The Grass Crown (8 page)

They were sitting in the reception room alongside the low wall of the courtyard garden, one on either side of a table, the grapes, all swollen and purple, in a dish between them. When she finished speaking she continued to look at him, though he had turned his gaze away from her. How attractive he is! she thought, feeling a sudden stab of a private misery she normally kept completely below conscious level. He has a mouth like my husband’s, and beautiful it is. Beautiful. Beautiful…

Up came Sulla’s eyes, straight into hers; Aurelia blushed scarlet. His face changed, exactly how, hard to define—he just seemed to become more of himself. Out went his hand to her, a sudden and bewitching smile lighting him.

“Aurelia—”

She put her own hand into his, caught her breath, felt dizzy. “What, Lucius Cornelius?” she managed to ask.

“Have an affair with me!”

Her mouth was dry, she felt she must swallow or lose consciousness, yet could not; and his fingers around hers were like the last threads of a slipping life, she could not leave them go and survive.

How he got himself around the table she never afterward understood, only looked up at his face so close to hers, the sheen on his lips, the layers in his eyes flaked as in the depths of polished marble. Fascinated, she watched a muscle in his right arm move beneath its sheath of skin, and found herself vibrating rather than trembling, as weak, as lost…

She closed her eyes and waited, and then when she felt his mouth touch hers, she kissed him as if starved of love for some long eternity, awash with more emotions than she had ever known existed, stunned, terrified, exalted, burned to a cinder.

One moment more and the whole room lay between them, Aurelia flat against a brightly painted wall as if trying to lose a dimension, Sulla by the table drawing in great breaths, with the sun seeding fire through his hair.

“I—can’t!” she said, a quiet scream.

“Then may you never know another moment’s peace!”

Determined even in the midst of this towering rage that he would do nothing she could find laughable or farcical, he dealt magnificently with his toga, abandoned on the floor; then, every footstep telling her he would never come back, he walked out of that place as if he were the victor of the field.

But there could be no satisfaction for himself in being the victor of the field—he was too furious at his defeat. Home Sulla walked with such a storm wrapped round him that whole crowds leaped out of his way. How dared she! How dared she sit there with the hunger naked in her eyes, lead him on with a kiss—such a kiss!—then tell him she couldn’t. As if she hadn’t wanted it more than he. He ought to kill her, break her slender neck, see her face puff up from some poison, watch those purple eyes bulge out as his fingers tightened about her throat. Kill her, kill her, kill her, kill her, said the heart he could hear in his ears, said the blood distending the veins of forehead and scalp. Kill her, kill her, kill her! And no less a part of that gigantic fury was the knowledge that he couldn’t kill her any more than he had been able to kill Julilla, kill Aelia, kill Dalmatica. Why? What did these women have that women like Clitumna and Nicopolis did not?

At sight of him when he erupted into the atrium his servants scattered, his wife retreated voiceless to her own room, and his house shrank in upon itself, so huge was its silence. In his study he went straight to the little wooden temple which held the wax mask of his ancestor the flamen Dialis, and wrenched open the drawer hidden in its perfect flight of steps. The first object his groping fingers fastened around was a tiny bottle, and there it lay upon his palm, its clear contents lapping sluggishly inside its walls of greenish glass. He looked, and he looked.

The time he spent looking down at what he held in his hand had no measure, nor could his mind now dredge up one single thought; all he owned was rage. Or was it pain? Or was it grief? Or was it just a monumental loneliness? From fire he fell down through warmth to coolness, and finally to ice. Only then could he face this frightful disability, the fact that he, so enamored of murder as a solace as well as a necessity, could not physically perform the deed upon a woman of his own class. With Julilla as with Aelia, he had at least found comfort in witnessing their manifest misery because of him, and with Julilla he had known the satisfaction of causing her death; for there could be no doubt that had she not seen his reunion with Metrobius, she would have continued to guzzle her wine and fix her great hollow yellow eyes upon him mournfully in silent, eternal reproach. With Aurelia, however, he could count on no reaction lasting longer than his presence in her house; as soon as he had gone out her front door, no doubt, she had picked up the pieces of a momentary lapse and buried herself in her work. By tomorrow, she would forget him completely. That was Aurelia. May she rot! May she be chewed up by worms! The malignant sow!

