarried. It was not the social event of the year, but it did bring a measure of relief to the young man, who had been used for years to having to find sufficient money to underwrite his father's bottomless thirst. For his father's new wife (by name Clitumna, by birth an Umbrian peasant) was the relict of a very rich merchant, and had managed to inherit all her dead husband's property by dint of destroying his will and packing his only child off to Calabria as the wife of an oil vendor.

Just what Clitumna saw in the decayed Sulla Senior at first was beyond his son; then Clitumna invited his son to share her commodious house on the Germalus of the Palatine, and promptly hopped out of her new husband's bed and into young Sulla's. Somewhere, he discovered at that moment, there did burn in him a small spark of loyalty and affection for his importunate parent, for he foisted Clitumna off as tactfully as possible and immediately moved out.

He had managed to save a very little, and found two rooms in a huge insula on the Esquiline near the Agger for a rent he could just afford: three thousand sesterces a year. This gave him a room for himself and another for his servant to sleep and cook in, plus the laundry labor of a girl who lived two floors higher up in the crumbling tenement and did for various tenants in all sorts of ways. Once a week she took his dirty clothing down the alley to where a crossroads widened the maze of streets into a tiny, irregular, square; in it were a shrine of the crossroads, a clubhouse where the crossroads sodality met, and a fountain spewing a continuous trickle of water out of the mouth of an ugly old Silanus into a stone-bottomed pool donated to the city— one of many—by that grand old man of history, Cato the Censor, a man as practical as he had been lowborn. Fighting for elbow room, she pounded Sulla's tunics on the stones, borrowed the assistance of another washerwoman to wring every garment bone-dry (having performed the same service for her fellow), and then brought him back his laundry neatly folded. Her price was simple; a quick in-and-out and none the wiser, especially the sour old bird she lived with.

At which point he met Nicopolis. Victory City, her name meant in her native Greek. She was certainly that to him, for she was a widow, comfortably off, and in love with him to the point of madness. The only trouble was that while she was happy to support him in lavish fashion, she was far too shrewd to give him an allowance. The twin, he recognized gloomily, of his stepmother, Clitumna. Women were fools, but they were clever fools. Either that, or he was far too transparent.

Two years after he had moved out of Clitumna's splendid house, his father died, having guzzled himself with unalloyed happiness into terminal liver disease; and if he had been the price Clitumna was prepared to pay in order to catch his son, then her ruse worked at last, especially after Sulla discovered that Clitumna was not at all averse to sharing his favors—and her bed—with Nicopolis the Greek tart. The three of them settled down into a cozy relationship in the house on the Palatine, a relationship which had only one occasional marring element, Sulla's weakness for young boys. It was not, he assured his two women, a serious weakness; he had no taste for the innocent, no desire to seduce the sons of senators as they cavorted on the exercise fields of the Campus Martius, playing at fencing with their wooden swords and vaulting on and off the backs of stuffed bolsters saddled just like real horses. No, Sulla liked trollops, the professional pretty-boys up to every trick in town; the truth was, they reminded him of himself at the same age.

But because his women detested his trollops, and he was in spite of his sexual appetites very much a man, he resisted his urges in this direction for the sake of domestic harmony, or else made sure he indulged himself mighty far away from the ken of Clitumna and Nicopolis. Until New Year's Eve, the last hours of the consulship of Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica and Lucius Calpurnius Bestia, the last hours before the commencement of the consulship of Marcus Minucius Rufus and Spurius Postumius Albinus. The Eve of Metrobius, it was likely to come to be called, if Clitumna and Nicopolis had anything to do with it.

The three of them adored the theater, but not the highbrow Greek stuff of Sophocles and Aeschylus and Euripides, all masks and groaning throbbing voices and high-flown poetry. No, they loved comedy—the giggle-gorged Latin larkery of Plautus and Naevius and Terence; and above all else the simple, maskless idiocy of the pure mime, with its naked strumpets, clumsy fools, clarion farts, elaborate practical jokes, improbable plots made up on the spur of the moment from traditional repertoires. Tall daisies stuck in arses wiggle-waggled; the movement of one finger was more eloquent than a thousand words; blindfolded fathers-in-law mistook tits for ripe melons; the adulteries were insane and the gods drunk—nothing was sacred in the name of Mimus.

They were friends with every comedic actor and director in Rome, didn't consider they threw a good party unless a cluster of "names" were present. As far as they were concerned, the tragic theater didn't exist—and in that they were true Romans, for Romans adored a good laugh.

So to the party at Clitumna's house on New Year's Eve were invited Scylax, Astera, Milo, Pedocles, Daphne, and Marsyas. It was of course a costume party; Clitumna reveled in dressing up, so did Nicopolis, and Sulla liked female impersonation of a certain kind, the kind where the onlooker can laugh at the antics of a patent man mocking women.

