The Grass Crown (10 page)

“Ye gods!” said Marius blankly. “How does he manage to hold things together?”

“His barons govern in his absence—not an arduous task, as most of the cities of Pontus are Greek states governing themselves. They simply pay Mithridates whatever he asks. As for the rural areas, they are primitive and isolated. Pontus is a land of very high mountains all running parallel to the Euxine Sea, with the result that communications are not good between one part and any other. The King has many fortresses scattered through the ranges, and at least four courts when last I heard—Amaseia, Sinope, Dasteira, and Trapezus. As I say, he moves about constantly, and usually without much state. He also journeys to Galatia, Sophene, Cappadocia, and Commagene. His relatives rule those places.”

“I see.” Marius leaned forward, linked his hands together between his knees. “What you’re saying, I suppose, is that I may never succeed in making contact with him.”

“It depends how long you intend to remain in Asia Minor,” said Battaces, sounding indifferent.

“I think I must stay until I manage to see the King of Pontus, archigallos. In the meantime, I’ll pay a visit to King Nicomedes—at least he stays put! Then it’s back to Halicarnassus for the winter. In the spring I intend to go to Tarsus, and from there I shall venture inland to see King Ariarathes of Cappadocia.” Marius rattled all this off casually, then turned the subject to temple banking, in which he professed himself interested.

“There is no point, Gaius Marius, in keeping the Goddess’s money mouldering in our vaults,” said Battaces gently. “By lending it at good rates of interest, we increase her wealth. However, here at Pessinus we do not seek depositors, as some others among the temple confraternity do.”

“It’s not an activity one sees in Rome,” said Marius, “I suppose because Rome’s temples are the property of the Roman People, and administered by the State.”

“The Roman State could make money, could it not?”

“It could, but that would lead to an additional bureaucracy, and Rome doesn’t care much for bureaucrats. They tend either to be inert, or too acquisitive. Our banking is private, and in the hands of professional bankers.”

“I do assure you, Gaius Marius,” said Battaces, “that we temple bankers are highly professional.”

“What about Cos?” asked Marius.

“The sanctuary of Asklepios, you mean?”

“I do.”

“Ah, a very professional operation!” said Battaces, not without envy. “Now there is an institution eminently capable of funding whole wars! They have many depositors, of course.”

Marius got up. “I thank you, archigallos.”

Battaces watched Marius stride down the incline toward the beautiful colonnade built above the spring-fed stream; then, sure Marius would not turn back, the priest hurried to his palace, a small but lovely building within a grove of trees.

Ensconced in his study, he drew writing materials toward him, and proceeded to begin a letter to King Mithridates.

It would appear, Great King, that the Roman consul Gaius Marius is determined to see you. He applied to me for help in tracking you down, and when I gave him no kind of encouragement, he told me that he intends to remain in Asia Minor until he manages to meet you.

Among his plans for the near future are visits to Nicomedes and Ariarathes. One wonders why he would submit himself to the rigors of a journey into Cappadocia, for he is not very young—nor very well, I strongly suspect. But he made it clear that in the spring he goes to Tarsus, and from there he will go to Cappadocia.

I find him a formidable man, Great One. If such as he succeeded in becoming consul of Rome no less than six times—for he is a blunt and rather uncouth individual—then one must not underestimate him. Those noble Romans I have met before were far smoother, more sophisticated men. A pity perhaps that I did not have the opportunity to meet Gaius Marius in Rome, when, contrasting him with his peers, I might have been able to make more of him than I can here in Pessinus.

In all this, please find me your devoted and ever-loyal subject, Battaces.

The letter sealed and wrapped in softest leather, then put inside a wallet, Battaces gave it to one of his junior priests and sent him posthaste to Sinope, where lay King Mithridates.

Its contents did not please the King, who sat chewing his full lip and frowning so awfully that those among his courtiers bidden to be in his presence but not to speak were both thankful for this and sorry for Archelaus, bidden to sit with the King and speak when spoken to. Not that Archelaus appeared worried; the King’s first cousin and chief baron, Archelaus was friend as much as servant, brother as much as cousin.