In the midst of these futile, age-old curses, he caught himself up and grinned a twisted travesty of amusement. No comfort there. Ridiculous, ludicrous. The gods took no note of human frustrations or desires, and he was not of that kind who could in some awful, mysterious way transfer his destructive thoughts into a death wish which bore fruit. Aurelia still lived within him, he needed to banish her before he went to Spain if he was to bend all his energies to the advancement of his career. He needed a something to replace the ecstasy he would have known in breaching the walls of Aurelia’s citadel. The fact that until he surprised the look on her face he had harbored no wish to seduce her was beside the point—the urge had been so powerful, so all-pervasive that he could not shake himself free of it.

Rome, of course. Once he got to Spain it would all go away. If he could find some kind of satisfaction now. In the field he never suffered these dreadful frustrations, perhaps because he was too busy, perhaps because death lay all around him, perhaps because he could tell himself he was moving upward. But in Rome—and he had been in Rome now for almost three years—he came eventually to a degree of thwarted boredom which in the past had only dissipated after literal or metaphorical murder.

He fell, ice-cold, into a reverie; faces came and went, of victims and of those he wished were victims. Julilla. Aelia. Dalmatica. Lucius Gavius Stichus. Clitumna. Nicopolis. Catulus Caesar—how nice to wipe that haughty camel’s look away forever! Scaurus. Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle. Piggle-wiggle… Slowly Sulla got up, slowly closed the secret drawer. But kept the little bottle in his hand.

The water clock said it was the middle of the day. Six hours gone, six hours to go. Drip drip, drip drip. Time enough and more to visit Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle.

Upon his return from exile, Metellus Numidicus had found himself turned into something of a legend. Not nearly old enough to be dead, he told himself exultantly, yet here he was, already become a part of Forum lore. They recounted the story of his Homeric career as censor, the fearless way he had dealt with Lucius Equitius, the beatings he had taken, the courage he displayed in coming back for more; and they gave the story of how he had gone into exile, with his stammering son cuh-cuh-cuh-counting that endless stream of denarii while the sun went down on the Curia Hostilia and Gaius Marius waited to enforce his oath of allegiance to Saturninus’s second land bill.

Yes, thought Metellus Numidicus after the last client of the day had been dismissed, I will pass into history as the greatest of a great family, the quintessential Quintus of the Caecilii Metelli. And he swelled with pride in himself, happy with being home again, pleased with his welcome, replete with an enormous satisfaction. Yes, it had been a long war against Gaius Marius! But now it was definitely over. And he had won, Gaius Marius had lost. Never again would Rome suffer the indignity of Gaius Marius.

His steward scratched upon the door to his study.

“Yes?” asked Metellus Numidicus.

“Lucius Cornelius Sulla is asking to see you, domine.”

When Sulla came through the door Metellus Numidicus was already on his feet and halfway across the room, his hand stretched out in welcome.

“My dear Lucius Cornelius, what a pleasure to see you,” he said, oozing affability.

“Yes, it’s more than time I came to pay my personal respects in private,” said Sulla, seating himself in the client’s chair and assuming an expression of rather charming self-deprecation.

“Some wine?”

“Thank you.”

Standing by the console table upon which two flagons and some goblets of very nice Alexandrian glass reposed, Metellus Numidicus turned back toward Sulla, one eyebrow lifted, a slightly quizzical look on his face. “Is this an occasion to merit Chian unadulterated by water?” he asked.

Sulla put on a smile suggesting that he was beginning to feel more at ease. “To water Chian down is a crime,” he said.

His host didn’t move. “that’s a politician’s answer, Lucius Cornelius. I didn’t think you belonged to the breed.”

“Quintus Caecilius, leave the water out of your wine!” cried Sulla. “I come in the hope that we can be good friends,” he said, voice sincere.

“In that case, Lucius Cornelius, we will drink our Chian without water.”

Back came Metellus Numidicus bearing two of the goblets; he placed one on Sulla’s side of the desk, one on his own, then sat down, picked up his glass. “I drink to friendship,” he said.