Sulla had therefore got himself up as Medusa the Gorgon, complete with a wig of genuine living snakelets that had the whole room screaming in terror every time he lowered his head and threatened to charge, and a flowing mass of draperies in Coan floss silk that showed the guests his biggest snake all too clearly. His stepmother came as an ape, which meant she capered and scratched in a hairy coat, and bared blue-painted buttocks. Rather more orthodox because she was rather more beautiful than Clitumna, Nicopolis tricked herself out as Diana of the Grove, thus exposing her long slender legs and one perfect breast as she cavorted about to make the tinny arrows in her quiver rattle in time to the music of flutes, pipes, bells, lyres, and drums.

The party got off to a swinging start. Sulla in his snaky getup was an undeniable success, but Clitumna the Ape was funniest. The wine flowed; the laughter and shrieks burst out of the peristyle-garden at the back of the house and drove all the conservative neighbors mad long before New Year's Eve became New Year's Day. Then, last guest to arrive, Scylax teetered through the door in cork-soled platform sandals, a golden-blonde wig, huge tits inflating his gorgeous gown, and the maquillage of an old whore. Poor Venus! In tow as his Cupid came Metrobius.

Sulla's biggest snake took one look and stood up in less than a second, which didn't please the Ape or Diana of the Grove. Nor for that matter did it please Venus Scylax. And there ensued scenes as frenzied as any that ever enlivened farce or mime: a bouncing blue bottom, a bouncing bared breast, a bouncing blonde wig, a bouncing biggest snake, and a bouncing befeathered boy. Culminating in the best bounce of all, which was Metrobius and Sulla enjoying a little buggery in a corner they had fancied more secluded than it actually was.

He had known, of course, that he was making a ghastly mistake; but knowing it didn't help in the least. From the moment he'd seen the dye running down those silky legs and the length of the lashes round those lustrous, night-dark eyes, Sulla had been finished, rolled up, hopelessly conquered. And when he brushed his hand across the little frilly skirt the boy wore and lifted it just enough to see how beautiful and hairless and dusky-hued was the endowment beneath, there was nothing else in the world he could do save what he did do, pull the boy into a corner behind a large pouffe and have him.

Farce almost turned into tragedy. Clitumna took up a rare goblet of Alexandrian glass, broke it, and went in real earnest for Sulla's face. Whereupon Nicopolis went for Clitumna with a wine jug, and Scylax went for Metrobius with one of his cork-soled platform sandals. Everyone else stopped partying to watch, enchanted. Luckily Sulla was not drunk enough to have lost his extraordinary physical competence, so he dealt with the lot of them briskly and harshly: gave Scylax a wallop on one lavishly painted eye that bruised it for a month, administered the sharp ends of a quiverful of arrows to Diana's long bare legs, and turned Clitumna upside down across his knee to make her bare buttocks as black as they were blue. After which he kissed the boy a lingering tongue-borne thank-you, and took himself off to bed in a mood of towering disgust.

It was only at dawn on New Year's Day that Sulla understood what was really the matter. Not farce. Not even comedy. A tragedy as strange and hideously convoluted as anything Sophocles ever imagined in his worst bout of despair at the antics of gods and men. Today, New Year's Day, was Sulla's birthday. He was exactly thirty years old.

And he turned then to look at the two brawling bawling women in the bed, no trace of his Medusa of the night before now remaining, and he looked at them with such icy anger and pain and loathing that they stilled immediately to stone, and sat incapable of moving while he dressed in a fresh white tunic and had a slave drape his toga around him, a garment he hadn't worn in years save to the theater. Only when he had gone did the women regain power to move, and then they stared at each other and blubbered noisy tears;  not for their own grief, but for his, which they didn't even begin to understand.

The truth was that Lucius Cornelius Sulla, thirty today, was living a lie. Had always lived a lie. The world in which he had dwelled for thirty years—a world inhabited by drunkards and beggars, actors and whores, charlatans and freed-men—was not his world at all.

Rome was full of men bearing the family name Cornelius. But they had come to be called Cornelius because a father or a grandfather or however many generations back had once belonged, slave or peasant, to a patrician high aristocrat named Cornelius. When that patrician Cornelius emancipated them from their bondage in honor of a marriage or a birthday or a funeral, or because the purchase price of freedom had been saved up out of wages, they took his name, and so became Cornelius too. All those named Cornelius were clients of some patrician Cornelius because they owed him thanks for the citizenship which had come to them along with his name.

Excepting Clitumna and Nicopolis, the people Lucius Cornelius Sulla knew automatically assumed he was just such a Cornelius, the son or grandson or however many generations back of a Cornelian slave or peasant; with his barbaric coloring, more likely by far to be slave than peasant. After all, there were patrician noblemen called Cornelius Scipio and Cornelius Lentulus and Cornelius Merula, but who ever
heard
of a patrician Cornelius Sulla? No one even knew what the word "Sulla" meant!