Beneath his unconcerned exterior, however, Archelaus harbored the same degree of apprehension for his safety as the rest of those in attendance on the King; if any man might be excused for thinking he stood high in the King’s favor, he had better remember the fate of the chief baron Diophantus. Diophantus too had been friend as much as servant, father as much as the uncle he actually was.

However, reflected Archelaus as he sat watching the strong yet petulant face only feet away, a man really had no choice in the matter. The King was the King, all others his to command—and to kill, if such was his pleasure. A state of affairs that sharpened the wits of those living in close proximity to so much energy, capriciousness, infantilism, brilliance, strength, and timidity. All a man owned to extricate himself from a thousand perilous situations were his wits. And these perilous situations could blow up like storms off the Euxine, or simmer like kettles on glowing coals at the back of the King’s mind, or loom out of some unremembered sin a decade old. The King never forgot an injury, real or imagined; only put it away for future use.

“I will have to see him, it appears,” said Mithridates, then added, “Won’t I?”

A trap: what did one answer?

“If you don’t choose to, Great King, you don’t have to see anyone,” said Archelaus easily. “However, I imagine Gaius Marius would be an interesting man to meet.”

“Cappadocia, then. In the spring. Let him get the measure of Nicomedes first. If this Gaius Marius is so formidable, he will not be predisposed to like Nicomedes of Bithynia,” said the King. “And let him meet Ariarathes first too. Send that little insect word from me that in the spring he will present himself to Gaius Marius in Tarsus, and personally escort the Roman to Cappadocia.”

“The army will be mobilized as planned, O Great One?”

“Of course. Is Gordius coming?”

“He should be in Sinope before the winter snows close the passes, my King,” said Archelaus.

“Good!” Still frowning, Mithridates returned his attention to the letter from Battaces, and began to chew his lip again. These Romans! Why couldn’t they keep their noses out of what was, after all, none of their business? Why was a man as famous as Gaius Marius concerning himself with the doings of peoples in eastern Anatolia? Had Ariarathes already concluded a bargain with the Romans to have Mithridates Eupator off his throne, turn Pontus into a satrapy of Cappadocia?

“The road has been too long and too hard,” he said to his cousin Archelaus. “I will not bow down to the Romans!”

Indeed the road had been long and hard, almost from birth, for he had been the younger son of his father, King Mithridates V, and the King’s sister-wife, Laodice. Born in the same year Scipio Aemilianus had died so mysteriously, Mithridates called Eupator had had a brother less than two years older than himself, called Mithridates Chrestos because he was the anointed one, the chosen king. The King their father had dreamed of enlarging Pontus at anyone’s expense, but preferably at the expense of Bithynia, the oldest enemy—and the most obdurate.

At first it had seemed as if Pontus would retain the title Friend and Ally of the Roman People, earned by the fourth King Mithridates when he assisted the second Attalus of Pergamum in his war against King Prusias of Bithynia. The fifth Mithridates had continued in this alliance with Rome for some time, sending help against Carthage in the third of Rome’s Punic wars, and against the successors of the third King Attalus of Pergamum after his will had revealed that he had left his entire kingdom to Rome. But then the fifth Mithridates had acquired Phrygia by paying the Roman proconsul in Asia Minor, Manius Aquillius, a sum of gold into his own purse; the title Friend and Ally had been withdrawn and enmity between Rome and Pontus had persisted ever since, cunningly fostered by King Nicomedes of Bithynia—and by anti-Aquillian senators in Rome.

Roman and Bithynian enmity or no, the fifth Mithridates had continued his expansionist policies, drawing Galatia into his net, and then succeeding in getting himself named heir to most of Paphlagonia. But his sister-wife didn’t like the fifth King Mithridates; she had conceived a desire to rule Pontus on her own behalf. When young Mithridates Eupator was nine years old—the court was at Amaseia at the time—Queen Laodice murdered the husband who was also her brother, and put Mithridates Chrestos, aged eleven, on the throne. She, of course, was regent. In return for a guarantee from Bithynia that the borders of Pontus itself would not be breached, the Queen relinquished the claims of Pontus to Paphlagonia, and liberated Galatia.