“And I.” Sulla sipped a little of his wine, frowned, and looked very directly at Metellus Numidicus. “Quintus Caecilius, I am going as senior legate with Titus Didius to Nearer Spain. I have no idea how long I’m likely to be away, but at this moment it looks as if it could be several years. When I come back, I intend to stand as soon as possible for election as praetor.” He cleared his throat, sipped a little more wine. “Do you know the real reason why I was not elected praetor last year?”

A smile played about the corners of Metellus Numidicus’s mouth, too faint for Sulla to be able to decide whether it was ironic, malicious, or merely amused,

“Yes, Lucius Cornelius, I do.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think you greatly annoyed my dear friend Marcus Aemilius Scaurus in the matter of his wife.”

“Ah! Not because of my connection to Gaius Marius!”

“Lucius Cornelius, no one with Marcus Aemilius’s good sense would suffocate your public career because of a military connection to Gaius Marius. Though I wasn’t here myself to see it, I did preserve sufficient contact with Rome to be aware that your relations with Gaius Marius have not been close in some time,” said Metellus Numidicus smoothly. “Since you are no longer brothers-in-law, I find that understandable.” He sighed. “However, it is unfortunate that, just when you had succeeded in divorcing yourself from Gaius Marius, you should almost provoke a divorce in the household of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus.”

“I did nothing dishonorable, Quintus Caecilius,” said Sulla stiffly, careful not to let his anger at being patronized show, but moment by moment hardening in his resolve that this conceited mediocrity should die.

“I know you did nothing dishonorable.” Metellus Numidicus quaffed the last of his wine. “How sad it is that in the matter of women—particularly wives—even the oldest and wisest heads spin round like tops.”

When his host moved to get up Sulla rose quickly to his feet, plucked both goblets from the table, and went to the console to refill them.

“The lady is your niece, Quintus Caecilius,” said Sulla, his back turned, the bulk of his toga hiding the table.

“That is the only reason I know the full story.”

Having handed one goblet to Metellus Numidicus, Sulla sat down again. “Do you, being the lady’s uncle—and being a very good friend of Marcus Aemilius’s—consider my treatment fair?”

A shrug, a mouthful of wine, a grimace. “Were you some mushroom, Lucius Cornelius, you would not be sitting here now. But yours is a very old and illustrious name, you are a patrician Cornelius, and you are a man of superior ability.” He pulled another face, drank some more wine. “Had I been in Rome at the time my niece developed her fancy for you, I would of course have supported my friend Marcus Aemilius in anything he chose to do to rectify the situation. I gather he asked you to leave Rome, and you refused. Not a prudent thing to do!”

Sulla laughed without amusement. “I suppose I didn’t believe Marcus Aemilius would act less honorably than I had.”

“Oh, how much a few years in the Forum Romanum as a youth would have improved you!” exclaimed Metellus Numidicus. “You lack tact, Lucius Cornelius.”

“I daresay you’re right,” said Sulla, finding this the hardest role his life had yet called upon him to play. “But one cannot go back, and I need to go forward.”

“Nearer Spain with Titus Didius is definitely a step forward.”

Once more Sulla got up, poured two goblets of wine. “I must make at least one good friend in Rome before I go,” he said, “and I would—I say it from the heart—very much like that friend to be you. In spite of your niece. In spite of your close ties to Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus. I am a Cornelian, which means I cannot offer myself to you in the role of a client. Only as a friend. What do you say?”

“I say—stay to dinner, Lucius Cornelius.”

And so Lucius Cornelius stayed to dinner, a pleasant and intimate affair, since Metellus Numidicus had originally intended to dine alone that day, a little tired of living up to his new status as a Forum legend. They talked about the indefatigable struggle of his son to end the exile on Rhodes.

“No man was ever blessed with a better boy,” said the returned exile, feeling his wine, for his intake had been considerable, and started well before his dinner.

Sulla’s smile was charm personified. “I cannot argue with that, Quintus Caecilius. Indeed, I call your son a good friend of mine. My boy is still a child. However, the blind prejudice of fatherhood says my boy is going to be hard to beat.”

“He is a Lucius, like you?”

Sulla blinked, surprised. “Of course.”

“Odd, that,” Metellus Numidicus said, the two words very carefully pronounced. “Isn’t Publius the first name of the eldest son in your branch of the Cornelians?”