Not yet ten years old, young Mithridates Eupator fled from Amaseia scant weeks after his mother’s coup, convinced that he too would be murdered; for, unlike his slow and biddable brother Chrestos, he reminded his mother of her husband, and she had begun to say so with increasing frequency. Completely alone, the boy fled not to Rome or some neighboring court but into the eastern Pontic mountains, where he made no secret of his identity to the local inhabitants, only begging them to keep his secret. Awed and flattered, predisposed to love a member of the royal house who would choose exile among them, the local people protected Mithridates fanatically. Moving from village to village, the young prince came to know his country as no other scion of the royal house ever had, and penetrated deeply into parts of it where civilization had slowed, or stopped, or never started. In the summers he roamed utterly free, hunting bear and lion to win a reputation for daring among his ignorant subjects, knowing that the bounty of the Pontic forests would yield him food—cherries and hazelnuts, apricots and succulent vegetables, deer and rabbits.

In some ways his life was never again to yield to him so much simple satisfaction—nor any subjects to yield him so much simple adoration—as during the seven years Mithridates Eupator hid in the mountains of eastern Pontus. Slipping silently beneath the eaves of forests brilliant with the pink and lilac of rhododendron, the pendulous cream of acacia, never it seemed without the roar of tumbling white water in his ears, he grew from boy into young man. His first women were the girls of tiny and primitive villages; his first lion a maned beast of huge proportions that he killed, a reincarnation of Herakles, with a club; his first bear a creature far taller than he was.

The Mithridatidae were big people, their origins Germano-Celt from Thrace, but this was admixed with a little Persian blood from the court (if not the loins) of King Darius, and through the two hundred and fifty years the Mithridatidae had ruled Pontus, they had occasionally married into the Syrian Seleucid dynasty, another Germano-Thracian royal house, descended as it was from Alexander the Great’s Macedonian general Seleucus. An occasional throwback to the Persian strain provided someone slight and smooth and creamy-dark, but Mithridates Eupator was a true Germano-Celt. So he grew very tall, grew shoulders wide enough to support the carcass of a fully developed male deer, and grew thighs and calves strong enough to scale the crags of a Pontic peak.

At seventeen he felt himself sufficiently a man to make his move; he sent a secret message to his uncle Archelaus, a man he knew to bear no love for Queen Laodice, who was his half sister as well as his sovereign. A plan was evolved through a number of furtive meetings in the hills behind Sinope, where the Queen now lived permanently; one by one, Mithridates met those barons whom Archelaus thought trustworthy, and took their oaths of allegiance.

Everything went exactly according to plan; Sinope fell because the struggle for power went on within its walls, never threatened from without. The Queen and Chrestos and those barons loyal to them were taken bloodlessly; when blood did flow, it gushed out from under an executioner’s sword. Several uncles, aunts and cousins perished at once, Chrestos somewhat later, and Queen Laodice last of all. Pious son, Mithridates threw his mother into a dungeon under Sinope’s battlements, where—how could it have happened?—someone forgot to feed her, and she starved to death. Innocent of matricide, the sixth King Mithridates ruled alone. He was not yet eighteen.

He felt his oats, he itched to make a great name for himself, he burned to see Pontus become more powerful by far than any of its neighbors, he hungered to rule the world; for his huge silver mirror told him he was no ordinary king. Instead of a diadem or a tiara, he took to wearing the skin of a lion, its huge fanged mouth jammed down across his forehead, its head and ears covering his scalp, its paws knotted on his chest. Because his hair was so like Alexander the Great’s—the same yellow-gold color, as thick, as loosely curled—he wore it in the same style. Then, wanting to demonstrate his masculinity, he grew not a beard or a moustache (they were beyond the boundaries of Hellenic taste) but long bristling side-whiskers in front of each ear. What a contrast to Nicomedes of Bithynia! Virile, a man entirely for women, huge, lusty, fearsome, powerful. Such were the qualities his silver mirror showed him, and he was well satisfied.

He married his oldest sister, another Laodice, then married anyone else he fancied as well, so that he had a dozen wives and several times that number of concubines; Laodice he appointed his Queen, but—as he told her quite often—that would last only as long as she was loyal. To reinforce this warning, he sent to Syria for a Seleucid bride of the reigning house, and—there being a plethora of princesses at that moment—he received his Syrian wife, whose name was Antiochis. He also acquired one Nysa, who was the daughter of a Cappadocian prince named Gordius, and gave one of his younger sisters (yet another Laodice!) to the sixth King Ariarathes of Cappadocia.

Marriage alliances, as he quickly found out, were extremely useful things. His father-in-law Gordius conspired with his sister Laodice to murder Laodice’s husband, King of Cappadocia; looking smugly at a decade and a half of regency, Queen Laodice put her baby son on the throne as the seventh Ariarathes and held Cappadocia in thrall to her brother Mithridates. Until, that is, she succumbed to the blandishments of old King Nicomedes of Bithynia, for she fancied ruling independently of Mithridates and his Cappadocian watchdog, Gordius. Gordius fled to Pontus, Nicomedes assumed the title King of Cappadocia, but remained in Bithynia and allowed his new wife Laodice to act precisely as she wanted within Cappadocia provided she had nothing friendly to do with Pontus. An arrangement which suited Laodice very well. However, her little son was now nearly ten years of age, and like all the kingly oriental breeds, he had developed autocratic tendencies already; he wanted to rule by himself. A clash with his mother saw his pretensions crushed, but not his convictions. Within a month he presented himself at the court of his uncle Mithridates in Amaseia, and within a month more his uncle Mithridates had installed him alone on his throne in Mazaca, for the army of Pontus was permanently in a state of readiness, that of Cappadocia not. Laodice was put to death, her brother watching impassively; the tenure of Bithynia in Cappadocia was abruptly severed. The only thing which annoyed Mithridates was that the ten-year-old seventh King Ariarathes of Cappadocia refused to allow Gordius to return home, steadily maintaining that he could not play host to his father’s murderer.

All this Cappadocian meddling had occupied but a small part of the young King of Pontus’s time; during the early years of his reign, his main energies were directed at increasing the manpower and excellence of the Pontic armies, and the wealth in the Pontic treasury. He was a thinker, Mithridates, despite his leonine affectations, his grandiose posturings, and his youth.

With a handful of those barons who were also his close (and Mithridatid) relatives—his uncle Archelaus, his uncle Diophantus, and his cousins Archelaus and Neoptolemus—he took ship in Amisus for a voyage around the eastern shores of the Euxine Sea. The party went in the guise of Greek merchants looking for trade alliances and passed muster everywhere they landed, as the peoples they encountered were neither learned nor sophisticated. Trapezus and Rhizus had long paid tribute to the Kings of Pontus and were nominally a part of the realm; but beyond these two prosperous outlets for the rich silver mines of the interior lay terra incognita.

The expedition explored legendary Colchis, where the Phasis River poured into the sea and the peoples who lived along it suspended the fleeces of sheep in its stream to catch the many particles of gold it carried down from the Caucasus; they gaped up at mountains even taller than those of Pontus and Armenia, sides perpetually crusted with snow, and kept a wary eye out for the descendants of the Amazons who had once lived in Pontus where the Thermodon spread its alluvial plain into the sea.

Slowly the Caucasus decreased in height and there began the endless plains of the Scythians and Sarmatians, teeming peoples of almost settled habits who had been somewhat tamed by the Greeks who had set up colonies on the coast—not militarily tamed, but exposed to Greek customs and culture—most alluring, most exotic, most seductive.

Where the delta of the Vardanes River cut up the shoreline, the ship bearing King Mithridates entered into a huge and almost landlocked lake called Maeotis and sailed along its triangular shape, discovering at its apex the mightiest river in the world, the fabled Tanais. They heard the names of other rivers—Rha, Udon, Borysthenes, Hypanis—and tales about the vast sea to the east called Hyrcanus or Caspium.

Wheat was growing everywhere the Greeks had established their trading cities.

“We would grow more, did we have a market,” said the ethnarch of Sinde. “Liking their first taste of bread, the Scythians have learned to break ground, grow wheat.”

“You sold grain to King Masinissa of Numidia a century ago,” said Mithridates. “There are still markets. The Romans were willing to pay anything not long ago. Why aren’t you actively seeking markets?”